Various - Truckers, Kickers, Cowboy Angels Vol.02, The Blissed-Out Birth Of Country Rock 1969 (1-CD)

1-CD Digipak (6-plated) with 56-page booklet, 24 tracks. Total playing time approx. 72:24minutes. Country Rock


TRUCKERS, KICKERS, COWBOY ANGELS
The Blissed-Out Birth of Country Rock 1969; Volume 2

"It was something in the air, almost like the earth was passing through a cloud. I think this music was the direct result of psychedelia, the chaotic noisiness of it. People wanted to return to the simplicity that country music represented. Three-chord songs, melodies, and stories." (Roger McGuinn, the Byrds)

This is the second volume of Bear Family's Country Rock chronicle. Sprinkle some patchouli oil, light up an exotic cigarette - only in jurisdictions where it's legal to do so, of course, and situate yourself in one of Los Angeles' vertiginous canyons. It's 1969. Nixon, Manson, Woodstock … Flying Burrito Brothers.

Sixties Country Rock was like its Fifties forebear, Rockabilly. Neither was successful until someone found a way to channel the precepts into slick, commercial formulae. Elvis did that for rockabilly; the Eagles did it for country rock. Both rockabilly and country rock were underground movements, hugely more influential than their sales would suggest. Just a handful of these songs were hits.

Country Rock wasn't trying to supplant or reinvent Nashville. These were times as bitterly polarized as our own. Country music as it was made and played in Nashville was grounded in contempt for the counter-culture. Gram Parsons' dream that country radio would sandwich his singles between George Jones and Loretta Lynn was no more than a dream. Country Rock was tailored to the newly minted underground FM rock format, not AM country.

The first volume in this series was sequenced in rough chronology by recording date to show how and where country rock originated and developed. This volume comprises records released in 1969, sequenced for listening. If a couple of your favorite tracks aren't here, there are several reasons: perhaps we didn't know about them; perhaps we didn't like them; or perhaps, and this is far more likely, the originating label wouldn't license to us.

Colin Escott

TRUCKERS, KICKERS, COWBOY ANGELS

The Blissed-Out Birth of Country Rock

On January 12, 1970, 'Time' magazine placed The Band on its cover with the headline, 'The New Sound of Country Rock.' In the taxonomy of popular music, Country Rock was now a thing, a categoryby 1970. There were Country Rock browser bins in some stores, and trade magazines like 'Billboard'routinely classified records as country-rock or country/rock, expecting readers to know what they meant.

A category as vague and fissiparous as Country Rock can be defined narrowly or broadly. We've focused on rock musicians who embraced the concision, narrative drive, melodicism, and folk roots of country music, but we've also included a few country artists reaching out the other way. Rock musicians began trekking to Nashville after Bob Dylan began recording in Nashville in 1966, and they come still. Taking their cue from Dylan, a new breed of country songwriters, led by John Hartford, Mickey Newbury, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson, began writing songs that dared to stray from the I-IV-V chord norm. A scene coalesced around them, attracting guys like Donnie Fritts, Billy Joe Shaver, and Tony Joe White. Before long, established country artists like Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash began to think about not making records the way Nashville liked to make them. Whether from Nashville, Los Angeles, or someplace else, country rock was enough of a category by 1970 to attract artists who often understood neither country nor rock. We tried to avoid bandwagon jumpers, preferring those who brought an original spin to their music.

Licensing can be a problem with compilations like this. Artists as well-known as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Creedence Clearwater Revival were unavailable to us, alongside inexplicable denials like Rig. Some artists like Shiloh were on labels that have fallen into a contractual black hole. So if a recording that seems to belong here is missing, there's probably a clause in an aging contract explaining that. Even so, there's still plenty to love on the road to 1975.

 Colin Escott

 

 

"There was a shared sense of direction that was in tune with the times. The Band, the Byrds, Poco, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Dylan were all exploring traditional music augmented by the power of rock 'n' roll. Psychedelia had had its moment and we were continuing to evolve what we believed to be the logical next step in American music."

(Robert Hunter, lyricist for the Grateful Dead) 

"The winds that were blowing moved us all along. We each had different approaches - different tacks and different sails in the wind - but we mostly headed the same direction, just because of the push. I had no notion of country rock as a possible genre, although we used the phrase among ourselves as First National Band members. This was more to frame up and focus a feeling of playing. We weren't conscious of this being innovative. It was fun to play like that, and there was plenty to say with it, and we enjoyed listening to it, to each other. I listened to all the bands at some point, but not until some time after the form was well under way. We were all immersed in playing it and giving it voice; we only slowly discovered each other over time. Ideas come along like this regularly that push everyone along. No one controls it; no one leads it. Certainly, no one invents it. It is the moment when the songs start to sing the singers, and not the other way round. Everyone who plays and sings knows this when it happens, and it is the most fun you can have playing music. Like flying in your dreams, effortlessly - and especially fun if you find someone up there with you. You wave and smile and acknowledge the forces at work."

(Michael Nesmith)