Outlaw:
Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville by
Michael Streissguth (!t books, 304 pages, June 4, 2013, $26.99)
describes in vivid detail a time of turmoil in Nashville and in the
music business when country music, as represented by the corporate
image or RCA's country music division with Chet Atkins as the chief
of the Nashville office, had reached a point of over production and
artistic decadence which challenged its listenership and sales.
Streissguth describes a time when Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley
pioneered the “Nashville sound” by merging soft rock with
traditional country and adding crooning strings to develop a
marshmallow sound needing refreshment. Into this environment came
three singer/songwriters nurtured in Texas and seeking their own ways
of expressing themselves. Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and
Willie Nelson didn't fit the mold that Atkins and men like him tried
to force them into. By finding their own sound and audience in a
changing Nashville, they established and maintained careers on their
own terms that broke the corporate hold on music and established the
independence of performers.
Johnny Cash
Johnny Cash, of whom Streissguth has
written a standalone biography, paved the way for the outlaws to
cast off the strictures imposed by the studio system, being the first
artist allowed to record with his own band, rather than the stable of
willing and able session musicians available in Nashville, and to
work out his own arrangements in the studio at Columbia Records.
Complaints about contemporary country-pop sound seem eerily similar
to those regarding the Nashville sound of the 1960's produced by Chet
Atkins. Overproduced and disregarding the authentic sound of the
artists and song writers themselves, it lost contact with its roots.
The outlaws, in their counter-culture rebellion, looked at the world, creating the anger,and loss they found there that no soaring
violins could reproduce.
Nashville in the 1960's was torn
between the cultural forces of a traditional southern segregated city
and one changing and responding to the emerging forces of the
alternative culture of the students at Vanderbilt University. The
black music scene accompanied by a more open society provided more
alternatives in music as white students sought out the black clubs as
well as the emerging rock and roll and rockabilly scenes.. A club
called the Exit/In became a center for this ferment. Waylon Jennings,
Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and Johnny Cash appealed to this
group of consumers who represented change and had the money to
support the new sounds. While revered as a great guitar player from
the 1940's and 1950's, Chet Atkins, as chief of RCA in Nashville,
represented the conservative elements of the city aristocracy and
country music in resisting the energy, innovation, and change
represented by the singer/songwriter musicians who became the
Outlaws. The artists presage the crossover appeal of certain artists,
and perhaps the problem, too, wherein “crossover” is a rejection
of purity of genre. Sacrificing genre for the personal muse appeals
to a broader spectrum while leaving those committed to genre purity
are left out in the cold, rejected, even angry. The artists live on
“the border between conformity and the outlaw life.”
Willie Nelson
Willie Nelson, born in Abbott, TX in
1933, arrived in Nashville as a young, neat, and carefully groomed
country singer who, while recognized by some, never really caught on
until he returned, in the late 60's to Texas, where the Austin music
scene was just beginning to emerge. He allowed his hair to grow long
and began writing and performing a large number of songs which were
recorded by others and, as he set out on his never ending bus tour,
became a recognized character whose persona reflected the merger of
cowboy values with the hippy counter-culture which was borne out in
his well-known use of marijuana. When he returned to Nashville, he
had sufficient audience to demand and get the right to record with
his own traveling band in his own idiosyncratic style. Introducing
his audience to re-styled pop classics as well as his own
compositions, he forged a huge career.
Kris Kristofferson
Kris Kristofferson, born in
Brownsville, TX in 1936, was the son of a career air force officer
who moved frequently, He settled in Southern California where he was
recognized as an athlete and scholar. Graduating with honors from
Pomona College, he studied at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. Later,
as an army helicopter pilot, he began song-writing and performing.
His break out hit, Me and Bobby McGeem,
propelled him to a career as a song writer and later increasingly
polished performer. His good looks and ironic, laid back personality
also brought him to Hollywood, where he experienced some success.
Waylon Jennings
Waylon
Jennings, was born in Littlefield, TX in 1937, where he began playing
guitar at an early age and was soon working in radio. He famously
gave up his seat on the plane in which Buddy Holly was killed in
1958, a decision which apparently caused him much guilt later on. He
performed to limited success until he embraced the outlaw image in
the early seventies. His recordings of Wanted! The Outlaws
and later with Kristofferson, Nelson, and Cash on The
Highwaymen helped identify his
connection between country and rock and roll which gave him a
crossover appeal to a number of constituencies. His life and career
were shortened by his extensive use of narcotic pills and cocaine.
Streissguth,
sometimes uses language that moves forward like a hipster riff
befitting the times, sometimes loose and impressionistic as if his
prose meshes with the sex, drugs, and rock & roll of the 1970's.
At other times, his account is more restrained as he details the
interactions and political struggles between emerging independent
producers and large music production companies as they vie to reach
out to audiences having more musical choices than ever before. Chet
Atkins and his contemporaries from the 1940's into the mid-sixties
are portrayed as dinosaurs seeking to enforce the use of outmoded
production standards and styles to a new and younger group of
performers and song writers who were responding to emerging social
and political strains in society. He notes that at a performance of
the Grand Old Opry in 1972, Alabama Governor George Wallace sat front
and center while Richard Nixon played piano from the stage of the new
Grand Old Opry on Music City Road, while times they were a changin'
as Bob Dylan and Ray Charles recorded in Nashville. He captures the
excitement of the loosey-goosey vibe of the 1970's Nashville in it's
relatively short lived days of artistic freedom coupled with the
personal license the period represented.
Michael Streissguth
Michael
Streissguth is a professor in the Department of Communications and
Film Studies at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. He is the
author of several books, including Johnny Cash: The
Biography. He has produced two
documentary films: Record Paradise and
Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison.
In
Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville (!t books, 304 pages,
June 4, 2013, $26.99),
Michael Streissguth has captured the excitement and danger of the
Outlaw movement as well as its power to represent, if only for a
brief moment, the sense of freedom it represented. The book is
somewhat flawed by its heavy reliance on liner notes, a notorious
medium for picturing artists in only their best lights, but by
referencing numerous other sources, including extensive interviews
with people who were there, he recreates an age which takes on
greater importance as the battle seems to continue today in a world
gone digitally mad, searching for a standout sales force which has
spawned Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift and performers nurtured by the
quasi-democratic American Idol and its imitators. This book is must
reading for those interested in the history of country music as it represents changes in our politics and popular culture.
I received the book as an electronic galley from Edelweiss and read
it on my Kindle.
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