(This is a remix of pieces written for Chuck Eddy and the Voice in 1999, and Kandia Crazy Horse @ Charlotte Creative Loafing in 2005, with material added later, some of it today.)(Original merger is on The Freelance Mentalists.)
Some people seem most at home in crowds. Not necessarily happiest, but that's not necessarily what home is for; it always involves having your own slot—
Fresh out of prison in the Summer of Love, David Allan Coe was the kind of country singer who slept in a hearse parked in front of the Grand Ole Opry, when he wasn't touring with heartland arena rock heroes Grand Funk Railroad.
Akron-born in '39, Coe was considered a mite old for a potential country music star. True, he was three years younger than ex-Rhodes Scholar-to-ex-military vinyl noob Kris Kristofferson, but KK already had better hair, a truthfully promising future-movie-actor smoky air, and some sureshot-to-recognizably country hits—including, it must be said, "Me and Bobbie McGee," probably his all-time best, among the cogent croaker’s cover bait—budding on his maiden vehicle, Kristofferson---in 1970, when Coe had a couple of obscure, reputedly out-there, blues-based albums. Several of the later-biz-tagged Outlaws were in the same age boat, at least, but they never claimed to spend their youth on or near Death Row, nor to teach Charlie Manson how to play the guitar…
Having finally scored a major label contract, with Columbia, no less, he adorned himself in a Lone Ranger mask and rhinestones for the cover of 1974's The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy, which is snowbound Southern Gothic. It follows the colorful, rueful memoryscape of Michael Peter Smith's "Crazy Mary"----now it's Lil David and his boys, running scared as they taunt an old, formerly running-wild local character---with the Coe-Marty Yonts monochrome "River," sung from his cell. Which is where he then freaks out, via
Mickey Newbury's grandiose, ritualistic, solitary meltdown, "33rd of August," pushing against its impossible, indelible date—Coe finally bleats, "Looks lahk rain!" at the very end, which actually comes as a splash of welcome comic relief, each time I dare listen. (But lately, the comic's getting darker, as questions emerge, and answers follow: who the hell cares, who even knows about rain, when a body's so deep inside? He does.)
Overall, a cautionary tale: that's how the Cowboy got this way---yet there are
holes in the links of his chain-chain-chain---it's only part of the story, as always.
This segment of songs and associations is just another visit from the thought train, and the night may still be young, who knows, back in 19XX, for instance.
It didn't sell, and, like another David, he took another step out and went Glam,
which, as in Rock, meant matching the glittery (in this case cowboy) suits with more macho music.
Yet all the while, he was still studying how to build his own doggie-door Big House (after what some in prison lore call the slammer), starting with a big tent, and a bigger boat.
As you might guess from the Grand Funk connection, he had audiences who
crossed from grassroots rock---smokin' gold---to country, and that was before country radio programmers knew just what to do about it.
They got a clue in the Bicentennial Year of 1976: Wanted! The
Outlaws lassoed just the right earlier-70s tracks of Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter, and Tompall Glaser, becoming the first album of country of any kind to go platinum, when that designation was new, as the record market reached Boomtown---Coe, just not that in with the Outcrowd (who had been building up cred with cautious suits and dedicated heads for several years before he appeared), was left at the station, megs-publicity-wise, despite his continuing self-hype.
Which. along with whatever the truth may be or seem to him about his early off-mic life, may have something to do with why he always has seemed a bit grizzled, 'n' frazzled, too—a bitten bit anxious, in an engagingly real-enough, relatable way. But he's prowled around enough to sniff out the most likely, bearably bumpy routes to getting his money made and his 'maker shaken---even more of a deadpan baggy-pants character actor than designated, top-riding Outlaws, Coe's the one who makes the gigs like an underdawg independent contractor, hustling and shuffling, still semi-tucking those cuffs into some hungry boots.
He kept plugging away. "Living on the Run," from 1976's Long-Haired Redneck, was one of the earlier (listenable) melds of Allmanesque guitar wheels with fiddles, steel, and as replenishing a mountain spring of female vocaltitude (thoughtfully subdued on the subsequent polygamy song "The House We Call Home") as you could find, east
of Tupelo Honey-era Van Morrison. On Spectrum VII and Compass Point, Coe even drew balm for sore spirits from Caribbean rhythms, seeping deeper than Jimmy Buffett's. (Buffett said he wanted to sue Coe for allegedly lifting elements of a song, but didn't want to give him the satisfaction.)
This was no happy-hippy blend; it was an effective contrast for "Don't Tread On Me" principles and mood swings, malcontents under pressure,
shipping themselves all the way down through the ever-smoldering continent, never fully committed to or bound by any certain direction, unless you count the zigzags in traces.
Speaking again of Glam, you could even say it afterglows, that DAC on record continues to run gender-convention redlights, unashamedly and frequently and doubtfully asking, in effect, "No, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" (And in fact, covering "Stand By Your Man," on For The Record.) But isn't this actually a certain expedient Country Male Tradition? Especially if you leave out "Country"?
Even on '77's Rides Again, with cover pic of DAC on motorsickle, dressed damn appropriately, he travels "Under Rachel's Wings," 'til his magpie eye is taken elsewhere, like the status-seeking "Willie Waylon and Me."
(Which reappears on his Son of the South, along with tracks featuring Waylon, equally strong Wanted! The Outlaws contributor Jessi Colter [even moreso on the expanded 1996 reissue]. and Willie.
Coe had tried to have it both ways, courting the musical/image association, while taking some negatory, more Outlaw-than-the-Outlaws, jabs in interviews, but/and, judging by autobiographical comments, Waylon saw Coe as something of a poster child, so made his contribution.)
Past certain once(?)-notorious, audience-polarizing self-bootlegs (and the mid-'70s sleeper classic Nashville documentary Heartworn Highways letting its initially smoky contemplative wooden frame house vibe 'n' groove [as future Coe-collaborators Guy and Susannah Clark host, not Coe, but mostly their acolytes: younger, equally individualistically exacting songwriters, times standard-setting Townes Van Zandt, on the creatively starker side of a mood swing, which shows up later][ btw, as wiki sez, TVZ's "If I Needed You" is "very similar" to DAC's later "Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone"]) get shattered by backstage-at-the-prison-concert Coepulsive testifying---extruding, before the glittering eyes of a trusty, who is nodding obligingly, encouragingly, "Uh-huh, uh-huh...," the ever-self-generating coat of many dark anecdotal colors that was already something that Coe, especially, was known for, among mythopoeic peers, as one of the champeen BS artists in Nashville), studio outbursts can be carefully framed by the artist himself, though sometimes with ludicrous rhetoric in motion (watch it now, podner).
Whatever it took. Human Emotions proffers "Suicide," actually about shooting
his unfaithful wife and her lover—but he yowls like a parody of Hank Jr. with a mouf-ful of pills 'n' beard, the music's ZZ Top as carnival ride, and basically this here's his Slim Shady moment, in 1978.
Well, kind of: close as a cautious parolee/sane-enough person can get to rootin'-tootin' revenge, via the creative coup of clapping on a mask of
comical psychodrama---it wasn't a leap to the top of the critical-public-
commercial heap 'o' real trouble's acclaim, a la Eminem,
but, whatever the attorneys thought, it's not bad for someone who just found out that his real-life wife was cheatin', while this very album was still in the works.(so he said later)(Keeping things organized, of course, the finished LP had its "Happy Side" and "Sui-I-cide.") At least as effective as/ much more enjoyable than Dylan's notorious "Idiot Wind," "Suicide" is a stage blood steam whistle showdown, with sufficient Realness to satisfy judges of such in the drag doc Paris Is Burning, probably.
Measuring, maintaining, and adjusting what sounds like his maybe technically lonely space in the crowd means that he can, when in a mind to. apply a very practiced eye to situations that call for the even bolder side of professionalism too, as in Coe's most famous self-writ song, "Take This Job And Shove It" ("I ain't workin' here no more"). No going postal or on strike for him: he's already out the door. (Before such drastic measures, he might go along to get along, but only so far.)
Another standby, Steve Goodman and John Prine's "You Never Even Call Me By My Name," establishes an ironic distance between
himself and the clichés expected of country performers (and here listed and
demanded by Coe---Mama, trucks, prison, drinking, and more!--- as
commemorated in frequent live and recorded monologue, always leading into the resulting, added, Coe-approved-as-"perfect" final verse, which allows him to use said clichés again elsewhere however he pleases (always shamelessly, and, in proximity to this audience fave, pert near blamelessly). A little space can be becoming, when you're ready for the spotlight, under that hat and/or braided beard.
One thing that helps him get over (musically, at least) is, along with the often,
though not always, shrewd-to-astute choices of material and personnel, the way he manages to suggest a compatible combination: just the right elements of other, more inherently (or anyway precedent-establishing) distinctive voices. He often sounds like Waylon, minus the trademark vibrato, thus paradoxically poised. Maybe he just can't vibrate like that, and/or knows not to try (later for too much trying in this world). There's also a fairly reliable rate of drying and drawing out of mawkish phrases, a practice I first associated, and still do, with Merle Haggard, when he's not sagging: those long Coe-Hag whitefolk-nostrils spear excess sentiment, but borh artists' residual warmth (plus DAC's slightly-fogged-windshield Waylonics) guarantee that love's left enough sediment for pipedreams and homefires.
Oh, but
"Can't you see?" DAC asks his multitudes on
1997's brickhouse Live—If That Ain't Country...,"Ah'm a desperate man."
And on his 1999 album of all-new material, Recommended for Airplay, he's still throwing tasty songbabies, catchy bits, breadcrumbs anyway, to the wolves of anxiety. As for true, truer, truest desperation: well, who knows---after all this time, it's what we fans still expect as a necessary ingredient, in his stance, his brand, and he delivers.
Yet Recommended for Airplay is actually, in its autumnal cool, and even
(initial) political correctness, a seeming curveball for those expecting new
veerings through vintage-style illin'. Despite the usual dry runs, "The Price We'll Have To Pay" manages quite the civil, reproachful undertone (yes, he's picked that trick from wimmen too!), "She's Already Gone"'s pedal steel breathes unearthly joy (Joy might even be the backup singer, exuding her own inscrutables), and "Drink My Wife Away" is so fun it's almost Bubblegum. Yet "Let Me Be the One You Turn To" is the soulfullest, r'n'b–est thing I've ever heard him do, and his "In My Life" moves me like the Beatles'. "We Can Talk" (rhymes with Billy Swan's "I Can Help") somehow sustains intimate insinuation via epic guitar, and "Sweet Rebecca" is so concisely (yet Skynyrdly!) in love. It's got his old heart-shaped tattoo beating like a question mark. So what? And why not?
Inferred musical swingin' door questions for which more words might go
something like this:
While we're living on the run, my designated driver friends, in this crowded house that we call home, the odds can shift, and if she never even calls you by your name, maybe that's because she doesn't need to, not in here----can't that be a good sign, some of the time? And like the Goodman-Prine, Coe-approved song says. "Ah was drunk the day Mama/Got out of prison." Things come to those who wait.
PS: and while we're waiting on the run for the 2005 PB Deluxe reissue, here's another live 'un, from ballot comments on 2003 releases:
(I've been told that he wrote a pamphlet of guidance for his fellow ex-cons, perhaps included in some original-release LP sleeves, and apparently with some reissue CD promos, of PB, sternly advising said peers to have sex only with prostitutes for the first six months, or maybe more, after being released.)
Ro-mance is alluring, but in an elusive, somewhut fairytale way (later attempts at real normal, country radio-acceptable updates of countrypolitan gentility can suddenly morph into nobody-but Coe-politan, after-midnight specials, eventually---still long before the acid folk vogue, much less any semi-imaginary country crossover from or to acid folk---with backing voices of dream babies from the holler and thee canyon, suddenly spilling like a slo-mo gold rush all around his eternally smoky tones).
David Allen Coe: LIVE AT BILLY BOB'S TEXAS (Smith Music Group): not as good as LIVE: IF THAT AIN'T COUNTRY...Doesn't give his band as much room here. Oh well. Warren Haynes and Johnny Neel are long gone, anyway, but (70s-boogie-ing or banjo-and-mandolin picking in a good, trashily-electrified, expertly-rationed way), these current guys are high generic, as is Coe, the original John the Baptist (or John the Confederate Mormon Polygamist, he'd correct me)/ poet laureate of the longhaired daddies (and mamas) of today's Montgomery Gentrified, Buffed-Hat mainstream. (A letter from a forsaken, guilt-tripping daddy [the more nuanced re audible aging of Coe, and young-sounding lungs of his fairly well-behaved, sometimes-sing-along attendees] is slipped in under the smoke, as moody and deft as anything I've heard him do.) Some nods in the direction of recognition, but he still feels some pain of neglect and other "old scars under new tattoos" (as he tells us, around the campfire, a few too many times, but even the boring parts keep me alert, ready for the good times to come again). The songs co-written with Kid Richie fit well, not many mere rehashes of hits (not many hits to be rehashed, but still), and "You Never Even Called Me By My Name" gets a surprise guest-shot of "The Real Slim Shady"). When he finally resumes the group vocals (which made for a strong start), we get a lilting, expressive "Free My Mind," (like a lawnneck Cooke/Marley-smoker) and certainly a better "Follow Me" than Uncle Kracker's watery Steve Millerism.
Among the Nashville Cats on Coe's 1969's or 1970 debut, Penitentiary Blues -- long out of print, until the 2005 Deluxe Edition CD reissue by Hacktone/Shout! Factory, in time for Coe's 66th birthday-- is drummer Kenneth Buttrey, who previously played on Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35" ("They stone ya when you're tryin' ta be so good..."). In an extension of his “Rainy Day…” exercise routine, Buttrey gets to march, pound, shuffle, and roll Coe through the echoing halls of this portrait of the later-self-proclaimed Longhaired Redneck as young bluesman. Its songs don't all deal with prison life, but, in this context, they sure seem like cells, both connected and separated. Places where your thoughts crowd you and people are alone together, in little cages like stages, even when teeming, because somebody's always watching and being watched.
Now, in unexpected early 21st Century retrospect, PB seems like the blueprint for his enduring worldview, at its most appealingly Coe-herent blue:
This freedbird seems to see himself and his lady friends as forever finding and losing each other in the maze and locks of life: ships that go bump in the night. If one discovers or accuses the other of (and/or finds oneself) bumping someone else, Coe's always ready enough, soon enough (sometimes eager, sometimes sad) to hit the road, to stay away from conflict, and any other confinement.
Gosh---pre-proto-acid folk crossover Coepolitan dream babies: what album are they on? These sisters made a strong impression and moved along----better listen for 'em some more.
