The 1968 Byrds album Sweetheart of the Rodeo, for all intents and purposes, kickstarted country-rock into, eventually, the mainstream. In some unholy sleight of hand, newly enrolled Byrd Gram Parsons steered McGuinn and co full pelt into, rather than any earlier dabbling, what might later be called Americana. With the album awash with banjos, pedal steel and fiddle, these were sounds less commonly encountered at the Fillmores, east or west.
You don’t need me to retell the story, do you? It’s all available elsewhere anyway. Today the emphasis is all around Israel Nash Gripka, a singer-songwriter with form, having issued a slew of albums since 2009. Dropping his surname in 2013, he has increasingly made his mark as an accomplished and varied musician, as much at home with a full band as he is alone in a cabin with his guitar. He’s been equally happy espousing much of modern technology, embracing all the attributes of 21st century studio opportunities. He has hit the Cover Me radar on a number of occasions, often to take note of songs from his 2011 EP, Working Class Hero & Other Favorites. Whilst that was little more than his plaintive voice and picked guitar, his release of his own Sweetheart of the Rodeo couldn’t be more different.
That point is immediately apparent, as it is with sweeps of synthesiser and electronic drums that the album opens, for Dylan’s “Pretty Boy Floyd,” sounding more like Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark than anyone from further west. Sure, Nash’s voice remains a composite of Neil Young and Jonathan Wilson, but it fits this arrangement perfectly, not least as some never more Heartland big sky electric guitar soars in, with the backing vocals repeating “pretty boy, pretty boy, such a pretty boy” in a mantra that might stop Mr. Z. in his tracks. Vocals apart, as the layers of production accumulate, some real drums cut in alongside the programmed. There are hefty flavors of Springsteen-esque Tunnel of Love-shaped ideas seeping through all over. Utterly glorious, and a prime contender for our end-of-year best-covers list.
Still bedded into electronic textures, “Hickory Wind” is similarly near unrecognizable, the familiar melody in only the vocal, which is the faintest wisp of smoke, blowing in over the strong atmospheric texture. As beats hit a rhythm, the lamentation implicit in the song has never felt quite so keen. Guitars flicker through myriad pedals to add a sense of impending apocalypse. It’ll be now apparent that Nash is not sticking to Sweetheart of the Rodeo‘s original running order, leading to an early concern that Nash may have top-ended it with the bangers and big hitters. That thought gets amplified as “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” trips next. Like early U2 or Ian McNabb’s The Icicle Works, this is a bombastic explosion of powerful post-punk. Country or country rock? Nowhere yet in sight, as an organ swirls Al Kooper-isms into the closing bars.
It would be difficult to de-Nashville “You’re Still on My Mind,” given the sentiment, and there is even the first sighting of a pedal steel guitar, but the rhythm track is still locked into a motorik groove, an analog keyboard moan providing some low groan ballast. Electronic handclaps dip in to add further tasty confusions, but we are at least back in the expected territory and I dare say you could line-dance well enough to it. Less so “100 Years,” where the drumbeat is so up front and person as to impact a whole different sort of narrative unfolding. This is added to by Nash’s increasingly fraught vocal, at times channeling the same vein of Roy Orbison’s final recordings, with the studio applying a thick gloss of deliberately OTT veneer. The secondary vocals from Amethyst Kiah add to the sense of dislocation.
William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water” was never a country song until Gram’s influence imbued it with his “Cosmic American Music” attitude. Nash takes it back more to Bell’s Memphis roots, retaining enough residual twang to act as counterpoint to the cavernously echoing beats. Another female voice takes up the flow, with, confusingly, the distinct Appalachian tones of Emily Scott Robinson. I still have no idea why the lyric means, but I’m loving the Ennio Morricone meets Robert Rodriguez ambience offered here. Orthodoxy returns, if briefly, for a steel-laden “I Am a Pilgrim,” even if the tempo is driven more by the program than the doleful vocal. They work well together, mind, with a crazy thought lighting up my head, around what if the original Sweetheart of the Rodeo had all sounded this way back in 1968.
With “The Christian Life” placing the two devotional songs together, this has had the least work done of any the 11 songs here, and could probably even pass muster at the Grand Ole Opry of yesteryear. Providing that Nash had a haircut, of course, his flowing locks perhaps the only other palpable link to the Byrds. Oddly, the original “Blue Canadian Rockies” here seems to have lost a little in translation, here becoming the “Blue Mountain Rockies.” Transported away from the agreeably 4:4 clip-clop of the Byrds’ version, more is lost, it becoming, without any noticeable forward propulsion, a somewhat directionless moan, and, incidentally, the first track to other than fully impress, otherwise discounting that earlier fear about top-loading.
That missing 4:4 clip-clop is present and correct, however, for a respectful swagger through “Nothing Was Delivered,” which sounds like a Shakey b-side, as Nash pours all his Neil Young into a very credible Stray Gators impersonation. I like it, but it is beginning to feel that the ambient electronic match has flickered and begun to fade, certainly against the impact of the opening barrage. That balance does get some redress for the final track, as a beseeching “Life In Prison” sounds fresh from the sort of closing electronic anthem that Neil Young, still inescapably in the room, adds to the end of some of his noughties output, largely courtesy the arpeggiating sequencers that flit out much the sound, allowing the disc to end on a high.
Nash’s Sweetheart of the Rodeo is a worthy addition to anyone’s library, whether as a standalone curio, or perhaps a cheeky challenge to anyone still playing the original.
Sweetheart of the Rodeo
tracklisting:
- Pretty Boy Floyd (Bob Dylan cover)
- Hickory Wind (The Byrds cover)
- You Ain’t Going Nowhere (Bob Dylan cover)
- You’re Still On My Mind (Jeff Daniels cover)
- One Hundred Years from Now (The Byrds cover)
- You Don’t Miss Your Water (William Bell cover)
- I Am a Pilgrim (Norfolk Jubilee Quartette cover)
- The Christian Life (The Louvin Brothers cover)
- Blue Mountain Rockies (Gene Autry cover)
- Nothing Was Delivered (Bob Dylan cover)
- Life in Prison (Merle Haggard cover)
