I first found out about Chris Wall a few years ago when Jerry Jeff Walker covered two of his songs on his Live At Gruene Hall record. Those songs reflected the two sides of Chris Wall’s work. The first, “I Feel Like Hank Williams Tonight”, is a beautiful and smart country tune about pain, loss and Hank Williams. The next, “Trashy Women”, is a gonzo party song that met with vigorous approval from the college frat boys in the hall (and later with a mass audience when Confederate Railroad covered it).
As I’ve listened to Wall’s own records since then, I’ve continued to be attracted to the fine songwriting of his quieter material and only tolerant of the rave-ups. At live shows, however, those party songs are the crowd-pleasers that get the place rocking and tend to drown out the more carefully crafted tunes. And now here comes Any Saturday Night In Texas, a live album recorded at, you guessed it, Gruene Hall, the oldest dancehall in Texas.
The highlight of the record is “Big In The Heart”, a simple and very pretty love song with no hint of boastful swagger and no mention of drunken stagger. About half the record continues this tone and illustrates Wall’s smooth, low vocals along with some sweet guitar and fiddle. Some of these highlights include the opening “I Feel Like Singing Along”, the reverent “Wild Bill And The Montana Kid”, and the regretful “Miles Of Rodeo”, the latter featuring Kelly Willis and Bruce Robison on harmony vocals.
Not surprisingly, about halfway through the disc, the scales tip toward the gonzo. Recorded on Texas Independence Day, Any Saturday Night In Texas contains an inordinate number of references to all things Texan, from the Alamo to the Broken Spoke. The song “Texas Time” starts with the lines, “I live my life on Texas time/Lone Star beer and Mad Dog wine/Me and Bubba in my pickup truck/Rollin’ down the highway and pushing our luck,” then moves on to a chorus about being a “Redneck, what the heck.” The party continues with “A Gal From San Antone”, a road song during which the crowd is called upon to periodically shout out “Free Bird!”
The record closes with someone saying “I’d rather be a fence post in Texas than the king of Tennessee” into the mic as the crowd exits, followed by a phone message from a couple of Wall’s friends telling him how awesome the show was and how great the live record will be. And if a rowdy Texas dancehall sing-along is what you want, I’m sure you’ll agree with these guys.
