Alan Jackson’s Under The Influence may be the most rebellious mainstream country album of the year. Not because it does anything particularly new, though; in fact, it does quite the opposite. Consisting entirely of covers of old country songs, Under The Influence flies in the face of current fashion by daring to feature music that is explicitly, unabashedly, sometimes even unreconstructedly country. The album can be viewed, along with Jackson’s protest of the exclusion of George Jones from the recent CMA telecast, as part of his apparent mission to get current country music speaking again to its own tradition.
Under The Influence challenges the status quo in several ways. The most obvious are the song’s arrangements, which feature more twang than you’ll hear in an hour’s worth of mainstream country radio. The tracks don’t merely include pedal steel and fiddle, they emphasize them, and often stretch to the radio-unfriendly length of four minutes or more. (The album’s finest moment, a riveting take on Hank Jr.’s “The Blues Man”, clocks in at 7:04.)
Intriguingly, Jackson and producer Keith Stegall have chosen most of these country “classics” from a period, 1979 to 1981, that conventional wisdom claims didn’t have any classics from which to choose. Jackson’s solid renditions of earlier hits such as Gene Watson’s “Farewell Party” and John Anderson’s “She Just Started Liking Cheating Songs” remain perhaps too loyal to the original versions; the most engaging differences are in the subtlety of Jackson’s easygoing phrasing. But on other cuts, especially the intimate recordings of Mel McDaniel’s “Right In The Palm Of Your Hand” and Merle Haggard’s “The Way I Am”, Stegall’s arrangements feel both vaguely retro and utterly contemporary — and thus suggest what a great country station might sound like sometime in the future.
A silly duet reading of Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” (with Buffett himself) actually sells short an underappreciated song, but everywhere else, Under The Influence sounds like the best album of Jackson’s career.
Of course, there was a time when covering C&W standards wasn’t rebellious at all; check out nearly any album from nearly any major country artist up through the mid-’70s and it’ll be loaded with covers. Mainstream country has more recently learned to disdain this connection to tradition — a tendency picked up from rock, which, at least since the Beatles, has increasingly eschewed covers in favor of original material performed in the style of the moment.
Not that older country music, taken as a living-and-breathing genre, ever actually subordinated innovation to tradition. Inevitably, changes have occurred in both country and rock ‘n’ roll — the Dixie Chicks aren’t any closer to Hank Williams than Beck is to Elvis — but there have been key differences in the way the musics have chosen to tell their respective stories. Country artists such as Buck Owens and Waylon Jennings, innovators of the highest order, still presented themselves as links in a chain, as intimately connected to tradition.
Latter-day rockers, on the other hand, though no less indebted to their forebears, know they probably won’t be taken seriously unless they present themselves as breaking with the past. So bluegrass, a Next Big Thing if ever there was one, gets heard as a return to roots, while 1970s punk rock typically ignores its influences altogether (in rockabilly, metal, garage rock, and early ’70s bands such as the New York Dolls and the Stooges) to arrive as a rockin’ virgin birth.
Mike Ness has never played that game. A punk rock anomaly, Ness’ regular band, Social Distortion, has announced its roots frequently and proudly, even its uncool country ones. On recordings such as the band’s 1992 cover of Kitty Wells’ C&W hit “Making Believe”, they’ve regularly come off like a bunch of Clash fans who dug “White Riot” well enough, but who actually had their lives changed when they heard the twangy riff that fuels “Brand New Cadillac”.
Ness’ second solo release this year, Under The Influences, ventures as far into the twang as he’s ever dared. If Social Distortion has been that rare punk band unashamed to let its roots show (and with roots planted deeper than 1976, no less), then Ness solo emerges as an at-last uncamouflaged roots-rocker, though one with a Dr. Marten’s still kicking him hard in the ass.
Ness gives us rockabilly that thunders; sax-fueled R&B so heartsick it sounds as if he might puke; a “Wildwood Flower” that comes off like the Pogues in a boozy rumble with the Wacos. On the front cover, Ness is snazzed up like Kid Rock’s older brother, but there’s nothing on the disc so of-the-moment as that. Surrounded by fiddle and pedal steel that regularly slice through the colossal drum-and-guitar attack like a switchblade through flesh, Ness updates two cuts each by Harlan Howard and Hank Williams, plus 10 more twang-rock covers — some obscure (Wayne Walker’s “All I Can Do”) and some classic (“Once A Day”).
Like Jackson’s album, Ness’ disc arrives out of step with its times, but despite tipping its hat to the past, it feels somehow forward-looking. True to both Ness’ punk and country pasts, Under The Influences seems at times to be using the latter to debate the former, all in an effort to shape some possible better future. It might seem odd, at first, to hear Ness singing Marty Robbins’ “Big Iron”, but since it immediately follows a raging version of “I Fought The Law”, we know he is identifying, and poignantly, not with “the ranger…with the big iron on his hip,” but with the song’s doomed young rebel-without-a-cause, Texas Red, who fights the law in the most superficial ways and loses everything.
“There’s got to be a better way,” Ness prays aloud on a remarkable new honky-tonk version of his own “Ball And Chain”. There’s got to be some way to learn from earlier successes without simply repeating the past, he suggests, to live outside the law and still be honest, to do more than “run all your life and not go anywhere.” The clues, Ness and Jackson both seem to be saying, are somewhere here underneath all these influences. We just have to keep digging.
