As the cover blurb from critic Ed Ward attests, this five-piece band “was arguably the last great progressive country band Austin produced.” Whiskey Drinkin’ Music was fronted by Jon Emery and Leroy Preston. The latter, who’d left Asleep At The Wheel a year before co-launching this band, is for my money the great lost songwriter of the whole 1970s Austin thang; his most serious songs (like “Whiskey Drinkin’ Music” itself) tell detailed stories with the sparest of images, but it’s the serious-with-a-comic-twist tunes (like “My Mind Takes A Walk”) that make you ask yourself, “Did he really say that?” — while also suggesting where Junior Brown, to name one, filled some of his own bag of tricks. Emery wasn’t quite as subtle or advanced as a writer, but efforts such as “Duchess” and “Still Hung Up On You” show he was getting there.
Emery, who still plays his brand of “hillbilly rock ‘n’ roll” around Austin, mostly wants to rip it up; his stomping version of Moon Mullican’s “Rocket To The Moon” rides on tension and release, with bristling guitar breaks replacing Moon’s piano and jazzy interplay between his own harmonica and Richard Casanova’s fiddle. He also turns in a serene, sexy reading of “Sugar Moon”.
Preston, who now lives in New England and is out of the music biz, is a master of down-and-out songs like the two mentioned above plus “Hillbilly Blues” and the Jones-like “Staring At The Bottles”. He also reprises such Wheel material as the melancholy shuffle “When Love Goes Wrong”, a bopping boogie version of “Route 66″, and the chugging “My Baby Thinks She’s A Train” (later a hit for Rosanne Cash). Fiddler Richard Casanova, another Wheel veteran who later played with George Strait, shreds away on his instrumentals “Sailor At The Bar” and “I’m A Comin’”, and also gets busy behind Preston on the latter’s reading of George Jones’ “Your Heart Turned Left”.
Whiskey Drinkin’ Music lasted two years to the day, releasing only the DIY single “Hillbilly Blues” b/w “Duchess” before breaking up because they couldn’t get a record deal. But as this romping, jazzy live set proves, their mastery of Texas swing, shuffles, boogie, blues and hardcore country-with-a-beat summed up all that was best about the ’70s Austin scene, while inadvertently providing the template for countless bands working today. They were really great.
