These two reissues make available four albums from the big-label years of a singer a lot of people now recall only as “that other guy on The Outlaws LP.” My Notorious Youth covers Tompall’s Charlie (MGM, 1973) and Take The Singer With The Song (Polydor, 1974); Another Log On The Fire combines Tompall Glaser Sings The Songs Of Shel Silverstein and The Great Tompall & His Outlaw Band (MGM, 1974 and 1975).
Like Waylon and Willie, the man already had been around a long time when the mid-’70s outlaw phenomenon hit. The young Glaser Brothers — three tuneful fish-out-of-water Roman Catholic kids from rural Nebraska — began singing sweetly and adding “doo wahs” in 1959 for Marty Robbins, long the only one in country music who seemed to have much use for them. There were scattered Jack Clement-produced hits in the mid-’60s, including the Glaser Brothers’ original version of Tompall’s enduring “Streets Of Baltimore”. Like Clement, Glaser would be a key — and rare — independent producer in Nashville in those outlaw ’70s, bringing his now more roughened, experienced voice to these albums of his own.
“Roughened” is relative, however. The pleasant fun and flowing tones on these LPs generally strike the ear now as the very reason his records didn’t score that well or last that long. Tompall’s maverick sensibility in choice of content was not matched by anything as distinctive and unnervingly ’round the bend in his own vocal tone, which is sometimes pegged with that awful cliché “whiskey-soaked” but is really something more like disheveled. (He does so well with a Waylon-produced version of “Wild Side Of Life” on the second CD that you wonder why he didn’t do more old-time smooth ballads from that space between Clement and Mac Wiseman.)
Crucially, the born outsider knew great outsider writers when he heard them, and so Glaser sings, often introducing, a good number of excellent songs here, from that remarkable era of Nashville songwriting. Among them are early work from Kristofferson (“Breakdown”), Billy Joe Shaver (“The Good Lord Knows I Tried”), Kinky Friedman (“Sold American” and “Gideon Bible”) — and, as the one full LP title says, much Shel Silverstein (“Put Another Log On The Fire”). Glaser is utterly at home with this strong material, and that’s what makes these discs worth more than a casual listen today.
