20 Country Chartstoppers!
20 Country Chartstoppers! Vinyl.
An excerpt from the liner notes to 20 Country Chartstoppers!:
"Don't just look, but LISTEN TO COUNTRY like you've never heard before. Don't be surprised at what you hear. It's clear! COUNTRY OR POPS Chartstoppers is tops. STARS are our business. You've proven it by buying CHARTSTOPPERS Volumes 1 and 2. See them on TV, buy them in your record store and you're assured that when we say TWENTY ORIGINAL STARS . . . TWENTY ORIGINAL HITS . . . we mean it. That's our business . . . to give to you the greatest and the latest. So don't just look but LISTEN to TWENTY COUNTRY CHARTSTOPPERS. You'll find you're LISTENING TO COUNTRY . . . and that's what this exclusive record is all about."
All those caps are in the original liner notes, I didn't add them. More than wanting to LISTEN TO COUNTRY, I felt like I had been hypnotised into buying a sea monkey village or shares in an alpaca farm. The claim about TWENTY ORIGINAL STARS isn't even true. Twenty songs, but Johnny Cash sings three, Bill Anderson and Lee Conway sing two each: that's actually 16 ORIGINAL STARS singing 20 COUNTRY CHARTSTOPPERS!
This is a pretty stock standard late 60s K-TEL style compilation. Solid Nashville sound: none of that Haggard, Jennings outlaw malarkey. That said, this compilation does encompass a reasonable range of late 60s country styles. There was a lot of room for maneuver in the country and western genres judging by the representations on this disc. All of it is recognisably country, a unifying factor is the folksy storytelling nature of the lyrics. The strangest track on here is Dave Dudley's 'Fly away again'. This is a jet age update of the old standard 'on-the-road-again' story. Instead of mounting the horse or hitching up the wagon or getting a ride on a boxcar, the protagonist in this song seems to be waiting around for his flight in an airport lounge with his long-suffering lady friend.
What makes this updating of an archetypal country song strange is the synthesized strings, great slatherings phasing from one speaker to the other in tandem with the harmonica. Of course, the harmonica instantly evokes the great travelling hobo boxcar song tradition that modern country acquired from its dustbowl depression era roots. The combination of the synthesized (ARP?) strings and the harmonica works in creating a slightly queasy, compressed, flat sound. It's a sound that in its way conjures the empty feeling of hanging around airports waiting for loved ones to depart.
An excerpt from the liner notes to 20 Country Chartstoppers!:
"Don't just look, but LISTEN TO COUNTRY like you've never heard before. Don't be surprised at what you hear. It's clear! COUNTRY OR POPS Chartstoppers is tops. STARS are our business. You've proven it by buying CHARTSTOPPERS Volumes 1 and 2. See them on TV, buy them in your record store and you're assured that when we say TWENTY ORIGINAL STARS . . . TWENTY ORIGINAL HITS . . . we mean it. That's our business . . . to give to you the greatest and the latest. So don't just look but LISTEN to TWENTY COUNTRY CHARTSTOPPERS. You'll find you're LISTENING TO COUNTRY . . . and that's what this exclusive record is all about."
All those caps are in the original liner notes, I didn't add them. More than wanting to LISTEN TO COUNTRY, I felt like I had been hypnotised into buying a sea monkey village or shares in an alpaca farm. The claim about TWENTY ORIGINAL STARS isn't even true. Twenty songs, but Johnny Cash sings three, Bill Anderson and Lee Conway sing two each: that's actually 16 ORIGINAL STARS singing 20 COUNTRY CHARTSTOPPERS!
This is a pretty stock standard late 60s K-TEL style compilation. Solid Nashville sound: none of that Haggard, Jennings outlaw malarkey. That said, this compilation does encompass a reasonable range of late 60s country styles. There was a lot of room for maneuver in the country and western genres judging by the representations on this disc. All of it is recognisably country, a unifying factor is the folksy storytelling nature of the lyrics. The strangest track on here is Dave Dudley's 'Fly away again'. This is a jet age update of the old standard 'on-the-road-again' story. Instead of mounting the horse or hitching up the wagon or getting a ride on a boxcar, the protagonist in this song seems to be waiting around for his flight in an airport lounge with his long-suffering lady friend.
What makes this updating of an archetypal country song strange is the synthesized strings, great slatherings phasing from one speaker to the other in tandem with the harmonica. Of course, the harmonica instantly evokes the great travelling hobo boxcar song tradition that modern country acquired from its dustbowl depression era roots. The combination of the synthesized (ARP?) strings and the harmonica works in creating a slightly queasy, compressed, flat sound. It's a sound that in its way conjures the empty feeling of hanging around airports waiting for loved ones to depart.
posted by Engel at 4:57 PM
1 Comments:
country sux, man!
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