What kind of stooping nag brought these shorties to our saloon? The name of the nag is punk rock. It was this nag that completed the history of rock music, thoroughly defecating in the ears of the younger generation. The phenomenon of the new style was that you can be a teenager with a pack of mental diagnoses and at the same time the idol of the same youth. It turned out that there are much more punk rock fans in the USA than in little Britain. Rotten Johnny and Vicious Sid have brought back “No Fun” by The Stooges. Played and sung in an absolutely bestial way, this song complemented the main hits of the Sex Pistols.
Malcolm McLaren destroyed not just the sprouts of youth rebellion, but dried up the roots, and the sparsely toothed lip slaps that followed his toothless pets falsely perceived “God Save The Queen” and “Anarchy In UK” as manifestos. The blockheads from sunny California felt a special taste for punk. The schizophrenically sugary The Beach Boys were already stuck in their throats, Dick Dale’s recordings were memorized, high waves were rolling in anticipation of surfers, and the mass culture around them was rapidly changing. And then suddenly there was a whiff from the islands. Many people were poisoned by the smell of Rotten.
While The Cramps were developing a graveyard sound within rockabilly, their Gun Club buddies started digging in a different direction. Gun Club could be safely classified as a cycobilly, but their expressive means (slide guitar, step rhythm, etc.) allowed them to christen their style with the term “cowpunk”.
Violent Femmes anticipated grunge, which became fashionable in the late 1980s. Their music is like suicidal rockabilly, composed by a school outcast half an hour before he picks up a shotgun. Gordon Gano’s eternally pubescent voice always adds teenage drama to any composition, and Brian Richie’s expressive bass adds nerve.
A group of sidekicks stands apart, not seen in the special love of the island’s youngsters: Beat Farmers, The Blasters and the mighty Mojo Nixon. Beat Farmers generally saw all this punk under cow’s tail, it’s just that their pitch was always bumpy, and the composition was based on John Fogerty, Willie Nelson and other titans.
But the main instrument of forcing country music was the drummer Country Dick Montana. Montana performed one song in each album, and each song weighed like an entire album. The apotheosis was the almost musical “Beat Generation”, where Nick Lowe and Phil Alvin sing along to Montana.
Daniel Monty McLain, known as Country Dick Montana, died of an aneurysm on stage while performing “The Girl I Almost Married” on November 8, 1995, reaching his fortieth birthday on May 11 of the same year. Three days later, the Beat Farmers band decided to self-disband. You can’t replace such a figure as a Dick from the Mountain with any dick from the mountain, it just would not come out. Anyway, Montana returned from the dead to decorate the beautiful computer game “Redneck Rampage” with the songs “Gettin’ Drunk” and “Baby’s Liquored Up”. On one of the game levels, you can find his grave with the epitaph “The Devil Lied To Me”. That was the name of Dick’s solo album, which was released posthumously.
Mojo Nixon is a brilliant scoffer. His fat irony can be caught in the title of the song “Burgers Of Wrath” or in “Bring Me The Head Of David Geffen”. He dedicated the swashbuckling (as is customary on the planet Melmak) ballad “The Ballad Of Country Dick” to Montana. It is immediately followed by “Drunk-Divorced Floozie” on the EP, and then you can’t help but laugh out loud.
Nixon’s music is based on rockabilly, country blues and transcendent country rock, which, in fact, is also rockabilly. With Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys, Mojo recorded a magnificent mini-album “Prairie Home Invasion”, where social themes are superimposed through humor on boogie and other dashing rhythms. Cowpunk? He is, dear, in a crystallized and concentrated form.
Mike Ness conceived his Social Distortion back in the 1970s, after listening to the notorious punks from Albion. Hardcore prevailed among California’s musical styles, and playing it faster and harder was helped by substances that became more accessible as the band grew. As a result, Ness went into rehab, after which he began to think about the roots of music. Blues and country influences appeared in the feed. However, they later gave way to skate rock. Mike Ness’s 1999 solo album Cheating At Solitaire was really interesting. The guests were Bruce Springsteen, Brian Setzer and the brass band from the Royal Crown Review. The noir rockabilly blues “Crime Don’t Pay” with a desperate saxophone and an alarming guitar could pave Mike a new path into rock and roll. His version of “You Win Again” is the very presence of an extra person among the plains who do not remember the edge.
J.D. Wilkes and Reverend Horton Heat also work in the cowpunk field, portraying exalted preachers to a much greater extent than the sycophiles that the sycophiles want them to be.
Hank Williams III, the ferocious cowpunk in the impossible hat, deserves a separate conversation, which we will still have to talk about. Have a hot night rodeo for you, Moon Dawgs!
