When I discovered Honky Tonk Heroes was the first time I ever vibed with a country album. This was no commercialized pop music to accompany racists in wraparound sunglasses on fishing trips--this was something raw, direct, blue-collar, understatedly intelligent; something that told the truth about life on the margins but didn't glamorize it. In short, I heard a lot of the same qualities that resonated with me about the hiphop I was obsessed with at the time.
Honky Tonk Heroes captures the moment the slick, overproduced sequin-suit "Nashville Sound" became old hat. Waylon growing his hair long & openly smoking weed pissed a lot of people in Music City off, but "outlaw country" didn't just get its energy & aesthetics from rock music: Waylon & co. were also inspired by the creative freedom that rock bands had, whereas Nashville labels still exercised old southern totalitarian control over their artists. After 9 years & 17 albums (all but 1 of which charted) in the Nashville gristmill, Waylon (with the help of a new business manager who came from the rock world) finally managed to convince his label to let him produce his own records, choose his own musicians (he chose his superglue-tight road band, The Waylors) & pick his own songs. Honky Tonk Heroes was the 2nd album to result from this new freedom, & introduced the final piece of the puzzle, songwriter Billy Joe Shaver.
It's become a cliche for critics to remark that Shaver wrote such great songs because he lived them, since his hardscrabble biography is good review fodder, but the fact is that no amount of rough living could have produced these songs without Shaver's innate knack for a turn of phrase. The album is full of unshowy lyrical gems like "Old Five and Dimers (Like Me)", a song about identity, perception, & the gulf between reach & grasp, where he declares "Fenced yards ain't hole cards & like as not never will be/Reason for rhymers & old five & dimers like me."
Every song (except for the closer, which I'll get to in a minute) being written by Shaver gives the album a sonic unity that patchwork Nashville albums often lacked. The last element that ties the whole thing together is the playing. When I listen to country albums, I'm more interested in songwriting than musicianship, but I'll be damned if this record doesn't have some righteous playing. The opening title track starts out with a solo acoustic guitar picking a cowboy-style figure, & Waylon sings over this (in a voice that sounds like it's made of leather), then stops...& the universe takes a breath...then the distortion gets turned on & the full band tears in, with the power of a road-tested combo, & Waylon howls the lyrics once again on top of the maelstrom. A reeling Don Brooks harmonica solo later, the whole band turns on a dime & plays a completely different riff for the last 10 seconds of the song, & it's so good it could have been the whole song. (I went ahead & did that several years ago, if you're interested.)
The album is full of moments like this, that shore up the already solid foundations of the songs. Brooks on harmonica & Ralph Mooney on steel guitar (both of the Waylors) are probably the album's instrumental heroes overall, but my favorite bit is when those fiddles come in on the chorus of "Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me," which is the most transcendent moment I know of in all of country music. It makes me feel like the travelers in the song, cresting a ridge just as the fog breaks & seeing home on the other side of the valley.
The album closer, "We Had It All," is not a bad song, but it's the only one not written by Shaver, & it's the only one that has the swooning string arrangement & overproduced "Nashville Sound," & thus is a bummer to close with. Including it on the album must have been a concession to the label--it sounds that out of place. RCA Victor did release it as a single, but it only charted at #28, compared to Shaver's "You Ask Me To," which went to #8, which must have been a nice feather in the cap for Billy Joe & Waylon.
I have the 1999 Buddha Records reissue, which tacks on Shaver's "Slow Rollin' Low' from the next album & the single version of "You Ask Me To," with an overdubbed Brooks harmonica solo. Both are fine, but I guess Buddha was scrambling to offer some bonus tracks because neither is very necessary. The 10 tracks that precede them, though? Very necessary. Monumental.
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