“Outlaw country” is an ironic descriptor at best, applied to a music that, without the modifier, began as a lucrative embarrassment to the phonograph salesmen of the 1920s, their newly-minted “hillbilly” record catalogs doing surprisingly well next to the more respectable stacks of whatever maudlin tenor was the operatic toast of the day. Country music’s cornpone reputation grew as its burgeoning industry began to trade on an image based in white southern poverty; but if the marketing suggested the music was as impoverished as its people (a patent falsehood), this achieved for the proponents of such thinking a comfortable outsider-ism, a romantic us-versus-them rewind and replay of Reconstruction that survives in other place in the South as well, through for instance a protracted and continuing — and, unfortunately, necessary — civil rights movement, to this day. So then, what’s this Outlaw business? The term attached to Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and a handful of other country writers and singers who, starting in the late 1960s, were drawn away from the industrial strength, smooth country music produced by “Nashville,” that Tennessee town’s small oligarchy of producers and record labels who held sway over any music distributed under the category of country, and pointedly avoided shifting their audience’s gaze towards the rockier issues or musical themes of the times. Jennings, like Nelson, bucked at this, knew what it meant for their art, and went back to Texas; he turned up the rock’n’roll rhythms he’d played with Buddy Holly, sang what he wanted, and called Nashville out on its phony conservatism. In so doing, Waylon and the country outlaws — and the new southern bands like the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd — found a younger, national country audience, and also reminded rockers that their favorite music was as much country as blues.
Fast forward a half century and the same tension exists in country music, with a handful of artists living outside the airbrush Nashville continues to apply to its version of bro’ country American culture. Trying to live real. Living the dream, as Sturgill Simpson might say, though the song he wrote by this name is nothing if not double-edged, and carries a lot more weight in its few words than most anthems I can think of. Forced to defend the song’s lyrics at one point, he wrote:
Ironically, the song is actually a metaphor comparing the soothing yet completely addictive and damaging effects of hard narcotic opiates to the negative sociological impact of organized religion and blind faith when forced upon society and used as a political tool by self-righteous, thinly-veiled bigots to control and manipulate the masses and enhance the suffering of impoverished, lower class citizens. Also, since I’m self-funding/self-releasing my art instead of shooting for ACM [Academy of Country Music] awards and taking it up the ass from the music row man, I have the right to write and sing and say whatever I choose just as you have the right to not buy or listen to my music and stay away from my page if you don’t like it.
That Simpson had to write this at all is a farce, but that he did is valuable, and continues the tradition of outlaw country and what country music was at its roots. Like the other songs on 2014’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, “Living the Dream” is a primer in the lean, rock and roll approach to country, its guitars drawing from the full history of its pioneering players while marking out its own ground. From its languid beginning to its keening wail of a finish, this song is from the wellspring itself.
*Photo above by David McClister.
In 1979, while in New York City and around the time he was adding guitar overdubs to 
Put a couple of decades on the protagonist of 
“Unlikely” is probably the right word, that the hairiest, grittiest, straight-uppenest American rock record of the 1970s, maybe ever, would be made by an English band in tax exile in the south of France lolling in sheer European decadence. That the Rolling Stones attained such a state of grace is only partly surprising, though, given the sheer will of their progress to the point of Exile on Main Street: with Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, and Sticky Fingers the writing was on the wall, but it was this double album that sealed their legend, where the channeling was complete, where without seams the Deep South blackness poured through their pasty, pale, drug-addled limey fingers in drums and basses and guitars and voxes and keys and horns. They hadn’t just gone to the crossroads, they’d set up the tent years before and waited it out, for the spirit to finally visit them. “Satisfaction”? “Get Off My Cloud”? Even “Honky Tonk Women,” with its perfect guitar? Those were killing time, chop builders, and the work they’ve done since has had high points too but has never been more than the downhill coast. Exile’s the big meet up, a meticulously made album with no contrivance, a blues turned over with a rock shovel, originals mixing with covers with barely a hint of borderline, as if this is their music as much as it is yours or mine or 
Boston’s mega public broadcasting treasure trove, WGBH, has added to its Open Vault the interviews that went into the making of its epic 1995 documentary, Rock and Roll. Those of us who remember this 10-hour landmark from those foggy, hoar-bitten pre-Wikipedia days may think fondly of it as the only long-form documentary to take on the genre as a whole, from a reasonable distance from Rock’s genesis but while many of its prophets were still alive and interview-able. While the finished programs are not as yet available (no doubt due to copyright on the songs used in the film), video and transcripts of the interviews are here:
Progarchy 