Track Two - Drive-By Truckers - Zip City

The Drive-By Truckers are purveyers of Dirty, southern, country-rock at its very best. Much influenced by Lynyrd Skynyrd, it is often their lyrical content that sets them apart.

When the Truckers reappear on this blog, and they will, chances are that those selections will be songs written by Patterson Hood, the main writer for the band. But this song is by Mike Cooley and is arguably his best for the Band.

A straight ahead Southern Rock song, what sets it apart is the awkward elegance of the lyrics. Written from the perspective of an angry 17 year old who 'ain't gettin none" from his girlfriend, Cooley finds the voice perfectly and manages to be profane and poetic at the same time. He snarls the song out and there is real anger in some of the verses. Take this.

Keep your drawers on, girl, it ain't worth the fight
By the time you drop them I'll be gone
And you'll be right where they fall the rest of your life

Real, angry, raw and powerful. The key verse to what is an old fashioned story song, this is the stand-out rock track from their first really sucessful album, Southern Rock Opera.

Track One - Lew Lewis Band: Caravan Man

If I was ever to get my own radio show I'd want this as my opening theme. Something about the mixture of Harmonica runs along with the chopping guitar sound is almost hypnotic. The credits imply that this was jammed, rather than being written.

I first heard the track on an album called "Hits Greatest Stiffs", a compilation of tracks from Stiff Records' first 15 singles which had been deleted. I lent it to a friend many years ago and never saw it again. This track, more than any other, was the one I missed and I only recovered it a few years ago with the reissue of Lewis' one and only album.

Lewis played with Eddie and the Hot Rods, just before they achieved success on the coat-tails of punk. He was kicked out of the band after they recorded their first single, Writing on the Wall.

The Hot Rods, like Graham Parker and Dr Feelgood were pub-rock bands with their roots firmly in the R&B boom of the 1960's, but each, to some degree or other, owed their success to the 'New Wave' that followed the Punk Revolution. Lewis never quite made it. The Harmonica was not a 'Punk' instrument and he was, at best, an adequate singer.

There is an obvious reggae influence to this track, something that was also associated with Punk. His band made one album for Stiff in 1979, Save the Wail, which was re-released in 2002. Nothing on it matches Caravan Man.

Lewis missed out on the success of Eddie and the Hot Rods, and bouts of illness and drug addiction have prevented him for making any great headway with his music. In 1987 Lewis was sentenced to seven years in prison for robbing a Post Office with a fake gun. Since then he has had his own band and has played with friends from Dr Feelgood and Wilko Johnston's band. He is, by all accounts, a difficult man to know, and has had drug-related problems with his health in recent years. Last I heard of him he was out of hospital and clean, but the long promised new material has never appeared.


Buy 5: Lew Lewis and His Band

A Side: Boogie on the Street (Lewis)
B Side: Caravan Man (Zear/Green/Ocean/Clouter/Araby/Lewis

Stigandnasty's Spotify Blog

The Spotify software allows me, just for a while, to imagine I've fulfilled one of my ambitions. To have my own Radio show. Ok its a show nobody much listens too and one in which I never get to speak, but what the hell.

Talking to Bingobison one evening, trying to justify my selections on the "90% Dead Free" playlist it struck me that I’d like to write a wee bit about most of the tracks I was selecting.

There are three playlists to have a look at, the original "90% Dead Free" An Alternate takes playlists, with songs I'll probably mention when I write about the main list and finally a collaborative list for seanb and Bingobison (and anyone else) to play about in.

So here we are. Comments are very welcome, even if it’s just to say hi but I'd love to hear what you think about my selections.