"Country Cuzzins"A young woman living in L.A. goes back to her family's homestead way up in the mountains for a family reunion. At first put off by her relatives' hillbilly ways, she soon decides to let her hair down and join in the fun. Before she leaves she invites them all to stop by her place in Los Angeles if they're ever in the area. They soon are, and they do. "Midnite Plowboy" Junior comes from the country to Hollywood where he soon ends up living in a house full of prostitutes. As payment for his rent, Junior is assigned the task of driving the girls around in a van that doubles as a place to have sex.
When Charlie Daniels released his eponymous debut in 1970, Southern rock was in its nascent stages. It had been a year since the Allman Brothers Band released their debut and Lynyrd Skynyrd wouldn't unleash its first record for another three years, so the genre was in the process of being born, and Charlie Daniels' debut plays a pivotal role in the genre -- not so much because it was directly influential, but because it points the way to how the genre could and would sound, and how country music could retain its hillbilly spirit and rock like a mother. Where the Allmans were firmly grounded in the blues, especially on the first two records, Daniels was a redneck from the start, and all ten songs on his debut were country at their foundation, even if some of it is country via the Band, as Rich Kienzle points out in his brief liner notes to Koch's 2001 reissue of the album. The Band connections derive from Daniels' time as a session musician for Columbia in Nashville, where he played on many country-rock albums, including Dylan's Nashville Skyline, but there's a heavy dose of hard rock, often via the Allmans' extended jams, on this record. Daniels simply wails on his guitar here, most notably on the six-minute closer "Thirty Nine Miles from Mobile," but, apart from the ballads, he doesn't miss a chance to solo. Once he formed the Charlie Daniels Band, he became a star and with Fire on the Mountain, he had another classic, but he would never sound as wild, unpredictable, or as much like a maverick as he does on this superb album.
A young woman living in L.A. goes back to her family's homestead way up in the mountains for a family reunion. At first put off by her relatives' hillbilly ways, she soon decides to let her hair down and join in the fun. Before she leaves she invites them all to stop by her place in Los Angeles if they're ever in the area. They soon are, and they do.
Who better to follow up the greatest of all library LPs than Alan Moorhouse, a twisted genius whose musical output clearly proves that he couldn't have given a monkey's what anyone thought of him. From unlistenable marching band versions of Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep, to an entire album of demented Tijuana styled hymns to the hard hitting funk of his work for KPM, Moorhouse would surely have shocked and amazed us with more musical mayhem had his life not been tragically cut short at the end of the 1970s…