The Laconic

Townes Van Zandt - Rear View Mirror (1993) {Sugar Hill Records SHCD-1054 rel 1997}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 347 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 137 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (jpg) -> 12 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1993, 1997 Van Zandt / Eggers / Sugar Hill Records| SHCD-1054
Folk / Country / Folk Rock / Acoustic / Progressive Country

This reissue of a 1993 live album was never intended to memorialize Townes Van Zandt (in the saddest of posthumous ironies, its Sugar Hill sleeve includes a phone number to call for bookings), but it'll do for now. Originally released by Sundown, a tiny Austin indie with limited distribution, the 17-song set finds Van Zandt in fine form – upbeat, gracious, apparently sober – and in good company, with fiddler Owen Cody and guitarist Danny Rowland adding a dimension of musical enhancement that never overwhelms the nuances of the material. As anyone who ever saw Van Zandt fall off a stool recognizes, there was no such thing as a typical Townes performance, but when he was good, no one working in the Texas troubadour tradition has ever been better.

There’s always been a wonderful, symphonic bombast that’s gone with the heroes of space operas, probably no more notably then when John Williams re-launched the old-school sound of the Big Hollywood Orchestra with 1977’s STAR WARS. Yet as he made a new generation of sci-fi fans imagine they were Luke Skywalker, Han Solo or Princess Leia Organa, there was a group of earthbound heroes with names like Alan Shepard, John Glenn and Gus Grissom who needed to get their Hollywood due, not to mention the swirling strings and brass that would come with it. The composer who would help elevate them to icon status would be Bill Conti, whose main theme for 1983’s THE RIGHT STUFF became the soundtrack equivalent of “Entrance of the Gladiators” – music that defined pride, bravery and duty with no small measure of rousing excitement. Here that patriotic vibe is played under a slow-motion shot of astronauts marching towards the fearsome wonder of space itself, a classic cinema image that would be riffed on in every film from RESERVOIR DOGS to ARMAGEDDON.