Big Country Hits: The Country Cousins - Windmill 1972

 "The days when 'country music' was reckoned to be the sound of a guitar, fiddle and 'squeeze box' are over. You don't need to be a square dancing yokel in a straw hat to appreciate the music of the wide open spaces". Says who? Well whoever wrote the bizarre puff piece on the back cover of this record, that’s who. You can see what they’re trying to do – set out an unappealing sounding cliché as the poison and then present this record as the antidote. 

 

If I was resorting to cliché myself then I’d be more inclined to tarnish country music with the wide brush of all being about steel guitars and whiny lyrics. That’s not true either, but then this record doesn’t stint on the former, meaning my own cliché is perpetuated regardless of the erroneous ones they set out  to debunk. There are no whiny lyrics here though; this is more or less an instrumental affair and any human voice is reduced to some occasional, easy listening backing ‘ba ba bas’. Which are a cliché all of their own - alarm bells are ringing already. 

 

Country music rendered into easy listening style is no different to death metal or rap or prog rock (etc.) rendered into easy listening style – that is, it factors out everything that made the original genre unique to leave just the tune behind. True, rap, death metal and the like can be 'tamed' in this way to make them more palatable to the squeamish, but therein lies the problem with the concept behind this record - none of the songs on it needed taming. 'Ode To Billy Jo' (sic), 'By The Time I Get To Phoenix', 'King Of The Road'; these were hardly raucous stompers in their original form and they certainly don't benefit from the greasy string arrangements that Country Cousins pour over them as some kind of inconsequential lowest denominator potion until songs like 'Honey' and  'Gentle On My Mind' are genuinely indistinguishable. Another problem is that most of these songs chosen are all about the lyrics; 'Phoenix', 'Billy Joe', 'Little Green Apples' - all have a story to tell and to listen to and so instrumental versions are about as much use as Hamlet performed as mime.

 

What really takes the cake though is the sheer cheek of four tracks not listed on the front cover. The first two ('Rebel Guitar' and 'Thirty Miles Of Bad Road') I automatically assumed were Duane Eddy covers* and that the other two ('Living The Bad Life' and 'Draggin' The Pick') were just ‘Hits’ that, not being the world's biggest country fan, I’d not heard of myself. But not a bit of it – these are original compositions dressed up to look like standards, they hardly belong under the banner 'Big Country Hits' when in fact they've never in fact been hits anywhere and have no independent existence beyond this record. 

This was presumably done to give someone a nice easy royalties pay day courtesy of the familiarity and goodwill associated with the titles around them that work as so much the bait to draw in the unwary and it neatly sums up the cynical and cheapjack feel of this album. None of the four are in any way memorable and as tunes they only do just enough to allow them to stand alone and actually deserve individual titles, but in their cheap blandness they're much of a muchness and blend in nicely with the cheap blandness that the genuine country standards around them are reduced to, a comment that's meant as a damning indictment of the rest being dragged down to the level of these impostors rather than praise for those 'originals' hitting any heights.  Frankly, this is awful, but I'd like to offer a final word of advice to that miserable looking chap on the cover – don’t wear flip-flops out in the country or around horses mate, you might find your feet caked in the same stuff that would accurately describe this dreadful waste of vinyl, cardboard and paper in a far more succinct way than a written review ever could.

 

* Eddy's hits were, of course, 'Rebel Rouser' and 'Forty Miles Of Bad Road'. Fooled me anyway.