For the first time, I am willing to believe Waylon is an Outlaw: got to be, to record "MacArthur Park (Revisited)" at this point in his career. That soppiest of pretentious pop tunes heads up the second side of Are You Ready for the Country. Jennings sings it with conviction, but to sit through its six and a half minutes more than once requires a preternatural taste for kitsch. Conversely, the title song, Neil Young's jangling, ominously cheerful pastoral, is a treasure, with Waylon's surly guitar snapping out the melody as he huffs out the lyrics commandingly.
few efforts, it still stumbles badly in a few places. Waylon is a sucker for the sort of romantic, hard-boiled poesy that people such as Billy Joe Shaver and Shel Silverstein turn out like poker hands. Silverstein is represented here by "A Couple More Years," which typically plows up a good bit of gruff sentiment cleverly phrased, tacked carelessly to a threadbare melody. Waylon's songwriting suffers from this approach as well, and three of his four compositions on
Are You Ready are more or less disposable. But the fourth, "I'll Go Back to Her," is one of the album's triumphs, just a good, lean love song.
Part of Jennings's attractiveness and value is his willingness to blend a couple of the rock culture's pleasures—fast, loud music and a reckless demeanor—with country's more precise discipline and tradition. But he has no instinct for rock music and his haphazard gropings lead him to talents as disparate as Neil Young and Jimmy Webb.
Another matter is the persistence of the style from which Jennings, Willie Nelson, et al., are supposed to be rebelling. Their basic instrumental sound is as elemental as that of Hank Williams or Hank Snow, with a goodly amount of pedal steel and a skeletal backup band (no MOR orchestration). But their subject matter and melodies are really no different from those of Ray Price and other progressive boys. This residue of sentimentality tends to draw them more to folk music forms than to the cynical, coarse rock they feign to embrace.
Of all his confreres, Waylon Jennings could most easily surmount all this and become the true anarchist he pretends to be, mainly on the strength of his voice. It is surely one of the greatest instruments in country music, and were he to focus on rock & roll, or perform the sort of old-fashioned honky-tonk that Gary Stewart ignites, Jennings would quickly become a major artist. (RS 222)
KEN TUCKER
