Listening to country music in times like these is always ironic. Here are all these middle-American housewives listening to freaky Top Forty million sellers by gays and blacks, while the Number One album on the entire country chart probably won't go gold if it hangs in there all month. Does the fact that black popular music has a better chance of crossing over than white working-class music say something healthy about America? Naw — it just means we're all still a crazy bunch, unable to remain consistent in any form. (A lot of those housewives wouldn't be especially eager to have Donna Summer move next door, or have their son date even the cop in the Village People. But then, they'd probably
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rather not have their daughter running around with Waylon Jennings either.)
The real reason country music rarely crosses over is because, in its heart, there's a belief in restriction. Nobody ever has a good time in a country song without paying a heavy penalty, which is antithetical to the rampant hedonism that rules the pop charts. Dolly Parton is an aberration, and her crossover hits aren't any more country than "Life in the Fast Lane." And Willie Nelson's Red Headed Stranger doesn't count, since Willie is Willie and not subject to rules applicable to everyone else.
Yet country is able to persist on its narrow path because the rewards are there. They might not show up immediately, but once someone is established with a couple of hits on the country charts, the money and recognition are there forever. The audience is incredibly loyal, which is great for business over the long term, but a little restrictive for artists with the potential to bend boundaries, damn the torpedoes and cut loose.
Take Gary Stewart, a man with a voice big enough for rockabilly and a loose-jointed sense of rhythm that always threatens to drag him over the edge. Somehow, Stewart never quite makes it across, maybe because a full-fledged rock-out could be the one thing that kills his bird in the hand. Still, no one listening to his albums could help but wonder what's in the bush. On Gary, he's got a fine love song, "Mazelle," that'd be absolutely perverse in the hands of somebody like Nick Lowe. Yet Stewart keeps the tune firmly in tether, singing it like he means it. There's no sense of irony, or too much realism — however you choose to put it. Given a shove in the right direction, Gary Stewart could be the Roy Orbison of the Eighties, a full-blown rockin' paranoid. When he sings something like Jack Tempchin's "Walkaway," he's halfway there already.
But Stewart is clearly more comfortable with songs about guilt: "I've Just Seen the Rock of Ages" and "Lost Highway" surround "Walkaway" like a pair of plainclothes men. Considering that his career began with a great piece of bluster about honky-tonk Saturday-night adventures, this kind of stuff amounts to self-abuse. Which is one reason why the barfly cowboys of Hollywood like to ide
