Proto-punk Richard Meltzer was ready for country before most rock critics of his generation. This 1973 review of an Ernest Tubb album was more than a hoot. In Meltzer’s collection of music writing, “A Whore Just Like the Rest,” he starts the piece with a one-line intro invoking a music bizzer/traducer: “Grelon Landon, Colonel Tom Parker’s ‘man inside’ RCA, stopped sending me RCA product on three separate occasions (and started again twice). This record was on MCA , so I was safe…”
Me and Tom Nolan were up at Grelon Landon’s office long about a while ago. He apologized to me profusely for wearing a tie. Casual guys like him don’t usually wear em. On his mug was a smile, a smile which only tightened up his hatchmark wrinkles, a smile in honor of his new book Golden Guitars–the story of country music. Me and Tom thumbed thru the venerable gent’s volume with great interest. Photos of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones–two examples of contemporaries indebted to c&w–dazzled our eyes. Thumb, thumb, thumb but where was Hank Williams? “Where is Hank Williams?” we asked the man as responsible as anyone for Elvis’s easy ride these past umpteen years at RCA. “He isn’t in the book at all. He didn’t write any of his own songs, Freddy Ross did. Oh well he scribbled ideas on napkins and scraps of paper and things like that, but it took Freddy to polish them up. And besides, he isn’t even one of the top three performers in the history of country music, Roy Acuff, Lefty Frizell and ERNEST TUBB.”
Okay so the question remains, is Ernest Tubb any good at all?
You bet your bulb he is. At least for a geezer (nowadays modern with-it people don’t call em “old geezers” anymore, just “geezers”). Cause this geezer’s a good bitter geezer, not one of them manbi-pambs like Tennessee Ernie or Kate Smith. He’s not a comic geezer either like Johnny Bond of “Here Come the Elephants” fame. Or a tired geezer like Maurice Chevalier. Or a dying geezer like Billie Holiday. Or a wised out geezer like Leadbelly. Or a washed-up geezer like the Pelvis. Or a geezer’s geezer like Moms Mabley. No, Ernest Tubb is–pure and simple–a bitter geezer and damn good one at that.
Who else but a bitter geezer could make palatable something as unpalatable as yet another new SHEL SILVERSTEIN contribution? Cause that’s what the title song is and you’d never know to listen to it. All the bogus pseudo-country hee-ha Shel’s always tossing is ignored cause Ernest’s mind is just on grouching it up. He’s been p.o.’ed by virtually everything he’s encountered on the road down life’s highway and he’d just as soon have you get the hell out of his sight. And lyrics better just not assert themselves out of turn unless that’s their function, to enhance his grimace and shrug.
Which brings it all down to “The Lord Knows I’m Drinking,” a Bill Anderson tune. In it Ernest (as in “Ernest Hemingway” but he’s better than him as the night to day) is sitting with bottle & broad and this other broad walks over and insults the three of em so Ernest tells her to go shove it, sister. Then he out self righteouses her by adding that at bottle’s end he’s gonna have himself a better talk with the goddam Lord than she’s ever had. You ain’t gonna catch Merle Haggard singing nasty stuff like that even to draft card burners. If he did you wouldn’t catch yourself believing him cause young whippersnappers like him just ain’t that mean while cutting wax (it’s in their contract). And Ernest is meaner than Iggy Pop.
Reading between the lines (cause that’s all country ever lets you do) this man is the king of the cursers no doubt.