By Don Jacobson
This time in Don’s Root Cellar, the Hoyle Brothers hold ’em in down in Texas, Jon Christopher Davis makes me laugh in my beer and Lee Rocker shows why he’s still an O.C. (Original Cat).
1. The Hoyle Brothers play some extremely authentic Texas honky-tonk. Real cry in your beer stuff. So authentic that many a Texan is apparently swearing these Chicago guys are channeling Lefty himself . . . or at least some reasonable facsimile thereof.
Late every Sunday afternoon at the Empty Bottle, the Hoyles trot out the teardrops in a regular gig that has drawn notice, and not just because it comes at a time when absolutely nothing else is going on onstage around town. The brothers (like a countrified version of the Ramones, not really brothers) are tapping the old-time country purist vein in that their songs are mostly about drinking and cheating and delivered with an ultratwang from pedal steel guitarist Brian (Wilke) Hoyle, who like most of his bandmates/kin, actually hails from Illinois but seems about as Texas as you can get.
Deep-voiced singer Jacque Judy (Hoyle, of course) has that kind of smooth, clear delivery that you find on some of the choicest vintage honky tonk – we’re talking Lefty or Tubbs here, or in a more contemporary comparison, Dave Marr of the Star Room Boys. The group’s second album, One More Draw, came out earlier this year.
But the proof of their ultimate authenticity is their nomination for this year’s best classic country band from the Academy of Western Artists (AWA), an outfit based in Dallas that’s best known for its dogged determination keep to Will Rogers’ memory alive as well as for its efforts to maintain what it calls the “cowboy movement.” It also does a good job calling together radio industry types in an effort to get more twang on the air.
That nomination puts the Hoyles in the same classic country category as Dale Watson, James Hand, Jamie Richards, Dallas Wayne, Justin Trevino, Amber Digby, Heather Myles, Sunny Sweeney, Liz Talley, Leona Williams, Miss Leslie and Her Juke Jointers, the Cornell Hurd Band, the Derailers, the Lucky Tomblin Band and Marti Brom.
Not bad for Chicago city slickers. The Hoyles will be playing the AWA awards show on Sept. 26 and then sticking around the Lone Star State for some other gigs, including a Sept. 29 date at Ginny’s Little Longhorn in Austin, a cinderblock saloon that Judy calls “the Carnegie Hall of real country music.”
2. Also on the Texas tip, there’s a new entry from that state in that woefully under-populated category of Cool Country Songs With Witty Lyrics – Population: One. And the winner is . . . Jon Christopher Davis.
Davis recently returned to his home state after spending 10 years in Nashville as a songwriter for such mainstream acts as Billy Ray Cyrus and Dolly Parton, but after the birth of his daughter and getting frustrated with the “cookie cutter” approach of the major labels toward country music, he fled to make independent records. Judging from his clever writing on songs like “Cosmic Joke” – Like how is it he didn’t inhale, but managed to take a toke? Like how did he win the election without the popular vote? – it’s no wonder he gave up on corporate country.
The music for “Cosmic Joke” – and other equally interesting Davis tunes – was written by former Tom Petty drummer Stan Lynch. Davis has a new self-titled full length out that has “Cosmic Joke” as well as a track that’s been getting some noticeable alt-country playlist attention called “Love Had Something Else In Mind.” Check it out, if you like to laugh in your beer while you cry in it too.
3. Anybody who loved the Stray Cats in the 1980s and thought it was all over for them when Brian Setzer turned into a big band wacko ought to check out former bandmate Lee Rocker. The knock against the stand-up bassist soldiering on alone in the rockabilly purist vein was that he couldn’t match Setzer vocally, but I challenge anyone to make that argument after hearing his new release Racin’ the Devil on Chicago’s Alligator Records.
Rocker has worked hard to refine his singing, and he has succeeded to the point where he has surpassed the Stray Cats’ groundbreaking discs of 20 years ago. Not only that, but his embrace of hardcore, psychobilly-ish licks has made for a reiteration of what it was we really dug about the Cats all those years ago – something approaching the dangerous wild abandon of rock ‘n’ roll that even back then was turning into a rare commodity. So much moreso today.
Before he appeared at the On the Waterfront Festival in Rockford this past summer, he told the Rock River Times that his signing to Alligator has produced a good situation for him, in which the folks at what is essentially a great blues label understood his long quest for rockabilly purity.
“We have a lot more in common than less,” Rocker said. “It’s music that, ultimately, comes from the same place. It’s real American music, not made by machines but by people. It’s about passion and realness.”
Racin’ the Devil is Lee Rocker’s statement that the neo-rockabilly types who have found success in the past few years still can’t hold a candle to the Original Cat.
Posted on September 16, 2006