Let’s face it, you never really took country music that seriously until you realised that all your favourite bands declared mad love for the late, great Johnny Cash. Up till that point you brushed the entire genre aside like an empty Rizla packet and Saturday’s losing lottery ticket. You screwed it up, tossed it to one side and forgot about it along with all the other things you’d tried to ignore since entering adulthood. In an effort to streamline your developing tastes you put it alongside such crusty old turn-offs as Angela Ripon, that bottle of Old Spice your Gran got you and a collection of Jim Reeves 45s. And whilst I’m not here to explain your own inevitable decline or indeed provide a commentary on the cult-re branding of an already established icon, I just thought I’d say I told you so. Minus the oversized Stetsons and the likes of pop-cowboys like Garth Brooks and the lamentable Billy Ray Cyrus, country music always was that good. And here are four of country’s greatest legends to prove it: Willie Nelson, Saint Cash, Kris Kristopherson and Waylon Jennings. They may sound like they’re all about to keel over and die from either consumption or cirrhosis of the liver (or both) but it’s a spirited collapse all the same.
Sure it has its stinkers: ‘It Is What It Is’ is pure novelty, a disastrous ‘Cowboy-Aid’ style offering full of all the tongue-twisting puns and word play that characterize and afflict the genre, and ‘End Of Understanding’ – Willie Nelson’s inevitable foray into all that legendary country-schmaltz. But the record is more than ably supported by the likes of Earl Slick’s ‘The Devil’s Right Hand’, the poignant ‘Live Forever’ and the confessional ‘I Do Believe’ – all of which take the listener on a whistle stop tour of all the waterholes and valleys of the cowboy heart.
Produced by Don Was, the producer who transformed Bonnie Raitt from cult hero to pop star, and jump-lead to Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings 90s careers: Across the Borderline and Waymore’s Blues (Part II), respectively – The Road Goes on Forever is generally considered the best of the three Highwaymen albums released by the band, sizably outgunning the two earlier releases, 1985’s Highwaymen and 1990’s Highwaymen 2 with a minimal selection of self-written rarities and a batch of material from the cream of texas song-writers: Steve Earle, Billy Joe Shaver, Stephen Bruton, and Robert Earl Keen Jr.
Sounds like the dying breath of the last man standing and the crack of the trigger both. Terrific.