Cowboy Nation
Cowgirl A-Go-Go
Paras Recordings
By David Pilot
 Cowboy Nation.
You're reading this in Texas, you're thinking the record from
Chris Wall that featured a song by that name. You're thinking
the band that backs Chris when he gets out on the road and unleashes
the dogs on "33 Reasons To Say Goodbye." Well, this
ain't that band. And nothing here sounds remotely like anything
Wall ever did or ever would record. So get that little roadbump
outta the way right now. This is a situation where the name association
game can hurt you. Maybe even worse than the vocals the brothers
Kinman lay down could do.
There are performers who've made an art form of the lower
registers and a minimalistic approach to melody. Ronny Elliott
comes to mind. Johnny Cash. Over in the gospel world there's
the old school mastery of George Beverly Shea. Pearl Jam at times.
Even U2's Joshua Tree. Widely varied acts who mined the
darkness and made magic in their respective genres. Then there's
Cowboy Nation.
The distinction? Easy as a fastball right across the middle
of the plate. The aforementioned acts melded (or still meld,
in at least two cases) their rumbling menace of a wall of sound
with lyrics that fit the aura. Elliott's Magneto, for
example, or "Room 101" from the Poisonville
record. Cash on the Murder recording. Tony and Chip Kinman,
on the other hand, make music that's as far removed from its
lyric soul as al-Qaeda is from, say, Lambeau Field. It doesn't
make sense. For example:
Children in the garden running naked, stoned and free
Without the blood of the soldiers who were guarding your gates
There's nothing holding up your tree
Sit there and talk about how good things used to be
What was so good about the good old days?
Bitter fruit falls from the tree better leave it
Where it lays
What was so good about the good old days?
That's a mouthful in eight lines, and not even the strongest
verse in the song. But the delivery, dear God, the delivery.
A mind-numbing bass line irreparably separated from the nostalgic
reality of the traditional cattle-drive dress of the performers.
A vocal like sandpaper, moving at the pace of a stoner on the
LA freeways. An absence of melody that fairly screams there never
were any good days at all. Forget the metaphor the artsy crowd
might choose to assume the band could be going for there. Think
godawful moan along the lines of the Minotaur's last gasp as
the Labyrinth was finally bested.
And that's a damn shame. A visit to the lyric notes behind
the half-naked cowgirl poster in the jewel case showcases a surprising
poetic grace and a searing grasp of the things that made the
Old West work. There's verse here that could fit in the toniest
collections of cowboy literature. Train robbery for the sake
of a stolen love. Earnest and doomed affectations toward another.
I've lost a lot of innocence and guile along the way
Have I made it up in wisdom?
Well, that now I can't say
Three steps forward and a stumble back and a
Thousand paths to choose
All I had to offer there was
Nothing she could use
Calloused hands:
My needs are few, my means are fewer
Ambition's a stranger to me
I never dream of life's greener pasture
It all seems the same shade to me
In short, the real stuff. The bona fide honest to God down
home real stuff. Life in all its faded beauty, gloriously following
Icarus (or maybe Lestat?) into the desert sun. Songs worth writing,
thoughts well worth singing, doomed to dwell in a twilight land
of gloom where each new note and each new chorus sounds the same
as the one before. Christ, at least Def Leppard found a palatable
vibe before they wrote forty songs that could've been just pieces
of one composition.
This band is challenging at best. Their fans in California
and through the Southwest swear by them, filling their live shows
at every opportunity. Maybe there's an epiphany in the heat and
the sweat and the beer and the surge of the crowd that offers
the missing piece to this equation. Or maybe the desert folk
and their city neighbors along the Pacific have succumbed to
the awfulness of the vision that legend says drove the Anasazi
away from their cliff homes in the Fourth World. Same desert
vistas give birth to these songs, so who knows. One thing's sure,
most who frequent the 'tonks and roadhouses are looking for a
lift. Transcendent as the Kinmans' lyric gift may be, their muse
apparently stayed behind at Miss Kitty's the day the guitars
came in on the stage. A pity such gifted writers can't find a
melody to accentuate and strengthen their words. With Cowgirl
A-Go-Go they've turned potentially viable, even important
cowboy poetry into a dirge that says maybe the West is all but
dead even in the, well, West.
* www.cowboynation.com
if you haven't had your dose of shit-my-life-sucks today
Contact David Pilot at: tailgunner-at-rockzilla.net
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