Concert Review: Pistol Annies, Terminal 5, New York City, September 13, 2012
David Shasha
Concert Review: Pistol Annies, Terminal 5, New York City, September 13, 2012
Today’s artists live in perilous times.
Forced to bow and scrape in a hyper-competitive corporate culture, it is often the case that natural expression and personal values have to take a backseat to what are considered the routine exigencies of the commercial marketplace.
Over the course of time American Country music, once valued – as the late, great Ray Charles famously asserted – for the authentic human stories it told, has now become a soulless and lifeless and bloodless muddle of conformity to a model that has little if any relation to the real issues that people today face. It’s all just one big fake.
Back in 2005 Miranda Lambert released her debut album “Kerosene” with all the old-time swagger and fierceness of the Loretta Lynns and Johnny Cashes of Country music’s illustrious past. It was a bold and sometimes breathtaking recording that announced the arrival of a voice that did not care what corporate Country sounded like; Lambert was going her own way doing the things she wanted to do. But unlike her contemporaries she seemed to have trouble commercially. She was successful to be sure, but not as hugely successful as those who played it safe. And over the course of her next three albums her work became progressively safer and less adventurous. By album four – “Four the Record” released in 2011 – she became a Country music superstar and yet her bold vision had been blunted, her music more generic with its rockist intimations of Ted Nugent and the demotion of the Loretta/Patsy/Dolly tradition at the service of mega-stardom.
Her first major arena headlining tour in support of “Four the Record” was all glitz and artifice in the manner of the current mega-spectacles that pass for Country music concerts. The show I saw at the New Jersey Meadowlands last February was high on blinding video images, but light on authentic musicianship in the traditional Country style. The very young girls who screeched their approval – sitting next to their parents! – served to neuter the wild Miranda and turn her into an unthreatening kewpie doll whose transgressive rebel image was all part of the commercial-corporate package. It was no more intimidating than some Disney Channel glam product like Miley Cyrus or the Jonas Brothers. There were her great songs and the down-home twang buried somewhere in there, but heaven knows how anyone could find it under all the layers of glitzy artifice.
It was particularly disappointing because alongside “Four the Record” there was her anti-corporate-Country side project called Pistol Annies with their debut album “Hell on Heels.” Teaming up with two other young songwriters, Ashley Monroe and Angeleena Presley, Lambert drew the line and said “no” to the hack-ethic of today’s corporatized Nashville. The three young women re-opened the traditional Country playbook and wrote songs about drinking, working, fighting, loving, and feeling pain; the very things that have animated authentic Country music for years but which are now filtered through the mechanized corporate trash that routinely fills arenas and stadiums and gets promoted in videos shown on Country Music Television.
The Pistol Annies performance at Terminal 5 was a far more intimate affair than the Miranda Lambert concert at the Meadowlands. The group mixed songs from “Hell on Heels” with a bunch of wisely-chosen cover versions that reflected the deep interconnections between the different forms of American music. From the Elvis Presley classics “Little Sister” and “Hard Headed Woman” to Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools” to a hard-rocking boogie-woogie version of Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man” to the Chi-Lites’ “Oh Girl” and Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz,” the Pistol Annies’ originals were contextualized in a generous American tradition that effortlessly brought R&B and Country together.
Original songs like Presley’s “Lemon Drop” with its promise of “better days” in the midst of social turmoil and Monroe’s “Beige,” a haunting lament with a mournful Pedal Steel guitar, spoke to the innermost recesses of the human experience, but not in some high-toned philosophical ponderousness. Instead, as has been the Country way, the songs spoke simply and plaintively in the ordinary language of the average person.
The Pistol Annies’ songs are both free-wheeling and heart-breaking – sometimes at one and the same time. It is about crying in your beer and dancing furiously to beat the devil. It is about keeping your man, but knowing that, once drunk, anything is liable to happen.
In “Bad Example” it is all about excess and wild abandon:
Somebody had to set a
bad example
Teach all the prim and propers what not to do
Nobody around here wants to ramble
What the hell, that's what I was born to do
But in the stunning “Housewife’s Prayer,” as the title indicates, life has turned cruel and unsparing:
I've been thinking
about
Setting my house on fire
Can't see a way out of the mess I'm in
And the bills keep getting higher
All I need is a gallon of gas
God I'm getting tired
Gonna set this house on fire
I've been thinking
about
Going off the deep end
My man can't get no overtime
And the baby ain't been sleeping
All I need is a washing machine
These ends have gone and?
I'm about to go off the deep end
Well I've been
thinking about
All the pills I'm taking
I wash them down with an ice cold beer
And a love I ain't been making
Oh I feel like I'm
burning up
With words I ain't been saying
And all these pills I'm taking
Similarly in “Takin’ Pills”:
She's on the highest
dose of prozac a woman can take,
She's likes to pop her pain pills with every little ache,
She's got a Tennessee mountain point of view,
If your gonna have one might as well have two
Raised up right in the hills of Kentucky,
No she ain't gonna smile til she lights up her lucky,
No filter on her mouth or her cigarettes
Oh baby what your lookin' at is what you get
We owe 400 dollars to the boys in the band
Gas lights blinking on our broke down van
We're living on truck stop burgers and fries
Crossing our fingers for a vacancy sign
Now who in the hell is gonna pay these bills
When one's drinking, one’s smoking, one’s taking pills
It is life on the edge, and in their performance the three young women hewed to the old standards of Country glamour, but infused their pretty exterior – as the old standard-bearers did so well – with a brash toughness and steely resolve. It was – as we saw on Lambert’s first couple of albums – a brilliant fusion of overt sexuality with a seething social critique of a world of trailers, bars, truckstops, and dead-end lives filled with pain and frustration. It was a release of pent-up energies and hostilities that spoke to the very human soul in all of us. It was pure Country.
As they attempted to counter the over-staged, over-produced, and over-choreographed arena-glitz that has become ubiquitous in corporate Country, the three women were clearly somewhat nervous and unsure how exactly to play a real Country music show in an age of fakery. But they eventually trusted their own best instincts and came through with flying colors. This was their music and they took hold of it with a vengeance. The cover versions told a story of how they see themselves and their American musical heritage. Hearing Elvis Presley and Loretta Lynn side-by-side with Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin set out a narrative that refused the ephemera of what now passes for Country music. It was a brilliantly-constructed set that affirmed the past while confronting the painful challenges of the present.
In the middle of the set the stage was cleared, barstools brought out, and the three singers with just their acoustic guitars each sang a song they wrote. Monroe sang one recorded by Jason Aldean called “The Truth,” Lambert sang her first number one hit “White Liar,” and Presley sang “Fastest Girl in Town,” a track on “Four the Record.” They were insistent and deeply proud that these were their songs – they wrote them and presented them as the work of their creativity and not that of some nameless and faceless Nashville hacks.
And that exemplified the wonderful spirit of this uplifting and deeply satisfying concert: It was a group of young women who had something important to say and were going to say it without the interference of record company executives with their market research and demographics. Music is too important to be left to the bean counters and stiff corporate suits. It is only in the creative act of the songwriter that the truth can be told.
And the liberating effect of the concert was wondrously life-affirming; it was filled with joy and pain, good cheer and depression, robust sexuality and murderous anger. By allowing themselves to speak out freely in their own voices, the Pistol Annies have denied those who would suppress personal expression and stifle the very elementary human values that Country music – from the Carter Family to Johnny Cash – has always been about. They clowned around with the sheer joy and democratic freedom that turned the concert hall into a celebration of the basic things that make us human.
The Pistol Annies are a wonder to behold. Not mindless dolls, they are stunning in their natural beauty. They are real women – not anorexic models puffed up in vanity and mindlessly vapid posturing. They represent the very life force that corporate culture has tried to stifle and marginalize. For Miranda Lambert to return to the smaller stage and play the traditionally stylized Country with its massive debt to the past is a bold act. It is far easier – and more lucrative – to do a concert tour of arenas and stadiums where there is no room for spontaneity and raw emotional truth.
It is never easy to stand out there on the stage – for all to see – and speak the things that you feel and know. It must have been a shock for them because it did take a little while for their nerves to settle, but once they hit their groove they were unstoppable. The songs teemed out and the expert band could play like it was the Grand Ole Opry with Minnie Pearl standing by the side of the stage and Earl Scruggs was picking on his banjo.
By the time of the encore, as the notes of Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” started to clamor out to the reggae off-beat, it all came together and made perfect sense: It was a sly and knowing nod and wink to the “birds” – the Pistol Annies themselves – and yet another unifying piece of our collective humanity. It brought together the American Country soul with the Jamaican-African soul of the great Marley. Like Ray Charles, I think that Bob Marley would have very much understood the desperate, yet hopeful songs of the Pistol Annies who, in the classic Country tradition, could see life’s troubles as they could see the great power and beauty of that same hard life.
When artists are able to be who they truly are, the liberating effect is infectious. So to begin their first tour as the Pistol Annies, Monroe, Presley, and Lambert embraced the traditions of the past in a way that freed them to tell the stories of the world that they know. It was this astounding authenticity that generated a boundless joy in the concert hall, providing a very rare celebration of our humanity in all its complexity and its many difficult challenges.
Like the Appalachian musicians who sat on the porch of their mountain homes so many years ago, the Pistol Annies have produced music that comes from the heart and allows us to bring some happiness, joy, and release to a life that is so often filled with sorrow, fear, shame, and pain.
David Shasha