book review - Are You Ready For The Country Sun, 18 Jun 2000 18:44:00 +0100 Are You Ready For The Country, by Peter Doggett Review by Terence Blacker The Sunday Times (UK), Culture section. Sunday 18th June 2000 The troubled, fruitful relationship between country music and mainstream pop has always caused problems when it comes to marketing. In 1969, when A & M Records put out the Guilded Palace of Sin, the first release from Gram Parsons's band The Flying Burrito Brothers, the company pointed up the group's country roots by sending the album to journalists in packets stuffed with hay. A few years later, the great rock 'n' roller Jerry Lee Lewis went Nashville-wards with that little-remembered country favourite, I Can Still Hear the Music in the Restroom. His company supported the single by sending out lavatory seats. Behind the marketing craziness, something significant was going on. From the time of Hank Williams (whose music, lifestyle and death by overdose at 29 established him as the first rock 'n' roll icon) to today's queens and kings of crossover (Shania Twain, Steve Earle), there has been a steady flow of two-way traffic between Nashville or Austin, and LA or New York. The fusions and confusions surrounding country music have been the subject if many books, but none has been as comprehensive or ambitious as Are You Ready for the Country. Peter Doggett appears not only to have listened to every album, including some that were never released, but also to have read every interview and biography. Most significantly, he has spoken to all the lead players, weaving the first-hand testimony of musicians, recording executives, journalists, groupies and other bystanders into his compelling, thematically ordered narrative. The traditional focal point of the country/rock connection is the moment in 1953 when Elvis Presley walked into the Memphis Recording Service and asked to cut a record for his mom. Although Doggett covers the epochal launch of the Hillbilly Cat, as he was dubbed, he identifies the key moment in the relationship between country and rock in 1969, when Bob Dylan appeared on The Johnny Cash show. Dylan and Cash were different in temperament, politics and background but their music drew them together. The simplicity of Dylan's John Wesley Harding, followed by the searing fiddle-and-guitar brilliance of Nashville Skyline, signalled a revolt against the complexity and self-absorption of psychedelia, and inspired a return to the roots of popular music. The term "country rock" may worry some potential readers, invoking awful memories of Olivia Newton-John and John Denver, but Doggett has an important story to tell, paying tribute to the big names from the movement, from Willie Nelson to Charlie Rich, Emmylou Harris to kd lang, but also finding less likely heroes - Peter Rowan, The band, Leon Russell Kris Kristofferson, the Everley Brothers, Rick Nelson. Daringly, Doggett presents Parsons, for many the tragic patron saint of country rock, as a playboy poseur, self-destructive, wealthy and in thrall to the rock-star lifestyle. Doggett is not afraid to put his head above the parapet, apportioning blame on both sides of the great divide. He reveals the political bigotry and musical nullness of the Nashville establishment, More controversially, he presents the Eagles as hedonistic, self-indulgent symbols of "cowboy chic". Few readers will agree with every one of Doggett's 500 pages - personally, I found the decision to accord Buddy Holly less space than Brenda Lee a touch bizarre - but, for all the rows it may cause among the cognoscenti, his book will send readers back to their record shelves and have them dusting off their guitars. Superbly researched, passionately written, full of revealing and frequently hilarious anecdote and blessed with an invaluable selective discography, his book rescues a great musical tradition from cliché and prejudice.