47. Buck Owens and His Buckaroos - I've Got A Tiger By The Tail (1965)

Tracks: I've Got A Tiger By The Tail // Trouble and Me // Let the Sad Times Roll On // Wham Bam // If You Fall Out of Love With Me // Fallin' For You // We're Gonna Let the Good Times Roll // The Band Keeps Playin' On // Streets of Laredo // Cryin' Time // A Maiden's Prayer // Memphis

Review:

Buck Owens looks just like my brother! He really does! My brother is only thirteen, granted, but if 2020 rolls around and his portrait doesn't look just like the one above then I'll eat my genetically-modified space hat. It's really quite uncanny. Whether my brother will then go-on to host a successful revival of Hee-Haw is another matter entirely.

You know what else is weird? The music on this album. Well, maybe not, but I don't really know all that much about country music. I just know what I hate - and I don't hate this. It's a little bit rockabilly, but it's mostly just hard-edged, old-timey hillbilly music. Apparently this was the "Bakersfield Sound", which was a hard-edged reaction against the over-produced "Nashville Sound" that was doing quite well at the time? Apparently. What this all translates into is an album where all the music is quite stripped and raw, with a prominent back-beat and lots of twangy guitars and unadorned, yokel vocals yodelling about how a man's only true friend is his dog. Actually, the lyrics on this album are generally pretty good - nothing spectacular, mind, but they're often quite funny, although not always in a very PC way. For example, "Wham Bham" (and thank you mam), which is basically about exactly what you'd expect something with such a refrain to be about, and "We're Gonna Let The Good Times Roll", which is about a man's baby finally coming home to stay and includes lines about the pair locking themselves in the house and barring the windows and doors. Credit to Mr. Owens - it never quite crosses the line from ridiculous and funny to "weirdly threatening". On the other end of the spectrum, there are songs like "The Streets of Laredo", which is about sad, dead cowboys, and "If You Fall Out Of Love With Me", which comes right after "Wham Bam" and features antithetical lyrics requesting that, if a girl fall out of love with the man, she not let him know about it.

So all in all this is a pretty neat little album. There's a nice bit of stylistic variation between the raw and rockin' tracks and those that boast subtler, fiddle-and-slide arrangements, and Owens himself displays an impressive vocal range that covers everything from deep crooning to a high-pitched "Yeeha!" sort of spruking. I can't really see myself listening to it all the time, but I don't really listen to anything all the time - not even Kate Bush, and I love Kate Bush.

I'm not sure what to say about this. It's very good, but I don't really know enough about country music to offer an intelligent appraisal of it beyond saying "I really like "I've Got A Tiger By The Tail"". Incidentally, I really like "I've Got A Tiger By the Tail". It kind of reminds me of "Everybody's Somebody's Fool" by Connie Francis, although this time around the lyrics are about marrying a troublesome woman. Actually, that's one thing about this album that irks me somewhat - there's a sort of casual, low-key misogyny running through the proceedings, the kind that's never bad enough for it to ruin a friendship, but which is always enough for you to view the friend a little bit askew. Actually, even calling it misogyny might be a bit much. It only pops-up on a few tracks, always in a humorous context, and it's really just more of a bum attitude than anything, and meant in good fun. I don't want to give anyone the impression that this the country equivalent of an N.W.A. album. Although they were probably joking too... Anyway, if I want to avoid getting tangled-up in a web of semantics then perhaps I should just try and avoid saying anything at all. Ignore the last hundred odd words, if you will. This is what happens when you spend four years at university looking for patriarchal subtexts in everything.

Anyway! There you have it. Not a bad album. Apparently it's considered a genre classic, but I wouldn't know. All I know is that, from the small time I've spent with it, I really like it.

8/10

Look at this:



A bit ostentatious, honestly.