Danny Alexander writes:

One reason I’ve got to write this is as a feeble effort to say thanks to my wife, Lauren. She fell in love with Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit’s self-titled second album around the same time that she developed a similar affection for a collection of Bottle Rockets’ gems compiled by our good friend David Cantwell.  Now, my wife and I more or less bonded around R&B and hip hop, and I’ve spent most of the last decade with some sense of alienation regarding the postpunk and alt-country that offered refuge to so many of my brethren. 
 
But they are my brethren.  When I was in high school embracing the punk insurgency against the dominance of rock stardom that seemed to have no connection to our lives, I also picked up the allusions to Hank Williams, Carl Perkins, George Jones and Buck Owens.  When I was in college in Stillwater, Oklahoma, I heard the call in shows by Dwight Yoakum and Steve Earle (opened by our local Santa Fe band, fronted by my college town’s ubiquitous lounge singer, Garth Brooks).  Later, I recognized my kin in bands like the Gear Daddies, the Starkweathers, and (slightly missing the Uncle Tupelo moment) the Bottle Rockets.
 
Still, the same references that led me back to honky tonk and the blues also pointed me toward modern day connections.  If I have a rep, I guess I’ve made it writing about contemporary R&B women singers, but I’ve also spent a lot of time writing about their gangsta rap brothers who hold up the other end of the richest conversation about class, race and sexuality I’ve ever heard.  I also spend a lot of time writing about Rock En Espanol and norteno music, a legacy I inherited when I bought my first Los Lobos tape the same day I bought the Del Lords’ Frontier Days.  I also spend a fair amount of time with metal.  It’s all Hank Williams fault, even if he hadn’t sung “Jambalaya (On the Bayou),” or if he hadn’t had a head-banging grandson, or if Al Green hadn’t sounded so sweet singing, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”
 
That said, this summer ended on a beautiful note, with Lauren’s interest seemingly sparking a return of the Bottle Rockets working with producer Eric Ambel, who has given four of their studio albums the fire and crunch characteristic of their live shows.  The new one, Lean Forward, is a record I need.
 
In a way, it starts in the middle, with another lyric by Scott Taylor (“Kerosene,” “Welfare Music”) about “the kid next door” who went off to war and never came back.  Avoiding a traditional melodic structure, singer Brian Henneman’s vocal just calls out in mournful repetition, decorated only by simple, spiraling guitar riffs.  In the same way “Born In the U.S.A.” might be heard as an answer to the emerging political voice in rap, “The Kid Next Door,” obliquely pays homage to the “loud hip hop” the neighbor kid played on his “kick ass stereo.”  There’s no sarcasm here, only an effort to reach out and make sense of his relationship with the kid and its loss.
 
I wouldn’t call “The Kid Next Door” the best song here, but it is a reach that helped me embrace the fine, tough record that surrounds it.  And one of the beauties of Lean Forward is its constant sense of reach.  Whether it’s the Bo Diddley beat of “Nothin’ But A Driver,” the honky tonk blues of “Shame on Me,” or the Southern soul of “Slip Away,” this music refuses to be confined by genre.  And on a song like “Hard Times,” the legacy of Katrina in the wake of the recession is personalized with funky riffs and percussion that sound like they’re popping south of the 10.  The album begins its journey, appropriately enough, with “The Long Way,” a wild ride co-written by Bottle Rockets originals Mark Ortmann and Henneman, featuring clarion call guitars and a relentless rhythm section that pushes the music around one hair pin turn after another, ending in a crescendo of drums and ringing guitar.
 
The dynamics of this record are remarkable, with the soulful uplift of bassist Keith Voegele’s “Done It All,” countering the depression in the lyric, and Voegele’s sweet love song “Open Your Eyes” calling to mind the stately elegance of the Band.  Henneman’s trademark humor shines forth on a rollicking song about moving slow, “Get On the Bus,” while the gorgeous country ballad “Solitaire” captures the lonely desperate places relationships can find inescapable.
 
Ending with “Give Me Room,” built around a funky, percussive groove that’s downright menacing, this is a record about accepting limits, embracing humility and living for others, on one hand, but it’s also a record about having enough scrap and dignity to fight when you have to.  The belly for the fight couldn’t be more evident than on “The Way It Used to Be,” a song about the dangers of looking backward and the dangers waiting just around the next bend.  In other words, the dangers we have to plunge through.
 
Suffice it to say, I fell in love with this record the first weekend my wife and I found ourselves playing it over and over on a trip to Arkansas, about the same time I fell in love with the new 400 Unit.  So, when Lauren told me the two bands were playing together one night only, in Carbondale, Illinois, I was excited, for her.  When I worked out my scheduling conflicts and realized I could make the trip with her, I knew I was in for something special.
 
I wasn’t disappointed.  In fact, I’ve spent the past several weeks trying to figure out how to express the magic of that evening.  It would have been so much simpler if I’d written it at the time, perhaps on no sleep.
 
Instead, I got to think about it, about why the whole trip is as elusive and beautiful as that new 400 Unit record.  (If you listened to the thing enough to sing along to “Sunstroke,” you definitely know what I mean.)  Part of it was the autumn drive down into a part of Illinois I’ve never seen before, through patchwork towns of varied architecture and at least one near ghost town, with a home in an old gas station (the word “Closed” in spray paint over its rusting sign).  We came home with a trunk full of pumpkins and gourds.
 
Part of it was finding the place, some sort of facility called Sports Blast, far enough off the main road no one we talked to had ever heard of it.  The top floor, something like a chic-ly lit attic, was rented out for this event, and the crowd of a couple of hundred or so gradually filled in an S-shape of open space in front of the stage.  When we ran across the street to check in at the Super 8, we found ourselves waiting behind all 6’5” linebacker of Jason Isbell, who was checking in just ahead of us.  At the breakfast bar, we’d find we pretty much had that place to ourselves with the two bands—oh, and a cranky businessman, whose one obviously redeeming quality was that he knew his way around the waffle machine and didn’t mind dispensing advice.
 
But it was the show that was the real magic, of course.  More than it had to be by far. 
 
The Bottle Rockets played an incredibly hard hitting 21 song set.  After crowd favorites like “24 Hours A Day,” “Every Kind of Everything,” and “Kit Kat Clock,” they played a gorgeous “Happy Anniversary,” off of Zoysia, the album Stephen King helped put on the map.  Then the band launched into seven songs in a row off the new album—firing away with all the funkiest and hardest rocking stuff before launching into a quite literally explosive, “Slo Tom’s” (a fuse went in the middle of the song, and Henneman, more than a little tickled, waved his bottled water and encouraged folks to have another drink because who knew when this was going to get fixed).
 
After picking up where they left off on “Slo Tom’s,” they played perhaps their greatest, simplest song, “Kerosene,” for Jason Isbell.  If it’s possible for such a perfect indictment to take on more force, it carried at least all the weight it ever has in a set filled with songs plagued by economic insecurity and collapse—getting stuck in Indianapolis with your $2000 thousand dollar car, driving other peoples’ cars to make money and drawing on the sounds of southern Louisiana as a reminder “I ain’t broke down, I’m just out of gas.”  “Kerosene” is a song that asks at least three times what kind of just world kills a family just scraping by when they “try to improvise” by substituting gasoline to heat their home.
 
But the most emotional moment in the Bottle Rockets’ set had to come with the closer, the twenty-first century song, The Brooklyn Side’s opener, “Welfare Music.”  With its portrait of a young mother and child playing together, celebrating hope in the midst of hopelessness, it’s another great lyric from Scott Taylor.  But what made the live performance that night so extraordinarily moving was all about the music.  Lead guitarist Johnny Horton and Brian Henneman traded licks in beautiful guitar interplay that quieted to the point where Henneman was picking out his lead near the level of a whisper, so that the whole bar had to grow silent for an exquisite little eternity before he sang the next, crucial lines: 

Baby fall down,
Baby get up,
Baby need a drink from a loving cup.

Then the band kicked back in to finish the number, that extraordinarily intimate focus ringing in all of our ears.
 
After this essentially perfect set, complete with the system blowing out, it was hard to imagine how Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit could provide an adequate follow up.  Of course, part of the answer was intrinsic in the music.  Isbell’s band complements the Bottle Rockets without competing on the level of guitar attack more commonly associated with his old friends in the Drive By Truckers.
 
Throwing the Velvet Underground’s Loaded on before his set hinted at the differences to come.  The movement from “Who Loves the Sun,” as bluesy a lyric as a shiny 60s pop song can conceivably carry, into “Sweet Jane,” with that insistence on human decency—“Anyone who ever had a heart, wouldn’t go around and break it”—to “Rock and Roll,” with that sentiment that’s central to everything good about Lou Reed (and damn near redeems the rest of it), “oh, her life was saved by rock and roll!”
 
The 400 Unit took the stage unassumingly as that sprightly 40 year old jam wound its way to a conclusion, and I found myself yet again thankful at these artists’ insistence on broadening the sense of their tradition.  Opening with his song, “Grown,” which has that great line, “are you still dancing to ‘Purple Rain,’” only drove the point home further.
 
Though the Bottle Rockets hadn’t done “The Kid Next Door,” Isbell followed his opener with a trilogy of songs dealing with the legacy of war, “Decoration Day,” “Soldiers Get Strange” and “Dress Blues.”  “Dress Blues” is a gorgeously painful cousin of the Bottle Rockets song, daring to express the singer’s frustration and ambivalence toward his friend and the family of his friend, whose never coming back—his friend who “showed us what we had to lose.”
 
Though he only played the one song from the new album, sticking to crowd favorites from Sirens of the Ditch and his Drive By Trucker years, Isbell’s set had that sinewy, layered beauty that the new album captures so beautifully, no doubt in large part thanks to the band’s unusual reliance on surprising keyboard turns from Derry DeBorja and supple rhythms from bassist Jimbo Hart and drummer Chad Gamble.  The set took surprising turns like Browan Lollar’s lead vocal on “Psycho Killer” and the haunted blues of “Hurricanes and Hand Grenades,” and most welcome of all, an instrumental turn to New Orleans with the Meter’s great hit, “Cissy Strut.”  This came in response to an audience member’s repeated calls for the band to get crazy, and Isbell took the opportunity to make fireworks of his lead.  Just when it seemed the energy had peaked, the band ramped things up even higher with set closer “Never Gonna Change.”  This was followed by a three song encore that finished off with the great “American Girl,” some effusive audience member near us shouting in our ears how this song had saved his life in Korea.

From the Talking Heads to Prince to Lou Reed and the Meters, from Doug Sahm (how did I omit the Bottle Rockets’ beautiful “At the Crossroads”?) to the beat of Bo Diddley and the whole MO of Chuck Berry—from St. Louis and Festus, Missouri to Memphis, Tennessee and Muscle Schoals, Alabama—a whole helluva lot of what makes music matter got conjured up in that attic of the Sports Blast that Sunday night in September.  My brothers did the story proud, and I can only hope these words do them some minor note of justice. 

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