‘UNDER THE COVERS’ RETURNS
Welcome back to our popular series which aims to explore and debunk the need for anyone to write a new song ever again! Part One documented the neoliberal scourge represented by The Beatles, who dethroned the ‘King of Rock and Roll’ with their endless litany of original — i.e. lucrative! — hits.

In this episode we take a journey into a genre of music that defied this trend wholeheartedly, and instead practically specialised in ‘covering’ the world with many and various different performers versions of existing hits and/or obscurities.

THE HAYRIDE
The Shakin’ Evil Hayride are an evolution, if we might use that term loosely, of an earlier attempt known as The Shakin’ Evil Limbo Party. As an entirely hopeless instrumental 3-piece, these guys were destined for obscurity. However a shared enthusiasm for BBQ chicken and gas-guzzling vehicles kept them showing up at the concrete box they like to call a ‘band room’, and after a few too many over-cooked birds lullaby-ed into oblivion by Buck Owens and his Buckaroos, our protagonists — now joined by a fourth, urgh, ‘member’ — started banging out shambolic attempts at (for arguments sake) Country and Western music.

Undeterred by an up-front lack of technical ability, these boys instead chose to dig into the electric momentum of raw enthusiasm. More back-water honky tonk than Grand Ole Opry. More Paycheck than Jones. More Opawa than Lyttelton.

KEEP ON TRUCKIN’
Doing the wrong thing could well be The Hayride’s mandate. Could there be a worse time to be singing songs about trucks? On the precipice of ecological meltdown these lumbering behemoths are, these days, often the source of public scorn and defamation. So, what gives?

“Well, when I was a kid the movie Smokey and The Bandit was a big deal. And trucks were cool. So were muscle cars and motorcycles, but trucks — especially customised ‘big rigs’ — were kinda like UFOs. All chrome and lights and thunder. And as well as movies, TV shows like BJ and The Bear romanticised life on the road as a truck driver.”

So is this pure nostalgia? Or a eulogy perhaps? For another time and place, beamed through cathode rays and burnt into kid-sized brains on an island on the wrong side of the world in the late 1970s. A world obsessed with heroic symbols of industrial capitalism, liberally soaked in the influence of post-war America. Fast food, supermarkets, malls and highways. And country music. Trucks and country went hand-in-hand.

THE END OF AN ERA
The Flying Burrito Brothers are just one of many hundreds of other bands that have covered both of the songs on this record. Departing from their tenure in The Byrds, Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman were leaning hard into ‘outlaw country’ and frequenting honky tonks and truckstops on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Imagine, if you will, the effeminate ‘hippies’ smoking their pot in the parking lot and then heading into an all-but-lawless barroom full of truck drivers hopped up on speed. We’ll assume you’ve seen Easy Rider and you know how that ended?

Late in 1969 The Flying Burrito Brothers played the infamous ‘Free Concert’ organised by The Rolling Stones at Altamont Speedway. A show now often cited as the end of the era of ‘free love’ based on the carnage that ensued, largely because of The Stones employment of the Hells Angels as ‘security’.

By all accounts The Burrito’s set provided a brief period of calm on a day beset with simmering tension and violence. ‘Six Days on The Road’, their third song that day, possibly points at why this might have been. The Burritos were already used to crossing the boundaries between the en mass culture clash playing out so violently in the audience before them. And they appealed—for a brief moment at least— to ‘everyone’.

And here WE are at the end of another era, no? The end of gas guzzlin’ free market capitalism? The end of the internal combustion engine? The end of global distribution as we know it? Are electric trucks viable? Maybe. But how we gonna generate all that electricity? And make all those batteries? Just think of the mining that would involve. And how unsustainable that would, no doubt, be.

I’m outta room here. But I’ll leave you with this; horses. Yeah. Horses. Think about it...
(LW, CHCH 2021)