Since launching his career in the mid-90s, dyed-in-the-wool honky-tonk devotee Dale Watson has operated with keen self-awareness: on his superb 1995 debut, Cheatin’ Heart Attack, he sang, “I’m too country now for country, just like Johnny Cash / Help me, Merle, I’m breaking out in a Nashville rash.” He knew that his stripped-down twang would make him persona non grata in Music City, so he operated from Austin, Texas, a longtime bastion for subversive elements within the country tradition. Over the years he’s devoted certain recordings to specific aesthetics (woozy 70s balladry, for instance, or the chucka-chucka sound of early Johnny Cash), but he’s never wavered from his core loyalties. And though he’s fully conscious of his nonrelationship to contemporary country music, he’s never let his own career turn into a game of retro dress-up—even at his most arch and comic, he always seems to be putting at least part of his real self into every song. To do this for two decades, I suppose he’d have to. Watson has a new album, El Rancho Azul, coming out in January on Red House Records.
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The style of music that we like ended right before we were able to be a part of it. But still that influences me. And the answer is because I liked the music my dad was—his records, I liked. I was a rebellious teenager in other ways but not in the way of his music. I liked his music a whole lot; he played it and sang it. And again, as much as mainstream radio is so god-awful today, when I look back on it, I was cringing when I would hear stuff like Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers singing “Islands in the Stream.” I agree with when Charlie Rich took his lighter out of his pocket on that award show and set fire to John Denver’s ballot. That was pretty much country music going up in smoke right there.
You know, when you look back on that stuff, it does sound more country than anything mainstream today, which doesn’t have any connection to anything. That’s what people don’t understand—if it was connected in any way, you could understand it being part of the genre. But the genre doesn’t exist anymore.
I remember when I was a kid, the country station we listened to in Denver—it’s interesting to think back on it now because it was a big, commercial country station. They played all the new stuff but they played all the old stuff too.
Makes some sense. A boy can dream.
I don’t blame record companies for my stuff not going. It all depends on money. It did then and it does now. You get enough money to throw at promotion and TV and all that kind of stuff, you know, that’s what the public is gonna like. That’s why what’s really weird is what every Joe Six-Pack and hard-working guy and woman listened to was stuff like Merle Haggard and Loretta Lynn. Now it’s more likely to be between a 20-year-old college student that stumbled on a Hank Williams tribute show and people that don’t want to follow the flocks any more. So you got a smaller audience but a more eclectic audience.
She’s a singer too, and she used to work in the Playboy mansion or club or something in New York, and she had a picture of her in that outfit somebody’s taken of her, and she’s just smiling and giving the finger. That one picture—I thought, you know what, I’m gonna do a 45. Just all songs about leaving somebody. Telling somebody good-bye and good riddance. But the whole reason I bring that up is that inspiration comes from all over the place. We’re onstage and a lot of times somebody will say something. I was onstage and somebody said, “You lie when you drink!” I go, hmm. So I wrote a song called “I Lie When I Drink,” on the album that’s coming in January.
Lawrence Peters Outfit, Grit & the Double Knit Sat 12/15, 10 PM, Cole’s Bar, free.
