Album Reviews

The documentary "Heartworn Highways" produced and directed in the mid-1970s by James Szalapski but not released until 1981 documented the rise of a generation of singer-songwriters that included Steve Earle, the late Townes Van Zandt, David Allan Coe, Rodney Crowell, Guy Clark, Steve Young and Charlie Daniels.

However, this double LP set (also on CD) is not the actual movie soundtrack. Instead, Hacktone Records founder David Gorman chose in 2005 to restore and release the best recorded performances culled from the original analog tapes, both because of their historical nature and because of the superb sonics of the location recordings engineered by Alvar Stugard. In fact, Gorman recently told me, he founded the label for the express purpose of bringing this music to disc.

The recordings are direct, unprocessed and "raw" in the best, most audiophile sense of the word, just as the term "lo-fi" generally means "hi-fi" in our world.

Gorman sent the boxes of reel-to-reel analog tapes to engineer Alan Silverman who, in collaboration with the film's editor Phil Schopper, culled and sequenced the best performances, some of which, for one reason or another, did not make it into the movie. Also included are bits of dialogue and stage chatter, used as bridges that cohere the segueways.

With their deep Southern drawls these singer-songwriters exude "Americana"—they could not possibly be from anyplace else. In that way they all sound similar to one another but once you get beyond the similarities the individual styles, concerns and emotional underpinnings exert themselves convincingly.

Here is an early version of Townes Van Zandt's classic "Pancho and Lefty" that as the liner notes explain had to be cut from the original film. The album opens with Guy Clark's now classic "L.A. Freeway", which can be taken both literally and metaphorically. These artists all were getting off the L.A. Freeway and the Nashville assembly line and striking out on their own to create a new country sound.

A young John Hiatt sings "One For the One" the very evening he signed his first (and not particularly successful) recording contract. Hell, these recordings are almost forty years old! The film did not include any covers, but one of Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" was filmed and recorded and for the first time released here.

There's a country-rap by the late Gamble Rogers you won't think of as filler or a waste of groove space, followed by "The Black Label Blues" an ode to Jack Daniels. The twenty year old Steve Earle gets three songs on side four, one of which, "The Mercenary Song," wasn't formally recorded until 1995. The other one, "Elijah's Church" has never been recorded other than here.

The double LP set ends with a Christmas Eve recording of "Silent Night" made at Guy and Susannah Clark's Christmas Eve party featuring Rodney Crowell, Steve Young, Steve Earle, and others.

The goal was to provide a passageway back in time to eavesdrop on a musical movement and the artists who created it. As you listen you'll be transported.

If you aren't a fan of country or roots rock this won't appeal, but if you are, this window onto the beginnings of a vital musical scene captured mostly at small clubs and oh so intimately miked and expertly recorded under what must have been difficult circumstances will mesmerize, aided by the liner notes that fill in the details lost by the lack of picture.

In producing the sound Silverman writes "It became imperative to transfer these tapes at the highest resolution to preserve their integrity and full dynamic range....Mixing was done through a Legendary Audio Masterpiece, an analog system recently designed by Rupert Neve..."

"Unlike many reissues", Silverman writes, "where classic recordings are mastered with extreme compression so as to sound more like today's artificially loud pop music, we opted to let these recordings breathe with their full, original dynamic range." Amen! Recording quality does vary.

Sometimes you're in the front row of a small club and other times you're among friends in a living room but always you're witness to vital American musical history.

Mastered by Ray Staff, pressed at Pallas and beautifully gatefold packaged, Heartworn Highways will be treasured for years to come by fans of these artists captured early in their careers.