David Allan Coe is one of the most fascinating—and notorious—figures in country music. Sent to reform school at age 9, he spent most of his next 20 years in correctional facilities, at one of which he received musical encouragement from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. He has lived in a hearse parked outside the Grand Ole Opry, worn a mask and gone by the name The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy, written both racist and anti-racist songs, been a member of a no-joke one-percenter motorcycle club, and has been known to hurl angry obscenities at audiences made up primarily of kindly senior citizens due to sheer shitfacedness.

Oh, and when the IRS took Coe’s house, he moved into a cave. That’s right, a cave. In Tennessee. Rent was dirt cheap and the bats were housebroken.

And did I happen to mention Coe wears a three-foot blonde wig? And he’s been known to perform The Dead Kennedys’ version of his own “Take This Job and Shove It” at shows? And that he’s rapped? Shit, about the only thing David Allen Coe has never done is kill anybody, although if asked he’ll tell you that he has.

I dare you: Come up with a more interesting bio than that, and I’ll demand that you kick me in the ass like Spın̈al Tap’s Artie Fufkin. Okay, so there’s the infamous Spade Cooley, the Western Swing musician who killed his second wife in front of his daughter and barely escaped the electric chair. But he never lived in a cave, and the same goes for those legendary country characters Jerry Lee Lewis and George Jones, and I’m sorry, but if you haven’t lived in a cave you simply haven’t lived that interesting a life.

Coe, who possesses a supernatural baritone and whose often funny country tunes are richly influenced by rock (check out “Son of the South” or the great “Fuzzy Was an Outlaw” for some real Coe rock’n’roll) and the blues, is chiefly famous for writing such great songs as “The Ride,” “Longhaired Redneck,” “Mary Magdeline,” “Willie, Waylon and Me,” “Take This Job and Shove It,” “She Used to Love Me a Lot,” and “If That Ain’t Country.” And for being the fellow who took Steve Goodman and John Prine’s brilliant “You Never Even Called Me By My Name” and made it his own.

Unfortunately, Coe’s reputation has been permanently besmirched by the infamous pair of bawdy joke LPs (or so he has described them) he recorded in 1978 (Nothing Sacred) and 1982 (Underground Album), and which were originally only available through an ad in the back pages of biker mag Easyriders. I’ve heard talk of their being filled with racist bile, but that turns out to be a gross exaggeration. Only one song on the two LPs—which granted, is one song too many—is racist, while most of the rest tend to be extremely raunchy and sophomoric attempts at humor bearing titles like “Don’t Bite the Dick,” “Cum Stains on the Pillow,” and “I Made Linda Lovelace Gag.” Many are extremely homophobic and misogynistic, but most people have chosen to overlook this fact and concentrate on Underground Album’s “Nigger Fucker.”

While Coe has never apologized for the song, and continues to peddle the compilation of the two LPs (1990’s 18 X-Rated Hits) at his shows, he has gone on record as saying, “They could say whatever they wanted to about me, but they couldn’t call me a racist or white supremacist because that wasn’t true.” He also stated that racism is “against everything that I am.” And in his defense, sort of, Coe’s drummer on the LPs (the son of Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown) was black, and Coe had black friends in prison, which led to his being mistreated by his fellow whites.

In the end one is left with a contradictory picture of a complex man, one who actually managed to pull off the difficult feat of writing a very homophobic song condemning infamous orange juice hawker and anti-gay activist Anita Bryant for being a homophobe. That said, there’s no way of looking into the heart of a man, and just as Elvis Costello has been given a pass for calling Ray Charles “a blind, ignorant nigger” during a drunken encounter with Stephen Stills and Bonnie Bramlett back in 1979, I would be inclined to give David Allan Coe a grudging and hesitant benefit of the doubt for having written a solitary–but undeniably abhorrent–racist tune back in 1982.

But onto the songs on 2004’s The Essential David Allan Coe, which so far as I can tell is the exact same album as 2008’s Playlist: The Very Best of David Allan Coe, so I recommend you buy them both!

The LP opens with the moving Hank Williams’ ghost song “The Ride,” a mid-tempo number boasting some nice electric and pedal steel guitars and Coe singing at his best, going from a whisper to full-throttle in a heartbeat, half-talking and half singing his heart out. It’s a marvelous story song: a hitchhiking Coe gets picked up by a hollow-eyed, half-drunk fellow “dressed like 1950” in an “antique Cadillac,” and the stranger gives Coe a lesson on making it in country music: “Drifter can ya make folks cry when you play and sing?/Have you paid your dues, can you moan the blues?/Can you bend them guitar strings?”/He said, “Boy, can you make folks feel what you feel inside?/’Cause if you’re big star bound let me warn ya, it’s a long, hard ride.” And while Coe knows something’s not quite right with this “ghost white” stranger he doesn’t know what it is, that is until the stranger drops him off and Coe says, “Thanks, Mister.” To which the stranger replies, “You don’t have to call me Mr., Mr./The whole world called me Hank.” Damn thing never fails to send shivers up my spine, but I’ve always been a sucker for a Hank Williams ghost song, and I’m even writing one of my own called “The Ghost of Hank Williams Just Threw Up On My Darling, and Never Even Said Pardon Me.”

What I find really interesting about Coe’s definitive take on Steve Goodman and John Prine’s brilliant “You Never Even Called Me By My Name” is that many folks still think Coe wrote it, even though he says right there in the song he didn’t. The song’s basically two songs: the first is a catchy lament by a guy named David Allan Coe who tells his lover, “You don’t have to call me darlin’, darlin’/You never even called by my name.” She doesn’t have to call him Waylon Jennings, or Charlie Pride, or Merle Haggard anymore, but he’s dead certain that “The only time I know/I’ll hear David Allan Coe/Is when Jesus has his final judgment day.” Coe then stops the tune to tell a great story about how Goodman told him it was the perfect country song, to which Coe responded it wasn’t the perfect country song because it made no reference to mama, trains, trucks, prison, or getting drunk. So Goodman added an additional verse, which has nothing to do with the rest of the song and is one of the funniest things country music has ever produced: “Well I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison/And I went to pick her up in the rain/But before I could get to the station in the pick-up truck/She got runned over by a damned old train.” It’s a great lyric and Coe puts all he has into it, and the joy in his voice is infectious.

“Willie, Waylon and Me” is a lovely history lesson of a song: an upbeat number with a beguiling and lovely melody, it names checks all kinds of great rockers including—wait a minute: what are The Eagles doing in there? Anyway, it opens with Coe singing, “I’d heard The Burritos out in California/Could fly higher than The Byrds/Roger McGuinn had a 12-string guitar/It was like nothing I’d ever heard” to the accompaniment of harmonica and one burrito hot mandolin. And every so often the song heats up and Coe turns from talking about rock’n’roll to crow on Texas, “where the talk turned to outlaws/Like Willie, Waylon and me.” I love it when Coe introduces himself (“Hey! My name is David Allan Coe and I’m from Dallas Texas”), and I think it’s wonderfully giving of Coe to go out of his way to praise everybody from Dylan to Joplin in a song called “Willie, Waylon and Me.” If I were David Allan Coe I wouldn’t have mentioned any of ‘em, and given short shrift to Willie and Waylon while I was at it.

I admit I’m not so crazy about the slow love song “Will You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone)”—which Tanya Tucker took to No. 1—despite Coe’s incredible vocals, both because it’s overly sentimental for my jaded sensibilities and because it seems to me that Coe is asking an awful lot of his lover (e.g., walk a thousand miles through burning sand—nothing to it!) and hence must think pretty highly of himself. I really like the vocals of the woman who sings on the tune, but I’ll be damned if I know who she is—either Pam Rose or Janie Fricke, I suspect, but she could be Dolly Parton for all I know: Google, god damn you, you’re useless!

The same goes for the up-tempo but downcast “Mona Lisa Smile,” which gets the full commercial radio treatment (big swinging Manilow intro, hokum string arrangement, spoken interludes, shlocky piano). Coe is in fine voice, but when he recites, “And the eyes that used to burn for me/Now they no longer look my way/And the love that used to be/Why, it just got lost in yesterday” to the accompaniment of a string arrangement that would make Englebert Humperdinck blow chunks, why, I’ll be damned if I can figure out why anybody thinks this song is so great, unless it be they have a taste for pure, unadulterated treacle. “And the masterpiece that we had planned,” recites Coe portentously toward the end, “It’s laying there shattered on the ground,” after which guitar, piano, and strings conjure up a crescendo of sheer corn pone that should get “Mona Lisa Smile” tossed out of Coe’s canon for conduct unbecoming an outlaw.

Leave it to Coe, who has been known to overindulge before shows and forget to finish songs, to put three drinking songs in a row. “If I Could Climb (The Walls of This Bottle”) may be one great title, but the song itself is an overproduced tear jerker complete with doleful pedal steel guitar and choir, and finds poor maudlin DAC trapped inside a bottle like I Dream of Jeannie. And if only he could climb out, he sings, “Darlin’, I’d come home to you.” “Jack Daniels, If You Please” is more to my tastes, what with the way Coe practically blackens your eye he throws so much vocal punch into the lines “Jack Daniels, if you please/Knocked me to my knees” and that crazy guitar tangle in the middle and that tasteful (i.e., bathos free) pedal steel guitar throwing in all over the place. It’s still a mite sentimental for my tastes, what with Coe getting all maudlin over the loss of his true love due to a one-night stand, but it’s got a nice kick to it, just like Jack Daniels itself. As for “Tennessee Whiskey,” it’s a love song, and not about alcohol but about the woman who saved Coe from it. “Tennessee Whiskey” features Coe singing in a voice borrowed from somebody else, and is as overproduced as “If I Could Climb (The Walls of This Bottle),” only its basic metaphor—namely, that his woman is every bit as smooth, sweet, and warm as the liquors he used to imbibe—isn’t half as arresting as the image of poor Coe trying to scale the liquor-slick interior walls of a whiskey bottle.

“Now I Lay Me Down to Cheat,” on the other hand, I find palatable, despite its lengthy spoken interludes and overly lush vocal harmonies. Frankly, I’m not quite sure why I like it. Perhaps for its clever title. Or maybe it’s that lonesome harmonica. I never could resist a lonesome harmonica. When I hear a lonesome harmonica, I want to find it a date. Or perhaps it’s the cheesy way Coe says, “Cheatin’s never crossed her mind/Aw, but it crossed his/In the person of a neighbor/She still calls a friend.” But most likely it’s Coe’s mighty baritone on the chorus, which if converted into megatonnage could flatten Austin. Still, “Now I Lay Me Down to Cheat” is straight-from-the-tap Tennessee maple syrup—and yes they do make maple syrup in Tennessee; it contains five compounds never before found in nature, one of which is George Jones’ voice—so love it at your own risk, because it’s a thick romantic goo guaranteed to harden the arteries of your cheatin’ heart.

“Longhaired Redneck” is a blessedly stripped-down barroom rocker and features Coe at his funniest. It begins with acoustic guitars, a pedal steel comes in, then Coe sings those immortal opening lines, “Country DJs knows that I’m an outlaw/They’d never come to see me in this dive/Where bikers stare at cowboys who are laughing at the hippies/Who are praying they’ll get out of here alive.” As for the chorus, it’s raw and splendid: “Cuz my long hair just can’t cover up my redneck/I’ve won every fight I’ve ever fought/And I don’t need some turkey tellin’ me that I ain’t country/Sayin’ I ain’t worth the damned ol’ ticket that he bought.” To prove his country bona fides, Coe goes on to sing in a slow and mockingly saccharine voice, “’I can sing all them songs about Texas/And I still do all the sad ones that I know/They tell me, I look like Merle Haggard/And sound a lot like David Allan Coe.” That last line is brilliant, as is the whole damn song, which may just be the best honky-tonk tune ever. It sure beats hell out of Charlie Daniels’ “Long Haired Country Boy,” to say nothing of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Gimme Three Steps.” Now Jerry Jeff Walker’s cover of “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother,” on the other hand…

“If That Ain’t Country” ain’t country, then I’m Patsy Cline. I grew up in redneck country and used to wear, no shit, bib overalls without a shirt—even used the bib pocket as an ashtray while indoors. So I know a great country tale when I hear one, and Coe’s spoken recollections of his upbringing are wonderful—sentimental and clear-eyed and defiant all at once. The song is raw with slow verses and a fast chorus, and Coe talks about the “old junked” cars that “looked like tombstones in our front yard,” and the old dog that was “trained to attack… sometimes,” and how his old man “bought our house on the G.I. Bill/But it wasn’t worth all he had to kill.” And while the line “working like a nigger for my room and board” is regrettable, the chorus (“If that ain’t Country, it’ll hair-lip the Pope/If that ain’t Country, it’s a damn good joke/I’ve seen the Grand Ol’ Opry, and I’ve met Johnny Cash/If that ain’t Country, I’ll kiss your ass”) is classic, as is the brief pedal steel guitar solo that follows. And I love the way Coe takes us on a brief tour through country music history towards the end, singing about that gray speckled bird and how he didn’t know God made honky-tonk angels, at which point guitars, the old pedal steel, and piano play a kick-ass little breakdown to close the tune.

Johnny Paycheck may have made Coe’s immortal workingman’s anthem “Take This Job and Shove It” a hit, but the latter’s take is definitive. “Take this job and shove it,” sings Coe at the song’s opening, and it has a gospel feel, not to mention real punch, what with that titanic baritone of his. Meanwhile some female backups and a yearning pedal steel guitar join in, while a harmonica wails away and some guitars play a cool riff. I love it when Paycheck sings, “The foreman is a regular S.O.B./And the line boss, he’s a fool/He got himself a brand new flat-top haircut/ Lord, he really thinks that’s cool,” because it reminds me of my flat-topped fool of a boss back at the Littlestown Hardware and Foundry, who once told me, no fooling, “I don’t need men. I need bulls. Bulls!” I’d have gladly told him to take this job and shove it, but I needed the paycheck to buy dope. Besides, he’d have probably kicked my ass.

“Don’t Cry Darlin’” is a great sap-fest of a song: not only is it sung by a deceased drunkard to his wife, but it comes complete with a “recitation” by George Jones. Great pedal steel, some nice piano, more lonesome as a three-legged pig harmonica, and that oh so familiar mid-tempo country rhythm make “Don’t Cry Darlin’” irresistible, as do Coe’s great vocals. I love the way he sings the opening lines, “Drunk, totally drained/On the verge of going crazy/On the edge of insane/I know you prayed I’d make it/But I never pulled through.” “Don’t Cry Darlin’” is a great confessional in the mode of Randy Newman’s “Guilty,” and it’s made even better by Jones, who really hams it up on lines like, “But that strong stuff /Aw, it was always his weakness/But any man can be a fool/And I know that he was so ashamed and sorry/For all those bad things he did to you.” And the capper for me comes when Coe sings, “I was hooked on that whiskey so bad/I didn’t know my name when I died.” I’ve never forgotten my name drunk, but I once forgot my first wife’s name, and she threw a bottle of Rolling Rock at me and hit me square in the forehead, and the pain brought her name right up.

Album closer “Need a Little Time Off for Bad Behavior” is a rockin’ and rollickin’ honky tonker, and features great harmonica, a hard-charging chorus (“Need a little time off for bad behavior/The devil in me done been asleep too long/I need a little time off for bad behavior/It’s looks like I been too good for too long”), and backing vocals that don’t sound like they were arranged by Burt Bacharach. Oh, and beat-up pickup truck beds full of tasty guitar licks, and a hayloft’s worth of cool lyrics. Coe talks his way through this one, too—sometimes I think David Allen talks too much—but I love it when he says, “I been sayin’ yes sir all day at work/I been sayin’ yes ma’am at home/I been storin’ up the cuss words keepin’ ‘em under my tongue” almost as much as I love it when he sings, “Some good old boys come from Alabam’ says the fish been missin’ me/And I need to renew my friendship with Jim Beam.” It’s like I always say: keep your friends close, especially if they’re 90 proof.

Bottom line? I infinitely prefer the outlaw David Allan Coe to the romantic David Allan Coe, but I’m willing to overlook the mawkish numbers because I understand that maudlin sentimentalism has always had its place in country music, like a pure vein of Tennessee sorghum running straight from Nashville through T is for Texas, and it’s this sappy strain of self-indulgent sadness that attracts many people to country in the first place. I’m simply not one of them. There are people who weep teardrops into the mouthhole of their bottle of Lone Star beer at the sound of Coe squeezing ever last ache out of heartbreak, and I respect them for it, but I’ll take the David Allan Coe who rides a hog and cracks wise and won every fight he ever fought any day. He sounds more genuine to me. He sounds like he’s having a grand old time. He sounds ornery and dangerous. He sounds like a man who lives in a cave.

GRADED ON A CURVE:

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