Various Artists - Heartworn Highways

Life can be a hard slog. Things don’t always work out textbook. Birth, death, taxes, they say, are all you can count on. Shit, sometimes they at least break up the monotony of the daily grind. Yet another sunrise and another long pointless stretch of morning. Nothing much to do, no money to do it with: just a gnawing sense of frustration and loneliness. Yeah? Well, it has all been said before, and a hundred times better on the soundtrack to seminal seventies doco Heartworn Highways.

Seminal, of course, is slang for ‘no one really cared much at the time’. Re-appraisal of the mid-seventies urban cowboy milieu, thanks to the release of Heartworn Highways on DVD and CD, shocks one in just how much it can be mirrored in today’s alternative music. Slang, of course, for ‘not enough care at the moment’. Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, John Hiatt and Steve Earle are mostgly household names these days – well, in households with a music collection of more than a couple of hundred discs – but back when the red light was grinding away on these performances they were just young(er) contenders.

And while the mood is mostly down during this set of tunes, the overall thing connecting it is booze. Yep, that’s right, the ol’ demon drink, the devil’s brew, moonshine, whatever its code in your favoured genre, it is celebrated across the eighty minutes collected here. From rambunctious neo-blues (The Black Label Blues, Gamble Rogers) to skit (”...people condemn whiskey”) to superstar jam (Bluebird Wine, Rodney Crowell with Steve Earle, Guy Clake and Steve Young) and back again at the end to the very reason you could get so many (soused) legends reverently singing Silent Night as dawn breaks on Christmas Day, 1975. The reason? Liquor. As Van Zandt sings so desperately, early on in the piece, “it’s better’n sittin’ round waitin’ to die.”

There is much to recommend to you on Heartworn Highways. A twenty year-old Earle, years before recording his debut, singing Mercenary Song and Elijah’s Church. Guy Clark’s dominant voice all alone, only his guitar, as he sings Desperadoes Waiting For A Train. Anything by Steve Young (whose reappraisal is surely imminent). And of course, Van Zandt, with the inclusion of arguably his two most treasured songs – Pancho and Lefty and Waitin Round To Die. So much of what has come since in the singer/songwriter field – from Will Oldham’s wonky metaphysics right through to Springsteen’s paranoid Nebraska – has his demons echoed in it somewhere.

Country music in but name only, this disc captures what it is to be alive. The fact that it is not really as celebration is not the fault of those you’ll hear within. Like we know, sometimes life can be a bloody hard slog.