What happens when you play a country song backward?
Yeah, you’ve heard this one: Mama gets out of jail, Daddy stops drinking, your truck starts, the rain stops, and your dog comes home.
Of course, that’s only true of traditional, hard-core country music. These days, country’s all about finding love and happiness — if you play a Faith Hill tune backward, you’d probably get splashed by a wave while vacationing in Acapulco. Although country music has traditionally examined the frustrations of the working class, these days, it’s about love and good times, which suggests that the working class is moving on up. It’s also the result of Nashville’s “Hot Country”, a musical product marketed to the largest demographic because happy pop songs just plain sell better.
Alternative country, however, has been less willing to buy into Nashville’s marketing plan, and one of the best examples is Washington D.C.’s Honky Tonk Confidential. Their independently released, 2002 album, Your Trailer or Mine? is marked by stunning musicianship as well as clever, insightful lyrics in “16 songs about loving, drinking, cheating, murdering, and dying” — with absolutely no compromises.
Honky Tonk Confidential has five players: Diana Quinn (vocals, acoustic guitar), Mike Woods (vocals, electric guitars, dobro), Geff King (vocals, bass), Bobby Martin (“flying pedal steel” — he once tossed it off the stage); and Dave Elliott (drums). The band also brings with it a wide range of musical experience. Quinn, trained in classical guitar, belongs to one of D.C.’s first punk bands (Tru Fax & the Insaniacs); Woods has played with everyone from Tex Rubinowitz to Kinky Friedman and Webb Pierce; King came out of bluegrass and has worked in numerous honky-tonk bands, like the Slim Jims and the New Early Sunrise Band; Martin’s played pedal steel with the Cold Steel Benders (his philosophy is “It ain’t country without a pedal steel guitar”); and Elliot has worked with Danny Gatton for years.
In a recent interview, Diana Quinn, Mike Woods, and Geff King discussed the band’s music as well as its place in country music.
Honky Tonk Confidential came together in 1996 after a series of meetings and musical collaborations. As Quinn remembers, “Mike and I had a blues band called Diana and the Moondogs, but we weren’t totally comfortable with that (there being so many great blues bands already in the D.C. area), and we morphed that band into the Fabulettes, a ’60s girl-group band. My strengths were always in the pop area, but I’d also wanted to form a traditional country band for a long time. When I met Mike, it was a natural — he is a great all-around guitar player and excels on the country-side of things. I like to say that I told him I’d help form a country band if he’d help me form a girl-group band.”
Woods then helped fill out the roster: “I recruited Bobby Martin because we had been together in a band before, and I recruited Geff because I’d seen him work with another Washington-area band and knew he was a good bassist and harmony singer. I don’t think I knew about his songwriting abilities until we’d been rehearsing together for awhile.”
“I met Michael on an E-Mail discussion group in 1994 over an obscure Dick Curless song and found we were working in two very similar DC-area bands (Guitar Town and the Slim Jims),” King adds. “Michael asked me if I’d like to look into this new country/swing band project he and Diana were thinking about. I went in, it clicked, our steel player got us our first job at the J-V in (I think) January of 1997, we did a demo tape and later a whole CD and then a whole ‘nother.”
“We started out playing the best traditional country songs,” Quinn says, “and then added our own songs. Geff came to the band with handfuls of really terrific and funny songs, and we went from there. All of us write, but Geff is the most prolific.”
Honky Tonk Confidential was nominated for six Washington-Area Music Awards (WAMMIEs) the year they formed, even though the band didn’t yet have an album. Their self-titled, WAMMIE-winning debut, released in 1998, was a critical success and is now back in print; Your Trailer or Mine? is their second outing.
Honky Tonk Confidential is part of D.C.’s vibrant but largely overlooked music scene. The city provided wartime and post-war jobs for many of the Carolinas’s rural poor, hence the area’s strong hillbilly and rockabilly scenes.
As Quinn explains, “We’ve got [a great tradition], starting back with Patsy Cline, Jimmy Dean, Roy Clark, and Seldom Scene and the Country Gentlemen through the ’70s with Tex Rubinowitz. And Evan Johns and Billy Hank Hawkins and then our more famous progeny, like Mary Chapin Carpenter, and now we’ve got Bill Kirchen, a Grammy nominee who’s now from Washington that we’re very proud of, and there’s us and a whole bevy of really good bands in Washington. The scene is small, but we hope that it’s growing.”
The D.C. tradition brings with it a political twist. For example, when naming musical influences, Geff King cites the anticipated “Buck Owens, Faron Young, Neil Young, Frank Zappa, Flo n’ Eddie, Don McLean, Bill Monroe” and then includes “Robbie Fulks, Kinky Friedman”, and finally adds, “with some Allan Sherman and Mark Russell and Firesign Theater and Gene Tracy and Lewis Grizzard and P.J. O’Rourke thrown in just for farts and giggles.”
“There’s a tradition in Washington D.C., especially,” King says, “and we wanted to be a country band from Washington D.C. There’s a little bit of that in just about everybody — they’ve tried their hands at social commentary with varying degrees of success.” He continues, “You know just comment on where you are and what you’re doing.”
So there’s the rockabilly tune “Rock Creek Crawl”, a musical exploration of sitting in traffic, “crawling” along, or “That Depends (On What You Mean by Lonesome)”, inspired by Ken Starr’s asking Bill Clinton the question that earned the infamous “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is” answer.
(King is quick to point out, “That song was actually more related to Roger Miller.”)
Another case in point is Honky Tonk Confidential’s unusual name — and be warned that this band’s conversation is every bit as sharp as their music:
Diana: It really popped out of Geff’s head one day.
Geff: Fully grown. I said, “Okay, we’ve got 50 styles, the rockabilly angle, and we’ve got the country music angle, you know, the honky-tonk angle,” and just thinking about this black-and-white buzz in my head, and, like she said, there came “Honky Tonk Confidential.” Nobody’d used it. I mean we looked on the web as best we could to see if anyone else had done it. No one else had done it. All those Google searches came up 404s, so we were all right.
Diana: Well, if there’s one thing that we are, we’re a honky-tonk band. And the “confidential” sort of goes back to LA Confidential or Hollywood Confidential, and that’s the noir. So it’s like “honky tonk noir.” And a lot of the songs are dark and twisted yet kind of funny, which a lot of film noir . . . There are many similarities. Although we don’t play in black and white —
Geff: Black and red more than anything.
Diana: We do play mostly at night, though, so there’s another similarity.
Equally interesting is the band’s vision of its sound.
According to King, “I always wanted us to sound like the road band for one of the ‘countrypolitan’ singers of the ’60s — how did they make the sound on the records come alive with no strings, just a five-piece band with the lead and steel doing the instrumental work, like Jim Reeves’s Blue Boys or Faron Young’s Deputies or Ray Price’s Cherokee Cowboys? What did Patsy Cline sound like live?”
Honky-tonk tunes like “It Still Hurts” and “Daddy’s in a Honky Tonk Downtown” show the band’s taking the traditional sound in new thematic directions.
In addition to its musicianship, Honky Tonk Confidential has a nicely varied musical palette — and a lot of humor:
Diana: I love the western swing for sure. It’s usually so happy and so danceable and so much fun. And the honky-tonk, I like the fun aspect of things and not so much the weepy although if you play in a hard-core honky-tonk band, you have to do your share of weepy, maudlin songs. We always get into little tugs of war over doing songs that — there was a period in the ’60s and early ’70s that I’ve always had a problem with, the cheating songs. You know, everyone was cheating on each other —
Geff: “Bad Breath Country.”
Diana: Yes, “Bad Breath Country” we call it. And sometimes we’ll be playing, and the boys will want to play “The Other Woman”, and I just cringe and try to make myself invisible!
Mike: And I can’t understand why. It’s a great song; it’s full of truth. What’s not to like?
In other words, Honky Tonk Confidential refuses to buy into the tidy happiness myth that Nashville sells with is performers and music; this band understands that the honky-tonk sound is as relevant today as it was in the 1950s; however, their music reflects a recognition that while the working class faces different trials in a different context, the basic human conflicts remain unchanged.
Consider the band’s philosophy of love songs:
Diana: You can’t write all of your songs about looking for love or losing love or dealing with love. You’ve got to write things that make it interesting.
Mike: I don’t think we’ve recorded hardly anything that’s much about love.
Geff: I can’t think of any real blatant love songs — you’re right about that.
Diana: Does that mean that our “16 songs about loving and living and dying” is not totally accurate?
Mike: Well, there’s plenty in there about sinning. . . . Although that was the old country euphemism, “loving”. What they meant was sex.
Diana: That’s true.
And don’t even get them started on “party dolls”. . . .
Quinn explains, “One thing that I’m really proud of the songs is that the writing really is well done, and there are not any songs that have clichés in them or are songs about clichés. When we hear a band, and they’re just doing the same old stuff, and even their originals sound like they’re not saying anything, and the writing is really poor — I hate that.”
A case that illustrates the kind of writing Honky Tonk Confidential does like — and an album highlight — is “Check-out Time”, a tune King describes as “the perfect alt.country song.”
“There’s just this kind of dark thing going on,” King says, “which a lot of the alt.country songs seem to have these stories about being on the road in the Midwest in some kind of lonely hotel room or something. To me it was always, I see an Edward Hopper painting in that hotel room in “Check-out Time”. But there’s the car, the intimation of crime — you don’t really know what’s happening — an intimation of murder. I don’t know. There are just intimations all over the place in that tune. It was kind of fun to be able to stuff it all into three minutes and hope that people got most of what was going on. And most of them did.”
Or consider the band’s description of “Hi-tech Redneck”, which ought not be confused with the George Jones song released last year (In fact, Honky Tonk Confidential’s song precedes that one):
Geff: It was written for a guy I worked with. He was an electrical engineer for a defense contractor up in Baltimore. He played pedal steel guitar and had this big, ugly amplifier, which he had rebuilt himself. It had huge, components, which he probably stole from work, and it had chicken wire on the front. . . . It was really amazing stuff. College educated, highly intelligent, but very true to his roots.
Diana: Michael’s a computer programmer. He also relates to this song in a way, don’t you Mike?
Mike: Oh, yeah! Jeff wrote it, but I’m the one who usually sings it.
Geff: And we have different versions of it: Version 1.08, 2.0 . . .
Or there’s “Sancho Panzer”, that rarity in country music these days: the instrumental.
As composer Woods explains, “There’s hardly anyone that puts instrumentals on records, and we’re not like the singer with a backing band; we’re a band, and an instrumental is a very legit thing to do, so we thought we ought to do one. It was sort of a writing assignment: ‘Mike, you have to come up with an instrumental for this record.'”
According to the album’s liner notes, the song was inspired by Fred Reed, a band friend and newspaper columnist: “In a piece about his misspent youth in the Marine Corps, he mentioned a tank no one could communicate with because its crew spoke no English. Fred dubbed the tank ‘Sancho Panzer’. Mike invented a pseudo-Mexican melody and melded it to the old German march ‘Panzerlield’ — originally a 19th century folk song called ‘Luiska-lied’ — then gave the whole thing a surf beat.”
Unfortunately, the band’s not heard anything from Pee Wee Herman, the subject of the hillbilly-folk ballad “Pee Wee’s Gone”. (The moral: “Do not play with your pee wee at the moving picture show.”) In fact, when asked about the song, the band is quick to change the subject, not wanting to jinx their luck.
“Hush!” Quinn implores. “Keep your fingers crossed!”
Honky Tonk Confidential also used material from their fellow D.C.ers, recording Evan Johns’ “Cowboy, Whatcha Got on Me?” as well as Tex Rubinowitz’s “Love My Baby (All Night Long)”. And there’s Louise Kirchen’s “Big Hat, No Cattle”, a song about hypocrisy that also works as a critique of mainstream country music.
“Louise’s was a song we’d already heard, and we wanted another western swing song,” Quinn explains. “I actually wanted to sing it — I thought we did a really good job with it. It also had an attitude. My vision of it was the guy with the big black hat. They all look the same, sound the same. They can’t promise anything. They’re not really real.”
Although Honky Tonk Confidential is writing and playing great honky-tonk songs, they haven’t found a place in mainstream country — not that that’s surprising. And they’re not shy about addressing Nashville’s falling standards.
“I thought we were having that in skywriting,” Woods says, making references to songs like “Hit with a Bullet” and “Cowboy, Whatcha Go on Me?”
According to Quinn, “Any time you turn on what poses as country radio, the only thing country about it is largely a pedal steel. That’s how you can tell that it’s not the pop station but a country station. We don’t think that’s country at all, and we’re very disappointed in how country music doesn’t play country music. It does play watered-down pop music . . . I can’t understand how anyone likes that stuff. And once in awhile, something will shine through, and you’ll hear it on popular country music radio stations, but likely as not, it’s an anomaly, like O Brother Where Art Thou? The #1-selling country music record, and it never showed up on the country music stations.”
Like many independent bands, Honky Tonk Confidential has to split its time between music and day jobs that pay the bills.
Quinn works as a writer/producer at a major television network; Woods is a computer programmer; King spends his days as a librarian at a government agency; and Martin works as a master diesel mechanic — in fact, Elliott is the only full-time musician. But they would all just as soon play music fulltime.
“If the right offer came along, we would love to do that,” Quinn says. “Bobby Martin often dreams about which Winnebago we’re going to get, renovate, and travel [in] around the country and Europe . . . Going away and touring for a month or two would be really terrific, but right now, we can’t afford to do that.” (The band is trying to get together a fall tour of France, Germany, and the Netherlands.)
There are, however, real advantages to being a regional band.
“One thing I’ve always hear about country music,” King says, “as far as making it, is that you can make it very well on a local level; it’s bringing that to a national level that’s just about impossible.” He continues, “In country music, too, you run up against the limitations of the room you’re in. If you’re in a really large arena, what you’re doing may not translate real well to 20,000 as compared to a 200-seat club.”
Quinn quickly adds, “On the other hand, we would love to be wildly popular and play Carnegie Hall and the MCI Center and the Patriot Center and the Enron — no, not the Enron Center. But we’re very proud of being on the fringe. We’ve always been on the fringe of whatever musical genre we’re in, and if it’s alt.country, we’re on the fringe of that. If it’s mainstream country, we’re really on the fringe of that. We’re honky tonk with an attitude, I guess.”