At some undefined moment, a once-prominent alt.country style took on shades of nostalgia and loss. That crunchy, raggedy twang of Gen X rockers turning their amps on country melodies, riffs, and themes — the sound of Blue Earth and Faithless Street — now feels like it belongs to an estranged time.
In the early and mid-’90s, Steve Pride explored that style with intelligence and soul. He wrote of life on the wrong-side-of-the-working-class-tracks, delivering those songs with a downers-and-Dorals voice, and backing them with a damn good country rock band called the Blood Kin (featuring pre-Wilco Jay Bennett, bassist Don Gerard, and various drummers).
Pride was born in the South, moved to the Midwest, hung out in Latin America (commemorated in the tune “Eva Peron”), and has since relocated to North Carolina. He was even managed by Tony Margherita (Wilco, previously Uncle Tupelo and Blue Mountain), but the strong 1997 release Haint (on indie label Spur) was pretty much all he had to show for it.
Pride On Pride gathers demos, stray singles and live cuts, and suggests Pride deserves better than obscurity. According to Gerard, these 25 tracks were mostly “recorded on sketchy equipment in a dusty basement with no ‘engineer’. Jay [Bennett] would run upstairs, turn the tape machine on, run down and start playing,” Pride On Pride sounds like it, even with Bennett and Adam Schmitt’s new mixing and mastering work, and that’s not necessarily a criticism. The slurry sonics, false starts and endings, and spatters of crowd noise accompany the loosely candescent rhythm section and Bennett’s anarchic guitar work, which flits and ricochets everywhere as on Wilco’s early, countrified performances.
The real draw, though, is Pride’s songwriting. In “Lap Of Luxury” he sketches a Springsteenesque class drama: “Make a deal and the deck is stacked/Spend your life just to pay it back.” In “Ghost Of Mary Magdalene” he tackles more institutional corruption, amid a setting rendered with documentary force.
A casual listen might suggest that thematic concerns rarely stray from titles such as “Drugs, Guns & Cigarettes” and “I Prefer The Darker Side Of Life”. But Pride’s vignettes have a bit more ambition than that, an attentiveness which deepens the dead-end lives he chronicles.