Beat Farmers – Live At The Spring Valley Inn, 1983

San Diego in 1983 was a miserable place for a new-music fan. Long before the city’s brief flirtation as the new Seattle in the mid-’90s, the live music coming from its bars was dominated by pandering cover bands, as if there were one for every sailor and beach bum in this coastal military town. You could count the number of decent original bands on one hand while underground scenes boiled over elsewhere, be it up the road in Los Angeles or points beyond such as Minneapolis, Boston, Austin and Athens. National touring acts often bypassed the metropolis entirely, assuming, perhaps, that its small army of new-music fans would make the 120-mile drive to Hollywood instead. Dismal.

But in one ocean-breeze-deprived corner of the city, where the collars were mostly blue and the beer American, cheap and served in longneck bottles, four musicians dubbed themselves the Beat Farmers and made their first stand. It was at the Spring Valley Inn, a biker bar so small that the pool table had to be moved to make room for the gear. They performed for $50 a night and, perhaps more importantly, unlimited alcohol.

Immediately, the Beat Farmers were beyond the typical bar band. Call it cowpunk, the prevailing alt-country-esque phrase of the time, but that seems too tidy a term. In a typically blurry five-hour, three-set, please-tip-your-waitress gig, here was a band that mashed together with grit and nerve what seemed like every good style of American music save jazz. And they did so with far greater versatility than many of their American counterparts, be it the Blasters, Rank & File, or Jason & the Scorchers.

On the frontline were two talented vocalist/guitarist/wisecrackers in Jerry Raney and Buddy Blue — both roots-informed, the former also leaning toward classic rock, the latter a slide-and-reverb-happy ‘billy boy. On the backline was pretty-faced pompadoured punk Rolle Love, known to use his upright bass like a jungle gym, and drummer-vocalist Country Dick Montana, a larger-than-life character who, while not driving the songs with a torque that would have made John Bonham proud, made beer-swilling, side-splitting frontman forays with a baritone voice and an infatuation with country and old-time ditties.

Live At The Spring Valley Inn, 1983 captures part of one of those early gigs. It’s an expansive yet fast-paced trip, with 21 tracks in almost 67 minutes that toe the line between ambition and a sort of beyond-the-spotlight innocence, all delivered in a supercharged, 12-ounce sort of way.

There are bullet-train versions of the country classic “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (And Loud, Loud Music)” and Willie Dixon’s blues staple “You Can’t Judge A Book By Its Cover”, and a rock reading of Bruce Springsteen’s somber folk song “Reason To Believe”. Elsewhere, there’s a muscular take on Elvis Presley’s “Trying To Get To You”, Montana’s whimsical reads of Beat poet Rod McKuen’s “Beat Generation” and the traditional “Big Rock Candy Mountain”, and several originals built on multiple influences.

The Beat Farmers got better, maybe just months later, when they graduated to a residency at another biker bar called Bodies. By then, the group had expanded its sonic palette to include more Creedence-like rock, such as a considerable redressing of the Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again”. (It was a path that would eventually dominate the band’s recorded output and also contribute to Blue’s departure only two albums in.) Greater notoriety meant great chemistry between band and audience; gigs boiled over ferociously, with liberal amounts of beer both spilled and sprayed.

Still, if Spring Valley Inn precedes such a zenith, it succeeds in documenting the band falling into its great moment. And quickly enough, it would be gone. The Farmers would soon be seeking (unsuccessfully) the big time with rock music built for FM radio while each album chipped away at the band’s initial, vast charm. Meanwhile, each tour seemed to further shackle the band to Country Dick’s frat-boy-empowering ways. Overlooked were the talents of the others. Both patterns continued until the band’s sudden end when Montana died of a heart attack onstage in Whistler, British Columbia, in 1995.

Spring Valley Inn is hardly high-fidelity. It was never intended for release, made merely to attract the interest of labels (successfully, it turned out — the band signed to Rhino Records less than a year later). But when a cassette dub was unearthed recently, Blue and Raney gave it a spit-shine and deemed it a worthy commercial addition to the Farmers’ story. It’s good enough.

Besides, anything more sparkling might miss the point. Spring Valley Inn tells no lies. As Blue writes in the liners: “We were hammered, we were out of tune, we were sloppy, we were raw and we had a whole fuckin’ blast. No one could have told us or the dozen-odd Spring Valley Inn-breds in attendance that we weren’t the greatest band in the world on that fine evening long ago.”

Precisely.