Bottle Rockets – Songs Of Sahm

Alt-country mid-’90s Midwest punkers delivering a full album’s worth of songs from a cosmic, psychedelic Texan who’d spent time in San Francisco? As if Brian Henneman and Sir Doug had missed that one big chance to sit down for a heaping plate of vegetarian chow and Red Zinger tea together? Right. And yet…

“The Bottle Rockets are back, and we want to thank Doug Sahm for all the beautiful vibrations. We miss you.”

That’s how “Mendocino” begins here, with that slight turn on the original greeting to “all our beautiful friends around the country.” And that’s certainly the vibe maintained throughout this sweet, heartfelt and suitably raw, rockin’ salute to the music of Sir Doug, from a band that may have seemed an unlikely source — until they got us all to think about it with this release.

The “cosmic” numbers are approached without the slightest irony. This is a Bottle Rockets record that includes a ’60s-pop-smiley “Sunday Sunny Mill Valley Groove Day”. And very nicely, too! The whole CD is wrapped in an Avalon Ballroom-style foldout psychedelic poster with the Golden Gate ensconced amidst armadillo cowgirl goddesses, and Sir Doug’s head in the quiet eye of a swirling Texas tornado. (The package is a sweet job in itself.)

It is easy, come to think of it, to imagine Henneman and Sahm discussing the rest of Doug’s obsessions over a beer — wrasslin’, baseball, R&B, and the deep heart of country music. Both the B’rox and the Quintet have offered tight, rockin’ songs that often focus on specifics of the actual lives of regular people; both honed their gritty sounds in a thousand ragged genre-busting barrooms. They could both do an evening of hard country covers as well as their slightly impaired memories would carry them.

So the Bottle Rockets deliver a fine, hard “She’s About A Mover” (which so many aspiring bands simply can’t), an oozing “Mendocino”, and a restrained but touching “At The Crossroads” that’s definitely better than Mott The Hoople’s. The country shuffle (“Be Real”) shuffles, the Tex-Mex border song (“Nitty Gritty”) stretches across the border with hot sauce, and the sledgehammer blues (“You Can’t Hide A Redneck Under That Hippy Hair”) hammers real sledge. Guitars and some secondary rhythm organ from bassist Robert Kearns may not quite take Augie’s place, but what could? The obligatory post-Zombies guitar freakouts (“Song Of Everything”) prove the Bottle Rockets and Sir Douglas Quintet (or later Doug enterprises) are from the same interplanetary league. Production values throughout, courtesy of so-right-for-the-project Lou Whitney, are spot-on simple.

This disc offers no dramatic twists on Sahm music, and wasn’t “necessary,” but it’s altogether pleasurable, downright rough lovable. It may introduce some new fans to the Doug Sahm legacy. And it may even help, in its good-natured way, to shatter some myths — such as the continuing, largely sentimental delusion that the gap between “hippie” and “alternative” music is huge, insurmountable and ought to stay that way.

Sahm was always too tough and too smart to buy into that. And so are the Bottle Rockets. You just can’t live in Festus if you don’t have a lotta soul.