John Anderson – Just Came Home To Count The Memories/All The People Are Talkin’/Eye Of A Hurricane/Tokyo, Oklahoma/Countrified

First charting in 1977 and coming on strong by 1980, John Anderson was a harbinger of the New Traditionalist movement that hit Nashville in the mid-’80s, a young man with an old man’s voice — his unfettered, adenoidal baritone tore like Lefty and Haggard and swooped like Jones. These, his third and fifth through eighth Warner Bros. albums (the previously reissued Wild And Blue was his fourth), cover 1981 through 1987 and balance no-apologies honky-tonk with textbook country-boy rock that could only have seemed radical in those Urban Cowboy years.

Anderson sounds like nobody else, before or since; not only is he instantly recognizable, but when he rips into a lyric full-bore, he leaves most other singers sounding limp and inhibited. Yet he also has a mawkish streak that could let the air out of even his strongest albums, and he sometimes allowed strings and backup singers to undercut his best performances. He can also be distractingly self-conscious and erratic in selecting material; for all his career high points, he never cut a truly essential album.

I Just Came Home features the newly-arrived star bemoaning a country burnout on “Can You Catch A Falling Star” and flirting with bluegrass on “Stop In The Road” and Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right”, before closing with a version of the Delmore Brothers’ “Trail Of Time” that sounds like Hank Williams cutting the follow-up to “Lost Highway”. (Lionel Delmore, Alton’s son, was Anderson’s favorite writing partner.)

All The People, probably the best of these five reissues, is dominated by rocking songs with country themes, including “Black Sheep” (co-written by filmmaker Robert Altman) and “Let Somebody Else Drive”, but “Look What Followed Me Home” is a ghostly weeper. Hurricane, Anderson’s first album of all new material (by a variety of writers), was well received and yielded three hits, but sounds in retrospect like a bit of a time-marker, part apex and part beginning of the end. “She Sure Got Away With My Heart” (a dead ringer for Van Morrison, of all people) is the most engaging single, while the rambling-man album track “Lonely Is Another State” is an understated sleeper.

By Tokyo, Anderson’s whole approach is beginning to seem formulaic, more rutted than rooted, despite the devastating “Down In Tennessee”. Countrified smells like a contract-fulfilling throwaway that only a books-balancing major-label accountant could truly love. Anderson subsequently switched labels and went into a career swoon that lasted about five years before he temporarily righted himself with the likes of “Straight Tequila Night” and “Seminole Wind”.

It’s unfortunate that Wild And Blue couldn’t be part of this batch, because it’s his best effort. Anderson die-hards will greet these long-unavailable albums enthusiastically, but others are better served by the two volumes of Greatest Hits condensing this era. Regardless, you do need to hear Anderson, who’s proof that worthy music can happen in Nashville even amidst its worst phases.