by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the Val Lewton documentary last night I wanted to watch the latest episode of Live at the Belly Up, featuring a man named Sam Outlaw – “Yeah, right,” you’ll be going, and you’d be right. He was born July 26, 1982 in Aberdeen, South Dakota as Sam Morgan, but at age 10 he was moved with his parents to the town of Poway, a suburb of San Diego. As a young man he pursued a career in advertising, but he was already an aspiring country music. His Wikipedia page claims that his parents were hard-core Fundamentalist Christians who severely limited the kinds of music he could listen to when he was growing up, but as a young man he discovered the neo-country band Asleep at the Wheel and said their tribute album to Bob Wills was "country music in a bottle" for him. He decided to put a band together ahd the first thing he did was go to a local music store in Los Angeles, where he was working and living, to ask if anybody knew of a pedal steel guitar player. They did, and he and Outlaw became the nucleus of a band that as of the Live at the Belly Up show they did in 2018 consisted of seven players: Outlaw on lead vocals and acoustic guitar, Molly Jensen on second vocals and rhythm (electric) guitar, men on lead guitar, bass, keyboards and pedal steel guitar (one downer of having to watch these shows live as they air is I can’t stop the screen to read the personnel lists and write down who plays what), and a woman drummer. She also handles basking vocals and is damned good. Outlaw performed 15 songs – just one less than Deer Tick played the last time I watched a Live at the Belly Up episode – and, as I’ve noted earlier about this show, one can tell whether the group is a tight-knit song band or a loose jam band based on the number of songs they can crowd into the Live at the Belly Up time slot (which is usually 52 minutes, though I think they give Outlaw slightly more time than that).
My favorite song of the night was his second, called “I’m Not Jealous” and the one true doet of the night between Outlaw and Molly Jensen; for once, instead of just lead and backup singer, they were doing a true duet, and the song sounded like the sort of things George Jones and Tammy Wynette were recording together for years, since Columbia’s Nashville head Billy Sherrill was making a ton of money off them and wasn’t about to let them stop recording together just because they had broken up as a couple. Whether Outlaw and Jensen are a real-life couple off-stage I have no idea, though I got a vibe from them that they are; I was hoping his Wikipedia page would clarify and also give me the names of his musicians, but it didn’t. Outlaw describes his music as a fusion of the traditional honky-tonk country of Hank Williams and his imitators; the so-called “Bakersfield sound” of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard (“and Rose Maddox!,” I muttered under my breath, given how big a fan of hers I became almost instantly once i first heard of her on the Ken Burns mega-documentary on country music; Maddox was the first woman country singer to project feistiness, independence and self-sufficiency, and it’s almost impossible to imagine Kitty Wells, Wanda Jackson, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton or Tammy Wynette without the trail Rose Maddox blazed); and the Southern California folk/rock/country sound of James Taylor, The Eagles and Crosby, Stills and Nash.
The so-called “L.A. Country” sound actually began in 1968, when The Byrds hired pedal steel guitarist, singer and songwriter Gram Parsons and made a country album called Sweetheart of the Rodeo which got them booed off the stage at the Grand Ole Opry because they wore long hair. Parsons had an all too typical drug-shortened rock-star life, but not before he recruited the singer Emmylou Harris to country after she’d started out singing rock. Sam Outlaw’s music sounds like country with pop flavorings, though so far (at least) they remain no more than flavorings. It’s interesting how he mixes the pedal steel guitar (that once-paradigmatic country instrument now usually either omitted altogether or buried deep in the mix) front and center. His song titles include “Kind to Me,” “I’m Not Jealous,” “Who Do You Think You Are?,” “Two Broken Hearts,” “Say It to Me,” “Look at You Now,” “Ghost Town” (inspired, he said, by his mom leaving his dad and then dying almost immediately afterwards), “You’re Playing Hard to Get (Rid Of)” (which he said was about an ex-girlfriend, someone he had a hard time getting rid of, “Love Me for a While,” “Tenderheart” (one word), “Angeleno” (which Charles got a sideways glance at the chyron when the title was on air and he mistakenly read it as “Anglican,” which ied him to a few amusing conjectures about what a country song about the Church of England might sound like), “All My LIfe,” “Keep It Interesting,” “Trouble,” and “Hole Deep in My Heart.” Outlaw’s music is pleasant and engaging but not especially memorable, and he does pretty much what he sets out to do, which is plumbing the usual emotional realms of country music and saying something engaging but not really mind-blowing or attention-grabbing.
