From Elvis Costello to The Flatlanders: Pub-Rock and Americana’s Great Overlap

When Johnny Rotten was squawking, “There’s no future for you,” on the Sex Pistols’ 1977 hit single “God Save the Queen,” he seemed to be implying that there was no past either. That same year Joe Strummer of the Clash was heard hollering, “I’m So Tired of the U.S.A.”

These figureheads of the British punk movement were so eager to separate themselves from all that was decadent and exhausted in Anglo-American culture—from bands like Yes and the Eagles to politicians like Richard Nixon and Margaret Thatcher—that they severed all ties to what had happened before and what might happen next. They especially wanted to escape the heavy weight of American culture on rock ‘n’ roll. They tried to exist only in the narrow focus of the here and now.

This strategy had the welcome effect—especially for the Clash and the Buzzcocks—of stripping away the clutter and pretensions of rock ‘n’ roll—the barnacles on the speedboat—and restoring the music to its fast, hard shot of adrenaline. The problem was, it was all an illusion. We are all created out of bits and pieces of the past. We can pick and choose which elements to emphasize but we can’t refuse the past without negating ourselves. Furthermore, the past is as full of genius as it is of corruption—as the Clash realized by the time they covered the Bobby Fuller Four’s “I Fought the Law (And the Law Won).”

While the punk movement was dominating the media, a parallel musical movement in England took advantage of stripping down an encrusted present without cancelling a valuable past. This other scene was dubbed pub-rock, a group of musicians that played the no-frills, punchy basics of rock ‘n’ roll without abandoning the American past that had invented those basics.

The essence of pub-rock is captured on Dave Edmunds’ new two-CD, 29-track anthology, Swan Songs: The Singles 1976-1981. Edmunds, a solid singer and terrific guitarist, sang a few of his own compositions, but mostly he made the songs of his pub-rock comrades sound as good as they ever would. In this collection, for example, he sings songs written by the movement’s three main figures—Elvis Costello, Graham Parker and Nick Lowe—as well as some of the scene’s gifted but overlooked sidekicks—Billy Bremner, Will Birch and Mickey Jupp.

While the Sex Pistols and Clash were complaining about Buckingham Palace and the White House in 1977, Edmunds released a single that had Lowe’s “I Knew the Bride, “ backed with Parker’s “Back to Schooldays.” Both were contagious celebrations of life before marriage and graduation, not in the form of fond nostalgia but in the form of recreating those days in hard-rocking earworms that seemed to promise that one could go back to that promised land. Lowe and Parker had both recorded strong versions of their songs, but Edmunds had a knack for zeroing in on each song’s essence and presenting that as forcefully as possible.

The following year, Edmunds reconvened his most effective ensemble: himself, Lowe, Bremner and drummer Terry Williams. This quartet, nicknamed Rockpile after an earlier Edmunds album, was prevented by record contracts from recording under its own name. So in 1979, it recorded four titles: an Edmunds album Repeat When Necessary, featuring the #4 U.K. hit “Girl Talk” (written by Costello); a Lowe album Labour of Lust, featuring the #12 USA hit, “Cruel To Be Kind”; Jupp’s debut album, Juppanese, and Carlene Carter, the debut from Lowe’s new wife.

Finally, the legal matters were cleared up; the band released the only album under its own name, Seconds of Pleasure, in 1980 and then broke up a year later. Edmunds’ best years were already behind him, and he didn’t enjoy the post-1980 productivity that Costello, Lowe and Parker had. But Edmunds’ best years were very good indeed as this new collection demonstrates. He wasn’t afraid of the past or America—this set includes potent covers of Chuck Berry, Bob Seger and John Fogerty—but he knew how to distill the past into something new and British. In doing so, he helped birth power-pop.

Costello openly declared his love for rock ‘n’ roll’s USA origins on his landmark 1986 album, King of America. The album’s opener, “Brilliant Mistake,” seems to be about a doomed affair with an American woman but is more fruitfully heard as a song about his complicated relationship with American music—or about anyone’s tangled feelings about artistic heroes. You start off trying to imitate them, which “was a fine idea at the time,” but if you screw it up just enough to come up with something original, it turns out to be “a brilliant mistake.”

It was true of the Rolling Stones imitating Chuck Berry brilliantly wrong and of Ray Charles imitating Rosetta Tharpe brilliantly wrong as it is of Costello imitating the Righteous Brothers (he refers to “Your Lovin’ Feeling” in “Brilliant Mistake”). “I wish that I could push a button,” he sings in “Brilliant Mistake,” “and talk in the past and not the present tense.” He tried it and wound up speaking in the future tense.

Now, we have a new six-CD, 97-track box set, King of America & Other Realms, which harvests the crop of music that came with Costello giving up his denial of a love for American music. The set opens with a remastered version of the original album, followed by the acoustic demos for those songs and others from the same period, including the heady “Blue Chair.” Two are credited to the Coward Brothers, the made-up name for the duo of Costello (Howard Coward) and T Bone Burnett (Henry Coward), the Texan who produced King of America.

The third disc is the best live recording Costello has ever released, a 1987 show at London’s Royal Albert Hall featuring Elvis Presley’s James Burton and Jerry Scheff, Tom Petty’s Benmont Tench, Hall & Oates’ T-Bone Wolk and John Lennon’s Jim Keltner. The show was heavy on covers of older songs recorded by Waylon Jennings, Percy Sledge, Buddy Holly, Arthur Alexander, Mose Allison and Ray Charles. For whatever reason, both Costello and the band seemed to be operating in a higher gear that evening.

The fourth, fifth and sixth discs collect songs from his subsequent encounters with the American South, most of it already released, including performances with Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, the Nashville Bluegrass Band, Rhiannon Giddens, Ralph Stanley, Gillian Welch, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and Fats Domino’s forgotten partner Dave Bartholomew. There are also songs co-written with Burnett, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Rosanne Cash, Loretta Lynn, Kris Kristofferson, Jerry Ragavoy and Allen Toussaint.

Unlike the guest stars on many pop projects, these do not come across as brief encounters where the goal is to add one more trophy to the shelf. Instead they seem like engagements with a real give-and-take over some rehearsal time, inspired by the host’s intellectual curiosity in and emotional attachment to his visitors. There’s a sense that all the parties involved came away a little bit changed by the encounter, as if the young and the old, the British and the American had something to learn from each other.

That’s why this box set contains much of Costello’s finest post-1985 work. Musicians and songwriters who deny the future and the past often sound lost when the future nonetheless arrives—or when the past catches up and bites them in the ass. By contrast, those who have embraced the past—those like Costello, Lowe, Parker, Burnett, Dylan, Cash and Giddens—are better equipped to cope with the future and thus more likely to do good work over a long stretch of time.

Now comes The Coward Brothers, the first album credited to the duo. The 20 songs come from the duo’s new Audible podcast, The True Story of the Coward Brothers, directed by Christopher Guest of Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind fame. The story spins a tall tale about two musicians, a four-eyed Brit and a tall Yank, who wandered for decades in the music business, trying nearly every imaginable style without commercial success.

In this, it reminds one of The Flight of the Conchords, and I mean that as a high compliment. Just as the smart, funny New Zealanders Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement mixed lots of craftsmanship and a little earnestness into their satirical versions of hip-hop and soft-rock numbers, so do the Cowards in their pastiches of the Beach Boys (“Always,” the first single), Curtis Mayfield (“Tipsy Woman”), Monty Python (“Yesterday Is Near”) and Bobby Darin (“Early Shirley”).

Like England’s Rockpile, America’s Flatlanders were a band led by a trio of singer-songwriters that made an impact on many recordings without releasing very many under its own name. Like the Brits, the Texans were an all-star band without any certified stars. Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock may be legendary in the roots-music community, but they’ve never sold enough records to dent the general public.

The three friends from Buddy Holly’s hometown of Lubbock in West Texas traveled to Nashville with four musician friends to record an album for Plantation Records, the label owned by Shelby Singleton, a hustler who’d lucked into hits with Paul & Paula’s “Hey Paula” in 1962 and Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley PTA” in 1968. He used the proceeds to launch Plantation and to buy Sun Records and its catalogue from Sam Phillips. Ely and Hancock were suspicious of Singleton’s contract and refused to sign, leaving the more optimistic Gilmore as the lead singer.

Gilmore has a warbling high tenor of unusual purity and charm. His Lubbock neighbor Steve Wesson thought it sounded like a musical saw, so he bought one and learned how to play it. As a result, All American Music, credited to Jimmie Dale Gilmore and the Flatlanders, is perhaps the best showcase for the instrument you’ll ever hear. The eerie vibrato of Gilmore’s voice and the carpentry tool make this unlike any other country album.

They taped 17 songs, four written by Gilmore, four by Hancock, five by various Texas pals, three country standards and the Cajun classic “Jole Blon.” Like Rockpile and Costello, the Flatlanders were unafraid of the deep past, and they sang numbers by Willie Nelson, the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers as if they’d written them the week before—and they sang their originals if they’d cribbed them from the 1927 Bristol Sessions.

Plantation picked 11 songs for the album but released it only as an eight-track tape in 1973. All 17 songs were released on vinyl in England in 1980 as One More Road and finally in the U.S. in 1989 as a 13-song CD, More a Legend than a Band in 1990. It fell out of print and was fetching $100 before Omnivore reissued the music as an 18-track CD (including an alternate take of “Dallas”), All American Music.

Unlike Rockpile, which broke up acrimoniously in 1981 due to conflict between Lowe and the notoriously difficult Edmunds, the Flatlanders remained friends and often performed together on stage or on each other’s solo albums. Finally, in 2002, they released their second album, Now Again. Now, as they say in the comic books, the origin story is back in print again.