HEARTWORN HIGHWAYS O.S.T. VINYL LP

HEARTWORN HIGHWAYS - DIV016DLP

Double 180g LP, pressed at Pallas, Germany.  Mastering by Ray Staff, Air Studios, London.

Diverse Records celebrates its first soundtrack style release, with this audiophile vinyl version of the compelling 1976 outlaw Americana documentary by James Szalapski....

It’s Christmas Eve, 1975, and 19-year old Steve Earle is seated at a weather-worn dinner table, surrounded by emptied jugs of wine, spent cigarette butts, and a guitar-wielding pack of honky-tonk misfits that includes Guy Clark, Rodney Crowell, and Steve Young. The fresh-faced Earle leans over and launches into the sweet, backcountry chords of “Mercenary Song.” The room is nearly silent as he plays, save for the occasional clink of wine-filled glasses. Then, slowly, voices around the table rise up at the chorus into a rusty campfire harmony, united in smoke, drink, and song. These would be the first ever recording by Earle and Crowell.

Heartworn Highways is your seat at that dinner table, listening in as these troubadours pour earnest confessions through strings and voice. In particular, Clark’s naked performances dominate the collection, his plaintive heartache searing through “LA Freeway” and landing right in your lap on the classic “Desperadoes Waiting for a Train,”. Equally moving is the bleak, dusty balladry of Townes Van Zandt on “Waiting Around To Die,” performed in his kitchen for an audience of two—his girlfriend and his blacksmith neighbour. Then there’s the growling back-porch groove of Larry Jon Wilson’s “Ohoopee River Bottomland;” the sweet, lost ballad “One For the One” by John Hiatt; and Crowell’s first-ever turn at the mic on “Bluebird Wine,” a song in whose shadow modern country music can only hope to have a foot. Featuring the very first recordings of Earle, Hiatt, and Crowell, and stirring whiskey-soaked performances by Clark, Van Zandt, Young, David Allan Coe, and others, Heartworn Highways raises the spirit of true roots music, representing a slice of Americana musical history and a generous tip of the ol’ cowboy hat to its pioneers.

Producers Michael and David of Hacktone Records worked with the filmmakers to sift through hours of gutbucket performances from these legends-in-training, winding up with a wholly original chronicle of the down-home resilience and earthy song making that conjures those proverbial shivers.

Comment from Alan Silverman, [01.06.2005]

“When HackTone’s David Gorman phoned to say we were going to restore rare documentary recordings from 1975‚ of some of the greatest singer-songwriters of the American Southwest, I did not know what to expect. Some days later, a large box of analog tapes arrived. Loading up the first tape by Guy Clark and hitting play filled my studio with a real presence rarely heard in today’s era of over-processed music. The simplicity and honesty of the performance and the bigger-than-life sound of Guy’s voice and guitar were mesmerizing; likewise for all the seminal artists whose one-on-one performances the film crew captured. It was the kind of music hardly ever experienced anymore ¬ music made by people sitting right next to you in their homes, unamplified, playing and singing.
Phil Schopper, the film’s editor, and I spent many hours exploring the old tapes, looking for gems of lost verses and alternate takes that were not included in the final cut of the film. A considerable challenge lay in how to sonically present these raw recordings‚ so they could stand on their own without the benefit of the evocative on-screen imagery. It was clear that great care and skill had been employed by Alvar Stugard, the location sound recordist, to provide the raw material for a truly lifelike sound. It became imperative to transfer these tapes at the highest resolution to preserve their integrity and full dynamic range. No noise reduction was used, sparing use was made of Algorithmix restoration software to minimize overload distortion and to reduce distracting ambient intrusions where possible. Mixing was done through a Legendary Audio Masterpiece, an analogue system recently designed by Rupert Neve, whose name is synonymous with the best recording equipment of the 60s and 70s. The Masterpiece enabled a large, rich, crystal-clear soundstage to be distilled from these simple tracks. Unlike many reissues, where classic recordings are mastered with extreme compression so as to sound more like today’s artificially loud pop music, we opted to let these recordings breathe with their full, original, dynamic range. You’ll need to turn them up a bit, but the reward will be all the depth and emotion that these great voices can convey.

Warning: after hearing the naturalness and honesty of the performances on the Heartworn Highways, listening to modern recordings may be difficult.”

Track Listing

Side 1

1 “LA Freeway” Guy Clark 2 “Ohoopee River Bottomland “Larry Jon Wilson 3 “That Old Time Feeling” Guy Clark 4 “Waiting Around To Die” Townes Van Zandt 5 “I Still Sing The Old Songs” David Allen Coe

Side 2

1 “Desperados Waiting For A Train” Guy Clark 2 “Bluebird Wine” Rodney Crowell 3 “Alabama Highway” Steve Young 4 “Pancho And Lefty” Townes Van Zandt 5 “Texas Cookin'” Guy Clark

Side 3

1 “Charlie's Place” Gamble Rogers 2 “Black Label Blues” Gamble Rogers 3 “River “ David Allen Coe 4 “One For The One” John Hiatt 5 “Darlin' Commit Me” Steve Earle

Side 4

1 “Ballad Of Laverne And Captain Flynt” Guy Clark 2 “I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry” Steve Young 3 “Mercenary Song” Steve Earle 4 “Elijah's Church” Steve Earle 5 “Silent Night” Rodney Crowell, Guy Clark, Steve Young, Steve Earl