The opening song on the Robbie Walden Band’s latest album, When the Rooster Crows, is 50 Years Too Late. Â It’s appropriately named because the record is what it would have sounded like if Merle Haggard had done a concept album in the late sixties when The Beatles first popularized the idea. Â Lyrically the project follows the trajectory of a few years in Walden’s life. Â Musically, a lot of the album is a real-deal Bakersfield sound that would have made Roy Nichols and Ralph Mooney proud.
Take Dark Days for example. Â It’s got a driving bass and drum rhythm with Telecaster licks as good as anything laid down by Redd Volkaert. Â It’s the first in a trio of numbers about a bad marriage. Â The next one is Chain And Shackles, a slow, almost ponderous, perp walk of a song where our protagonist talks about his buddies trying to figure out bail while his wife is a jury by herself. Â Finally, Thank God For You is another heavier, irony-laden suggestion that all that hate was a good thing.
A little later you realize our hero has finally gotten out of the marriage and is back in action. Â On Take Me Back, John Coker and Dan Tyack trade smoking guitar and pedal steel licks in honky-tonk jam about the dating scene, as Walden sings, “I gave her my best Charlie Sheen.” Â Falling Again, In Love leads with a piano representing things getting better now that our guy is “happier than a tick on a fat dog”. Â That’s How I Start My Day sort of finishes the story, rejoicing in the first kiss of the morning. Â This is one of several songs on the record where some judicious horns really add a great texture.
While I hear the Central Valley of California all over this album, Walden insists there’s a lot of his home territory of eastern Washington and Idaho. Â I suppose that’s what gives it the originality that keeps When the Rooster Crows from being a Haggard tribute album. Â Regardless, I think this is going to be one of my finds of the year.
About the author: I've actually driven from Tehatchapee to Tonopah. And I've seen Dallas from a DC-9 at night.