Ever since days long gone spent hassling the Everly Brothers for their long hair and loud songs – not to mention them dern Byrds for bringing a ( gasp! ) fuzzbox onto the hallowed Grand Ole Opry stage – Nashville has enjoyed quite the abusive relationship with the rock and the roll, wouldn’t you agree?
Eventually of course, it took such brave new souls as Steve Earle, Dwight Yoakam and those Everlys-for-the-Eighties Foster & Lloyd to once and for all shove the corn out of Country and the Wit back into Western. And not surprisingly in the least to those in the know with ears wide open, the latter half of the latter, Bill Lloyd, has to this day remained busy right there in N-town writing, playing, singing and recording mighty storms up alongside anyone and everyone from Carl Perkins to Marshall Crenshaw to Buck Owens to even our favorite Brady herself.
Leave it to those Wizzards at Japan’s greatest label, though, to finally make available, All In One Place as the man himself would say, fifteen selected Bill Lloyd tracks from 1984 clear through 2004. Said stellar new collection’s called Slide Show, and it really does contain such Required Bill Listens as “Back To Even” (“from a Dom Perignon to a brown paper sack; from a Jacqueline Susann to a Jack Kerouac” indeed!), “Turn Me On Dead Man” (for those out there still without out-takes from the second and third Badfinger LP’s), “Cool And Gone” (lyrically autobiographic of all of us who’ve spent any time at all Lost in the Grooves), “This Very Second” (someone somewhere call Richard X Heyman asap!!), and lastly but far from leastly the classic “I Went Electric” (featuring the afore-mentioned M. Crenshaw) and the should’a-been, COULD’a-been Worldwide-Multiple-Format-Crossover Top-Five H-I-T “In A Perfect World.”
And speaking of perfect worlds, Bill’s got an additional little CD-R full of just such, and I quote, “Nashville tracks I made available as downloads but are sort of meant to be a collection …as in record." That one’s called Horizontal Hold, offering fourteen more (!!) rooty-pop gems the likes of “Blue Radio” (too bad The Blue Shadows never got hold of this one…), “A Brand New Way To Say I Love You” (which should be cut IMMEDIATELY by no less than Hoboken’s own Tammy Faye Starlite!), and one of my fave Lloyd numbers ever, “I Can’t Tell My Heart What To Do.”
No need to go to Japan or even Tennessee for this all, however; just drop right by Bill Lloyd Music
….and yep, Tell ‘em the Pig sentcha.