O.C. Record Reviews : As Good as All Country Should Be

*** 1/2, Chris Gaffney, “Loser’s Paradise”, HighTone

Backstage at the Academy of Country Music awards earlier this month, Garth Brooks commented astutely: “I don’t think country music will ever be as good as it was when [Merle] Haggard and Loretta Lynn and those people were at the helm. . . . I feel the torch has been passed, and I feel we’re all doin’ the best we can, but I think all of us will tell you right now that we’re not half of what country music is for us as far as the roots.”

Brooks wouldn’t need to feel that way if records as honest, as richly observed and as vibrantly performed as Chris Gaffney’s latest were the rule rather than the exception.

For the third time in five years, the singer-songwriter-guitarist-accordionist from Costa Mesa has delivered an album steeped in exquisitely detailed songs of busted dreams, broken hearts and yearnings for compensatory good times.

The title tune is a deliciously double-edged ode. Gaffney cleverly salutes the people he encounters night after night in local honky-tonks, and the down-and-out characters who populate the classic country songs that inform his music so deeply:

Take a streetcar named Desire

And you won’t have far to go.

There’s no peace down in the valley

Where that whiskey river flows.

Steal the heart of a devil woman.

You’ll have to pay the price.

Admission’s always on the house

In my loser’s paradise.

With its hard-swinging backbeat, it’s such an appealing number that country radio well might forget its independent-label-phobia and latch on to it.

In “Man of Somebody’s Dreams,” Gaffney has written as good a country song as you’ll hear anywhere, any time (he wisely has reprised it from a live album of the same title released last year but available only in Europe). The song is a masterstroke of powerful writing, a waltzing reflection on one man’s tragically missed opportunity for love and happiness, and Gaffney’s woody baritone conveys both regret and acceptance.

With Ed Bruce’s “See the Big Man Cry,” Gaffney displays the hallmark of a great country singer--the ability to transform a potentially maudlin melodrama into a genuinely affecting saga. In this case, a man gazes tearfully from afar at the son who doesn’t know him, fully recognizing the error of his ways that has shut him out of any role in the child’s life.

Feel-good country it’s not, but neither were the best efforts of Haggard, George Jones, Hank Williams and the other standard-bearers Brooks rightly was lionizing.

Country, however, is just one facet of Gaffney’s wide-ranging talent (albeit the dominant one). He also reveals his soul-singing abilities with his gritty cover of the Intruders’ 1968 R&B; hit “Cowboys to Girls”; pulls off a totally credible Tex-Mex polka with the perky yet melancholy “Azulito,” and closes the album with a muscular shuffle workout on the blues chestnut “Sugar Bee.”

Two tunes written by the album’s producer, Dave Alvin (the Cajun-zydeco-flavored “East of Houston, West of Baton Rouge” and “Help You Dream,” a number recorded by Alvin’s old band, the Blasters) are stylistic siblings of Gaffney’s own songs, so they dovetail beautifully.

The album was recorded in Austin with first-rate help from such Gaffney-Alvin pals as Rosie Flores, Jim Lauderdale, Dale Watson, Lucinda Williams and Ponty Bone. If there’s any disappointment, it’s that only one member of Gaffney’s own crack band, the Cold Hard Facts, plays on the album (ever-inventive guitarist Danny Ott). While instrumental support from the assembled players is never less than tasteful, the feeling of a seasoned unit, one that can inflect each measure of a song with something special, is missing at times.

That caveat aside, Gaffney’s latest triumph (along with Laguna Niguel resident Jann Browne’s flawless “Count Me In” album) should send Nashville talent scouts scurrying to Orange County, name-your-terms contracts in hand. A few major-label releases like these just might prove Garth Brooks wrong.

Albums are rated on a scale of * (poor) to **** (excellent), with *** denoting a solid recommendation.