IEM Training Update- Vol. 13; Issue 10

February 11 status: WEIGHT: 187.8

CONSUMED ON 2/11:

• Bowl of homemade kettle corn
• 20oz Pepsi
• Potato samosa, pumpkin paratha, chicken tikka masala naan-wich (all freebies from the Indian food factory tour field trip I attended for school)
• French onion soup with cheese

DEFECATION (what my turd looked like): A pile of wet croutons

EXERCISE: As usual, I saved my homework for the day of class and couldn't get to the gym, so my only exercise was walking to and from my car at CSUEB.

LISTENING:

Johnny Paycheck Mr. Lovemaker

Until recently, all I had heard by Paycheck was his earlier Bakersfield-style material and his hit cover of David Allen Coe's "Take This Job and Shove It." Understandably, this gave me the impression that Paycheck was a 1960's Buck Owens-style honky-tonker who went "outlaw" in the 70's. Thanks to genius producer Billy Sherrill, Johnny Paycheck actually spent the early-mid 1970's making some killer country-politan records.

This LP has got all of the hallmarks of the country-politan sound (string arrangements, lush background vocals, songs with crossover appeal), but Paycheck still sounds like a shit-kicker. All of the production bells and whistles cannot obscure the fact that Paycheck was a pill-popping drunk who was court martialed, subsequently spending 2 years in a Naval prison for striking a superior officer. And this fancy LP didn't keep him from shooting a man in a barroom and going to prison in Ohio. Still, this record sounds expensive. It has much more in common with 70's Elvis records like "Suspicious Minds" than it does Paycheck's 60's murder ballad "Pardon Me I've Got Someone to Kill."

The songs here range from a smoothed-out take on straightforward C&W tunes like the title track and "I'm Just Tired of Hurting You" to tunes like "If Love Gets Any Better," that sound like a cross between Arlo Guthrie, "Rhinestone Cowboy"-period Glenn Campbell", and Bread. "I Won't Ever Fall in Love Again" sounds a lot like fellow Sherrill artist, Charlie Rich, but with less focus on the piano playing. And then there's "All in the Name of Love," a soulful stomper that could've been a Four Tops hit. The record ends with "She'll Unwine Me," where Sherrill throws out the coutry-politan formula and Paycheck sounds like he did in 1966.

Whether he's sounding like Bakersfield, Nashville, or Austin, you cannot go wrong with any Paycheck record pre-1990. And luckily, the mid-70's records are pretty readily available for cheap.