Consumer Guide Album

Gary Stewart: Greatest Hits [RCA Victor, 1981]
Half of these ten tracks are on Out of Hand or Your Place or Mine, both worth owning, only let's face it--you don't. Sounded pretty good for country music, but since he wasn't Hank Williams, you passed. This was dumb. I'm not gonna claim he's Hank, though he's a damn sight closer than Waylon or Hank Jr., because Hank preceded Jerry Lee Lewis, not to mention Eddie Rabbitt, while Gary lives in a world that includes both--no matter what they think at RCA, he's no stranger to concepts like "rock" and "commercial." Which is not to suggest that boogie or schlock dilutes these vibrato-laden outcries of desperate abandon--they're the pure hard country of a honky-tonk piano man. No matter how justly Jerry Lee suffers, he always seems affronted that this should be happening to him. Though he hasn't thought about going to church two successive Sundays since he was twelve, Gary knows that what the Bible says is true--that sin and hell are the same place. And he lives there. A