Down-Home Country
Sounds in the Heart of Metropolis
By JON PARELES
The
New York Times
January 12, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final
Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company
Roscoe's Gang, With Eric Ambel, Off Broadway,
Thursday, May 24.
Eric Ambel (formerly with Joan Jett's Blackhearts and the Del-Lords)
and Warner Hodges (guitar slinger from Jason and the Scorchers) get
together for some of the most rootsy rock rompings around.
New York City is a long way from the country,
but that doesn't stop some of New York's best bar bands from twanging
their own kind of down-home music -high-octane honky-tonk that adds
a modern urban kick to old-fashioned rockabilly. At the Lone Star Roadhouse
on Wednesday night, Roscoe's Gang and the World Famous Blue Jays shared
a bill of New York country-rock.
Roscoe's Gang is an occasional project for Eric Ambel, the guitarist, songwriter and occasional lead singer of the Del-Lords. Mr. Ambel has a high tenor voice, like a pushier Neil Young; with Roscoe's Gang he sings his own songs and obscure favorites like Bob Dylan's ''If You Gotta Go'' and Swamp Dogg's ''Total Destruction to Your Mind,'' arranged with a Rolling Stones-like swagger.
On Wednesday, the Gang included Warner Hodges, the lead guitarist for the Nashville band Jason and the Scorchers; he and Mr. Ambel traded lead and rhythm parts that were all sinew. Most of his songs are about romances wrecked by dishonesty, and Mr. Ambel, whether wronged or in the wrong, always sounds like he's willing to try one more time.
The World Famous Blue Jays may be from New York, where traffic rarely moves faster than 40 miles an hour, but their songs imagine them in the cab of an 18-wheel truck speeding down an endless Interstate. The four-man band plays a lean, aggressive update of Dave Dudley-style trucker songs - especially their current single, 'Good Morning, Mr. Trucker,'' in which the singer declares, ''It's not that I like driving -it's the only thing I can do.''
When the songs move away from the road, they become pensive, but most of the time they go barreling along, topped by the wiry lead lines of Jay Sherman-Godfrey. Jeremy Tepper sings in a hearty baritone that determinedly avoids sounding like Johnny Cash, and he gives new life to country's myth of the trucker as a homesick wanderer.
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