Word: cowboying
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That's it: mystery. That's what's been missing, and that is precisely what the Cowboy Junkies offer. This Canadian-based band takes hold of some old blues, or some vintage country that is threatening to lose its edge and turn into something cushy and classic. They spin it out, rework it, rediscover it, find the secret pulse under the familiarity. Suddenly a song that's been on tape delay somewhere in the back of the memory bank comes into the consciousness at full volume. I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry hasn't sounded so desolate since Hank...
...exception of the wondrous O'Kanes, the sounds in the country air do not abound with enigma. Country has traditionally run to chill depths, though. When Patsy Cline sang Walking After Midnight, she found a lonesomeness whose locus was closer to the soul than the heart. When the Cowboy Junkies cover Cline's tune on their just released RCA album, The Trinity Session, they bring something extra of their own to it, something haunted. In the false lull of Margo Timmins' lovely voice and measured phrasing there is the suggestion that whoever's up after midnight may be not only...
...band, which has recently grown to seven members, also has a maverick edge that harks back to the best rowdy traditions of country. The Trinity Session contains a startling version of Lou Reed's acrid Velvet Underground tune, Sweet Jane. The Velvets were a formative influence on the Cowboy Junkies, one that is still discernible in the unpolished precision of their playing, all those drifting Svengali chords that put on the whammy and make every tune into a three-minute trance state...
...until recently America's Team was able to overcome this handicap. The mysterious Cowboy computer and superb scouting staff annually picked those diamonds-in-the-rough, like cornerback Everson Walls, who other teams overlooked...
ANYTHING FOR BILLY by Larry McMurtry (Simon & Schuster; $18.95). The author of Terms of Endearment offers a horse-opera bouffe about Billy the Kid, showing how a Charles Manson in cowboy boots became a national legend...