Kid Rock's Big Wheels Keep on Turning

Maybe it’s about time people stopped underestimating Kid Rock. Just a year ago, you might have been forgiven for thinking he was a has-been – and if so, it wouldn’t have been the first time the charts later proved you wrong. I mean, how many Kid Rock albums has this happened with? Months after it seemed a lost cause, last fall’s Rock N Roll Jesus wound up in resurrection mode this summer, just like his long-tailed 1998 breakthrough and career album Devil Without a Cause, and 2001’s “Picture”-spurred Cocky before it. Buoyed first by a late spring tour with Reverend Run, Peter Wolf and whatever street survivors own the Lynyrd Skynyrd logo these days, then by a late-breaking single that crossed from country -- Kid’s fallback format -- to pop and rock radio, Jesus wound up re-lodging itself in the top 10 around Independence Day. The seasonal bent of “All Summer Long” -- an appropriately lazy, unabashedly manipulative and eventually inescapable late-'70s-Seger-style reminiscence of pre-Internet-era teenaged deflowering and marijuana consumption in northern Michigan that makes no attempt to disguise its “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Werewolves of London” steals – proved such perfect timing that two knock-off cover versions wound up charting to fill the digital-sales gap. And this week, Kid’s own Atlantic-era catalog finally makes its digital debut – exclusively on Rhapsody.

I’ve written about that catalog plenty in the past, especially when I was employed at the Village Voice; feel free to refer to this or this if you’re curious. But it’s Kid’s most recent album I want to talk about now. Here’s something almost nobody pointed out last year, even though Rock N Roll Jesus first entered the Billboard 200 at #1, apparently with barely any critics actually listening to the thing: it’s a real good album. So good that I listed it in my 2007 top 10, though among 784 critics voting in the Idolator and Voice Pazz & Jop polls, I was the only voter to do so. Not saying its eventual chart success proves me “right,” but who cares – I’m right anyway. Rock N Roll Jesus has more life in it than any album the Drive-By Truckers (to pick a semi-random redneck-rock analogy) have put out in several years. And it’s Kid’s own best set since Devil, with easily his funniest punchlines since then -- most rip-roaringly in the closer "Lowlife (Living the Highlife)," which (after a funky initial "Bang a Gong"/"Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress" riff) starts out "I've got my Cat Scratch Fever eight-track/My best friend's in my gun rack,” then proceeds in many ways guaranteed to offend the humorless.

“Lowlife” rocks my sweatsocks off, too, and it’s not alone. I wholeheartedly recommend "New Orleans" (well-saxed second-line R&B-grooved homage to gumbo and the Neville Brothers); "Blue Jeans and a Rosary" (saved-by-a-Catholic-girl power ballad cornballism swaying like the second Faster Pussycat album); "Half Your Age" (vengeful-hillbilly jerkitude allegedly aimed at Pamela Anderson and reminiscent of Kid's buddy David Allan Coe in more or less the same way  Gn'R's "Used to Love Her" used to be); and "So Hott" (spare "Black Betty"-by-Ram Jam drumbeat evolving into a "Satisfaction"-gone-Clear-Channel-rock rhythm so brawny you can ignore the lunkhead lugnut come-ons). "Sugar” has some okay Steve Tyler-type screeching and giddily race-baiting lines -- "Kiss my Anglo-Saxon ass," for instance. And “Amen,” a socially conscious gospel move unconvincingly tipping its topper to early Seger’s "Ball of Confusion"-absorbing hippie side then adding a decent hair-metal guitar part, is smarter than it seems at first.

Also, those two ladies that Kid’s sandwiched between on the cover and in the CD booklet sure do have impressive Afros. And "All Summer Long" always makes me think of  Werewolf Warren Zevon's "Play It All Night Long": "Sweet Home Alabama/Play that dead band's song." And the other songs on Rock N Roll Jesus (a couple more sappy ballads, a brag where he likens himself to Cool Hand Luke and Bad Bad Leroy Brown – may Paul Newman and Jim Croce both rest in peace) are respectable throwaways. When you get down to it, Kid Rock’s heartland brand of Joe Six-Pack populism is probably no less pandering than Sarah Palin’s. But as has been clear for years, he’s still a consummate pro, proud to be a journeyman like his ‘70s rock heroes. That's a big part of the point. And I, for one, am glad he can still get away with it.