JAMES McMURTRY & THE HEARTLESS BASTARDS : LIVE IN AUGHT-THREE

  1. Saint Mary Of The Woods
  2. Fraulein O.
  3. Red Dress
  4. No More Buffalo
  5. 60 Acres
  6. Rachel's Song
  7. Out Here In The Middle
  8. Choctaw Bingo
  9. Lights Of Cheyenne
  10. Levelland
  11. Max's Theorem
  12. I'm Not From Here
  13. Too Long In The Wasteland
  14. Rex's Blues

Label : Lightning Rod Records

Time : 77:48

Released : March 23, 2004

Venue : The Zephyr Club, Salt Lake City, Utah + The Orange Peel, Ashville, North Carolina + 12th and Porter, Nashville, Tennessee + John Barleycorn's, Wichita, Kansas.

Recording Date : May 16th & 17th, 2003 + June 27th, 2003 + June 26th 2003 + November 15th, 2003

Review (AllMusic) : James McMurtry's written plenty of great songs, but he's never made a great album. His character sketches and stories have always rung true, and he's as perceptive a chronicler of the disaffected and alienated as you'll find, but his limited vocal range and sometimes almost-indifferent delivery have made even his best discs, Too Long in the Wasteland and Where'd You Hide the Body a struggle to get through. Live in Aught-Three isn't a great album, but the live setting lets McMurtry and his backing group, the Heartless Bastards, breathe real rock & roll life into many of these songs for the first time. "Levelland," an account of stasis in the fly-over land, aches with a longing for something, anything, that's more exciting than high-school football games and farms, and "Red Dress" burns with an angry intensity that you'd never have guessed McMurtry had in him. We also get a dose of McMurtry's deadpan humor on a few between-song asides ("I used to think I was an artist. Come to find out I'm a beer salesman") and a hilarious delineation between intellectuals and good ol' boys. In fact, the strongest material here -- and McMurtry's best work overall -- are the ones in which he finds both the humor and the pathos in quirky, nasty characters like the ticked-off heir to the worthless farmland of "60 Acres," or the twisted crew at a family reunion in "Choctaw Bingo." If McMurtry's albums haven't caught your attention before, Live in Aught-Three is a perfect opportunity to reassess him.