Cowboy Logic – Garry Gray & Sacred Cowboys (Kasumen Records)
Just when you through it was safe to go back into the corral, those ornery Sacred Cowboys are back on the reservation.
Molly Meldrum once called them the worst band he’d seen in five years and the Cowboys - or more correctly sole constant member Garry Gray - has worn that critique as a badge of honour ever since. And why not? Molly didn’t know his arse from his elbow and wasn’t likely to be converted, and his dissing the band on national TV played right into their ethos of confrontation.
It’s been 16 years since Savage Beat’s “Nailed To The Cross” compilation of Sacred Cowboys material. Presented with an opportunity do another, Gray did not want to go over all the same old coals and that’s why this collection collates some of the band’s studio story on one disc and adds selections from his two more recent projects. 2015’s Garry Gray and the Sixth Circle and the 2022 “We Mainline Dreamers” collaboration with The Wreckery’s Ed Clayton-Jones.
The second CD is live stuff (save for one song) and comes from three different Cowboys line-ups.
For the uninitiated, Garry Gray grew up in the late ‘70s Melbourne punk scene, charting an early punk course before it was fashionable to do so with both The Reals (1975-76) and The Negatives (’77-79), and hanging out with the Boys Next Door. Fate deals strange hands and torch songs have made old mate Nick Cave an international star, Garry Gray, not so much - although you’d never know it from his recordings or stage presence.
Sacred Cowboys came together as a supergroup of sorts, goading audiences through the ‘80s with Gray their chainsaw wielding frontman. Various line-ups have re-surfaced down the years and a new one, built around Gray and co-founder Mark Ferrie, is back playing live and readying to record.
So you know that “Cowboy Logic” isn’t just a Sacred Cowboys collection. The Sixth Circle material is in a similar vein while the “We Mainline Dreamers” is more acoustic, bluesy and effect-laden but not lacking in intensity.
The live disc is really where the rubber hits the bitumen. There’s been some minimal work done to polish the desk tapes but it remains a raw and fearsomely great trip. Six tracks feature the 1988 line-up when the late Spencer P Jones joined and you can hear the paint being stripped from The Espy’s walls.
SPJ is another three with Penny Ikinger, Nick Rischbeith, Ash Wednesday and Stephen Fidduck. Songs like “Hell Sucks”, “Cut Price Martyr” and “Pay For It In The New Life” capture the Sacred Cowboys’ spirit.
Any boxiness on the more recent tracks is offset by the intense playing. There’s a pulsating version of the Stones’ “We Love You” and the cover of “Highway 61” is even more warped than anything His Bobness has dished up on his contemporary Never Ending Tours. An updated 2006 studio recording of Alex Chilton’s “Bangkok” rounds it all off nicely.
If you’ve had trouble getting a handle on the patchwork of labels that have put out Sacred Cowboys music over the years, this is the place to start.
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