Three years before Aereo-Plain was released, Hartford had played banjo on the Byrds’ seminal Sweetheart of the Rodeo album, notable (and at the time, notorious to some) for showcasing a Los Angeles rock band building a bridge from their hippie culture halfway toward the more conservative culture of Nashville country music. In that sense, Sweethearts, too, was a concept album. Aereo-Plain can perhaps be viewed as building the other half of that bridge, with a handful of Nashville’s most prominent names pushing their genre in the direction of the popular rock culture of the West Coast.
Hartford was uniquely positioned to build this bridge. He had released several records on RCA in the late 60s that defied easy categorization. These records, including The Love Album, Earthwords & Music, and Looks at Life featured a fresh-faced and clean-cut Hartford on the cover. In some places they were straight ahead pop-country, including the Grammy Award-winning hit “Gentle on My Mind.” But in other places there was no easy label. There were elements of psychedelia, show tunes, novelty, humor, sound effects, and rock and roll. Hartford’s Banjo is mashed together with drumsets, timpanis, horns, guitars, and washing-machine impressions (old and new), among other things to create a singular sound. Hartford was demonstrating early on his desire to stretch accepted musical boundaries and his penchant for defying listener and industry expectations.
Hartford also began to tease out the Aereo-Plain themes in these earlier recordings. Consider this passage from “(Good Old Electric) Washing Machine [Circa 1943],” a lament about the modernization of washing machine technology:
Well I cry when I see that brand new automatic washing machine
Cause I’m sentimental for that old machine still yet;
Cause that old one really looked like a real live washing machine
But the new one just looks more like a television set.
This sentiment foreshadows the notes of skepticism about modernity Hartford expresses throughout Aereo-Plain, particularly those in “Steamboat Whistle Blues,” in which he bemoans the changing cityscape of Nashville and other aspects of his then-contemporary world:
Well the city’s grown up where it looks all square like a crossword puzzle on the landscape
It looks like electric shaver now where the courthouse used to be
The grass is all synthetic and we don’t know for sure about the food
The only thing we know for sure is them Steamboat Whistle Blues
I’d sit and watch my TV if I thought I could trust the news
About the only thing I trust these days is them Steamboat Whistle Blues
To the singer, troubling elements of tawdry present-day Nashville include boxy, uninspired modern architecture, fake chemical-lawns, questionably-sourced food, and an untrustworthy media establishment. In a later verse, “Far Out Johnny” expresses the sentiment that “Bluegrass music is thing of the past and the same for rock and roll.” What horrors the modern world has bestowed!
“Tear Down the Grand Ole Opry” continues the theme of discontent with a once-traditional but now-modernizing city, expressing Hartford’s displeasure with the Opry’s move from the fabled Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville to Opryland USA, a concrete-and-blacktop theme park in the city’s suburbs. The Ryman’s owners, National Life and Accident insurance company, subsequently sought to tear down the Ryman to and use the bricks to build a chapel at Opryland. “Broad Street will never be the same,” Hartford worries, and “another good thing has done gone on,” suggesting a sentiment that the power of the forces upending tradition is gaining steam—perhaps even inevitability. Ultimately, public resistance to the plan to tear down the Ryman—and especially the resistance of influential musicians at the time—eventually thwarted the effort. In 1999 the Opry elected to return to the Ryman annually during the off-peak winter months, a tradition that continues today.
The Opry is the subject of withering criticism from Hartford, who refers to it later on in “Station Break” as the “Grand Ole Conglomeration,” reflecting a sense that the once pure and holy embodiment of country music—hosted by its Mother Church—had become yet another shameful, late-post-war profit machine; another victim of modernity. “Nobody Eats at Linebaugh’s Anymore,” from 1972’s Morning Bugle further fleshes out Hartford’s discontent with the Opry and a changing Nashville, as Hartford expresses concern that the Opry’s move from downtown would devastate the local businesses like Linebaugh’s Diner and Ernest Tubbs’ Record Store that thrived on the Opry’s foot traffic. Incidentally, the record store remains open today, although we can only imagine what Hartford might have thought of the exploding modern metropolis that is Nashville in 2016. Hartford did ultimately make some kind of peace with Opryland, where he helped develop an old-fashioned steamboat ride in later years.
A quick glance at the title suggests “Back in the Goodle Days” might be an explicit rejection of the present. But the song is somewhat more subversive. The title foretells an intent to lionize times past, and yet it fails—=quite intentionally, it seems—to name a single event that made those “goodle days” so good, sending the listener the message that perhaps nostalgia is merely wistful thinking about a past that was never quite as heroic—or as perfect—as it inevitably looks in the gauzy reflections of our mind’s eye. Hartford has some fun at the expense of the character singing this song by making the failure of specificity explicit, as he can muster only the vague assertion that “a lotta good things went down one time back in the goodle days.” Indeed, several of the songs lyrical turns appear to be gently poking fun at the reflexive exaltation of the traditional over the modern:
Sometimes I get to thinkin’ that we’re almost done
And there ain’t nothing left that we can figure out.
And I guess it must’ve seemed a lot more like that
Back in the goodle days.
Hartford seems to be pondering here whether the ostensibly contemptible modern is so drastically different from the past upon which we heap such adulation. He also hints at an unending cycle of nostalgia; a human condition characterized by the feeling in the present moment—whether that’s in 1951, 1971, 1991, or today—that history has ended and all great accomplishments have been accomplished—that’s there’s “nothing left that we can figure out.”
“Turn Your Radio On” is the only song on the album that is neither traditional nor written by Hartford, and he chose it very carefully, as it, too, teases out the album’s themes. Albert E. Brumley wrote the song in 1937, and has said it was written in the wake of the introduction of the modern invention of radio to rural communities. Friends, having heard one of Brumley’s other gospel songs on their radio and would call him on the telephone tell him “turn your radio on” so that he could hear his music being played. Hence, the jarring lyrical juxtaposition of traditional gospel themes and imagery with a plastic and steel box of transistors – the traditional and the modern.
Larry Groce of Mountain Stage has said that Hartford “was one of the rarest of musical birds. He had one foot deeply rooted in the past and the other always at least a few steps into the future- and both were dancing.” This masterful record is the clearest, most concise statement of that dichotomy.
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Special thanks to Robert Greer, of Asheville, NC-based bluegrass band Town Mountain, who handed me a copy of Aereo-Plain when we were roommates in 2002 and told me the album would change my life. Thanks Bob – it did!
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