Everybody's Got a Family, Meet Mine

AMG Review of Everybody's Got a Family, Meet Mine

Eugene Chadbourne
All Music Guide

On the cover we see a gang of sleazy individuals, the members of Johnny Paycheck's band and road crew. The song titles promise us a peek into a depraved honky tonk lifestyle, but they don't really tell a good story the way the best country songs do, and in the end it seems this is the album where the Paycheck outlaw image, although still greasy and grungy, starts to seem like an imitation of itself. The "family" was his finest working band, and the efforts of instrumentalists such as the striking harmonica player P.T. Gazell insure that everything has a nice kick to it. But Paycheck is capable of much more substance than this, and some of the moves just backfire. After success in the past grabbing chestnuts out of the oldtime music bag, this album's "Rollin' in My Sweet Baby's Arms" just comes across as corny. Right in the middle of it all lies an absolute masterpiece, though, the brooding and frightening "Billy Bardo," a tale of a narc that is told with the sing-songy repetition of something like "Froggie Went a Courtin'," making the violent surprise ending that much more potent. Despite the high visible profile of the working band in the artwork, the tracks actually feature a larger than usual quotient of session sidemen, which doesn't seemed to have helped matters.