Carmelita. Flaco Jiménez featuring Dwight Yoakam. 1992. Reprise.

 Rock and roll history is like a geographical survey of community trends as they went about the cultural business of shaping, through the galvanizing shock of immediate pleasure, our national taste in pop music. Pick up the eponymous Warren Zevon record, and reading the personnel credits will evoke that mid-seventies Los Angeles musical style that was an extension of the Laurel Canyon aesthetic with added barroom truculence for masculine, delinquency cool. Zevon, like Gram Parsons or Lindsey Buckingham, was too sophisticated a musical talent to remain fixed behind one artistic persona for very long; a deeply flawed romanticist, gifted with poetic insight, Zevon burned perilously close to the ill defined borders of pop genius. His early career ballad Carmelita is more than just a clever marriage of singer-songwriter conceits. By fusing the rock clichè of the drug addicted personality to the country and western lyricism of the desperately lonely stranger, Zevon created a new archetype by making explicit in song form the tradition carried forward by rock and roll out of postwar country and western since the time of Hank Williams: the archetypical desperate stranger bent by loneliness now severed from government dependency and set adrift to languish on his doom spiral. The Texas accordionist Flaco Jimenez is a regional virtuoso from San Antonio with vast experience as a journeyman artist having played alongside pop luminaries as varied as Ry Cooder and Dr John. For his recording of Carmelita, Jiménez performs with Dwight Yoakam, an inspired pairing of musical sensibilities with a working acumen of what Willie Nelson famously referred to as the “no good life.” Together, they underscore the country notes of Zevon’s original version, penetrating its subdued nuance and revealing the vinegary aromatic Chinese rock therein. What keeps this Carmelita from sinking low into oddball country pathos—like the GG Allin performance featured in the Todd Phillips documentary Hated—is Carmelita’s seamless fit of voice and instrument. The voice of the accordion varies, like all voices, natural or man-made, depending upon the tenor of its operator. For Carmelita, Jiménez locates a complementary pitch that stresses, with working class after hours fatalism, the smack addled, country blues of Yoakam’s Bakersfield tenor. Jiménez’ Carmelita is the stuff of robust jukebox rotation, but it was lost in the digital age without the proper exposure to find an audience who could hear in its peerless mix of Bakersfield-San Antonio dynamics the class poetry redolent of its age. The nineties was a transitional period when the recording industry, caught between technologies, created the following paradox. While the market was flooded with reissues made possible by digitizing old recordings, opportuning the most daring artists to broaden their base of influence and expand their style in ways their audiences could recognize because we were listening to those same reissues, the business end of the music industry was continuing to throw A&R money at new talent, hoping to strike gold with another Backstreet Boys or Mariah Carey, thus emptying their budgets of marketing dollars. Lamentably, a consumer driven market inaugurated the Götterdämmerung, but, especially for fans of new and innovative pop music, it was an exhilarating time to be alive.