Lone Justice: This World Is Not My Home : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

In the musty closet of rock history, there's a special shelf for next big things that never panned out, and Lone Justice sit right between acid jazz and Morris Day's solo career. These Eighties cowpunks had a born star in Maria McKee, a sun-kissed Cali ingenue who obviously got up early on the morning God was handing out blond ringlets. She had a powerhouse country voice, and she could wear a gingham dress like nobody's business, but the band's two LPs were slick radio-rock flops. This World Is Not My Home, a retrospective heavy on previously unreleased early tracks, is really the first Lone Justice album -- it lets you hear these city kids dreaming country, before they noticed what big cars the Hooters were driving.

"Ways To Be Wicked" is the only decent hit here, a vaguely ridiculous ditty co-written by Tom Petty. But the bang-up early stuff includes the Dylan throwaway "Go Away Little Boy" and the self-explanatory "Rattlesnake Mama." Lone Justice's biggest charm is sheer Valley Girl pop enthusiasm. Unlike so many ponderous country rockers then and now, Lone Justice didn't play the roots card -- their frisky fakery puts Son Volt to shame. When McKee belts Merle Haggard's "Working Man Blues," she flaunts all the cowgirl style that made her the definitive MTV art chick of the mid- to late summer of 1985, not to mention all the gusto that still infuses her solo work today. (RS 808)

ROB SHEFFIELD