The Sir Douglas Quintet: Best Of Sir Douglas Quintet (Takoma) : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Doug Sahm
The Return of Wayne Douglas
Tornado
2000

Doug Sahm
San Antonio Rock: The Harlem Recordings 1957-1961
Norton
2000

The Sir Douglas Quintet
The Sir Douglas Quintet Is Back!
Beatrocket/Sundazed
2000

"This may be the last song I'll ever write for you": That line in "You Was for Real," a slice of fine country anguish on The Return of Wayne Douglas, comes with an extra chill. Recorded last summer in Floresville, Texas, near Doug Sahm's hometown of San Antonio, the album became his final bow when he died on November 18th at fifty-eight. But together these posthumous issues perfectly bookend Sahm's life in music, one as big and vivid as Texas itself.

Getting a grip on the four decades in between is a labor of love. Sahm recorded in a variety of styles for a legion of labels; there is no one-stop anthology of his catholic adventures in rock, R&B and conjunto. But The Best of Doug Sahm and the Sir Douglas Quintet 1968-1975 (Mercury) is a rich dip into the SDQ's crisp Mexicali soul ("At the Crossroads," "Catch the Man on the Rise"). Doug Sahm and Friends: The Best of Doug Sahm's Atlantic Sessions (Rhino) pulls the choicest moments from Sahm's two '73 all-star projects for Atlantic, feasts of celebrity (Bob Dylan, Dr. John) and roadhouse ballads and boogie ("Wallflower," "[Is Anybody Going to] San Antone").

Wayne Douglas (a reversal of Sahm's first and middle names) is not a return so much as a reaffirmation of the country swing and sentiment ever present in Sahm's music. He covers Dylan's "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" with cowpuncher pathos and takes the hippie groove of his '69 SDQ hit, "Mendocino," out to open prairie in "Beautiful Texas Sunshine." "Oh No! Not Another One" is Sahm's honky-tonk potshot at plastic country stars: "There's a young dude walking across the stage like a gazelle/Hell, I'll bet he never even heard of Lefty Frizzell." But Sahm doesn't sound bitter. He loved taking Texas music to the world; he sings like a man with plenty of work to do.

Sahm started early: San Antonio Rock compiles his teenage forays into the ethnic stew of Texas R&B. The multiple takes of "Crazy Daisy" and "Sapphire" are crude barroom fun, and Sahm turns on the ache to precocious effect in the slow burner "Why, Why, Why." His future voice is also evident in "Just a Moment," a Tex-Mex weeper with strong traces of black doo-wop.

The BeatRocket discs corral the '64-'66 sides by the SDQ, Sahm's spicy, barbecued take on Beatlemania, distinguished by the brassy chop of Augie Meyers' Vox organ. The Best has the hit "She's About a Mover" and the great melancholy stomp "The Rains Came." But both sets abound with inspired eccentricity: mod grease ("It's a Man Down There"); backwoods-Zombies pop ("Love Don't Treat Me Fair"); stark garage blues (the Leadbelly lament "It Was in the Pines"). Sahm kept the SDQ going, in some form, for the rest of his career; these tracks were the blueprint.

There is a return of sorts on Wayne Douglas: to "Texas Me," a song of Lone Star homesickness that Sahm first cut in '69 with the SDQ. Here, he turns the tune into a stone-country carol with a reflective choke in his throat: "I wonder what happened to that man inside/The real old Texas me." These four albums, and everything Sahm ever cut, show how he carried Texas with him everywhere he went. (RS 844/845)

DAVID FRICKE