Like most people who have ever heard her sing or enjoyed her witty banter with Neko Case onstage, I love Miss Kelly Hogan. (Or as she was known at the tome of this recording, Kelly Hogan Murray. What's the story there? Ex-husband? "Kelly Hogan" just sound better?) My first exposure to her was in the mid 90s, courtesy of a dubbed tape of this 1990 album released on DB Records. I think it was somewhat beloved by a few folks I knew in Knoxville at the time, and someone must have made me a copy, but for the life of me I can't remember who. I liked it well enough, but there was something nigglingly Adult Contemporary about it to my ears, which at the time were more attuned to free jazz and pigfuck music. Things like the covers of the "Peter Gunn" theme and "Wishin' and Hopin'" always made me feel a little uncomfortable. As music, too comfortable with its effervescent state of being, perhaps. So I lost the tape sometime along the way and didn't think much of it again, until a copy of the album turned up at Hot Horse a few months ago.
It was from some radio station in Athens or Atlanta, I removed the label and can't remember which, but since the band and label were from Atlanta that makes perfect sense. I left a sticker on the back with bore the handwritten declaration "Folk Shit!" which I find amusing because whoever wrote that couldn't be more wrong. It's more of a jazz/lounge/torch song type of thing, with more rock influence than folk. Though there is a banjo on it. But guess who plays that banjo (along with guitar and pump organ)? Bill Taft! Of Smoke non-fame. I love love love Smoke*, and have a more difficult but still rewarding relationship with his latest band Hubcap City. I had no idea he was in The Jody Grind. Well I listened to One Man's Trash and now love it unequivocally. More so, in fact, than Kelly's solo albums, which I must confess my present state finds a bit Adult Contemporary. On her album Beneath the Country Underdog, she does do a devastating take on Willie Nelson's "I Still Can't Believe You're Gone," and achieves the near-impossible task of doing Richard Manuel proud on a version of The Band's "Whispering Pines," which to my mind makes her a national treasure, but some of the instrumentation and arrangements on her albums make me feel uncomfortable in that old familiar way. I'm sure I'll grow into them some day. But One Man's Trash is a lot of fun, Hogan is her usual big-throated sultry self and there's a good mix of torch songs and more upbeat tunes. Although there was a lounge revival coming down the pike in the 90s, this album doesn't sound at all dated and has little relation to something that would fit well with a Gap commercials that used Matrix effects.
*Reminder to self to tell my Smoke/Cat Power anecdote.
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