Texas Funeral

Personnel: Ernest Bovine (guitar).
Photographer: Brian Smale.
One of the dumbest and most willfully offensive anti-cool country-rock albums of the '90s, Jon Wayne's Texas Funeral managed to drag well-drawn pockmarked radicalism out of the trappings of a dire novelty record. Obsessing over carpet urination, apple schnapps, and incomprehensible gas-station attendants, Wayne warbled through a jumbly catalog of obliquely moralist tones and a drawling rural heatstroke cartoon shuffle. Texas Funeral lived off polka, racism, Captain Beefheart, Garth Ennis, and Nine Pound Hammer, and, fittingly, its cover was a Sex Pistols pastiche. ~ Dean Carlson