Customer Reviews

Creatures From the Black Saloon

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This is a great album (and my 1st Lounge Lizard one). Only 1 poor song (in my opinion) and with songs like the "Golden Triangle, Hut Tubs of Tears (over you), The War Between the States, Kool Whip... etc... This is a must for an y Lounge Lizard.

Fifteen years ago you could drive 50 miles every Thursday night and sit with the same 75 people in a closed down cafe to listen to the Lounge Lizards sing the best they'd ever do. Those songs are available today as they performed them then and recorded them on vinyl. Highway Cafe of the Damned and Creatures of the Black Saloon contain them all. The fact I wouldn't trade a single song from any those guys released later doesn't take anything away from the ones they produced during that, their zenith. If you've never heard (of) the Austin Lounge Lizards and you buy these two albums you'll be compelled to buy the others just to make absolutely certain I'm wrong. You won't feel cheated, but you will feel a little disappointed.
Introduce yourself to them with Highway and Creature. On those you'll feel no letdown at all.

Having more depth than I do in "classic" country music (is that an oxymoron), my wife claims that "Creatures from the Black Saloon", the first album from the famous, fabulous, fearless and flamboyant Austin Lounge Lizards, is basically a collection of satirical remakes of classic country songs. She may be right, but without such a background, I just think it's hilarious, clever and delightful every time I listen to it. Living in Louisiana and traveling often to Texas and other parts of the South, I can relate to most of the songs. Trips through Beaumont, TX on the way from Louisiana to Houston, make me feel like I'm in the rhyming, odiferous, double entendre-laden world of the "Golden Triangle". I've been near "Pflugerville", though I've never "phled with my pflogger", and to Nashville too, though I've never gotten to "ride in the car Hank died in." I'm pretty sure the "boondocks" and "shotgun home" of the narrator of "Crystal Chandelier" are somewhere in neighboring Arkansas. Just down I-10 from Beaumont is "Anahuac", where the "air is all smelly and the mud is really black," and where Jerry Jeff Walker, "with (his) head in a bag", "watched the Newlywed Game". I've lived near "Chester Wooley"'s stomping grounds in South Carolina (Augusta, GA is just across the border). And anyone who's lived in Pennsylvania can relate to the rebels of "The War Between the States" march into Stuckey's, "100,000 strong" for some "delicious" pecan rolls before they later "taste a great defeat." "Didn't Go to College" mentions Waukegan, which I've never been near, but it still contains one of my favorite lines about the singer's mother, who's "a research psychologist, working on a top secret project for NASA." I've listened to all the Lizards' CD's many times. I won't say that "Creatures" is necessarily the best, but like another reviewer said, it never disappoints.