X factors

A tribute to the Knitters

by Meredith Ochs

In 1985, the members of the LA punk band X hooked up with their friend Dave Alvin of the Blasters to record an album of country music. Calling themselves the Knitters, the group tackled classics by legends like the Carter Family, Merle Haggard, the Delmore Brothers, and Leadbelly, as well as new tunes penned by Alvin and X's John Doe and Exene Cervenka. The result, Poor Little Critter on the Road (Slash), which was co-produced by X guitarist Billy Zoom, even featured a reworked version of X's "The New World" from the band's 1983 Elektra album More Fun in the New World. At the time, Poor Little Critter was a pleasant oddity, a for-fans-only X excursion that exposed the deep roots hidden underneath X's punk rock. But as a national network of underground artists dedicated to the notion of alternative country music gradually coalesced over the next decade, Poor Little Critter became part of the canon, a process that culminated in the release earlier this month of the Knitters tribute album Poor Little Knitter on the Road (Bloodshot).

A track-by-track re-creation of the original album -- capped off by a previously unreleased Knitters track, Doe's "Why Don't We Try Anymore" -- Poor Little Knitter is largely a showcase for performers associated with Bloodshot, a Chicago-based independent label dedicated to the kind of raucous and rootsy country music that's taboo in Nashville. The disc features tracks by the surfabilly Sadies (with guest vocals by Freakwater's Catherine Irwin), the bluegrassy Trailer Bride, and the Gun Club-influenced Blacks, as well as artists who started with the indie label and moved on to the majors -- Elektra's Old 97's, Outpost's Whiskeytown, and Robbie Fulks, who's back on Bloodshot after a brief signing to DreamWorks.

"When we first approached the Knitters about this project, they were like `Why do you guys want to do a tribute to a record we made when we were drunk?' " laughs Bloodshot's former in-house publicist, Kelly Hogan, who also appears on Poor Little Knitter performing with her old band, the Rock*A*Teens. "But, in a way, the Knitters embodied what Bloodshot is trying to do by including playfulness in this music. They sang about prison and dying, but the tone of the record is really joyful."

According to Cervenka, though, the group started getting together in 1982 for less happy occasions, playing benefit shows for striking miners and sick friends. "We were kinda beatnik folkies. We all had a political conscience." It was also a good excuse to play the country and folk chestnuts they couldn't have gotten away with in X. "We were more interested in digging up these old tunes than writing new ones," Cervenka recalls. "Back then, you couldn't just walk into Tower and buy reissues."

That said, some of Poor Little Critter's finest moments were penned by the Knitters themselves. Doe & Alvin's "The Call of the Wrecking Ball" sounds like an early Sun Studios recording; Cervenka & Doe's "The New World" is a quarter-note stomper that Bonebrake drives with a dashing shuffle, and their "Love Shack" is a honky-tonk swinger. X were never a by-the-numbers punk band. Guitarist Billy Zoom's rockabilly chops put a personal twist on their revved-up rock. Along with pounding out thrash and burning backbeats, drummer D.J. Bonebrake could play subtly, his sticks dancing on cymbals with the finesse of a jazzman. And both Doe and Cervenka wrote beautiful poetic lyrics steeped more in whisky, sex, and guilt than in nihilistic rage. But it was by dusting off rootsy nuggets like the traditional "Walkin' Cane," Haggard's "Silver Wings," and the Carter Family's "Poor Old Heartsick Me" with the Knitters that Doe, Cervenka, Bonebrake, and Zoom did their biggest service to the alterna-country movement.

To me, at the time, country music was Hee-Haw. It was Deliverance. It was tobacco-spitting hillbillies who drove pick-up trucks with gun racks. It was anathema to the punk that had become the anthem of my suburban alienation. I didn't know who the Carter Family and Merle Haggard were. But if X thought they were cool enough to cover, then I had to find out more. Besides, filtered through the familiar voices of Doe and Cervenka, roots music no longer seemed so divergent from punk. All across the country, the Knitters sent X fans off to scour thrift stores for old country, folk, and blues. In Atlanta, Bloodshot's Hogan borrowed the album from a friend and never returned it. Her future boss, Bloodshot founder Rob Miller, remembers hearing Poor Little Critter on a local college station. A decade and a half later, the two found themselves sharing a 12-pack of Labatt's at the Bloodshot offices, dreaming up a tribute to the one-off album that made country music acceptable to their punk palates.

The Knitters are planning to regroup for a couple of benefits to honor the release of the tribute album. But Cervenka admits she's happy with the band's cult status, and she's not aiming to generate much in the way of mainstream media attention. "Being an underground artist is like living in a small town. You really don't want everyone to move there."