Guys, if you've ever felt like a loser while getting drunk over a girl, then you need to hear the Old 97's. Girls, if you've ever hooked up with a guy who you knew meant you no good, then the Old 97's are your band. Everyone else, get cracking. Few bands can appeal to both sexes while essentially differentiating them from one another, which is to the credit of Rhett Miller, who managed to create a compelling and complex musical persona during the mid to late 1990s. He could play the pathetic loser just as easily as the "serial ladykiller." both the dumper and the dumped, his own and everyone else's worst enemy. On song after song Miller-as-narrator does the wrong thing-- whether it's taking that young woman to bed, or allowing her to make him miserable, or just leaving his back door open for his lost cat-- even though he knows better.
This persona, to varying degrees fictional and autobiographical, fueled the Old 97's' endearing debut, two great alt-country albums, and two great-to-good pop albums before Miller settled down, dropped his worrying ways, and made two solo albums-- one a disaster and the other a fiasco. So after being dropped by Elektra and putting out a just-okay album and an overdue live album on New West, the Old 97's have released their very first best-of, which is a transparent attempt (as was the guest spot in The Break-Up) to gain a commercial foothold.
If there's any justice in the world, it'll work. Sure, there are some notable omissions: "Wish the Worst" (Miller's greatest loser anthem), "Busted Afternoon" (Miller's greatest chorus hook), and "Book of Poems" (the band's greatest momentum), among too many others to name ("Big Brown Eyes", "Bel-Air", "Salome", and on and on). But that's the case with just about any best-of, and besides, these 18 tracks aren't just uniformly good, they're all uniformly better than most everything else that came out of the too-reverent alt-country movement.
The three chords that kickstart "Stoned", from the band's 1994 debut Hitchhike to Rhome, are a fitting introduction to the Old 97's, setting up that album's ramshackle sound and providing a perfect context for Miller's intelligent lyrics and tales of woman woes. Ken Bethea, who plays those chords, is the band's secret weapon, a guitarist with a gift for concise and eloquent riffs and solos that alternately finished Miller's sentences and pulled the rug out from under him. As a unit, the band could shift easily from the runaway-train momentum of "Four Leaf Clover" (a duet with X's Exene Cervenkova) to the chugging shuffle of "Crying Drunk" to the exquisite pop of "Murder (or a Heart Attack)", drawing from a wealth of sources that covered Merle Haggard to the Kinks. The songs on Hit By a Train-- which include a soundtrack cut, a B-side, and two live tracks from a Satellite Rides bonus disc-- reveal a band that's professional enough to keep the emphasis on Miller's songs but dynamic enough never to be overshadowed, even when the slick production of Satellite Rides values defanged them.
The Old 97's went pop, as did many others associated with alt-country, although that step wasn't the big one fans and detractors often make it out to be. There was always a little country in their pop, a lot of pop in their country. So, while Hit By a Train has a distinct stylistic arc, tracks from their later albums perfectly complement those from their earlier ones. And at the core of every song, whatever its sound, is Miller himself, whose lyrics never lost their wit and whose persona never lost any of its conflicted shiftiness... at least not during the period covered by Hit By a Train. "I believe in love," he exclaims on "Rollerskate Skinny", "but it don't believe in me!" We can all relate.
