The painting on the cover of Bloodshot Records’ new CD, Hell-Bent: Insurgent Country, shows a stern, emaciated Hank Williams Sr. riddled with arrows. “We come to exhume Hank, not to canonize him,” proclaim the liner notes. “Unbury him . . . from beneath the mounds of gutless swill which pass for his legacy, the suffocating spew of the Nashville hit factories.” The words, in white, are superimposed over a sepia-toned 1940s-era photo of an ecstatic woman holding a snake at a religious revival.
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Bloodshot Records is the brainchild of Nan Warshaw, a band publicist and longtime country music deejay; Rob Miller, a house painter and former drummer; and Eric Babcock, veteran of several roots record labels. The three share a dislike of slick Nashville bands. Warshaw met Miller while spinning country records at Crash Palace (they now spin Wednesday nights at Delilah’s), and her work as publicist for the seminal thrash-grass band Killbilly brought her into contact with Babcock, who works for Flying Fish Records. Warshaw introduced the two at a bar late in 1993. They hit it off, and Bloodshot Records was born. Hell-Bent is the label’s second collection of non-U.S. 99 country bands and includes a diverse range of songs, from the World Famous Blue Jays’ rig rock “Mad Flap Boogie” to the Bottle Rockets’ soulful “Get Down.” Babcock, who helped coin the term insurgent country, describes the music that Bloodshot Records promotes as “too much twang for indie rock and too much attitude for country.”
But is the music country or rock? Babcock says he was at Best Buy recently, where Hell-Bent is usually filed in the country bin. “I was looking for something in “various artists’ in the rock section, and there it was,” he recalls. “Someone had reracked it there. We got lucky and someone knew what it was and what to do with it. So I put it right in front.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Cynthia Howe.
