Heartland Rock Part III - Mink Deville?

This special is not only about recognizing Heartland as a genre, but also about isolating the specifics that makes Heartland Rock what it is. I've mushed through the whole blue collar concept in the Springsteen post, and I touched on the musical side of it in the Setzer post with his glass Hammonds and whatnots. This is gonna tie the knot a little bit tighter around the concept.

The lyrical content in a Heartland song is more than often sprayed with escapism, using metaphors such as cars and the road. And on the flip-side about imprisonment - either personal or social with the metaphors here being the small town and the factory. This is all fine and dandy, and very important of course. Not every song is about that obviously, there still has to be love songs and other stuff. This creates a quite particular environment around Heartland rock, making it so much broader than it actually is. And sometimes it works the other way around, turning other big emotions into Heartland Rock when they probably wouldn't go for that label themselves.

Now that's what I wanted to show you today. Mink Deville during their peak, performing a song smothered in so much Heartland it actually drips of it. Notice the saxophone, the dual electric guitars, the syncopated fills, the piano playing the riff melody in two high octaves. But would Willy sit down in the sofa and admit to being a Heartland rocker? Now sadly he died last year (I am still waiting to perform on a celebration gig) so that's impossible, and during '81 I think he was probably way too much into heroin to admit to anything, but still. He and many others with him had very little to do with the original idea of Heartland, yet it seems to me like they used the same ingredients and ended up with a product very similar to Heartland Rock. From an art perspective I find this interesting and will show you another example of it in the next post. From a musical perspective I just find it rocking.

I could go on forever about Mink Deville and Willy himself, and draw parallels from their new orleans gumbo to whatever we're trying to pin down here. But I won't, even if their cajun influences is worth mentioning when we travel deeper into why Heartland Rock rose to power in the late 70s and early 80s.