Love And Death
This month’s de-dusted vintage bottle; a hardcore country maverick sings songs of cars, love and murder.
“I like to sing about the heart, hurt and pain and everything in between.” JOHNNY PAYCHECK
Johnny Paycheck
The Lovin’ Machine
LITTLE DARLIN’, 1966
THE WIDER LISTENING world knows Johnny Paycheck for his bird-flipping cover of David Allan Coe’s Take This Job And Shove It, a US country Number 1 in January 1978. But the singer born Donald E. Lytle in Greenfield, Ohio in May 1938 was by then already a 20-year veteran of the honky tonks, and a man who trouble loved.
He had started as he meant to go on. A drop out and drifter who served two years in the brig for punching his commanding officer when ser ving in the navy, in 1958 he washed up in Nashville. Over the next few years he recorded singles for Decca as Donny Young, and played bass and sang back-up in the bands of Porter Wagoner, Faron Young and Ray Price. He toured with George Jones’s Jones Boys from 1962 to ’66, on bass and steel guitar, singing harmony on songs including the 1965 hit Love Bug, and giving that soon-to-be-familiar stare of on-edge bonhomie on the sleeve of New Country Hits.
In 1965 he was introduced to Pickwick Records executive Aubrey Mayhew, also a noted collector of John F Kennedy memorabilia, allegedly while lying intoxicated under a bridge in Nashville. Soon after, Donald Lytle took the name Johnny Paycheck, from Chicago heavyweight boxer John J Pacek, who fought Joe Louis in 1940. After Paycheck’s first solo single A-11, a jukebox weepie convincingly sung in his strong tenor, the two founded the Little Darlin’ label in 1966.
Released in July that same year, a few months after his recorded-in-the-studio
debut
was an upfront, bang-to-rights country album whose twists and tributaries continue to perplex. As unthreatening as the album’s goofy Model T cover cartoon, songs including the open-road title track, moonshine thriller Fountain Of Love and adulterous lament Florence Jean would have fit easily on mainstream C&W radio. Familiar tropes they may be, but they’re handled masterfully, as on the Paycheck/Mayhew composition We’re The Kind Of People: with Lloyd Green’s pedal steel alive to the sentiment of the song, crying for all it’s worth as it revisits the maudlin world of A-11, evoking a dimly-lit joint full of heartbroken barflies finding succour in sweet wine and songs just like this.
“When I was doing the arrangements with the Little Darlin’ songs,” Paycheck said in 1998, “I could take those three or four chord songs and see what I could do… I don’t write many songs about trucks or trees because I like to sing about the heart, hurt and pain and everything in between.”
Elsewhere, and often without warning, we’re in more primal, psychologically fraught territory. A cover of Cowboy Jack Clement’s Miller’s Cave depicts the murderous bravado and ultimate impotence of the rejected man no one took seriously (“then they laughed at me, so I shot ’em”). Written by Paycheck and Mayhew, patricidal shuffle The Johnsons Of Turkey Ridge depicts an inter-clan blood feud in Kentucky. Yet these pale beside I’ve Got Someone To Kill, one of the most chilling country songs of them all.
To a canter-like beat and distracted steel, there’s an old-fashioned courtesy to this song of premeditated murder, told almost apologetically during a chance encounter in a bar. Like the protagonists in a thousand songs from You’d Better Move On to Jolene, the narrator fears their one chance at happiness is being taken from them, yet here he’s prepared to take the ultimate step in self-annihilation, shrugging, “I know I’ll surely die for what I’m about to do, but it doesn’t matter, I’m a dead man anyhow.” The listener may realise, in a cold sweat, how reasonable this killer sounds: the “someone” he has to kill is also himself. To the Country Music Foundation’s Daniel Cooper, its singer would later muse on this brief, horrific glimpse into psychopathology, “That was in the old days, and people said, ‘Geeeah! What a song!’”
With the title song reaching Number 8 on the country listings, Paycheck enjoyed further chart entries that decade with Jukebox Charlie (And Other Songs That Make The Jukebox Play) and Country Soul, though by the end of the decade Little Darlin’ had folded and the bottle beckoned, as did a period of homelessness. The revival of his fortunes in the ’70s as a country outlaw was punctuated by bankruptcy and yet more drinking. A YouTube-able, high-speed 1981 date at New York’s Lone Star Café suggests a taste for strong powders and hints that the lessons of 1979’s (Stay Away From The) Cocaine Train were not being heeded. Paycheck would end the ’80s in the Chillicothe Correctional Institute after a Christmas 1985 incident at the North High Lounge in Hillsboro, Ohio. Paycheck shot bar patron Larry Wise with his .22 handgun, grazing his skull and blowing his hat off, apparently after Wise had insulted the singer by offering him a meal of turtle soup and deer. Merle Haggard came to play a show with him in the jail, saying he hoped Paycheck would in future, “stay off that dope.”
He was pardoned by Ohio governor Richard Celeste in January 1991 and was, he said, 10 years clean when he was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry in 1997. “No matter what I do,” he said before his death in 2003, “the fans don’t really care.”