IF country music were baseball, listening to the album “Last of the Breed” would be the equivalent of watching Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Duke Snider play in the same outfield.
Last spring, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and Ray Price – all Country Music Hall of Famers – went into the studio together. The result: a 22-song double-CD out Tuesday and a tour which hits Radio City on Thursday.
From his biodiesel-fueled tour bus (which must be Nelson’s influence) 80 miles out of Tulsa, Haggard explains what that “Breed” is: “We all three play what we call Texas dance music,” he says. “We do it in a different way, but it’s mainly dance music.”
And why do we need dance music? Haggard, who’s well known for being ornery, lets loose – in a good-natured way.
“Well, they’ve outlawed dancing, you know?” he says. “There’s no more nightclubs. The government pretty much canceled out New Orleans. It was the only city left that aimed at entertaining people and allowed people to dance. You could find music at 2 in the morning,”
Critiquing society is practically a Haggard trademark. In addition to honky-tonk hits like “The Bottle Let Me Down” and “Mama Tried,” he denounced the hippie counterculture with 1969’s “Okie from Muskogee.” More recently, he issued “Rebuild America First,” singing “Let’s get out of Iraq and back on track.”
Haggard, who turns 70 in a few weeks, says it took only two days to record the whole album – even without his longtime band, the Strangers. “Breaking it to them “wasn’t easy,” he admits.
“I just told ’em, ‘Hey, go get unemployment and I’ll be back shortly.'”