When this album was originally issued on Parachute Records in 1980 it was in the context of a growing wave of American conservatism that would ultimately see Ronald Reagan elected US president later that same year. Eugene Chadbourne vainly sought some sort of preventative by inoculating would-be reactionaries with a shot of swine flu, penetrating the flabby epidermis of illiberal country music with outlaw doses of Johnny Paycheck and David Allan Coe. But the good doctor went further, dismantling these bastions of Dixieland defiance (‘Take This Job And Shove It’) in muddles of taut spidery-guitar, Manring's doleful lap steel and spluttered eruptions from Zorn's wild sax. In so doing, he disarmed them of their explicit dogma, uncovering deep-seated roots more universally humane, philanthropic and unashamedly oddball. There's life beyond the ballot box, after all.