The Tape: 1. Count On Cowboy Cletus (1980) What It Is: Children's songs... by David Allan Coe
After his first underground novelty album Nothing Sacred's success, David Allan Coe flirted briefly with a 180-degree turn in the other direction. Recovered from the ruins of an exploded moonshine shack in Alabama, the only surviving copy of these demos features Coe vascillating wildly between child-friendly lyrics and the sex-infused profanity common in his other underground works.
Whenever Coe forgets a lyric, which is often, he breaks his cheerful Cowboy Cletus character and fills in the holes with blue humor. On "Count With Me," he sings "Count with me, 1, 2, 3/ It's as easy as ABC/ Count on sticks, 4, 5, 6/ Tell your Mom to suck my dick." Coe and his fellow musicians laugh over much of the recordings and become audibly drunker as time goes on, becoming nearly unintelligible by the end of side two.
"Zebras are horses with stripes, with stripes/ In jail I killed a guy with a pipe, a pipe," he slurs, adding "Nah, fuck it, we'll fix it later." Later never came, however, and the project was abandoned. Too soon, in our opinion.
Sample song titles: "The Magic of Colors," "S-P-E-L-I-N-G," "All You Little Bastards"
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