Brooklyn Side
Imagine for a moment that the survivors of the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash in 1977 had decided to keep going and had replaced Ronnie Van Zant and Steve Gaines with the Clash's Joe Strummer and Mick Jones.  The reborn band would have had it all: redneck country-rock with in-your-face class consciousness and cockney punk-rock with swing and guitar chops. It would have sounded a lot like the BottleRockets on their second album,The Brooklyn Side. When the BottleRockets' chief singer-songwriter Brian Henneman wants to sing about the American class structure, what does he do? He tells jokes about buying a "1000 Dollar Car." "A thousand-dollar car ain't gonna roll," he sings over grinding, Neil Youngish guitar chords, "till you put at least another thousand in the hole/Sink your money in and there you are:/The owner of a two-thousand-dollar thousand-dollar car." --Geoffrey Himes