Does it seem weird to you that the guys behind the Found Footage Festival would do a documentary on an insanely obscure country music artist from the middle of nowhere? Well, it isn’t. See, in addition to being a documentary on the history of dirty music, Dirty Country is also a movie about discovering weird-ass shit; the movie’s central story is about a bunch of guys becoming hardcore fans of dirty country artist Larry Pierce after one of them ran across his CD at a truck stop. So there.
Anyways, they definitely had some good ideas going into this. Though he’s not as amusing to talk to as Blowfly, Larry Pierce is a pretty good subject for a documentary! He’s very relatable, in that his music career hasn’t effected his lifestyle in any way. He’s a guy with a blue collar job who lives with his wife of 800 years in some small-ass town, and he just happens to put out a few albums of dick-joke music every year on a small label. He’s sorta like the guys from Anvil, except that when we meet him he doesn’t have bandmates and he doesn’t really play gigs at all, so he’s even more removed from anything that resembles a rock star lifestyle. Larry hasn’t cultivated any sort of stage persona like John Valby’s “Dr. Dirty” or anything.
As an introduction to the history of scumbaggery in popular music, Dirty Country is sorta informative, although at the outset I was sorta bugged by a few glaring omissions, such as G.G. Allin and David Allen Coe. Of course, Coe is old as hell nowadays if he’s not dead yet, and I’m sure he’d prefer to be remembered more for his mainstream country material than for “Fuckin’ in the Butt”, and I guess the omission of dirty punk acts was a necessity if they were going to keep the running time under 5 hours. Christ, the people at Rhino could probably put together a 4-disc set full of nothing but dirty, filthy music - That’d be more realistic than a comprehensive documentary!
The movie has a sort of loosely-defined focus on stuff that could more or less be defined as novelty music, stuff that’s dirty but also kinda silly. You know, somethin’ like “Shaving Cream” by Benny Bell. The ol’ folks called it “bawdy”! Of course, plenty of punk acts and rap acts did joke songs that were sly with their scumbaggery, but generally the genres are known for songs that are a lot less adorable.
So anyway, interspersed with the little featurettes on Blowfly, John Valby, and Doug Clark, we get the story of Larry’s budding friendship with the band -Itis, the guys who discovered his stuff at a truck stop. Despite apparently being a rap-metal (or nü-metal or whatever) band that no one has ever heard of, they are apparently men of means, or the guys from the Found Footage Festival are. They manage to track down Larry, present him with a guitar, and play a show with him as his backing band. It’s a pretty touching story arc for a documentary on people who write songs about buttsex.
I’ll withhold my opinions on their music, because the dudes in -Itis seem like some pretty swell guys, although the movie does tend to beat you over the head with the whole “THESE REALLY COOL GUYS WITH HOT DREADLOCKED GIRLFRIENDS DEIGNED TO HANG OUT WITH A MIDDLE AGED DORK! ISN’T THAT AMAZING?” thing, but I suppose you can blame that more on the Found Footage guys and their choice to pepper Larry Pierce’s climactic performance with interview snippets of anonymous dudes singing Larry’s praises, which I guess is supposed to be a half-assed equivalent of that part in the Anvil movie where Lars Ulrich and a bunch of other successful metal artists are talking up Anvil. Still, this movie will warm the cockles of your heart!