1994 produced a number of special albums that could have collectively, or each single-handedly, changed the sound and trajectory of Nashville in the mid nineties had they stuck, but they simply didn’t.
Despite Bob Woodruff’s Dreams & Saturday Nights being as steely and bullseye-sharp as the tip of a barroom dart, his debut album was basically a bounce out. All three singles failed to score on the country charts.
Founded in 1992 as part the parent company Elektra Entertainment, itself a division of Warner Communication Inc, Asylum famously recorded Emmylou Harris’ Wrecking Ball and Guy Clark’s Boats to Build and Dublin Blues. As a new artist, Woodruff was keeping good company with some other edgy acts on the new Asylum country roster. Mandy Barnett recorded her eponymous debut album on the hip label.
Dreams & Saturday Nights was produced by Steve Fishell whose name has been celebrated before in this feature for his production work with Tony Brown on McBride & the Rides debut album Burnin’ Up the Road. He has also worked with Pam Tillis, the Mavericks, and Radney Foster among others.
The album was released at this wonderful moment in time when Nashville clearly had its agenda but was still seemingly willing to offer an alternate menu of acts to its featured blue-plate specials. It felt like country fans had real choice, though it is telling that mismanagement and a lack of promotional heft eventually starved the careers of these aspiring artists on so many of the smaller upstart labels. That “Hard Liquor, Cold Women, Warm Beer” and “Bayou Girl” only climbed to #70 and #74 respectively on the country charts is proof of that. The third single, “Alright,” didn’t even chart, and it was the one ray of sunlight shining through this hazy collection of misery and messiness.
Woodruff’s album is shockingly bleak and hard, to the point of being uncomfortable to listen to at times. That does not negate how excellent it is. Online, a No Fences
review said, “Trust me: Dreams & Saturday Nights is one of the best country albums of the Nineties, and if you dig storytellers like Steve Earle or Robert Earl Keen, or you think you’d be into a rougher version of the Elvisy, country-rock sounds that The Mavericks and Dwight Yoakam were cooking up in the decade, you need to track this one down yesterday.” Alan Cackett said, “In fact, all of Woodruff’s songs are cut from a coarser cloth that has trouble squeezing through the country radio bottleneck.
“Borrowing from music mavericks such as Gram Parsons, the Beatles, Merle Haggard, the Byrds, Emmylou Harris and Creedence Clearwater Revival, his debut album, Dreams & Saturday Nights, was released on Asylum in 1994, and though overlooked by country radio, gained rave reviews.”
Woodruff was born and raised in New York City. While attending Hunter College, a public college in New York City, he started songwriting. In a 2016 article by Billy Gilbert in No Depression, Woodruff says, “I remember Elvis Costello put out that record called Almost Blue and it contained songs that were kind of my gateway to George Jones, to Gram Parsons…And those are big openings. I became a researcher of country music. There was so much mystery and wonder that was associated with that music, with the South.” He formed a band called the Fields and enjoyed some local success. Enough that a cassette tape of his work caught Kyle Lehning’s attention at Asylum.
The Dreams & Saturday Nights album operates in a world of missed opportunities dangerously closing in on the lives of its ragged and desperate characters. People marry early and live in trailers with unwanted kids. Woodruff writes, “ I’ve seen a lot of people die and it looks easy/It’s getting easier to hate you all the time/Baby’s crying to herself but no one’s listening/I think our love was poisoned at the well.”
There are stories about losers with guns and liquor store take downs. In “You Can’t Win” he sings, “Prisons are built with the stones of law/Brothels with bricks of religion/I’ve been in both and I know that I Saw/ God answer a sinner’s prayer.”
So many of the songs are brutally straight observations on sex, drugs, and bad intentions. In “This Broken Heart” (absolutely not to be confused with the Mavericks song of the same name from their 1992 Fishell-produced album From Hell to Paradise) has the cutting line, “I’d tell you a secret/But you won’t hope to die.”
Maybe the hardest hitting number of all is “Caroline, ” an aching story of man missing his lover as he faces dealing with his dying mother in hospital. He observes, “Jesus bares the cross for us/But won’t pass the wine/I’m sanctified but so unsatisfied/ Now all the dreams that haunted us seem so far behind/If they don’t come true girl, do they die?”
Woodruff had some serious players on the album backing him up. James Burton played guitar Glen D. Hardin was on the piano. Dun Dugmore and Sam Brossard played acoustic guitar. Milton Sledge played the drums. Michael Joyce was on the bass. Emmylou Harris, Joy Lynn White, and Harry Stinson provided harmony vocals. Fishell played the steel guitar. Sam Bush shows up on the mandolin.
Woodruff said, “But everybody has a calling. My wish is that people find whatever it is that makes their heart sing and that they get on with that. I think that’s what we owe to ourselves and to everybody else.”
Woodruff certainly got on with it with this stellar debut album. He let his heart sing and played the game, but he just couldn’t win with Dreams & Saturday Nights.
I’m so happy you covered this album. I have so many personal connections to it.
I was discovering country music in NYC the way Woodruff had done in his youth, attending Hunter College High School, which was run by his alma mater.
His album was released the same year as Sweetheart’s Dance, and I was so disappointed that the same guy who co-produced the album that won Pam Tillis her Female Vocalist trophy didn’t have the same success with this project.
Thank you for bringing it back again!