DON NIX

“I’ll Fly Away” & “He Never Lived a Day Without Jesus”

(Memphis/Muscle Shoals 1971)

Know this: there’s always another amazing record you don’t know about yet. No matter how much music you hear in your life, your next trip to the store might be the time when you find the greatest record you never heard of before.

I bought Don Nix’s In God We Trust last year in NYC because:

1. It was a rock record by Don Nix from the Mar-Keys and the Stax house band.
2. They made it at Muscle Shoals Sound.
3. Furry Lewis plays slide guitar on it.
4. Barry Beckett plays keyboards.
5. Eddie Hinton plays guitar.
6. David Hood (Patterson from Drive-By Truckers’ dad) plays bass.
7. Someone was helpful enough to print all those credits on the back cover.
8. The LP is on Denny Cordell & Leon Russell’s Shelter Records & has the original Shelter logo that rips off the Superman “S” right there on the front.
9. Don looks both surly and lit in the cover photo.

What I got was a genuine white-boy soul hippie Jesus record, the kind where true religious ecstasy is fueled by a fifth of Jim Beam and a little weed.

“I’ll Fly Away” features amazing electric sitar and piano parts, both so good that you can almost forgive Don for trying to pass off Alfred Brumley’s song as “Trad.” so he could take all the publishing money for his arrangement.

“He Never Lived a Day Without Jesus” sounds like a eulogy for a brother who died in Vietnam. Embracing the 60s counterculture was a lot more complicated in the South because almost everyone was rebelling against God and the military instead of against a middle-class lifestyle that few of them had anyway. I’m sure all the guys playing on this record (except maybe Furry) didn’t have college deferments from the draft and were disappointing their mothers as well.

In God We Trust is a completely sincere gospel record made by a bunch of guys who were definitely living the hedonist rock & roll life. There was likely no place for it on FM radio and, while Don went on to a success as both a producer and songwriter, he never made another record for Shelter.

My copy of this record is worn, so the transfer isn’t pristine. Then again, I’ve never seen another copy of the record and I’m grateful to have it.

• Download “I’ll Fly Away”
• Download “He Never Lived a Day Without Jesus”

(In God We Trust — Shelter Records SHE 8902)

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 7:58 pm and is filed under Memphis, Sacred, Rock, 70s. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.