Green on Red
No Free Lunch

Right band at the wrong time. The Green On Red were too retro and oriented towards roots revival for the mid-80s and too early to achieve the success that in the 90s would be reaped by the champions of Alternative Country like Wilco, Uncle Tupelo, and Son Volt.

After delivering a masterful work in 1985 with Gas, Food, Lodging, the following year came the EP No Free Lunch, which tilted the band's balance even more decisively towards Country.

No Free Lunch is the erratic wandering through the desert dust, towards the boundless horizon, between gas stations, motels for a few dollars a night, warm beer, and low-quality whiskey, and the Green On Red don't miss a note, don't make missteps, playing perfectly clear and well-crafted songs, sung with an unusually clear and strong voice by an inspired Dan Stuart. The opening of "Time Ain't Nothing" is as fresh as the desert breeze at dawn. It evokes a time - that of youth - of innocence and optimism that become lost somewhere along the road, as demonstrated by the superb contrast in "Honest Man," where a farmer is crushed by the weight of debts and the unstoppable march of progress. Absolutely impressive are the country/Hillbilly flair of the Title track and the album's masterpieces, namely the reinterpretation of a country standard like "(Gee Ain't It Funny How) Time Slips Away" by Willie Nelson - with an arrangement nestled between Dylan and the Stones - and the epic and painful western ballad "Jimmy Boy," where Chuck Prophet's refined guitar technique perfectly combines with Cacavas's organ and Dan Stuart's angry and desperate voice. In the CD version, there is also an incredible over thirteen-minute long bonus track version of Howling Wolf's classic, "Smokestack Lightning," with Prophet's splendid lead guitar chasing Cacavas's honky-tonk piano until the doorsian organ comes into play, imposing a psychedelic "treatment," as this blues classic had never received before. Unmissable.

No Free Lunch is a record of adamantine beauty that preludes to a further change of direction that will manifest with the subsequent The Killer Inside Me, wherein Stuart will ferry the band towards new territories where the initial sixties psychedelia will be constrained in tight spaces and the narrated stories will become increasingly bitter and cursed. But this further change imposed by the Stuart-Prophet leadership will induce Cacavas, Waterson, and drummer McNicol to mutiny and abandon the ship, by then set for ports too far from where they had set sail.

The new Green On Red, reduced to the sole bandits Stuart and Prophet, fascinated by the myth of escape like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, will craft a handful of excellent albums and some poignant twilight ballads that smell of desert, whiskey, and gunpowder and that speak to us of a marginal America made, to paraphrase Joe Lansdale, of sunsets and dust.