SXSW Review: Dirty Country

I'm not surprised to learn that Dirty Country won the SXSW audience award in the "24 Beats Per Second" category. I have rarely heard people laugh so much at a documentary -- and not just giggles but full-blown belly laughs. Dirty Country explores a musical genre that I hardly knew existed: songs that contain lyrics that the FCC would never allow to be broadcast due to their sexually explicit nature. While the film focuses on one country-music artist who delights in dirty lyrics, we also are exposed to dirty cabaret, rap, indie rock and blues music. This is not a movie for children or the easily offended.Larry Pierce is the primary focus of Dirty Country. You probably haven't heard of him, unless you live in his hometown of Middletown, Indiana, or you frequent truck stops where his albums can be purchased. He's released more than a dozen albums of songs with titles like "She Makes My Peter Stand Up" (written for his wife) and "I Like to F**k." A couple of these songs made my jaw hit the floor -- the lyrics must be heard to be believed. And yet at the beginning of this movie, Pierce leads a very unassuming life in the Midwest, working for a factory until he's forced into early retirement at age 53. He didn't perform in public, since small-town Indiana had no appropriate venues for his music. He set up a small recording studio in his garage, and every so often he'd record a dozen songs and send them to a small record company that released them as cassettes, to be sold primarily in truck stops. Apparently the truckers enjoy a little humor with their music, which Pierce's songs provide in abundance.

However, a rock band called -itis had heard of Pierce; they found one of his albums and immediately added some of the songs to their repertoire. -itis is another band that plays a lot of sexually explicit music, and also incorporates plenty of naughty props into their live performances. (I think some of that stuff may be illegal in Texas, at least in quantity.) The band decides to track down Pierce and eventually meet him in person, which leads to all sorts of interesting results. I have to wonder how much of the musicians finally meeting each other might have been facilitated by the filmmakers, but that I'm cynical that way, and it didn't affect my opinion of the film.

Dirty Country alternates between the story of Larry Pierce and some smaller profiles of other musicians who specialize in filthy songs: pianist John "Dr. Dirty" Valby, the longtime R&B band Doug Clark's Hot Nuts and Blowfly, whom the documentary argues could have been one of the first dirty rappers. Their songs range from being merely suggestive, like the classic "Hot Nuts" song (it's about peanuts, right? sure) to lyrics that would make Quentin Tarantino blush. We also hear from a number of scholars and collectors of raunchy music, as they give us some background and context into the types of songs that have historically been considered too objectionable for mainstream society.

The movie isn't without its flaws: for one thing, no dates/years are ever given, and I had trouble trying to figure out the chronology of the film. (This happened several times during SXSW doc watching: filmmakers, please insert some dates in your docs.) A shotgun mic appears in the frame more than once -- well, I assume it was a mic; considering the props used by some of these bands, it could have been something else. And while it looks like the kind of documentary you might catch on PBS one night, there is no way in the world that public television could ever broadcast a documentary with so many four-letter words. It would be one big digital blur. I hope that Dirty Country doesn't suffer the fate of Pierce's albums in being limited to distribution at truck stops. This is far too funny a movie not to share. (I'd love to watch it with my dad.) Even if you're not a country-music fan, Dirty Country is a hoot.