It does'nt get any better than this folks. Each one of these guys is a tour de force on their own. Together they are awesome. If you you like Texas music.....this is the mainline. Stephen Bruton in the lineup should be all you need to see to buy this disk. His new solo CD will stop a Bull at 30 paces!!!!

Who the Hell are these people and what in the Hell gives them the right to write such a Ridiculously long review!!! You have got to be kidding me w/ this crap!!!

August 14 It’s hard to imagine a livelier live set than The Resentments’ Sunday Night Line-up. Jon Dee Graham (a personal fave), Stephen Bruton, Scrappy Jud Newcomb, Bruce Hughes and the late “Mambo” John Treanor have been in residency at Austin’s Saxon Pub for ages and this is their first album. Bruton (a fine solo artist and superb producer) gets things going like gangbusters with his Dylan-esque and irresistible “That’s Love.” It cracked me up with lines like this: “Ain’t nothing finer/when your gal’s not a dish, she’s a whole set of china.” This been there-sung that song gives that Bonnie Raitt hit “Thing Called Love” a run for its money. When The Resentments are playing, resentment is the last thing you’ll be feeling.

Right away I know I’m in for trouble if I call the Resentments the best bar band in America. Somebody’s liable to say they aren’t even the best bar band in Texas, which is where they’re from, and how do I know that’s not true? I haven’t heard every bar band in Texas, which automatically cancels any chance I might have to claim I’ve heard every bar band in America. To tell the truth, I don’t go to bars all that much anymore. SO THERE WAS no reason for the Resentments to have popped up on my musical radar screen until I stumbled upon them in Austin a year ago. I was at the Saxon Pub to hear James McMurtry, whose alt-country songwriting bears the mark of a true craftsman and whose face clouds up at the mention that his father, Larry, wrote “Lonesome Dove.” But McMurtry’s prickly stage presence sent me back to doing what I usually do in bars: peel the label off the only bottle of beer I bought all night. The more I peeled, the more I wished the Resentments were still playing. They’d been McMurtry’s warm-up act, doing what they do every Sunday they’re in town, weaving songs by Chuck Berry, Hank Snow and W.C. Handy in among their own compositions and wry commentary on whatever popped into their minds. It was clear these five guys really liked each other, and the musical conversations they were having, and the idea of letting a packed house in on their fun. To me, a stranger in a strange land every time I set foot in a bar these days, they seemed to have hit the bar-band trifecta. ROLL WITH IT. If you don’t want to take my word but you can’t get to Austin to do your own research, maybe you can track down the CD the Resentments just released, “Sunday Night Line-Up.” It was recorded at the Saxon, naturally, and it features the band’s founding fathers — Stephen Bruton on guitar and mandolin, Jon Dee Graham and Scrappy Jud Newcomb on guitar, Bruce Hughes on bass and the late Mambo John Treanor on drums. What their album delivers is, to borrow a phrase from Bruton, “that good Resentments lost-in-the-house-of-gravity feel.” No need to puzzle over the word choice. Just roll with it. Laugh and think about all the other good times you’ve had when a bar band was trying to play louder than the case of empties that just crashed to the floor and the customers who waited until the first note to start yakking. In the more-than-one-brew phase of my life, it seemed like I couldn’t step out the door without hearing Buddy Guy or Koko Taylor or somebody else’s great band turning the Chicago night blue. I’m not sure I’d admit ever having set foot in the Playboy Club in St. Petersburg, Fla., if I hadn’t seen George Thorogood show up and jam with the house band. And I was in New Orleans when Tipitina’s reopened in time for the 1986 Super Bowl and Jessie Hill got up and sang “Ooo Poo Pah Do,” thereby providing all the spiritual connective tissue I needed to be one with the Meters, the Neville Brothers and the sainted Professor Longhair. LIVING WITH INDIGNITIES I began what turned into a 10-year hiatus from bars soon afterward not because I needed to dry out, but because I’d started swimming in uncharted waters professionally and I didn’t want to drown if I could help it. I still knew how a bar band should sound, though. Keith Richards put one together for a live 1991 CD and called it the X-Pensive Winos, which, for my money, ranks right up there with the Resentments when you’re talking about great band names. But the Winos played the Hollywood Palladium, and I’ve always been more intrigued by holes in the wall with shrieking sound systems and backed-up toilets and, as Greg Brown, the amiably gnarly folk singer, says, “don’t even try dancing, your feet would just stick.” Young or old, big-name or not, bar bands learn to live with the indignities. Some — the bad ones, and they are legion — seem to deserve them. But even the bands that are good enough to cash in on their dreams of a recording contract soon realize that the bar gigs haven’t stopped. They will still find places like the late, lamented Jack’s Sugar Shack, at Hollywood and Vine, where I saw Robert Earl Keen, Kelly Willis and Billy Joe Shaver lead their bands through the same front door the paying customers used and head straight to the stage. So it goes when a joint doesn’t have a dressing room. WORKING-CLASS RAGE, TEXAS LEGENDS Maybe it was the kind of thing that musicians who play bars realize comes with the turf. Maybe some of them even think it keeps their noses stuck in the reality that fuels their music. That’s how the Hangdogs strike me, anyway, though I’ve never made it to Manhattan’s Rodeo Bar to see them. But I have checked out their Web site, which bills them as “New York’s favorite cadre of lovable losers and the official band of the Booze Council.” No thin skins here. No limp-wristed music, either. I’ve listened to the Hangdogs’ album, “Beware of Dog,” and they can play sad or funny, but best of all, they can play with a sense of the working-class rage our CEO culture needs as badly as a steam cleaning. But until I catch the Dogs in person, I can’t put them on the same pedestal as the Resentments, who salt the popcorn the way a bar band should. Though credentials are hardly mandatory in the world of cover charges and Led Zeppelin requests, the Resentments come with all kinds of them. Steve Bruton and Jon Dee Graham have solo albums of their own, and Bruton has served honorably in bands backing Kris Kristofferson, Bonnie Raitt and a whole South by Southwest Conference’s worth of Texas legends. Graham made his bones as one of the True Believers, and Jud Newcomb — Scrappy, if you will — did likewise with Loose Diamonds before Toni Price, one of those treasures Austin keeps for itself, hired him for her band. On his night off, he becomes a Resentment. And the Resentments do what they’ve always done, playing for fun and their love of rock, blues and country. MAMBO’S BEAT Since cancer killed Mambo John Treanor last year, their music has served a second purpose as an ongoing tribute to what Graham calls the drummer’s “sweet and freaky memory.” Mambo gets a “guardian angel” credit on “Sunday Night Line-Up,” and even though he was failing badly when the album was recorded, his beat is the backbone of every song, from Bruton’s “That’s Love” to Scrappy’s “Been So Wicked” to Graham’s “Big Sweet Life.” When the Resentments took a rare road trip to Los Angeles in March, it was with Mambo in mind and without a drummer to replace him, or a bass player, either. They played McCabe’s Guitar Shop, which doesn’t serve anything harder than coffee and cider. I’m not sure anybody noticed the lack of alcohol. Scrappy did Chuck Berry’s “Bye-Bye Johnny,” Graham did Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “Takin’ Care of Business” (honest), and Bonnie Raitt showed up to sing harmony for old friend Bruton. Everything was loud and loosey-goosey, just the way you want it from a band whose motto is “No gig too small, no fee too large.” And if there wasn’t room to get up and dance, if you couldn’t just kick the chairs out of the way and shake a tail feather, you danced in your head. Lost in the house of gravity. John Schulian is a TV writer-producer in Los Angeles. He writes the weekly column “Against the grain” for MSNBC’s Living section.

The Saxon Pub's showcase of the Resentments has become a Sunday event. The Resentments are true showmen who can lay down one-liners as effortlessly as power chords. The only thing to resent about this act is that they haven't cut an album, yet.