When
Marty Stuart cut
This One's Gonna Hurt You in 1991 with producers
Richard Bennett and
Tony Brown, he opened it with a modern country equivalent of what is now de rigueur in the hip-hop community: a skit that became a song. The disembodied voice of
Hank Williams comes out of the ether before
Stuart's does; a trippy synthesizer plays in the foreground; and clapping, cheering audiences are heard between the two. But this isn't the skit; it's the track. "Me & Hank & Jumpin' Jack Flash" offers a weird, acid cowboy tale of the two meeting in outer space and having a conversation about everything from the lineage of country to rock & roll --
Marty happens to dig both and was sure
Hank would've dug
the Rolling Stones as well. It's a bizarre way to open a contemporary country record, but given
Stuart's maverick nature, it's utterly understandable and even charming the first three or four times you hear it. After that it's best to start on track two, "High on a Mountain Top," a tough, rockin', high lonesome honky tonk tune with blazing guitars, whining fiddles (courtesy of
Stuart Duncan), and a chorus of backing vocalists including
Ashley Cleveland and
Pam Tillis. The set gets even better from here, as evidenced by the title track, a wonderful midtempo ballad done in duet with
Travis Tritt, and by
Jimmie Skinner's "Doin' My Time," with a guest appearance by then father-in-law
Johnny Cash. The rest walks from the very traditional reading of Cowboy Jack Clement's beer weeper "Just Between You and Me" to rockabilly on "Down Home" and jangling Rickenbacker country-pop on "Hey Baby" (both written by
Paul Kennerley), another straight rocking tribute to
Williams on a cover of
Allen Shamblin's "The King of Dixie," and
Stuart's own spunky, hard country "Honky Tonk Crowd," which closes the set. Of his early records,
This One's Gonna Hurt You is truly inspired and hungry; it's the very best from the period. Even in the 21st century, it endures as a watermark for the music at the time and as one of
Stuart's finest moments in a career full of great ones. ~ Thom Jurek