Hard Times In The Land Of Plenty

There is a certain kind of record that only a Texas rock station can play without apology, and "Hard Times in the Land of Plenty" is one of them. Omar and the Howlers cut it for Columbia in 1987, the title track of their major-label debut, and it landed at number 19 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart. That is not a blues-club footnote. That is album-rock radio doing what it used to do best, taking a Mississippi-born baritone, a lean power trio, and a song about the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and putting it between the hits. The album that carried it sold more than half a million copies and took the band across North America. On The Zoo, where deep cuts and Texas rock history still get a fair shake, it belongs in heavy rotation. If you want the station that still treats this kind of record like a living thing, start at THE ZOO.

The song itself is a blunt inventory. Some people have, some people have not. Some got a little, and some got a lot. Poor people stand in a welfare line. The taxman wants more money from somebody who is already broke. You rob Peter to pay Paul. You used to stand up straight, and now you have to crawl. Nobody knows you when your money is gone, and the future looks dark when the credit is blown. The chorus does not dress any of that up. Hard times in the land of plenty. Some got it all, and the rest ain't got any. Writers later filed the album with the heartland-rock records of the eighties that looked at a widening economic split in the United States. Omar Kent Dykes did not need a seminar to get there. He came out of McComb, Mississippi, and he wrote the way a working band writes, in short lines a room can shout back.

The track runs about three minutes and fifty-four seconds, written by Dykes, and it opens the album. Columbia issued it as a single in several countries, including promo 12-inch and 7-inch pressings, and the song turned up in the 1987 film Like Father Like Son. That is the sort of placement that used to move a regional act onto national rock playlists. AllMusic later called the album a rough-and-tumble collection driven as much by the songwriting as by the band's edge, and noted that trimming the group to a trio for the major-label debut made them leaner and meaner rather than smaller. Dykes preferred power chords to the one-note guitar heroics that were everywhere in blues-rock at the time. The vocal model was Howlin' Wolf. You can hear both choices in the title track: a riff that hits like a fist, and a voice that does not ask permission.

The sessions were recorded digitally at the Fire Station Studios in San Marcos, Texas, mixed at the Fire Station and at Austin's Riverside Sound, and finished in post-production at Riverside. Richard Mullen produced and engineered. Mullen was already the Texas studio hand behind key Stevie Ray Vaughan records, so the Columbia album arrived with a sound Austin rock fans already trusted. The core band on the record was Dykes on vocals and guitar, Bruce Jones on bass, and Gene Brandon on drums. Reese Wynans, the keyboard player from Double Trouble, played organ, and Neil Pederson added synthesizer. Herschel Cunningham was executive producer. Art direction came from Dick Reeves. One credit on the sleeve is pure radio: "Ears," Redbeard. For anyone who grew up on Dallas-Fort Worth album rock, that name is a signal. A station legend was in the room when this record was being judged.

Omar Kent Dykes was born Darryl Kent Dykes in McComb, Mississippi, on January 24, 1950. McComb is also Bo Diddley's hometown, and Dykes has never been shy about that lineage. His parents, Henry and Chrystine Dykes, backed the idea of music early. He started on guitar at twelve, hanging around edge-of-town juke joints, and he led his first band at thirteen, with the next youngest player somewhere around fifty. By his early twenties he had landed with a wild party band in Hattiesburg called the Howlers. They played fraternity gigs, R&B, rock and roll, the occasional polka and western swing. Two saxophone players wore Henry Kissinger masks and got billed as the Kissinger Brothers. Other nights the sax section showed up as Dolly Parton or Cher, with cardboard record-store cutouts for skits. The other Howlers started calling him Omar Overtone, because he would let the guitar feed back and drop to the floor to spin on his back. Kent and the Howlers did not have the same ring. Omar and the Howlers stuck.

The original Howlers formed in Hattiesburg in 1973. In 1976 Dykes moved the name to Austin, which was then filling up with the players who would define Texas rock: Stevie Ray Vaughan was still with Paul Ray and the Cobras, Eric Johnson was coming up, and rooms like the Soap Creek Saloon, the Broken Spoke, the Armadillo World Headquarters, and Antone's were open to a band that did not fit a format. A lot of the Mississippi and Arkansas players decided full-time music was not the life they wanted and went home. Dykes kept the name. The first album, Big Leg Beat, arrived in 1980 on Amazing. I Told You So followed in 1984 on Austin Records and included an earlier pass at "Border Girl." The band picked up consecutive Austin band-of-the-year honors around 1985 and 1986. Columbia came calling, and Hard Times in the Land of Plenty was the payoff.

The rest of that album shows how wide the net was. "Dancing in the Canebrake," "Border Girl," "Mississippi Hoo Doo Man," "Don't Rock Me the Wrong Way," "Same Old Grind," "Don't You Know," "You Ain't Foolin' Nobody," "Shadow Man," and "Lee Anne" fill out a set that runs a little over thirty-seven minutes. Catalog numbers collectors still chase include Columbia FC 40815 on vinyl and CK 40815 on CD, with European pressings on CBS. The band added a keyboard player before the tour. The follow-up, Wall of Pride, came in 1988 and gave them another Mainstream Rock entry with a cover of "Rattlesnake Shake" at number 36. Then Sony bought the company and the band was dropped. The Columbia chapter was short. The career was not.

After the major-label run, Dykes and the Howlers kept recording on Antone's, Bullseye Blues, Watermelon, Black Top, Blind Pig, Provogue, Ruf, and their own Big Guitar Music. Monkeyland, Live at the Paradiso, Blues Bag, Muddy Springs Road, and a long string of later sets kept the boogie and the Wolf-sized voice in circulation, especially on the European festival circuit, where the band often found a bigger room than American radio was offering. Dykes has been credited with touring dozens of states and more than twenty countries, and with something on the order of three dozen albums between the band and his solo work. Longtime partners have included Bruce Jones on bass and Wes Starr on drums. Gene Brandon, the drummer on the Columbia album, died in January 2014. Stephen Bruton, who passed through the circle, died in 2009. The catalog also includes Jimmy Reed tributes, Bo Diddley covers, and a 2023 set, What's Buggin' You?, with ten originals and a take on Diddley's "Crackin' Up."

Honors followed the work rather than the chart peak. Dykes has been cited for a Netherlands Edison Award, a Mississippi Blues Trail marker in McComb, a lifetime achievement honor from Austin music people, recognition from the city of McComb, a Bluebird Reviews lifetime career award, and induction into the Texas Music Hall of Fame. In 2017 a skin illness wasted the flesh of his arms and took public performance off the table for a long stretch. In 2020 he published a memoir, Omar Dykes: The Life and Times of a Poor and Almost Famous Bluesman, along with song books that collect the recorded and unrecorded work. The official home for all of that remains omarandthehowlers.com. A long-running fan gathering lives in the public Facebook group Omar and the Howlers. No stable official Instagram or X page turned up that is worth sending you to, so those are left off rather than guessed at. For writing that has treated the catalog with real care, Bluebird Reviews is a standing fan and critic stop, and the listener-built pages at Last.fm still collect the discography the way radio used to, one record at a time.

"Hard Times in the Land of Plenty" did not need a second life to matter. It already had the chart, the film, the half-million seller, the Austin studio trail, and a Dallas radio ear on the credits. What it still has is the riff and the complaint. Plenty is not the same thing as enough, and a rock station that remembers where this music came from does not need a focus group to know the difference. That is the record. That is the band. That is the reason it is on The Zoo.