Tyler Mahan Coe
“The reaction has been so positive that it’s almost like an episode of The Twilight Zone.”
Tyler Mahan Coe, host of breakout podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones: The History of Country Music, has just wrapped his first season, and the project has crossed the threshold from passion project to cult hit. His Nashville-created word-of-mouth sensation has garnered enough mainstream attention to become one of U.K. newspaper The Guardian’s podcasts of the week.
“I’m just like, ‘OK, when is someone going to step on my eyeglasses and I’m not going to be able to read books?’ ” says Coe, referencing what is possibly the best Twilight Zone episode.
And this is a somewhat legitimate fear — if Coe couldn’t read books, this podcast would be screwed. While Coe could probably rely on a lifetime of overheard stories — the son of outlaw singer David Allan Coe, Tyler has been neck-deep in country music since before he could walk — it’s Coe’s unflinching love for research that makes Cocaine & Rhinestones a binge-worthy listen.
Coe is a glutton for autobiographical punishment, diving headlong into long-lost tomes that would make your average fact-checker’s wig explode. He’s got a knack for sorting out facts from self-aggrandizing fiction, a keen ability to parse the personality from the pageantry and the gossip from the good stuff. Coe is essentially an art historian with a true-crime writer’s eye for grift.
Over the 14 episodes of Season 1, it becomes clear that Cocaine & Rhinestones is closer in spirit to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States than Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. While Coe is clearly having fun with all the cheatin’ and a-fightin’ and a-fussin’ and occasional murderin’ throughout the history of country music, the way he finds humanity beneath the hella scandalous headlines is the podcast’s real appeal.
Let’s face it: Reclaiming a sense of humanity from the celebrity-industrial complex is a radical act in 2018. Country music in the 21st century exists in a very safe, staid, suburban bubble without a real sense of history, where PR pros and corporate playlists have sanded down all the rough edges. Cocaine & Rhinestones takes aim at the genre’s homogenous culture and its mythmaking.
“Honestly, the moment that I had the idea, that I knew this [type of podcast] didn’t exist, was the moment that I committed to doing it,” Coe says. “It was a pretty terrifying moment.
“You know exactly how fevered fans can be,” he continues. “Express opinion, let alone someone attempting to set the record straight on things that have been wildly misunderstood for decades, it’s just painting a giant bullseye on your chest and walking outside and making as much noise as possible. Then add the fact that we’re talking about country music to the equation, and it amplifies everything times five. So, yeah, pretty intimidating.”
Unsurprisingly, not all of the reactions have been positive. Apparently, Merle Haggard fans are a bit defensive about their hero’s early affection for Marty Robbins. It’s not entirely clear why that’s so controversial — Merle sounded just like Marty on those early records, which is nothing less than awesome. But it’s the internet, and irrational seething is the raison d’être. And Coe — who’s also the proprietor of novelty-shopping site DrunkMall.com and co-host of the hilariously harsh Your Favorite Band Sucks podcast — knows this.
“The first thing I did was I looked for [a country history podcast],” says Coe. “I wanted to listen to it, and it didn’t exist. Then I reached the conclusion that, who would do this, you know? You’ve got to have someone with a general overview of the genre and the higher history of the genre, and also someone who just likes to listen to some country music every now and then. You gotta have someone who is an independent scholar of the history and the context, able to put everything together.
“Pretty much anyone that you are gonna find is 60 years old,” he continues, “and they’re not going to know how to make a podcast, they don’t know what a podcast is. And they aren’t going to be interested in making one.”
The effort is immense. By Coe’s estimation, each episode takes about 100 hours to assemble, from writing to recording, to editing and distribution. That’s nearly three weeks of workdays, spent in some of the creepiest, crawliest corners of country music’s consciousness. That’s a lot of time to spend inside the minds of some very conflicted characters.
It can be, at times, an overwhelming listen. When Coe jokes that he “must get paid by the fact” on the Season 1 Q&A episode, he’s really only hinting at the information density of the prior episodes. Tightly scripted and rich with intertextual connections, Cocaine & Rhinestones’ momentum comes from Coe’s need to stockpile context to make points about grand cultural theories or the importance of a particular pedal steel solo.
With his unique understanding of family dynamics and the art-versus-capital struggle in 20th-century America, Coe manages to find the larger meaning in otherwise insane situations. He clearly enjoys negotiating conflicting stories, fact-checking and doing all the nerd stuff that history nerds have to do to be taken seriously. (And to avoid getting sued.) Cocaine & Rhinestones would pass muster as a master’s thesis, but it works best as a podcast.
An entirely DIY endeavour, Coe has created a show with top-flight production value without the benefit of a production team or any institutional support to speak of. To put this in perspective, Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast, a pioneer in the medium, with millions of downloads per episode, has a staff of three. Breakout true-crime podcast Serial has a staff of 12. Most podcasts have an engineer, someone to at least press record on the thing. But Coe’s unique voice and singular vision wouldn’t come through as clearly if he did it any other way.
“I felt like I was in a pretty unique position that made me obligated, in a way, to do this. Or to at least try to do it.”
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