Nick Lowe SXSW Interview, Pt. V (March 21, 1998)

I wanted to ask you about the album Nick Lowe and His Cowboy Outfit. 

Oh, yeah. I love that album. Yeah, that wasn't a bad one. What was on that? 

It had "Half a Boy and Half a Man." 

Yeah. 

"Maureen." 

Oh, yeah. 

And a quite incongruous song--but one of my favorites nevertheless--"L.A.F.S."

Oh, yeah (laughs). 

That album got me back into you. Then, I was living in Seattle in '85, where KJET-AM had your redone "I Knew the Bride" in heavy rotation, further reigniting my interest in your music, which I'd lost track of from about 1980 to 1984. Did you ever do a video for that? 

Yeah, we did. We did do a video for it, actually, and quite a sort of fancy video--in England, yeah. I never saw it. I think it was sort of in between two stools then because--it was too sort of--it was too old fashioned for MTV, and I'm not sure whether VH-1 had started then. So it never really got much play as I remember. It was quite a good video, quite a good one. 

Back to "All Men Are Liars," I've often wondered what you think now about the Rick Astley verse. 

I've felt very sorry about that. I really do. I really do regret saying that. At the time, I thought that [the Rick Astley song] was so awful. I just hated the sentiment of the thing. I know it's--I mean, maybe I was a little oversensitive, because you hear awful music all the time--"I'm never going to do anything horrible to you." I thought, "What? Can anybody sawllow this, that I'm never gonna do anything--?" Sorry, that was a lie. So, then, I thought, because it was a big hit at the time and it seemed as if Rick was on his way--he was gonna be churning this stuff out. But I regret it because I've since found out that, one, he's a very nice man--I've never met him, but they tell me he's an extremely nice man--and the other thing is that he's down on his luck a bit now. So I do feel rather bad about it because at the time I wrote it, he was huge and about to do more of it, so I thought he was a legitimate target. 

Do you regret that in 1998 people may not follow the reference? 

Oh, no. No, I'm kind of glad that they won't follow the reference actually. And that does happen more and more. I blithely make references about bands and artists from my generations to--I mean, obviously, you're younger than I am, but to some journalists I make these remarks, and I see their faces go creepy blank. You realize, "You've gotta get your references a little more up to date, my friend!" That's the way it goes. 

What did you think of the John Hiatt song on Little Village, "Don't Think About Her When You're Trying to Drive"? 

Oh, I thought that was a really good one. I like it quite a bit. Yeah, that's a really good one. And it was a funny thing, that, because--that Little Village thing--because when we did John Hiatt's record, obviously it was John Hiatt's record. He was in charge, he had the songs, and we were there to back him up. When you take away the front person and you have four people in there trying to create something, people are very reluctant to step forward somehow. If it's somebody's actual record, then obviously they are questioned and asked, "How do you want this? How do we play this?" You know. But when it's four individuals, all rather edgy about it, you come up with a kind of compromise. So John got, I think rather unfairly, got castigated for that thing because he sang so many of the tunes on it that people thought he was stepping forward and hogging the limelight, whereas in actual fact he was doing us all a favor by coming forward and saying, "Well, I'll do it. I'll jump in there." So it was unfair, that, I think. 

You mentioned the way that old pop songs, like Cole Porter's, contained many subtle and sophisticated references. I wondered if when you wrote "Cruel to Be Kind" you were conscious of the phrase's Shakespearean roots. 

No, I didn't know that it was a Shakespearean quote until people started saying to me, "Oh, what a brilliant thing you made up! 'You've gotta be cruel to be kind'!" And I started to say that it's a very well-known expression. Where I come from, people say it all the time, "You've gotta be cruel to be kind." 

You didn't know it originated in Shakespeare? 

I didn't know it was a Shakespearean quote. It was then that somebody said, "Well, it's actually from--" Whatever it is. 

Hamlet. 

Is it from Hamlet? 

"I must be cruel only to be kind." 

Brilliant. That sounds so much better though, doesn't it" (laughs)?

Nick Lowe SXSW Interview, Pt. IV (March 21, 1998)

Loudon Wainwright III: Whatever Floats Your Boat

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer, May 1998)

On the cover of his new album Little Ship (Virgin/Charisma), Loudon Wainwright III sits in an inflatable lifeboat, paddling with a ukulele to get out of the way of a fast-approaching ocean liner that bears a striking resemblance to a certain big ship that's been all the rage at the movie theaters and record shops lately.  

In a sense, the image captures Wainwright's commercial dilemma perfectly: For twenty-eight years now, he has watched his carefully crafted singer-songwriterly albums get overrun by "bigger" ones.  Wainwright says he had no conscious premonition of how huge Titanic was going to be when he began designing Little Ship's cover with his art director Hugh Brown (who, coincidentally, won a "Best Recording Package" Grammy for his work on Titanic: Music As Heard On The Fateful Voyage). "I must've known it subconsciously," he jokes dryly.  "I'm sure I'm going to sell a lot of CDs with that alone."

At fifty-one, the legendarily sardonic Wainwright has grown accustomed to referring to his album sales in sarcastic tones.  Despite the fact that he's released sixteen albums, almost all of them on major labels, and even had a Top 40 hit (the roadkill classic "Dead Skunk," which peaked at number sixteen on Billboard's chart in 1973), he's never had a multi-platinum album and doesn't expect a box set anytime soon.

"There's been talk of one," he admits, "but it hasn't happened.  No one's gotten in gear on it, least of all myself."  Ferreting through his several hundred songs in search of highlights, he says, "sounds like a daunting task. I 'd leave that up to somebody else.  Once I make these things, I really don't like to listen to them that much."

He does, however, like to perform them.  That's why, despite the high quality of his studio recordings, it's his live albums--1980's A Live One (Rounder), '93's Career Moves (Virgin), side two of '75's Unrequited (Columbia)--that capture his James-Taylor-on-caffeine act at its most enthusiastic.  His current tour also captures him at his most vulnerable: This time he's facing his audience armed with nothing but his guitar, banjo, and ukulele.  As one might expect, the set list tends toward flexibility.

"That can vary from night to night," he says.  "I'm certainly doing quite a few songs from Little Ship, but the other night I sang one from Grown Man ['95] and probably three from History ['92].  And the night before that I sang "Unrequited to the Nth Degree" from an album I did in 1975 [Unrequited].  I'm also playing a lot of brand new songs that aren't on any album."

He even takes requests--sometimes.  "I will if I'm in the mood, but moods are fleeting.  If somebody yells something and I think, 'That'll be fun to play,' I'll play it.  On the other hand, if somebody yells something and my little voice says, 'I don't want to do that,' then I usually listen to my little voice."  And what do people shout for the most? "People like 'The Acid Song,'" he says.  "I get a lot of requests for that."

"The Acid Song," like many of Wainwright's songs, is a comedy number.  However, unlike the tunes of singing humorists (Tom Lehrer, Mark Russell) and comedians-turned-hitmakers (Steve "King Tut" Martin, Julie "Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun" Brown), Wainwright's funny songs are as musically sharp as they are funny.

No song exemplifies Wainwright's funny side better than Grown Man's "I.W.I.W.A.L."-- better known as "I Wish I Was a Lesbian."  Chosen by Spin as the funniest song of 1996, it featured a frenetic Wainwright spouting such quatrains as "I wish I was a lesbian / I'd like to be a dyke / I could hang with k.d. lang / Mel Gibson take a hike" and "I wish I was a lesbian / That's why this song is sung / It shouldn't matter how someone is hung."

"That song probably got more play than any other song on Grown Man," he laughs.  "My object when I wrote it was to make people laugh, which I try to do from time to time.  We tried to make it funny on the record, and some people thought it was.  Other people didn't, I guess, but there's a radio station in Baltimore that played it everyday."

Little Ship also has its share of yoks.  On "Breakfast in Bed," Wainwright serves up one food-sex double entendre after another, and in "I Can't Stand Myself," he salivates over his next Miss Wrong: "There must be some kind of waitress / I could lure under my mattress ... How's about a rich heiress / Or a nice massage therapist?"

The comic numbers, though, tell only half the story.  The other half is told by the tender, ironic, sad, and funny family and broken-family songs that Wainwright has been perfecting ever since his classic odes to childbirth ("Dilated to Meet You," 1973) and breastfeeding ("Rufus Is a Tit Man," 1975).  On Little Ship, the songs "Four Mirrors," "What Are Families For?," and "Bein' a Dad" join the family-song canon.

According to Wainwright, there's no big secret to getting the emotional extremes of his music to balance.  "What I do is write a batch of songs--serious ones, comedy ones, love songs, children's songs, family songs--and I just mix and match and try to create a theme or a mood out of the thirteen or fifteen that I choose.  We cut those, and then we sequence the record so that there's a kind of an audio arc in terms of listening.  It isn't like 'Oh, this album needs a serious song--I'd better come up with something.'  We just take what we cut and shape it."

As one of a handful of singer-songwriters to have sustained a career for nearly thirty years, Wainwright is clearly doing something right.  And in another fourteen years, he can add senior-citizenship to his great storehouse of topics.

Syl Johnson: Burning Bridges (1998)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

Syl Johnson, the sixty-two-year-old soul man most famous for R&B hits like "Different Strokes," "Is It Because I'm Black," and "Take Me to the River," does not--repeat, does not--want you to buy his new album, Bridge to a Legacy (Antone's).

It seems that after Johnson, a Chicago resident since 1952, finished recording and producing the album at the Chicago Recording Company in mid-'97, the higher-ups at Antone's Records thought that three of the tracks could use more commercial oomph. So they arranged for the producer David Z to remix them in Nashville. After Z'd finished, the Antone's folks inserted his mixes into the final product, confident they'd improved on the Johnson-produced originals.

"At first I thought it was a good idea," Johnson admits, "because David Z was going to mix the single. But he didn't even put his name on the cover, and he messed up the tracks besides."

The single to which Johnson refers is "I Been Missin' U," his duet with the teen blues phenomenon Jonny Lang. So far, neither it nor the other two Z-produced tracks have crossed over to pop radio, and Syl Johnson wouldn't like them even if they had. "On 'I Been Missin' U,' [David Z] left the guitar player out," says Johnson, referring to the rhythm guitarist Corey Giles. "He's a baaad guitar player! He's twenty-two, he's a white boy--he's good man!--and they took him out. I haven't felt good since."

Johnson doesn't feel good about the Z's mix of "Unconditional Love" either. "They used parts of the scratch vocal! And Gene Barge, the saxophone player, was just tuning up! He was just jacking off, getting ready to do his thing. But Dennis [Tousana], the engineer, picked that shit up and put it in the mix. We don't want that in there!"

Then there's the Z's mix of "Half a Love," Johnson's duet with his daughter Syleena. Johnson is willing to concede that the track "turned out pretty good," but there's still the matter of his guitar ("too loud") and the B3 organ ("too low"). "The B3," Johnson grumbles, "That's '60s shit. They don't even know what the fuck that is."

The obvious question is, why did Johnson--who considers Bridge to a Legacy and not his 1994 Delmark album Back in the Game his official comeback album--surrender so much creative control? Furthermore, why did Antone's question the judgment of a man with a proven forty-year track record of success as a writer, performer, and producer?

According to Johnson, the majority of the blame lies with two women: Miki Mulvehill, his manager, and Christie Warren, the head of Antone's Records at the time he was recording Bridge to a Legacy. He cites their relative youth (thirty-four and twenty-eight respectively) and their collective inability to resist industry peer pressure as the main reasons for their refusal to carry out his wishes. "You know what happens? They hang around at the blues fests and all that shit, and critics start asking them, 'Why are you putting Jonny Lang's name so big on the cover?' Fuck the critics, man! They ain't going to buy no records.

"Anyway," he adds, "Even if critics say it sucks, people will say, 'Well, let me hear and see if it sucks.' Any publicity is good publicity."

Johnson had also hoped that the cover would prominently feature the names of both David Z and Jonny Lang. Instead, Z's appears on the inside only (in tiny print), and Lang's, although it appears on the front, is printed in a faint, almost illegible font. As far as Johnson is concerned, the printing gaffes combined with the remixing ones are proof positive that Antone's doesn't know how to sell records.

"You can't see Jonny Lang's name!" Johnson exclaims. "Can you imagine the kind of fans that kid can give me, man? You can not imagine! And they muted his name out. What kind of idiot is that! I said, 'Why'd you mute his name out?' 'Well, we didn't want 'em to think that we were trying to use him to sell the album.' Does that make sense? That's exactly what we were trying to do!"

Despite all the negative vibes surrounding the new album, there is a Sylver lining. First, seven of the album's ten songs have survived in their original versions, including an ace remake of George Jackson's "They Can't See Your Good Side" and a new Johnson original called "Sexy Wayz," which like so many rap songs over the last ten years samples "Different Strokes."

Even better news for Johnson aficionados with international connections is that the copy circulating in Scandinavia features the original Johnson mixes all the way through. Johnson thinks Antone's may eventually issue the original mixes in the United States as well. "They have the real version in Europe and Scandinavia," says Johnson. "That's why it's doing really great there. I've got a lot of fans up there, and they ain't gonna like no bullshit, now."

Johnson's fans don't like "no bullshit" because for almost thirty years he trained them to expect anything but. After spending the late '50s and early '60s touring with Junior Wells and recording singles for the Vee-Jay Records subsidiary Federal, Johnson signed with Twilight--later Twinight--Records and kicked off a string of national R&B hits that in their hard, soulful funkiness rival the classic sides James Brown was waxing at the time.

The comparison with Brown is fitting. Johnson's powerful, brooding "Is It Because I'm Black" came out in 1968, the same year as Brown's "Say It Loud--I'm Black and Proud," bookended by "Dresses Too Short" and its answer record "Let Them Hang High," soulful celebrations of leggy ladies that preceded Brown's "Hot Pants" by several years.

In some ways, Soul Brother Number Two was a role that Johnson seems born to play. As the '60s ended, so did his Twinight contract, leaving him free to sign with Willie Mitchell's Hi Records, where, despite continued R&B success, he spent the '70s in the shadow of Al Green.

Still, Johnson not only accepted his backup role, he relished it. "One time I did almost a hundred days with Al Green," Johnson recalls. "He was drawing big crowds. Oh, my God! He drew people like you wouldn't believe, like blackbirds coming out of the fields. He was making a hundred thousand every night, and I was making two. But I made lots of money with just the two, and I kept saving the two."

By the early '80s, the fruits of Johnson's business savvy had begun to exceed the fruits of his musical skills, so he retired from music and concentrated on his chain of Solomon's Fish restaurants, and for several years his professional decisions were vindicated with financial prosperity.

Then the bottom fell out. His wife sued him for divorce, and his restaurant franchises began to default on their loans. When the legal dust had settled, Johnson was broke. "That knocked me completely out the box," he remembers. "All I had was a bed and a TV."

It was then that the rappers began to go mad for "Different Strokes." "Everybody sampled it," Johnson laughs. "I made all the money back that I'd lost, and then some. It started with the Geto Boys, and the Wu-Tang Clan--God! What a wonderful bunch of people! And Whodini paid me really good too. I got about $40,000 from them."

Johnson cannot say the same for MC Hammer, Big Daddy Kane, Ice Cube, Ice-T, Michel'le, NWA, Sister Souljah, Public Enemy, EPMD and Erick Sermon, and Tone-Loc, each of whom sampled him and each of whom paid him little or nothing. "TLC, and En Vogue, I'm still chasing them," Johnson says.

It was this new wave of attention that re-whetted Johnson's appetite for performing, and despite his disappointment over the American version of Bridge to a Legacy, he intends to make the follow-up albums that his Antone's contract calls for. "I'm just going to try to work with them, man, and see what the fuck I can do with them."

For the first time in his career, with neither James Brown nor Al Green providing any serious competition, the R&B spotlight may finally be Johnson's for the seizing. If the best parts of Bride to a Legacy are any indication, Soul Brother Number Two intends to spend his twilight years moving on up a little higher.

Buster Poindexter: Buster's Spanish Rocket Ship (1998)

(As published in Offbeat ... )

Buster Poindexter
Buster's Spanish Rocket Ship
(Island)

Those who consider David Johansen's Buster poindexter act a novelty might reconsider after getting run over by this piñata-busting party album. "Novelty"? Johansen has now been Poindexter for seven years longer than he was a New York Doll. And "act"? Forget it. He means it, man. Sure, some of the songs sound like production numbers in search of a musical, but what a musical! Outrageous characters, Manhattan reveries, Latino rock-and-roll, sin, salvation, rhythms by the dozen--there's something for everyone. By the time he exits singing "Feel like I could dance forever!" you do too.

Chaka Demus and Pliers: For Every Kinda People (1998)

(As published in Offbeat ... )

Chaka Demus & Pliers
For Every Kinda People
(Island Jamaica)

Demus is a patois-mouthed toaster, Pliers a silken-voiced soul singer, and neither is the main reason for this disc's considerable appeal--that is, unless one or both of them is behind the decision not only to cover good songs previously covered by Robert Palmer ("Every Kinda People," "Man Smart, Woman Smarter") but also to cover them better. The real reasons to listen are Sly and Robbie (who produce and contribute crucial riddims), Robbie Lyn (who contributes crucial keyboards), and "Witness Stand"--a "Red, Red Wine" re-write so ace it can make you forget UB40 and Neil Diamond.

Bill Kirchen: Hot Rod Lincoln--LIVE! (1998)

(As published in Offbeat ... )

Bill Kirchen
Hot Rod Lincoln--LIVE!
(Hightone)

It's hard enough to think up reasons for listening to Commander Cody without having to think up reasons for listening to his ex-sidemen, but Bill Kirchen is not just any ex-sideman. For one thing, he picks songs ("Rockin' over China," "Sometimes I Think") as skillfully as he picks guitar. For another, he writes hot rockabilly boogies of his own ("Too Much Fun," "Swing Fever"). What he does best, though, is show off, especially on the title cut, which here becomes a revelatory History of Rock Guitar in Eight Minutes. Bo Diddley you might expect from a gray-haired roots guy. But the Sex Pistols?

The Vandalias: buzzbomb! (Big Deal, 1998)

(As published on the In Music We Trust website ... )

The Vandalias
buzzbomb! (Big Deal)

If the Vandalias' cartoon-character personas rank them among such enshrinees of the Animated Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame as the Way-Outs, the Archies, and Josie and the Pussycats, their power-bubblegum-poppin' personas rank them among such sugar-rush titans as the Raspberries, early Cheap Trick, and Sweet (they even bid the late Brian Connolly R.I.P. in their liner notes). In other words, the fact that the Vandalia Brothers look like extras from Speed Racer (their debut wasn't called Mach V for nothing) doesn't mean they can't make rockin' like yesterday's heroes sound like the future of rock 'n' roll today. Their "The End of the World" beats R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine"), their "Big Red Catalina" beats Prince's "Little Red Corvette," their "Down" beats the Beatles' "I'm Down," their "No One Told Him" wrestles the Thin Lizzy original to a draw, their "buzzbomb!" beats both the Gap Band's "You Dropped a Bomb on Me" and the Runaways' "Cherry Bomb," and their "Hey Kari G" would beat the Zeros' "Sticky Sweet Girls" if the Zeros' "Sticky Sweet Girls" weren't still the lip-smackingest buzzbomb ever.

Dr. John: Hoodoo You Love (1998)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer....)

....................

Considering rock 'n' roll's dual emphasis on the individual male singer, its roll call of great, instantly identifiable male voices is surprisingly short: Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Al Green, Aaron Neville, Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger, Neil Young, Robert Plant--even allowing for borderline calls like the solo Beatles, the list barely comes to a dozen. All of which puts Mac "Dr. John" Rebennack, the possessor of a great, instantly identifiable rock 'n' roll voice if ever there was one, in some very select company.

Those who doubt Rebennack's qualifications need only listen to Anutha Zone, his new album for Virgin Records and the twenty-fourth official solo release (give or take a live album or compilation or two) of his long and varied career. His most commercial offering in more than a decade, Anutha Zone finds him not only giving slyly sinister voice to his trademark voodoo-inflected musings but also doing so amid some uncharacteristically hip accompaniment.

On paper, with two tracks apiece featuring the British tripsters Spiritualized ("Hello God," "John Gris"), members of Portishead and Primal Scream ("Voices in My Head," "Sweet Home New Orleans"), and Paul Weller, Jools Holland, and other assorted Britrockers ("Party Hellfire," John Martyn's "I Don't Wanna Know About Evil"), the album looks like a desperation move--the Dr. John equivalent of a Frank Sinatra-duets album. On the CD player, however, Anutha Zone cuts a warm, funky groove, the richness of which is, if anything, enhanced by the pop savvy of the Doctor's youthful collaborators.

"I was familiar with Supergrass and Primal Scream because my kids listen to their records," says Rebennack, "and I'd recorded with Jools Holland and some of the other people [he appears on Spiritualized's 1997 album, Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating], but I wasn't familiar with Portishead, and I hadn't heard Ocean Colour Scene or the Beta Band. John Leckie, my producer, said, 'Well, we'll try this, and if it works, cool. If not, we'll just go do a record with your band in the States.'"

They ended up doing both. "We cut half the record at Abbey Road Studios in London. Then I had to come back to do some gigs in the States, and at the end of those, I caught the flu. So instead of going back to London, we cut tracks in New York with my band." The album's transatlantic plot thickened. "John started mixing the stuff we'd cut at Abbey Road in New York. Then, when we went back to gig in Europe, he started mixing the stuff we'd cut in New York at the Townhouse Studio in London. By using real studio tricknology he made it all sound real cohesive."

Rebennack will turn fifty-six, fifty-seven, or fifty-eight this fall (depending on whether one believes his Virgin bio, his autobiography, or The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll respectively--"I'm not too good at names, dates, and places," he chuckles), and he uses words like "tricknology" a lot. His vocabulary, like his hometown of New Orleans, bears the traces of many traditions and subcultures.

Rebennack has traveled down more back roads, dark alleys, and dead ends than most Grammy-winning legends of indeterminate age. These travels were the subject of his 1994 as-told-to autobiography, Under a Hoodoo Moon (St. Martin's). In it, Rebennack shared details about his New Orleans upbringing, his days in the mid-'60's as an El-Lay session musician (On Sonny Bono: "[E]very song he wrote used the same two chords over and over"; on Phil Spector's "Wall Of Sound": "[I]n New Orleans we put out just as much sound with only six guys"), and his nearly life-long heroin habit, which he finally kicked in 1989.

According to Rebennack, he dictated the book to his co-author, Jack Rummel under both financial duress and the influence of "lithium poisoning." "There's a lot of confusement over things I put and didn't put in that book," he explains in typical Dr. John slang. "It was writ in the situate where I was on a drug called lithium that I didn't know I was being poisoned by at the time. If I hadn't been in the jackpot coming out of a rehab owing the IRS a whole bunch of money--I couldn't even pay the band--I probably would've waited a while to write it. But that's how life is. You do what you do when you do it, and it's done and did-with now."

One statement in the book that he still stands by is his contention that he's more of a "shucker" than a singer. "I consider Johnny Adams and Aaron Neville singers. Art Neville's a singer. Chuck Carbo's a singer. Jimmy Scott's a singer. Whatever knowledge I have of singing comes from being a songwriter and showing singers my songs from back in the game." In other words, when he worked as a studio musician, songwriter, and producer. "I wrote a lot of songs, and I could shuck my way through them enough to show somebody where I thought the melody and the groove should go. What gave me the balls to sing was hearing some early Bob Dylan records and working sessions with Sonny and Cher. When I did the first Dr. John record, I was planning to get [the New Orleans singer] Ronnie Barron to be Dr. John, but that didn't work out, so I just got an attitude and did it. I figured it'd be a one-off deal. I didn't have a clue that thirty-some years later I'd still be doing that."

About his piano playing he remains more confident. It's his piano playing, in fact, that lands him more session work than practically any other big-name musician. One recent on-line search of his in-print appearances turned up ninety-eight albums, most of them by other artists. Still, as he nears the completion of his first heroin-free decade in years, it's his own plans that occupy his time. Anutha Zone itself was a Plan B. "A couple of years ago, some people were talking to me about doing a record with Dr. Henry Butler, a great piano player from New Orleans, and a record with Little Jimmy Scott. It didn't work out, but I thought it was one of my better ideas for a production at the time, and I'd still like to do it. Nobody had told me the idea was dumped anyways by the label, but then the people that makes records is usually the last ones to know something."

That's another theme of his book that Rebennack still stands by: the perfidy of the music industry. "Since I've been away from my old lifestyle, everything's been easier because it's more pleasant, but it ain't nothing to do with the business, and it ain't nothing to do with financially. I just live different." He pauses, then adds, "It's like the music is killer, but the business really sucks a big one."

Whether or not the music business really does suck a big one, Rebennack is certainly right about one thing: His current music is killer. Here's hoping that, his restless muse to the contrary, he spends a little more time in Anutha Zone before moving on.

Gillian Welch: Purgatory, Anyone?

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer, 1998)


When Gillian Welch's first album, Revival (Almo Sounds), appeared in 1996 on a label notorious for being home to the overtly sleazy Garbagewoman Shirley Manson, it hardly seemed hell-bent for controversy. What, after all, could be less controversial than a twenty-eight-year-old woman strumming an acoustic guitar and singing plaintive ballads that went "When He calls me / I will be able / To meet my family / At God's table"?

Nevertheless, Welch ended up starting a rather heated debate in the editorial rooms of America's music magazines: Did a young woman who grew up in Hollywood, who didn't start listening to bluegrass until she was in college, and whose parents actually wrote music for The Carol Burnett Show have the right to pass herself off as some latter-day combination of the Stanley Brothers and Emily Dickinson?

Strange as it now seems, some of the sharpest, freshest, most affecting, and least affected music to shuttle down the major-label pipeline in years was actually on the verge of getting lost in an anemically academic debate--a debate, by the way, that was settled over thirty years ago when Hibbing, Minnesota's Robert Zimmerman moved to New York and emerged as Bob Dylan.

The debate eventually subsided, but not before surfacing once more in the August 9, 1998, issue of the New York Times. In an editorial headlined "So What's All The Fuss About 'Keeping It Real'?," Mark Kemp, MTV's vice-president for music development, paraphrased the central question thus: "Which is more genuine, the artist who is committed to the art of artifice or the one who uses real tragedy to land a hit single?"

Kemp proceeded to argue persuasively that "[s]trictly using the facts of an artist's background as a barometer of his or her honesty not only has become tedious but is also downright lazy thinking." Still, the very idea that he or anyone else has to defend Gillian Welch's music against such charges--especially when "Everyone lies about sex" has become a national mantra--is itself provocative. (Admittedly, "All singer-songwriters lie about their roots" isn't much of a soundbite.)

Perhaps the most ironic twist of the entire fracas is that even the Los Angeles Times's Robert Hilburn, whose reputation rests in large part on the few interviews he has conducted with Bob Dylan over the last twenty years, felt obliged to begin his positive review of Hell Among the Yearlings, Welch's latest album, with the following disclaimer: "Once you get past the fact that Welch is from West L.A. rather than the Appalachia you'd expect...."

The good news is that neither Welch nor her fans seem to care about her past, not when her present offers more musical riches than one can shake a Grammy-winning Anthology Of American Folk Music at. Like Revival, Hell Among the Yearlings finds Welch, her musical partner David Rawlings, and her producer T Bone Burnett eschewing nearly everything but acoustic guitars and an occasional banjo in their pursuit of that rarest and most delicate of pop-music commodities: a clear vision.

Welch, now thirty-one, began writing songs when she was in junior high. Although she has no plans to record her juvenilia or shop any of it around, she readily defends the relative merits of her precocious work. "They're not bad songs," she says. "They're a little more confessional than what I do now, but they're not terrible." As proof against more charges of revisionist self-history, she has preserved the notebook in which she wrote her early efforts, but, she says, "about the only people who've seen those are my parents."

If only for nudging contemporary songwriting away from confessionality, the music world owes Welch a debt of thanks. Instead of "expressing herself," she expresses something bigger, older, and more important. Just what it is she's hesitant to say. Like so many musicians, she has a hard time categorizing herself, laughingly referring to her work as "whatever genre you want to call what I do."

One reason that tags do not adhere to Welch's music is that all of her songs are co-credited to Rawlings, rendering the term "her songs" somewhat ambiguous. Another is that the tag has yet to be invented for music like Welch's: Ancient-sounding yet new, it's both more and less than the sum of its influences.

Its "folk" elements have made her a favorite at folk festivals around the country, and indeed fans of Sandy Denny and Linda Thompson will hear plenty to like in a songs such as "One Morning" and "Miner's Refrain," as will fans of Nick Drake in "Whiskey Girl." It was, however, the bluegrass and country communities that extended her the warmest welcomes when, after two years at Boston's Berklee College, she moved to Music City.

"When I moved to Nashville, I had about four songs that I would play for people," Welch recalls. "I knew that I needed to spend more time writing." Securing a publishing deal, she was able to stop adding to her growing list of day jobs and "really be a full-time writer."

It wasn't long before her efforts began to bear fruit. Kathy Mattea recorded "Patiently Waiting" and "455 Rocket," Trisha Yearwood recorded "Two Days from Knowing," and Emmylou Harris recorded "Orphan Girl," the song with which Welch would eventually lead off Revival. "That's how a lot of people first heard of me," says Welch of Harris's cover.

Not to be outdone, the bluegrass community also began helping themselves to Welch's expanding output. Tim and Molly O'Brien recorded "Orphan Girl" and "Wichita," Valerie Smith recorded "Red Clay Halo," and the Nashville Bluegrass Band recorded "Red Clay Halo," "One More Dollar," and "Tear My Stillhouse Down," the last two of which, like "Orphan Girl," also turned up on Revival. "I was really embraced by the bluegrass community in Nashville first," she says.

Being embraced by bluegrass musicians was fine with Welch, who describes herself as "a big fan of 'brother-team' music." "The early Monroe Brothers, the Delmore Brothers, the Blue Sky Boys, the Stanley Brothers--that stuff had a pretty big impact on me." Especially the Stanley Brothers. "I don't think I'd be doing what I do if I hadn't heard them. Ralph Stanley's singing is probably one of the biggest vocal influences on me."

One of the biggest conceptual influences on her has been bluegrass's frequent exhumation of Scottish, English, and Appalachian ballads. "Most of the best ballads have as their subject a tragic incident," writes E. Talbot Donaldson in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, "often a murder or accidental death, generally involving supernatural elements." Substitute the phrase "Welch's songs" for "best ballads" and you have a perfect description of the songs on Revival and Hell Among The Yearlings.

The tragic incidents on Revival include the death of a child ("Annabelle"), the destruction of a life through gambling ("One More Dollar"), and the destruction of a life through moonshining ("Tear My Stillhouse Down"); on Hell Among the Yearlings there's an attempted rape and a murder in self-defense ("Caleb Meyer") and the destruction of a life through drugs ("My Morphine").

As for supernatural elements, Welch's songs are a primer in old-time religion. References to Christ the Savior, the Devil, heaven, and hell abound. "Till my body gives out / Gonna read the gospel pages" she sings in "Rock Of Ages," "Satan he lives / In my whiskey machine" in "Tear My Stillhouse Down."

"I've definitely listened to a lot of ballads," says Welch, who numbers "She's More to Be Pitied," "Pretty Polly," and "The Butcher's Boy" among her favorites. "The Devil Had a Hold of Me" (Hell Among The Yearlings) even contains a direct reference to the latter, while "Barroom Girls" (Revival) owes an obvious debt to "She's More to Be Pitied."

"They're very archetypal, to use a big word," laughs Welch. "They're very profound stories. They cut very deep, and they touch on some really basic emotions and human responses. That's part of what I respond to in the music, and that's part of why I write the way I do. I'm hoping to touch on that stuff too."

She's also hoping to gradually broaden her palette, and not only sonically. For her next album cover, the former photography major says that she's considering something other than the sepia-tinted black-and-white images that have adorned her first two releases. "That seemed to really suit this collection of songs. They were very stark and fairly dark in nature, but we're actually thinking of using color next time!"

To a music business that already finds Welch controversial, a color cover will probably rank with Dylan's going electric. If it does, Welch will deserve every bit of the ensuing acclaim.

Nick Lowe SXSW Interview, Pt. IV (March 21, 1998)

You've done so much good work in the '90's, it seems to me that someone's going to have to bring Basher up to date. 

Oh, well, I hope so. I hope so. 

Has anyone shown an interest in gathering your more recent-- 

Yes. They have actually. There's talk about box sets and things like that, which--I don't know. I can't work my way through a box set, even of people that I like. I've got a Johnny Cash box set. I've only listened to the first one. Whenever I want to hear Johnny Cash, I just put the same one. I never listen to any of the others, you know.

Speaking of Johnny Cash, did you write "The Beast in Me" for him? 

I did, actually, yes. 

Was there ever the chance that he would've rejected it? 

Oh, yeah. He did. I actually thought it up when he came to London and came to stay with me and Carlene [Carter]. He came around. Carlene phoned him up and said we'd written this song. And, in fact, what it was is, I had this first--I had the title and the first verse, and when he came along--he came 'round to hear it, and the song really wasn't finished--we'd made up a whole bunch of other stuff to tag onto it, but I knew that the first couple of lines were great. Anyway, I sang it to him, and he said, "Well, you're onto something here, but it's not quite right, is it?" I said, "Well, it's not really." He said, "Well, when you finish it, send it along." And that was about 1980. And every so often--I finished it in what? 1994 or something. But every so often I'd get this song out, or if I'd run into him, he'd say, "How's 'The Beast in Me,' Nick?" And I'd get it out again, and it was one of those songs where you think you've said it all in the first verse. There's nothing else to say. But something must've clicked one day, and I just finished it off. It just seemed to all fit, which sometimes happens. The song hasn't kind of revealed itself to you or something until some time passes, and that's the danger time [tape ends] ... the song we'll be revealed. So, anyway, I sent it off to him and didn't hear anything, and next thing I know American Recordings has come out, and it's on it. So-- 

He didn't tell you he was going to record it? 

No, he didn't tell me he was going to do it. It was fantastic. I did know that my step-daughter, who hangs out with him a lot, she said that he'd been playing it to people who'd come around to the house. He'd been singing it to them. So I thought, "Oh, that's interesting. So he got the tape." I thought he just might've listened to it and thought, "Oh, no! He still hasn't got it right." But, no, I thought it was good. 

"The Man That I've Become" sounds like a Johnny Cash song. Yeah. Yes, it is a Johnny Cash song--a Johnny Cash-style song. But I think Johnny Cash is such a great artist--I'm such an admirer, a fan, of his--as well as my familial connections to him--that I think it's sort of--he's a great enough artist--if you've got a good song, even if it sounds like--I don't know--like a good Barbra Streisand song--but a good song, good song--"People Who Need People," for instance. It's a good pop song of a kind, from the point of view of being in every airport, playing in every airport around the world. It's a crafty piece of work that everybody knows. But if you send a song like that, a really good song that doesn't necessarily sound like Johnny Cash, he'd be able to spot--"This is a really good song!" Here comes Johnny Cash singing it: (in mock Johnny Cash) "People--boom-chick-boom"--Now, he'd do something with it. He'd do something with it and make it brilliant, but I think it's sort of insulting to send a song to somebody that just sounds like them. It's sort of insulting to. People have done it to me. They mean well. They mean well. But they say, "Ah, here's a song! You're gonna love it!" And it's this rather embarrassing pastiche of three or four of your things slung together, and you go, "Thanks very much. That's very nice of you. That's very interesting, but it's not quite what I'm trading with at the moment." So I never would've dreamt of sending him "The Man That I've Become" because it does sound like him, especially with that Luther Perkins lick on it, that really does--it just cries out for it, you know. But the other thing is, it's got that country and organ music. I think organ on country tunes sounds so cool. It just puts something in there that's--on country songs--that's really emotional, better than a pedal steel for me, even though I like pedal steel played well. You know what they say, that women don't like pedal steel. It's only men who like pedal steel. There's something about that tone. Men react to the pedal steel much more than women do (laughs). I don't know. It's just one of those things. I think it's more sonic than anything else. 

I first heard "High on a Hilltop" as an extension of "What's Shakin' on the Hill." In both the "hill" is a metaphor for what's really important. 

I suppose it is. I hadn't thought about it like that. I think that that is a gospel song. I think "High on a Hilltop" actually is a kind of gospel song. I felt inspired with "High on a Hilltop." It's still pop, you know. It's still pop. I still think, "Would Dan Penn do this, or Arthur Alexander?" You know, some of the people that I like. Ivory Joe Hunter. I think, "Would they do something like this?" If I think they would, I think, "Oh well, I will too" (laughs). 

When I first saw the title "High on a Hilltop," I thought, "Yet another gospel song!" 

Yeah. 

"The Man That I've Become" goes well with "Failed Christian" because they both have verses about the choir. 

Oh yeah, yes. That's true. Yes, I didn't know that until we actually--I hadn't realized that until they sequenced it. But they do. Yes, they've both got the choir reference.

They sound as if they're being sung by two people coming at the same emotional or spiritual state from different perspectives. 

Oh, well, that's great. That's great. 

Such connections seem to continually emerge from your albums. I have the feeling that ten years from now I could play this album and discover more. 

Well, I hope so. I really hope so because--well, I like listening to it too. See, that's the strange thing. You get a real kick from sitting down and listening to your own record. There comes a time when you stop, but generally it's when you start thinking up a new way of telling your story. But until that comes along, to listen to your own record and really enjoy it and not be going--twitching and--you know, because you can hear yourself going to work--there are always things that you wish you'd done slightly different. Of course there are. But they're all honest, honest--you know, you overlooked something. I mean, it's honest. But to be able to listen to your own record and for it to sound like somebody else, for you to enjoy it as if it were somebody else, is a very curious sensation. Or maybe it's not curious enough. Maybe it's not a curious sensation. 

Did you always listen to your own records and enjoy them, even in the '70's? 

I did, but some more than others. Definitely some. Whenever I thought I'd done a good thing, oh yes! I'd listen to it over and over again and dig myself, you know (laughs)? But, no, there was a period when I was striving for something and not--I was very unhappy, and I felt very uncreative and at a low ebb and trapped. I felt--I was still with a big record label then, and when it's time for an album, you've gotta come up with one. It doesn't matter if you don't feel like it. 

Columbia? 

Columbia, yeah. And that's a terrible feeling, to go into the studio with feet like anvils, you know, just dragging them. And that's, of course, when you start taking to the bottle and thinking that if you've got half an idea--if you get drunk enough, you can actually turn it into something good. And the awful thing is that occasionally it works. But, of course, the next time you do it, what you're left with is this drunken mess. And that's awful, when you've got to--when you know you've done a record that, in your heart, you know is a sorry thing. 

Part III: https://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2009/05/nick-lowe-sxsw-interview-pt-iii-march.html

Part V: http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2009/05/nick-lowe-sxsw-interview-pt-v-march-21.html

Nick Lowe SXSW Interview, Pt. III (March 21, 1998)

I'm a Catholic, so when I first heard "Soulful Wind," I thought you were singing about the Apocalypse or the Holy Spirit or something. Was I way off base?
No. I was thinking of something good. I rather thought the soulful wind was kind of a good thing, but at the same time maybe a good thing that could sweep away the bad stuff. So whether that's apocalyptic, I don't know. I always think of the Apocalypse as something that sweeps away a bunch of good stuff too. Everyone's history.

You use phrases like "the lion will lie down with the dove"--
Yeah.

Familiar biblical phrases--
Yeah.

And I thought, "Oh, he's writing a song about ultimate hope."
Yeah, I think it is. I'm--I find I'm using a lot more of that sort of language in the songs I write now, but it seems sort of natural somehow. I don't give it much thought. You know, I'm an--I suppose I'm an Anglican, you know, which they describe as "Catholicism lite" (laughs), but I'm not a practicing Anglican. But I have a sensibility about this, and the older I get as well, the more I'm at ease with whatever this thing is. But to me it's a kind of language. It's not something I thought up. It's a kind of a language and a way of expressing a feeling, and those--as we all know, those biblical phrases and things are--they strike chords and are really fantastic fun to sing. It's just great to say them.

Then I heard on this album--
"Failed Christian," right.

But also "Lead Me Not"--
Yeah.

And I thought, "Well, he's continuing in that. It's growing instead of shrinking."
Yeah, it does seem to be, but as I say, I haven't thought it out at all. It's so hard to come up with a sort of three-minute, simple song with a very direct lyric and a direct tune that people haven't heard millions of times before that if I started boxing it off and saying, "Oh, you can't do that. You can't do that. You've gotta--No, it's going too far this way." If I started corraling it too much, it would sound stiff and kind of make people feel uncomfortable somehow. I've done that in the past. I've had good ideas for a song--in my opinion, again, in my opinion--I've had a good idea for a song, but I've rather squashed the idea at birth. I've said, "Oh, it's that kind of tune! Right! It goes in this box!" And I've forced it into a box, and in fact the thing probably--you haven't served it well. I'm much more apt to letting the song--letting the lyrics and the melody and how long the thing is structured, whether those things are structured--I try and let the music do the talking much more now than me doing the talking. At least, that's what it feels like to me anyway. And one of them is in the strange sort of quasi-religious thing that seems to have come in. But, you know, I haven't had somegreat revelation, sadly (laughs). It's a sort of a device, but it's one that makes me feel good to use.

Why did you choose to cover "Failed Christian"?
Well, do you know who Henry McCullough is?

No.
Well, he's a very interesting man. He's from Northern Ireland, with all that that implies. And he's also a really fantastic musician. He was in the sort of Woodstock lineup of the Joe Cocker and the Grease Band. He was the guitar player--you know, "A Little Help from My Friends" and all that. And he was also the guitarist in the first lineup of Wings as well.

Henry McCollough?
Yeah.

Isn't there a Jimmy McCulloch who played in Wings too?
Yeah, there is, but they're no relation. Jimmy was--Jimmy followed Henry, actually. Henry was the person who did "Band on the Run" and "My Love," all those. But coincidentally the next guy's name was McCulloch too, although Jimmy was a Scot, and Henry was from Northern Ireland. Although they're very similar. You know, when you get up to Northern Ireland and Scotland, they're not very far apart. It doesn't sound like it. Their accents are completely different, but they're very similar sort of people. But, anyway, Henry had a lot of--am I rambling too much? Maybe you've got a bunch of questions that you want to ask, and I'm just--

No, this is fantastic!
Oh, all right. Well, Henry had a lot ups and downs with drink and drugs and what have you, and he really blew his--blew his thing, really. So he decided, in the nick of time, to go back to Northern Ireland and kind of clean himself up and get himself straight again and organized again and stop hanging out with these hoodlum friends and whatnot. And I lost touch with him. I was never really a big friend of his, but he got Brinsley Schwartz--the band I was in, Brinsley Schwartz--onto the Wings tour to open for them. He got us onto it. And, anyway, I lost touch with him. And about two summers ago, myself and my boys were doing a show in Belfast with Van Morrison, who, by the way, Geraint Watkins, the keyboard player, and Robert Treherne, the drummer, who play on my record and on The Impossible Bird, have just finished doing Van's album, Van Morrison's, the next one. Yes, it's coming out.

That'll be a different sound.
Yeah, I can't wait to hear it. I don't know what it's going to be like. I said to them, "Now, don't give away all your stuff that you do with me to Van" (laughs)! Anyway, no, it's a different thing, although he records live as well. He records his vocals live as well. Anyway, so we did this show with Van in Belfast, and Henry, right out of the blue, just came backstage, and it was really fantastic to see him. And he gave me a tape of some songs that he'd been working on. One of them was "Failed Christian," and I just thought it was a really great song because it had that--it's got that sort of naivete and wisdom thing working for it. It's not a particularly original thought. I've heard it expressed before. But the point is well made yet again.

I thought it was probably fifty years old or something.
Well, he's got that (laughs)--he sometimes seems extremely old. But, oh yeah, I think it's a really good thing, although people who haven't really listened to it right and heard what the song is saying have put it together with a few other things like you were saying--you know, those other biblical references -- and said, "What do you mean 'Failed Christian'? What's happened to you? Steady on now" (laughs)! And I say, "No, no, no. Just listen to it. It's all right. Everything's fine."

It's good to know that he's still--
Yes, he comes up with something as strong as that. Right. And he hasn't recorded it. I phoned him up and said, "Look, Henry, I've been listening to your tape, and 'Failed Christian' I think is so cool. What do you think about letting me record it?" And obviously he recorded the demo of it, but he hasn't got a record deal or anything like that. But he said, "Yeah, go ahead." So that's pretty good to give away a tune like that.

When The Impossible Bird came out, the publicity accompanying it made mention of the fact that you'd recently become wealthy by virtue of having a song on The Bodyguard soundtrack.
That's right, a song of mine you might be familiar with, "Peace, Love and Understanding."

Whose version was on the soundtrack? Yours?
No, it was done by Curtis Stigers.

So it was a new version.
Yeah, a new version. But it's a song that's been covered by lots and lots of people. I've got covers of it by a gospel choir--a sort of black gospel choir from Harlem--and it's a fantastic version. And bluegrass--I have a great bluegrass version of it.

I heard you say one time that you wrote it tongue-in-cheek.
Yeah. When I first thought it up, it was supposed to be like an old hick because everything was changing, you know, in the '70's so fast. You know, hippies were going right out of fashion. And it was supposed to be this sort of washed-up old hippie sort of saying to the new, you know, "Well, I might be out of the window, but one thing: what's so funny about peace, love, and understanding? You can answer that with your flash new ways." It was supposed to be sort of funny. But when Elvis recorded it, he put that anthemic thing into it, and even when I do it now, I do it with the--I've forgotten the original thing. I've got so used to people doing--but it is--it's got a great title, that song. I think that's why people identify with it. The song itself is very simple and trite, really, and sort of pretentious. "As I walk this wicked world" sounds a little bit much. But that's the way it was supposed to be when I did it. But now I don't think about it. It just seems to me all dead righteous now.

Pt. IV: http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2009/05/nick-lowe-sxsw-interview-pt-iv-march-21.html

Nick Lowe SXSW Interview, Pt. II (March 21, 1998)

You said that you'd explain your reasons for cutting your vocals with the band.
Well, I've been trying to figure out--ever since--you know, the received wisdom says that you do your best work when you're a kid, and then come thirty or so--thirty years old or so--it's all over, basically. Everyone only likes--you do your best stuff when you're a kid, and then you go off. Either you try to redo what you did when you were a kid, only kind of grown up--and it's a rather embarrassing, not very edifying spectacle--or you just lose it and give up. So when the--you know, I had a brief job--a job for a short while--as a pop star in the late '70's. And it seemed totally natural. I don't ever remember once going, "I've made it!" I never remember thinking that. It seemeed totally that me and my friends--my contemporaries--it was our time, and everything we did was totally current, totally bang up to date, they were all hits, no matter if it was records I was producing--even my own records were hits. Or if I played bass on someone's record, it was a hit. Rockpile was having hits. We made lots of records, and they were all hits. And then the wheel turns, as it does, you know, all the time. The wheel turns and suddenly starts turning away from you. And that's when some artists--there are some artists who quite mystifyingly manage to stick with the wheel, like Elton John, for instance. The man has had a career that just goes through the decades. Cher, she just goes on and on and on. And so now especially--Madonna's getting up there. Prince almost did, but he got fed up with it and jumped off. He sort of stumbled a bit. But some of these others seem to go on and on. So I have no interest in doing that, but the elements of being a star--you know, famous I mean--when you start out, that's all you're interested in. That's the only thing that interests you, being famous. But it's amazing how quickly that you soon realize that it's the worst part of doing this job--being famous and pointed out in the street, pointed out, noticed. That's a real nuissance. So when the wheel started turning away from me, I said, "Look, what am I going to do now?" But I realized thart what was falling away was being in the public eye. And I said, "Don't worry about that. You never liked it anyway. So who cares?" What was more worrying was that I was perceived--on paper my career was perceived as being all over, and yet I'd had hit records, but I was perceived as being all over. "Sorry, you're history, man"--by the music business in general.

What period are you referring to?
I think sort of '82--1982--something like that. But I felt, even though I'd had hits and things like that, I thought I hadn't done anything that was much good up to this point. I thought, "You've got your pop-star thing over now. Now you can get on and do something." I thought, "Well, what is it that I feel I haven't done? I know that I feel that there's something not working here, but I don't know what the hell it is." So I started to try and figure out what this was, and how to record and write--how to write songs for myself and record myself in a way that uses the fact that I'm getting older in a business that values youth sometimes more than talent, but certainly as much--how I can use the fact that I'm getting older in this business as an advantage, as a real asset, as opposed to its being this terrible hindrance, because it's coming along anyway, so you might as well get with it now. Well, it took me a long time to figure it out, and because I couldn't figure it out, I couldn't persuade anyone to kind of help me. I couldn't tell anyone what I wanted them to do so they could maybe give me a hand and help me out, because I didn't really understand it myself. But, bit by bit, things got revealed to me that--a great thing that happened was when I got to meet, and play with and make music with, Ry Cooder and Jim Keltner and those guys, and John Hiatt.

You're referring to Little Village.
Well, not necessarily. The record, in my opinion, is not good. I think it's overfancy and fussed with, I think. But the experience of playing with those guys, in making that record--and the one before, the John Hiatt record Bring the Family--was a tremendous experience for someone like me, especially thinking the way I was. To suddenly be pitched into playing with these people--I learned a lot from that, and I saw a lot of the things that I thought were out of my reach, maybe, that I couldn't do, were possible. You've gotta have a certain amount of faith, you know, and things that I hadn't considered before. And I've gotta be really careful here because I love talking about this stuff, but it looks really pretentious in print. So you've got to be very, very careful (laughs) what quotes you use from me. But are you with me so far?

I think so.
O.K. So one of the things that bugged me was how I'd write a song--and putting aside whether the song was any good or not--and I'd sing it into a little thing like that [pointing at my tape recorder], a little Walkman, at home, and I'd play it back, and it would sound--again, putting aside whether it was a good or bad song--but it would sound great. You know, you have a guitar there and this voice sitting on top of it, and everything would make sense. And so I'd take it to the studio, and piece by piece this would be kind of chipped away and taken away, and it seemed that the people I was playing with, the people I was--you can't really blame them--but they were locked into a way of making pop records, pop band records. "There's a way of doing it. We all know how it goes. Let's get on with it." So my little song--well, suddenly it's a little too slow, so speed the tempo up. And when the tempo goes up, suddenly it's a bit too low down to sing in the key it's in, so we've gotta put the key up. So suddenly I'm singing it in a different way, a different character. A different character comes along now. And you're caught up in this, and suddenly your song is taken away from you and suddenly turns into something else. Occasionally it would be better--occasionally. But the overwhelming--

Can you think of an instance when a song got better as the result of those changes?
Well, I don't really want to do that because it could be something--a tune that people really like, and I don't want to spoil that. While I like talking about the way I make music and things like that, I don't want to spoil people's perception of--

You were saying that sometimes it would get better--
Occasionally it would get better--to my mind. This is all to my mind, all to my mind, it would get better. But the overwhelming number of times, I thought--after it happened about two albums in a row--not all the way through, necessarily, not every track--you know, it's an album full of things that I thought, "This sounds so tired and kind of not the--this ain't real. This sounds like it's too young for you or something. There's something not right here. It doesn't sound correct." So I figured out--I resolved that I had to find a way of writing songs for myself and recording myself so that it sounded like that thing on the Walkman, only bigger and with other musicians on it. And this all coincided again, as I said, with meeting Ry and all those people. But also I'd started doing solo shows. That was a real eye-opener as well, because when you stand up in front of a bunch of people and play your songs, you suddenly see your song in sharp relief, and you start thinking--as you're playing it, you think, "Why did I put this thing in, this bit in? This is hopeless! Why am I saying this again? I said it. Everyone thought it was really cool the first time I said it, but now you've done it again. It's sort of hopeless. No, no, no, you haven't done this right at all." So it started to make me write songs in a different way, because you use everything you've got. If you try to start writing songs, you use everything you've got. You've only got your voice and your guitar, but you make everything count--not too many chords, get on a nice groove and keep it there, and say something nice--and funky. Try and make it funky and uplifting in some way. I started thinking about all this stuff. And then, well, I started to sort of get it. I started to get it, although I suppose when I did Party of One--I did that with Edmunds, Dave Edmunds--he wouldn't have it. I remember saying to him, "Look, I really want to sing some of these songs when the boys are playing them. Give me a mic, and I'm going to perform it for you." And he said, "Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, let's just do it the way we know, all right? Just make the backing track, and then you sing on top of that." So I did it.

You did it his way?
I did it his way, and some of them came off.

"All Men Are Liars" sure sounds live.
Well, you know what? I think that might've been the only one that was. I've suddenly got a feeling that I did do that one live. In fact, there might've been a couple that I managed to do live, and that one might be one of them. There were some pretty good tunes on that. But after that record, I thought, "This is almost a good record. This is almost a good thing, but it isn't what I've got in mind at all." Then a few things more started dropping into place, and then I did The Impossible Bird, and by that time I'd had a few things that happened to me in my personal life, which had really made me blue. You know, I'd really started to know what being blue felt like. And, luckily, I'm an artist, and I can write some cool songs about it (laughs). I don't know how people deal with it if they can't do that.

They listen to your songs.
(Laughs) Well, that's pretty nice to know. But I know that's what I do. See, I listen to blues music, and it cheers me up. It makes me feel good. But at the same time, I don't want to put my diary to music. I want these tunes to be really good pop songs so that people will go, "Oh, I know--" Even though I'm saying, "I, I, I" all the time in the songs, it could just be a character saying "I, I, I." It's not necessarily my diary, you know. But the thing about atmosphere is really interesting and exciting. So I realized, as I say, that I have to sing the songs at the same time as we do the track. So what I did was, I started going to this--well, you'd describe it as a little kind of dance hall, a little dance hall which is near where I live in west London. And it's got a sort of wooden, sprung dance floor and a vaulted ceiling, and they have--it's a sort of community center. They have Cub Scouts meeting there, and they have aerobics classes, and they have a dramatic society--you know, all that. So I rent this place by the afternoon. When I've got a few tunes going, I go in there--to finish them off, I go in there and just sing them out into the room, just take a guitar there and sing them out into--because the acoustics are so great, really quiet, and it fills the room. When you sing loud, the room seems to absorb it, so it's a very inspiring sort of room to sing in. Then I'd let the songs kind of say where they wanted to go, you know? That experience would just take the uptightness out of it. And I'd sing these songs over and over and over again until--not so that I found one definitive way of doing it. Quite the opposite. It would get that I'd know these songs so well that they'd stop being my songs. It'd be like I'd be singing a bunch of covers. It'd be like I would open my mouth and sing "In the Midnight Hour" or "Bye Bye, Johnny" or something like that, something really familiar, so that when you open your mouth, you don't know how it's going to come out. You're going to interpret it different every time. But all you know is it works, and you know how it goes. So then I'd go to the studio with my guys, and they--as I say, they're really great musicians. I should say a bit about that because--especially being here at South by Southwest. Now, this town has been full of really good musicians all this week, and the world, in fact, is full of good musicians. You come from an area where particularly fantastic music comes from. And the people who've come here to this town are probably the best ones from their cities, the top guys who pack the places everywhere. When they come in here and they get with everybody else, it all levels out to kind of this--this level of talent, you know, this level of excellence which suddenly goes extremely bland. It seems to be like everybody can do it--except when you hear someone who is really good, and they just zoom out. They're so much head-and-shoulders above the average. And that's what I've found. I've been lucky enough to play with some really, really highly rated musicians in my time. And I won't name any names, but in my opinion some of these people are extremely overpraised. You know, they've got licks and chops and things like that that they do, but they don't really know how to open themselves up. And to find musicians who know how to do that, to open themselves up and reinterpret what they--different every time, is extremely rare, and so whenever I find people who are like that, I like to hang out with them. So I go to the studio with these fellows, and I show them how the song goes maybe once or twice, so they hardly know it at all. I know it inside out, but they hardly know it at all. And they know that they've got to listen to the vocal to get their cues, and they also know that I am going to be performing this thing, so they can trust me that I'm not going to be stopping it every two minutes and saying, "Oh, no! Not that!" They know I am going to be going for it. And I trust them as well. And they are good enough so that they interpret this song different every time, and if they make a mistake, well, a mistake is a mistake, and you stop and you fix it. But with this process, you just get these incredible little accidents and little clashes and things like that that come along, which you can't dial up because we're continually trying to trick ourselves into being like the way we made our first records--in other words, not having all the experience and knowledge that we've got. Because when you hear a record that's made by someone with bags of experience and knowledge, it sounds really dull somehow. The great artists that somehow transcend that sound have this great naivety and continually find ways of tricking themselves into doing stuff that you don't normally do. And then it sounds exciting and fresh and exhilarating. It doesn't sound like yours. It sounds like some other thing. This other element seems to come into the music. It doesn't always come along, but I've found that if you record like this, I get--I stand a chance of getting that element that I was trying to find when I listened to my thing on the Walkman--that naturalness--except it's with other people as well. I mean the sidemen, the musicians. And they're making these comments and kind of agreeing, you know, that sort of thing. These people, funnily enough, are--they can't really do sessions, you know? Not like session men do. The world is full of session men who've got loads of chops. A producer says, "Right, we need heavy metal on this bit." They bang a few pedals, and suddenly out it comes. "We want that!" And the world's full of those people, and they're very, very--that's admirable. Anyone that can make a buck out of making music has got my vote, but the people I'm looking for are the guys that--they play it one time, and the producer says, "That's great what you did in that--!" "What? I'll try. Uh, can you play it to me?" Because they don't really know what they're doing, but these people are great, great musicians in my book because they're not afraid to go into a studio and open themselves up. It's not a common way of making records. I can't help it if my records don't fit on the radio or anything like that. Too damn bad. It's too damn bad. I go through a lot of trouble to make my records sound the way they do, and I'm sorry, I can't help it if (laughs)--

Your hard work is paying off. These records, without sacrificing any naturalness, are so rich and detailed that some day--maybe in five years, maybe in twenty--someone is going to pick up on them and appreciate them in a big way.
Well, I really appreciate your saying that. That's really fantastic. I thank you very much. That was a very good compliment.

Pt. III: http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2009/05/nick-lowe-sxsw-interview-pt-iii-march.html

Nick Lowe SXSW Interview, Pt. I (March 21, 1998)

(Originally posted at the now-defunct popped.com; conducted at the SXSW, Austin, Texas. His latest album was Dig My Mood, hence the preponderance of questions about it.)

I found this [the first Brinsley Schwartz album] recently in a pawn shop.
Amazing.

Were you the lead singer on it?
It's been so long since I've even seen it. Let me just have a look. I know I did quite a lot. Oh, yeah, I did. I did most of the singing on this, I think. Yeah. Good God! There's only three tracks a side on one (laughs).

One of them goes on for quite awhile.
I know (laughs).

Side one reminded me a good deal of Crosby, Stills and Nash.
Yeah. We were very influenced by their first album, and being young, you tend to wear your influences very much on your sleeve until you get a little older and you start to find out where they got their thing from, and you start listening to that, and so on, and so you start discovering other people. But, yeah, Crosby, Stills and Nash were the thing at that time, and we were very influenced by it.

You did a better job than America, who were also influenced by them.
Well, they had the "Horse with No Name" though, didn't they?

Why did you dedicate Dig My Mood to your parents?
Well, that's nice of you to ask that. I think probably because they--well, not in my mother's case. You know, my mother has always been a tremendous fan of mine, even through some of my less successful artistic efforts, but my dad definitely hasn't. He's really--poor old chap, he's had to--when I used to bring my records back and put them on at home, I used to see him sit there, kind of with this really long-suffering look on his face, having to sit there and listen to it. But recently he's started liking my records.

Your recent records or your old records?
I think a bit of both actually. I think a bit of both. Certainly, he likes my recent records and records that I sort of play on and things, you know, I bring home and say, "Well, this is so-and-so. I was playing on this" or "I did this," you know. He likes the company I keep, if you know what I mean, as well--Little Village and things like that. He likes John Hiatt. And I think he started listening to some of my earlier things and enjoying them now as well, certainly more than he did. But my mom and dad are really getting on quite a bit now, although they're very sprightly and fit, really. I thought that probably now was an appropriate time to make a little dedication to them.

Is it the slower material on your last couple of albums that he's especially liked?
I suppose so, yeah. I think he likes the songs. I think he likes the songs, and he likes the sound, I think. The sound seems to get to him. You know, he's a sort of a jazz fan. He likes that kind of mellower thing. He always professed to not like music at all actually, but I've found out lately that he's kind of a closet music fan, and with rather good taste, as a matter of fact, but he's always kept it rather quiet, strangely enough.

Has he come around yet to "Marie Provost"?
No, I don't think that--he doesn't like the sort of cluttering drums very much.

You mentioned jazz--the first time I heard the first line of "Faithless Lover," I heard Gershwin's "Summertime"--
Oh, did you?

Do you have an appreciation for Gershwin?
Well, of course, yes.

Not all rock stars would say, "Well, of course" to the question of whether or not they liked Gershwin.
Oh, well, I suppose so, yeah (laughs). Well, you know, I'm a songwriter, so I'm very interested in the craft of songwriting, which, of course, those great songwriters had--and with their bafflingly sophisticated lyrics, which, of course, everyone used to sing, you know? Even if you were pumping gas back them, you'd be singing these really sophisticated lyrics with references to these rather well-traveled subjects, which doesn't really play nowadays, I don't think, in quite the same way, sadly.

It might play in twenty years.
Well, it might. At the moment, you know, you've got Andrew Lloyd Webber's version of it, which I--you know, that doesn't happen for me. But "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair" is a brilliant, brilliant showtune, or tune on any level, just to name but one. Was that Rogers and Hammerstein?

I don't know.
Anyway--I can't remember what you asked me.

I mentioned that "Faithless Lover" had reminded me of Porgy and Bess--
Oh, I see. No, actually, with the "Faithless Lover" song I'd been listening to a lot of French chanson--you know, like Jacques Brel and Gilbert Bécaud and Charles Aznavour--you know, that sort of Parisian street music, which really is fantastic stuff. I don't speak French very well. I've got schoolboy French. So I don't always know what they're singing about, but the French have a reputation for having the worst pop music in the world, and yet they've got this brilliant, indigenous street thing, which is rather elegant even though it's tawdry and comes from the gutter. It's got this--the purveyors of it are rather elegant, are rather interesting people, and the songs are incredible-- the stories and the songs. They're about transsexual strippers, you know, and how (laughs)--you know, completely over the top.

There's a moment in "Faithless Lover" when this high-sounding instrument comes in behind the melody.
Oh, it's just a fuzz guitar. We were trying to get that sound like you hear in French porn music. You know, they have that sort of funny fuzz guitar, that really over-the-top fuzz guitar. That's what we were trying to go for. And that kind of funny clicky bass they always have on it.

That song and "You Inspire Me" both sound like something Frank Sinatra could've recorded.
Yeah. That song--I told the guys when we went to record it--I said, "Look, this has got this--this song has got a little descending little line in it, which is very redolent of the '40's and the '50's. It sounds like one of those late-night, sort of loungy kinds of tricks." But I said to them when we went in, "Look, this might sound like jazz, but let's just remember, we're not jazz guys. So don't try and push it into something that sounds really phony and fake." Not that these guys would, because they're really great players, these people that I play with. But they're not--

You didn't want them to think "jazz."
Yeah, exactly. I said, "If it comes along--" you know, because I cut my stuff with the vocal at the same time, for reasons I'll go into if you want me to. But there's a great English eccentric, a guy called Viv Stanshall--I don't know if you've ever heard of him. He had a sort of satirical group in the '60's called the Bonzo Dog Do Dah Band. He was the singer. He was a very eccentric bloke. And he had this little thing he used to say about jazz. He used to say, to describe jazz, he'd say, "Jazz-- delicious hot, disgusting cold." And I said to them, "Look--" Viv's no longer with us, of course--I said, "Look, Viv is looking down on us now. Just remember, 'Jazz--delicious hot, disgusting cold.' So please handle with care." I think it came out really sounding sweet and wistful. It doesn't make go, "Oh! It's that horrible fake jazz thing!" Because the song itself is basically a three-chord, four-chord song. It sounds like a country-western song when you just play it on the acoustic (laughs). So I wouldn't dream of saying, "Oh, I'm really into jazz now." I like pop music, albeit pop music from my era. You know, that's what I'm schooled in--two verses, middle eight, chorus, and out.

Your dad must like "You Inspire Me."
Oh, he does like that one, yeah. Yes, he does like that one. But he likes some of the others as well, which are not quite so obviously of his era.

Why did Rounder pick up Party of One, of all of your albums it could've chosen to reissue?
I didn't even know it was.

It's listed on the Rounder website with your two latest albums and the live EP.
Oh. Well, maybe they leased them off Demon, because Demon--you know, all my back catalogue--they've got all my back catalogue. And they recently reissued Party of One, with a new cover and two-- that awful thing they do where they take two outtakes--

You don't like that?
Oh, man! There's a reason why they're outtakes! I think it's such a shame. I know that if you're a real fan--real fans would be interested in it, but if it's not very good music, I think it's kind of a shame to do that. But that's the way it is.

You had no say over whether they did that or not?
Well, but I can be persuaded very easily, and if they tell--"Well, that's what everyone does, man! Wake up! It's the real world! It's only just trying to sell some records!" I'll go, "Oh, yeah. All right. Maybe I'm getting a little aloof about this."

I think your reservations are in large part correct. I found most of the outtakes on Bob Dylan's Bootleg (Volumes I-III) box set rather underwhelming.
Well, exactly. What the ear don't hear, the heart don't grieve for.

Part II: http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2009/05/nick-lowe-interview-pt-ii-march-21-1998.html


"CRACKIN' UP" (Not the Abba song.)