| |
Where do you come from?
I grew up in Springfield,
Illinois. It's a small city of
about 100,000 people 200 miles
south of Chicago & 100 miles
east of St. Louis. My dad's from
a farm in southeastern Illinois
and my mom is from a small town
in western Illinois. In 1983 I
moved to Iowa. I spent eleven
years in Des Moines and Iowa City.
In 1994 I moved to San Francisco
and have been in the Bay Area
ever since.
What is your musical
background? When did you start
playing music?
What/who decided you to pick an
instrument or to sing?
Music wasn't a big deal in my
family, it was appreciated but no
one was really an enthusiastic
musician or singer. When I was
ten or eleven years old I started
listening to 60s pop music, the
Beatles and the Byrds, that's
when I got really passionate
about music.
My sister had a cheap classical
guitar and some songbooks that
had basic chord diagrams in them
so I started teaching myself to
play guitar. The first song I
played all the way through was
"Yesterday", I picked
out the melody by ear. Once I got
down the basic chords I played
along with records and learned a
lot that way. I also took some
guitar lessons and learned a
little music theory. I started
writing songs when I was 15. As a
teen I had a lot of angst to work
out.
Can you tell us about
your punk band/years. Did you
listen to country music at that
time?
When I was 13 or 14 my sister
married this guy who would take
me out in his car and play me
Elvis Costello, The Clash, The
Jam, The Buzzcocks, all that sort
of stuff. There were also a few
guys who worked at a local record
store who encouraged me to listen
to Captain Beefheart, Ornette
Coleman, Wire, Pere Ubu, you name
it. So I got hooked on seeking
out music that was out of the
mainstream. I played in a few
cover bands when I was a teen,
then after I moved to Iowa I
joined a band that played all
original material and that was
it, I was hooked. By the mid-80s
American indie rock was really
hitting its stride. There were
labels like SST and Homestead and
Touch & Go, and all those
great bands like Sonic Youth and
Big Black and Husker Du.
I was in a band called the
Hollowmen, we made two records
and played around on the indie
rock circuit in the midwest for
five years, with one tour on the
west coast in 1989. We broke up
at the end of that year. We had
big amps and played really loud.
We loved Soul Asylum and Dinosaur
Jr. so there was some of that in
our sound. We wrote most of our
material collaboratively. I
listened to a little bit of
country in those years, I had a
Patsy Cline album and a Kitty
Wells tape and a few other things.
Country music didn't figure much
as a direct influence in the kind
of music I was making, but I
loved the sense of melancholy in
Patsy Cline's music and was
hoping to get some of that
feeling in the Hollowmen's music,
even if the sound and methods
were otherwise very different.
Did it have an influence
on your punk songwriting?
There wasn't much direct
influence of country music in the
Hollowmen's sound. There was
maybe a hint of country in some
of the vocals, my sense of
harmony has always tended toward
close harmony in 3rds, which is
common in country. But not much
in the lyrics, rhythms, or
arrangements.
How did you come to
country music? Punk and free jazz
are not really the best
introduction for this kind of
music.
Country wasn't the main type of
music I was exposed to growing
up, but it was always around. My
older brother had an album of
Johnny Cash and I remember loving
"I Walk The Line" when
I was four or five years old. We
used to watch "Hee Haw"
every Saturday night, right
before Lawrence Welk. Whenever
we'd go visit my dad's family on
the farm you'd hear country music
in the house or in the truck or
on the tractor. My guitar teacher
when I was 15 & 16 was a
country picker so a lot of what
he showed me was based on that. I
remember when I first heard Patsy
Cline when I was 18, driving
around with a drummer friend of
mine, and being captivated by it.
When the Hollowmen broke up I
recorded an album's worth of
rootsy rock stuff that had more
of a country influence to it but
it never got released. After that
I got really interested in
expanding my musical horizons,
writing in unusual time
signatures and making up my own
chords. From there I abandoned
songwriting completely and played
almost nothing but spontaneously
improvised music/noise for a few
years. Playing free-form music
and really being good at it is
much harder than it looks, it's a
very demanding and abstract kind
of discipline. After a while I
found it unsatisfying. Meanwhile
I was buying country records in
thrift stores and bargain bins,
and I started to get more and
more into it. I found some really
good stuff right off the bat,
like Jimmie Skinner and Bobby
Austin and Wynn Stewart, and got
really inspired. I loved the
simplicity and directness of the
songwriting, it was very
refreshing to me because it said
what it had to say without
artifice or obfuscation, and the
melodies and chord structures
always resolved back to the 1,
making the songs sound so whole.
I was also going through some
changes in my personal life with
a romance that petered out, so I
was feeling lonesome and confused
and had a lot of mental &
emotional garbage to sort out. So
I decided to try writing songs in
the country idiom. Immediately
the songs started pouring out
effortlessly and I decided to
accept the fact that my musical
strength was as a songwriter, not
as an improviser. I also decided
to work harder on my singing, to
try to sing accurately on pitch
and carry a melody instead of
bellowing or mumbling, and with a
lot of practice over a couple of
years I improved quite a bit.
After I moved to San Francisco I
saw Junior Brown and Wayne
Hancock play in the clubs. Seeing
them showed me it was possible to
play this kind of music in this
day and age and make it fresh and
relevant. They inspired me, but I
also knew I had my own spin on
country and honky-tonk, my own
contribution to make to the
music, so that motivated to make
my first CD and put together a
band to play it.
Have you ever been
tempted by playing rockabilly? It
shares a certain energy/anger
with punk but with a more musical
approach.
Rockabilly isn't my thing. I like
it in small doses but I don't
think I'd be good at it. Webb
Pierce and Faron Young sounded
awful when they tried to sing
rockabilly, I think the same
would be true of me.
Are you still influenced,
one way or another, by your punk
period?
Most definitely. I think the best
punk rock and the best country
music have a few qualities in
common, like honesty and
sincerity of delivery, and saying
what you mean in a very direct
way. I also learned a lot from
playing improvised music about
spontaneity and being open to the
moment. Now I get that by
providing a song structure for my
musicians to improvise on. My
guitarist and steel player and
fiddler are all players who never
play the same solo twice, I
really love that. It keeps the
music fresh and exciting. I still
listen to punk on college radio
sometimes, and just yesterday I
was spinning some of my Sun Ra
and Mal Waldron records. The last
show I went to see was Ornette
Coleman at the SF Jazz Festival. What
about the recording of your first
album? Did you play and tour live
with a country formation before
recording. Was it hard and long
to get the right sound?
No, I didn't tour or play live
with a band before we made that
record. That line-up was put
together just for the recordings.
I had worked with the engineer,
Joe Goldring, on another project.
I told him what kind of record I
wanted to make and he said he'd
love to do it. Shortly after that
I ran into the bass player, John
Walter, who was an old friend of
mine from my hometown in Illinois.
He introduced me to the steel
player, Steve Cornell, who was in
Red Meat at the time. Steve then
called in the drummer, Les James,
who's also in Red Meat. The four
of us did our parts in three live
sessions. We'd get together the
night before each session and run
down the material, then we'd go
in the next day and knock out
four songs in two or three hours.
Those guys were all such good
players that we got most of the
songs in a few takes.
The recording sessions weren't
hard at all, it was the mixing
that got difficult. Joe used
different microphones and
different techniques on each of
the three sessions, so each
session sounded very different
from the other ones. It took a
lot of work to get it to where we
were satisfied with the mixes.
About the time we did the last
session in 1997 I started playing
with my current guitarist Mike
Wolf and put together the core of
my live band, with Les James on
drums, Greg Reeves on bass, and
David Phillips on steel. Those
guys are the ones on my new CD
"Songs That Make The Jukebox
Play," though Greg has since
bowed out and now Rob Douglas is
my first-call bassist. Doug Adams
played fiddle on both records and
he still makes it to my gigs when
he can. The second CD is more the
sound of a seasoned unit, as we
played most of those songs as a
band quite a bit before we
recorded them.
"Sings heart songs"
was recorded in 96/97 but only
released in 99...
I spent a long time mixing &
remixing the thing. I knew I
wanted fiddle on three of the
songs but it took me a while to
find the right player so that was
a delay. I also sent it around to
a few labels to see if I could
get someone else to put it out.
No one I presented it to wanted
to do it. I had never self-released
a record before so I hesitated a
while before deciding to take the
plunge and become my own label.
What is the part of
autobiography in your songs?
It varies a lot from song to song.
Some songs come very directly out
something that I experienced,
like "What Did I Lose"
"How Much Longer" or
"Brand New Memories."
Some come from situations I've
observed or heard about from
friends like "First One To
Get There" which was
inspired by this little
neighborhood bar that a friend of
mine owns. Some are rewrites of
ideas I've gotten from other
songs like "You Used To Live
It Up" and "Get While
The Getting's Good", and
some just arrive out of the blue
like "Give Up On Me" or
"I'm Damned". Even the
most autobiographical of them
often get fictionalized in some
regard in order to meet the needs
of the song. I like for a song to
make a single point, or to
express a single point of view. I
don't like to look at a situation
from a lot of different vantage
points in a single song, I'd
rather have each song express one
idea. When you do that you
necessarily eliminate other
shades of meaning, other
interpretations, other ways of
looking at a situation that may
be just as true as the one you're
going for. In that regard they
get exaggerated or fictionalized.
Did your wedding and the
birth of your daughter change
your songwriting?
Sure. "Hard Times Are Gone"
probably would not have been
written if I hadn't met my wife.
It gets harder to write
heartbreak songs when your
homelife is happy. My wife and I
get along very well and we work
out our troubles together, so I
don't hold onto things that go on
between us and turn them into
songs very much. Mostly my songs
come from things that happened in
my past, or things I observe
happening to other people, or
sometimes they come from just a
word or phrase that suggests a
story. In the weeks before and
after my daughter was born last
year I went on a writing spree, I
wrote two dozen songs. Having a
baby stirs things up, and I was
also in a panic that I wouldn't
have the time to write songs for
a while so I wrote as many as I
could when I had the chance.
Your first album is a
graphic reference to Ray Price's
Columbia album, the title of the
second comes from Jimmie Skinner,
but on the records you made only
one cover. Are there any songs
you'd like to cover on album?
There are hundreds of songs I'd
like to cover. Live the band does
a few like "Fort Worth Jail"
by Dick Reinhart and "Old
Faithful" by Mel Tillis. But
when it comes time to make a
record I want to do my own work.
I've got well over 100 of my own
songs to choose from for the next
record. I think my strongest suit
is my material. I make records to
get my material heard, in the
hopes that other like-minded
folks out there might cover some
of my songs someday. That said, I
would love to make an album of
covers, paying tribute to great
under-appreciated writers and
performers like Tibby Edwards,
Jimmie Skinner, Bob Morris, and
James O'Gwynn. Even more ideal
would be to do a series of EPs
where I'd sing five or six songs
by one of my favorite writers or
performers on each record. But
given the cost of recording &
pressing that project will
probably remain in the realm of
fantasy. My priority now is to
get my own material heard.
Who
are your references in term of
songwriting and singing?
It's taken me many years to
accept the voice God gave me. I
love bass/baritone voices and
I've always wished I had a deeper
voice, or a more guttural,
rougher, lived-in voice. But I'm
stuck with what I've got so it's
up to me to maximize it by
finding ways to use it that work.
I really dig full-throated
singers like Webb Pierce, the
Louvin Bros, Bobby Austin, Buck
Owens, Tibby Edwards, Carl
Butler, Chuck Reed, Skeets
McDonald, Gene O'Quin, the kind
of singers who really belt it out
loud and clear. I love Ray Price
and that whole school of Texas
singers he's inspired like Johnny
Bush, Darrell McCall, and Justin
Trevino. I also love the school
of singers they call groaners
like Frankie Miller, James
O'Gwynn, Sonny Burns, and I guess
you could put Vernon Oxford in
that category. I really love
Charlie Rich too but I don't try
to sing like him, I couldn't even
get close to what he could do
with his voice so I don't even
try. As a writer I've gone
through a lot of changes, I could
point to any song and tell you
whose style influenced it. "Sleep
Never Will Come" and "Give
Up On Me" have a strong Hank
Williams Sr. flavor. "Blues
& Dues" and "Eat At
Home" have a lot of Skeets
McDonald in them. "See The
Sun Again" and "How
Much Longer" come from the
Floyd Tillman/Willie Nelson thing.
"You Used To Live It Up"
shows a Tommy Collins influence,
and "If I Only Knew" is
very Louvins-ish. Other favorites
of mine would be Harlan Howard,
Merle Haggard, and Bob Morris.
Bob Morris wrote Buck Owens'
theme song "Buckaroo"
but he wrote a lot of other great
songs that
not enough people have heard.
Lately I've gotten more into that
whole school of songwriting that
got popular in the 60s, those
gimmicky, clever, punning
heartbreak songs that writers
like Bill Anderson and Liz
Anderson cranked out. Roger
Miller wrote a lot of great sad
honky-tonk songs in the years
before his novelty material took
off. Oftentimes when I'm writing
a song I'll have a particular
voice in mind and that'll
influence the way it comes out,
like I think "I Wonder If
I'll Ever Love Again" would
have been perfect for Wynn
Stewart, and "I'll Match You"
would sound great if Vernon
Oxford sang it.
Did you ever meet or play
with singers like Ray Price Buck
Owens?
No, not too much. I did get to
hang out with Johnny Cuviello one
night, he played drums back in
the 40s & 50s for Bob Wills,
Jean Shepard, and the Farmer Boys.
I also met the great 50s gospel
singer Chester Smith about a year
ago, he's playing out again after
being retired from music since
1963.
Your
roots are deeply located in the
classic honky tonk/ late western-swing
styles. Are you treated by the
medias as a revivalist or do they
understand that you're also a
real author ?
I've been lucky, I've gotten
nothing but sympathetic press
from people who really get what
I'm doing. It's largely because I
write my own material. I believe
my songwriting is my greatest
strength. The fact that I can
come up with valid, authentic new
songs and breathe some life into
them keeps me from becoming
merely a revivalist.
What is the profile of
your audience ?
Mostly people over 30 years old.
Usually they're people of some
sort of hipster mentality, either
musicians themselves or the type
of music fans who like to seek
out things they haven't heard
before. There's a big part of the
audience that's of my age group,
people who came of age in the 80s
and got tired of whatever it was
they used to listen to and got
into country. Then there's a
segment that's older, people of
the baby-boomer counter-culture
generation who got into country
with the hippy acts of the 70s
like Gram Parsons and Commander
Cody. Then of course there are
the random drunks, and the
Dancin' Man down at the Ivy Room.
Do you feel close to guys
like Johnny Dilks, Big Sandy,
Deke Dickerson, Wayne Hancock or
The Derailers ?
Very much so. I 've met Dilks and
Deke, and I've met Whit Smith
from the Hot Club of Cowtown a
few times. I played a showcase at
SXSW in 2001 and I met
lots of Austin musicians like
Roger Wallace, Cornell Hurd,
Susanna Van Tassel, Ted Roddy,
Brad Fordham. Here in SF I do a
lot of shows with Red Meat,
they're an excellent band. There
used to be a good band around
town called Jeff Bright and the
Sunshine Boys who played a lot of
Buck Owens and Ray Price style
songs. I feel a lot more kinship
with those artists then with
Nashpop or even the No Depression
scene.
When I got interested in playing
country music I decided early on
that I didn't want to start a
rock band in cowboy hats and call
it country. I wanted to see if I
could play straight-up honky-tonk
like they used to do, with the
same kind of instrumentation and
arrangements. I think my most
recent CD proves I can. Some
people have a big problem with
the term "retro" but I
don't mind it. I think it's
pretty clear I'm reviving a style
that hasn't been commercially
viable at a significant level for
forty years. I use the word
"retro" myself
sometimes to describe what I do.
If you tell people you play
country music and don't qualify
it somehow they might think
you're trying to be the next Phil
Vassar, which is the last thing
in the world I'd want to be
confused with. Where I depart
from some retro-minded people is
in how far to take it in terms of
image and lifestyle. Like I don't
insist that my band members all
drive 40-year old cars or play 40-year
old instruments or wear 40-year
old clothes or put Brylcream in
their hair.
How is the musical (and
especially country music) scene
in San Francisco?
Well country music isn't exactly
all the rage out here. The Bay
Area is a unique place where a
lot of people who don't fit in
other parts of the USA come to be
themselves. People out here like
to think they're very forward-thinking
and unorthodox, and in the US
country music is widely
associated with conservative
social values, so your average
left-leaning Bay Area citizen
doesn't have much use for it. I
think country music reminds too
many people of the south and
midwest, the places they left
behind, to be that big out here.
The big thing now is DJ music,
techno and hip-hop. DJs have
replaced bands at a lot of places.
Live music in general is in a bit
of a lull these days, since the
economy slowed down. Lots of
people have lost their jobs or
left the city, venues have closed
or stopped booking music, and the
biggest rehearsal studio in town
closed up shop. What clubs there
are book lots of punk, indie
rock, metal, world beat, jam
bands, jazz, Latin groups, you
name it. A few years ago cover
bands and retro swing bands were
all the rage, but those trends
have petered out. The country and
Americana scenes have produced
some really good acts like Red
Meat, Johnny Dilks, Carrie Lee,
Dave Gleason's Wasted Days,
Dallas Wayne, Tom Heyman, The
Bellyachers, and lots more. Most
of us don't get much press
locally, but there are a handful
of good community radio shows
that play our stuff, and a few
venues where we can draw a crowd.
There's still good roots music
somewhere in town every week,
because San Francisco is a great
place to live and keeps
attracting talented people.
What do you think about
Nashville? Do you think country
is still played there? Would you
like to play at the Grand Ole
Opry?
I haven't been to Nashville since
1982, when my family flew me down
there to see Elvis Costello play
at the Grand Ol' Opry on his
"Almost Blue" tour as a
Christmas present. I hear there's
not much of a club scene there. I
don't know anyone there. Most of
my favorite bands and performers
are independent, grassroots club
acts who work out of Texas or
California. Sure, I'd play the
Opry if I had the chance, but I'm
not holding my breath.
It seems there is a new
generation of bands who play
country music the way it must be
done. Do you think Nashville (and
the opry) will have to consider
them?
Yes, there's a whole new crop of
really good hard country, honky
tonk, and western swing players
that have gotten going in the
last ten years. It's great. Does
Nashville need them? I don't
think so. Country music at the
top big-business level has become
a whole different kind of music
from what artists like me do. I
think some of my songs could have
been mainstream country hits 40
or 50 years ago, but not now. I
think most of the performers who
want to play country music their
own way, heavily informed by
older styles, will have to build
their careers outside the
Nashville machine. That's sad
maybe but that's the way it is.
It's nothing new either, in the
70s they were recording the hell
out of Dave & Sugar while
Vernon Oxford was hanging drywall.
On a brighter note, I've heard
that the
Opry has been booking some indie
artists with talent and
intergrity like Elizabeth Cook
and Mike Ireland, which is very
encouraging. And who knows, maybe
there'll be an upswing in demand
for country that's closer to its
roots, like what happened with
the New Trads in the late 80s.
Do you feel yourself on
war, as Wayne Hancock seems to
be, against what happened to
country music in Nashville ?
It's a big leap from Ernest Tubb
to Rascal Flatts, and it's hard
for many of us to consider the
latter country music at all. But
what are you going to do? Stay up
at night worrying about it?
Nashville's gonna crank out
whatever they think will sell and
they'll call it "country
music" whether it fits my
definition or not. What has
always defined country music
since its birth as a commercial
entity has been a sort of
consensus of the people who play
it, listen to it, market it, buy
it. By that definition then yeah
today's mainstream country is
country music, simply because
that's what a large number of
people have agreed to call it.
And the culture has changed a lot
since 1950. The suburbification
and mallification of America have
changed country music just like
they've changed everything else.
That said, I do consider today's
country mainstream to be a
significantly different subgenre
from what I do, and I don't care
for a lot of it. There's too much
of the 70s country-rock sound
like the Eagles in it, and some
of it even reminds me of 80s hair
metal power ballads and arena
rock. But you know, no one is
making me listen to it. I can
change the channel and ignore it
and go do my own thing.
Do you make a living out
of your music, or do you have a
day job?
Part of why I'm less inclined to
really badmouth Nashville than
Wayne or Dale Watson or Robbie
Fulks is because I haven't quit
my day job and attempted to make
a living playing and selling my
music full-time. If I was trying
hard for a successful full-time
country music career then I'd
probably be a lot grouchier about
not getting played on the radio,
or not having a record deal, or
seeing Faith Hill passed off as
country music. As it is I don't
expect to become a big name as a
performer, because I don't plan
on quitting my job and going out
on tour for long stretches. I'm
too happy with my home life to be
out on the road all the time.
Long-term I hope to gain greater
recognition as a songwriter. I
would love it if other performers
covered my songs. That's happened
a little bit, one band here in
town was playing "I'm Damned"
for a while and another has been
performing "Give Up On Me".
I've heard rumours of bands in
Illinois and Missouri covering my
songs. I love that, I want more
of that. I think that's the best
contribution I can make to the
country music tradition. I'd love
to hear Justin Trevino sing one
of my songs.
A last word?
Thanks for your interest in my
music. There's so much music in
the world today that any time
anyone chooses to listen to mine
I feel flattered.
|
