Bobby Bare – Daddy, what if…
Bare’s early albums embraced a dazzling array of material that allowed them to transcend Nashville’s two-hit-singles-and-a-bunch-of-filler formula. He cut traditional and folk-flavored material (including several Bob Dylan songs), Charlie Rich obscurities such as “Long Way To Tennessee”, Harlan Howard oddities (“Lynchin’ Party”) and more mainstream fare (“She Called Me Baby”, two years before Carl Smith made it a hit), the best of rising writers including Willie Nelson and Hank Cochran, you name it. His own originals, such as “Passin’ Through”, held their own in such company. No doubt Bare could have been a first-class writer himself if he hadn’t hit the road, a pursuit that tends to sap all available energy, privacy and focus.
So Bobby Bare was a song guy from way back. He began hanging out with Howard in Los Angeles before he even knew Harlan was a writer; when they first moved to Nashville in 1964, he and Jeannie stayed with Harlan until they found their own house. As soon as he settled in, he began running with the likes of Cochran, Nelson and Roger Miller.
Bare likes to joke that he’s recorded more Tom T. Hall songs than Hall has; the two men reached Nashville around the same time and were connected to each other through Jimmy Keys, who was Bare’s booker and Hall’s publisher. Early on, Bare took Hall on the road with him, obstensibly to share driving, but mostly because “I just wanted Tom’s company.” Hall eventually became Bare’s bassist and bandleader before becoming too much in demand himself, and the two men later shared an office. Though he’d recorded other Hall material first, Bare took the mystifying “(Margie’s At) The Lincoln Park Inn”, a did-they-or-didn’t-they cheating song, to #4 country in 1969, and came back a year later with the first version of “That’s How I Got To Memphis” (#3).
As more modern songwriters began trying to crack Nashville, Bare bridged the gap between old and new. He met Kristofferson through guitar pulls with Cash and Roger Miller and admits, “I couldn’t really hear him, I didn’t take him serious for a while.” Then he heard “Loving Her Was Easier” on an unmarked demo; told it was Kristofferson, he first replied, “That’s bullshit; Kris can’t sing.” Once convinced, “I just said, ‘Oh my God,’ and I wound up recording nearly everything he’d written up till then while I was on Mercury.” That would be 1970-72, with both “Come Sundown” and “Please Don’t Tell Me How The Story Ends” going top-10.
When Bare subsequently returned to RCA, his second single was Billy Joe Shaver’s “Ride Me Down Easy”. Billy Joe had “just wandered in one day” (actually, Harlan Howard sent him) when Bare was looking for writers for his new publishing company. “He’s so strange it kinda spooked me,” Bobby laughs, but after they’d talked a while, Bare began paying Shaver $50 weekly for his efforts. Kristofferson heard Shaver singing “Good Christian Soldier” at Bare’s house and recorded it later that same morning; he then produced Shaver’s first album. “Billy Joe’s writing is so simple, and so cutting,” Bare says, gazing out over the lake as a tour boat putters by. Then he shakes his head in admiration: “‘Too much ain’t enough/For old five and dimers like me.’ Just brilliant.”
And that, in a nutshell, is why Bare has always preferred hanging out with songwriters. “The writers were always brighter and more fun to be around, more aware of what was going on. You couldn’t be in more entertaining company,” he exclaims. “They were funnier, and I think they were more talented too. I bet if you ever took the IQ of all the really good songwriters it’d be through the roof.”
Bare’s output includes a surprisingly small number of straightforward heart songs or cheating songs, despite the fact that when he was coming up, it was hard to crack the charts with anything else. But he knew all along what he wanted.
“I have to have songs that paint vivid pictures,” he explains, “because when I’m singing a song it’s like I’m watching a movie. If I can see it evolve…if I’m doing ‘Detroit City’, as many times as I’ve sung that song, if I lose that visual in my mind, I just don’t have the lyrics anymore, they won’t come and I can’t finish the song.”
By the late ’60s, things were changing at RCA. Atkins, who was running the Nashville office, eased out of production because the move to eight-track and sixteen-track recording meant he no longer had time. “(Margie’s At) The Lincoln Park Inn” was their last single together, and Bare started drawing up to three different producers on just one album. He fled to Mercury for two-plus years, then Atkins wooed him back. “I told him they had too many producers over there, it was too confusing,” Bare recalls, “and he said, ‘Why don’t you produce your own records?’ Nobody had ever done that, but I said, ‘I can do that’.”
And he did, launching yet another phase of his career. When Waylon got wind of this development, he went to Jerry Bradley, who was then taking the label over from Atkins, and demanded that he be able to produce his own albums. Though select artists such as Porter Wagoner had already produced their own work uncredited, the Bare-Waylon one-two, combined with what Willie was doing out of Texas, amounted to the inmates taking over the Nashville asylum.
Ride Me Down Easy, Bare’s first self-produced effort, produced a near top-1 in Shaver’s title song, and then Bare got the idea that he wanted to find “someone who could write me a whole album that had a thread going through it, that made sense as an album.” (He also had the savvy to know that if he got a dozen songs out of one great writer, two or three were bound to be hits.)
None of the usual Nashville suspects were up to the task. But cartoonist/humorist and children’s author Shel Silverstein, who’d first met Bare while pitching songs to Atkins, and who’d already written hits such as “A Boy Named Sue” for Johnny Cash and “One’s On The Way” for Loretta Lynn, turned out to be the man.
Bare told him his idea at a party at Harlan Howard’s on a Saturday night, and that Monday morning Shel phoned from his home in Chicago to say he’d finished writing the album. Silverstein flew back to Nashville that day and began by playing Bare the cautionary “The Winner”, a talking song that was not exactly a talking blues and not exactly a recitation either.
“It’s a long song, but it was so funny I had to make him stop about halfway through so I could laugh a while before he continued on.” Bare took top sidemen into the studio to “work on a few Shel songs to see what happens. And I did it completely different. I would sing in the studio and they would follow me.”
The result wasn’t country’s first “concept album” — Johnny Cash’s Ride This Train had been on the market since 1960 — but as a piece of modern American storytelling, Bobby Bare Sings Lullabys, Legends & Lies was something new and different. Bradley later told Bobby that if he’d known what the singer was doing in the studio, he’d have vetoed the whole experiment.