Carlene Carter – Back in the fold
It was during these leisurely days that her mother first taught her “a little boogie-woogie piece on the piano,” which became her first, and favorite, instrument. “I just got the bug when I was about five,” she says, adding that she always felt a strange connection to the piano and even considered becoming a classical pianist. “I had visions of being like Van Cliburn, you know…” She curls her fingers out in front of her and pounds the imaginary keys, closing her eyes and swaying her head as she mimics a melodramatic piano intro: “Duh, duh, duh dum!”
Her childhood was over a bit sooner than most. She became pregnant and left home at age 15. In a year’s time she went from a high school cheerleader and homecoming queen to a newlywed mother, but the marriage didn’t hold. She has said that she barely even remembers it. The union did produce her first child, though: Tiffany Anastasia, who is now 34.
Then came a marriage to Jack Routh, a guitarist and songwriter with the House of Cash. They had a child together, Jackson, but the marriage didn’t stick, and it eventually turned awkward when her ex-husband ended up marrying her stepsister, Cindy Cash.
Carter doesn’t dwell too much on the past these days. She’d rather focus on happy times, like those after her move to England when she was 22. Music led her there.
“I was going to college, at Belmont,” she recalls of her days at the Nashville liberal arts university. “Six months before I got my degree I got my record deal, so I thought, do I want to get my degree or make a record?” She puts her hands out palm up, balancing, as if they’re scales. “And I’m like, hmmm, OK, let’s make a record.”
She went to England at the urging of her managers, who thought it would be a great idea to take someone with a bona fide country pedigree and turn her loose with a rock ‘n’ roll band.
“I ended up with [Graham Parker’s band] the Rumour and it wasn’t really my kind of music but it was fun. It was very loud and very exciting and I got carried away a little bit, but I also got to be really creative and wasn’t expected to be any kind of way over there,” she says.
Her self-titled debut was released to great critical acclaim in 1978 but barely registered on the charts. In hindsight, the best part for Carlene might have been that her grandmother was still around for the start of her career. Rolling Stone even mentioned it in their obituary of Maybelle Carter: “She lived to see her granddaughter merge Nashville with contemporary rock ‘n’ roll.”
That merger was easier because the creative spirit around her was pumping, Carlene says. “It was a real exciting time; the new wave stuff was just starting. Elvis Costello had just come out, and Nick [Lowe] had just had his first hit. Thin Lizzy, Squeeze. Really good songwriting,” she says.
It wasn’t long before she had grown romantic with Lowe, the rising British rocker who had played on her first album. “We had the greatest guitar pulls in my and Nick’s living room, all the time,” she says. “One night it’d be Eric Clapton. Next night the Monkees.”
Lowe and Carter were living the big life. They married in 1979 and Lowe adopted Tiffany (she took his last name). But the happy times didn’t translate into career trajectory. Her second album, 1979’s Two Sides To Every Woman, didn’t turn out to be the follow-up she was hoping for, though it produced her first minor hit (“Do It In A Heartbeat” peaked at #42 on the Billboard country charts).
When she and Lowe finally managed to work out what it was she was trying to do musically, they succeeded in a big way. Her third album, 1980’s Musical Shapes, is now considered a classic. Carlene says she thinks it’s “still the rockingest country record of its time,” and she acknowledges Lowe’s contributions as its producer.
“I learned a lot about songwriting from Nick, watching him, being around it; there were no limitations,” she says. “I think Musical Shapes was the album I went there to make, it just took me awhile to make it.” The album contains many of her most devoted fans’ favorites, including “Cry”, “Baby Ride Easy”, and “I’m So Cool”, as well as nods to her heritage, including songs by her mother and the Carter Family.
It’s fair to say that without Musical Shapes, it would have been harder for artists such as Mary Chapin Carpenter, K.D. Lang, Kelly Willis and Shelby Lynne to make the music they wanted to during the so-called “New Country” boom of the early ’90s. One could even venture to include modern mainstream acts such as Gretchen Wilson into the circle that owes a great debt to Carter’s inability to conform.
Indeed, “I’m So Cool” and Wilson’s “Redneck Woman” are not that much different in premise, but “I’m So Cool” operates on at least three dimensions whereas “Redneck Woman” became a breakout hit for its one-dimensionality, a trait radio stations seem to covet. Things weren’t that different in 1980: Radio stations didn’t give the songs on Musical Shapes many spins, even though it was one of the biggest critical hits of the year.
The R&B-influenced follow-up, Blue Nun (1981), was another critical favorite that, according to Carlene, “didn’t sell shit.” It did, however, include another of her best-loved songs, “Oh How Happy”. Tracks with provocative titles such as “Do Me Lover” and “Think Dirty” didn’t help dissuade the image most people had about Carter after the widely publicized 1979 episode at the Bottom Line in New York City where she introduced a song by saying, “If this don’t put the cunt back in country, nothing will,” without realizing her mother and stepfather were in the audience. “I almost fainted when one of the band members told me later that Mama was there,” she said.
The incident was written up in newspapers across the country and became a popular cartoon in Playboy. For a long while she was better known for such antics than for her music, which she found troubling.
Today, Carter can see why people had such impressions of her, but she still makes no apologies. “I never tried to be a rebel. I was just being myself. People will still sometimes say I was trying to buck the Carter Family name and all that. I’s just having a life,” she says, not sounding so much put out as she is eager for clarification. “I have a life and it goes on all damn day. I come from a long line of women in country music who were always just doing their thing. And I was just doing mine.”