Carlene Carter – Back in the fold
She did her own thing again with 1983’s C’est C Bon, a dance record that had those in Nashville really scratching their heads. The album was a major failure, with little notice from the critics and even less from the public.
After five albums and very little chart success, Carter knew she had to reevaluate her music and her life, so she decided to take a part in the American musical Pump Boys And Dinettes, which was a sensation on the London stage.
“Singing with Kiki Dee every night really taught me how to sing,” she says. She remembers her yearlong stint with the show as a time of much fun and booze and friends. She partied with Elton John and Bernie Taupin (with whom she later co-wrote “The Rain”, which appeared on her 1993 album Little Love Letters).
“Most of all it taught me discipline,” she says. “I had never had discipline about performing because I was always just wide open.”
Doing eight shows a week also wore her out, and after a year she decided to quit. By this time her marriage with Lowe was falling apart (they remained close friends), and her partying, she says, was heading her into a downward spiral.
Carter says her drug use was first brought on by the boredom of being on the road. “The weird thing was I was always happiest and did my best work when I was clean,” she contends. “I can’t say me being an artist contributed to it so much, and I don’t think it was anything from growing up; it was just where I was at, what was going on around me. For a long time I was a party girl and I had a great time. It wasn’t always awful. In England, it was a blast. But then there’s this line you cross, and I remember crossing that line and I thought, ‘Uh-oh.'”
She knew it was time to head to Tennessee.
“I really needed to be with my family. I was spinning out of control,” she says, alluding to what she calls her first real addiction problem, which was mostly alcohol and drugs such as pot and cocaine. She wasn’t so far gone that she didn’t know the best way to climb out, though. “I needed that grounding of being with my mom and Helen and Anita, and they needed me, too, so that felt good.”
The Carter Sisters needed her because Anita was often too ill to perform, suffering from complications caused by rheumatoid arthritis. Carlene began performing with the family act. “I loved being with them,” she recalls. “That first year was so awesome. They were so smart and funny.”
But in the second year she began to feel restless. “I didn’t do any of my own material,” she explains. “And I knew I needed to take the chance and not sit in my little cushy job, not stay in my little cocoon. And I still had that passion for creating.”
If there was one thing her mother and others had taught her, it was to follow her heart, to do what felt right. And what felt the most right to Carlene Carter was the act of creating music. Before long, she found the perfect partner for making the music she wanted to create.
“I wanted to get back into making my own music, so a friend suggested I call him up. So I did,” Carter says of Howie Epstein, most famous as Tom Petty’s bass player and soon to be her closest collaborator. “I went up there and he had a track and I wrote the lyrics and the melody to it, and within three hours we had a song and I thought, wow, this is good, this is going to work.”
Carter started staying with a friend who lived close to Epstein, but after awhile she found herself staying with him. “We just worked all the time. It was a working courtship, completely,” she says.
Their work led to the creation of 1990’s I Fell In Love, a more country and more polished cousin of Musical Shapes. It would prove to be the album that would make Carter famous for her music instead of her lineage or her wild ways.
“I really didn’t know what we had, but I thought it was country,” she says, scooting to the edge of her seat. “The funny thing is, I came back to Nashville and said, ‘Well, I’m country now,’ and they believed it, although I hadn’t changed a thing about my music.”
She came up with her own look, including her clothes and hairstyle, because she knew she had to set herself apart from the pack. This included how she approached the video for the title track, which was the album’s first single. Carter says she had always liked MTV more than CMT, and that influenced her selection of a director. The video plays like a celebration of color and dancing and music.
Carter became one of the first country stars whose stardom was cemented by her videos. But the album was more than just videogenic. I Fell In Love was also a work of a true artist. Her writing skills were in full bloom with songs such as “Come On Back” and “Me And the Wildwood Rose”, the latter of which immortalized her sister Rosey and grandmother Maybelle. There were also co-writes such as “Guardian Angels” (with James Eller) and “The Sweetest Thing” (with Robert Ellis Orrall). She once again paid tribute to her family with her rendition of the Carter Family’s “My Dixie Darling”.
Among its many laurels, the album garnered Carter a nomination from the Country Music Association for Best New Female Vocalist, even though she’d recorded her first album thirteen years earlier. “It was weird. I thought, ‘Hell, I guess I really did reinvent myself!'” Carter laughs. “But, to most people who were listening to those records and buying my albums then, they really didn’t know about my other albums, so I guess it made sense that way.”
Unbelievably, unexpectedly, Carter found herself among Nashville’s big stars, participating in such ventures as a “second generation” tour with Pam Tillis (daughter of Mel) and Lorrie Morgan (daughter of George). “I had never felt so driven to feel consumed, to not have a life, as when those big hit records were out,” she says. “It was a strange time, but great in many ways.”