Greg Brown – Hallelujah anyway
Not so, he says. Take, for instance, that gunpowder tea. “I just wrote that song out as fast as I could write,” he says. “I’d had this image in my mind for a while of a trip and going to the places where, when I’m out touring, I don’t have time to explore as much as I’d like to. My mind was just drifting along with that idea, and one day I just sat down with my notebook, and I didn’t think of it as something I would do music with, it was just kind of a free-flow deal. And when I finished it, I thought, Hmmm, I wonder what this would be like if you put some music behind it.
“I’m not much of a detail editor. I’m a groove singer and player and writer. Once I can find the groove, I feel like I’m just ridin’ in my little boat. Sometimes, with certain songs I’ve written over the years, like ‘My New Book’, or ‘Milk Of The Moon’, or ‘Rexroth’s Daughter’, they’ve gone through many, many versions. Probably dozens and dozens of discarded verses. But if I do feel like I’m gettin’ the groove a little bit, I’ll stick with something. I’ll keep cuttin’ and hackin’ and tryin’.”
And then he’ll revise on the fly. Just when you’re taken with that gunpowder tea, he drops it. Last night, for instance. It wasn’t there. “That was the first time I played ‘Eugene’ live,” says Brown. “I ended up putting a lot of different things in there that weren’t in the way I recorded it. And that’s probably the way that song will be. It can change depending on the night. New details will come in, other things will drift away. With me, it’s just the way I’m trying to catch that groove, and once I do that, then I’m free, really, and whatever’s gonna come up that particular night has got an open door.”
Brown’s ability to conjure verite sometimes leads his fans to speculation and fact-checking. To separate the real from the made-up. “That whole thing, that whole issue, y’know, I…” He trails off for a minute, then gets rolling again. “I don’t think it matters in terms of where a song starts, if it’s actual details, actual people I know or not. That’s not really the point with songs. If they’re not bigger than that, then…”
He thinks a bit. “If there’s not room in songs for other people, then they ain’t gonna listen to ’em. It’s just that simple. There are certain people who’ve thought they were in a song. I generally don’t try to dissuade anyone if they wanna think that. But it’s not what I’m up to. Things I wanna say in a letter to somebody, I say in a letter.”
Last night’s show at the Englert was a homecoming of sorts. Brown was long a part of the Iowa City scene, playing at the Mill and living outside of town in the eponymous little red house of Red House Records, the mainstay purveyor of Brown’s work. (Brown’s tender eulogy for longtime friend and label president Bob Feldman, who died in January, is on the inside flap of The Evening Call.) Brown moved out of Iowa City a few years ago, and it’s no secret that he doesn’t think Iowa City is aging well.
“In some ways it’s almost like coming back to a different town,” he says. “I mean this stuff…” he waves at the carpeted playground before him and the Hotel Vetro behind him, “…all this stuff was not here. The town has gotten kind of mallish. I remember this town when it had a lot more architecturally. And there were a lot more characters. It just kinda looks like a lot of other places now. And the police force had gotten overly aggressive, I thought. You could hardly walk down the street without getting a ticket for something or other. The town had taken a right turn, I’d say, politically and pro-development, etcetera, etcetera. When I left, I was ready to go.”
When Brown played the song “Your Town Now” last night, an insider’s chuckle rippled around the room. But Brown cautions against a literal autobiographical take. “That had been my plan for a while — when my youngest graduated, I was going to move down to my grandparents’ farm and build a house, and I did all that.
“My attachment to my friends and my family members who live here, those attachments are undying, and they’re not really even dependent upon a place so much. I actually wrote that song several years before I left and wasn’t thinking so much of the town not being here as I was kind of handing the baton to the next generation. I really wrote the song mostly for a guy named Dave Zollo [the Iowa City musician who started Trailer Records] and other young musicians. It was like, well, it’s kinda up to you now.”
These days Brown splits his days between time on the road, a farmhouse in the Iowa countryside, and a home in Kansas City with his wife (singer Iris DeMent) and their young daughter. “I basically think your sense of place has to be inside you,” he says. “On the other hand, Hacklebarney, which is my grandparents’ old farm where I live part of the time now, that kind of sense of place…that little farm goes back in my family to statehood and it’s true, I feel things there I just don’t feel anywhere else. I have connections there that run very deep.”
If the accumulated works of Greg Brown are to be hung on the pintle of the fact that he is Iowegian by birth and Midwestern by raising, it should be said this is but the bolt on which the rudder pivots. He is an omnivorous American hybrid. You can see it in his dress, hear it in his lyrics, and detect it in his vocalizations: plenty of seed corn cap and loam, but also the Greenwich Village bohemian, the San Francisco beat. The cantankerous rustic and the hopeful hippie. The calloused hand, the polished mind. If a Greg Brown song was just some guy, he’d be rocked back in a chair on a porch at dusk, his head would be full with the scent of tilled soil, and he would have some old book open over one knee.
“I’ve just been reading Henry Miller’s Air-Conditioned Nightmare, which is a brilliant book. It was written in the 1940s, but it could have been written yesterday. I go back and read Henry Miller every few years. I’m hoping someday I’m going to feel enough inward strength to go back and read Jude The Obscure again. It’s the darkest book you can imagine. After Thomas Hardy wrote that, there was such an outcry in England, he never wrote another novel. He turned to poetry — which I’m grateful for, because he’s a great poet. I like reading Thomas Hardy in the fall. His books always make me feel like autumn somehow.