Growing up in public- A brief history of ND
ND #15, May-June 1998
The passage of some 30 years since Carter Stanley’s death brought increasing recognition of Ralph Stanley’s genius, as much a matter of iron-willed perseverance as it is of the music itself. With generations of musicians growing up learning Stanley Brothers songs and staring up at Ralph and his band from festival audiences, the Stanley influence strengthened rather than diminished, setting the stage for — and this must surely sound odd when said of a man of 71 — Ralph Stanley’s ultimate breakthrough. Clinch Mountain Country is meant to move his career to a new level, and it’s almost certain to do just that.
— JON WEISBERGER
ND #16, July-August 1998
Getting Car Wheels On A Gravel Road to sound the way Lucinda Williams heard it in her head was her top priority, “regardless of personal relationships, and regardless of the other things that make me happy,” she said.
“The worst thing,” she continued, “would be to sell out. I’m terrified of that happening. I’ve got such an innate fear of that happening that my defenses go up if I even think something’s headed in that direction.
“I’ve seen it happen with other people. They make an album the way somebody tells them to, and then three years later they’re making the record they wanted to make in the first place. My feeling is, ‘Why didn’t you do what you wanted to do to begin with?'”
— BILL FRISKICS-WARREN
ND #17, September-October 1998
Emmylou Harris has never spoken of herself as an angel. Critics and reviewers confer the title referring both to vocal quality and to her ethereal beauty. Emmylou’s musical “angel” statement is to be found solely in her gospel album, Angel Band. Yet the angel image arguably serves Emmylou well in context of the angelic traits in popular speech, literature, and art: purity, innocence, radiance, magnanimity, benevolence. The angel image is surely powerful because one does not affront an angel. One keeps a reverential distance.
In terms of a very tough music business in which women have been readily dismissed as mere “chick singers,” the angel image is extremely powerful. It enables a rather shy female country singer to exert force in a world of aggressive, egoistic musicians, producers, label executives, handlers of every stripe. Emmylou’s personality is not in-your-face aggressive, like Tanya Tucker’s or Lorrie Morgan’s, nor genially garrulous, like Dolly’s. Harris is reticent and guarded.
— CECILIA TICHI
ND #18, November-December 1998
Dan Murphy, who has seen every rung on the ladder of success with Soul Asylum, some more than once, describes Golden Smog as pure. Born in the close-knit Minneapolis scene of the late-’80s, the Smog began as little more than a lark, an opportunity to goof off and play cover songs with friends, some in your other band, some not. While that still holds true on some level, Golden Smog has evolved over the years into much more: an outlet for songwriters like the Jayhawks’ Gary Louris and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy to record songs that didn’t “fit” their other bands; a place where musical collaboration was encouraged; and a company of peers that has supported each other through professional and personal hard times.
— ERIK FLANNIGAN
ND #19, January-February 1999
Don Williams’ name has surfaced on occasion amidst the careers of many of America’s finest country and folk artists. John Prine and Kevin Welch have each written a couple of songs for him, and Williams has sung duets with both Kathy Mattea and Emmylou Harris. The latter duet, an incandescent version of Townes Van Zandt’s “If I Needed You”, is one of the peak moments in Williams’ career.
“I was on tour in Texas with Waylon Jennings and Emmylou,” he remembers. “I watched Emmy’s show one night in Houston and it inspired me to write a song called ‘Crying Eyes’. It wasn’t about her, but it was her approach. I wrote it on the way up to Fort Worth and played it for her in the dressing room. She loved it and said we ought to do that as a duet, so that’s how that started. So we recorded my song, the Townes song and a couple of [Bob] McDill songs, but we only released ‘If I Needed You’. It’s just a great song.”
— GEOFFREY HIMES
ND #20, March-April 1999
Like desperadoes waiting for a train — that is, like two men waiting with practiced ease for their proper work to resume — Steve Earle and Del McCoury sit patiently for interviews in Earle’s seldom-used E-Squared office. Through the walls one can sometimes hear Steve’s teenage son, Justin, playing his father’s guitar, struggling with the writing of songs when he’s meant to be interning (read: answering phones) at the label. Earle toys at his desk with a gold lighter for his pipe, an accouterment to his latest plan to quit cigarettes. McCoury sprawls easily from a chair in the corner, his long legs in freshly pressed jeans, hair perfect, manner courtly. Words come in torrents from Earle, and in slow drops from McCoury.
An unlikely pair, perhaps. And perhaps not.
— GRANT ALDEN
ND #21, May-June 1999
The vast majority of bands that have spent a few years on the alt-country front — from Wilco to the Bottle Rockets to the Jayhawks to Freakwater to the Backsliders to the Bad Livers to the Derailers to the Honeydogs — have undergone at least some sort of membership shuffle in the midst of the madness. That the Old 97’s have stayed solid is a testament largely to the compatibility of the people involved.
“It’s really hard to keep a band together,” Rhett Miller acknowledges, “and the fact that the four of us get along as well as we do, and to have as healthy a relationship as we do, is huge.”
Murry Hammond puts it this way: “The main thing that makes any band stick is that you get along with each other. That is absolutely the first thing. You could play the crappiest music in the world, the most derivative music in the world, but as long as you get along, well, you’re probably gonna have a pretty good time in that band.”
— PETER BLACKSTOCK
ND #22, July-August 1999
Overseen by Parsons’ greatest protege and acolyte, Emmylou Harris, Return Of The Grievous Angel features renditions of his songs by ’90s acts including Beck, Gillian Welch, Wilco and Whiskeytown, as well as artists from the generation right behind Parsons including Elvis Costello, Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams — all of whom, like Parsons, have tenaciously followed their artistic muses, damn the commercial consequences. These are the people for whom Parsons’ message and music have been the most profound.
“Gram would be horrified by the state of country music today,” says Harris. “But he’d have a big ol’ smile on his face to hear Lucinda Williams and Steve Earle and a lot of the great stuff out there that you won’t hear on mainstream country radio.”
— HOLLY GEORGE-WARREN
,!–nextpage–>ND #23, September-October 1999
Much as family singers have done from the Carter Family on down, the Millers’ harmonies convey a rarely matched depth of intimacy. Witness “Take Me Back”, an Appalachian waltz from Blue Pony, Julie’s 1997 HighTone disc. When she and Buddy sing, “If my love was fire/It would burn this house down,” they do much more than make the notes work. Their voices — his reedy, hers willowy, both exquisitely soulful — modulate in much the same way as partners who anticipate each other’s moves on the dance floor.
“Sometimes when we’re at home by ourselves, we sing instead of talk,” Julie says. “We jokingly sing about the cats and stuff, about whatever pops into our heads. But when Buddy joins in, he always knows the harmony, even on songs we’ve never sung before.”
— BILL FRISKICS-WARREN
ND #24, November-December 1999
Dolly Parton makes the point that even after she crossed over with her 1977 blockbuster “Here You Come Again”, she continued to have country hits. At the time, she declared: “I’m not leaving country music. I’m taking it with me!” She survived the slings and arrows of the naysayers, and, characteristically, she talks sometimes as if the other side of the coin is just as bright. She believes her label-free status is resulting in some of the best work she’s ever done.
“I don’t have to answer to record labels, heads of companies,” she says. “I don’t have to discuss it with a bunch of managers that head the record labels. I manage myself, I have my own record label, I have total freedom to do exactly what I want to do.”
— LINDA RAY
ND #25, January-February 2000
Doug Sahm’s death on November 18 from a heart attack may not necessarily spell the end of an era — an era the 58-year-old Sahm felt was long gone once computer chips replaced guitar picks as Austin’s cultural currency — but it most definitely diminishes the world of musical possibility. Not only was Doug a larger-than-life character — a world-class talker and self-mythologizer — but nobody better understood that categories are for small minds rather than big hearts, and that all Texas music emanates from a common source. Sahm seemed to have his own private pipeline into that source, and no single artist better embodied all of its various tributaries. His soul was sufficiently oversized to encompass infinite musical incarnations: child prodigy, high-school rocker, stoned hippie, psychedelic raver, new waver, blues revivalist, country traditionalist, Tejano expansionist, and, ultimately, Renaissance man of the Texas roadhouse.
— DON MCLEESE
ND #26, March-April 2000
The one song on Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s new album that best captures his beatific vision is his cover of Jesse Winchester’s “Defying Gravity”. For starters, there’s the bodhisattva-like whimsy of the lyrics: “I live on a big round ball/I never do dream I may fall/But even one day if I do/Well I’ll jump off and smile back at you.” Even more striking, though, is the way the song’s title captures the essence of Gilmore’s singular voice — most notably, the way that, on such stiff draughts of post-hillbilly existentialism as “Dallas” and “Tonight I Think I’m Gonna Go Downtown”, his ethereal timbre literally seems to defy the gravity or transcend the weightiness of his lyrics.
— BILL FRISKICS-WARREN
ND #27, May-June 2000
“I’m attracted to beautiful-sounding stuff,” Gary Louris says. “I didn’t grow up listening to Americana music; that was something I listened to when I was 27 or 28 years old. It was the last piece of the puzzle for me. [I was into] British punk rock, power pop and art rock. I’m pretty well-rounded in English and American pop music — from Cole Porter to Chemical Brothers, I’ve listened to and absorbed a little bit.
“The folk/Americana thing is not something I built my music around. It’s something that was added on top. I liked the soulfulness of traditional music, and I loved when that was put together with pop and took away some of the cheesiness. One of the highest compliments paid to us recently by a good musical friend was, ‘You guys are a soul band.'”
— ERIK FLANNIGAN
ND #28, July-August 2000
“Where I’d get a lot of my ideas for songs was, I’d get down and sit with the public when I’d get offstage at a club,” Loretta Lynn explains. “They would buy me Cokes, because I didn’t drink, and I’d listen to the women — like with ‘The Pill’. Everyone was taking the pill. Well, I wrote ‘The Pill’. No big deal, everybody took it but me, and I had the kids to prove it. And man! They started banning it down in the Bible Belt, the preachers were preaching, ‘Loretta Lynn is turning the people bad,’ you know. And the women would go out Monday morning and buy the record to see what I had to say.”
— JON WEISBERGER
ND #29, September-October 2000
“This is a love story,” Allison Moorer says, her husband at her side and Mermaid Avenue playing on the bar stereo. “The first song on the record, ‘The Hardest Part’, makes a statement about love: ‘The hardest part of living is loving, ’cause loving turns to leaving every time.’ That is what I believe to be true. No matter if you’re in a love relationship, in a relationship with parents or siblings, whatever it may be, it’s gonna end.
“Some people think I’m cynical, some people think that’s a hard way of looking at things. I just see it as reality. That’s the truth to me. Tracks two through ten back that up, for me. By the time you get to the end of the record, you know why I said that.”
— GRANT ALDEN
ND #30, November-December 2000
Though he regularly makes cracks about being an “old man,” age isn’t something Merle Haggard’s giving into just yet.
“People are only handicapped by age if they allow it to occur,” he sagely advises. “Tomorrow is the most important thing in your life. Today and tomorrow, not yesterday. Yesterday, unless you did something you’re going to have to pay for tomorrow, will fade into the past.
“I’ll tell you, what I’ve done is a lot and I’m proud of it, but what I’m doing and what I’m going to do are more important and fun to think about and talk about.
“If there’s one thing we could communicate with the younger people, it doesn’t make no difference if you’re 75 years old, you still want to live longer. Life is so precious, and no matter how long you been here you’ll never be here long enough.”
— KURT WOLFF