Growing up in public- A brief history of ND
ND #31, January-February 2001
“When I first left Houston, I tried to deny my background, like a lot of 22-year-olds,” Rodney Crowell says. “And when I had a little success in the music business, I felt like I was wearing the emperor’s new clothes. I was suddenly rubbing elbows with millionaires, and I had never been in a sit-down restaurant until I was 13. I was ashamed of my lack of worldliness.
“But now I’ve come to love where I’m from. I love writing about it. People always ask me, ‘What is it about Texas?’ All I can say is we went barefoot seven months of the year, everyone was crazy, and there was a big blue sky overhead. Most of the people in the neighborhood were characters whose lives were poetry. Huck Finn came out of that kind of neighborhood and so did a lot of other great literature and music.”
— GEOFFREY HIMES
ND #32, March-April 2001
“I’ve spent all my money that I made off writing going down the road, paying people,” Billy Joe Shaver says. “My wife used to just have a fit about it. She said, ‘You take all our money and spend it on these damn guys going up and down the road.’ I said, ‘Well, I like doing that, you know. I like singing and stuff.’ ‘But you ain’t no good at it.’ And I said, ‘Well, I do the best I can, just like the writing,'” and he’s laughing pretty good by now.
“She’d say, ‘You’re no good at that, either.’ And dancing. She used to tell me, ‘You ain’t got an ounce of rhythm in your body.’ And she mighta been right about the dancing. But the rest of it, I don’t guess so. But I sure miss her. I miss Eddy, too. But, there ain’t nothing bring ’em back. Just try to get with ’em later on.”
Just don’t be in a hurry.
“Well, it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t seem like I can. I’d be losing all I ever worked for if I tried to do myself in. My words wouldn’t mean nothing if I don’t practice what I preached. Not that I’m that important, but I’m just as important as anybody else.”
— GRANT ALDEN
ND #33, May-June 2001
When Lucinda Williams and Dub Cornett take me on a tour of East Nashville — “the cool part of the city, the places people should really see when they come here” — we pass places like the God Almighty Cafe and the Hair of Sensation Beauty Salon. Finally, we pull into a 24-hour barbecue joint. It’s one in the morning and we’re hungry again. Since the restaurant is a take-out place where you order at the window, we eat in the truck. Lucinda unwraps her chicken sandwich only to find that it is a whole chicken breast — bone and all — between two pieces of white bread. “In my 48 years, I’ve never had a sandwich that had bone in it, ” she says, holding up a sauce-soaked piece of bread. She eats it anyway, tearing the meat off the bone with her hands. “It’s good, though.”
When one of us comments on how hilarious it seems for a celebrity to be sitting in her truck, eating a chicken-with-bone sandwich, Lucinda looks genuinely surprised. “I’m not a celebrity,” she says, holding shreds of chicken up to her mouth. “Am I?”
— SILAS HOUSE
ND #34, July-August 2001
There are those who would trot out critical double-speak like “real” or “authentic” to tout Patty Loveless’ MCA sides over her less overtly hard-core recordings for Epic. Such terms, though, are never terribly helpful when discussing music that is inherently commercial, music that, no more or less than the latest records by Wilco or the Wu-Tang Clan, is made by artists who aspire to some sort of mass appeal.
More to the point, Loveless’ records with Emory Gordy at Epic constitute one of those increasingly rare convergences of artistry and popularity. Indeed, Loveless’ sides for Epic are to her work at MCA what Elvis’ comeback recordings are to his sessions for Sun: Slicker, punchier, and more “produced,” and gloriously so, just as they are better and much more authoritatively sung.
— BILL FRISKICS-WARREN
ND #35, September-October 2001
“Somebody asked me if we struggled, if we walked the line between commerciality and our own thing,” Gillian Welch says, choosing carefully. “No, we don’t deal with that at all! But that issue of modernity versus traditionalism, conservation, yeah, we deal with that a lot. For instance, for three years now, we’ve been lucky enough to play Ralph Stanley’s festival. That’s a really heavy gig for us. That’s a difficult gig for me.
“That’s one of the proving grounds for us, personally, of that exact issue. Are we modern, and yet do these people — who are some of the staunchest traditional music fans I’ve ever seen — do they like us? Because the majority of people up there are playing only Stanley Brothers songs that are 40 or 50 years old. And then I get up there, and I’m playing new songs that they’ve never heard before? You know, what does that mean? So that’s a big deal, for us.”
— GRANT ALDEN
ND #36, November-December 2001
If there’s one particular quality that has tended to draw listeners to the music Jay Farrar has made over the years, it is his voice. His strength is not a matter of histrionics, though he can convey considerable emotional power at times; nor is it related to range, though he sometimes hits high notes that are beyond the reach of most male singers who prefer to forsake falsetto. Rather, it is a simple sense of melodic expression, which resonates with an impact that’s difficult to describe or convey in words.
“The thing about Jay’s voice is, it’s like, he opens his mouth and it’s just pure fucking tone,” says John Agnello, who co-produced Sebastopol with Farrar….”There’s a bar in Hoboken [New Jersey] that I sometimes go to with friends, and No Depression [Uncle Tupelo’s debut album] is in the jukebox, and I’ll punch up ‘Whiskey Bottle’, and it’ll just come on in the middle of the night, and it’s just — it gives me chicken skin to this day.”
— PETER BLACKSTOCK
ND #37, January-February 2002
“I spent my childhood living on the Nullarbor Plain and having no material things at all, but those were the happiest days of my life,” Kasey Chambers says. “I’ve gone from having the most simple life in the whole wide world to having the world’s most complicated life. Part of that is just missing your childhood; it’s the difference between being 10 and being 25. Even if you didn’t grow up on the Nullarbor and then go into the world’s most superficial business, you might feel that way.”
— GEOFFREY HIMES
ND #38, March-April 2002
It’s said that “God inhabits the praises of [God’s] people,” and that’s certainly the case with the Fairfield Four, whether they’re lifting their voices with Elvis Costello at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall or feeling the spirit in black worship back at home. The latter has always been the group’s element, even though for the past decade or so the people who have gathered to hear the Fairfields have been predominantly white.
The same has been true of their collaborators, who have included everyone from Kevin Welch and Steve Earle to Pam Tillis and the Nashville Bluegrass Band. Raised on rock ‘n’ roll, this new generation of fans seems to appreciate, among other things, the way the Fairfields’ hard-driving rhythms anticipated those of Elvis, Little Richard, and the Beatles.
— BILL FRISKICS-WARREN