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(A Revised Auto Bio) My name is Rodney Crowell. I am a songwriter and recording artist. (A Grammy, an ASCAP
star of the future after the release of my first album and induction into the Nashville Songwriter’s Hall of Fame are few of the laurels that might decorate my calling card were I to carry one.) The place of my birth is Houston Texas. The Crowell / Willoughby blood-lines are of the Scottish,
Tennessee. In the late depression era barn dance society of Paris, Tennessee and Calloway County Kentucky, my father, his father, my mother’s mother and sister were fairly well known for their musical inclinations. The more industrious of this particular gene pool were recognized as the local purveyor’s of mirth and merriment. Assorted uncles were equally well known for their hard drinking and fistfights. My mother and father met during World War II at a Roy Acuff concert in Buchanan, Tennessee. Eager to flee the farm, they married and eventually moved to Houston. In the late fifties, my father formed a musical outfit called J.W. Crowell and the Rhythmaires. The honkytonks and icehouses plentiful on Houston’s East Side gave my father a format for his particular blend of hardcore honkytonk, Texas swing and Appalachian folk music. It was my colorful good fortune to be, at the age of eleven and twelve, the drummer of this illustrious musical combo. When the cute novelty of the child drummer wore off (truth is I couldn’t play very well), it was decided I would give up my seat in the Rhythmaires rhythm section. At the age of fifteen, with two older guys and a girl drummer my own age, I formed a rock and roll band called the Arbitrators. In high school, I made most of my spending money playing teen parties and legion hall dances with The Arbitrators. Along with my college room mate, Donivan Cowart and his truck driving older brother, I began dabbling with the notion of writing my own songs. Donivan and I dropped out of college believing ourselves destined to take our place among the elite songwriters in Nashville. With a few bucks in our pockets we arrived in Nashville on an August night in 1972. It was our good fortune to fall in with the misfit songwriters and self styled characters who used Bishop’s Pub as a combination soup kitchen and open mike stage. Donivan and I averaged five or six dollars a night passing the hat after a twenty minute set. Food and gas money. Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Robin and Linda Williams, Johnny Rodriguez, Lee Clayton, Skinny Dennis Sanchez, Steve Earle, David Olney, Richard Dobson, John Hiatt, Lucinda Williams, Bronco Newcombe, Harlan White, Steve Runkle, Uncle Walt’s Band, Steve Young, a singing trapeze artist, a sword swallower and a guy named Johnny Dollar were a few of the regulars at Bishops Pub. Guy and Susanna Clark, Townes Van Zandt and the legendary Mickey Newberry set the bar for what was considered real songwriting in early seventies Nashville. When Guy Clark took an unexpected liking to me, it became a singular goal in my life to write a song he would dub “a keeper.” After six months of failure, I wrote a song called “Bluebird Wine.” It caused Guy to raise an eyebrow in approval. With Guy’s approval, I then set out to win over Townes. This proved to be a difficult task. In the end, I had to settle for a grunt and a “yeah but can you do it again” when I played “Til I Can Gain Control Again” for the first time during an all night drinking and song swapping session. It was a great way to learn the craft of songwriting. ”’Til I Can Gain Control Again” and “Bluebird Wine” came to Emmylou Harris’s attention as she was preparing for her first album in late 1974. She recorded both songs. As a result of this rather fortunate turn of events, it was my good fortune to become a family friend and collaborator of Emmylou’s. When Emmylou formed The Hot Band in ‘75, I moved to Los Angeles as her rhythm guitarist, harmony singer and songwriter. Thanks to Emmylou’s rising star, I was able to hitch a ride around the world three times over. In the same way it was my great fortune to stumble my way onto the perfect situation to learn the art of songwriting, so it was, that with The Hot Band, I stumbled onto some of the best arranging musicians in all of Southern California. With Glen D Hardin, James Burton and Emory Gordy splitting their live dates between Elvis Presley and Emmylou in ‘75 and ‘76, I was given a crash course in the art of arranging music for the studio and stage. Thanks to the association with Emmylou, my reputation as a songwriter grew rather quickly. Warner Brother’s Records signed me to a recording contract late in 1977, my last year of touring full time with Emmylou. Since leaving The Hot Band, I have eleven solo records and a greatest hits package to show for my efforts as a recording artist. Along the way, I produced Rosanne Cash’s first five studio albums, Guy Clark, Beth Nielsen Chapman and a handful of others. I was also lucky to have several hundred versions of my songs recorded by an assortment of artists ranging from The Grateful Dead to Andy Williams. . . . I’ve done alright. The Houston Kid was the beginning of a new phase in my career, a re-invention of sorts. The record explored memories of the hard knock East Houston environment where I grew up. With it came a fundamental change in my approach to making records. Fate’s Right Hand followed with a quasi-spiritual look at the complexities of living the so-called examined life. With all due respect to those who might have gotten attached to the records I made in the late nineteen eighties, I unapologetically claim The Houston Kid, Fate’s Right Hand, and The Outsider as the best work I've done as a recording artist. - Rodney Crowell |
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>>>> From: Chet Flippo To: Rodney Crowell Subject: Stuff and things Date: Thursday, February 24, 2005, at 11:14 PM Rodney, Sorry to be so long in stepping into this fast-moving stream. I always try to get some undivided time for serious listening and my time has been pretty divided recently. Also, I’m a bit trepiditious about commenting on people whose work I admire. That said, I started listening to “The Outsider” in a hotel room overlooking Hollywood late at night, which has always been one of my favorite vistas to look out on while contemplating matters of great import, popular culture and society. Hollywood has a way of wiping the mind clean (or perhaps empty) and rendering it able to see and listen in fresh ways. And my initial reaction to “The Outsider” is that it’s an exuberant, freewheeling and very spirited music that takes me through the issues spawned during the past few decades without at all dwelling on the past. In a way it takes me back to seeing you and Guy [Clark] and Townes [Van Zandt] and the other songwriters in Houston at clubs like Sand Mountain and The Jester when the music was at once full of joy and still fairly earnest and extremely optimistic. The sort of unrestrained esprit of that era is captured in your words “Lean into this world without restraint” as you sing in that desperately beautiful song “Beautiful Despair.” What was your first building block in putting this whole thing together? CHET >>>> From: Rodney Crowell To: Chet Flippo Subject: Re: Stuff and things Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 14:34:49 +0000 Chet: The Outsider began insinuating itself while I was reading “The Art Of Living” a collection of translated essays by a Roman slave turned philosopher named Epictetus born 50 A.D. The song “(Epictetus Speaks) Dancing Circles Round The Sun” came to me when I was forced to go to the dictionary to look up the word ‘disputation’. The words “a formal rhetorical exercise in which somebody defends a thesis” struck a chord (no pun). I began writing in such a way as to defend the basic philosophies by which I live. A bit high minded I’ll admit but I’ll take what I can get. The end result, I was pleased to find, has a serious bounce to it. “Ignorance Is The Enemy” lay unfinished in a studio vault, a contender for the album Fate’s Right Hand not yet fully realized. The song itself is an experiment in which I give the God of my understanding both a male and female voice. A cosmic version of the mother/father principle if you will. I called Emmylou Harris and John Prine and asked If they would be interested in assuming the roles. Neither said no. I enlisted a heavenly choir of earthly angels to assist me singing the choruses and voila, serious bounce of another kind. RODNEY >>>> From: Chet Flippo To: Rodney Crowell Subject: Two Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 11:46 Rodney, I didn’t know “The Art of Living” but your vivid evocation of it in the song “Epictetus Speaks (Dancing Circles Round the Sun)” will drive me to read it. I too didn’t know the word “disputation” but I recalled that Mark Twain now and again used the word “disputatious” to great effect and Twain was so wonderful at context that readers could grasp what even unfamiliar words meant when he used them. I’ve always wondered if Twain could have been a great songwriter; although, since he was paid by the word, he perhaps could never have handled the economy of words that songwriters must master. Which, by the way, I think you do marvelously here in a song that fairly lunges from the speakers and grabs me by the throat and shakes me: “The Obscenity Prayer” is a catalog of modern-day pop-cultural excesses. You sing, “I just want to get what’s mine.” It’s in the great tradition of Broadsides, which of course were song messages of topical subjects of the day told in the form of street posters and streetcorner songs long before tabloid newspapers existed. And that’s what you years ago were doing in the coffee houses and the bars... And not many others are doing that these days... CHET >>>> From: Rodney Crowell To: Chet Flippo Subject: Re: Two Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 19:10:35 +0000 Chet, I suspect that were Mark Twain born near the middle of the twentieth century, and if there was an ounce of musicality in the Clemens gene pool we’d have had Tom T. Hall, John Prine, Tom Waits, Bob McDill, Gram Parsons and Dolly Parton rolled into one. If vividity is indeed a word (if not, I claim it) Twain’s wordsmithing oozed the stuff. Thank you for mentioning “The Obscenity Prayer.” It is a favorite of mine. It was my intention, in writing the song, to vivify the selfishness and greed propelling corporate American culture toward its undoing, think Enron. For first impressions to suggest I’m having a nasty go at the conservative right is a fair assessment. But for me, the song draws it’s deeper strength from profiling the a-political baby boom centrists whose passion for living is defined by creature comfort. That and the band’s garage rock commitment to playing the song as if their clothes were on fire. Much of “The Outsider” was written while on tour in Europe. I owe the idea for “Don’t Get Me Started” to being verbally abused by a woman in a Belfast pub. Poor gal found herself an American to hold accountable for the generic ills of a world gone mad. Had I been allowed to get a word in edgewise, the woman might have learned there was more common ground between us than cultural difference. “Don’t Get Me Started” is a one sided rant set in a bar wherein the narrator fires off a litany of anti-conservative incantations while owning his alcohol fueled tendency toward excess verbiage. Were I of Dixie Chick repute, the song would doubtless get me black-balled. “Glasgow Girl” was written in Edinburg. >> >>>> My wife Claudia and I were sitting in a sidewalk cafe, deep in conversation about museum quality art when I noticed a woman pass us by with the most milk white skin imaginable. Unguarded, I blurted out: “That woman has skin like milk.” Claudia nodded approval of my observation and returned to her sketch-pad. (She loves to draw in public.) A moment later Claudia looked up and smiled, “Why don’t you write about it? Great woman, my wife; she never sees my creative process as being at her expense. “Beautiful Despair” came from a post gig party at a friend’s house in Belfast. While the party raged on above us, my friend and I sat on the floor listening to Bob Dylan records. When “Every Grain Of Sand” finished playing, my friend, who is an honest to God white wig wearing barrister, turned to me and said, “Dylan’s as powerful as Byron.... I drink because I’ll never write like either of them.” I was moved near to tears by the dark beauty of my friends resignation. The next day, driving down to Dublin, the words beautiful despair seeped into my consciousness and I recognized them as the beginning of a song. I owe my friend James a debt of gratitude for giving me a glimpse into his heart. Beautiful Despair is his song. If it plumbs a fraction of the depths of his poetic sensitivity, I will have achieved my goal. RODNEY >>>> From: Chet Flippo To: Rodney Crowell Subject: Two Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 06:38 Rodney, I don’t perceive this album as being in any way political. I think it’s extremely realistic. Anyone with half a brain can see the excesses that have wrecked the world as we know it. Just in Houston alone, the Enron spectacle was breathtaking in its arrogance. If Enron hadn’t blown up when it did, the company’s mastermind Ken Lay was said to be in line to become the next U.S. Secretary of Commerce. That brings to mind a fascination I’ve always had about Houston. As a wildcatter oil town, it has always seemed to have a freewheeling, wide-open if-it-works-do-it kind of spirit. It has produced you, Townes, Guy, Lightnin’ Hopkins, ZZ Top, and Bobby “Blue” Bland to name just a few. If that’s not a freewheeling, eclectic kind of output, I don’t know what is. Obviously as was self-evident in “The Houston Kid” and “Fate’s Right Hand”, Houston had a great deal to do with forming what you have become. Just the fact that Houston is the only big city with no zoning laws whatsoever shapes one’s everyday life there. I’ve always found the juxtaposition of architectures there to be endlessly interesting, not to mention seeing the kinds of businesses nestled up against each other. I wonder if Enron could have happened anywhere else.... I certainly can grasp the vantage point you had of looking at this country from abroad while writing “The Outsider.” That of course reminds of Twain’s book “Innocents Abroad,” which started as a series of travel letters for a California newspaper and became along the way a very telling social commentary. By the way, I find the title song “The Outsider’s” wry observations very satisfying. And the sax bursts are a great musical touch....The genesis of the song? CHET >>>> From: Rodney Crowell To: Chet Flippo Subject: Re: Two Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 03:34:46 +0000 Chet, Hallowed be The Houston Ship Channel . . . fifty miles of salt marsh bayou turned worlds longest deep water shipping lane, host waterway to the most sludge pumping, poisonous gas spewing paper mills, chemical plants and oil refineries in the western hemisphere. The Houston Ship Channel on whose creosote soaked banks new monied oil-boom tycoons rub chaffed elbows with Mexican drag line operators and coon-ass pile drivers in a pay-day Friday winner-takes-all beer and whiskey chugging contest. Piss on Enron, Houston’s heart and soul is over on the east side where New Orleans rhythm, Fort Worth blues and Nashville heartbreak once spilled out of it’s honkytonk and icehouse juke boxes onto an endless sea of oyster shell parking lots. That’s right cat daddy, Houston Texas, land of hot toddies, cold watermelon and lying sons-of-bitches who’d rather gut you with a Barlow knife than listen to a sappy song. Not a bad place to come from. I take it as a good sign you don’t see “The Outsider” as being particularly political, with the presidential election a thing of the past I’m ready to move on. I’m much more interested in what unites the human beings walking this earth than what divides them. I had finished what I thought was a pretty good album in time for the Christmas holidays. Listening to the sequence, something made me hesitant thinking the LP was indeed finished. I didn’t have the right track to follow “Obscenity Prayer.” I was also mildly concerned that the album’s topical point of view came off a bit judgmental toward my conservative brothers and sisters. My intention writing “The Outsider” was to find a way to accommodate both sides of the I’m right / you’re wrong, conservative / liberal, mud-slinging contest without betraying what little moral conscience I’ve been able to muster. I also wanted a cool groove with a splash of funk. I would not be forthcoming if I did not say it is my opinion that in this post modern, ego-driven, media-trained world of my way or the highway God is “The Outsider.” Need I remind you Chet, dear boy, I’m the lapsed Buddhist son of a hell-fire breathing, unknown tongue speaking, Pentecostal mother, what else am I to do but strip search the human condition for signs of a song? RODNEY >>>> From: Chet Flippo To: Rodney Crowell Subject: Re: Two Date: Mon Feb 28, 2005 7:45:25 PM US/Central Rodney Amen, brother. I was raised Assembly of God myself in Texas and the speaking in tongues made me all the more receptive to rock and roll when it finally came along. Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis were very much cut from some of the same cloth as many of the preachers I saw as a child. Do you think there’s inevitably a thread of theology of some sort in works by any serious artist? I know that I was not at all surprised to see you covering Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm” here, even though you seldom cover anybody else’s stuff and I don’t recall you ever covering Dylan. The core message of “Shelter” though is of a piece with the themes you’re addressing throughout the album. I’m surprised no college professors have ever taught classes on ‘The Theology of Bob Dylan.” God knows his lyrical mysticism is steeped in religion. So why did you decide to include “Shelter” here? And to use it to set up the powerful album closer “We Can’t Turn Back”? CHET >>>> From: Rodney Crowell To: Chet Flippo Subject: Re: Two Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2005 01:15:32 +0000 Chet The duet of “Shelter From The Storm” was originally recorded for a television show, The show’s producers wanted Emmylou Harris and I singing alone as well as together. Thus the modulating arrangement. At first, I was convinced we were fools to tinker with a Dylan song. Then I remembered the liberties he had taken with his melodies the last few times I’d seen him perform. I must say I think Emmy and I sound damn good together. We always have. As for Dylan’s mysticism, my father knew some pretty far out Appalachian dead baby songs, “Little Rosewood Casket” and “Put My Little Shoes Away” come to mind, neither of which are as existentially out-there as “It’s Albright Ma” or “ My Back Pages.” For my money, Dylan and Johnny Cash are the Lancelot and Arthur of singing troubadours. “Say You Love Me”, is a re-write of a song I first came up with in the early nineties. After playing the song every night for the past three years, I was sure I had a grasp on how to record it. Opening the record, it puts me in mind of The Yardbirds and The Easy Beats. “We Can’t Turn Back” was written specifically to end the album. I think of it as an existential gospel song that asks the question, if life is a journey from which there is no turning back, why aren’t more of us enjoying the ride? peace..... RODNEY >>>> From: Chet Flippo To: Rodney Crowell Subject: Re: Two Date: Tue, Feb 29, 2005 05:24:13 PM US/Central Rodney, Well said. I daresay I think that you are helping quite a few of us enjoy the ride. Play on.... CHET |
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WITH THE OUTSIDER Album due August 16th mostly written on tour in Europe Crowell’s success as a songwriter subsidizes his recording independence Rawest AND most subtle chapter yet from an artist who has said that he "strip-searches the human condition for signs of a song" In 2001, after a six year hiatus, Rodney Crowell re-started his career. Of course, as a blue-ribbon songwriter and gifted producer, Crowell's career had never stopped. But for a long while he had craved something different, something both broader and closer-to-the-bone, with regard to the albums that bore his name. "I was feeling around in the dark, but I knew I was going to find it," says Crowell about the elusive artistic turn he felt determined to discover and execute. His acclaimed collection 'The Houston Kid', with its autobiographical foundation, began the Texas native and Nashville resident's intense new story, followed three years later by 'Fate's Right Hand'. Now comes 'The Outsider', the third offering of Crowell's artistic transformation. He knows that, as a songwriter, he has and does enjoy success; Keith Urban's recording of Crowell's "Making Memories of Us" recently spent five weeks atop the country charts, and this is no isolated incident. "Now and again mainstream artists will call me looking for songs," Crowell says. "Sometimes I'll have one, other times I won't. To be honest, apart from the collaborations with some wonderfully talented people, the reason I live in Nashville -- it's not the gist of how I conduct myself as an artist -- is that I know that I'm not too far away from an occasional explosion that sends money to subsidize the records I want to make. I've basically made my last three albums out-of-pocket." On 'The Houston Kid' Crowell approached the narrative element of his work with a new-found concentration and acuity; on 'Fate's Right Hand' he stayed with his narrator, but viewed him from increasingly more emotional and psychological perspectives. "With 'The Houston Kid'," Crowell says, "I was working with a composite of myself and of others I grew up around in Houston. I did grow up in a drunk, rowdy, domestically violent household, but so were all the other households around me. So that main narrator was myself. With 'Fates' Right Hand' I looked to articulate the interior spirituality of that kid, who was now living in an adult world." 'The Outsider' continues Crowell's emphasis on the frequently jarring present. It is an 11-song collection written and conceived during the past U.S. election year, a time during which Crowell was touring overseas with a straightforward rock band. "The basic Beatles line-up," Crowell says, "that's what it was -- bass, drums, two guitars. That really influenced how I put the songs together, along with the fact that I was writing a lot of it while on tour, at hotels and on days off, much of the time in Europe. When we got to the studio, I realized that these songs meant basically two guitars, bass, and drums with minimal keyboards added -- with the exception of a couple tunes produced more lushly." It is an album that begins with Crowell, on the talkative, hung-over "Say You Love Me," strongly delivering the line "I been up all night the night before/ My teeth are dirty, my eyes are sore." Recorded outside Nashville, produced by Crowell and Peter Coleman, 'The Outsider' brims with stripped-down electricity, ignited emotion, and experimental energy and space. Crowell describes the aura of the album like this: "as if our clothes were set on fire." In songs such as "The Obscenity Prayer (Give It to Me)" -- a "greedy bastard prayer," in Crowell's word, in which a manic guy talks out of both sides of his mouth -- and the boisterous "Don't Get Me Started" various narrators try to make sense of their outlooks, viewpoints shaped by a world Crowell himself finds distinctly troubling. "I remember thinking while I was playing those concerts 'I'm an expatriate'," Crowell says. "I was walking the streets of Edinburgh, thinking that. I was letting the romance of that enshroud me, and then, being in a pub with rowdy drunks and feeling the hostility -- not so much in Scotland, but a couple times in Belfast. I was thinking, 'I gotta play this close to the chest, and make my points.' I had to use some guile and subtlety because I knew that the blanket statement -- which was: 'Don't blame me, I'm not like the rest of those bastards' -- wouldn't work. I think that's why I set 'Don't Get Me Started' in a bar. The narrator, the list of things that are bugging him -- you know, the politicians and the corporations -- that's all the stuff that's bugging me, too. But I made him, as a narrator, drunk and belligerent, too. He's proceeding with a certain amount of awareness that he can also be a bore." The album contains some of Crowell's finely wrought balladry, such as "Beautiful Despair," which beings with a memory of hearing "Dylan drunk at 3 AM," and the hopeful climactic mid-tempo "We Can't Turn Back," as well as a version of Dylan's "Shelter from the Storm," sung as a duet with Emmylou Harris. But the dominant mood of this Crowell collection is less deliberate. "I was kind of processing some anger, too," Crowell says. "Most of these songs were written in the election year, and I was not happy with what I was seeing, you know. My rule of thumb is always show-don't-tell. I don't think it will ever be my style take a big mallet and just slam it, bust the window out with it. I have to get there in a more subtle way." That subtle way, though, coincides with instinctiveness on 'The Outsider'. "This was more of an instant-feeling expression," Crowell says. "I was in Europe. I was pissed-off. I was interested in my contribution to this night-after-night, stripped-down band, playing in clubs and theaters. That's what triggered what I ended up doing with these songs -- that feeling. It was all there, then we were in the studio, and now we have a record." It's the latest, rawest, most subtle chapter yet from an artist who has said that he "strip-searches the human condition for signs of a song." ---- 2005 tour dates here |
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