Mavericks of Sound Read online

  Mavericks of Sound

  Mavericks of Sound

  Conversations with Artists Who

  Shaped Indie and Roots Music

  David Ensminger

  ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

  Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

  Published by Rowman & Littlefield

  A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

  www.rowman.com

  16 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BT, United Kingdom

  Copyright © 2014 by David Ensminger

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ensminger, David, 1971–

  Mavericks of sound : conversations with artists who shaped indie and roots music / David Ensminger.

  pages cm

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-1-4422-3590-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-3591-5 (ebook)

  1. Alternative rock musicians—Interviews. 2. Alternative rock music—History and criticism. I. Title.

  ML400.E57 2014

  781.66—dc23

  2014010002

  TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Unless otherwise noted, all photographs in the book are from the author’s collection.

  To Julie Ensminger

  My Muse and Love

  Preface

  These compiled interviews preserve and share much of the work I developed at periodicals like Thirsty Ear magazine. Based out of Santa Fe, NM, editor Mike Koster let me dig deep into the lives of country and roots rock mavericks for his regional free publication, which quickly gained notoriety and respect for its integrity, scope, and earthy style. Koster sought a Rolling Stone­–style approach: the art of the interview was considered prime. He did not want to waste paper on drivel.

  In my tenure there, I discovered my own appreciation for the subtly shaded substance of conversation. Moreover, I believe my research allowed me to probe careers without (I hope) becoming overly mired in nostalgia and sentimentality. Ideally, I wanted to make sense of lifestyles, attitudes, pursuits, and aesthetic choices, all while making artists feel like they also owned the conversations. They had something at stake, I hoped, beyond mere publicity. Sometimes they kept me slightly at bay, and sometimes I triggered their love of writers, obscure fragments of culture, or deep pockets of their past. Sometimes they were ready and willing, filling phone calls with enthusiastic memories or swigging drinks and gesturing as my microphone contended with bar noise, coughing and honking traffic, the echoing blasts of sound checks, and fellow bandmates chortling.

  Some of the material reflects the raw goods of Left of the Dial (LOTD), too, a do-it-yourself, digest-sized, perfect-bound magazine I published from 2000 to 2005, which featured an all-interview format, along with prose written by artists. At the time, I felt that the MTV rat packs, punk-of-the-month bands, and indie rock clones were “tomorrow’s bargain-bin dust collectors, with a shorter shelf life than a corroded alkaline battery.” I sought out music that transcends genres, since people and art matter most, not the cult of the new espoused by faceless and warmed-over magazines that are often no more than industry mouthpieces full of hype, gloss, and a fake sense of careerism.

  I burned with the desire to go beyond the common and expected. I aimed for those I once described on promotional postcards as “people who still have music on fire inside of them, rockers who are under the spell of books, and those people who don’t think music belongs to elite critics” (as well as pigeonholing purists). “Wits and raw talent are the message: LOTD is the transmitter. Now stake your claim because here’s the new heresy and rebellion,” I avowed, producing eight issues that melded roots rock, Americana, and rockabilly artists with hardcore, post-punk, and modern indie music.

  All are defined by certain maverick qualities, including bucking trends, remaining resilient, maintaining a dedicated fan base, and forging very inchoate musical qualities. As the concerts of Austin City Limits pay witness, the fan base and crowds for the indie and roots genres often blur and overlap. The time is ripe to create a compendium that is equally unbound.

  Whereas my recent collection, Left of the Dial, focused exclusively on punk performers, this volume is more open-ended, diverse, and inclusive. I believe this is wise, since younger buyers, especially, don’t necessarily abide by singular musical tastes; instead, they swap and share music while scouring a huge cross-fertilized library. I also believe the interviews, most of them rarely seen (LOTD print runs were tiny), offer conversations that remain penetrating, insightful, far-reaching, and imbued with a sense of history and heritage, pop culture and politics, and surveys of personal ideologies and worldviews.

  I stand and deliver these to you, as is. These are interviews without fillers, adornment, and anything that might keep you at arm’s length from the words of the wise-blooded—the “rogues gallery” found herein from the ’zine that guided me from dive bars and taverns to buzzing phones in the midnight hour. Having spoken to these productive and potent “outsiders,” I consider myself lucky just to have been in their graces, if only for an hour, and to see the other side of musicianship away from stage glares, hand-scrawled set lists, and steady gazes. Dive into the marrow of the content, and you might be surprised by the musicians’ transparency and openness, their hidden hungers and long-held beliefs that go beyond the humdrum daily grind of reportage.

  Chapter 1

  The Song Is the Territory

  Singer-Songwriters

  These lauded singer-songwriters, from baritone Tom Russell to the bluesy Beat Generation–inspired Peter Case, explore the fabric and spirit of history though innovative and spirited narratives that bend and weave from personal observation to finely tuned close-to-the-ground research. These writers prove that the art of song—sometimes rustic, spiritual, and investigative—is alive and well, tucked in traditions that speak to newsprint issues and perennial affairs of the heart.

  Tom Russell: Chronicling History’s Heartbreaks

  Portions originally published in Thirsty Ear, October/November 2000; Left of the Dial, 2000; and Popmatters, August 2011.

  In a dark motel room below the steel fingers of Houston’s high-rises, Tom Russell slopes low in a chair, talking about his career like most men talk about women—molding and prodding every thought. “It’s really the most important record I’ve made,” he says about The Man from God Knows Where. Nominated in the early stages of the Grammy process for Best Contemporary Folk Record of 1999, The Man was Russell’s insightful if slightly mongrel collection of American voices and vignettes. The story line spanned his family’s migration from Norway and Ireland to America’s sometimes risky, cruel shores and included his father’s struggle with the sun-bleached California ranch dream gone bad.

  With his larger-than-life baritone and rustic intelligentsia style, Russell is the kind of astute writer who can dig effortlessly into lore, history, and popular culture. Whether spinning songs about Navajo rugs, the Seine River, Nina Simone, Africa, or bygone Hollywood, Russell is a distinct brand of songwriter with few peers. Sometimes hard-bitten, sometimes softly
sentimental, sometimes sardonic as hell, Russell mixes his past and present—sociology graduate, teacher, cab driver, writer, and painter—into a storehouse of song that some critics have likened to a melding of Howard Zinn and Walt Whitman.

  Your work reminds me of the “camera eye” technique of John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy, and his other technique of stopping the narrative for a moment to write a poem on the life of people that were important to his view of the overall American experience, like Eugene V. Debs. Are you familiar with his work?

  I know of him, but haven’t read him. It’s also Masters’ Spoon River anthology and even the influence of Sandburg’s poems, like “Chicago.” And the best of Beat poetry, some of Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and a guy named Lew Welch.

  Who wrote a poem named “Chicago,” too, about being a cab driver.

  Exactly. I was influenced by that, too, and still like the Beats, this alternative but personal “I was there” view of America. Like Kerouac’s “October in the Railroad Earth” and even down to Bukowski. I’m not one hundred percent into Bukowski, but I knew him a little bit and like his telling of “I’m an American spirit, I’ve lived through it, I lived through the post office and this is my story.”

  John Fante, too? Another older generation of California writers?

  I love Fante. And Brotherhood of the Grape is one of my favorite California books, and Leonard Gardner’s Fat City. But it came down to my father telling his story after he died, in the song “Chickasaw County Jail.” Like, this is what happened. I lost all the money and went to jail, and I’m going to win it back.

  Is the quintessential American character always about the friction between the idea of America and the reality of America in terms of the great dream?

  I think so, especially with the media being so heavy, and every three or four years the culture changes, and the TV, film, and major market radio is so strong in this country. Every five years people like Garth Brooks or some new form of movie casts a big mold over America, which doesn’t happen once you get outside of America, whether you’re going to Canada or Scandinavia.

  The mold drops off?

  You get a more objective look at what’s happening here with this culture that is moving so fast.

  Recently, there’s been a plethora of concept records with song cycles, including Mike Watt’s The Engine Room, Richard Thompson’s Factory, Joe Ely’s Chippy, and Bruce Springsteen’s Tom Joad. What is so appealing about that form of writing?

  Well, it’s cinematic, number one. Number two, I was not only raised on Bakersfield country, folk music, and movies but also on Broadway musicals, as corny as it sounds. I loved The Music Man; I loved some of the Rodgers and Hammerstein stuff. Even right on up to Les Misérables. Most stuff like Andrew Lloyd Webber I can’t take. But some of it is well written, and parts of which are sung by characters, that’s in the back of my head. Sometimes I mention that I saw Jerry Lee Lewis in a rock version of Othello called Catch My Soul, and it was amazing. He played the piano at the side of the stage in this real hick accent doing Shakespeare. It was bizarre, it was unbelievable, so I had that in the back of my mind when I had Dave Van Ronk do “The Outcast.” The black humor delivery is right out of Bertolt Brecht, a music hall thing. The scope was taken from that, from seeing stage plays and film and making a bigger statement. I knew I’d only have one shot at making a record that big. In a sense, it has done very well worldwide and gotten great press, but in a sense it’s intimidating for some people. I don’t know how many people will sit down and listen to the whole twenty-six pieces of music, one second less than the maximum time of a CD.

  There’s a real landscape of sounds behind the music too, including Sioux tribal chants . . .

  Those are field recordings that I got from the Smithsonian, and there’s circus music, an organ-grinder. I wanted to use more stuff, but I ended up just using a little, like the Walt Whitman piece, which most people weren’t even aware that it exists.

  It’s on an Edison wax cylinder.

  We grew up with an Edison wax cylinder because we had one of those Edison players. My brother still has it and it works. They had music, Sousa marches, and even some raps on there about a guy buying an automobile. Wild shit.

  In the Sioux tradition, if I’m right here, the Ghost Dance consisted of a group of dancers in a circle, and one dancer spinning furiously until they almost collapsed in a trance. Soon thereafter, the lone dancer gathered him/herself back up and sang a song that was just learned from the spirit world. That is not totally unlike your approach. You take songs that were essentially already out there, these voices, and you let them sing through you. You enmeshed your family history with American history at this poignant point, the songs themselves.

  I think so. And also, I knew I couldn’t stack one song after the other; it would be too much, too many words, too many stories. It magically came together with some of the instrumental parts. Besides the sound effects, I wanted some instrumental pauses, so not only could you think about a story, but there’d be a rest in between going on to something else. It doesn’t go A, B, C, and D. It’s kind of like a collage of voices and experience. And I wanted also to start with the sound of the Hardanger fiddle, which is a very Norwegian instrument, mixing with the sounds of the Irish pipe, representing the two sides of the family and then melting them together.

  And there’s a Johnny Cash guitar line thrown in.

  The basic core of Norwegian guys on the record is pretty freaky musicians. You can imagine how this record would have been if I recorded it in Nashville: it would have been very one-sided and straight. These guys think differently. They’re playing country and folk music as if it’s a Mingus thing—it’s floating out there on some different level. I mean the drummer is twenty-three years old and a lot of the time is playing with his hands, so it sounds like this very strange world jazz folk music.

  It doesn’t sound like a Steve Earle record.

  No, that’s a straight-ahead, country-edge sound. We were looking for bigger, broader strokes. Almost a symphonic sound. A soundtrack. And I told the producer I wanted to throw a couple of traditional songs into the mix for color, like “Rugged Cross,” which I thought was perfect for Iris DeMent, and “Wayfaring Stranger.” It blends very well with Irish and Norwegian melodies.

  It’s been said that unlike Steve Earle, who’s coming from Nashville’s underbelly and plays roots rock, you actually have your finger on the pulse of what’s happening not just in America but in Barcelona, Glasgow, Oslo, and elsewhere, giving you a different kind of international audience.

  There are two ways I differ from people like Steve and even Dave Alvin, who are so rooted in California and Nashville, and write from that. We’ve been touring over in Europe and Scandinavia for over twenty years. Though I came out of L.A., I’ve lived all over, including over there. I never felt an identity of being a Californian or Texan. I’ve felt more rootless in the way that I see myself. In doing the new record, I’ve probably come up with more than a few reasons why I’ve felt like this. It seems like my family came from Tinkers almost. My father was a horse trader deep down, and a gambler. And my brother’s that way, and my mother was a painter, writer, and artist. But as I trace back to what brought these people over, and why they were so restless anyway, I found out that they really just wanted more all the time. They were hustlers in a way.

  One reviewer said, “This is the history that should be taught in high school.” In the end, is this kind of impact, the idea that you’ve made your mark in the way that somebody may see American history, more important than selling 40,000 copies?

  That’s rewarding, and I get a lot of that, and not just from this record but also from songs like “Manzanar” (about Japanese-American internment camps in WWII). Grade school and high school teachers come up to me and say they played it in class.

  As a teacher, I feel that kids long for a narrative, that dates and names aren’t enough. They want the stories behind history.

  If people can
use this record like that, like this is Tom Russell’s opinion, so take it or leave it, then kids might get into it. Kids have really good built-in shit-detectors. Out of all those twelve years of education, you, like me, can probably count those teachers I admired, or that moved me, on one hand. And songs have the potential to move people tremendously. A three-minute piece of work, like a Van Gogh painting, can move you by just glancing at it, and so can a song. That’s probably attached to being a songwriter instead of a novelist because a novel is such an unfathomable job that you have to write every day.

  Not long ago, you heard from Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead, who prodded you down this path over two decades ago. Did that mean more to you than a dozen generous music reviews?

  Of course. Robert Hunter is one person in this business who really laid it on the line for me when I was a New York cab driver back in the 1980s. I picked him up late one night and sang him a song. He loved it. A few days later he got me up on stage and handed me his guitar and split. I’ve been on the road ever since. Never saw him again, until I heard from him about my last record, Blood and Candle Smoke. He dug it. Said some very nice things. You don’t get that kind of honesty anymore. He’s the real deal. He co-wrote a lot of songs on the last Dylan record. Robert is always on the frontlines of modern song.