Tag: levon helm

Shawn Colvin Still Going ‘Steady On’ With 30th Anniversary Acoustic Album

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Shawn Colvin’s new album will be intimately familiar to fans who have loved her from the start. To commemorate the 30th anniversary of her landmark debut album, Steady On, Colvin re-recorded the full album acoustically – and she’s posing on the cover with the same guitar strap she wore on the back of the original packaging, too.

Since her auspicious arrival on the scene, Colvin has sold millions of albums and won multiple Grammys, including her first one for Steady On, in the category of Best Contemporary Folk Recording. If you’ve seen her perform over the last 30 years, you’ve certainly heard these songs — “Shotgun Down the Avalanche,” “Diamond in the Rough,” and “Ricochet in Time,” among them. She invited BGS for a hotel room conversation while she was in Nashville for AmericanaFest, where she’s performing the album in its entirety.

BGS: When you went into these sessions, were you hoping to capture a certain sound for this version of Steady On?

SC: No, just an acoustic tone, a stripped-down, non-produced, sort of bare-bones rendition of the songs.

Because you’re so familiar with these songs, were you able to work pretty quickly?

Even though I co-wrote a lot of them with John Leventhal, he would give me pieces of production and I thought, the way I need to figure out how to write is to strip all this production down to just me and a guitar. Almost every song on the record began that way. I stripped it down. It’s the beginning of what became the produced version of Steady On.

I was curious if you wrote most of those songs on the same guitar.

Oh, I think so, yeah. The Martin D-28.

What is it about that guitar that suits you so well?

I bought that guitar in 1974, and it was a 1971. I was 18 and it was my dream to have a Martin guitar. I think I paid $400 for it. And it was just my guitar. I mean, that was a big deal for me to spend that kind of money. I played that guitar on the road I don’t even know how many years. I still have it. It’s pretty beaten up. And I retired it, but yes, in 1988 or ’87 whenever that was, that’s the guitar I was still using.

How many songs had you written up into the songs that were on Steady On?

Maybe three or four.

Wow. So these are some of your earliest songs.

Oh, yeah.

That’s pretty remarkable.

Well, I wasn’t really a songwriter. I wanted to be and I practiced at it, writing lyrics to John’s fully-produced pieces, which were really pop. And I love pop music, but I wasn’t very good at writing lyrics to it. You know, my heroes were all singer-songwriters from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Joni Mitchell in particular. Very personal stuff, and that’s not what I had been writing. I realized, I think I have my own story to tell and I opened up to that and then I liked what I was doing.

Were you living in New York at the time?

Yeah.

How did that city shape you as an artist, do you think?

Oh gosh, the city shaped me personally and artistically in a huge way. I underwent a lot of personal changes there, a lot of growing up, a lot of waking up. It’s a dose, as Levon Helm said in The Last Waltz. But I met people I’m still friends with to this day that really nurtured me in my 20s and helped me grow up. My best friend Stokes is still there in New York that I met in 1980. And the music scene was so rich!

I started out in Buddy Miller’s country band. That’s how I got to New York. He hired me to come sing because Julie had left the band. And he needed another, what we called then, girl singer. So I was in a band like that. I played solo acoustic at places like The Cottonwood Cafe and The Bitter End and I did anything I could make a buck at. I was also in a country band with Soozie Tyrell. I did rockabilly bands.

We were just putting together bands piecemeal, you know “Hey, can you make this gig?” Everybody was up for whatever, all the musicians, and you cobbled together a band from gig to gig, whatever you could get, just whatever we could do. So I learned a lot. I played a lot, which is part of my advice to anybody who might want it,who is a young up-and-comer. Play live. Just do it and do it and do it, you know? I think it makes you confident and good and better your craft and you learn. You’re a student.

What was your live show like at that time? Was it just you and the Martin, singing solo acoustic?

Yeah.

You were never intimidated by that?

Nobody ever listened.

What do you mean?

When I was doing bar bands four hours a night in the city, sometimes they did. That was the goal, to play well enough that maybe someone would listen. It’s where I developed this percussive guitar style that I have, because I thought, what can I do to make it sound like more instruments and do something a little bit different? So I made more noise that way. Sort of a rhythmic thing.

I think of that as your signature sound because I haven’t seen a lot of artists doing that.

And that came partly from Joni Mitchell, who made progressive, clicky sounds on the guitar. And I always thought she was using the back of her hand to go against the strings, this fleshy part of your thumb in the back of your hand. I realized later she was using her nails against the strings to give that click. But I developed it my own way.

As a new artist, how did you find your audience? Or how did your audience find you?

I started to make a name for myself a little bit down the Eastern seaboard, Cambridge and DC, New York, and some other areas in Massachusetts, and Philadelphia. So I was getting finally to play listening rooms rather than bars. I had a little bit of a draw. I got to go on college radio stations and they would play cassettes of mine. It was really helpful, especially in Cambridge, so I got some fans that way that weren’t just the New York people. Then when I put out the record, I wasn’t prepared it for what was going to happen. It was on Columbia Records and it was time for the big push. I’m like, “Sure, no problem.” And it was a grassroots global push. So that meant drive-time and morning radio shows, if they’d have me.

And God bless the label reps in all these different cities, which you don’t have anymore. Their job was to take you around the radio and try to get them to listen to you. And they had a reputation so they could usually get you in. Whether the radio station was really interested or not was always sort of up in the air. And then I would do press, anybody that would talk to me, a magazine and a paper — local, big, small, whatever, other radio if I could — and then I’d do a show at night. Sometimes there were 10 people. And I did that a lot. It was a groundswell, I guess you could call it. Radio stations did start picking up songs from the album. And next thing you know, I’d go back to a town like Boulder and people would come.

That is grassroots for real.

Oh yeah, for real. But you know, those people that have been with me from the beginning have stayed. I have a loyal following. It’s fantastic, yeah.

When Steady On was released in 1989, how did you define success at that time? What did success mean to you?

I remember being in Boulder and I had a day off and I like to ski. I was in a rental car and I was driving to… I can’t remember if it was Keystone, someplace close to Boulder, and I heard myself on the radio and I almost went off the road. That was to me a measure of success. Then the Grammy Award of course was pretty cool. Who could have thought that up?

How do you define success now?

I’d say first and foremost, if I write a song that I like, that’s the best feeling. It’s gotten harder to do for me. There’s less time, because there’s so much roadwork. Less drama in my life, to force me to the paper. There’s really not a better feeling than finishing a song. Writing is hard, but the fact that I can still sell tickets, that’s success to me. Not everybody’s in that position. I think those two things — and I can still do it. Physically I can still play and sing as well, in my opinion, as I ever have. So it’s kind of longevity and luck.

Photo credit: Deidre Schoo

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Jeff Hanna Reflects on ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Volume Two’

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Why mess with a classic? That was the original thought from a few members of Nitty Gritty Dirt Band when the idea was presented to record a sequel to their seminal 1972 album, Will the Circle Be Unbroken.

However, with encouragement from one of the group’s biggest fans, the legendary June Carter Cash, the recording sessions for Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Volume Two commenced in the winter of 1988, with a cast of accomplished musicians who are now considered cornerstones of Americana music.

Often referred to simply as Circle 2, the acclaimed project was released in 1989 and went on to win three Grammy Awards and a CMA Award for Album of the Year. To commemorate its 30th anniversary, Jeff Hanna shares its back story with the Bluegrass Situation.

Editor’s Note: Jeff Hanna and guest Sam Bush will participate in a screening of clips from a documentary film, The Making of Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Volume Two, at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville on Wednesday, September 11 at 11 a.m., during AmericanaFest.

BGS: Can you explain why Circle 2 is such an important album for the band?

Hanna: It’s important in our history because at that point, we were no longer just the kids. We were all in our early 20s when we did the first Circle record, making music with those revered folks. And so we had a different point of view, somewhat. Here we were in the midst of our mainstream country career, and we still revered the first album.

The way we viewed Circle 1 was like something untouchable – just leave it. It is what it is. As time went on and as that project matured, it mattered a lot to a lot of people, including us. So we resisted the concept of doing another Circle record. Especially me, Jimmy Ibbotson, and Jimmie Fadden. Bob Carpenter was like, “I didn’t get to play on the first one! I wasn’t in the band! I want to do it!” He was pretty excited about the concept, and Chuck Morris, our manager at the time, brought it up a bunch. But we waited a while, and by the time it came out, it was 17 years between the releases.

When did you decide to move forward with it?

We were on tour with the Johnny Cash show, which included the Carter Family, and we were in Europe. I think it was in 1988 in Switzerland. June came into our dressing room — and she would visit us a lot. She was really sweet and she loved to talk about Mother Maybelle, and how much she loved us. She called us “them dirty boys.” I love that. And at the end of the conversation, she said, “You know, if you all ever thought about doing another Circle record, John and I would really love to take part in it.”

That was the tipping point. If you have that sort of endorsement from folks we idolized, and who were so important in the history of this music – and music in general — we thought, “Well, there you go.” That’s what we did. The winter of ’88, we started making calls.

How did you come up with the guest list, so to speak, for this one?

Our approach was to delve more into the next generation of folks, like New Grass Revival, and certainly a lot of our singer-songwriter buddies, like Bruce Hornsby, John Hiatt, Rosanne Cash, and John Prine. We had only recorded a little bit with Emmylou Harris and we really wanted to work with her. And we were really excited to do a record with Levon Helm. That was one of the highlights.

I think the collaborative spirit of this album really shines through when Bruce Hornsby is playing “Valley Road” with you guys.

I’d never met Bruce Hornsby but I was a huge fan of his music. I heard “Every Little Kiss” on the radio and it just blew me away. But then I’m reading an article in a magazine, and it was a “desert island disc” thing, talking about the records that you’ve gotta have, and he mentioned Will the Circle Be Unbroken. It was like, WOW! So I somehow got his phone number, I called him up — cold-called him — and he said, “Oh yeah, man, I love that record, I love you guys.” I said, “You’ve seen us play?” He said, “Yeah, my brother and I sneaked in.” We were playing a college show in his hometown, and those guys started carrying amps into the venue. We were unloading the truck and they started carrying gear in, and ended up sort of hiding behind the bleachers, and when the show started, came out and watched the show.

We hit it off right away, so there’s a direct line to Circle 1 right there. And when we were putting together our core band for the sessions, of course we included our buddy Randy Scruggs (who was on the first Circle album), Roy Huskey Jr. (whose dad Junior Huskey played on the first album), Jerry Douglas, Mark O’Connor… It was so much fun walking in and making music with those guys every day. Chet Atkins is on a track and played one of my guitars, which I liked. I know I’m never selling that guitar.

One of the coolest tracks on there is “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” How did that come about?

We brought in Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman, because the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers were so important to us. The Byrds had done Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” but they wouldn’t play it on country radio, so we cut a version of “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” with Roger and Chris, and it became a Top 10 country single, which we thought was cool redemption. We were really excited about being on the track with them. We still play that tune now and again. That’s one of our favorites. We’re really happy to have a good excuse to play it, because for years we played it in sound checks anyway.

It’s been 30 years now, but what do you remember about how Circle 2 was received upon release?

Perhaps because we had the platform of being a hit country band right about then, the label promoted the heck out of the record when it initially came out. And it had hits on it, that’s the other thing. Circle 1 didn’t really have any radio impact, whereas Circle 2 had “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” and we had a song called “When It’s Gone” that was a Top 10 single.

It’s a significant record and it’s funny, having been there from the get-go with this band, and having that first Circle record so deeply ingrained in my DNA, I sometimes forget how important Circle 2 was to a lot of folks. I’ve had more than one songwriter and musician tell me, “That’s what got me into you guys.”

 

BGS Presents 30 Years of ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Volume Two’ at Americanafest

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What started as a music video concept for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band evolved into a 1989 full-length film documenting the all-star recording sessions for Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Volume Two. Nitty Gritty Dirt Band co-founder Jeff Hanna will present a rare screening of clips from The Making of Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Volume Two at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum on September 11 at 11 a.m., during AmericanaFest.

Hanna will be joined by bluegrass virtuoso Sam Bush, who appears in the film and on the album with New Grass Revival. Craig Shelburne, managing editor of the Bluegrass Situation, will moderate.

Produced by Joanne Gardner Lowell and Rosanne Cash, the film captures the band in the studio recording their groundbreaking project. Select clips will show performances by Johnny and June Carter Cash; Jerry Douglas; Emmylou Harris; Bruce Hornsby; Jimmy Martin; New Grass Revival; John Prine; Earl Scruggs; Randy Scruggs; Ricky Skaggs; and others. Will the Circle be Unbroken, Volume Two won three Grammy Awards as well as the 1989 CMA award for the Album of the Year.

Three decades after its release, Joanne Gardner Lowell offered some keen perspective on the film through an email interview with the Bluegrass Situation.

BGS: What was it about the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and this project that made it a compelling film subject for you?

JGL: ACME Pictures was contracted to make a video for the title track. This is pretty common. We signed the contract and when I asked what day during the multi-week schedule this song would be done, Jeff said, “All of them.” When I realized we would need to go to the studio every day for weeks to get this song, it seemed obvious we should shoot the whole experience — so we did.

How would you describe the mood, or the vibe, in the room during these sessions?

It was joyful in the studio. Each day the musicians came so ready to create and collaborate. We were honored to be in the room with it all. Being live made everyone really stay on top of their game. It felt like a family reunion on many days, and there was always a lot of humor and laughter. Our primary director, Bill Pope, captured so much of the mood with his amazing camera work.

It was also shot during the holiday season, so people were in a happy mood. Emmylou brought a handmade Christmas ornament you can see hanging in some of the shots. And my partner Rosanne Cash came into the studio with her newborn Carrie. I don’t think she was even two weeks old. Rose handed her to me and I held her tight while running sound for the track Rose and John Hiatt did together. Carrie never made a peep!

It was crucial to capture the acoustic nature of these sessions. What was your audio setup like?

I had a simple Nagra tape recorder just to have an edit track to work from and to record interviews. I had a single mic that I would place in the room to catch all the conversation, as some of that was obviously not recorded for the album and we wanted it for the film. Although, during our interview with Emmylou Harris, the band loved what she said so much that those comments ended up on the album.

Do you remember any particularly fun encounters with the legendary musicians in the film?

We caught some great moments and they’re in the film. The ending of a fast-paced “Valley Road” with Bruce Hornsby was a favorite. The band all stops for a second to look at each other — then they realize they got it and they all start shouting and cheering.

After Jimmy Martin’s session one day, he went out for some cocktails and came back into the studio while Ricky Skaggs was working. We captured Jimmy (feeling no pain and wearing a coonskin cap) as he and Ricky ripped into a spontaneous version of “The Old Crossroads.”

This film was Mr. Acuff’s last filmed appearance and that was special. I have to say — each time the song “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” was performed, it was magic. Every single time.

The Dirt Band did a masterful job of keeping things upbeat and fun for everyone. Every one of them was so engaged in each song — and brought individual songs or artists to the project. They were like marathon runners, giving their all each day and then coming back the next day to do it again.

What were some of the hurdles you faced in the film’s creation and release?

The very existence of this film was due to a California record company exec telling me that we would be in breach of contract if we didn’t deliver this video for the agreed-upon budget. When I explained this “song” was going to require us to shoot for several weeks, this delightful woman didn’t seem to care. I think it was meant to be — we HAD to make it work.

Bill couldn’t figure out how to light the dimly lit studio without a pile of light stands in every shot — and in everyone’s way. So, he created a giant light box and hung it from the ceiling. You don’t see a single light stand.

We didn’t have any money to sync up the video with electronic slates or fancy editing gear. I moved a cuts only 3/4″ video editing system into my office and had to sync the shots up by eye more than once… if we didn’t have an audio track running. Watching Mark O’Connor’s fingers or Earl Scruggs’ fingers to make sure you lock each note made for some very long nights. Those fingers were flying!

Rosanne and I sold 50 percent of the film rights to a company who released it on home video. Unbeknownst to us, the entire archive of that company was acquired by another company that isn’t interested in letting us buy the remaining rights, so we remain in limbo.

What do you hope a modern viewer will experience when watching these clips 30 years later?

This is a piece of living history. The first Circle album influenced every single musician I know. Watching the creation of the second — especially thirty years on — reminds you what kind of power music has.

It makes me sad to count off how many artists from this project are gone now: Johnny Cash, all of the Carter Sisters, Earl and Randy Scruggs, Vassar Clements, Chet Atkins, Levon Helm, John Denver, Roy Acuff, and dear Roy Huskey, Jr. In this world of instant technology, I think this 30-year-old film puts the viewer right into the studio for a front row seat at this amazing recording. I’m very proud of it.

Living Your Passion: A Conversation with Larry Campbell & Teresa Williams

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Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams have been married for nearly 30 years, but they only turned their private song-making into a public affair with the release of their 2015 self-titled debut. (Though, before that, they played for seven years in Levon Helm’s band.)

Last year, they returned with their sophomore effort, Contraband Love, a darker affair that takes a hard look at love’s pocks in order to reveal its pearls. Original folk-driven songs like “Save Me from Myself” explore a strong relationship’s balm, while the title track promises to keep fighting past the hard-bitten instinct to keep love at bay. Williams’ voice leads the charge on the verses, while Campbell joins her on the harmonies, their voices showcasing their lengthy partnership together. The admiration and respect the couple exhibit for one another — and for the opportunities they’ve been given to live their passion in tandem — only adds to their music-making journey. As they’ve learned, not everything happens quickly. But some things are worth the wait.

You’ve been described as being a riskier slice of Americana. How do you see yourselves pushing against its status quo?

Teresa Williams: Are we pushing against the status quo of Americana? [Laughs] I guess we’re just not thinking about it and letting the chips falls where they fall.

Larry Campbell: That’s pretty much it.

TW: I don’t think that’s a good plan, if you have a trajectory. You just have to take the music as it comes.

LC: Yeah, the stuff we write and perform, ideally, it comes from an organic place where what we’re creating is a mixture of all our influences and, because of the genre that Teresa and I have both been attracted to most of our lives, what comes out fits in the Americana theme. But the goal has never been to make music that can be called Americana music.

TW: They called us Americana! We never did.

Right, I can see how the narrative springs up after the fact.

LC: Levon [Helm] affectionately called Americana “the trash bin of rock.”

TW: It’s a nice haven for all the outcasts, I think. I’ve heard Mary Gauthier say, “This is my tribe. I love my tribe.”

That’s perfect.

LC: Then, by that definition, it pushes against any kind of status quo. The beauty of it is, there really is no status quo for Americana. It’s a big tent. I would hope the underlying requirement to be placed in that category is complete artistic expression and, if you’ve got that, then you’re welcome in.

As opposed to a more commercial approach?

LC: Right.

TW: Or maybe if you’re trying to achieve what you think will go over. Like, “Oops, probably not smart.”

“Save Me from Myself” is such an interesting take on the love song. Can you tell me a bit about where that came from?

LC: It is a love song. We’ve all known people, or been people at times in our lives, who find it very difficult to face our own shortcomings. To me, it’s the idea of unconditional love, where you’re allowed to go through your own personal misery and someone will stand next to you and try to help you through it, but if nothing else, just be there for you. That’s a fascinating facet of love. I’m dabbling with that theme in that song and in the title song, “Contraband Love.” I’ve had issues in my life where I didn’t necessarily like the person I was. The idea that someone would still be there for you, while you’re trying to get all this stuff sorted out and get your stuff together, that’s just fascinating.

You also covered Carl Perkins’ “Turn Around,” which feels like an interesting companion piece to “Save Me.” One is pleading for help from a lover, and the other is offering that very thing. How has time been reshaping your own understanding of love?

LC: Wow.

Big questions today!

LC: Well, Teresa and I have been married for almost 30 years now.

That’s amazing.

TW: Especially in this business.

In the business, but also in this day and age. People don’t put in that kind of time anymore.

TW: It was a little later … I had just turned 32 when we got married.

LC: And I was 33. We’d been through a lot of the experiences that people have that they eventually regret and which causes the relationship to fall apart. We had exhausted most of those experiences. When we got married, it was a really good time in both of our lives where we both understood who were individually, and we both understood the other.

TW: We’ve been through enough to recognize … people use the word soulmate, throw that word around pretty loosely, but it truly felt like, from the first day I met Larry, that was it. What drove us musically was very similar, and that was a huge part of the attraction.

LC: What Teresa and I have between us, we’ve experienced so many facets and aspects of what love is — that it does change and it does morph. But there’s sort of a rock underneath it all. The longer you go, when you’re in a healthy relationship, the firmer that rock gets. I think both of us in this 30-year journey have really done the best we could to treat this relationship with the respect that it warrants.

TW: The irony is that neither of us was looking for marriage at the time.

Isn’t that always how it happens, though?

Both: Yeah!

TW: The day I met Larry, I was putting myself out on a limb, musically. When people talk about meeting the right person, I always say, “Do what you love and keep putting yourself out there with what you love to do.” I think that’s really part of it.

Larry, you’ve mentioned in another interview that songwriting isn’t an easy form of self-expression for you and, after your self-titled debut, you had to get comfortable with what you and Teresa were as a duo. How did you set about doing that?

LC: From my perspective, Teresa has always been a front person, in one respect or another; she was comfortable in that role. For me, I was always a back-up musician, and I was always comfortable as a studio musician or producer. From the first day we met, we would sing together for the love and the fun of doing it.

TW: Especially down in West Tennessee with my family and the local people there.

LC: It took me a long time to develop an appreciation for the notion of being out front and being a singer with original material. I would’ve never been able to develop this, unless I’d done it with Teresa. Fortunately, we had an incubator, which was with the Levon Helm band. He wanted everybody to step up front and do something. That gave me the opportunity to try that stuff with Teresa in public. There are people that are born to get out there and sing and throw themselves in front of the crowd, and it’s taken me an evolution to make that happen, for me to be comfortable. I get such fulfillment out of doing this thing with Teresa that that’s the point, rather than the point being wanting to be up there in front of someone.

It sounds like quite a gift. Talent can, in its own way, take people away from each other, and when you were playing with [Bob] Dylan that did happen.

TW: Yeah, it took its toll. But, at the same time, when I would be out there [visiting Larry on the road], we’d sit in the back of the bus after shows and play music, and Dylan’s manager said, “You guys oughta be making pay off what you have.” I’m not sure it really occurred to us before this. I kinda felt icky about a husband-and-wife team, for some reason. I grew up in the cotton patch — literally, working in the cotton patch. And it felt like [a creative life] was some other cast of people that did that thing out in the world.

Right, it’s such a big thing to think, let alone achieve.

TW: Yeah, like you can’t get too big for your britches. I hate to admit that, as I feel like a strong female.

What’s so interesting about both of your stories is, you didn’t set out looking for this, but you found it together. I love that circularity, that life could bring you what you needed.

LC: When Teresa and I made our first record, and it was starting to kick in that we were going to do this project — this Larry & Teresa thing — I had this feeling that just doing it makes it a success. We’re not going to be JAY-Z and Beyoncé. That’s okay.

TW: [Laughs]

“My Sweetie Went Away” and “Slidin’ Delta” are such fun songs because they stretch the bounds of what you do in more regional ways. I know, Teresa, you grew up in Western Tennessee, and you’ve both been in upstate New York. Is there a region that you feel most drawn to, musically?

TW: I realized, on stage some nights, that almost all the songs we’re singing — except the ones Larry wrote — are the ones from Tennessee. Larry was in New York, going to hear all these world famous artists, these rock ‘n’ roll artists and bluegrass artists passing through New York City. He had a friend who was getting him into the Fillmore East when he was 12. I’m so jealous! I’ll joke; I’ll say, “We weren’t getting that. They weren’t coming through the cotton patch.” But we were getting the music from the dirt, I like to think.

The people that Larry was hearing in New York, they were recirculating our music back to us. We’re technically in the Delta, where I’m from. We’re on the edge of it, so it’s kind of inevitable that Larry and I … I felt like the dirt met the city. His sensibility is from down there, too, obviously. He spent a couple of years down in Jackson, Mississippi, which is the only reason I thought it was okay to marry him. If he hadn’t spent that time, the cultural divide would’ve been too big.

It all feeds into the title: Contraband Love.

LC: Yeah. And what Teresa’s saying about the groups I was seeing in New York — Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead and Cream and Jimi Hendrix — all these bands, they had mixed with the cutting edge of rock ‘n’ roll in those days. But beneath that, rock ‘n’ roll did grow out of the South. It came out of all those influences: the country music, the gospel music, the bluegrass music, the old-time music, and the blues of the South. And I was always attracted to the distillation of rock ‘n’ roll. When I was growing up and I would hear someone like Doc Watson and Bill Monroe or Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters, that stuff would ring a bell in me even more than the rock ‘n’ roll I was seeing constantly.

TW: It was like the roots. And the bluegrass, too. Where I was located, we had the blues. We were getting the music coming up from Muscle Shoals. I’m right in the middle of all of that. We’d come in from the fields on Saturday, and we’d listen to Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs — they had their Saturday evening show. And then daddy was playing this stuff in the living room after supper, and that’s how I learned. I wouldn’t even have to go to school: I’m doing what I learned at my parents’ feet.

Photo credit: Gregg Roth

Canon Fodder: The Band, ‘The Band’

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For decades, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” the third song on the Band’s second album, has been among their most popular and beloved songs. It has appeared on every official live album and greatest hits compilation they’ve released — most notably on The Last Waltz with a horn chart by Allen Toussaint. It’s been covered countless times: Johnny Cash, John Denver, the Allman Brothers Band, the Black Crowes, the Zac Brown Band, Tanya Tucker, and even Roger Waters have recorded their own versions. The original was not a hit for the Band, but Joan Baez’s cover went to number five in 1971. More recently, it scored a pivotal scene in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Robbie Robertson, a Canadian, wrote the lyrics to “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Every member of the Band contributed to the arrangement. Levon Helm, the only American in the group — and a Southerner, to boot — sang lead. Together, they all tell the story of Virgil Caine, a farmer in Virginia bearing witness to the cataclysmic end of the Civil War. Every element comments on his story: The wheeze of Garth Hudson’s organ evokes his spiritual fatigue, while the insistent tap of Helm’s snare drums jumps a beat when he sings the line about his dead brothers. And the four singers — Robertson and Helm joined by Rick Danko and Richard Manuel — harmonize beautifully, when Caine seems to have run out of words and can only express himself with a chorus of na na na nas.

Robertson gets the details just right to evoke this dark iteration of America: He introduces himself by saying he “served on the Danville train,” referring to the Danville & Richmond Railroad that was a crucial transportation for the Confederate Army. And when he declares, “I don’t care if my money’s no good,” he’s referring to the Confederate dollar, called a “greyback,” which was worthless after the war. His literary and Biblical references — to Dante’s Divine Comedy, to the Book of Genesis — suggest that this is not the actual South, but a mythological one. Is Virgil Caine our guide through the Purgatory of Reconstruction? Is this a retelling of Cain and Abel on a national scale? (And, if so, why is the South Cain instead of Abel?)

As Ralph J. Gleason wrote in his Rolling Stone album review in 1969, “Nothing that I have read … has brought home to me the overwhelming human sense of history that this song does … It is a remarkable song. The rhythmic structure, the voice of Levon, and the bass line with the drum accents and then the heavy close harmony of Levon, Rick, and Richard Manuel in the theme, make it seem impossible that this isn’t some oral tradition material handed down from father to son straight from that winter of ’65 to today. It has the ring of truth and the whole aura of authenticity.”

That could be said of every song on The Band. A self-schooled student of North American history, Robertson was writing about the past, setting the Band’s song deep in what Greil Marcus, writing about The Basement Tapes they recorded with Bob Dylan, called “the old, weird America.” This was not necessarily a new tack, as folk musicians had been not only reviving songs from previous centuries, but had occasionally written a few themselves. But the Band weren’t folk musicians — at least not strictly. They were a rock band. Rock in 1969 was still considered new: The Beatles and the Who proved it could be serious, heady high art; the San Francisco bands proved it could be political discourse; and the psych bands proved rock could serve as a narcotic/existential inquiry. The Band proved rock could be old, as well as new, the lens through which we view the past, either how it actually was or how we might want it to be.

Not every song is quite as specific in its historical setting as “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)” explores the hard life of subsistence farmers, who faced innumerable tribulations and catastrophes. The narrator might even be Virgil Caine himself, turning from the lamentations of the Civil War to the horrors of survival in rural America. Other songs are much more elusive, like the fleet “Look Out Cleveland” (about Texas, not Ohio) and the randy, country-funk number “Up on Cripple Creek.” The latter is one of several songs on here about sex. Perhaps it was a response to the sexual liberation of the 1960s (as opposed to the 1860s) or perhaps the Band were merely addressing rock ‘n’ roll’s favorite topic through the filter of history. “Jemima surrender, I’m gonna give it to you,” they sing on “Jemima Surrender.” “Ain’t no pretender, gonna ride in my canoe.”

In the half-century since the Band recorded their second album, the Americana scene has pushed forward not with their openness about sex, but with the historically based songwriting. It’s nearly impossible to gauge their impact on the contemporary country and roots scene, but it’s safe to say that, whenever you hear an artist sing about something that happened decades ago, you’re hearing the Band’s influence. Last year, Colter Wall ended his breakthrough album with “Bald Butte,” a lengthy gunslinger story-song that is somehow bloodier than “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” The year before that, Shovels & Rope recounted the Battle of Chattanooga on “Missionary Ridge,” imagining the ghosts of the Civil War dead still haunting those hills.

Almost every singer/songwriter resorts to historical re-enactment at some point. Steve Earle wrote “Ben McCulloch” about the disgraced Civil War brigadier general. Johnny Cash recorded a song called “God Bless Robert E. Lee” for his 1983 album Johnny 99, praising the general’s decision to surrender at Appomattox. There are many, many others, too bountiful to count, some dealing with the Civil War and even more dealing with other historical events. (A favorite: “Saskatchewan” by the Toronto band the Rheostatics, which describes a sailor’s death in a sinking ship.)

These songs all reflect shifting attitudes toward (North) American history, new ideas, and new opinions, but our thinking about history continues to change no matter how many times we play these songs. As a result, these historical songs become pieces of history themselves, reflecting outdated attitudes and concerns. In 2018, at a moment when the Confederate flag has become a lightning-rod controversy and Civil War monuments are being defaced or removed, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” takes on a very different meaning than it had in 1969. The melancholy of those na na nas has curdled into something ugly and regrettable — not something to be celebrated, but something to be commiserated.

In their 2014 book — The Long Reconstruction: The Post-Civil War South in History, Film, and Memory — Frank J. Wetta and Martin A. Novelli call “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” “the theme song of the Lost Cause ideology.” It is a song about the defeated, about the thwarted righteousness of the Southern cause. But it’s that righteousness that has become so disgusting in 2018, when the most spurious political groups have adopted the symbols and syntax of the Confederacy. Let’s not mince words: The Lost Cause excuses the enslavement of an entire race of people and rationalized it with misinterpreted Bible verses and twisted moral logic.

So, what do we do with a song like “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”? It remains a compelling document of its time — 1969, not 1865 — and it is still a tremendous piece of music, inventive and innovative and finally, extremely influential. In that regard, it is exactly like every other song on The Band and on their 1968 debut, Music from Big Pink. Unlike a public monument, it cannot simply be removed from public space. Music doesn’t work that way. It is not stationary. It moves about, impossible to contain. We might strike it from future greatest hits albums, yet we would then have only a limited understanding of the Band’s story or their moment in time.

What do we do with disagreeable art? That’s one of the most important questions facing us in the final years of the 2010s. And here we come back to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. That film has been accused of being racially tone deaf and, sure enough, Baez’s version of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” which does nothing to interrogate Virgil Caine’s sympathies, plays during a scene in which a character with a history of racially motivated violence redeems himself by trying to solve the rape and murder of a white girl. If it were ironic, it might be a powerful moment dissecting Southern masculinity, but I doubt director Martin McDonagh had as much in mind. It’s just a song, just a signifier of Southernness. And that’s definitely not how it should play in 2018.

3×3: Christian Lopez on Marty Stuart, Levon Helm, and Forrest Gump

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Artist: Christian Lopez
Hometown: Martinsburg, WV
Latest Album: Red Arrow
Rejected Band Names: The Lix and Joe Taxi

 

Thanks for putting me up, @sourpatchkids! #HollywoodPatch #Sponsored

A post shared by Christian Lopez (@clopezmusic) on

What’s the best concert you’ve ever attended?

I was booked as the opener for Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives for a few dates and, honestly, his show blew me away. Greatest show I’ve ever seen in every aspect: musically, visually, and performance.

How many unread emails or texts currently fill your inbox?

Emails: 42,703. I need to work on my digital organization. Texts: 0

How many pillows do you sleep with?

Two, tops. Depends on if I’m alone or not.

How many pairs of shoes do you own?

Around 18 pairs. This is rock ‘n’ roll.

If you were going to buy a famous musician’s pair of dirty socks off of eBay, whose would you buy?

Levon Helm, without a doubt.

What’s your favorite vegetable?

Brussel Sprouts

Fate or free will?

Like Forrest Gump once said, “A little bit of both.”

Sweet or sour?

Sweet AND sour, if I can get it. Sweet, if I had to pick though.

Sunrise or sunset?

Sunrise. I’ve driven the band through the night many times and watching the sunrise is a sacred experience. Plus, I’m a morning person.

Photo credit: Robby Klein

Intentionally Simpler: A Conversation with Tracy Bonham

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For music fans of a certain age, hearing the name Tracy Bonham likely conjures up “Mother Mother,” an alt-rock MTV hit from the mid-'90s that found Bonham in a full-throated wail backed by a wall of shredding guitars. But that was then. And this is now. Over the two decades since, the singer/songwriter has chased and tracked her sound through the pop/rock gems of Down Here to the complex twists of Blink the Brightest to the playful dance of Masts of Manhatta, releasing albums, essentially, every five years. Right on time, she's back with Wax & Gold, a wonderfully rootsy collection that reflects where she is in life — geographically and personally — and features the work of local musicians — including Amy Helm and Langhorne Slim. (Bonham's local is Woodstock, NY, after all.)

You've gotten some good love on this new record. Four stars from Rolling Stone, a great write-up on HuffPost …

I got some love. It's been nice. It's so funny because it's a different age. You don't know what it turns into. It just feels good to be recognized, but it's not like it's really pertinent to your career except that maybe people will pay attention the next time you put something out … if you don't wait five years. I can't really tell what comes out of it, but it feels nice.

We came of age in the music industry at the same time, so we've seen it totally turned on its ear. But, we're adapting. It took you a while, but you finally got the hang of StageIt.

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And it's totally fun. I was kind of surprised — I don't know if you read the Huffington Post thing — but he made it sound like I was so savvy with all that stuff. [Laughs]

[Laughs] Just let 'em think it. The other thing is, most folks probably think of you — like in that article — as an alternative rocker chick from back in the day, but you've always dangled a couple toes in the roots music water. I remember the Wayfaring Strangers when you did that [with Matt Glaser, Tony Trischka, Jennifer Kimball, et al]. Were they your first? Take me back to that era.

Let me see … That was the first recorded … No, actually, I had been kind of interested in gospel music for a long, long time. I was in college, kind of doing everything. I wanted to sing jazz. I thought I wanted to be an R&B singer for a second.

[Laughs] Because a white girl from Oregon … that makes sense.

Uh huh. [Laughs] But I had this big, bellowing voice so I remember I would get the solos in the gospel choir at the University of Oregon. I went there for one term. After I'd done my SoCal thing and my Berklee thing, I went to U of O and was in the gospel choir. I was like [Sings] “Whoa-oa-oa-whooooa!” doing the whole thing and I just loved gospel music. I didn't love some of the cheesy stuff, but … At first it was Aretha Franklin doing her gospel, solo piano stuff. That was probably what got me really interested. And I just took it from there. So I always had that other side of me and it was so totally opposite of what I was doing on Burdens where I wasn't even trying to sing. I was just playing it all down. I was kind of schizophrenic back at that time.

And being the fiddle — or violin – player that you are, it lends a gypsy air to things. That's folksy.

Yeah. My classical foundation gave me a whole world of that kind of stuff. I totally love the Eastern Europeans … Tchaikovsky and all that Russian stuff. It just blended. The boundaries were not very clear.

Then, with your own stuff, In the City + In the Woods was probably your first real exploring of your rootsier side, right? Doing “Crazy in Love” as a gypsy folk bop-along and what not …

Right! [Laughs] Whatever that was.

So how much of that evolution can be attributed to spending a good chunk of your time in Woodstock and not in the city?

Hmmm … It's been almost 10 years that we've been hanging out in Woodstock. It has influenced me hugely. Not even just musically, but mentally. There's more space up there so you can kind of clear the cobwebs. I think it coincided with an era [in which] it didn't matter as much whether or not you had a hit on the radio. So I had this kind of freedom to go up there and create and just be myself. When I was doing my overdubs for Masts, I was in my cute little stone cottage with the fire burning and my ProTools set up — it was the first time I'd ever done my own ProTools thing. I was like, “I can do anything up here!” I recorded the fire, the wood-burning stove, the tea pot burning …

Move over, Alan Lomax!

Exactly! Or like Paul McCartney when he did Ram and he holed himself up in a castle somewhere. I was just enjoying being in control.

Tell me about the musical community up there. Levon's gone, but his legacy of pulling folks together lives on.

It's really true. It's so amazing up there. There are still stories of Levon. The local station up there [WDST] has a pretty far reach and they play the Band all the time. I'll be driving [my son] Selman in the backseat with Levon's grandkids because those are his best friends — Amy Helm's kids and Selman are the three musketeers. I'll be driving them to the pizza parlor and, all of a sudden, Levon's voice will be on radio and I'll be like, “Dudes! That's your grandpa!” [Laughs] It's such a weird phenomenon.

Then, we'll be at the pizza place and who'll walk by but John Sebastian, of course, from Lovin Spoonful, and we'll have a conversation. Then it'll be … Rachael Yamagata. It's just this amazing place where you can bump into so many talented people. We've made a lot of friends at a restaurant called the Bear which is part of the whole Bearsville complex that Albert Grossman started. I've made some of my best friends … a writer who wrote about the Beatles … there are just interesting people. It's 100 miles outside of the city — a lot of people are having some interesting conversations.

And this new record wouldn't have happened without some of those folks …

Oh my God, you're right.

… and your PledgeMusic donors, of course. That combination of the global and the local coming together is about as community-oriented as you can get.

That's nice. That's awesome. And the global feels local because it's really a small group of people.

How many donors did you end up having?

You know, not that many. I'm going to say only a few hundred people were following that whole thing. But I remember sitting with Kevin [Salem, her producer] at the café one time and he said, “Look. If you could find 1,000 Tracy Bonham fans and they each gave $10 to you, you'd be pretty psyched.” So I got, like, 600.

My whole conundrum has always been “Where did my fans go?” Probably because I spent five years on this new record, that's probably why and because I had a radio hit that fell off the face of the earth half as quick as it rose. The conversation was always, with management or labels, “Where did those people go?” It was back before you could connect with people on the Internet in '96. Then, when I had to wait for four years, I lost a lot of people.

But that's the shift from … I mean, all of my friends who were on major labels and came off of that lost their people because the major labels — at least back in the '90s — email lists weren't a thing. So those people just vanished and you have to call them up again, somehow. Summon their spirits.

Yeah.

The other main artistic driver for the record was the adoption of your little Selman. His presence is felt on this thing in various ways. You have nods to his Ethiopian homeland, but also several tunes that could easily be on a cool kids' record. Was that intentional or just how it came out?

Which songs are you referring to? Because I like that idea. Oh, I know: “From the Tree to the Hand to the Page.”

Sure. Yeah. Of course.

That's one of Selman's favorites.

There are others, though. The repetitive ones: “Lovelovelovelovelove” and “Gonegonegone,” maybe?

Oh, yeah. You're right.

They're a little bit of a stretch, but the kind of kids' record that the parents wouldn't be driven crazy by.

[Laughs] Exactly. That's probably because I am writing more for … I have that whole other [teaching kids] project going on. But I think, also, my writing has changed, at least for now, and it's a lot simpler. It's intentionally simpler. This is going to sound funny, but I just don't have time to … I can't explain it. I've often thought of it like moving through molasses, when you're a mom and you're trying to be creative and you have to stop and deal with life and come back to it a week later. You just want to finish the damn song. [Laughs] Just get it done.

I've been wanting to challenge myself to write more simply, although I love what I've done before and what other artists have done when things take left turns or bring something surprising. I still love that. But, for this particular album, I just wanted … “Under the Ruby Moon” is two chords over and over again, and it's one of my favorites.

I would say, Blink the Brightest will always be one of my across-the-board, all-time favorite records.

Thank you.

But, in your canon, I'll put this one second.

No way! Really?

Yeah. And I know the Burdens people are gonna get mad about that, but whatever. They can go kick some rocks. So Rolling Stone singled out “Grandpa's Guitar” as the heart of this thing …

Yeah, I was surprised by that.

… but I gotta go with “Wax & Gold.”

Me, too. Me, too.

That's your pick?

Yeah, totally. I mean, “Grandpa's Guitar,” as much as I love it, I feel like it's a certain audience. But I totally think “Wax & Gold” encapsulates everything.

It has such a great sound and feel to it. And, thematically, what you're pulling from for it …

Totally. Totally.

Take THAT, Rolling Stone. We just outvoted you.

[Laughs] Yeah!

Photos courtesy of the artist

LISTEN: Jackie Greene, ‘Motorhome’

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On his upcoming Yep Roc Records debut, Back to Birth, singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Jackie Greene gets back to, well, basics. He strips away pretense and focuses on the songs as a cycle, of sorts, that traces and tracks life as a circular experience rather than a linear one. It's his seventh solo album in the past 15 years, with his last one, Till the Light Comes, dropping in 2010.

"['Motorhome'] was a song I wrote for Levon Helm after the first time I met him some years ago,” Greene says. “Levon was such a hero of mine. I imagined myself driving through the Southeast in a cool vintage Airstream — stopping where I wanted, playing banjo and mandolin at night, sipping Coca-Cola and hanging out with my dog, Charlie. That kind of freedom is intoxicating, so I put it into a song. For some reason, I imagined that might have been the kind of thing Levon would've done in his younger years."

Speaking of hitting the road, Greene is on tour for the majority of the summer. Take a look at his awesome road trip playlist on Spotify, and view his upcoming tour dates right here. Over the weekend, Greene told fans via Facebook that he was quitting the supergroup Trigger Hippy, though the departure is amicable. We wish him the best of luck on all his solo endeavors.

Back to Birth hits the street on August 21 via Yep Roc Records.

Photo by York Wilson.