Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: Rodney Croll has been a fixture and Nashville songwriting community
Speaker 2: for over fifty years. Born in Houston in nineteen fifty,
Speaker 2: he was influenced early on by songwriters Guy Clark, in Towns,
Speaker 2: van zandt. In nineteen seventy five, he joined Emmy Lou
Speaker 2: Harris's Hot Band as a guitarist and harmony singer, playing
Speaker 2: with her for three years. Rodney became known for his
Speaker 2: own work with his nineteen eighty eight album Diamonds and Dirt,
Speaker 2: an album that made history by producing five consecutive number
Speaker 2: one singles. Over his career, he's written songs for Johnny Cash,
Speaker 2: Willie Nelson, Bob Seger, and countless others, earning him a
Speaker 2: place in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. Just last August,
Speaker 2: krow released his twentieth studio album, Airline Highway, produced by
Speaker 2: Tyler Bryant and recorded at Dockside Studio in Louisiana. In
Speaker 2: just a few months back, Willie Nelson at Least What
Speaker 2: a Beautiful World, an entire album of Krowell covers. On
Speaker 2: today's episode, Bruce Headlam talks to Rodney Crowell about making
Speaker 2: the Airline Highway In the emotional experience of hearing Willie
Speaker 2: Nelson's tribute album, he discusses his formative years in Nashville
Speaker 2: songwriting community, learning the craft from Guy Clark in towns
Speaker 2: Van Say. He opens up about his difficult childhood in Houston,
Speaker 2: including his mother's epilepsy and his father taking him to
Speaker 2: see Hank Williams perform when he was just two years old.
Speaker 2: Plus he talks about working with his ex wife Roseanne
Speaker 2: Cash and meeting his father in law, Johnny Cash, for
Speaker 2: the first time. This is broken record, real musicians, real conversations.
Speaker 2: Here's Bruce Headlam with Rodney Crowell.
Speaker 1: You have a new album, Airline Highway, that I do
Speaker 1: want to talk about if you've had a very big year.
Speaker 1: A couple months ago, Willie Nelson released an album covers
Speaker 1: of your material. What a Beautiful World. I'm just interested.
Speaker 1: What was your reaction to hearing that?
Speaker 3: Well, first I went in and sang on a song.
Speaker 3: We had a duet, so I heard one song and
Speaker 3: I had a sense of the sound of it. But
Speaker 3: he called me back to listen to the whole album,
Speaker 3: finished mix, sitting on his console, sitting there listening and
Speaker 3: by the second banks of the old band Beer. I
Speaker 3: was sobbing. It was like, you know, I cried through
Speaker 3: half of it. I think a lot of it was
Speaker 3: like fingers crossed that they even finished this project, that
Speaker 3: it comes to fruition. It's like, wouldn't it be great?
Speaker 3: And when I heard it, I was like, oh, man,
Speaker 3: but that had happened to me on an album before that.
Speaker 3: I was driving in my car and I heard Willy
Speaker 3: had done this song, and I called Minnie along and
Speaker 3: on some highway I was driving and it was so
Speaker 3: sweet sounding to me. I was sobbing then. So it's like,
Speaker 3: Willy has my number. All he has to do is
Speaker 3: sing a few words and I'm crying.
Speaker 1: Does that happen with other songs? And that happens with
Speaker 1: your songs that you cry mine?
Speaker 3: I'm selfish that way.
Speaker 1: I cry my own songs. Yeah, thank you very much.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm not interested in anybody else.
Speaker 1: It's a beautiful sounding album, like the space in it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just gorgeous. And he's ninety two.
Speaker 3: Yeah, go figure.
Speaker 1: It sounds great.
Speaker 3: Here's the interesting thing I think what got me about it.
Speaker 3: There are the second song's banks of the old Bandira,
Speaker 3: and it's a song I wrote way back in the
Speaker 3: mid seventies, and it's about childhood, and I recorded it
Speaker 3: in around nineteen ninety nine, a good while after I
Speaker 3: wrote it, and my version as a middle aged man
Speaker 3: singing about childhood. But the thing that got me the
Speaker 3: most is Willy's ninety one at the time and singing
Speaker 3: about childhood and my what really moved me emotionally was that, God,
Speaker 3: she was a ninety one year old man, and he's
Speaker 3: closer to childhood than a middle aged man in terms
Speaker 3: of delivering I don't know, just whatever it is about youth,
Speaker 3: it's like come in full circle.
Speaker 1: It's an amazing album. It's also very you're talking about
Speaker 1: that particular song. His takes are so sweet, but they're
Speaker 1: not sentimental at all, and I don't know quite how
Speaker 1: he pulls that off.
Speaker 3: I don't think Willy was ever particularly sentimental or cloying
Speaker 3: or anything like that. I mean, from the get go
Speaker 3: he was straight ahead. And part of my love for
Speaker 3: WILLI started around nineteen sixty four. He had a song
Speaker 3: call I Never Cared for You that was being played
Speaker 3: on the rock station in Houston, and I was walking
Speaker 3: down sidewalk and when it came out, the opening line says,
Speaker 3: the sun is filled with ice and gives no warmth
Speaker 3: at all. This guy was never blue. The stars a
Speaker 3: raindrop searching for a place to fall, and I never
Speaker 3: cared for you. I'm fourteen, and when I hear that,
Speaker 3: it's like, what language is this man speaking? Because the
Speaker 3: Beatles were cracking the radio at the time, and shortly
Speaker 3: after that I heard Subterranean Homesick Blues. A friend of
Speaker 3: mine had that Dylan album Bringing It All Back Home.
Speaker 3: I think that was the one. And so there were
Speaker 3: two pieces of music that happened that had a depth
Speaker 3: that I recognized, some sort of death. But I needed,
Speaker 3: you know, I needed twenty years to grow into whatever
Speaker 3: that was about that. I was sensing it in my
Speaker 3: mid teens, and I don't think really ever moved away
Speaker 3: from that. Even when he was singing you know, beautiful
Speaker 3: love ballads and stuff, it's still unded like he had
Speaker 3: that kind of gravity.
Speaker 1: Tell me a little bit when we want to dive
Speaker 1: back into early influences, but tell me a bit about
Speaker 1: how this album Airline Highway came about.
Speaker 3: Well, quite naturally. The writing process is, if I'm not
Speaker 3: out on the road performing, I'm pretty much up up
Speaker 3: every morning working on songs. Right, I approach it like
Speaker 3: a writer. It's I guess my job, and I love
Speaker 3: the work.
Speaker 1: So do you get up early to do it before
Speaker 1: anybody else?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm an early riser now because I raised four kids,
Speaker 3: and you know, I used to sleep till four in
Speaker 3: the afternoon before I started became a father, and I
Speaker 3: never got that turner. There didn't seem to be any
Speaker 3: need to turn that back around, and so I'm up working.
Speaker 3: It's I figure it's a blessing that I have the
Speaker 3: work in the first place and have the time to
Speaker 3: do it. So I'm writing the song songs that would
Speaker 3: become Airline Highway. But at the same time I met
Speaker 3: up with a lad named Tyler Bryant, who's the producer
Speaker 3: through Peter Leek, my manager, and Tyler's from Paris, Texas.
Speaker 3: We're both Texas boys. But I got into a conversation
Speaker 3: with him about the first recordings. First recording studio I
Speaker 3: ever walked into to try to sing something a song
Speaker 3: that I'd written was in Crowley, Louisiana. It's a studio
Speaker 3: owned by J. D. Miller, a real wheeler dealer down there,
Speaker 3: and nothing came of those sessions that I have the
Speaker 3: tapes at home and they'll never be released because they're
Speaker 3: not worthy of being released. But I also had this
Speaker 3: romantic notion because we used to growing up on the
Speaker 3: east side of Houston. We used to cross the Louisiana
Speaker 3: line over there to hear the Boogie Kings at the
Speaker 3: Big Oaks Club is It was called Blue Eyed Soul,
Speaker 3: big soul band with horn section and a couple of
Speaker 3: great R and B singers leading the band. So we
Speaker 3: would go and we would sit outside in the parking
Speaker 3: lot and we could hear him through the walls.
Speaker 1: Was this with friends or with your family?
Speaker 3: No? With other lads my age, you know, we would
Speaker 3: sneak over there. And also there was a romance of
Speaker 3: it now and again if you find the right spot,
Speaker 3: you could buy beer. When you were fifteen, it was
Speaker 3: lawless in that way, but the music was really it
Speaker 3: was a romantic trip to go over there to hear
Speaker 3: the Boogie Kings. And I was describing that to Tyler,
Speaker 3: and I was also describing Crowley, Louisiana, and we had
Speaker 3: decided we wanted to make a record. And Trina Shoemaker
Speaker 3: lives down there on the coast and she was part
Speaker 3: of that New Orleans scene that Lanoix had going on,
Speaker 3: and I've made a couple of records with her, and
Speaker 3: so we were going to bring her in and I said, guy,
Speaker 3: I went to Chicago and made a record. I had
Speaker 3: so much fun to fulfill this fantasy. I had to
Speaker 3: go into Chicago and recording Hellan Wolf and the likes.
Speaker 3: And I said, I need to go to Louisiana, but
Speaker 3: I don't feel like New Orleans where I ought to go.
Speaker 3: And Treata said, oh, well, you got to go to Dockside.
Speaker 3: It's on the Vermilion River. And if you don't get
Speaker 3: eaten by if we don't get eaten by crocodiles, we'll
Speaker 3: make a good record. So there the idea that we're
Speaker 3: going to Louisiana maker record was born. And so Tyler
Speaker 3: and I had loaded up a vanful of mostly his gear.
Speaker 3: I had a couple of guitars, but he had amps
Speaker 3: and whatever, and we drove down there to to Dockside
Speaker 3: Studio and met some musicians from Texas that that we
Speaker 3: love and set up in a studio not too much
Speaker 3: unlike this one with a good cement floor in case
Speaker 3: in case the river gets up, and we were off amazing.
Speaker 1: I want to go back to your writing because I
Speaker 1: want you to set the scene for me. You say
Speaker 1: you write every day. You have an office at home?
Speaker 1: Do you go to an office?
Speaker 3: I have a home studio, you know. I go down
Speaker 3: across the house and hit down the hallway and I
Speaker 3: have a studio in one wing of the house there
Speaker 3: which I've made records in there. And for me, you know,
Speaker 3: people say what's your favorite song you've ever written? And
Speaker 3: I always say, well, the one i'm working on, that's
Speaker 3: the most important song that I've ever written, whatever I'm
Speaker 3: working on now. And I can't say that the end
Speaker 3: result of the record we made was so much by
Speaker 3: design as I was writing, because pretty much the rule
Speaker 3: of thumb I have is that if I'm patient enough,
Speaker 3: the song will tell me what it wants to be.
Speaker 3: But slowly, I think, maybe intuitively, I knew I was
Speaker 3: headed south to record the record a song with Lucas
Speaker 3: Nelson about rainy days in California and going back east,
Speaker 3: and I just made my way back to Louisiana because
Speaker 3: of my childhood down there, and that might have been
Speaker 3: a signal that got me to think, well, wouldn't it
Speaker 3: be nice to go record in the swamps down there
Speaker 3: and see if we could pick up some swampy sounds.
Speaker 3: And I continued on and for a song like taking Flight,
Speaker 3: I'd already written it with Ashley McBride before, but it
Speaker 3: was certainly the landscape down in southern Mississippi. So maybe
Speaker 3: intuitively I was headed that way from the get go,
Speaker 3: but it wasn't conscious. I wasn't consciously trying to craft
Speaker 3: a song like a group of songs that were necessarily
Speaker 3: had a Louisiana vibe. But mind you, over the years
Speaker 3: I've written songs like Leaving Louisiana in the broad Daylight
Speaker 3: and Fever on the Bio and Stars on the Water.
Speaker 3: So I guess I figured that Louisiana owes me something.
Speaker 1: You know, your lyrics seem so precise to me. Do
Speaker 1: the lyrics change a lot once you get in the studio?
Speaker 3: No, I don't do any writing in the studio once
Speaker 3: we're set up to record, got microphones and the sounds.
Speaker 3: I write everything before we get in the studio. I
Speaker 3: don't like to have to think about finding a good
Speaker 3: rhyme in the middle of about to get a good
Speaker 3: take that doesn't work for me. I gotta have it
Speaker 3: written before we go in.
Speaker 1: So when you're writing, are you there with a guitar
Speaker 1: or are you working on lyrics?
Speaker 3: Usually, well, melody comes more easily for me than lyric.
Speaker 3: It's probably seventy thirty. I probably spend seventy percent of
Speaker 3: the time working on the lyric, but the music is,
Speaker 3: generally speaking a lot easier for me. I don't struggle
Speaker 3: with that too much. Generally, the melody comes. And it's
Speaker 3: very rare that I've written the lyric and then tried
Speaker 3: to match a melody to fit it. It's happened a
Speaker 3: couple of times. But the good ones, there's some kind
Speaker 3: of vibe or some notion or atmosphere from a chord
Speaker 3: or a couple of chords that fall together in the
Speaker 3: right way will lead the way to how the melody
Speaker 3: is and how the language fits it.
Speaker 1: So a line on the new record like She's a
Speaker 1: wildwood flower in a red Corvette, Yeah, which I love? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Do you remember did that come to you in the
Speaker 1: middle of writing the song? That did that? Started?
Speaker 3: Interestingly, that song, it started with an entirely different melodic
Speaker 3: feel and an entirely different sort of a little more
Speaker 3: rock and roll kind of thing that I was trying
Speaker 3: to force it into this, this kind of barcurd, a
Speaker 3: little chuck berry Ish take on a feel with a
Speaker 3: little bluesy rock Chuck berriersh. And I didn't have the
Speaker 3: wildwood Flower in the Red Corvette yet, but I had
Speaker 3: sometime thing, she don't make believe in making love to
Speaker 3: a sometime thing. I had that because that was based
Speaker 3: on an experience with some dude hitting home my girlfriend.
Speaker 3: I watched it happen. She's my wife now, we've been
Speaker 3: together all this time, and I was watching it. He
Speaker 3: was putting the move on her, and she was oblivious
Speaker 3: to it and blew him off. And she didn't blow
Speaker 3: him off intentionally, she just wasn't buying.
Speaker 1: It r And she was so cool.
Speaker 3: And I watched it, and that's she don't believe in
Speaker 3: making love to a sometime thing. That's the line that
Speaker 3: came to me, and I had it in that chuck
Speaker 3: berry Field. But years went by, twenty some years went
Speaker 3: by that I monkeyed around with it.
Speaker 1: Oh so the lyric was that old yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the the chorus, but then I just said this melody,
Speaker 3: I cannot bring anything home, and then one morning I
Speaker 3: woke up and I started playing just this real folky
Speaker 3: thumb style rhythm for it, and there it was. And
Speaker 3: then the line She's a wildwood flower in a red
Speaker 3: Corvette just came to me. And when you get a
Speaker 3: line like that, and I thought that was a really
Speaker 3: good line and line and when that hit, when that came,
Speaker 3: and then I hit on Tanya Tucker meets Kate Blanchett.
Speaker 3: I said, uh okay, and a song that had been
Speaker 3: just atting for twenty any plush years, came together in
Speaker 3: thirty minutes.
Speaker 1: It is an interesting song because it it sounds like
Speaker 1: a like an old blues kind of wang dang doodle
Speaker 1: sort of riff.
Speaker 3: And then it's just beauty should pay it.
Speaker 1: You should absolutely play it.
Speaker 3: Let me just play, at least play some of it.
Speaker 3: She's a wild wood flower in a red Corvette, Dan
Speaker 3: you Tucker meets Kate bland Set. She stagger like dishes
Speaker 3: in the kitchen sink. She doesn't give a damn what
Speaker 3: it is. You might thing. She got the blue green
Speaker 3: eyes and who doo smile pearly white over by drive
Speaker 3: them in wild, voicelike butter when she opens them mount you.
Speaker 3: Ever since I met her, I've been heading down south.
Speaker 3: Now you can try to make a thunder. You can
Speaker 3: try to slop the rain. She don't believe in making
Speaker 3: love to a sometime thing. Sometimes thing, sometimes thanks, you
Speaker 3: don't believe in making love to a sometime thing. Whoever
Speaker 3: said the diamonds are a girl's best friend might have
Speaker 3: set you thinking you could buy a way in. Because
Speaker 3: you haven't noticed why you're flashing that green. He was
Speaker 3: a rich guy. She's happy feeding quarters to a slop machine.
Speaker 3: Now she's an open invitation to go back from where
Speaker 3: you came. She don't believe in making love to a
Speaker 3: sometime thing. Sometimes things. Sometimes thinks you don't believe in
Speaker 3: making love to a sometime thing. You get on a
Speaker 3: Swiss Chatau, half a block of monocle and girls, a
Speaker 3: mass on and downtround santrope. You could take a Gulf
Speaker 3: stream jet party where the sun don't set. In case
Speaker 3: you haven't heard me yet, be careful where you place
Speaker 3: that bed. Heal, you better heed my wanter, Tell me
Speaker 3: what did I see? I love that woman till my
Speaker 3: die in day. Go on and make a move on
Speaker 3: what you know to be mine. It's only going to
Speaker 3: lead you to the back of the line. You can
Speaker 3: try to run your number. Let me try to make
Speaker 3: it plain. You don't believe in making enough to a
Speaker 3: sometime thing, sometime thing sometime. Thanks, you don't be even
Speaker 3: making love to do a sometimthing.
Speaker 1: That the lines in there are so good, thank you
Speaker 1: stack like dishes in the kitchen sink. Yes, and though
Speaker 1: the one that kills me is one way ticket back
Speaker 1: to where you came from where you came. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: also now that I know the story, somebody hitting on
Speaker 1: your girlfriend, somebody rich hitting on your girlfriend. It's not
Speaker 1: unsympathetic to the guy. Hmm. You could have written a
Speaker 1: song that was like you're a loser. Yeah, you're you're
Speaker 1: out of her league. But the guy was.
Speaker 3: A film star and I suppose still is. I'll never
Speaker 3: reveal his name, doesn't matter, but thank you for pointing
Speaker 3: out that it is sympathetic toward the guy. I'm glad because,
Speaker 3: to be honest, it wasn't my intention to be sympathetic.
Speaker 3: Really want to thumb my nose at him and pretty
Speaker 3: much what I'm doing.
Speaker 1: But maybe I should rephrase it's sympathetic towards men in general.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, God knows we need that. Yes, and our genders,
Speaker 3: our backs have been against the wall for a long
Speaker 3: time and for good reason.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we've earned that. Uh. You mentioned growing up in Houston.
Speaker 1: For people who notice how many references that are to
Speaker 1: rain in your songs, you come by it honestly. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: lots of hurricanes. Yeah, it rained a lot, Torrential. You
Speaker 1: describe in your book basically your house falling apart growing
Speaker 1: up because of the rain.
Speaker 3: In England they call them two up and two down.
Speaker 3: There's four rooms with a bathroom and uh, and there's
Speaker 3: a kitchen in my parents' bedroom. I was the only child.
Speaker 3: But you could see the stars through the through the
Speaker 3: through the room, through the ceiling in their bedroom, and
Speaker 3: they had number three wash tubs and igloo water coolers
Speaker 3: and pots and pants catching water coming through the ceiling,
Speaker 3: and same thing in the kitchen. But the water would
Speaker 3: the light bulb in the center of the ceiling. It
Speaker 3: had been dangerous as it could be, because the water
Speaker 3: would come pouring down around the light fixture in the ceiling,
Speaker 3: you know, And it would rain and just rain and
Speaker 3: rain and rain. And I still love rain. I mean,
Speaker 3: rain feels like home to me.
Speaker 1: You describe your father who worked construction, He was a
Speaker 1: handy guy, but not at home.
Speaker 3: No, that's true about him. I mean he six or
Speaker 3: seventh grade, sharecrop farm education in western Kentucky. He wound
Speaker 3: up running as the head guy at a big construction
Speaker 3: company in Houston, taking on really building barges and launch
Speaker 3: pads for ships being launched by a shipyard. There. Really
Speaker 3: a smart guy, but it just all the good things
Speaker 3: he did for other people just didn't make it all.
Speaker 1: Was that ever a discussion like we can see the Stars?
Speaker 3: No, I don't think so. I think it's no doubt
Speaker 3: my parents were Depression era of farm kids. Sharecraft farm
Speaker 3: could dis entitled, and I don't think that they really
Speaker 3: thought that they had a right to expect anything better
Speaker 3: than what was there. However, my dad would go off
Speaker 3: to work and really perform for the man. And my
Speaker 3: mother was a janitor at the school for a while there,
Speaker 3: and I suppose she was good at it. I don't know,
Speaker 3: But if you knew my mom and dad, you wouldn't
Speaker 3: know why I'm a songwriter Because my father played guitar
Speaker 3: and he had a beautiful voice, and he was a
Speaker 3: savant in another way, in that he grew up on
Speaker 3: a sharecraft farm where they walked four or five miles
Speaker 3: to someone who had a dry cell radio to listen
Speaker 3: to the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights. And I
Speaker 3: guess the way it was he could hear a song
Speaker 3: once or twice and have it, and most of those
Speaker 3: songs were simple in that way. And my father actually
Speaker 3: took me to Hank William's next to last performance in
Speaker 3: Houston in nineteen fifty two, right before Christmas, and I
Speaker 3: was two years and four months old.
Speaker 1: Do you remember that?
Speaker 3: And I wrote about it in my book, But what
Speaker 3: I remember is the smell of his hair tonic and
Speaker 3: a little bit of a light and that kind of
Speaker 3: hushed audience sound before things start to happen. But he
Speaker 3: reinforced the memory over and over and over again, because
Speaker 3: as I was from childhood on, he was like, don't
Speaker 3: ever forget that. I took you to see the Hillbilly Shakespeare,
Speaker 3: which is what they called Hank Williams back then. So
Speaker 3: he drove it home. So my memory of it is
Speaker 3: his memory, and I wrote about I tried to write
Speaker 3: about it that way.
Speaker 1: You don't remember the show itself, No, no, no way.
Speaker 3: But I do remember, you know, a couple of years
Speaker 3: after that, being on the floor with a little record
Speaker 3: player in those Hank william seventy eights. I'd figured out
Speaker 3: how to get them on a small turntable and listen
Speaker 3: to those Hank Williams seventy eights over and over and
Speaker 3: over again.
Speaker 1: What were the songs that stuck with you?
Speaker 3: Oh? Well, it's like moving on over come in last
Speaker 3: night about half past ten, a baby, I wouldn't let me.
Speaker 3: I man, that caught me even age four. It's like, whatever,
Speaker 3: the role of that language and Chuck Berry had sort
Speaker 3: of the same effect on me. You know that those
Speaker 3: cartoons of the the cat following floating through the air,
Speaker 3: following the cat nip, those kind of rolling, tumbling lyrical
Speaker 3: events like those. So I've always been on the lookout
Speaker 3: for that kind of thing. It's like, boy, how do
Speaker 3: you string them together where the song becomes a freight train?
Speaker 1: Are there songs of yours? You think you've succeeded in
Speaker 1: doing that?
Speaker 3: I've succeeded from you know, time and time again. You know,
Speaker 3: I've been doing it for fifty years, so you know,
Speaker 3: at least twice in a decade, I've succeeded in the.
Speaker 1: Strength with that particular kind of rolling feel.
Speaker 3: Well, it's I've never tried to ape somebody else's success.
Speaker 3: I've tried to find it in my own way. But
Speaker 3: like I'll look for trouble and I found its soun
Speaker 3: straight down the barrel of a low man's gun from
Speaker 3: my living alone like this, that was like that or
Speaker 3: fate's right hand. You know when your move like that
Speaker 3: at a young age and you're actually on your way
Speaker 3: to becoming a professional songwriter, those things never really leave you.
Speaker 3: They're there to stay because it's like it becomes a benchmark.
Speaker 3: It just happened in so many ways along the way.
Speaker 3: To hear Chris Christofferson woke up Sunday morning with no
Speaker 3: way to hold my head. That didn't hurt to hear
Speaker 3: that is like, oh boy, okay, there it is. I
Speaker 3: don't want to do that, but I want to access
Speaker 3: something inside of me that is my own version of
Speaker 3: what that is to me. That's the search.
Speaker 2: We'll be back with more from Rodney Crowell after the break.
Speaker 1: Before we go back to songwriting. I do want to
Speaker 1: mention your mother, who's this incredible character yea in your book.
Speaker 1: She took you to church. She wasn't particularly musical herself,
Speaker 1: but you've got a lot of church music through to her.
Speaker 1: She went to evangelical churches.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, you know, my mother was the way they
Speaker 3: referred to it back then, is Pentecostal woman. And she's
Speaker 3: spoke in tongues, you know. I jokingly say, we were,
Speaker 3: you know, just a couple of cuts below snake handlers.
Speaker 3: But my mother used to drag me up on the
Speaker 3: east side of Houston, used to drag me this place
Speaker 3: called Emmanuel Temple where they had If you read the book,
Speaker 3: it sounds like you have. It's like there were two
Speaker 3: preachers at this church. They alternated. I don't remember why
Speaker 3: they alternated. One guy was really slick, you know, he
Speaker 3: was sort of insinuated that he was the evolved spiritual
Speaker 3: leader of this thing. But I didn't trust the guy.
Speaker 3: You know, at age four or five, it's like something that.
Speaker 3: But there was another guy named Brother Premerton, who later
Speaker 3: reminded me of Jerry Lee Lewis, And I liked him
Speaker 3: because he was he was slinging it from the hip,
Speaker 3: he was making it up as his going. He was
Speaker 3: he was saving us all from from roasting and held
Speaker 3: you know, just at the very last minute. And he
Speaker 3: just had a knack for it, and I loved him.
Speaker 3: And the thing about it, the whole thing in the
Speaker 3: church was that we if the preacher was doing his job,
Speaker 3: we would all go down and kneel, you know, by
Speaker 3: the podium there and confess our sins. And I was
Speaker 3: just kind of disinterested in looking around. I happened to
Speaker 3: glance up at the guy and he was standing over me,
Speaker 3: and he winked. He just gave me a wink. And
Speaker 3: it's like it set me free for the rest of
Speaker 3: my life. It was like to me, he was saying, hey, man,
Speaker 3: this is show business. You know. Then he let me
Speaker 3: in on the secret. Of course, it took it took
Speaker 3: a long time for it to dawn on me that
Speaker 3: that what that wink really meant. And maybe he didn't,
Speaker 3: maybe he didn't mean it. But later on when it
Speaker 3: dawned on me, it's like, ah, he was letting me
Speaker 3: in on this is show business man, because that's what
Speaker 3: it was. The slick dude he was, it was show
Speaker 3: business for him. He was just doing it in a
Speaker 3: in a more suave way.
Speaker 1: Were you ever religious then?
Speaker 3: No, no, no, man. It's like organized religion doesn't work
Speaker 3: for me. A spiritual life works for me. And you know,
Speaker 3: I'm a god guy, you know. I think whatever that is,
Speaker 3: I got a connection to it. But it's it's strict
Speaker 3: my connection. I wouldn't even dare to assume that with
Speaker 3: anybody else's connection. I think one of my problems with
Speaker 3: religion is that they try to lead you down their
Speaker 3: path instead of your own path.
Speaker 1: Your mother also, and you talk about this a lot
Speaker 1: on your book. She had Caesar, she had epilepsy, I
Speaker 1: guess full blown.
Speaker 3: She had polio too. That girl started out you know,
Speaker 3: polio dyslexia. I'm sure epileptic. I mean if she had grandma,
Speaker 3: serious serious epilepsy. And but you had to look after her,
Speaker 3: had to after my grandmother pass away. It was my
Speaker 3: job because see, there's a thing about this epilepsy with
Speaker 3: my mother is that it never happened when my father
Speaker 3: was around. I think those were the rules. But in
Speaker 3: her case, when she would I feel it coming, she
Speaker 3: knew when it was coming. It never caught her off
Speaker 3: guard because like four or five blocks down to the
Speaker 3: little corner grocery where she'd go buy a six pack.
Speaker 3: I'd go with her a walk down there and she'd
Speaker 3: buy a six pack of Jack's beer and chug it down,
Speaker 3: and then I would nurse her through those epileptic seizures.
Speaker 3: And you know it was she was on the floor,
Speaker 3: foaming at the mouth, the whole thing, and I had
Speaker 3: a spoon try to keep her from swallowing her tongue.
Speaker 3: It was, you know, when you think about it, it
Speaker 3: was harrowing. But at the time, I'd watched my grandmother
Speaker 3: look after her, and pretty much it absorbed what she
Speaker 3: would do to look after her. So when my grandmother
Speaker 3: passed away, it was my job. Interestingly, until I was
Speaker 3: about seventeen or eighteen years old, and my mother had
Speaker 3: all the signs of it went on, and I just
Speaker 3: I won't repeat the words here, but I with a
Speaker 3: lot of explatives, I just said, you can die. As
Speaker 3: far as I'm concerned, I'm never going to nurse you
Speaker 3: through one of these things ever. Again, more vitriolic than that.
Speaker 3: I'd had enough of it. And with the exception of
Speaker 3: one small seizure, that was it for her. It's like
Speaker 3: I finally blew the whistle on it. And apparently I
Speaker 3: should have done that a long time before.
Speaker 1: So you said you thought it was your job. What
Speaker 1: made you stand up one day and say I can't
Speaker 1: do this.
Speaker 3: I was just fed up with it. Plus I was
Speaker 3: on the verge of heading out into the world, go
Speaker 3: to college or something, you know, senior in high school maybe.
Speaker 3: But it wasn't anything that I rehearsed. It just came up.
Speaker 3: I just had enough. Things can change in life in
Speaker 3: the strangest way, something that should have happened four years
Speaker 3: ago couldn't have happened four years ago. And that was it.
Speaker 1: So tell me when did making music start for you?
Speaker 3: Well, it was I was graduating high school, and you know,
Speaker 3: you have a class song, and so I was really
Speaker 3: interested in popular music, you know, from the Beatles on
Speaker 3: and Chuck Berry and all the things that I like,
Speaker 3: Bob Dylan, and so I went home and wrote a
Speaker 3: song for the class of sixty eight Crosby High School,
Speaker 3: forty three seniors graduating. I wrote this song, really not
Speaker 3: a very good song, but they all voted it in.
Speaker 1: So I'm not going to play it now.
Speaker 3: So, oh god no. I went to my twenty fifth
Speaker 3: class reunion, the only one ever, and I went and
Speaker 3: by then I had a reputation for making records and
Speaker 3: what have you been writing songs? And so some of my
Speaker 3: classmates from back then were We're like, hey, are you
Speaker 3: gonna play her class song? You know? Player? So I said, no, no,
Speaker 3: I don't think so. I have a guitar and no, no,
Speaker 3: that's not that's written. No. And there was a woman
Speaker 3: named Miss Hinson who was a home economics teacher who
Speaker 3: always really loved when I was in school, and she
Speaker 3: was hard on me, but I really liked it. And
Speaker 3: I could tell that she had a she liked me.
Speaker 3: But all these students, you know, from my high school
Speaker 3: were gathered around and it was almost like the red
Speaker 3: sea opened up. Here comes Miss Hinson, surely in her
Speaker 3: nineties by then, and she comes walking up and I said, well,
Speaker 3: you know that's not gonna and she said, she said good.
Speaker 3: That song wasn't any good then, and it wouldn't be
Speaker 3: any good now.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: And I said, miss him, and I hugged her and
Speaker 3: I said, You're so right, You're so right. It was wonderful.
Speaker 3: It was the perfect thing that to happen.
Speaker 1: And so you started playing in bands, though, or you
Speaker 1: got together with guys and played in clubs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well I left home. It wasn't runaway. I left
Speaker 3: home at age fifteen to join a band in a
Speaker 3: little country town. We lived on the east side of Houston,
Speaker 3: and these brother's sister team that I knew, came to
Speaker 3: the door and said they were putting a band together
Speaker 3: in a little town about thirty five miles northeast of
Speaker 3: where we lived. So I took a guitar and left
Speaker 3: home and my mother, I don't remember what she said,
Speaker 3: but my dad said, telling me, you write your own songs.
Speaker 3: So first rehearsal, I'm there with these teenagers and I
Speaker 3: started playing if you live change, oh about leaving leaving
Speaker 3: me behind? You know this song? And I said, yeah,
Speaker 3: I wrote that song. Of course, all that everybody knew
Speaker 3: I did. And it was like, you didn't write that song.
Speaker 3: I said, yeah, I wrote that song. So I never
Speaker 3: did back down, and uh, I had identified myself as
Speaker 3: a songwriter and I wasn't going to back down.
Speaker 1: What kind of gigs were you playing? Then?
Speaker 3: Oh? Well, we played the Legion Hall. It was called
Speaker 3: the Crosby Stomp Legion Hall, and it was teen dances.
Speaker 3: And then over in a little town called Humble, Texas,
Speaker 3: all these little outlying towns. They had legion halls and
Speaker 3: teen canteens and that kind of thing. And we had
Speaker 3: a band called the Arbitrators and we played we would
Speaker 3: cover band, We played country songs, we played Beatles songs,
Speaker 3: played beach boy. One of the guys in the in
Speaker 3: the band had a falsetto voice like Brian Wilson, so
Speaker 3: we could play beach Boys stuff. And we earned a
Speaker 3: little bit of money, and I moved in with his family,
Speaker 3: and eventually my parents left that house if that house
Speaker 3: finally fell down because the water finally got the best
Speaker 3: of it, and they moved out to the little town there.
Speaker 3: They rented a place out there, and I moved back
Speaker 3: in with my parents. Are probably somewhere around the junior
Speaker 3: year of high school.
Speaker 1: And then when did you start to think this could
Speaker 1: be a career for me? This is what I want
Speaker 1: to do.
Speaker 3: It takes me a minute to think about that, because
Speaker 3: I always wanted to do it, But it really, I
Speaker 3: mean really, I mean I'd already been Emmy Lou Harrison
Speaker 3: had recorded a couple of my songs, and I'd moved
Speaker 3: to Los Angeles to be in her band and go
Speaker 3: on tour with her. But I think it was when
Speaker 3: Willie Nelson at the old Palamino Club unbern knows me
Speaker 3: call me up on stage and said, I'm gonna do
Speaker 3: a Rodney crow song and and uh called till I
Speaker 3: Gain Controlled Again, which Emmy Lou had recorded first. And
Speaker 3: I remember walking up there thinking, huh, this is like
Speaker 3: I'm being knighted by King Arthur. I think this songwriting
Speaker 3: thing is gonna work. And that was the first time
Speaker 3: I ever had that thought, like, Okay, this is my career.
Speaker 1: Really, yeah, because you already moved to Nashville by that point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this was this was five years after I'd moved
Speaker 3: to Nashville.
Speaker 1: Did you move to Nashville wanted to be a performer
Speaker 1: or a songwriter?
Speaker 3: I got to Nashville under false prechenses. I'd gone to Crowley,
Speaker 3: Louisiana with a buddy of mine to do. We had
Speaker 3: a duet thing, kind of a Simon and Garfunk wil
Speaker 3: want to be And we went to Crowley and made
Speaker 3: a record over there, and the produce or went off
Speaker 3: to Nashville. Call me sometime later, a good six months later.
Speaker 1: And said how old were you at this point?
Speaker 3: Twenty one? He called me found me somehow. He said,
Speaker 3: get up here to Nashville. Find Donovan, my buddy, my
Speaker 3: college roommate who was I sang with. And he said,
Speaker 3: get up here. I've signed you to a ten year
Speaker 3: recording contract with Columbia Records and you're going on the
Speaker 3: road with Kenny Rogers in the first edition for a
Speaker 3: year opening. Okay, I'm into business. So we hopped and
Speaker 3: we got in the car. We found Donovan and we
Speaker 3: were off. We went there, but when we arrived in Nashville,
Speaker 3: none of this was true. We went to Columbia Records,
Speaker 3: you know, reported for duty at Columbia Records and walked
Speaker 3: in and you know, the secretary intake secretary is like who.
Speaker 3: So finally somebody three tiers up came down and said, look,
Speaker 3: we've never heard of you. You don't have a recording
Speaker 3: deal here. And so that's how we realize this is
Speaker 3: a sham. And as it turns out, the producer had
Speaker 3: sold the tapes in the publishing for a bus ticket
Speaker 3: back to Houston, and there I was in Nashville, so
Speaker 3: I decided to stay.
Speaker 1: He just wanted you out of Houston so you wouldn't
Speaker 1: make trouble.
Speaker 3: The backstory on him was that God, he was a brutal, brutal,
Speaker 3: brutal alcoholic. I have a lot of compassion for the
Speaker 3: amount of alcoholic to consume, and God knows what goes on,
Speaker 3: you know, when you're a blackout drunk. But it got
Speaker 3: me to Nashville, and within a short period of time
Speaker 3: I bumped into Guy Clark and a couple of guys,
Speaker 3: a guy named Skinny Dennis Sanchez, who's an upright bass player,
Speaker 3: and a guy named Richard Dobson. And they took me
Speaker 3: in because I was washing dishes making a little money,
Speaker 3: and they said, I you know, I was seven or
Speaker 3: eight years younger than they were and making a little
Speaker 3: bit of money. So they had an extra bed. But
Speaker 3: this house became I mean, it was Paris in the
Speaker 3: twenties there in its own way, because Guy Clark was
Speaker 3: was Skinny Dennis had been a bass player in a
Speaker 3: folk trio he had in California, and so all of
Speaker 3: these guys started towns van Zant started coming in and
Speaker 3: out of that place, and so it was kind of
Speaker 3: ground zero for songwriting pre record deal and because that's
Speaker 3: where Steve Earle first came around and there and Dave
Speaker 3: Uncle and it was just a salon and towns. Van
Speaker 3: Zante was traveling. He was already a wheeler dealer folk singer,
Speaker 3: but he would come through Nashville. And that's the first
Speaker 3: place I heard Poncho and Lefty in like three am
Speaker 3: in this house on Ackland Avenue and in Hillsborough Village
Speaker 3: in Nashville.
Speaker 1: You were sitting around and he played it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, wellbody. We would gather around every night, pretty
Speaker 3: much five nights a week at least in that house.
Speaker 3: Songwriters would come in. It was in Guy Clark was
Speaker 3: the curator of this mindset around then because Chris Krostofferson
Speaker 3: had done for Nashville what Bob Dylan had done for
Speaker 3: Greenwich Village. Nashville music business wasn't corporate then, but it
Speaker 3: was a closed community. But Chris Kostofferson opened it up
Speaker 3: to these kind of would be poet songwriters, which I
Speaker 3: fell in with. I didn't have any songs worthy of
Speaker 3: playing in the wee hours, but I knew all of
Speaker 3: these old Appalachian dead baby songs that I learned from
Speaker 3: my father, and I could throw them out and stay
Speaker 3: in the room that Guy Clark would say to me,
Speaker 3: you said, just shut up and listen you might learn something.
Speaker 1: And he was right, what did you learn from? Particularly
Speaker 1: Guy clark self editing?
Speaker 3: It took a while for at the dawn on me,
Speaker 3: but Guy Clark is probably the as songwriters go that
Speaker 3: I know personally. He's probably the best self editor I've
Speaker 3: ever been around, because when I started drifting over to
Speaker 3: his house and you're showing me what he was working on,
Speaker 3: he would lines that other songwriters would not elbow it out.
Speaker 3: For anything in the world, he'd elbow it out and say, hey,
Speaker 3: it doesn't this is not serving the narrative. It's got
Speaker 3: to go. That was important.
Speaker 1: Did he help you do that with your songs? No.
Speaker 3: The only thing he would do is when I had
Speaker 3: a new song. And his wife, Susannah was equally as
Speaker 3: formidable on this front. But I'd go over with a
Speaker 3: new song and he said, Okay, put your guitar down,
Speaker 3: now look me in the eye and say those words
Speaker 3: to me. And he had these like hawkeyes, you know,
Speaker 3: really intense staring and I realized when if I tried
Speaker 3: to say the words to him that whenever I wanted
Speaker 3: to avert my eyes away from him, the lines weren't true.
Speaker 3: And it was a really valuable lesson to learn, because
Speaker 3: when it was a really subpar line, or something that
Speaker 3: didn't work, a soft rhyme, or just something that didn't
Speaker 3: move the narrative along, his eyes would narrow and I
Speaker 3: would be I would feel ashamed that I had to
Speaker 3: expose it. It was a good lesson.
Speaker 1: That's a tough lesson, though, was say, have you ever
Speaker 1: done that with other songwriters?
Speaker 3: Look, I have these I host these songwriting camps, you know,
Speaker 3: one hundred and twenties so songwriters come to find out about songwriting,
Speaker 3: and now and again I'll say, okay, you want to
Speaker 3: know how I learned to do it, and I get
Speaker 3: him to put the guitar down and speak their lyrics
Speaker 3: to me. I don't think I had the intense eyeballs
Speaker 3: that Guy clark had, because some of them would gaily
Speaker 3: just look me in the eyes, smiling and really tell
Speaker 3: me really sub part of the lyrics and happy that
Speaker 3: they had.
Speaker 1: What is it about putting the guitar down and saying
Speaker 1: it that exposes them?
Speaker 3: Mind you? I don't know if you know Guy Clarker
Speaker 3: have any recollection of what he was like. He was
Speaker 3: an intense man and a beautiful writer. Himming way ish
Speaker 3: in his own way, and to look them in the
Speaker 3: eye with something inferior was a daunting proposition. It was
Speaker 3: just the perfect thing for me at the time.
Speaker 1: Did you ever present songs to Towns van Zant?
Speaker 3: Towns was not well. First, the only song that Towns
Speaker 3: ever kind of nodded toward me was a song Until
Speaker 3: I Gained Control Again, which was the one that was
Speaker 3: I wrote that early on and I got there and
Speaker 3: was able to move along with that song for a
Speaker 3: good But that's the only one that he ever kind
Speaker 3: of nodded approval of. But Towns wasn't as generous as
Speaker 3: Guy was. He was incredibly gifted poet. But Guy had
Speaker 3: for all of his imposing will. He was a generous
Speaker 3: artist and he shared his knowledge pretty freely.
Speaker 1: But Towns was more he held me We're back. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Towns was competitive. Okay, Towns was super competitive, which is
Speaker 3: a good thing, you know, a good thing for I
Speaker 3: got no problem with that.
Speaker 1: So when you're when you're sitting around doing songs, it's
Speaker 1: a contest.
Speaker 3: Well, you know that, you know the Donovan and Bob
Speaker 3: Dylan at the in London in the hotel, you know,
Speaker 3: Savoy whatever, hotel they where where Donovan's on the floor
Speaker 3: and he plays this uh really kind.
Speaker 1: Of mealy tweet little love song.
Speaker 3: You know, it's just going nowhere, and Dylan reaches over
Speaker 3: and gets a guitar and sing Crimson Flames tied to
Speaker 3: my ears. It's like I was so much older than
Speaker 3: I'm younger than whatever it was. It's just annihilated. I
Speaker 3: bring that up because that's you know, Towns had that too,
Speaker 3: and and early on, if if I'm sitting listening to
Speaker 3: Poncho and Lefty, I was smart enough to not make
Speaker 3: that mistake because he had hit me with with any
Speaker 3: one of those songs he had written by then and
Speaker 3: just shrunk me down to nothing. So it was better
Speaker 3: to observe and to listen and see just how Towns
Speaker 3: was able to pluck out of the ether real poetry,
Speaker 3: whereas with Guy it was closer to the experience. Was
Speaker 3: that he was he was a working songwriter. He was
Speaker 3: you know, he was somehow crafting it on the desk
Speaker 3: in front of him, where Towns was plucking it out
Speaker 3: of the ether.
Speaker 1: Was Towns competitive with Guy?
Speaker 3: Yes, Towns was competitive with Guy, but Guy ignored it.
Speaker 3: I say this because I watched those two closely. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: Now I'll tell you about Townsman's was. Had Towns come
Speaker 3: along thirty years later, he would have been a champion
Speaker 3: skateboarder because we had There was one thing that I
Speaker 3: did do that that that Towns and I were friendly,
Speaker 3: is that somehow we had we got a hold of
Speaker 3: a skateboard and there was there was a slope in
Speaker 3: Hillsborough Village and we would set up beer cans and
Speaker 3: slalom on skateboards. This is way before skateboarding was anything.
Speaker 3: I didn't have an act for it. But Towns was fluid.
Speaker 3: The man was extremely physically talented and he was a
Speaker 3: lot to take in. But he would he would slalom
Speaker 3: through those beer cans as if he was he was
Speaker 3: actually made of water.
Speaker 1: Amazing. I didn't know that, yeah about him. Did you
Speaker 1: see signs back then of his later mania and his
Speaker 1: his difficulties?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Is I mean the songwriting community around then with
Speaker 3: Amy Martin had a place there, and when Towns would
Speaker 3: come into town, usually he'd be a couple of days
Speaker 3: up and kicking Heroin up in Amy Martin's place. While
Speaker 3: the while all of the want to be songwriters, including me,
Speaker 3: were down in the in the garden. They're waiting for
Speaker 3: Towns to come down so we could play. But we
Speaker 3: would all sit around playing songs that he'd these really
Speaker 3: inferior songs at each other. Meanwhile, one of the masters
Speaker 3: was upstairs kicking heroin. It was it was pretty romantic.
Speaker 1: Are you competitive?
Speaker 3: No, I'm not. I'm not competitive. Wish I were. I
Speaker 3: don't think I could host these songwriting camps that I
Speaker 3: do if I were competitive, because you have to. You
Speaker 3: have to be a service to these people who pay
Speaker 3: money to come be around me and see what they
Speaker 3: can learn.
Speaker 1: Well, you've also had so many class oberations.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And also I was married to Roseanne Cash too,
Speaker 3: and I learned my lesson there because I was producing
Speaker 3: her records and she shot to the roof with the
Speaker 3: records I was helping her make, and I didn't at
Speaker 3: that particular.
Speaker 1: Time was that difficult.
Speaker 3: It was difficult, and it had I been more competitive,
Speaker 3: I would have probably hit the road because I wouldn't
Speaker 3: have been able to take it. But I had a
Speaker 3: sense that, you know, I'm part of this, and what
Speaker 3: I'm bringing to this is not easily recognizable. Because I
Speaker 3: was helping her with material and helping her get there,
Speaker 3: and she deserved every bit of it. She outdistanced me.
Speaker 3: Eventually I caught up.
Speaker 2: Well, last break and we'll be back with Rodney Crowell.
Speaker 1: You are the third ex son in law of Johnny
Speaker 1: Cash that we've had on the show. Yeah, and Marty Stewart.
Speaker 1: What Marty Stewart and we've had Nick Low. Nick Low
Speaker 1: certainly had a story about meeting Johnny Cash for the
Speaker 1: first time. Do you remember your first time?
Speaker 3: Well, the first time I remember was at the Beverly
Speaker 3: Hills Hotel in one of the bungalows. He and June
Speaker 3: had a bungalow out back, and Roseanne was bringing her
Speaker 3: boyfriend to dinner candlelit dinner in a Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow.
Speaker 1: Were you nervous?
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah, as nervous as I could be, but they
Speaker 3: were sweet and very accommodating in June. I actually was
Speaker 3: able to tell June the story that when I was
Speaker 3: the Carter family, you know, the in the the late thirties,
Speaker 3: they had made all of these exit It was one
Speaker 3: of the border radio stations where they Carter Family would
Speaker 3: come out live. But my grandmother and I would listen
Speaker 3: to the Carter Family rebroadcast in the fifty mid fifties,
Speaker 3: and June was an eleven year old comedian at the time,
Speaker 3: and so I had a crush on her, you know,
Speaker 3: the five year old kid. I had a crush on
Speaker 3: an eleven year old girl I was hearing on the radio,
Speaker 3: and so I got to tell her that story and
Speaker 3: she was charmed by it, and so we were good
Speaker 3: from there. Well, I did have my drunken run in
Speaker 3: with John later on. Oh yeah, in Jamaica.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, was this after you were married or.
Speaker 3: Now it was before we were summoned to Jamaica because
Speaker 3: we were living together by then and those were against
Speaker 3: the rules. So I did a little bit too much
Speaker 3: drinking between La and Montego Bay in the flights, and
Speaker 3: so by the time the sleeping situation came around, I
Speaker 3: was felt like I had to stand my ground because
Speaker 3: I heard some talk down the hallway and stepped around
Speaker 3: and Roseanne was said, well, you know, we we lived together,
Speaker 3: and so I stepped in all cavalier, like, yeah, well yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, I'm not going to be a hypocrites, you know,
Speaker 3: as we sleep together in La, you know, And he said,
Speaker 3: you know, he looked, and I've told this story before,
Speaker 3: but it bears repeating. He looked at me and he said, son,
Speaker 3: I don't know you well enough to miss you if
Speaker 3: you were to leave with that voice, yeah, voice of
Speaker 3: Abraham Lincoln. So that sobered me right up, and I said, yes, sir,
Speaker 3: you're right, and I wandered off down the hall and
Speaker 3: went to bed.
Speaker 1: I would have left, but yeah, I want to get
Speaker 1: back to Roseanne, but I first want to talk about
Speaker 1: your time with Emmy Harris Emmy Lou because she had
Speaker 1: recorded one of your songs and then asked you to
Speaker 1: join her band. Yeah, and who else was in the
Speaker 1: band when when you were with her?
Speaker 3: Kind of back up a little bit. I was in Austin.
Speaker 3: I had left Nashville, but Emmy came through like early
Speaker 3: in January nineteen seventy five and was playing the old
Speaker 3: Armadilla World Headquarters. And by then she had recorded a
Speaker 3: song of mine, Bluebird Wine. So somehow she found me
Speaker 3: and said, come and sit in with me at you know,
Speaker 3: my gig at Armadilla World Headquarters. And so I went
Speaker 3: and we sang something. I don't know what we're saying,
Speaker 3: but after her set, you know, she said, Hey, I'm
Speaker 3: going to LA tomorrow. You want to go? And I said,
Speaker 3: well yeah, and she said I got an extra ticket.
Speaker 3: She doesn't I was with Emmy a couple of nights
Speaker 3: ago and and she doesn't remember where she got this
Speaker 3: extra ticket. I certainly never knew. But I flew from
Speaker 3: Austin to Los Angeles with Emmy Lou on somebody else's
Speaker 3: ticket in nineteen seventy five and stayed seven years, and
Speaker 3: unbeknownt and me, she was putting together a band and
Speaker 3: had decided that she wanted me in it.
Speaker 1: I think there might be there might be a guitarist
Speaker 1: in Austin who's still waiting for his ticket.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, But that band turned out to be half
Speaker 3: of it came from Elvis's band and it and it
Speaker 3: was because of the band that had done Grievous Angel
Speaker 3: with Graham Parsons and Emmy, James Burton and Glenn Harden
Speaker 3: and Emery Gordy.
Speaker 1: So they were all still in the band.
Speaker 3: They were in the Hot band, and as John Ware
Speaker 3: and Hank DeVito and myself we called ourselves the Hippies,
Speaker 3: and James and Glindie and Emory were the pros and
Speaker 3: off we went on a world tour. It's in nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy five with him.
Speaker 1: You've mentioned Till I Gained Control Again a couple of times.
Speaker 1: I have a running argument with my wife over whose
Speaker 1: version is better, yours or Emmy LUs Oh.
Speaker 3: My particular recording of Until I Gain Control Again is
Speaker 3: not up to snuff. I produced that, and I spent
Speaker 3: a lot more time on the musicians then I spent
Speaker 3: on getting a proper vocal performance out of myself.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm going to disagree. I think it's a masterpiece
Speaker 1: your version of that song.
Speaker 3: I wish I could share your opinion about that, but
Speaker 3: I hear it and I go, oh, man, I wish
Speaker 3: you would have been paying attention.
Speaker 1: You know what I love about that song is what
Speaker 1: I love about a lot of your songs. And this
Speaker 1: is going to sound vague, so forgive me, but often
Speaker 1: your song seem to me there's a theme running through
Speaker 1: which is basically what it means to be a man,
Speaker 1: in relation to women, in relation to yourself, in relation
Speaker 1: to the world, how you kind of proceed in the world.
Speaker 1: That seems to be something that is in a lot
Speaker 1: of your songs. Simple on the new album made me
Speaker 1: think of that. Yeah, very much.
Speaker 3: Could be Susannah Clark. Susannah was probably twelve eleven, twelve
Speaker 3: years older than me when I met her in my
Speaker 3: early twenties, and she said to me clearly, she said,
Speaker 3: and it, you know in your early twenties is if
Speaker 3: I meet you meet a woman, or at that particular time,
Speaker 3: it's like I was on the make, you know. And
Speaker 3: Susanna held up her hand and said, hang on, you know,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna teach you to be friends with a woman.
Speaker 3: Valuable lesson for me at the time. And I listened
Speaker 3: to her and we developed a friendship, a real friendship
Speaker 3: and a real We had a long running conversation she
Speaker 3: and I and then Emmy Lou comes along, and Emmy
Speaker 3: and I are really close friends to this day. And
Speaker 3: I think it started at that particular time. I have
Speaker 3: really close I probably have more close women friends than
Speaker 3: I do men friends. It's just been that way, and
Speaker 3: I think it started with Susannah. My friendship with Mary Carr,
Speaker 3: we're close friends. We talk all the time. It's not romantic.
Speaker 3: It's brother and sisterhood. And I think maybe maybe that's
Speaker 3: what you're talking about. And also I have four daughters
Speaker 3: who have you know, will tan my hide if I
Speaker 3: get a little too far ahead of myself.
Speaker 1: Have you ever had to give their boyfriends the speech
Speaker 1: Johnny Cash gave you.
Speaker 3: Got I wish I really would like to pull up. Well,
Speaker 3: you know, I've had to call them on their foolishness,
Speaker 3: but I've never been able to come up with my
Speaker 3: own line that would match. I don't know you well
Speaker 3: enough to miss you if you were to leave.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well that should be in a song.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: You did a great version of I walked the Line
Speaker 1: with Johnny Cash mm hm, which is really about a
Speaker 1: kid hearing it. Yeah, and that is very That is
Speaker 1: a song about what it means to be a man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you re harmonized it, which is what I loved
Speaker 1: his sections.
Speaker 3: Yeah. This was after Roseanne and I split the blanket
Speaker 3: and I called him one day and I said, hey, man,
Speaker 3: we wrote a song because I had been trying to
Speaker 3: recapture the first time I heard I Walk the Line
Speaker 3: in a fishing trip. So he came to the studio.
Speaker 3: I said, I may of you come and sing on this.
Speaker 3: So he came to the studio thinking that he was
Speaker 3: going to be singing some version of his song. I
Speaker 3: sat there with a guitar and I started banging on
Speaker 3: the guitar and it got to the chorus where I
Speaker 3: used his lyric to make a chorus, which took me
Speaker 3: a long time to figure out because I wrote all
Speaker 3: kind of choruses for that song that just sounded like
Speaker 3: child's play. And then I hit on his words and
Speaker 3: it fit. And so he came and I'm singing it,
Speaker 3: and his eyes and narrowed, you know, and he said,
Speaker 3: he said, man, you've got a lot of nerve changing
Speaker 3: my melody. And I said yeah, and you're just the
Speaker 3: guy to go out there in the studio and do it.
Speaker 3: So he walked out there and did two passes and
Speaker 3: looked at him and he said, well that do and
Speaker 3: I said, yes, sir, that will do. Meanwhile, he had
Speaker 3: a he had a lunch date with Bonnie rait she
Speaker 3: came into the studio. I guess that's where she was
Speaker 3: going to meet him, And so we played it back
Speaker 3: pretty loud, and Bonnie when it was over, she said, God,
Speaker 3: it's sended like y'all were in there taken viagra when
Speaker 3: you recorded that. And I said, I know whose voice
Speaker 3: you're talking about, because there was some big old Johnny
Speaker 3: cast sing in that chorus.
Speaker 1: M hm. So after you had this great run of
Speaker 1: albums with Rosanne, So you said you were frustrated at
Speaker 1: that point though, that you hadn't that she was the star.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well it was. You can imagine in a household
Speaker 3: where two artists working side by side and one of
Speaker 3: them's taken off, and mind you, I stayed home with
Speaker 3: the kids. We never were both gone at the same time,
Speaker 3: which was I think a pretty good choice at the time.
Speaker 3: But she deserved it. Rosanna is. She is an artist
Speaker 3: through and through. She deserved it. It's not her fault
Speaker 3: that that it took off, and it took me a minute.
Speaker 3: She was in a portion I was on a bicycle,
Speaker 3: so it goes you.
Speaker 1: Know, you weren't in a bicycle long because you put
Speaker 1: out Diamonds and Dirt, which had what four or five singles.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the five number one songs off of that album.
Speaker 3: It's just like one right after the other.
Speaker 1: She's crazy for leaving one of my favorite songs of
Speaker 1: yours after all this time. Yeah, I just want to
Speaker 1: ask you about two of the songs. One you mentioned
Speaker 1: it earlier, taking Flight, which you wrote with Ashley McBride.
Speaker 1: How was How was the writing done?
Speaker 3: Well? Ashley, I made a record in Chico called Chicago
Speaker 3: Sessions one Back, and actually came around the house and
Speaker 3: we wrote a song called making Lovers out of Friends.
Speaker 3: It was pretty sweet and I thought she would do it,
Speaker 3: but she didn't, and so I recorded it in Chicago.
Speaker 3: But that the day we wrote that song, Ashley was
Speaker 3: coming back two days later. So I woke up the
Speaker 3: day that she was coming back and just to get
Speaker 3: ready for Ashley to come around, and I started writing
Speaker 3: taking Flight, and it was just coming out of me
Speaker 3: in a hurry, and I was trying to hurry up
Speaker 3: and get here, hurry up and get here. And she
Speaker 3: finally got there, and I was pretty far down the
Speaker 3: road on it, and I said, oh God, and she
Speaker 3: signed off on all of it, and then we finished
Speaker 3: it up. But later on, as I was when I
Speaker 3: realized it would make a good duet, we collaborated on
Speaker 3: the spoken word at the end of it to have
Speaker 3: a little conversation at the end, to make the song
Speaker 3: a conversation.
Speaker 1: A beautiful line about an unwed mother seemed to be
Speaker 1: a small voice on the phone. Was that from you?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Well, I claimed that one think you should. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I do want to ask about the last song, which
Speaker 1: is Jess Gorgeous maybe somewhere down the road.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Before I met Claudia, I had a friendship romance
Speaker 3: with a woman. She was really interesting woman, and I
Speaker 3: helped her get to India. She wanted to get to India,
Speaker 3: and I helped her get there, and she did come
Speaker 3: back to the States and I never saw her again
Speaker 3: when she came back from India. But I later found
Speaker 3: out that she had taken her own life and in
Speaker 3: a pretty horrific way. So I thought about her a lot,
Speaker 3: and I said, hey, God, the only thing I can
Speaker 3: do is she deserves a song. So I made the song.
Speaker 3: I wrote it and we recorded its first thing we
Speaker 3: recorded before we actually went down to Louisiana, and I
Speaker 3: didn't think it fit the record because the rest of
Speaker 3: Airline Highway was a little more lighthearted. But Tyler, the producer,
Speaker 3: he loved it, and I liked the song. I thought
Speaker 3: it was some good writing, but I just felt like
Speaker 3: it was it didn't work for the album. But everybody
Speaker 3: around me kept saying, you're wrong, you're wrong, You're wrong.
Speaker 3: And then then one day when Trina Shoemaker. She rang
Speaker 3: in and she said, you're wrong. Everybody told me I
Speaker 3: was wrong, so I said, okay, well then let's stick
Speaker 3: it on the end because it doesn't fit anywhere else.
Speaker 3: So there it is. And I always thought it was
Speaker 3: pretty good writing, and I think the performance is pretty good.
Speaker 3: And I'm glad it's on the record because the woman
Speaker 3: that I wrote it about deserve having a song, even
Speaker 3: though it was after her life was gone through.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for coming in. It's been complete delight,
Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 2: An episode of description, you'll find a link to a
Speaker 2: playlist featuring our favorite songs from Rodney Crowell, as well
Speaker 2: as his new album, Airline Highway. Be sure to check
Speaker 2: out YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast to see
Speaker 2: all of our video interviews, and be sure to follow
Speaker 2: us on Instagram at the Broken Record Pod. You can
Speaker 2: follow us on Twitter at Broken Record. Broken Record is
Speaker 2: produced and edited by Leah Rose, with marketing help from
Speaker 2: Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Holliday.
Speaker 2: Broken Record is production of Pushkin Industries. If you love
Speaker 2: this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus.
Speaker 2: Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content
Speaker 2: and ad free listening for four ninety nine a month.
Speaker 2: Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions, and if
Speaker 2: you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and
Speaker 2: review us on your podcast app Our theme musics by
Speaker 2: Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmonds.