Mavericks of Sound

by Ensminger, David

  What are you working on?

  Well, I am going to go back to New Zealand on Sunday and start writing and recording again.

  Do you think you could ever live in America?

  Yeah, I could. I don’t know how I would because I would need a green card to do it.

  What’s appealing about living here?

  Change; I’m a bit tired of New Zealand. I think change. I don’t know if I’d live there too long, I’m not sure. I think change is good. I’ve been itching to live somewhere else for the last three or four years, and I think I am pretty close to coming here to live something like twelve months. We’ll see how it goes. I really don’t know how I would do it.

  Is it easier to survive and make music the way you want to in New Zealand?

  Probably, but there’s not a lot of motivation to do it in New Zealand because of the way the music industry is set up. It’s a lot more stimulating to be here in America and play and make music here. It seems like such a larger country. Also, I know so many people here now, a nice network of friends throughout the country, so it’s a very appealing idea to come here. But I don’t want to come here and be an illegal . . . what do you call it? I would like to do it legit, so I’m not sure how to do that.

  There is a very strong cinematic feel to the instrumentals on the new record. Is that something you aimed for?

  Not really, but I do like instrumental music.

  Like what?

  As a kid, I was a huge fan of Brian Eno, especially his ambient stuff. Then there’s stuff like the soundtracks of Ennio Morricone, and I adore Jimi Hendrix, and a lot of his live stuff is instrumental music.

  Can you see yourself composing for films?

  I would love to. I’ve done a little bit for a friend’s short movie a few years ago. I would really like to. Yeah, I’ve had songs used in the odd movie or two in New Zealand, but I’ve never actually written anything, and I would really like to.

  If you could name one major difference between you and brother Hamish, what is it?

  [Long pause.] That’s a very good question. He’s got black hair and I’ve got brown.

  That’s it?

  Off the top of my head. Yeah. We are very similar in many ways, but sure we have our differences, absolutely.

  How did the Clean transcend “Kiwi Pop” and survive twenty years later?

  I really don’t know. This trip over we did very tentatively—we hadn’t been here for twelve years and we didn’t know what it was going to be like. We just did a few shows to test it out. We’re still flummoxed by how many people have still held on to the love of it. There are young people that we’re meeting who have been coming to the shows, and people at radio stations. I don’t know what it is. Maybe they hear the innocence of it all. I think Americans are also pretty turned on to the history of music.

  Do you find that in other places?

  Maybe not on such a grand scale. They are pretty turned on here. And I think there’s a great love of garage rock too.

  Chapter 5

  Short Cuts

  Concise Interviews with Icons

  These shorter interviews, compact and condensed, reveal various points of the artists’ interests—from studio projects and boat making to the changing nature of rural America—that grip artists like Merle Haggard and folksinger Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Breezy and informative, the pieces provide candid snapshots of artists in action, grappling with their careers or issues that plug into their deepest concerns.

  Merle Haggard: The Roots of His Raising

  Originally published in Thirsty Ear, June/July 2001.

  How did the 1930s and the Depression shape your vision of America?

  Well, I feel lucky that I even survived. But those were also the times when there were small businesses, ma-and-pa joints, and free industry. There hasn’t been anything like it since, and there probably never will be again, so I feel sorry for people like you.

  People say your conservatism is a longing for an idealized past.

  I’m not a conservative; I’m a liberal! I used to open my shows with, “Welcome, friends, neighbors, and conservatives.” If a man in his forties wants to walk over and do a line of coke, then I believe he should have that right. I once saw a man at a show get pulled over by the police, and they took this poor guy and roughed him over and found a joint on him, and started waving it at his little kid, saying things like, “Look what your daddy has done.” No one should get between a man and his child and do a thing like that, it’s crazy. I tell you, that put me in a fighting mood.

  Charlie Parker played until the very end. His last gig was at the Hotel Astoria. His doctors told him not to perform, but he did anyway because he felt it was important for the music and his fans. Will that be you some day?

  I’ve fought with that question every day of my life. You know, I sound like I’m going to cave in every once in a while, but it’s just because my body’s getting old. I could easily just sink back in the chair and become a hermit like some other people in the entertainment business. But I really think that life goes away when I do that, the minute I quit what I’m supposed to do. I’ve got to play somewhere on a regular basis, and to do that I guess you’re going to have to drive to some of them. I’m doing seven to ten days a month, and I have a young family that I want to be with, so I don’t want to be on the road much. But I’m not financially independent, you know; freedom comes with a lot of money. Freedom is a funny word. It’s only free if you’ve got money. I have an expensive lifestyle. I probably go through $100,000 a month, just to do what other people do. It seems like they get by on far less. I don’t quite understand it.

  Chaos, you once said, got you going, then you’d go to a quiet place, and the songs would come to you in a half-psychic way. Is that almost like a trance?

  It’s not like Edgar Cayce. I don’t go into a trance and come out with a hit. I wish. I love to write. I’m continually trying to analyze and put things into some sort of analogy. Then if you can also put it to music, you’ve got a song. I play guitar; that’s my first love. I play fiddle, and I love a certain kind of music. I love the kind of music that is straightforward and has no pretense to it. Things that happen from pure gut feelings during a recording—things that occur that, in my judgment, are treasures, whereas someone else might call them mistakes—what I try to do is bring reality and the pendulum of reality back into play again and make a song take notice of what we’ve allowed ourselves to become used to. Let’s clean out our ears. I’d like to hear some real talent; I’d like to hear all the talent that is available without all the interference of the so-called producers and electronic bullshit. I want to hear a story about a guy they sign to a contract and they [bring] him into the studio and let him do what he wants to, and, boy, he’s really good [laughs].

  You were the first artist from California in the Country Hall of Fame and its youngest member, and you’ve had too many hit songs to list. But would any of that matter if tomorrow you couldn’t write a song?

  You know, there’s an old saying that the man who just passed away a few minutes ago, he’s as dead as Julius Caesar. Once things slip into the past, they’re of no good to you. I don’t live in the past. I don’t sit around thinking about what I’ve done. I’ve always got a project, always working on something. And if I’m not, I’m a very depressed, miserable individual. So I have to keep doing something. And I’m more excited about this project [recording the songs of Lefty Frizzell live to two-track in his living room] than anything I’ve ever done, because it’s done without any electronic manipulation. We’re using basic microphones, no echo of any kind. We’re doing it all at the same time, so the spirit rises at once. It’s incredible. I can’t imagine how far off the damn center we’ve come with this electronic bombardment of manipulation and making everybody a good singer, when they couldn’t sing one song, couldn’t sing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” without the help of a tuner of some sort. In forty years, I haven’t heard a voice as good as Lefty Frizzell�
��s.

  Ramblin’ Jack Elliott: In the Deep Grain of Music

  Interviewed for Thirsty Ear in July 2002, which printed portions. Remaining portions published in Left of the Dial.

  You told a reporter that in your heart you are a sailor and that you used to inspire Pete Seeger with stories about ships during the 1960s?

  Yeah. That’s true.

  What is it about the life of a sailor that you find so fascinating?

  Not drowning is the most fascinating thing about sailing, and getting wet but not getting cold. Well, not getting too wet, staying dry, and not getting seasick. I’ve never been seasick, but I know that every sailor or any person who has been seasick, well, they feel like they want to die. It’s a miserable thing I have never experienced. I’ve always had good times when I have been sailing.

  But you’re not a huge fan of sailor songs?

  Not at all.

  What is so not interesting about them?

  The songs themselves are very interesting, but the people that sing them are like opera singers and not like sailors. They do it in such a hammy way that it sort of drove me away and spoiled my interest in it, so I have been driven in another direction when I’ve heard people interpret old sea shanties. One of my favorite sailors, the great author who wrote a lot of great books about the sea from his own experience sailing around Cape Horn and sailing vessels all over the world, was an Australian gentleman named Alan Villiers. He was the captain of the vessel they used for filming Moby Dick with Gregory Peck. He had an old schooner they had dummied up to look like or resemble a whaling vessel out of New Bedford. She was rigged like a whaler.

  The movie people—John Huston—forgot to tell the shipyard that he really intended to take that vessel out to sea and sail her so they could shoot movies onboard as they were underway with the sail set. The shipyard people thought they were rigging her up for another movie and kind of rigged her up with skinny spars and insufficient rigging and then they took her out to sea anyway. So, she was very weak, brittle, vulnerable, and breakable. The first captain quit, then they hired Alan Villiers, and then they had a man who was a friend of mine, a folksinger in England, singing the sea shanties. He had never sailed in a sailing vessel in his life, but he was a great student of folk music and had a lot of style and heart. His name was A. L. Lloyd.

  He was the shanty man in the movie Moby Dick. When I visited Alan’s home in Oxford, I said, “What did you think of the sea shanties there in the movie?” This is before I had actually seen the movie. They had just finished filming, and he said [Jack uses a thick accent], “I don’t know, Jack, I never heard any sea shanties sung when I was sailing around the world. They’d just say one, two, one, two, or heave, ho, heave, ho and stop that heaving, delay, and come up.” So he really didn’t have any knowledge about how sea shanties were supposed to be done.

  He said he thought that A. L. Lloyd sounded nice but didn’t have the right rhythm. Well, I don’t know. A. L. Lloyd didn’t have much experience with sailing vessels, but I thought it was blood-curdling good they way he sang, and he’s much better than most of the other people I have heard that try to do sea shanties. I have only heard a few people do them well. He was one. He’s dead now.

  And another fellow named Sam Larner. There was another Englishman who was the last English sailor to sail around Cape Horn in a square-rigger that was still singing sea shanties before 1930, when Alan Villiers started sailing. It was around 1929 or 1930, but Alan never heard them, so he thinks they stopped singing them around 1920. I don’t know anything about sea shanties. I sing one or two sea songs. But it’s not enough to make a big deal about it or claim to be a singer of sea shanties. But I certainly love sailing. That’s why I am up here in school.

  You were being trained at a young age by a neighbor to be an officer in the merchant marine?

  That’s right.

  So I assume your love of sailing goes back to your childhood. Was there a point where you, like Allen Ginsberg, might have been a merchant marine?

  I was twelve when I first met Captain Hinckley. I met another old sailor when I was about thirteen or fourteen who taught me about sailing. He was an old sailmaker from Denmark, Mr. Eriksen. He had a sailmaker shop, and they took me out sailing on his boat. He and his wife. Then I got off on the rodeo trip and got interested in the rodeo, and that really upset my sailmaker friend [laughs]. He was pretty pissed off about it.

  The Madison Square Garden Rodeo triggered your interest, along with the books by Will James. Were you a fan of history and the lore of the American West?

  I was reading Will James’ books and he was born in 1890. He started cowboying around 1915 or so, no, 1905, out in Alberta. He went west on the train. His mom gave him a bag of cookies, a brown paper bag, and he got a job on a ranch out there in western Canada and started cowboying. Then he came down into the U.S. and cowboyed all over the West. He even went to Hollywood and worked as an extra in Westerns for a while, but he was always a real cowboy.

  Do you remember any films with him in them?

  No, I never saw any films with him in them. He never had a speaking line because of his French-Canadian accent [laughs]. He wrote like American cowboys speak, and the way he spelled everything was like he was a cowboy from Nevada or Montana.

  You grew up in Brooklyn, and Henry Miller also grew up in Brooklyn. Were you aware of Miller and his books, like Tropic of Cancer?

  I was right next door to him visiting a lady who wrote a song that I sang, and he was her next-door neighbor, and I had never heard of him because his books weren’t discovered or popular in America. In fact, they were banned in America. You had to go to Paris to buy one in 1954 or 1953 when I visited her. Then I went to Europe in 1955, and his books were readily available, and I bought some of his books and read him and thought he was great. One book he wrote about Greece made me want to go to Greece. I came very close to meeting the man that the book was about.

  Was it The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder?

  The Colossus of Maroussi.

  You rode across Europe throughout the mid to late 1950s on a Vespa with the British writer Herb Greer?

  He was from New Mexico but lived in Britain. I lost track of him. He tried to contact me on email once, and I didn’t get back to him in time, and now I have lost his address and still don’t know how to reach him. He wrote a book about our travels. It was called The Trip and was published by some well-known British publishing company.

  Could that book be compared to The Americans, the photo and prose book written by Jack Kerouac and shot by Robert Frank, which explored late-1950s America?

  No, not quite, no, no. It was a very brief little book, and the stories he made up were not entirely true about our adventures, and some of it included actual things that he told as they did happen and for some reason or another he decided to make up some imaginary stories about things that didn’t really happen. I don’t think it was that great of a book at all. I am, however, proud I was in a book.

  You met the author/songwriter Shel Silverstein in Rome in 1957 and on the back of your 1964 Vanguard record he said that, “Jack treats his guitar like a human being.” What did he mean?

  Well, like I treat a dog or horse like a human being. Like everything I have a high regard for, I treat it like a human being. I used to treat my Land Rover like it was a human being too. Let’s see, what does that mean? He had a funny way of putting things; in fact, he wrote an incredibly hysterically funny and incredibly accurate description of me and my wife trying to pack for a trip, which were album notes. In fact, he was the best man at my wedding when I got married for the second time, after the first marriage dissolved.

  What distinguishes you from songwriters you enjoy today, such as Tom Russell, Dave Alvin, and Richard Thompson?

  I will be seeing Dave this Friday when he plays a theater here. Well, we seem to have a great deal of affinity for one another personally. We like each other. I don’t write songs; I’m not a singer-songwriter. I’ve
been misnomered as a singer-songwriter. I’ve only written four songs in forty years. I don’t go around writing. I wish I could write. It’s like wanting to learn how to build a boat. I’ve been studying boat building for fifty years now and don’t know a thing about it because I haven’t applied myself in a consistent manner for more than a little while at a time, and it takes much more attention than that to learn how to be a good airplane pilot or boat builder or songwriter.

  So what are you, a storyteller?

  I’m a storyteller and a guitar picker. I’m a picker and a driver. Can’t even work the Internet. I have a computer in the house, but I rarely go in that room. I keep it locked up. In fact, I call it the Radio Shack. My wife used to work with the computer. It was an old Mac she got when she worked for Jesse Colin Young’s record company. So, we bought the old computer when he closed his record company up. He sold us the old Mac. Now I’ve got a newer computer but haven’t dared yet to plug it in.

  I am very slow to learn about these electronic things. I have a cell phone, and I used it a couple of times, but I still can’t understand how to make it work. The thing keeps telling me I have lots of messages. But in order to get your messages, you have to dial certain numbers, numbers that you make up as your ID number, so I chose a certain year that something happened in my life, which is four digits, which is my ID number, and you dial your cell phone number and then you dial your ID number, and I get a message that says, you have dialed the wrong number. So, what do I do now? I wasn’t stupid before I got the cell phone. Now I got the cell phone and I am stupid.