by Jeff Burger
Q: What did you listen to besides the radio dramas?
A: Up north, at night, you could find these radio stations with no name on the dials, you know, that played pre-rock ’n’ roll things—country blues. We would hear Slim Harpo or Lightnin’ Slim and gospel groups, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. I was so far north, I didn’t even know where Alabama was. And then there’d be at a different hours the blues — you could hear Jimmy Reed, Wynonie Harris and Little Walter. Then there was a station out of Chicago. WSM? Is that the one I’m thinking of? Played all hillbilly stuff. Riley Puckett, Uncle Dave Macon, the Delmore Brothers. We also heard the Grand Ole Opry from Nashville every Saturday night. I heard Hank Williams way early, when he was still alive. A lot of those Opry stars, except for Hank, of course, came through the town I lived in and played at the armory building. Webb Pierce, Hank Snow, Carl Smith, Porter Wagoner. I saw all those country stars growing up.
One night I was lying in bed and listening to the radio. I think it was a station out of Shreveport, Louisiana. I wasn’t sure where Louisiana was either. I remember listening to the Staple Singers’ “Uncloudy Day.” And it was the most mysterious thing I’d ever heard. It was like the fog rolling in. I heard it again, maybe the next night, and its mystery had even deepened. What was that? How do you make that? It just went through me like my body was invisible. What is that? A tremolo guitar? What’s a tremolo guitar? I had no idea, I’d never seen one. And what kind of clapping is that? And that singer is pulling things out of my soul that I never knew were there. After hearing “Uncloudy Day” for the second time, I don’t think I could even sleep that night. I knew these Staple Singers were different than any other gospel group. But who were they anyway?
I’d think about them even at my school desk. I managed to get down to the Twin Cities and get my hands on an LP of the Staple Singers, and one of the songs on it was “Uncloudy Day.” And I’m like, “Man!” I looked at the cover and studied it, like people used to do with covers of records. I knew who Mavis was without having to be told. I knew it was she who was singing the lead part. I knew who Pops was. All the information was on the back of the record. Not much, but enough to let me in just a little ways. Mavis looked to be about the same age as me in her picture. Her singing just knocked me out. I listened to the Staple Singers a lot. Certainly more than any other gospel group. I like spiritual songs. They struck me as truthful and serious. They brought me down to earth and they lifted me up all in the same moment. And Mavis was a great singer—deep and mysterious. And even at the young age, I felt that life itself was a mystery.
This was before folk music had ever entered my life. I was still an aspiring rock ’n’ roller, the descendant, if you will, of the first generation of guys who played rock ’n’ roll—who were thrown down. Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis. They played this type of music that was black and white. Extremely incendiary. Your clothes could catch fire. It was a mixture of black culture and hillbilly culture. When I first heard Chuck Berry, I didn’t consider that he was black. I thought he was a white hillbilly. Little did I know, he was a great poet, too. “Flying across the desert in a TWA, I saw a woman walking ’cross the sand. She been walking 30 miles en route to Bombay to meet a brown-eyed handsome man.” I didn’t think about poetry at that time—those words just flew by. Only later did I realize how hard it is to write those kind of lyrics.
Chuck Berry could have been anything in the music business. He stopped where he was, but he could have been a jazz singer, a ballad singer, a guitar virtuoso. He could have been a lot of things. But there’s a spiritual aspect to him, too. In 50 or 100 years he might even be thought of as a religious icon. There’s only one him, and what he does physically is even hard to do. If you see him in person, you know he goes out of tune a lot. But who wouldn’t? He has to constantly be playing eighth notes on his guitar and sing at the same time, plus play fills and sing. People think that singing and playing is easy. It’s not. It’s easy to strum along with yourself, as you are singing a song and that’s OK, but if you actually want to really play, where it’s important, that’s a hard thing and not too many people are good at it.
Q: And he was always the main guitar player in his band.
A: He was the only guitar player. Yeah. And there was Jerry Lee [Lewis], his counterpart, and people like that. There must have been some elitist power that had to get rid of all these guys, to strike down rock ’n’ roll for what it was and what it represented—not least of all it being a black-and-white thing. Tied together and welded shut. If you separate the pieces, you’re killing it.
Q: Do you mean it’s musical race-mixing, and that’s what made it dangerous?
A: Well, racial prejudice has been around a while, so yeah. And that was extremely threatening for the city fathers, I would think. When they finally recognized what it was, they had to dismantle it, which they did, starting with payola scandals and things like that. The black element was turned into soul music and the white element was turned into English pop. They separated it. I think of rock ’n’ roll as a combination of country blues and swing band music, not Chicago blues, and modern pop. Real rock ’n’ roll hasn’t existed since when? 1961, 1962? Well, it was a part of my DNA, so it never disappeared from me. I just incorporated it into other aspects of what I was doing. I don’t know if this is answering the question. [Laughs.] I can’t remember what the question was.
Q: We were talking about your influences and your crush on Mavis Staples.
A: Oh, the Staple Singers! Mavis! So I had seen this picture of the Staple Singers. And I said to myself, “You know, one day you’ll be standing there with your arm around that girl.” I remember thinking that. Ten years later, there I was—with my arm around her. But it felt so natural. Felt like I’d been there before, many times. Well I was, in my mind.
Q: Did you recall your original thought?
A: No! I was moving too fast. Not until 10 years more beyond that did I remember anything about it.
Q: I was thinking how important it was to you when you were young to chase down those Woody Guthrie records. And I was thinking about how Mick [Jagger] and Keith [Richards] ran all over London to get blues records, and how Neil Young pumped quarters into the jukebox to hear Ian and Sylvia. And now the Internet has all of it—you can just touch a button and hear almost anything in the history of recorded music. Has it made music better? Or worse? More valued or less valued?
A: Well, if you’re just a member of the general public, and you have all this music available to you, what do you listen to? How many of these things are you going to listen to at the same time? Your head is just going to get jammed—it’s all going to become a blur, I would think. Back in the day, if you wanted to hear Memphis Minnie, you had to seek a compilation record, which would have a Memphis Minnie song on it. And if you heard Memphis Minnie back then, you would just accidentally discover her on a record that also had Son House and Skip James and the Memphis Jug Band. And then maybe you’d seek Memphis Minnie in some other places—a song here, a song there. You’d try to find out who she was. Is she still alive? Does she play? Can she teach me anything? Can I hang out with her? Can I do anything for her? Does she need anything? But now, if you want to hear Memphis Minnie, you can go hear a thousand songs. Likewise, all the rest of those performers, like Blind Lemon [Jefferson]. In the old days, maybe you’d hear “Matchbox” and “Prison Cell Blues.” That would be all you would hear, so those songs would be prominent in your mind. But when you hear an onslaught of 100 more songs of Blind Lemon, then it’s like, “Oh man! This is overkill!” It’s so easy you might appreciate it a lot less.
The Album
Q: Are the songs on this album laid down in the order you would like people to listen to them? Or do you care whether Apple sells them one by one?
A: The business end of the record—it’s none of my business. I sure hope it sells, and I would like people to listen to it. But the
way people listen to music has changed, and I hope they get a chance to hear all the songs in one way or another. But! I did record those songs, believe it or not, in that same order that you hear them. Not that it matters, really. I didn’t pay any attention to the sequencing like on other records. We would usually get one song done in three hours. There’s no mixing. That’s just the way it sounded. No dials, nothing enhanced, nothing—that’s it. Capitol’s got those big echo chambers. So some of that was probably used. We used as little technology as possible. It’s been done wrong too many other times. I wanted to do it rightly.
Q: Was this recording an experiment?
A: It was more than an experiment. Because we had played these songs, we were dead sure that we could do them. It’s just a question of could it be recorded right. We did it the old-fashioned way, I guess you would say. That’s the way I used to make records anyway. I never did use earphones up until into the ’80s or ’90s. I don’t like to use earphones.
Q: You feel that’s a distancing thing?
A: Yeah. There’s a complete disconnect. You can overwhelm yourself in your own head. I’ve never heard anybody sing with those things in their ears effectively. They just give you a false sense of security. A lot of us don’t need earphones. I don’t think Springsteen does. I know Mick doesn’t. I don’t think he does. But other people you see, more or less have given in. They just do it. But they ought not to do it. They don’t need to. Especially if they have a good band.
Recording studios are filled with technology. They are set in their ways. And to update them means you’d have to change them back. That would be my idea of upgrading. And this will never happen. As far as I know, recording studios are booked all the time. So obviously people like all the improvements. The more technically advanced they are, the more in demand they become. The corporations have taken over. Even in the recording studio. Actually, the corporate companies have taken over American life most everywhere. Go coast to coast and you will see people all wearing the same clothes, thinking the same thoughts and eating the same food. Everything is processed.
Q: Let’s talk about the first song on the album, “I’m a Fool To Want You.” I’m interested in how you put across the heartbreak that’s on this record. It’s believed that Frank Sinatra wrote it for Ava Gardner, his great love. You wrote once that the performer, the artist transmits emotion via alchemy. “I’m not feeling this,” you’re saying. “What I’m doing is I’m putting it across.” Is that right?
A: You’re right, but you don’t want to overstate that. Look, it all has to do with technique. Every singer has three or four or five techniques, and you can force them together in different combinations. Some of the techniques you discard along the way, and pick up others. But you do need them. It’s just like anything. You have to know certain things about what you’re doing that other people don’t know. Singing has to do with techniques and how many you use at the same time. One alone doesn’t work. There’s no point to going over three. But you might interchange them whenever you feel like it. So yes, it’s a bit like alchemy. It’s different than being an actor where you call up sources from your own experience that you can apply to whatever Shakespeare drama you’re in or whatever television show. With a song it’s not quite the same way. An actor is pretending to be somebody, but a singer isn’t. He’s not hiding behind anything. And that’s the difference. Singers today have to sing songs where there’s very little emotion involved. That and the fact that they have to sing hit records from years gone by doesn’t leave a lot of room for any kind of intelligent creativity. In a way, having hits buries a singer in the past. A lot of singers hide in the past because it’s safer back there. If you’ve ever heard today’s country music, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Why do all these songs fall flat? I think technology has a lot to do with it. Technology is mechanical and contrary to the emotions that inform a person’s life. The country music field has especially been hit hard by this turn of events.
These songs [on my album] have been written by people who went out of fashion years ago. I’m probably someone who helped put them out of fashion. But what they did is a lost art form. Just like da Vinci and Renoir and van Gogh. Nobody paints like that anymore either. But it can’t be wrong to try.
So a song like “I’m a Fool to Want You”—I know that song. I can sing that song. I’ve felt every word in that song. I mean, I know that song. It’s like I wrote it. It’s easier for me to sing that song than it is to sing, “Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane.” At one time that wouldn’t have been so. But now it is. Because “Queen Jane” might be a little bit outdated. It can’t be outrun. But this song is not outdated. It has to do with human emotion, which is a constant thing. There’s nothing contrived in these songs. There’s not one false word in any of them. They’re eternal, lyrically and musically.
Q: Do you wish you wrote them?
A: In a way I’m glad I didn’t write any of them. I’m good with songs that I haven’t written, if I like them. I already know how the song goes, so I have more freedom with it. I understand these songs. I’ve known them for 40 years, 50 years, maybe longer, and they make a lot of sense. So I’m not coming to them like a stranger. I’ve written all the songs that I feel are . . . I don’t know how to put this . . . You travel the world, you go see different things. I like to see Shakespeare plays, so I’ll go—I mean, even if it’s in a different language. I don’t care, I just like Shakespeare, you know. I’ve seen Othello and Hamlet and Merchant of Venice over the years, and some versions are better than others. Way better. It’s like hearing a bad version of a song. But then somewhere else somebody has a great version.
Q: I like your version of “Lucky Old Sun.” Can you talk about what drew you to this one in particular? Did you have a memory of it?
A: Oh, I’ve never not known that song. I don’t think anybody my age can tell you that they ever remember not knowing that song. I mean, it’s been recorded hundreds of times. I’ve sung it in concert.
Q: Have you?
A: Yeah. But I never really got to the heart of the song until recently.
Q: So how do you do that?
A: Well, you cut the song down to the bone and see if it’s really there for you to do. Most songs have bridges in them. A bridge is something that distracts a listener from the main verses of a song so the listener doesn’t get repetitively bored. My songs don’t have a lot of bridges because lyric poetry never had them. But when a song like “Autumn Leaves” presents itself, you have to decide what’s real about it and what’s not. Listen to how Eric Clapton does it. He sings the song, and then he plays the guitar for 10 minutes and then he sings the song again. He might even play the guitar again, I can’t remember. But when you listen to his version, where do you think the importance is? Well obviously, it’s in the guitar playing. He sings the song twice both the same way. And there’s really no reason to do that unless you’re singing the song in a different way. It’s OK for Eric because he’s a master guitar player and, of course, that’s what he wants to feature on any song he records. But other people couldn’t do it and get away with it. It’s not exactly getting to the heart of what “Autumn Leaves” is about. And as a performer, you don’t get many chances to do that. And when you get the opportunity, you don’t want to blow it. With all these songs you have to study the lyrics. You have to look at every one of these songs and be able to identify with them in a meaningful way. You can hardly sing these songs unless you’re in them. If you want to fake it, go ahead. Fake it if you want. But I’m not that kind of singer.
Q: Can we talk about some of the melodies of these songs?
A: Yeah, they’re incredible, aren’t they? All these songs have classical music under-themes. Why? Because all these composers learned from classical music. They were composers who understood music theory, and they went to music academies. It could be a little piece of Mozart, Bach—Paul Simon did an entire song using a Bach melody—or it could be a piece of Beethoven or Liszt,
Chopin, Rachmaninoff, or Stravinsky or Tchaikovsky. You can get a lot of great melodies listening to Tchaikovsky if you’re a commercial songwriter or composer, and these guys did that. Not that I myself recognize where these melodies and parts came from, but I know they came from somewhere in that direction. Most of these songs are written by two people, one for the music and one for the words.
There’s only one guy that I know of who did it all, and that was Irving Berlin. He wrote the melody and the lyrics. This guy was a flat-out genius. I mean, he had a gift, like, it just wouldn’t stop giving, classical themes notwithstanding, because I don’t think he used any. But everyone else who wrote lyrics had to depend on a piece of music. Lyricists themselves, they were a funny breed. They are not who you would think they would be. They came from all walks of life. Highbrow, lowbrow. Could be a telephone repairman, a typesetter, insurance salesman. One was a house painter, another a car mechanic. Jimmy Van Heusen was a stunt pilot. All these people knew how to keep it simple and understood ordinary daily existence, common life. And they did good.
Q: Who could speak the vernacular.
A: Who spoke the vernacular. Exactly. So there’s nothing contrived about these songs. There’s not one false word in any of them.
Q: Do you like Johnny Mercer?
A: I love Johnny Mercer. Yeah. I love . . .
Q: He did the English lyrics for “Autumn Leaves.”
A: Yeah, he did. Well it doesn’t surprise me. I love all of his stuff—one of the most gifted lyricists. Yeah. “Jeepers Creepers.” “Lazy Bones.” “Blues in the Night.” We do a lot of his songs at sound checks. If he was around now, I’d like to give him some of my instrumental tapes. See what he could do with them. But they might be beneath him.