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TERRY CLARKE'S U.S. JOURNAL
FEBRUARY 2003
NASHVILLE & AUSTIN
To begin ...
the first weekend of February saw heavy snow in Scotland.
Where we live out west in Argyll, the climate is more clement usually
but it left several inches this year.
So, allowing plenty of time for bad roads and emergencies,
on Tues the 4th I was up at 5.30.in the morning to get the Western Ferry
over the River Clyde to drive to Glasgow airport for the flight to Newark,
New Jersey and on down to Nashville.
I was performing a showcase at the Folk Alliance Confererence
which this year took place at the Renaissance Nashville Hotel.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the U.S. these past
years, mainly in Texas and some time in New England and New Jersey.
This was to be my first time in Nashville since 1987 when I performed
at a tribute concert for Gram Parsons and Clarence White.
Rosie Flores had offered me hospitality and a bed for
the duration of my stay.
We’ve been good friends now for a long time, since we both toured
with Butch Hancock back in 94.
Since then we’ve done a lot of live work and recording together;
she cut my song
‘Poor Girls Town’ - which I wrote for her - on her Hightone
release ‘Rockabilly Filly’ and sang on two of my albums ,
‘The Heart Sings’ in 97 and on the latest one ‘Green
Voodoo’.
I knew the Nashville trip would be a party
and it was !
I’ve developed a passion for photography these past years , my
favourite camera to use is a Canon T90 but it’s heavy to travel
with so for this trip I took an old Olympus OM1 I picked up in Reading
where I used to live, because it’s hardy and light to carry around
.
I did shoot a couple of rolls of film but the favourites are what I
call the
‘verbal snapshots’ , some Polaroid and some 35mm which are
reproduced below.
First night in town and Jim Lauderdale’s playing
at the Exit Inn.
I’ve been a fan of his music since 1988 when I was in Austin recording
my first
album ‘Call Up a Hurricane’ with J.D. Foster.
J.D. had a cassette of a Lauderdale gig in L.A. which was my introducation
to his music.
I always look forward to catching him play whenever I can .... I always
thought his song ‘Whispering’ was the best song George Jones
never cut.
Rosie’s friend Manuel was on the town that night
..... Manuel .... costumier and designer , heir to the legacy of Nudie
Cohen ..... remember that before Versace there was Nudie and Manuel.
Drinking Jameson’s whiskey with Rosie is a fine way to spend an
evening in Nashville.
Spent some time over the next few days with Rosie in
the studio listening to tracks for her new live CD ‘Single Rose’.
It was recorded in Nashville at Douglas Corner and sounds intimate,
tender and rocking in the same breath.
Featured are a lot of new compositions of hers, some beautiful songs
-
the title track ‘Single Rose’ and ‘Morning Light’
are like little three minute essays on life and love - I suppose that
makes them classics by definition .
We sat up late one night sipping whiskey , when that
ran out we turned to tequila and spent the wee small hours swapping
songs.
The favourites that we both grew up on ... some half remembered ....
a verse of one ... a chorus of another, as I recall now , most of them
were Don Gibson songs that night.
Always seemed to me that he was a bluesman .... his original versions
of ‘Sweet Dreams’, ‘Just One Time’, ‘Oh, Lonesome
Me’ etc had such a blue groove to them.
The following morning it was raining, it was cold ,
I was a guest in a non-smoking household so ...
I put on my down jacket, made some coffee, rolled a cigarette and took
the guitar out on the porch.
The street appeared to me as a black and white photo from the late 50s/early
60s,
seemed like a Don Gibson day, I sat there and wrote a song called ‘Lonesome
Street’.
It’s always going to be my ‘Don Gibson song’ , Rosie
heard me playing it .... we worked it up and played it in our set at
the Bluebird Cafe a few days later.
I’ll be recording it for my next album and I think Rosie has plans
to cut it too, so ... thank you Mr Gibson for the inspiration and the
poetry grooves.
I met up in the afternoon with my friend Dale Anderson
from Buffalo, NY.
We first knew each other in London at the Dublin Castle in Camden, back
when he was managing Ani DiFranco.
Ani and I had some mutual friends in Austin, TX and I’d helped
her out when she first came to England.
She stayed at the house with us and I set some shows up for her in London
and Reading.
Dale and I stayed in touch and he is currently part of my un-official
management team helping spread the word , he set it all up and made
it possible for me to showcase at Folk Alliance.
I played a set around midnight in room 319 , I think it was up around
the 18th floor anyway ....... the drapes pulled back and the Nashville
skyline as a backdrop ....
that my friends IS ‘Irish Rockabilly Blues’.
Had a good time , met up with some old friends and made
some new ones.
Mitch Cantor from Gadfly Records, Greg Johnson who I first knew when
he was a jounalist in Austin - he now runs a club called The Blue Door
in Oklahoma City,
Roz and Howard Larman from Los Angeles - Roz & Howard of ‘Folkscene’
fame - great people, Taylor McCaffrey from Baton Rouge .
It’s great to get together with people who’ve played your
music and supported you through their radio shows for years, one of
the joys and rewards of this life we choose.
If Sat night is a 35mm shot, then it’s definitely
cross-processed.
Rosie had arranged a gig for us at The Coble Opry, she told me it was
going to be as much fun as I could have on a Sat night and she was absolutely
right.
It had been a good day already ... Amy Rigby had just
finished mastering her new album ‘Til The Wheels Fall Off’
, she lives a few doors down the street from Rosie and threw a little
brunch party to which we were invited.
Greg Trooper came with copy of ‘Floating’ his new one , we’ve
played a lot of the same gigs over the years but had never met , we
also have mutual friends in his home state of New Jersey so it was an
unexpected pleasure to meet him.
Just another February afternoon in Nashville .... late
winter sunshine, delicious food, charming company and .... Amy’s
album is a current favourite of mine - her songs are on ‘repeat’
in my brain.
Greg Trooper ? ..... anybody who writes a song that refers to a Gibson
‘Hummingbird’ guitar is man to respect and ..... he’s
funny in that New Jersey way that Donald Fagen and Lou Reed are New
Jersey funny.
Now to The Coble Opry.
Coble is a tiny place, I believe it’s in Hickman County, west of
Nashville about an hour and a half, going towards Jackson, Tennessee
- hometown of the late Carl Perkins.
.... head for Memphis, cross the Duck River, past the Wolf Creek church
and ...
the Opry is held in a little wooden country store, festooned with fairy
lights in the dark.
No alcohol is served but southern food is ... catfish, chicken, home
fries ....
there was ice on the ground outside and that food tasted so good.
Inside .... a long narrow room with a stage set up at the end.
It wasn’t till we got inside that I found out the music is run
by Hugh Waddell, Rosie had kept that a secret.
Hugh used to work for Johnny Cash and had arranged for me to meet him
when he played at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London 10 years
ago.
Around that time I’d recorded an album called ‘Rhythm Oil’
with slide guitarist Michael Messer and Jesse ‘Guitar’ Taylor
from Austin while he was on one of his sojourns from Joe Ely’s
band.
Johnny Cash had written the sleevenotes for that album, so when he came
to London on tour it was set up for Michael and I to meet with him after
the show and ... Hugh was the guy who’d arranged it all and I’d
not seen him since then.
So meeting up with him again in the middle of Tennessee on a Saturday
night was cause for celebration.
Rosie goes out there a lot to play when she’s in town , mainly
for fun.
The audience are family orientated, children through to grand-parents,
some travel quite a way to get there now as the word is spreading about
the place.
Also playing that night with us was a singer/guitar player who had travelled
in from Alabama.
Johnny Collier ..... played a Fender, great honky tonk voice and did
a killer version of Bad Company’s ‘Can’t Get Enough of
Your Love’.
The house band are pretty much whoever turns up from Nashville to play,
if they haven’t got a big paying gig or a recording date then the
Coble Opry is the place to be.
We had an amazing Hammond B3 organist that night - Moe Denham - who
swung like Jimmy Smith and Georgie Fame and sang a version of ‘Rainy
Night in Georgia’ that I’ll remember forever.
The performance schedule is pretty loose there, I sang a couple of songs
solo and then got the band up and we jammed on country and blues - my
12 string acoustic, a double bass, drums. B3 organ - Rosie joined me
for some.
Did Carl Perkin’s ‘Matchbox’ .... I told the crowd that
being closer to Jackson than I ever had - I could feel his aura, Robert
Johnson’s ‘Walkin’ Blues’.
Rosie then did a set for which I joined her , shaking her rockabilly
party dress and blowing like Eddie Cochran on her Epiphone ‘Wildcat’.
They rate and give prizes for performance at the Coble Opry too ......
I was judged a 10 cans of spam and a box of candy cane.
We should have recorded it, it would probably be my next album, as I
said - cross processed - the colours are twisted and saturated but beautiful.
Thank you Ma and Pa Coble, Hugh Waddell, Moe Denham and Johnny Collier.
Sunday saw heavy snow , I sat on the porch until late
and planned to walk around the neighbourhood in the morning and shoot
photographs but through the night the temperature rose and by morning
it was nearly all gone.
Monday night was the ‘Rosie & Terry Show’ at the Bluebird
Cafe after which we stayed up all night ‘til Rosie dropped me at
the airport at 4.30. a.m. for my flight to St. Louis and on to Austin,
TX.
AUSTIN
Austin.
In town two days only, to see my friends and now partners - Merel Bregante
and Sarah Pierce.
They have Cribworks Digital Audio and Little Bear Records based in Austin.
We’ve worked together now since 1998 when I recorded my album ‘Lucky’
there,
the following year we did ‘The Sound of the Moon’.
2001 saw me record ‘Green Voodoo’ with them, this time with
Merel co-producing with me as well as playing drums/perc and Sarah singing
harmonies.
The latter was originally available on Catfish Records but as a result
of our meeting up on this trip will now be on Little Bear Records as
will my earlier CD release ‘The Shelly River’. I’ll be
recording a new album with them later this year too.
While there I contributed some 12 string guitar and sang harmony on
two tracks for Sarah’s forthcoming CD, we did Dino Valente’s
‘Get Together’ and a version of Roy Orbison’s ‘In
Dreams’.
The album’s titled ‘Love’s The Only Way’ and is
due out in August on Little Bear Records.
Thursday morning around 5.00.a.m. Merel dropped me back at the airport
for the return to Nashville, this time via Dallas .... the trip was
turning into a tour of major U.S. airports
Thurs afternoon was a radio recording with Rosie and
Warren Pash for The Songwriter Sessions for Nashville Public Radio.
It was presented and recorded by Ed Lambert ‘in the round’,
Ed being one of the best sound engineers I’ve worked with.
He later sent me a recording of the show as broadcast and it sounded
wonderful.
Thurs night ..... last night in town and probably the
highlight. Cowboy Jack Clement at the Douglas Corner.
Study; your rock ‘n’ roll history books, L.P. sleevenotes,
CD booklets .... and Jack Clement’s name is writ large.
From the genisis to the present, Memphis with Sam Phillips and Sun Records,
with Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Waylon Jennings ...
engineering, producing, writing, playing that rhythm guitar style of
his.
Joe Gracey in Austin - who is one of the greatest rhythm guitar players
I know -
told me once that Cowboy Jack taught him to play.
Watching him perform that night was an object lesson in how to write,
sing and play music.
Still a handsome man with thick, swept back silver hair he took the
stage and illustrated why I fell in love with this music as a 10 year
old boy.
He played some lap steel guitar, exchanged banter with old friends in
the audience,
played the classic chord changes in a classic manner.
In that Jack Clement voice that I wonder at, he sang some of my favourite
songs,
too many to list here but two highlights were, ‘Ballad of a Teenage
Queen’ and
‘Guess Things Happen That Way’.
He wrote both of those for Johnny Cash back in the 50s and they were
two of the first songs I ever learned to play.
They were on a Cash L.P. that my parents gave me for Christmas when
I was about 12 or 13 years old.
A poignant moment was when he mentioned that night was the first anniversary
of Waylon Jennings passing and in tribute sang ‘Dreaming My Dreams’
and ‘When I Dream’ .
In the middle of all this, Jack’s daughter Alison Clements took
the stage and nearly broke everybody’s heart with an awesome version
of Hank William’s ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’.
The Douglas Corner ..... Rosie, Terry, tequila, Jack
Clement .........
the shot is slightly out of focus but cross processed with high key
colour.
Back at the house, Rosie, her friend Layla -who runs
a bluegrass bar on Broadway - and me, sat up late .... swapped guitars,
finished the tequila and sang for hours ...
our songs, Patti Smith, Willie Nelson and probably some more Don Gibson
too.
Friday I was leaving late afternoon for New Jersey .
On the way to the airport we dropped in to see my new publishers , Bug
Music.
While there Marty Brown came in, went back out to his truck, came back
in with a guitar and sat down and played a song he’d just written
that morning ....
Think it was called ‘I Want My Valentine Back’ (it was Valentine’s
Day) ....
he’d written it with ex-Waylon Jennings sideman Earl Clark, who
came in with Marty and actually had the lyrics on a scrap of note paper
in his jeans pocket .... I mention all of this because it was a killer
song and you’ll hear it one day, I know that.
That IS Music Row.
There was just time left for a brief shopping
spree on Broadway, if I’m in Nashville I must go to the Ernest
Tubb Record Store. I picked up a copy of the new Steve Forbert CD ‘Any
Old Time’ , which is his collection of Jimmie Rodgers songs.
Im a long-time Forbert fan and this is a great record.
Also got a Gene Vincent Capitol re-issue CD for Rosie as a gift.
Happy Valentine’s Day and thanks for being my friend and party
girl for 2 weeks!
New Jersey ... here I come......
Check out
www.amyrigby.com
www.gregtrooper.com
www.rosieflores.com
www.littlebearrecords.com
www.sarahpierce.com
www.moedenham.com
www.steveforbert.com
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