TOM RUSSELL
CHRONICLING HISTORY'S HEARTBREAKS
October / November 2000
By David Ensminger
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In a dark motel room below the steel fingers of Houston's highrises, Tom Russell slopes low in a chair, talking about his career like most men talk about women—molding and prodding every thought. "It's really the most important record I've made," he says about A Man From God Knows Where (Hightone). Nominated in the early stages of the Grammy process for Best Contemporary Folk Record of 1999, A Man is Russell's insightful if slightly mongrel collection of American voices and vignettes. It spans his family's migration from Norway and Ireland to America's sometimes risky, cruel shores, and includes his father's struggle with the sun-bleached California ranch dream gone bad.
You grew up in what people have called the "real drugstore cowboy" era of the early '60s, and listened to the likes of Buck Owens, George Jones, and Merle Haggard.
It's hard to say how much people like that have influenced me. Of course, I'm a huge fan of Merle Haggard, and in another way Buck Owens. I usually tell people I heard Buck Owens and Bob Dylan the same night on an AM radio station out of LA in 1962. I was a kid then, and thought it was the same thing, some new kind of edgy hillbilly music. On one channel there was this twangy Buck Owens stuff, then I changed the channel and there was a folk show with Bob Dylan singing something from his first or second record.
You saw Dylan perform "Desolation Row" the day after he wrote it?
It was very near to when he wrote it, and it was a turning point for me. I was getting kicked out of a seat that I had snuck into when he was singing it. And I remember as they were carrying me away, I was completely locked into the song. I just thought, This is where popular music takes a huge turn and this is where it takes off, and it's probably where it ended too.
The songs on A Man are fragmentary, a tableau.
I've never stated this before, but to me it was my version of say, Howl, by Allen Ginsberg.
The songs really mirror the condition of the American everyman.
That, and I also, in the long run, always want to focus on one individual, as a way of describing one individual saying, "This is what it's like." It's always through the eyes of one individual. The other thing I never try to do—in the last chorus, as Phil Ochs might do—is say, "Therefore we have to gather together..." The one thing I always hated about liberalism, and I grew up with it, believe me I was educated that way, was the idea that you could get someone in a room and know their politics within two minutes, and therefore say, "We're the good guys, they're the bad guys."
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Recently, there've been many concept records with song cycles, including Mike Watt's The Engine Room, Richard Thompson's Factory, and Joe Ely's Chippy. What is so appealing about this form of writing?
Well, it's cinematic, number one. Number two, I was not only raised on Bakersfield country, folk music, and movies, but also on Broadway musicals, as corny as it sounds. I loved The Music Man, I loved some of the Rogers and Hammerstein stuff. Even right on up to Les Miserables. Most stuff like Andrew Lloyd Webber I can't take. But some of it is well written, and parts of which are sung by characters, that's in the back of my head. Sometimes I mention that I saw Jerry Lee Lewis in a rock version of Othello called Catch My Soul, and it was amazing. He played the piano at the side of the stage in this real hick accent doing Shakespeare. It was bizarre, it was unbelievable, so I had that in the back of my mind when I had Dave Van Ronk do The Outcast. The black humor delivery is right out of Bertolt Brecht—a music-hall thing. The scope was taken from that, from seeing stage plays and film and making a bigger statement.
It's been said that unlike Steve Earle, you have a finger on the pulse of what's happening not just in America, but in Barcelona, Glasgow, and Oslo.
There's two ways I differ from people like Steve and even Dave Alvin, who are so rooted in California and Nashville, and write from that. Although I came out of LA, I've lived all over, including Europe. I never felt an identity of being a Californian or Texan, I've felt more rootless in the way that I see myself. An audience is an audience, they vary, but they're always the people who are willing to listen. I can play to an audience of 200 young people in Oslo and Helsinki, then play to a small room in Houston. There's no sense that one place is hipper than the other. Some of my best audiences are in the Midwest, in St. Louis and Kansas City. I want to play to audiences who want to hear the stories. Ten years ago a lot of country, folk, and rock acts scoffed at going to Europe. Now they have to, so they can make a living. Their stories have turned around, but they used to feel alienated over there. The first time you go over there, you get jet-lagged and think that they don't understand what you're saying, and some Americans freaked out.
You didn't really have a name when you first went over.
No, we built it, in a way. Fifteen, 20 years ago we played honky-tonks in Oslo,
seven nights a week for two months at a time for three or four years. Really rough honky-tonks.
How rough are they compared to Texas honky tonks?
Back then, 15 years ago, they were rougher, because of the amount of drinking that was done. There were bloodbuckets. Money has changed a lot of these cultures. But everybody in town was drunk on the weekends, and there was blood and beer and people passed out by the hundreds on the floors of these places. After three beers, anything would happen, the barrier would be erased, and people would jump onstage. And I became real good at bulldozing people and just keeping them at a distance and gaining their respect.
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What makes the songs, the character, or the voice itself?
I don't know, because it's so hard to talk about the process, it's so magical and mysterious. For people who are good, or for the good songs, people try and strip the process down. It's like a playwright said, It's like seeing a centipede crawl across the floor who's got 200 legs moving in unison, and the spider stops and asks it, How do you do it? And the centipede starts thinking about it, and can't get its legs moving.
Did the record do well in Canada?
Yes, but we're talking about 5,000 copies up there. It's done real well, it's the best selling record I've ever done. It got some NPR action, Weekend Edition did a spot on it, and that made a significant impact. A little more of that would've been great, like a Garrison Keillor shot, because I really care about the record and want another 10,000 people to hear it. It's sold 50-60,000 copies worldwide.
Are the characters on the new record more interesting to you because they are emblematic of the American experience or because they're loosely based on your family?
It's a good question. Part of it is about being tied to my family and trying to understand my father, where he came from. Number one, I think they were bigger characters than the sort of human beings walking around today. But I have to read between the lines. What type of person would leave behind his family and hundreds of years of tradition, the town square and the pub, and get on a boat? I mean, poverty was part of it, but get on a boat for six weeks, watch some people die, then get off in Quebec and tell the English to fuck off and walk down into Iowa? I mean, carry a hoe and clear off five acres of land? Being out in El Paso makes me believe that these were bigger people.
But since that gigantic sense of space is gone, has the largeness of your characters also begun to fade?
It's going so rapidly. The way America looks now is totally different. When my girlfriend and I drove that 24-foot truck, fleeing New York, we realized it's not the same now, at least from the highway. Everything is the McDonald's and Cracker Barrel, again and again. Basically America is just this suburban strip mall. That really has damaged the spirit. At least outside of El Paso it is a bit spiritually isolated, it's not a hip city, it's very much a Mexican city, it's a farm community. I can open up a little bit to what it was like back then, I can spread out a bit.
You've worked with Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Nanci Griffith, Dave Alvin, and others. Why is collaboration so important?
They're side projects, ideally. I'm sure I speak for a lot of writers who feel that. I prefer to write by myself, from one point of view, but it's hard to do and keep inspired, because you get bored and your limitations as a musician play into it sometimes, like where your hands fall on the guitar or piano, and you get into certain ruts. To get outside of that, and for something different, I look to people I admire. I was a big fan of Ian and Sylvia, so writing with Ian Tyson taught me a lot. He writes cowboy stuff, and is strong on narrative and is very melodic. Katy Moffatt's very melodic and a great singer, and knows a lot of jazz chords that I wouldn't essentially use without her, so that takes me in another direction. Dave Alvin and Peter Case come from a rock-blues backyard, and I don't tend to write a lot of up-tempo stuff like that, so writing with them fills that part of it in. I have a million lyrics stacked up, most of them horrible, but once in awhile I reach in and find something good. But musically it makes it a lot more interesting to work with other writers, just to make it fresh.
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One reviewer said of A Man, "This is the history that should be taught in high school."
That's rewarding, and I get a lot of that, and not just from this record, but from songs like "Manzanar" [about Japanese-American internment camps in WWII]. Grade school and high school teachers come up to me and say they played it in class.
So names and dates aren't enough? Kids long for a narrative; they want the stories behind the history?
If people can use this record like that, like, This is Tom Russell's opinion, so take it or leave it, then kids might get into it. Kids have really good built-in shit detectors. Out of all those 12 years of education, you, like me, can probably count those teachers you admired, or that moved you, on one hand. And songs have the potential to move people tremendously. A three-minute piece of work, like a Van Gogh painting, can move you by just glancing at it. So can a song.
A painting shifts depending on the weight of the world, which is also what happens when listening to a song.
Exactly. A great song, whether it's written by Leonard Cohen or whoever, stops time for a moment, like a painting does. You almost step outside time for a moment. That's the experience I had when I first heard "Desolation Row," it felt like time had stopped. Everything stopped for about five minutes. Even on Dylan's last record, I thought he did that a couple times, not carte blanche, but when I heard a few songs, I thought, Jesus, this guy is still writing stuff that is well-written, moving stuff. He continues to do it, and there's not a lot of people who are still in the ballgame of writing important, moving songs.
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