Rodney Crowell

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: Rodney Croll has been a fixture and Nashville songwriting community for over fifty years. Born in Houston in nineteen fifty, he was influenced early on by songwriters Guy Clark, in Towns, van zandt. In nineteen seventy five, he joined Emmy Lou Harris's Hot Band as a guitarist and harmony singer, playing with her for three years. Rodney became known for his own work with his nineteen eighty eight album Diamonds and Dirt, an album that made history by producing five consecutive number one singles. Over his career, he's written songs for Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Bob Seger, and countless others, earning him a place in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. Just last August, krow released his twentieth studio album, Airline Highway, produced by Tyler Bryant and recorded at Dockside Studio in Louisiana. In just a few months back, Willie Nelson at Least What a Beautiful World, an entire album of Krowell covers. On today's episode, Bruce Headlam talks to Rodney Crowell about making the Airline Highway In the emotional experience of hearing Willie Nelson's tribute album, he discusses his formative years in Nashville songwriting community, learning the craft from Guy Clark in towns Van Say. He opens up about his difficult childhood in Houston, including his mother's epilepsy and his father taking him to see Hank Williams perform when he was just two years old. Plus he talks about working with his ex wife Roseanne Cash and meeting his father in law, Johnny Cash, for the first time. This is broken record, real musicians, real conversations. Here's Bruce Headlam with Rodney Crowell.

00:01:59
Speaker 1: You have a new album, Airline Highway, that I do want to talk about if you've had a very big year. A couple months ago, Willie Nelson released an album covers of your material. What a Beautiful World. I'm just interested. What was your reaction to hearing that?

00:02:15
Speaker 3: Well, first I went in and sang on a song. We had a duet, so I heard one song and I had a sense of the sound of it. But he called me back to listen to the whole album, finished mix, sitting on his console, sitting there listening and by the second banks of the old band Beer. I was sobbing. It was like, you know, I cried through half of it. I think a lot of it was like fingers crossed that they even finished this project, that it comes to fruition. It's like, wouldn't it be great? And when I heard it, I was like, oh, man, but that had happened to me on an album before that. I was driving in my car and I heard Willy had done this song, and I called Minnie along and on some highway I was driving and it was so sweet sounding to me. I was sobbing then. So it's like, Willy has my number. All he has to do is sing a few words and I'm crying.

00:03:15
Speaker 1: Does that happen with other songs? And that happens with your songs that you cry mine?

00:03:20
Speaker 3: I'm selfish that way.

00:03:22
Speaker 1: I cry my own songs. Yeah, thank you very much.

00:03:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm not interested in anybody else.

00:03:28
Speaker 1: It's a beautiful sounding album, like the space in it. Yeah, it's just gorgeous. And he's ninety two.

00:03:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, go figure.

00:03:37
Speaker 1: It sounds great.

00:03:38
Speaker 3: Here's the interesting thing I think what got me about it. There are the second song's banks of the old Bandira, and it's a song I wrote way back in the mid seventies, and it's about childhood, and I recorded it in around nineteen ninety nine, a good while after I wrote it, and my version as a middle aged man singing about childhood. But the thing that got me the most is Willy's ninety one at the time and singing about childhood and my what really moved me emotionally was that, God, she was a ninety one year old man, and he's closer to childhood than a middle aged man in terms of delivering I don't know, just whatever it is about youth, it's like come in full circle.

00:04:26
Speaker 1: It's an amazing album. It's also very you're talking about that particular song. His takes are so sweet, but they're not sentimental at all, and I don't know quite how he pulls that off.

00:04:43
Speaker 3: I don't think Willy was ever particularly sentimental or cloying or anything like that. I mean, from the get go he was straight ahead. And part of my love for WILLI started around nineteen sixty four. He had a song call I Never Cared for You that was being played on the rock station in Houston, and I was walking down sidewalk and when it came out, the opening line says, the sun is filled with ice and gives no warmth at all. This guy was never blue. The stars a raindrop searching for a place to fall, and I never cared for you. I'm fourteen, and when I hear that, it's like, what language is this man speaking? Because the Beatles were cracking the radio at the time, and shortly after that I heard Subterranean Homesick Blues. A friend of mine had that Dylan album Bringing It All Back Home. I think that was the one. And so there were two pieces of music that happened that had a depth that I recognized, some sort of death. But I needed, you know, I needed twenty years to grow into whatever that was about that. I was sensing it in my mid teens, and I don't think really ever moved away from that. Even when he was singing you know, beautiful love ballads and stuff, it's still unded like he had that kind of gravity.

00:06:12
Speaker 1: Tell me a little bit when we want to dive back into early influences, but tell me a bit about how this album Airline Highway came about.

00:06:21
Speaker 3: Well, quite naturally. The writing process is, if I'm not out on the road performing, I'm pretty much up up every morning working on songs. Right, I approach it like a writer. It's I guess my job, and I love the work.

00:06:38
Speaker 1: So do you get up early to do it before anybody else?

00:06:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm an early riser now because I raised four kids, and you know, I used to sleep till four in the afternoon before I started became a father, and I never got that turner. There didn't seem to be any need to turn that back around, and so I'm up working. It's I figure it's a blessing that I have the work in the first place and have the time to do it. So I'm writing the song songs that would become Airline Highway. But at the same time I met up with a lad named Tyler Bryant, who's the producer through Peter Leek, my manager, and Tyler's from Paris, Texas. We're both Texas boys. But I got into a conversation with him about the first recordings. First recording studio I ever walked into to try to sing something a song that I'd written was in Crowley, Louisiana. It's a studio owned by J. D. Miller, a real wheeler dealer down there, and nothing came of those sessions that I have the tapes at home and they'll never be released because they're not worthy of being released. But I also had this romantic notion because we used to growing up on the east side of Houston. We used to cross the Louisiana line over there to hear the Boogie Kings at the Big Oaks Club is It was called Blue Eyed Soul, big soul band with horn section and a couple of great R and B singers leading the band. So we would go and we would sit outside in the parking lot and we could hear him through the walls.

00:08:21
Speaker 1: Was this with friends or with your family?

00:08:23
Speaker 3: No? With other lads my age, you know, we would sneak over there. And also there was a romance of it now and again if you find the right spot, you could buy beer. When you were fifteen, it was lawless in that way, but the music was really it was a romantic trip to go over there to hear the Boogie Kings. And I was describing that to Tyler, and I was also describing Crowley, Louisiana, and we had decided we wanted to make a record. And Trina Shoemaker lives down there on the coast and she was part of that New Orleans scene that Lanoix had going on, and I've made a couple of records with her, and so we were going to bring her in and I said, guy, I went to Chicago and made a record. I had so much fun to fulfill this fantasy. I had to go into Chicago and recording Hellan Wolf and the likes. And I said, I need to go to Louisiana, but I don't feel like New Orleans where I ought to go. And Treata said, oh, well, you got to go to Dockside. It's on the Vermilion River. And if you don't get eaten by if we don't get eaten by crocodiles, we'll make a good record. So there the idea that we're going to Louisiana maker record was born. And so Tyler and I had loaded up a vanful of mostly his gear. I had a couple of guitars, but he had amps and whatever, and we drove down there to to Dockside Studio and met some musicians from Texas that that we love and set up in a studio not too much unlike this one with a good cement floor in case in case the river gets up, and we were off amazing.

00:10:07
Speaker 1: I want to go back to your writing because I want you to set the scene for me. You say you write every day. You have an office at home? Do you go to an office?

00:10:15
Speaker 3: I have a home studio, you know. I go down across the house and hit down the hallway and I have a studio in one wing of the house there which I've made records in there. And for me, you know, people say what's your favorite song you've ever written? And I always say, well, the one i'm working on, that's the most important song that I've ever written, whatever I'm working on now. And I can't say that the end result of the record we made was so much by design as I was writing, because pretty much the rule of thumb I have is that if I'm patient enough, the song will tell me what it wants to be. But slowly, I think, maybe intuitively, I knew I was headed south to record the record a song with Lucas Nelson about rainy days in California and going back east, and I just made my way back to Louisiana because of my childhood down there, and that might have been a signal that got me to think, well, wouldn't it be nice to go record in the swamps down there and see if we could pick up some swampy sounds. And I continued on and for a song like taking Flight, I'd already written it with Ashley McBride before, but it was certainly the landscape down in southern Mississippi. So maybe intuitively I was headed that way from the get go, but it wasn't conscious. I wasn't consciously trying to craft a song like a group of songs that were necessarily had a Louisiana vibe. But mind you, over the years I've written songs like Leaving Louisiana in the broad Daylight and Fever on the Bio and Stars on the Water. So I guess I figured that Louisiana owes me something.

00:12:25
Speaker 1: You know, your lyrics seem so precise to me. Do the lyrics change a lot once you get in the studio?

00:12:35
Speaker 3: No, I don't do any writing in the studio once we're set up to record, got microphones and the sounds. I write everything before we get in the studio. I don't like to have to think about finding a good rhyme in the middle of about to get a good take that doesn't work for me. I gotta have it written before we go in.

00:13:01
Speaker 1: So when you're writing, are you there with a guitar or are you working on lyrics?

00:13:06
Speaker 3: Usually, well, melody comes more easily for me than lyric. It's probably seventy thirty. I probably spend seventy percent of the time working on the lyric, but the music is, generally speaking a lot easier for me. I don't struggle with that too much. Generally, the melody comes. And it's very rare that I've written the lyric and then tried to match a melody to fit it. It's happened a couple of times. But the good ones, there's some kind of vibe or some notion or atmosphere from a chord or a couple of chords that fall together in the right way will lead the way to how the melody is and how the language fits it.

00:13:56
Speaker 1: So a line on the new record like She's a wildwood flower in a red Corvette, Yeah, which I love? Yeah? Do you remember did that come to you in the middle of writing the song? That did that? Started?

00:14:10
Speaker 3: Interestingly, that song, it started with an entirely different melodic feel and an entirely different sort of a little more rock and roll kind of thing that I was trying to force it into this, this kind of barcurd, a little chuck berry Ish take on a feel with a little bluesy rock Chuck berriersh. And I didn't have the wildwood Flower in the Red Corvette yet, but I had sometime thing, she don't make believe in making love to a sometime thing. I had that because that was based on an experience with some dude hitting home my girlfriend. I watched it happen. She's my wife now, we've been together all this time, and I was watching it. He was putting the move on her, and she was oblivious to it and blew him off. And she didn't blow him off intentionally, she just wasn't buying.

00:15:08
Speaker 1: It r And she was so cool.

00:15:10
Speaker 3: And I watched it, and that's she don't believe in making love to a sometime thing. That's the line that came to me, and I had it in that chuck berry Field. But years went by, twenty some years went by that I monkeyed around with it.

00:15:27
Speaker 1: Oh so the lyric was that old yeah.

00:15:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, the the chorus, but then I just said this melody, I cannot bring anything home, and then one morning I woke up and I started playing just this real folky thumb style rhythm for it, and there it was. And then the line She's a wildwood flower in a red Corvette just came to me. And when you get a line like that, and I thought that was a really good line and line and when that hit, when that came, and then I hit on Tanya Tucker meets Kate Blanchett. I said, uh okay, and a song that had been just atting for twenty any plush years, came together in thirty minutes.

00:16:13
Speaker 1: It is an interesting song because it it sounds like a like an old blues kind of wang dang doodle sort of riff.

00:16:22
Speaker 3: And then it's just beauty should pay it.

00:16:24
Speaker 1: You should absolutely play it.

00:16:25
Speaker 3: Let me just play, at least play some of it. She's a wild wood flower in a red Corvette, Dan you Tucker meets Kate bland Set. She stagger like dishes in the kitchen sink. She doesn't give a damn what it is. You might thing. She got the blue green eyes and who doo smile pearly white over by drive them in wild, voicelike butter when she opens them mount you. Ever since I met her, I've been heading down south. Now you can try to make a thunder. You can try to slop the rain. She don't believe in making love to a sometime thing. Sometimes thing, sometimes thanks, you don't believe in making love to a sometime thing. Whoever said the diamonds are a girl's best friend might have set you thinking you could buy a way in. Because you haven't noticed why you're flashing that green. He was a rich guy. She's happy feeding quarters to a slop machine. Now she's an open invitation to go back from where you came. She don't believe in making love to a sometime thing. Sometimes things. Sometimes thinks you don't believe in making love to a sometime thing. You get on a Swiss Chatau, half a block of monocle and girls, a mass on and downtround santrope. You could take a Gulf stream jet party where the sun don't set. In case you haven't heard me yet, be careful where you place that bed. Heal, you better heed my wanter, Tell me what did I see? I love that woman till my die in day. Go on and make a move on what you know to be mine. It's only going to lead you to the back of the line. You can try to run your number. Let me try to make it plain. You don't believe in making enough to a sometime thing, sometime thing sometime. Thanks, you don't be even making love to do a sometimthing.

00:19:14
Speaker 1: That the lines in there are so good, thank you stack like dishes in the kitchen sink. Yes, and though the one that kills me is one way ticket back to where you came from where you came. Yeah, it's also now that I know the story, somebody hitting on your girlfriend, somebody rich hitting on your girlfriend. It's not unsympathetic to the guy. Hmm. You could have written a song that was like you're a loser. Yeah, you're you're out of her league. But the guy was.

00:19:50
Speaker 3: A film star and I suppose still is. I'll never reveal his name, doesn't matter, but thank you for pointing out that it is sympathetic toward the guy. I'm glad because, to be honest, it wasn't my intention to be sympathetic. Really want to thumb my nose at him and pretty much what I'm doing.

00:20:14
Speaker 1: But maybe I should rephrase it's sympathetic towards men in general.

00:20:19
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, God knows we need that. Yes, and our genders, our backs have been against the wall for a long time and for good reason.

00:20:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, we've earned that. Uh. You mentioned growing up in Houston. For people who notice how many references that are to rain in your songs, you come by it honestly. Oh yeah, lots of hurricanes. Yeah, it rained a lot, Torrential. You describe in your book basically your house falling apart growing up because of the rain.

00:20:54
Speaker 3: In England they call them two up and two down. There's four rooms with a bathroom and uh, and there's a kitchen in my parents' bedroom. I was the only child. But you could see the stars through the through the through the room, through the ceiling in their bedroom, and they had number three wash tubs and igloo water coolers and pots and pants catching water coming through the ceiling, and same thing in the kitchen. But the water would the light bulb in the center of the ceiling. It had been dangerous as it could be, because the water would come pouring down around the light fixture in the ceiling, you know, And it would rain and just rain and rain and rain. And I still love rain. I mean, rain feels like home to me.

00:21:43
Speaker 1: You describe your father who worked construction, He was a handy guy, but not at home.

00:21:49
Speaker 3: No, that's true about him. I mean he six or seventh grade, sharecrop farm education in western Kentucky. He wound up running as the head guy at a big construction company in Houston, taking on really building barges and launch pads for ships being launched by a shipyard. There. Really a smart guy, but it just all the good things he did for other people just didn't make it all.

00:22:26
Speaker 1: Was that ever a discussion like we can see the Stars?

00:22:30
Speaker 3: No, I don't think so. I think it's no doubt my parents were Depression era of farm kids. Sharecraft farm could dis entitled, and I don't think that they really thought that they had a right to expect anything better than what was there. However, my dad would go off to work and really perform for the man. And my mother was a janitor at the school for a while there, and I suppose she was good at it. I don't know, But if you knew my mom and dad, you wouldn't know why I'm a songwriter Because my father played guitar and he had a beautiful voice, and he was a savant in another way, in that he grew up on a sharecraft farm where they walked four or five miles to someone who had a dry cell radio to listen to the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights. And I guess the way it was he could hear a song once or twice and have it, and most of those songs were simple in that way. And my father actually took me to Hank William's next to last performance in Houston in nineteen fifty two, right before Christmas, and I was two years and four months old.

00:23:53
Speaker 1: Do you remember that?

00:23:54
Speaker 3: And I wrote about it in my book, But what I remember is the smell of his hair tonic and a little bit of a light and that kind of hushed audience sound before things start to happen. But he reinforced the memory over and over and over again, because as I was from childhood on, he was like, don't ever forget that. I took you to see the Hillbilly Shakespeare, which is what they called Hank Williams back then. So he drove it home. So my memory of it is his memory, and I wrote about I tried to write about it that way.

00:24:33
Speaker 1: You don't remember the show itself, No, no, no way.

00:24:38
Speaker 3: But I do remember, you know, a couple of years after that, being on the floor with a little record player in those Hank william seventy eights. I'd figured out how to get them on a small turntable and listen to those Hank Williams seventy eights over and over and over again.

00:24:56
Speaker 1: What were the songs that stuck with you?

00:24:58
Speaker 3: Oh? Well, it's like moving on over come in last night about half past ten, a baby, I wouldn't let me. I man, that caught me even age four. It's like, whatever, the role of that language and Chuck Berry had sort of the same effect on me. You know that those cartoons of the the cat following floating through the air, following the cat nip, those kind of rolling, tumbling lyrical events like those. So I've always been on the lookout for that kind of thing. It's like, boy, how do you string them together where the song becomes a freight train?

00:25:41
Speaker 1: Are there songs of yours? You think you've succeeded in doing that?

00:25:45
Speaker 3: I've succeeded from you know, time and time again. You know, I've been doing it for fifty years, so you know, at least twice in a decade, I've succeeded in the.

00:25:56
Speaker 1: Strength with that particular kind of rolling feel.

00:26:00
Speaker 3: Well, it's I've never tried to ape somebody else's success. I've tried to find it in my own way. But like I'll look for trouble and I found its soun straight down the barrel of a low man's gun from my living alone like this, that was like that or fate's right hand. You know when your move like that at a young age and you're actually on your way to becoming a professional songwriter, those things never really leave you. They're there to stay because it's like it becomes a benchmark. It just happened in so many ways along the way. To hear Chris Christofferson woke up Sunday morning with no way to hold my head. That didn't hurt to hear that is like, oh boy, okay, there it is. I don't want to do that, but I want to access something inside of me that is my own version of what that is to me. That's the search.

00:27:04
Speaker 2: We'll be back with more from Rodney Crowell after the break.

00:27:11
Speaker 1: Before we go back to songwriting. I do want to mention your mother, who's this incredible character yea in your book. She took you to church. She wasn't particularly musical herself, but you've got a lot of church music through to her. She went to evangelical churches.

00:27:28
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, you know, my mother was the way they referred to it back then, is Pentecostal woman. And she's spoke in tongues, you know. I jokingly say, we were, you know, just a couple of cuts below snake handlers. But my mother used to drag me up on the east side of Houston, used to drag me this place called Emmanuel Temple where they had If you read the book, it sounds like you have. It's like there were two preachers at this church. They alternated. I don't remember why they alternated. One guy was really slick, you know, he was sort of insinuated that he was the evolved spiritual leader of this thing. But I didn't trust the guy. You know, at age four or five, it's like something that. But there was another guy named Brother Premerton, who later reminded me of Jerry Lee Lewis, And I liked him because he was he was slinging it from the hip, he was making it up as his going. He was he was saving us all from from roasting and held you know, just at the very last minute. And he just had a knack for it, and I loved him. And the thing about it, the whole thing in the church was that we if the preacher was doing his job, we would all go down and kneel, you know, by the podium there and confess our sins. And I was just kind of disinterested in looking around. I happened to glance up at the guy and he was standing over me, and he winked. He just gave me a wink. And it's like it set me free for the rest of my life. It was like to me, he was saying, hey, man, this is show business. You know. Then he let me in on the secret. Of course, it took it took a long time for it to dawn on me that that what that wink really meant. And maybe he didn't, maybe he didn't mean it. But later on when it dawned on me, it's like, ah, he was letting me in on this is show business man, because that's what it was. The slick dude he was, it was show business for him. He was just doing it in a in a more suave way.

00:29:50
Speaker 1: Were you ever religious then?

00:29:53
Speaker 3: No, no, no, man. It's like organized religion doesn't work for me. A spiritual life works for me. And you know, I'm a god guy, you know. I think whatever that is, I got a connection to it. But it's it's strict my connection. I wouldn't even dare to assume that with anybody else's connection. I think one of my problems with religion is that they try to lead you down their path instead of your own path.

00:30:22
Speaker 1: Your mother also, and you talk about this a lot on your book. She had Caesar, she had epilepsy, I guess full blown.

00:30:31
Speaker 3: She had polio too. That girl started out you know, polio dyslexia. I'm sure epileptic. I mean if she had grandma, serious serious epilepsy. And but you had to look after her, had to after my grandmother pass away. It was my job because see, there's a thing about this epilepsy with my mother is that it never happened when my father was around. I think those were the rules. But in her case, when she would I feel it coming, she knew when it was coming. It never caught her off guard because like four or five blocks down to the little corner grocery where she'd go buy a six pack. I'd go with her a walk down there and she'd buy a six pack of Jack's beer and chug it down, and then I would nurse her through those epileptic seizures. And you know it was she was on the floor, foaming at the mouth, the whole thing, and I had a spoon try to keep her from swallowing her tongue. It was, you know, when you think about it, it was harrowing. But at the time, I'd watched my grandmother look after her, and pretty much it absorbed what she would do to look after her. So when my grandmother passed away, it was my job. Interestingly, until I was about seventeen or eighteen years old, and my mother had all the signs of it went on, and I just I won't repeat the words here, but I with a lot of explatives, I just said, you can die. As far as I'm concerned, I'm never going to nurse you through one of these things ever. Again, more vitriolic than that. I'd had enough of it. And with the exception of one small seizure, that was it for her. It's like I finally blew the whistle on it. And apparently I should have done that a long time before.

00:32:41
Speaker 1: So you said you thought it was your job. What made you stand up one day and say I can't do this.

00:32:48
Speaker 3: I was just fed up with it. Plus I was on the verge of heading out into the world, go to college or something, you know, senior in high school maybe. But it wasn't anything that I rehearsed. It just came up. I just had enough. Things can change in life in the strangest way, something that should have happened four years ago couldn't have happened four years ago. And that was it.

00:33:17
Speaker 1: So tell me when did making music start for you?

00:33:22
Speaker 3: Well, it was I was graduating high school, and you know, you have a class song, and so I was really interested in popular music, you know, from the Beatles on and Chuck Berry and all the things that I like, Bob Dylan, and so I went home and wrote a song for the class of sixty eight Crosby High School, forty three seniors graduating. I wrote this song, really not a very good song, but they all voted it in.

00:33:58
Speaker 1: So I'm not going to play it now.

00:34:00
Speaker 3: So, oh god no. I went to my twenty fifth class reunion, the only one ever, and I went and by then I had a reputation for making records and what have you been writing songs? And so some of my classmates from back then were We're like, hey, are you gonna play her class song? You know? Player? So I said, no, no, I don't think so. I have a guitar and no, no, that's not that's written. No. And there was a woman named Miss Hinson who was a home economics teacher who always really loved when I was in school, and she was hard on me, but I really liked it. And I could tell that she had a she liked me. But all these students, you know, from my high school were gathered around and it was almost like the red sea opened up. Here comes Miss Hinson, surely in her nineties by then, and she comes walking up and I said, well, you know that's not gonna and she said, she said good. That song wasn't any good then, and it wouldn't be any good now.

00:35:06
Speaker 1: Wow.

00:35:07
Speaker 3: And I said, miss him, and I hugged her and I said, You're so right, You're so right. It was wonderful. It was the perfect thing that to happen.

00:35:19
Speaker 1: And so you started playing in bands, though, or you got together with guys and played in clubs.

00:35:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, well I left home. It wasn't runaway. I left home at age fifteen to join a band in a little country town. We lived on the east side of Houston, and these brother's sister team that I knew, came to the door and said they were putting a band together in a little town about thirty five miles northeast of where we lived. So I took a guitar and left home and my mother, I don't remember what she said, but my dad said, telling me, you write your own songs. So first rehearsal, I'm there with these teenagers and I started playing if you live change, oh about leaving leaving me behind? You know this song? And I said, yeah, I wrote that song. Of course, all that everybody knew I did. And it was like, you didn't write that song. I said, yeah, I wrote that song. So I never did back down, and uh, I had identified myself as a songwriter and I wasn't going to back down.

00:36:35
Speaker 1: What kind of gigs were you playing? Then?

00:36:38
Speaker 3: Oh? Well, we played the Legion Hall. It was called the Crosby Stomp Legion Hall, and it was teen dances. And then over in a little town called Humble, Texas, all these little outlying towns. They had legion halls and teen canteens and that kind of thing. And we had a band called the Arbitrators and we played we would cover band, We played country songs, we played Beatles songs, played beach boy. One of the guys in the in the band had a falsetto voice like Brian Wilson, so we could play beach Boys stuff. And we earned a little bit of money, and I moved in with his family, and eventually my parents left that house if that house finally fell down because the water finally got the best of it, and they moved out to the little town there. They rented a place out there, and I moved back in with my parents. Are probably somewhere around the junior year of high school.

00:37:43
Speaker 1: And then when did you start to think this could be a career for me? This is what I want to do.

00:37:50
Speaker 3: It takes me a minute to think about that, because I always wanted to do it, But it really, I mean really, I mean I'd already been Emmy Lou Harrison had recorded a couple of my songs, and I'd moved to Los Angeles to be in her band and go on tour with her. But I think it was when Willie Nelson at the old Palamino Club unbern knows me call me up on stage and said, I'm gonna do a Rodney crow song and and uh called till I Gain Controlled Again, which Emmy Lou had recorded first. And I remember walking up there thinking, huh, this is like I'm being knighted by King Arthur. I think this songwriting thing is gonna work. And that was the first time I ever had that thought, like, Okay, this is my career.

00:38:40
Speaker 1: Really, yeah, because you already moved to Nashville by that point.

00:38:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, this was this was five years after I'd moved to Nashville.

00:38:47
Speaker 1: Did you move to Nashville wanted to be a performer or a songwriter?

00:38:52
Speaker 3: I got to Nashville under false prechenses. I'd gone to Crowley, Louisiana with a buddy of mine to do. We had a duet thing, kind of a Simon and Garfunk wil want to be And we went to Crowley and made a record over there, and the produce or went off to Nashville. Call me sometime later, a good six months later.

00:39:16
Speaker 1: And said how old were you at this point?

00:39:19
Speaker 3: Twenty one? He called me found me somehow. He said, get up here to Nashville. Find Donovan, my buddy, my college roommate who was I sang with. And he said, get up here. I've signed you to a ten year recording contract with Columbia Records and you're going on the road with Kenny Rogers in the first edition for a year opening. Okay, I'm into business. So we hopped and we got in the car. We found Donovan and we were off. We went there, but when we arrived in Nashville, none of this was true. We went to Columbia Records, you know, reported for duty at Columbia Records and walked in and you know, the secretary intake secretary is like who. So finally somebody three tiers up came down and said, look, we've never heard of you. You don't have a recording deal here. And so that's how we realize this is a sham. And as it turns out, the producer had sold the tapes in the publishing for a bus ticket back to Houston, and there I was in Nashville, so I decided to stay.

00:40:25
Speaker 1: He just wanted you out of Houston so you wouldn't make trouble.

00:40:30
Speaker 3: The backstory on him was that God, he was a brutal, brutal, brutal alcoholic. I have a lot of compassion for the amount of alcoholic to consume, and God knows what goes on, you know, when you're a blackout drunk. But it got me to Nashville, and within a short period of time I bumped into Guy Clark and a couple of guys, a guy named Skinny Dennis Sanchez, who's an upright bass player, and a guy named Richard Dobson. And they took me in because I was washing dishes making a little money, and they said, I you know, I was seven or eight years younger than they were and making a little bit of money. So they had an extra bed. But this house became I mean, it was Paris in the twenties there in its own way, because Guy Clark was was Skinny Dennis had been a bass player in a folk trio he had in California, and so all of these guys started towns van Zant started coming in and out of that place, and so it was kind of ground zero for songwriting pre record deal and because that's where Steve Earle first came around and there and Dave Uncle and it was just a salon and towns. Van Zante was traveling. He was already a wheeler dealer folk singer, but he would come through Nashville. And that's the first place I heard Poncho and Lefty in like three am in this house on Ackland Avenue and in Hillsborough Village in Nashville.

00:42:19
Speaker 1: You were sitting around and he played it.

00:42:21
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, wellbody. We would gather around every night, pretty much five nights a week at least in that house. Songwriters would come in. It was in Guy Clark was the curator of this mindset around then because Chris Krostofferson had done for Nashville what Bob Dylan had done for Greenwich Village. Nashville music business wasn't corporate then, but it was a closed community. But Chris Kostofferson opened it up to these kind of would be poet songwriters, which I fell in with. I didn't have any songs worthy of playing in the wee hours, but I knew all of these old Appalachian dead baby songs that I learned from my father, and I could throw them out and stay in the room that Guy Clark would say to me, you said, just shut up and listen you might learn something.

00:43:19
Speaker 1: And he was right, what did you learn from? Particularly Guy clark self editing?

00:43:25
Speaker 3: It took a while for at the dawn on me, but Guy Clark is probably the as songwriters go that I know personally. He's probably the best self editor I've ever been around, because when I started drifting over to his house and you're showing me what he was working on, he would lines that other songwriters would not elbow it out. For anything in the world, he'd elbow it out and say, hey, it doesn't this is not serving the narrative. It's got to go. That was important.

00:43:56
Speaker 1: Did he help you do that with your songs? No.

00:44:00
Speaker 3: The only thing he would do is when I had a new song. And his wife, Susannah was equally as formidable on this front. But I'd go over with a new song and he said, Okay, put your guitar down, now look me in the eye and say those words to me. And he had these like hawkeyes, you know, really intense staring and I realized when if I tried to say the words to him that whenever I wanted to avert my eyes away from him, the lines weren't true. And it was a really valuable lesson to learn, because when it was a really subpar line, or something that didn't work, a soft rhyme, or just something that didn't move the narrative along, his eyes would narrow and I would be I would feel ashamed that I had to expose it. It was a good lesson.

00:44:59
Speaker 1: That's a tough lesson, though, was say, have you ever done that with other songwriters?

00:45:04
Speaker 3: Look, I have these I host these songwriting camps, you know, one hundred and twenties so songwriters come to find out about songwriting, and now and again I'll say, okay, you want to know how I learned to do it, and I get him to put the guitar down and speak their lyrics to me. I don't think I had the intense eyeballs that Guy clark had, because some of them would gaily just look me in the eyes, smiling and really tell me really sub part of the lyrics and happy that they had.

00:45:37
Speaker 1: What is it about putting the guitar down and saying it that exposes them?

00:45:43
Speaker 3: Mind you? I don't know if you know Guy Clarker have any recollection of what he was like. He was an intense man and a beautiful writer. Himming way ish in his own way, and to look them in the eye with something inferior was a daunting proposition. It was just the perfect thing for me at the time.

00:46:11
Speaker 1: Did you ever present songs to Towns van Zant?

00:46:15
Speaker 3: Towns was not well. First, the only song that Towns ever kind of nodded toward me was a song Until I Gained Control Again, which was the one that was I wrote that early on and I got there and was able to move along with that song for a good But that's the only one that he ever kind of nodded approval of. But Towns wasn't as generous as Guy was. He was incredibly gifted poet. But Guy had for all of his imposing will. He was a generous artist and he shared his knowledge pretty freely.

00:47:06
Speaker 1: But Towns was more he held me We're back. Yeah.

00:47:10
Speaker 3: Towns was competitive. Okay, Towns was super competitive, which is a good thing, you know, a good thing for I got no problem with that.

00:47:20
Speaker 1: So when you're when you're sitting around doing songs, it's a contest.

00:47:24
Speaker 3: Well, you know that, you know the Donovan and Bob Dylan at the in London in the hotel, you know, Savoy whatever, hotel they where where Donovan's on the floor and he plays this uh really kind.

00:47:39
Speaker 1: Of mealy tweet little love song.

00:47:43
Speaker 3: You know, it's just going nowhere, and Dylan reaches over and gets a guitar and sing Crimson Flames tied to my ears. It's like I was so much older than I'm younger than whatever it was. It's just annihilated. I bring that up because that's you know, Towns had that too, and and early on, if if I'm sitting listening to Poncho and Lefty, I was smart enough to not make that mistake because he had hit me with with any one of those songs he had written by then and just shrunk me down to nothing. So it was better to observe and to listen and see just how Towns was able to pluck out of the ether real poetry, whereas with Guy it was closer to the experience. Was that he was he was a working songwriter. He was you know, he was somehow crafting it on the desk in front of him, where Towns was plucking it out of the ether.

00:48:52
Speaker 1: Was Towns competitive with Guy?

00:48:54
Speaker 3: Yes, Towns was competitive with Guy, but Guy ignored it. I say this because I watched those two closely. Yeah, yeah, Now I'll tell you about Townsman's was. Had Towns come along thirty years later, he would have been a champion skateboarder because we had There was one thing that I did do that that that Towns and I were friendly, is that somehow we had we got a hold of a skateboard and there was there was a slope in Hillsborough Village and we would set up beer cans and slalom on skateboards. This is way before skateboarding was anything. I didn't have an act for it. But Towns was fluid. The man was extremely physically talented and he was a lot to take in. But he would he would slalom through those beer cans as if he was he was actually made of water.

00:50:00
Speaker 1: Amazing. I didn't know that, yeah about him. Did you see signs back then of his later mania and his his difficulties?

00:50:08
Speaker 3: Yeah? Is I mean the songwriting community around then with Amy Martin had a place there, and when Towns would come into town, usually he'd be a couple of days up and kicking Heroin up in Amy Martin's place. While the while all of the want to be songwriters, including me, were down in the in the garden. They're waiting for Towns to come down so we could play. But we would all sit around playing songs that he'd these really inferior songs at each other. Meanwhile, one of the masters was upstairs kicking heroin. It was it was pretty romantic.

00:50:42
Speaker 1: Are you competitive?

00:50:45
Speaker 3: No, I'm not. I'm not competitive. Wish I were. I don't think I could host these songwriting camps that I do if I were competitive, because you have to. You have to be a service to these people who pay money to come be around me and see what they can learn.

00:51:06
Speaker 1: Well, you've also had so many class oberations.

00:51:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, And also I was married to Roseanne Cash too, and I learned my lesson there because I was producing her records and she shot to the roof with the records I was helping her make, and I didn't at that particular.

00:51:27
Speaker 1: Time was that difficult.

00:51:29
Speaker 3: It was difficult, and it had I been more competitive, I would have probably hit the road because I wouldn't have been able to take it. But I had a sense that, you know, I'm part of this, and what I'm bringing to this is not easily recognizable. Because I was helping her with material and helping her get there, and she deserved every bit of it. She outdistanced me. Eventually I caught up.

00:52:03
Speaker 2: Well, last break and we'll be back with Rodney Crowell.

00:52:10
Speaker 1: You are the third ex son in law of Johnny Cash that we've had on the show. Yeah, and Marty Stewart. What Marty Stewart and we've had Nick Low. Nick Low certainly had a story about meeting Johnny Cash for the first time. Do you remember your first time?

00:52:30
Speaker 3: Well, the first time I remember was at the Beverly Hills Hotel in one of the bungalows. He and June had a bungalow out back, and Roseanne was bringing her boyfriend to dinner candlelit dinner in a Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow.

00:52:52
Speaker 1: Were you nervous?

00:52:53
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah, as nervous as I could be, but they were sweet and very accommodating in June. I actually was able to tell June the story that when I was the Carter family, you know, the in the the late thirties, they had made all of these exit It was one of the border radio stations where they Carter Family would come out live. But my grandmother and I would listen to the Carter Family rebroadcast in the fifty mid fifties, and June was an eleven year old comedian at the time, and so I had a crush on her, you know, the five year old kid. I had a crush on an eleven year old girl I was hearing on the radio, and so I got to tell her that story and she was charmed by it, and so we were good from there. Well, I did have my drunken run in with John later on. Oh yeah, in Jamaica.

00:53:52
Speaker 1: Oh okay, was this after you were married or.

00:53:54
Speaker 3: Now it was before we were summoned to Jamaica because we were living together by then and those were against the rules. So I did a little bit too much drinking between La and Montego Bay in the flights, and so by the time the sleeping situation came around, I was felt like I had to stand my ground because I heard some talk down the hallway and stepped around and Roseanne was said, well, you know, we we lived together, and so I stepped in all cavalier, like, yeah, well yeah, you know, I'm not going to be a hypocrites, you know, as we sleep together in La, you know, And he said, you know, he looked, and I've told this story before, but it bears repeating. He looked at me and he said, son, I don't know you well enough to miss you if you were to leave with that voice, yeah, voice of Abraham Lincoln. So that sobered me right up, and I said, yes, sir, you're right, and I wandered off down the hall and went to bed.

00:55:00
Speaker 1: I would have left, but yeah, I want to get back to Roseanne, but I first want to talk about your time with Emmy Harris Emmy Lou because she had recorded one of your songs and then asked you to join her band. Yeah, and who else was in the band when when you were with her?

00:55:19
Speaker 3: Kind of back up a little bit. I was in Austin. I had left Nashville, but Emmy came through like early in January nineteen seventy five and was playing the old Armadilla World Headquarters. And by then she had recorded a song of mine, Bluebird Wine. So somehow she found me and said, come and sit in with me at you know, my gig at Armadilla World Headquarters. And so I went and we sang something. I don't know what we're saying, but after her set, you know, she said, Hey, I'm going to LA tomorrow. You want to go? And I said, well yeah, and she said I got an extra ticket. She doesn't I was with Emmy a couple of nights ago and and she doesn't remember where she got this extra ticket. I certainly never knew. But I flew from Austin to Los Angeles with Emmy Lou on somebody else's ticket in nineteen seventy five and stayed seven years, and unbeknownt and me, she was putting together a band and had decided that she wanted me in it.

00:56:25
Speaker 1: I think there might be there might be a guitarist in Austin who's still waiting for his ticket.

00:56:31
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, But that band turned out to be half of it came from Elvis's band and it and it was because of the band that had done Grievous Angel with Graham Parsons and Emmy, James Burton and Glenn Harden and Emery Gordy.

00:56:47
Speaker 1: So they were all still in the band.

00:56:49
Speaker 3: They were in the Hot band, and as John Ware and Hank DeVito and myself we called ourselves the Hippies, and James and Glindie and Emory were the pros and off we went on a world tour. It's in nineteen seventy five with him.

00:57:06
Speaker 1: You've mentioned Till I Gained Control Again a couple of times. I have a running argument with my wife over whose version is better, yours or Emmy LUs Oh.

00:57:16
Speaker 3: My particular recording of Until I Gain Control Again is not up to snuff. I produced that, and I spent a lot more time on the musicians then I spent on getting a proper vocal performance out of myself.

00:57:35
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm going to disagree. I think it's a masterpiece your version of that song.

00:57:41
Speaker 3: I wish I could share your opinion about that, but I hear it and I go, oh, man, I wish you would have been paying attention.

00:57:49
Speaker 1: You know what I love about that song is what I love about a lot of your songs. And this is going to sound vague, so forgive me, but often your song seem to me there's a theme running through which is basically what it means to be a man, in relation to women, in relation to yourself, in relation to the world, how you kind of proceed in the world. That seems to be something that is in a lot of your songs. Simple on the new album made me think of that. Yeah, very much.

00:58:19
Speaker 3: Could be Susannah Clark. Susannah was probably twelve eleven, twelve years older than me when I met her in my early twenties, and she said to me clearly, she said, and it, you know in your early twenties is if I meet you meet a woman, or at that particular time, it's like I was on the make, you know. And Susanna held up her hand and said, hang on, you know, I'm gonna teach you to be friends with a woman. Valuable lesson for me at the time. And I listened to her and we developed a friendship, a real friendship and a real We had a long running conversation she and I and then Emmy Lou comes along, and Emmy and I are really close friends to this day. And I think it started at that particular time. I have really close I probably have more close women friends than I do men friends. It's just been that way, and I think it started with Susannah. My friendship with Mary Carr, we're close friends. We talk all the time. It's not romantic. It's brother and sisterhood. And I think maybe maybe that's what you're talking about. And also I have four daughters who have you know, will tan my hide if I get a little too far ahead of myself.

00:59:58
Speaker 1: Have you ever had to give their boyfriends the speech Johnny Cash gave you.

01:00:02
Speaker 3: Got I wish I really would like to pull up. Well, you know, I've had to call them on their foolishness, but I've never been able to come up with my own line that would match. I don't know you well enough to miss you if you were to leave.

01:00:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, well that should be in a song.

01:00:20
Speaker 3: You know.

01:00:21
Speaker 1: You did a great version of I walked the Line with Johnny Cash mm hm, which is really about a kid hearing it. Yeah, and that is very That is a song about what it means to be a man. Yeah, and you re harmonized it, which is what I loved his sections.

01:00:37
Speaker 3: Yeah. This was after Roseanne and I split the blanket and I called him one day and I said, hey, man, we wrote a song because I had been trying to recapture the first time I heard I Walk the Line in a fishing trip. So he came to the studio. I said, I may of you come and sing on this. So he came to the studio thinking that he was going to be singing some version of his song. I sat there with a guitar and I started banging on the guitar and it got to the chorus where I used his lyric to make a chorus, which took me a long time to figure out because I wrote all kind of choruses for that song that just sounded like child's play. And then I hit on his words and it fit. And so he came and I'm singing it, and his eyes and narrowed, you know, and he said, he said, man, you've got a lot of nerve changing my melody. And I said yeah, and you're just the guy to go out there in the studio and do it. So he walked out there and did two passes and looked at him and he said, well that do and I said, yes, sir, that will do. Meanwhile, he had a he had a lunch date with Bonnie rait she came into the studio. I guess that's where she was going to meet him, And so we played it back pretty loud, and Bonnie when it was over, she said, God, it's sended like y'all were in there taken viagra when you recorded that. And I said, I know whose voice you're talking about, because there was some big old Johnny cast sing in that chorus.

01:02:24
Speaker 1: M hm. So after you had this great run of albums with Rosanne, So you said you were frustrated at that point though, that you hadn't that she was the star.

01:02:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, well it was. You can imagine in a household where two artists working side by side and one of them's taken off, and mind you, I stayed home with the kids. We never were both gone at the same time, which was I think a pretty good choice at the time. But she deserved it. Rosanna is. She is an artist through and through. She deserved it. It's not her fault that that it took off, and it took me a minute. She was in a portion I was on a bicycle, so it goes you.

01:03:13
Speaker 1: Know, you weren't in a bicycle long because you put out Diamonds and Dirt, which had what four or five singles.

01:03:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, the five number one songs off of that album. It's just like one right after the other.

01:03:27
Speaker 1: She's crazy for leaving one of my favorite songs of yours after all this time. Yeah, I just want to ask you about two of the songs. One you mentioned it earlier, taking Flight, which you wrote with Ashley McBride. How was How was the writing done?

01:03:44
Speaker 3: Well? Ashley, I made a record in Chico called Chicago Sessions one Back, and actually came around the house and we wrote a song called making Lovers out of Friends. It was pretty sweet and I thought she would do it, but she didn't, and so I recorded it in Chicago. But that the day we wrote that song, Ashley was coming back two days later. So I woke up the day that she was coming back and just to get ready for Ashley to come around, and I started writing taking Flight, and it was just coming out of me in a hurry, and I was trying to hurry up and get here, hurry up and get here. And she finally got there, and I was pretty far down the road on it, and I said, oh God, and she signed off on all of it, and then we finished it up. But later on, as I was when I realized it would make a good duet, we collaborated on the spoken word at the end of it to have a little conversation at the end, to make the song a conversation.

01:04:54
Speaker 1: A beautiful line about an unwed mother seemed to be a small voice on the phone. Was that from you?

01:05:00
Speaker 3: Yeah?

01:05:01
Speaker 1: Well, I claimed that one think you should. Yeah, and I do want to ask about the last song, which is Jess Gorgeous maybe somewhere down the road.

01:05:12
Speaker 3: Yeah. Before I met Claudia, I had a friendship romance with a woman. She was really interesting woman, and I helped her get to India. She wanted to get to India, and I helped her get there, and she did come back to the States and I never saw her again when she came back from India. But I later found out that she had taken her own life and in a pretty horrific way. So I thought about her a lot, and I said, hey, God, the only thing I can do is she deserves a song. So I made the song. I wrote it and we recorded its first thing we recorded before we actually went down to Louisiana, and I didn't think it fit the record because the rest of Airline Highway was a little more lighthearted. But Tyler, the producer, he loved it, and I liked the song. I thought it was some good writing, but I just felt like it was it didn't work for the album. But everybody around me kept saying, you're wrong, you're wrong, You're wrong. And then then one day when Trina Shoemaker. She rang in and she said, you're wrong. Everybody told me I was wrong, so I said, okay, well then let's stick it on the end because it doesn't fit anywhere else. So there it is. And I always thought it was pretty good writing, and I think the performance is pretty good. And I'm glad it's on the record because the woman that I wrote it about deserve having a song, even though it was after her life was gone through.

01:07:07
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for coming in. It's been complete delight, Thank you so much.

01:07:11
Speaker 3: Thank you.

01:07:14
Speaker 2: An episode of description, you'll find a link to a playlist featuring our favorite songs from Rodney Crowell, as well as his new album, Airline Highway. Be sure to check out YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast to see all of our video interviews, and be sure to follow us on Instagram at the Broken Record Pod. You can follow us on Twitter at Broken Record. Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose, with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Holliday. Broken Record is production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions, and if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app Our theme musics by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmonds.