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Extreme closeup: Diane Lane

Oct. 20, 2012/Connect Savannah

“I haven’t been onstage in a quarter of a century,” Diane Lane says from Chicago, where she’s doing six nights a week in Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth.

She still can’t believe how well it’s going. “It was a dare,” Lane explains. “It was definitely a throwdown.”

With more than 50 films on her resume — most of them very high–profile — Lane presumably had nothing to prove by treading the boards at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre.

She says otherwise.

“Think about it,” Lane asks. “If you’re going to balance out your life with raising children, and having a wonderful marriage, and having an ambitious career, and whatever … when do you really feel tested? I feel tested by all those things, but film is so different. Film is s–o–o–o different, for satisfying something that you’re not sure of yourself, really. Because you can never really know what the celluloid is picking up — now, that’s even a moot terminology — I feel so removed, in some ways, from the end product.

“In comparison to theater. This is very healing for me. It’s sort of like a very strong cup of coffee. Because it demands so much focus and intention, and not a little prayer! Like they say, there’s no atheists on turbulent airplanes — believe me, there’s not very many in the theater either.”

Lane was only 6 when she began on the stage, and with her first film, the sweet 1979 trifle A Little Romance, with Laurence Olivier, she was hailed as a breakout star.

There she was, on the cover of Time magazine. At age 14.

Less than a year later, Lane and her mother moved to Tybee Island. She was enrolled at Savannah Christian Preparatory School, and on her 15th birthday — Jan. 22, 1980 — mayor John Rousakis gave her the key to the city.

As far as Lane can recall, her classmates didn’t know (or care) that she was a Hollywood Whiz Kid, as Time had proclaimed.

“Some did and some didn’t,” she says. “Whenever you’re the new kid, you’re gonna get pecked. Those kids didn’t read Time magazine. Nobody really cared. Nobody kept track of that stuff. We were much more interested in Tiger Beat.”

She remembers going to the St. Patrick’s Day parade, but she didn’t live here for very long.

It took a few years and a couple of tries, but Lane became one of the few child performers to make the successful leap into adult roles. As an actress, she is extraordinarily sensitive, and has held her own — and even outshone — many of Hollywood’s smoothest, sharpest and most talented leading men (and women, for that matter).

Just take a look at the range: Lonesome Dove (the miniseries), Under the Tuscan Sun, The Perfect Storm, Unfaithful (Lane got an Oscar nomination for that one), The Glass House, Secretariat, A Walk on the Moon, Hollywoodland, Must Love Dogs, Chaplin, Hard Ball, The Cotton Club, Nights in Rodanthe.

She has received multiple Emmy and Golden Globe nominations.

Next summer, she’ll be on a zillion screens as Clark Kent’s mother in the Superman movie Man of Steel.

Lane’s is making a stop in Savannah to pick up an award from the Savannah Film Festival, and to conduct a Q&A following the Nov. 1 screening of A Little Romance.

Olivier

Diane Lane: I was kind of overwhelmed. I felt very grateful and surprised. He was very gracious with me and the young boy I was working with. Considering all his physical ailments that he had at the time, he was very gracious. I’m sure he was suffering physically.

 Lonesome Dove ….

Diane Lane: There was such reverence there, respect for the writing. From a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Everybody wanted it to live up to the writing, so it kept our standards very high, with a great deal of affection and authenticity. And that paid off, in terms of something we’re all continuing to be very proud of many years later.

My dad died 10 years ago, but before he died he made it very clear to my then 7–year–old daughter that Lonesome Dove was Grandpa’s favorite movie that Mom ever made. He made my daughter sit through all two or three nights in a row, which I think tested her patience a little bit.

… and the Emmy snubs

Diane Lane: We were so popular that I think the Emmy–voting body just felt that they couldn’t give it to us, because we already had such a popular vote, you know? They put Bobby Duvall in the front row; all he had to do was step out of his seat and accept his award. It was such a given. But none of that occurred.

Your scenes in The Perfect Storm were all on land. Did you ever go to watch the other actors film their scenes on the boat?

Diane Lane: I didn’t watch all of it. There was no reason for me to know more than my character knew at the time, which was just white–knuckling it, hoping for the best. The storm’s out there, and we’re inland, and freaking out about our men out there.

They dug down deeper than the foundation of Warner Brothers Studios had ever been dug down before. Because this boat would go up in the air, and then way down, and you sure didn’t want to have the hull of the boat hit the floor of the studio. That room became so full of water and diesel and I don’t know what, just a bouillabaisse of stuff that probably led to everybody getting sinus and ear infections and stuff.

Out of compassion as an actor, I did go and see George and Mark … you know, Mark got so sick one day. He was just puking and they kept rolling. They just edited out when he would throw up. It was just nonstop puking. It was so sad. But it added to his vulnerability.

Favorite movie roles

Diane Lane: In hindsight, you don’t realize how good you’ve got it until you’re on to something else, and then you find yourself waxing sentimental about how it used to be. I think I’ve been incredibly blessed with the people that I’ve managed to work with. That’s always the greatest sense of connection to the work, because you feel like you’ve met somebody in a moment in their lives, and you share this experience. You may never see them again, but you’ve created something together. It always amazes me when people come up on the street and say “Oh, I loved this particular film that you were in,” or “My son still loves this movie” or “My mom loves this movie.” I’m very touched that people still see these things. They seem to have a long afterlife, with all the different media sources that there are to watch movies.

I’m sure people mention the obvious ones, Unfaithful or Under the Tuscan Sun, but do you ever get something like “You were great in Judge Dredd,” and you don’t even remember making the film?

Diane Lane: For years, I would get stopped about Streets of Fire more than anything. And there is a very strong demographic of people that have affection for movies like Judge Dredd, or Untraceable. I think 10 people got to see Killshot, it was released so briefly. Like that was their insurance claim for the year, the studio loss. I don’t know what they did! They four-walled that thing. But it was a good movie and a really good director … it’s like if you have a lot of children, they all can’t make you proud, right? But you don’t love them any less.

Man of Steel

Diane Lane: We wrapped that last summer. It was always slated to take two years, because these giant releases take up so much magnetic pull, or whatever that is, of the studio’s attention, they have to schedule it. They can’t just put it out like a regular movie — it’s an event, you know?

What’s it like to know that you have what’s sure to be a blockbuster, money machine coming out?

Diane Lane: In some ways, it’s a different journey for sure. When you have that much expectation, I don’t know, it always makes me nervous. I’d much rather be the underdog and surprise myself and everybody else, too. Like “This movie turned out great! Please go see it before it’s gone!” I’m much more used to that than a movie that’s way in-your-face.

 

 

 

Everybody loves Reba

Reba McEntire is maybe the hardest–working woman in show business.

The red–headed Oklahoma firebrand has just finished taping the fourth season of her hit sitcom “Reba,” launched the Reba clothing line through Dillard’s department stores, and begun a 25–city American tour that will have her singing in front of a half–million people.

As soon as it’s over, McEntire –– who, by the way, has hit No. 1 on the country chart 30 times –– will voice a character for an animated remake of “Charlotte’s Web,” sing on a movie soundtrack for Disney and play the part of Nellie Forbush in a one–night charity performance of “South Pacific” at Carnegie Hall.

That’s just the first half of this year.

“I never went out looking for any of this stuff,” she says by phone from her Nashville office. “It always just comes to me, and I have the choice of either taking the opportunity to be a part of it, or I pass on it.

“And I usually say ‘Boy, if I don’t take it, it’s gonna go to somebody else,’ so I’ve always jumped at it,” she explains.

In 2001, she was offered the starring role in a Broadway revival of “Annie Get Your Gun.” She’d never been in a play before, on any stage, but in true Reba fashion she accepted the challenge.

“I never, ever considered ‘What am I getting myself into? What do I know about it?” McEntire says with a laugh. “I wanted to be Annie Oakley so bad, and after I watched that show, that’s all I had on my mind.”

“Ms. McEntire doesn’t need a gun to bring Manhattan to its knees,” said the New York Times in its rave review of the show.

“They told me going in, ‘Don’t expect any good reviews,'” she says. “And I said, hey, I didn’t come in this to get an award, I just wanted to do this play. And when we did get good reviews, everybody was just shocked. I was thrilled.”

She stayed on Broadway for five months and then launched her TV show.

“I feel like I’ve worked 29 years getting where I am today,” she confesses, “and now the things that I get to do are more fun for me than work.”

The Reba clothing line was the brainchild of someone at Dillard’s.

“I sat in a two–hour meeting,” recalls McEntire, “listening to them tell about the clothes –– the fabrics, designs and patterns –– and after two hours they said ‘What do you think?’

“And I said ‘Guys, I wouldn’t wear a thing you showed me today, and I’m not about to put my name on it. Sorry,'” she says.

McEntire then got stacks of clothing catalogs and ripped out pages, creating a “huge file” to send to the Dillard’s people.

“It was stuff I liked and didn’t like,” she says. “And at the next meeting, it was 100 percent better. And I said ‘I think I can work with you guys.'”

She says she’s involved in the ongoing evolution of the line, flying to New York to watch “fit models” and making suggestions to the designers.

“I’ve been working with designers for all these years, and I learned a lot from them,” she says. “I never had found one line of clothing that had everything –– this designer, the pants didn’t fit right; that designer, the jackets weren’t right. So I had to mix and match.

“Now, I’ve got a clothing line that I really do like,” she adds.

In fact, McEntire says, she wears clothes from the Reba line on the May 13 and 20 episodes of her TV show.

At age 50, Reba McEntire is enjoying the fruits of her hard years –– because of her many business interests, she is one of the richest women in Nashville. (She also donates time and money to a number of local charities.)

She has been named the Country Music Association’s female vocalist of the year four times, and won 11 Academy of Country Music awards, two Grammys and a good 30 more prestigious statues. She’s written two books and appeared in 11 movies.

Still, she stresses, connecting with everyday country music fans –– the people, after all, who bought her records and made her what she is today –– remains a priority.

“Money is something that helps you survive in life,” McEntire says. “It’s the reason, mainly, I worked so hard at the beginning. I get to do it now because I love it; I had to do it before to survive.

“And even though I could quit doing all this, I love it,” she adds.

“The fame and fortune? I still like to be a regular person, and I like to be treated as a regular person –– except when I’m trying to get into a restaurant. Then I’ll throw that name in there in a heartbeat.” She pauses and laughs. “There’s nothing,” she says, “that can stand between me and food.”

 

@2005 Bill DeYoung

Billy Bob Thornton: The Edge of the World

Billy Bob Thornton lost three close friends in quick succession. Warren Zevon, John Ritter and Johnny Cash were all collaborators and confidantes, and their deaths — within four days of each other — left the Arkansas–born actor thinking more than ever about mortality.

“It sure does bring it all home to you,” Thornton says. “Because when we were 25, we didn’t think about this kind of stuff. Now, it’s like your friends are dropping like flies all around you, it’s right in your face.”

The Edge of the World, the 48–year–old Thornton’s second album, was released this week. On Sept. 7, he had just finished a cross–country tour with his rock ‘n’ roll band when the news came that Zevon had lost his battle with cancer. The Oscar–winning writer, director and star of Sling Blade maintains a healthy second career in music, and he sang on Zevon’s final album, The Wind.

In a phone interview from his Los Angeles home, Thornton recalled first encountering Zevon in the late 1980s at the mailbox outside their apartment complex.

“It was just so fantastic to meet somebody else who had obsessive–compulsive disorder,” Thornton said. “Because he saw me taking my mail out, putting it back in, taking it out and locking it twice. And he said ‘So you got that too, huh?'”

So developed a fast friendship. “It was pretty amazing knowing Warren. You know when you meet somebody who thinks differently than everybody else? They have their own thing that just doesn’t exist anywhere else. I just loved being around Warren. Dwight Yoakam and Warren and I used to hang out a lot together.”

In 1992, Thornton got one of his first Hollywood jobs, in the cast of John Ritter’s sitcom Hearts Afire. Between takes, Thornton liked to crack Ritter up with the mentally challenged hillbilly character he’d use four years later as the centerpiece of Sling Blade.

Thornton wrote another character in the film, the neurotic, gay grocery–store manager, with Ritter in mind.

“I knew what he could do, but he wasn’t given that chance very often,” Thornton said. “Everybody pigeonholed him into that guy that trips over the furniture.

“He used to do this weird thing where he would be sitting next to you someplace, and all of a sudden his hand would creep onto your knee. When you’d look at him like ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he would say ‘Oh, yeah, like I’m gay.’

“And his body language — I knew he could play the guy. Once I started writing the script, it was him all the way.”

For the film, Ritter was given a really, really strange haircut, a sort of regulation–Army buzz gone bad.

“The first thing we shot together was that scene in the diner, where he tells me he’s gay,” Thornton recalled. “And he just couldn’t hold himself together. He’d just look at me — I was in character — and bust up. So he had to get past that, and he said ‘Man, I hate you for this. For the haircut and everything.'”

The pair worked together again in director Terry Zwigoff’s comedy Bad Santa, which will be released in November. Ritter played the mall manager who hires Thornton, a con man, to play Santa Claus.

Thornton said Ritter got him back for the Sling Blade episode. “The facial expressions he does in ‘Bad Santa’ are priceless,” he explained. “I couldn’t keep a straight face. And here I’m supposed to be this dry guy who can’t stand him. I couldn’t even do the scenes with him half the time, just the way he stood, and rubbed his hands together.”

On Sept. 11, Thornton was home and thinking about Zevon, who’d passed away four days earlier. Someone called and told him Ritter had died suddenly, from an undiagnosed heart problem.

Yoakam — the country singer who’d also starred in Sling Blade and knew Ritter well — called next, and he and Thornton spent four hours on the phone, talking about their fallen friend.

“The next morning, I woke up and Cash had died. It was so numbing. I had just talked to Cash a few weeks ago.”

Johnny Cash died Sept. 12 after a history of illness.

Around 1998, Cash had sought Thornton out. “He called me and wanted to know if I would autograph a copy of U–Turn,” Thornton said. “He loved that movie. Cash was an edgy guy; he loved anything kinda offbeat. And I couldn’t believe he even called me, let alone wanted one of my movies.”

Thornton said Daddy and Them, which Thornton also wrote and starred in, was another favorite at Cash’s house.

“We just started talking on the phone a lot, and when I’d go to Nashville I would see him. He and I ended up doing a duet together on a song, and he was going to record my song ‘Private Radio.'”

The flood of bad news came just as Thornton was about to re–enter the limelight; he has a small role in the Coen Brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty (Oct. 10), then Bad Santa, followed at Christmas by Disney’s The Alamo, in which he stars as Davy Crockett.

The Edge of the World, he says, is “a veiled concept record, meaning it’s not as obvious a concept record as, say, Tommy or Red Headed Stranger.

“It’s the story of a broken man on his way to healing. It’s a guy who has a desire for love, for some sort of life, and then he dies.

“And in the end, he realizes what’s really important, which is your home and your family and being able to walk out the door every day and be alive.”

Thornton’s divorce last year from Angelina Jolie has fueled speculation that the more somber songs on The Edge of the World might have been inspired by the breakup.

“It’s pretty damned autobiographical, but it’s not all a specific reference to something that people would actually know. For instance, they’re already talking on the entertainment shows about the song ‘The Desperate One,’ about why I’m so desperate to get back with Angelina. And that’s just not true. That was someone totally unrelated to her.”

Jolie was seemingly on every magazine cover in the United States over the summer, talking about the couple’s less–than–amicable split.

Thornton swears he didn’t read any of it. “She doesn’t mean any harm toward me,” he said. “I mean, I know that. I know her. She’s not going to say anything about me, and if she does I’d be very surprised. We were friends, and hopefully will be at some point in the future.

“So it’s not surprising to me that she’s not slamming me because I don’t think that’s her style. And I wish people would leave her alone, too, I really do.”

Billy Bob Thornton isn’t thinking about it these days.

“I didn’t lose it at John’s funeral until I was walking out with my two little boys,” he said. “We were passing the casket, and I saw John’s kids sitting there in the front row of the church. And I made eye contact with Jason, his eldest son. When I looked at that kid, I couldn’t hold myself together.

“I went to Warren’s memorial. And I heard about Cash’s. People were kind of settled into the fact, I think, because we knew these guys were going to die. But at John’s funeral, it was just a bunch of people walking around stunned.”

@2003 Bill DeYoung (published by Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers)

Billy Bob Thornton: Hobo

“Music’s always been my first love,” says actor Billy Bob Thornton, one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation. “I’m almost a music geek.”

Thornton’s third album, “Hobo,” comes out Tuesday. Unlike its predecessors—both of which achieved gold–record status—this one has no rock or country songs, focusing instead on dark, smoky, half–spoken narratives.

“In this day and time, you can’t do eclectic records,” Thornton, 50, explains by phone from his Los Angeles office.

“We decided this was the thing we do best. I thought, ‘There’s plenty of people out there doing rock songs, and doing ’em well. But the fact of the matter is that my strength is as a storyteller, so let’s just stay with that.’ ”

The album, which Thornton originally wanted to call “California Possibilities,” is essentially a series of songs about one person’s exodus to the Golden State—similar to the one Thornton took in 1981, from his home in Arkansas.

“It’s really the story arc for everybody who comes out here,” says Thornton. “My other records have been very personal, and this one can literally be about anybody.

“It’s not that I didn’t have all these experiences, but I didn’t set out to write about me. It just kind of came out that way.”

Thornton was drumming for a ZZ Top tribute band when he went west in 1981, looking for work in music, movies or whatever came his way. “Sling Blade,” which he wrote, directed and starred in, brought him the 1996 Academy Award for screenwriting.

Since then, he’s been through the celebrity fodder machine—via his brief but doomed marriage to Angelina Jolie,—and a series of smash films including “A Simple Plan,” “Primary Colors,” “Monster’s Ball,” “Bad Santa” and this year’s “Bad News Bears.”

His next movie, “The Ice Harvest,” co–stars John Cusack, and will be released Nov. 23.

He still, however, considers himself a musician who got lucky in the movies. Indeed, Thornton likes to talk about the Band and the Allman Brothers more than his filmography.

“I still read liner notes,” he enthuses, “and when I’m up at night and my girlfriend’s asleep, I figure out different ways to categorize my CDs and my vinyl. I’m like, ‘Let me put my Porter Wagoner statue over here on this shelf, and I’ll put all my Frank Zappa records right here.'”

New arrivals to the west often are in for a culture shock, Thornton says. “Not all of California is full of swimming pools and movie stars.”

In such songs as “El Centro on $5 a Day,” he assumes the role of a state trooper telling a new arrival about the harsh realities of small–town life in the Golden State.

“Everybody who comes to California has such great expectations of what it is—and what they’re really talking about is L.A.,” Thornton says. “California’s a very diverse place; these towns could be in Kansas, they could be in New Jersey, or Florida or whatever.”

For the record, Thornton says he loves his adoptive home. “The fact of the matter is, my dreams were realized out here,” he explains. “I look at L.A. like that uncle you dread seeing at the family reunion, but at the same time there’s something about him you love.

“I wanted to pay tribute to this great old weird place, and at the same time point out all the miseries and troubles that you deal with.”

Thornton and his band will hit the road in February, playing small theaters on an intimate, living–room stage set, avoiding the big halls they’ve played (and sold out) in the past.

“I think I can tell my stories in that format better than any other way,” he says. “It’s not that I don’t sing rock ‘n’ roll songs—in our live shows, the high–energy, up–tempo songs go over better. Because audiences are out there throwin’ beer cans at each other’s heads; they don’t want to listen to some smoky, moody song.”

@2005 Bill DeYoung (published in Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers)

Billy Bob Thornton: Private Radio

For all his acting chops, screen presence and resumé of hit movies, Billy Bob Thornton considers himself a musician. Although he’s got five new films stacked up like planes over LAX, Thornton would rather talk about “Private Radio,” his very first album, released this week on the Nashville–based Lost Highway label.

“Music’s really my first love,” says the Arkansas native. “It’s what I’ve always wanted to do, and that’s what I was doing when I got into the movie business.”

Thornton left Hot Springs for Hollywood in 1981, and after a few years of scrambling hit the jackpot when he starred in 1996’s “Sling Blade,” which he also wrote and directed. “It wasn’t like I gave up music to become an actor. I just came to California to see what I could get going anywhere, in any way.”

“Private Radio” has a smoky, neon–and–beer feel to it; Thornton’s singing voice is somewhere between Merle Haggard and Leonard Cohen. He talk–sings many of the songs over a sinewy, noir country groove provided by producer Marty Stuart and a band of Nashville pros. He’s well aware that the road is littered with albums made by movie stars who thought they could sing, vanity projects by people with no business in a recording studio. “If I were going to make a vanity project, I would have made something far more commercial than this,” Thornton, 46, says. “This is honestly what I wanted to make.”

Thornton, whose most recent films were the back–to–back hits “A Simple Plan” and “Pushing Tin,” found that his cinema celebrity allowed him the time to write and record his album.

“These days I have the luxury to pick and choose, and I can do one or not do one if I want to,” he explains. “And my wife and I bought a house about a year and a half ago, and it had a world–class studio in it. That’s the main reason we bought the house, really. We loved the house, but that was a big selling point.” The house’s former owner was Guns N Roses guitarist Slash, who built the studio.

Thornton’s wife, as the world knows, is actress Angelina Jolie. Two of the “Private Radio” songs — “Angelina” and “Your Blue Shadow” — were written for her.

“She was there the whole way,” Thornton says. “What was great about making the record in the house was, she’d be upstairs watching TV or whatever, and every now and then she’d drop down to the studio. She cried the first time she heard the record.

“Since she’s been with me, she’s gotten a sort of musical education to some of the old music. She’s an Allman Brothers fan now, too.”

Thornton grew up with his parents’ Jim Reeves and Haggard records, but once he heard the Allman Brothers Band, his world shifted.

“Growing up in the South, we all wanted to play music,” he says. “Music was such a huge deal to us. We all grew up listening to what our parents did, and so we heard a lot of country music. But we kind of wanted, as kids, to separate ourselves from country music because it’s what our folks listened to. So there was some rebellion — and when the Beatles came along, we said OK, this is my music.

“But they were English. So I think when Southern Rock came along, that was the most direct place for us to plug in. It was not what our parents listened to, but it was still from down here with us. It’s like our own thing, and yet it’s rock music. We could still feel rebellious and yet loyal to our place, because it did have a Southern flavor to it.”

Thornton started playing drums and singing, and he went through numerous local bands. “We were so into hanging out with everybody,” he recalls. “And I never wanted anybody to leave. When we were all together, I was always one of those guys who never wanted to sleep, I wanted to stay up all the time.” Of course, he says, in the early ’70s there was plenty of chemical support for musicians.

“So when I saw the Allman Brothers, and you opened up the record cover and everybody’s there — they got a ranch where they all live, with wives and babies and friends … I can remember as a teen–ager, we didn’t give a sh–– if somebody could play something or not, they were in the band. We’d have a band with 15 guys in it sometimes; we’d have like nine conga players.”

Eventually, Thornton and two buddies put together Trés Hombres, a ZZ Top tribute band (as the drummer, he was the only one who didn’t have to grow a long beard). Today, several members of his regular film crew are musicians, and Thornton is famous for his weekend jam sessions — stress relievers during production.

Most of his friends are musicians, he says, and he’s well–known for showing up, unannounced, to introduce ZZ Top or Lynyrd Skynyrd to a delighted audience.

Starting next month, he’ll be all over movie screens: The Barry Levenson comedy “Bandits” (with Bruce Willis) comes out Oct. 12, followed by the Coen Brothers’ “The Man Who Wasn’t There” on Halloween.

“Daddy and Them,” which Thornton also wrote and directed, will be released in early 2002, along with the drama “Monsters Ball” (co–starring Halle Berry) and the comedy “Waking Up in Reno” (with Charlize Theron).

“I guess when people are aware of you, and you’re in the papers all the time for whatever the latest crazy thing I supposedly did, people assume you’re out there all the time,” Thornton says. “But I haven’t been in a movie since ‘Pushing Tin,’ and that’s been damn near three years ago.

“I’m so proud about this stuff coming out. Everything we got coming out is real strong.”

What Thornton wants most of all is for his fans to give “Private Radio” a shot — check it out for the music, not because he’s got a famous name and face.

And anyway, that’s how he built his reputation — on the work. “I’m real lucky, because I didn’t make it as a superstar,” he says. “I made it as a character actor. So once I became a movie star, people forgive me more in terms of the kinds of parts I play.

“They don’t want Mel Gibson to play anybody but Mel Gibson. I’m fortunate enough to be able to play all kinds of different things, so my choices are a little more open.”

 

@2001 Bill DeYoung (published in the Gainesville Sun)

Allman biopic starts shooting Feb. 21 at Meddin

(I wrote this story for Connect Savannah, where I worked as the A&E editor, in February 2014. In the interview, conducted at Meddin Studios, director Randall Miller informs me that principal photography on Midnight Rider was to start Feb. 21.

On Feb. 20, Miller brought his crew to a railroad bridge slightly south of Savannah, for an unauthorized bit of guerilla filmmaking. As the world knows, crew member Sarah Jones was killed when a freight train unexpectedly bore down on the company.

Miller spent less than two years in prison for this, and the tragedy has now been totally expunged from his record. Make no mistake, even though he liberally spread the blame around, it was his decision that led directly to her death. I wouldn’t trust him with a bag of trash.

It kind of makes me sick that mine was most likely the last interview Miller did before he caused Jones’ death. And that he knew that he was lying when he told me shooting would commence on Feb. 21.

PS He almost killed many others, including actor William Hurt.)

 

 

The original story:

Principal photography begins Feb. 21 on Midnight Rider, based on legendary rocker Gregg Allman’s autobiography, at Meddin Studios. The film is being produced by Unclaimed Freight Productions, which made CBGB at Meddin in 2012.

Like the book, My Cross to Bear, the movie will take an unflinching look at Allman’s early years in the band he co-founded with his brother Duane, and the roller-coaster of massive successes and personal trials that followed Duane’s death in 1971.

“I’ve read a number of rock ‘n’ roll biographies, and I think his book is really self-effacing, honest and raw,” says director Randall Miller, who co-wrote Midnight Rider with his wife Jody Savin (they’re both producers of the film). “And he’s not afraid to say he didn’t like people, or their music. For us, as filmmakers, the fact that the book basically pulls no punches is pretty cool.”

Allman, who lives in Richmond Hill, is an executive producer on the film, along with Meddin owner Nick Gant.

Miller says the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer has been extremely hands-on during the process. “If you’re making a movie about real people, you’ve got to work with the people,” he explains. “I can’t tell a squeaky-clean story; I’ve got to tell a story that has all the warts or it’s not a movie. So Gregg is really open. There’s stuff in the movie that’s even far worse than what’s in the book.

“We talk about being a movie like Ray, where you really get the journey and you understand what the fame bubble is like.”

Allman’s battles with drugs and alcohol are well-known; he told Connect last year he got clean and sober in the 1990s. In 2010, he underwent a liver transplant. “He’s like the cat with nine lives,” Miller says.

Academy Award winner William Hurt will play the present-day Allman. For the salad days of the Allman Brothers Band, the role will be assayed by All-American Rejects singer Tyson Ritter.

Many of the classic Allman Brothers songs have been re-recorded by an all-star band, without vocals: Ritter will sing them live. And Wyatt Russell, who plays Duane, is an accomplished slide guitarist who can reproduce the band’s hottest licks.

In some scenes, the characters will lip-synch to Allman tracks, a technique Miller and Savin, and co-producer Brad Rosenberger, used for CBGB).

Casting isn’t complete yet, but several roles have been filled: Zoey Deutch (Vampire Academy) will play one of the Allman Brothers’ most rabid fans, and Eliza Dushku (TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Miller/Savin movie Bottle Shock) has signed on as another “woman of the road.”

CBGB co-stars Bradley Whitford and Joel David Moore will also be in town for the Midnight Rider shoot, which is expected to take about six weeks.

Unclaimed Freight has hired young SCAD actors to fill several smaller roles; extras casting is underway now.

While Meddin’s soundstages will be used to film the interior scenes, the Midnight Rider company will also shoot in downtown Savannah and on Tybee Island. There will be a “concert in the park” with the erstwhile Allman Brothers Band, too. Miller isn’t sure yet where or when that will take place.

Additional scenes will be shot in Macon, the Allman Brothers Band’s base in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.

Miller, Savin and company decided early on to change the title, the director explains, because My Cross to Bear – although it accurately describes Allman’s many ups and downs – has a religious connotation (it’s actually the title of a song Gregg wrote for the band’s debut album). Midnight Rider (from another Allman song) is an evocative title.

After spending hours talking with Allman, Miller says, he understands why the autobiography had that name.

“Even today with Gregg, the whole thing about his brother is really right under the surface. There’s a bit of guilt: ‘Why did I survive and he didn’t?’”

George Martin: ‘These are my boys, the greatest in the world’

Published in the book I Need to Know: The Lost Music Interviews (St. Petersburg Press)

Hands down, my favorite interview. George Martin was, in every sense of the word, the Fifth Beatle. Without him, none of those incredible string and horn arrangements, no classical influence, no baroque harmonies, no eager acceptance of new and untried ideas. He was the antithesis of a pop producer in the 1960s in that he encouraged experimentation, and he enjoyed dark humor, and he selflessly nurtured the Fab Four’s growth spurts. I thought long and hard about questions for this one – I knew that this would most likely be my only shot at talking with someone so key in the Beatles universe, so I came up with a list of things I had always wondered about, from a serious fan’s perspective. The year was 1993, and since it first appeared in Goldmine this interview has been plagiarized, quoted and misquoted in magazines, books and online fan sites. Usually without attribution, I might add!

 

John Lennon used to say that when he heard a Beatles song, it automatically brought him back to the recording session, what he was playing, how he was feeling that day. Is it the same way for you?

Not really. Looking back at all the songs, it’s a long time ago, and I purposely over the years hadn’t looked back at the songs. My life has been so busy, I’ve tended to go on and look at tomorrow rather than today, or even yesterday. And I find that you can get too obsessive about the past. I did find, however, that when I did that television program on The Making Of Sgt. Pepper a couple of years ago, that of course forced me to look back and see what was going on. And it was the first time, to be honest; in all those years I’d really looked back and started thinking deeply about the past.

When I think of a song – if you play me “Paperback Writer” or “Norwegian Wood” – sometimes I will think about things … in the case of “Norwegian Wood,” it immediately brings it back to a hotel in St. Moritz, where John and I had a skiing holiday together. And he wrote the song during the time there, so that’s obviously very evocative. But if you take a song that doesn’t have that particular kind of nostalgia, it’s a kind of blur. “Fool On The Hill,” I can remember how we did that … but there were so many, and there are so much of them, that it’s all one sort of melting, shimmering haze.

 

You played piano on a lot of songs during the early years; it’s particularly evident on the Hard Day’s Night–era tracks. Was that literally because no one else could do it?

To begin with, of course, none of them knew what a keyboard was like. They were guitar players. When I first met them, I was aware that they were guitar men and I was a keyboard man. And if you’re running through a new song for the first time, a guitar player will look at another guy’s fingers and see the shapes. You can see what the guy’s doing on the fret, and you know what chord he’s playing. If you then take that guitar player, and he doesn’t know anything about keyboards, what you play on the piano will be completely meaningless to him. He won’t understand the chords at all. And a keyboard player, if he knows a bit about guitar, won’t understand what the chords are by looking at his hands. There’s a hidden language there.

So I actually said to myself, “Hey, I’m going to have to learn the guitar, because I’ll need to communicate with these guys on their level.” And Paul, at the same time, said the same thing to himself: He said, “I think I’ll have to learn piano, to see what George is up to.” Because what I used to do, whenever Paul or John sang me a song, I’d sit on a high stool and they’d play it in front of me. And I’d learn it, and I’d then go to the keyboard and I’d say, “Is this it?” and I’d play through the chords and hum the tune. And they’d say, “Yeah, that’s fine, Okay,” and I’d know the song.

 

That piano sound was very distinctive.

Piano’s a very useful instrument. And, of course, Paul was the one who actually took it up and learned it more quickly and more adaptably than anybody else. I mean, he’s such a fine, versatile musician; he could play almost any instrument if he set his mind to it. So that by the time he got to “Lady Madonna,” he was doing a bloody good solo. He couldn’t possibly have done that in 1962.

And John never really mastered the keyboard. His idea of playing the piano was having a group of triads – you know, three notes that formed a chord – and just go up and down the scale with them. He could play rhythm all right on keyboard, but he wasn’t very clever at doing single notes or lines.

 

It’s been theorized that your classical music background, and your work on comedy records, were big factors in making the unprecedented new pop sound that you made.

I tried to turn them on to it. We did get counterpoint into their work. I remember during “Eleanor Rigby,” which was quite a breakthrough in a way, when we were actually recording it I realized that one of the phrases could work against another phrase, that, they hadn’t designed that way.

In other words, “Ah, look at all the lonely people” actually could come at the end of the piece. Which it does. I put it in; got them to sing it … they were knocked out by that. “Hey, yeah, those two things go together! It’s great, innit? It works well.” It had never occurred to them; never occurred to Paul. But that was a lesson for him. Because I’m sure that when he came to write “She’s Leaving Home,” that was, definitely, two lines working against each other. It was one broad melody, and another one kind of answering underneath it. He learned how to use that weaving of lines.

 

They were like sponges, in a way, weren’t they?

They learned so quickly. But when I first met them, I had absolutely no idea at all they could write decent material. They wrote songs that were pretty awful – “One After 909,” and “P.S. I Love You,” and “Love Me Do” was the best of them. It was pretty rough stuff.

I didn’t really blame the guy who turned them down so much. In fact, everybody turned them down, more or less, on the grounds that their material wasn’t very good, I imagine.

 

Do you remember exactly when they stopped being your students in the studio and started pretty much calling their own shots, coming to you simply for advice?

There was no one moment. It was a gradual drift. By the time we got to a song like “Walrus” or any of John or Paul’s later songs, they would have very definite ideas on what they wanted to do, which they hadn’t to begin with. It was a gradual drift so that they became the teachers, almost at the end, and I was the pupil.

What I do remember, though, was that having rejected all the stuff that they had, and accepting only “Love Me Do,” I had actually rejected “Please Please Me,” in those very early days of 1962, saying “This is no good, this song, it’s very dreary. If you’re going to make anything of it at all, you need to double the speed and really put some pep into it. Make something really worthwhile. Maybe use some harmonica on it.” Because when they played it first to me, it was Paul singing a very kind of winsome, Roy Orbison slow ballad. Which was very dreary.

Well, they learned from that, because when I gave them “How Do You Do It,” and we made a record of that, they still wanted to have their material. They said, “We’ve been working on ‘Please Please Me,’ we’d like you to listen to it.” And the result was good. And that gave them an incentive, then, to do better things from that moment onward.

 

Had you tried that in 1968, say around “Hey Jude” time, would they have said, “Don’t tell us what to do, George?”

I don’t think so. I don’t think they ever rejected anything I said. All of us in the studio, including Ringo, had equal voices. And the five of us would look at things and try to make things better. They were much more fruitful by this time, so that if I did have something that I didn’t like … in the case of “Hey Jude” I said, “Do you think we’re being a bit unwise, going on for seven minutes?” And Paul said, “No, it’s there. Can you get it on a record?” I said, “I can get it on, but it’s not exactly a single. DJs will fade it.” I was being practical, and I was wrong, because he was right, because it was right that it should be seven minutes. And it always has been, ever since.

Curiously enough, Paul and I have always been good friends, and we’ve often had dinner with our wives and so on. And about eight years later, ’78 or ’79 I’d say, we were having dinner one night and Paul, at the end of it said, “By the way, I’d like you to produce my next record.”

I fell apart and I said, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

He said, “Come on! Don’t be so silly! Why not?”

I said, “Because things have changed now. You’re a good producer in your own right, and I don’t want to spoil a beautiful friendship, thank you very much.”

He laughed and said, “Why don’t you think it’ll work?”

I said, “Because I don’t think you will accept the direction that I have to give you as a producer.”

He said, “Of course I will. We know each other too well for that. How could it not work?”

I said, “Well, there’s a selection of songs, for a start.”

“Do you want me to audition for you?!?!!” he said, jokingly.

I said, “Not quite, Paul.” But, I said, “I’ve got to be able to choose your songs and tell you what’s good and what’s bad.”

And he swallowed. That had never occurred to him. By this time, all of them had got to the stage where everyone revered them so much that they hadn’t quite thought anyone would dare to suggest that anything they did wasn’t terribly good.

He said, “You’re quite right. I’ve got 14 songs.”

I said, “Give them to me, and I’ll listen to them over the weekend. I’ll tell you about them on Monday.”

He rung me on Monday and said, “What about it, then?”

I said, “Well, I’ve listened to every one of them.”

He said, “Good.”

I said, “Four are great.”

He said, “Four???!!”

I said, “Six need a lot of work on them, and the other four you can throw away.”

There was a kind of distant silence. But Paul is a sensible and honorable fellow, and he said, “All right, you and I had better talk about it, and we’d better sort them out.” And we did, and we made a very happy album.

I think that people, when they become superstars, they have to have someone to tell them … they’re surrounded so many times by people who tell them they’re the greatest thing in the world; they need to have an honest opinion. It’s the emperor and his new clothes, isn’t it?

 

Near the end of the Beatle years, did you consider yourself friends? Or was the relationship like that of an employee to an employer? This was White Album, Abbey Road time.

The White Album was a funny one, because at the time they came back from abroad and they all had a huge collection of songs they wanted to record. And they wanted them done all at the same time. By this time, they were four individuals with their individual songs, wanting to record them with the assistance of the other people, rather than being a group. I couldn’t cope with it all at once. We were actually recording in a couple of the studios at the same time, identically. John would be in one studio, and Paul would be in another. And I was running from one place to another. I had a very able assistant by this time, a guy called Chris Thomas, who’s now a first–class producer. We shared the work, so I would come in and see what he was doing, and supervise and so on.

But it was such a frantic time; I never really worried about any sort of splits there. The real cracks appeared during Let It Be. That was the worst time.

 

With regard to the White Album, you’ve said that you tried to get them to cut it down to a single–disc, 14–track album. What would you have cut out?

That’s a good question, because it’s now such an accepted album. Everyone thinks it’s terrific. A lot of people say it’s their favorite album. Don’t forget, I was looking at it from the point of view of the songs when I heard them, rather than the songs when they were finished. I said to myself, “Let’s pick the best and most commercial songs, and let’s work on those. Let’s forget the other ones for the moment.”

I’m not saying we wouldn’t have recorded those other songs, but I would like to have made a really great album out of the best of the stuff there, and concentrated and worked very hard on them. But they wanted everything done at once. I thought they were dissipating their energies rather than focusing them. That was my concern. There are one or two items of dross on the White Album.

 

Such as?

I haven’t got the list in front of me. You’ll have to read them off. Was “Bungalow Bill” on that? “Honey Pie?”

 

Yes, and “Wild Honey Pie,” “Revolution 9,” “Birthday.”

“Birthday.” Well, there you go. You’re picking them for me! There are songs that are not at the front rank, put it that way. From other groups they probably would be front rank, but these are my boys, they’re the greatest in the world, and that’s the way I saw it.

 

The songs that remain unreleased today: “Leave My Kitten Alone,” “If You’ve Got Troubles,” “That Means A Lot.” Was there a sense while you were cutting them that they were hopeless? Or were they just culled at the end of the sessions?

There were many instances when they would come in and not get very good results. I don’t remember the specific circumstances; quite often, they would be done at the tail end of sessions, or sometimes they would be done because they came into the studio and they didn’t have anything else.

 

Would you like to see that stuff released?

Now that all the water’s gone under the bridge and everybody’s much older and wiser, we are actually now looking at putting out a kind of definitive, all–encompassing Beatle Anthology.

They’ve certainly been doing it on film; the boys themselves have been collecting a hell of a lot of footage and interesting visual programming. They’ve got about six hours assembled so far. And toward the end of next year, or maybe 1995, there will be the beginnings of a television series of hours. It’ll be tracing the history of the boys from when they were kids right through to the dissolution in ’70.

Now there will be an accompanying series of albums, which will go alongside that. But they won’t be the soundtrack, because the soundtrack will be spasmodic and so on. They will be complementary rather than identical. And for that, I’m going to delve, and I’m going to look at every source – bootlegs that are in good condition. I’m going to look at radio broadcasts, live performances, demo records, all sorts of things apart from anything else we did in the studio, and I shall collate, polish, look at, criticize, chuck away, but maybe issue anything that I think is worthwhile, that actually traces their history.

 

The bootleg CDs that are out now, some of the stuff is pretty phenomenal.

So I understand! And where the material came from in the first place is most interesting. I’d love to know. I’ve heard some of it, and some of the quality is remarkably good.

 

You don’t think anyone knows how they got out?

I think all these things will probably be incorporated in what I’m talking about. It doesn’t make sense for them to go out on bootlegs, does it?

 

In his 1970 Rolling Stone interview, John made several disparaging remarks about Beatles recordings, what he called the “Dead Beatles sound.” Did that hurt your feelings at the time?

Very much! John went through a really crazy period. I was very incensed about that interview. I think everybody was. I think he slagged off everybody, including the Queen of England. I don’t think anyone escaped his attention.

When I saw him back in L.A. some years later, and we spent an evening together, I said, “You know, you were pretty rough in that interview, John.” He said, “Oh, Christ, I was stoned out of my fucking mind.” He said, “You didn’t take any notice of that, did you?” I said, “Well I did, and it hurt.”

He went through a very, very bad period of heavy drugs, and Rolling Stone got him during one of those periods. He was completely out of it. John had a very sweet side to him. He was a very tender person at heart. He could also be very brutal and very cruel. But he went through a very crazy time. The tragedy of John was that he’d been through all that and he’d got out the other side. And he really was becoming the person that I knew in the early days again.

I spent an evening with him at the Dakota not long before he died, and we had a long evening rapping about old times, which was marvelous. That’s now my happiest memory of him, because he really was back to his own self.

 

You were recording Tug Of War with Paul the day John died. Just for the record, where were you when you heard about it?

I lived about 80 miles west of London, and he (Paul) lived 70 miles south. We were both in our respective homes. It was six o’clock in the morning, and somebody rang me from America and told me the news, which was not a good way to start the day. I immediately picked up the phone and I rang Paul, and I asked if he’d heard it. He had heard it.

And after a few moments together, I said, “Paul, you obviously don’t want to come in today, do you?” He said, “God, I couldn’t possibly not come in. I must come in. I can’t stay here with what’s happened. Do you mind?” I said, “No, I’m fine. I’ll meet you.”

So we went into AIR studios in London. We were supposed to record that day. Of course, we didn’t put down a single note, because we got there and we fell on each other’s shoulders, and we poured ourselves tea and whiskey, and sat round and drank and talked. And we grieved for John all day, and it helped. At the end of the day we went back to our homes.

Now, one of the ironies and one of the bitter bits about life is that Paul, when he came out of the studio, of course was surrounded by reporters and journalists. He still was in a deep state of shock. They photographed him, and they flashed him, and they said him the usual sort of zany and stupid reporter questions. The question was, “How do you feel about John dying then, Paul?” I don’t know what you’re supposed to say to that. And he looked and he shrugged and he said, “Yeah, it’s a drag, isn’t it?” And went off into the night.

And he was slated for that. He was mercilessly attacked saying, “How callous can you be?” And I felt every inch for him. He was unwise, but he was off his guard. It was tough.

 

You recently scored Paul’s song “C’Mon People.” You must have a pretty good working relationship with him.

I don’t produce because I’m too old, and he’s a good producer anyway. I don’t want to produce. In fact, he’s asked me if I would. But life’s too short. But he had this song and he said, “Would you mind doing a bit of scoring for me?” So I listened to it and I said, “Okay, why not?” And it was fun. It’s nice occasionally working together. I wouldn’t want to make a habit out of it.

 

You’ve done a lot of remastering and CD transfer for EMI on these Beatles projects. When you get to the Phil Spector songs, “The Long And Winding Road” and that, are you ever tempted to twiddle the knobs and just wipe out those strings and choirs?

(Laughing) You bet I am! It’s a silly thing, really, because that was a wounding thing. And I don’t honestly think those tracks are as good as we should have made them. But hell, they were there, and they’re history now. If you’re a sensible bloke, you just say, “That’s it.” And obviously, when you’re transferring to CD, it’s got to be as it was when it was issued, and that’s the end of it.

 

Maybe you’ll get to change some when you do this anthology next year.

Well, you can’t really change the artistic content … that would be wrong. My brief was to try and reproduce on CD what we heard on analog. That was my prime motive, to try and make it sound, on CD, with the same warmth and quality we have on analog. Which is not an easy thing, by the way. So when it comes to the question of changing things, no, if I changed it, I would’ve re–scored it, and all that kind of thing.

 

On the American LPs, they added all that echo and awful stuff. Did you used to hear that, and throw your hands in the air?

Of course I did, but I was powerless to do anything about it. Capitol ran the roost. And they used to take the credit for it too.

 

Do you know why they did those things?

Ego? I don’t know! I mean, there’s a guy who actually put his name on the records, saying he produced them. So you tell me. Eventually, when we do this anthology thing, then we’ll go back over all those albums and make sure they’re in the right order, and in the original versions as well as other stuff. It’ll be quite a big job, but it’ll be fascinating to do. The last thing I’ll ever do with the Beatles.

 

You think so?

I guess so. The final thing. The final solution.

 

So you’re content with being known as The Beatles Guy now?

Well, you can’t escape these epithets. You get pigeonholed. Some people think I’ve never done anything else.

@1993 Bill DeYoung

Linda Ronstadt: ‘I grew up thinking I was a boy soprano’

From the book I Need to Know: The Lost Music Interviews

 

After my initial conversation with Linda Ronstadt, for the 1996 Emmylou Harris story, I always looked forward to speaking with her. She was frank, she was funny, and she seemed to me incapable of telling a falsehood. She was never really “pushing product,” it seemed to me. She just liked to talk. When she and Harris made the record Western Wall: The Tucson Sessions in 1999, I conducted a joint interview with both of them. Trio II had come out by then, with Dolly Parton’s original vocal tracks restored, and she and Linda had made some kind of peace.

For this story, written for in Goldmine in 2003, we were ostensibly on the phone to plug a new Best Of Ronstadt anthology Rhino Records had put out. But that didn’t interest her – or me – at all. So I just turned on the recorder and off we went.

 

There are many things about her career that Linda Ronstadt wishes she’d done differently. Still, the most successful female singer of the rock ‘n’ roll era is happily 56 years old, raising two young children, and working only when she wants to.

“All musicians, if they say they’re doing it for the audience, they’re probably bullshitting,” Ronstadt says. “Music is a biological necessity. It’s a way that we all have of processing our feelings.

“Everybody really should do music. And once in a while, when you’re doing your music and you’re processing your feelings, you strike a resonant chord with other people. And that’s a wonderful feeling, and it can be very good in that you can make a living. Otherwise you have to get another job, and then you get to do your music in your spare time.”

The doe-eyed Arizona native left Tucson for Los Angeles in 1964 with no particular goal, other than to sing. It took a few years of stumbling, bumbling and feeling her way along, but she finally fell in with the right people, finally made the connection with listeners. “Everybody has their own level of doing their music,” she says. “Mine just happened to resonate over the years, in one way and another, with a significant enough number of people so that I could do it professionally.”

Her career has been a series of happy accidents: She started off as a folksinger, then spent a while marrying country and rock, and for most of the 1970s everything she did – everything – hit big with the rock ‘n’ roll audience.

Her dissatisfaction with it all led to excursions into Broadway, grand opera, orchestrated standards, traditional Mexican music and straight-ahead country.

“Your musical soul is like facets of a jewel, and you stick out one facet at a time,” she says. “I tend to work real hard on whatever it is I do, to get it up to speed, up to a professional level. I tend to bury myself in one thing for years at a time.”

She is grateful for her fans, but has no qualms about letting them know she didn’t like too many of her records. “There’s a famous story where a fan is talking to this famous guitar player – I think Ry Cooder told this story – and the fan is saying oh, you were great tonight, this and that, and the famous guitar player turns to Ry and says ‘Gosh, I was just trying not to suck.’

“That’s what you do. You just try really hard not to suck. And when you record, you try to take out the stuff that’s really embarrassing and just leave all that’s really good, or maybe what you think you got away with, or doesn’t suck.”

Ronstadt’s father was of Mexican-German descent, and he was the first in the family line who didn’t operate a cattle ranch – he ran the Tucson hardware store. Linda and her two siblings – her brother was a boy soprano – grew up listening to Dad crooning Mexican songs. Mom preferred opera.

Linda’s California sojourn began with Kenny Edwards and Bob Kimmel, as the Stone Poneys. The trio was a regular act at the Troubadour on Sunset Strip.

“I wanted to do traditional music, which would include Mexican music,” Ronstadt explains. “I tried to talk them into doing certain Mexican songs. They liked it, but they didn’t really understand the rhythms and how to play it.

“I kept trying to get back to traditional stuff with a lot of harmony, which is what I loved. I remember I had learned ‘Different Drum’ off a Greenbriar Boys record, and I knew it as a bluegrass approach. We recorded it that way, but the producer at Capitol didn’t like it.

“Came back the next day, and there was an orchestra there. So I recorded with an orchestra, because that’s what they told me to do. I never liked it, but it was a big hit.”

“Different Drum” (from Evergreen, Vol. 2, the second of the Poneys’ albums on Capitol) was actually a minor hit, and when the trio split, Ronstadt naturally assumed the recording contract. Three solo albums for the label, all musically rambling and badly produced, garnered some attention from the hippie crowd but failed to turn a profit.

“Long Long Time,” a weepy country ballad from her second solo release, was a Top 30 single in the fall of 1970, but the money wasn’t exactly rolling in. “The immediate problem,” says Ronstadt, “was getting onstage at the Insomniac or wherever your gig was that weekend, or that night. We got paid $300 a week, and we could live on that.

“It was always, let’s try to get better. Can we get a better drummer, or get drums when we didn’t have them before? Or can you find that magical bass player? Or you find some new songs, because you went to New York and you met Gary White or Jerry Jeff Walker, or somebody told you about the McGarrigle Sisters? You don’t think about that other thing. As long as you’re eating, you’re just playing your next gig. And trying to get through it.”

In 1972 David Geffen negotiated her out of the Capitol deal and signed her to his Asylum label. Ronstadt had a cult following, and it was no secret to anyone that, given the right material, the right producer and the right push, she was going to be huge.

For her, it was always about the music.

“I would have a manager that would say to me, ‘You don’t want to do that country shit. It’s too corny.’ And he also managed the Mothers. He wasn’t a musician, he didn’t really know anything about music. I would go to him and say ‘I have this song written by Kate and Anna McGarrigle, and it’s really beautiful. I’d like to record it.’ It was ‘Heart Like a Wheel.’ He’d say ‘It’s too corny.’ We struggled along with somebody that Capitol had, Nick Venet … we were never any of us on the same page. I was trying to do one thing, they were trying to do another.”

While recording Don’t Cry Now with producers John Boyland and (then boyfriend) J.D. Souther, Ronstadt met the person who would, very quickly, end her career water-treading and send things into overdrive. His name was Peter Asher.

“I don’t think I would’ve got anywhere without Peter,” Ronstadt recalls. “He walked into the Bitter End with his wife one night, and we were doing a lot of Cajun stuff. I don’t know if my band was very good. I honestly can’t remember who was in it.”

At the time, Asher – a Londoner who’d had enough of fame and fortune as half of the ’60s pop duo Peter and Gordon – was managing and producing James Taylor, and making quite a good wage. He was eager to expand his stable.

“Peter was very cordial, and he was interested,” Ronstadt says. “When we got back to L.A., we had some various little meetings and he said he was interested in managing me – but as it turned out, he already managed Kate Taylor, James’ sister.”

That was, Asher explains, one female singer too many. He liked to give his artists his full attention.

“Bless Kate’s heart, she decided about a year later that a career in music really wasn’t for her,” Ronstadt recalls. “I was with her one night, backstage at a show, and she said ‘You know, you really ought to ask Peter again, because I don’t really think I’m going to be doing this.’”

Asher and Ronstadt met again, and something clicked. “I loved everything Linda was doing,” Asher says. “At that point, it was country rock, for lack of a better term, and I felt the songs were wonderful and she was wonderful. My main aim was to bring it to a wider audience. And to make the best possible record that I thought she could make.”

He came in at the tail end of her first Asylum album Don’t Cry Now, and to fully produce Heart Like a Wheel, her contract-ender with Capitol. Ronstadt: “When I sang ‘Heart Like a Wheel’ for him, he thought it was a wonderful song. He didn’t think it was corny or stupid. So at least we were on the same page musically about more things than I ever was with anybody.”

Asher didn’t think much of the way Ronstadt’s records had been produced. His idea was to focus them, to bring in the very best musicians available and to provide his singer with the best possible showcase for her instrument.

“It’s easy to talk in terms of master plans,” he says. “And of course one does have plans, but in general when you fall in love with an artist and their music, the plan is a fairly simple one. The plan is to make the whole thing as good as it can be. And get people to go and see them, and to make a record that you think properly presents their music to the public – and some of which you can get on the radio.

“I’ve had the good fortune to work with some terrific singers, and they tend to be the kind of singers whose voices are pretty unique, in all different ways. In each case, I’ve tried to have their voices be as well-recorded, as clear and as distinctive as it is in reality.”

His first order of business, as her manager, was to put her in front of as many people as possible. Ronstadt was the opening act for Neil Young’s Time Fades Away tour in early 1973. “So I went from being a club act to playing at Madison Square Garden overnight, which was pretty intimidating,” she says. “But I loved Neil’s music, and I watched every single show. Neil was using a lot of the same musical elements that I’d used. So it was real reinforcing for me to see somebody doing that so well.

“So I got a lot of exposure to people. Apparently they like the way I sang, because even in the coliseums they still listened. It was all completely over my head, I didn’t know what I was doing. We were just making it up as we went along.”

Released in the fall, Don’t Cry Now became Ronstadt’s first Top 50 album, but it wasn’t much different, sonically, from its predecessors (owing, perhaps, to its multiple producers, each of whom had different ideas about how Linda should be presented).

Heart Like a Wheel, however, was all Asher’s baby, and immediately after its appearance in late ’74 it rolled into the Top Ten, making No. 1 in December.

Within a month or two, “You’re No Good” (the old Betty Everett song) and “When Will I Be Loved” (from the Everly Brothers) had risen to No. 1 and 2, respectively.

“I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love With You)” hit No. 2 on the country chart. A duet with Ronstadt and her new best friend Emmylou Harris, the song brought Ronstadt her first Grammy, for Best Country Vocal Performance.

Asher had taken the best things about country rock – the tight, focused harmonies – and applied them to pop songs, with precise and compelling performances from the backing musicians.

And there out in front, her voice sounding big and yet still vulnerable, was little Linda, barefoot in the middle of the stage.

“The oldies,” says Ronstadt, “were because I was a club act, or I had a concert that I had to pace, and they were just things that we could do. They were songs that maybe I liked, or I had some quirky interest in, but basically I sang ballad after ballad after ballad.

“Songs that I was really passionate about were songs like ‘Heart Like a Wheel,’ so there I was with all these ballads. I had to have some way to structure shows. It’s always been a problem for me.”

Between 1975 and ’80, Ronstadt placed 13 songs in the American Top 40, seven of them in the Top 10. Several of her biggest singles were oldies – from Roy Orbison (“Blue Bayou”) to Chuck Berry (“Back in the U.S.A”) to the Vandellas (“Heat Wave”) to Buddy Holly (“That’ll Be the Day,” “It’s So Easy”).

No matter that the programming on her albums was as eclectic as ever – she covered Warren Zevon, Neil Young, James Taylor, Little Feat, the McGarrigles and Randy Newman – the singles were almost uniformly old rock or R&B songs done up in the Asher style.

Still, her albums went multi-platinum out of the box, she was a star of the highest magnitude, and you’d do well not to argue with success.

“When you’re struggling, one is always grateful for a hit,” Ronstadt says. “But I’d go ‘Why that one, and why not this other one? I like this one better.’ It was just that way, and I got stuck.

“Eventually I just had to turn away from a lot of those songs because I outgrew them. And they don’t speak for me any more, and sometimes they just flat out bored me until I was crosseyed.”

 

It’s so easy

As she toured incessantly, as her fame grew and her bank account swelled, she began to question the validity – for her – of the songs she was putting out there. “They all have their time and their place,” she explains. “I mean, if Martha Reeves were singing ‘Heat Wave’ tomorrow I’d listen, it’s a neat piece of material. But it wasn’t something that spoke for me. You have to use music to speak for you, and to speak for what your feelings are, and it just wasn’t who I was after a while. A song like ‘Heart Like a Wheel’ isn’t ever not who you are. It’s a song that grows with you; it’s not a song that’s locked into one age.

“I just remember waxing my floor, after my boyfriend and I had broken up, and singing ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.’ I just wanted to sing that for two weeks. Or when I learned ‘Willing,’ you know, when Lowell George taught me how to play it, I just wanted to play it and play it. I just loved it.”

Concurrent with the mega-success was a gnawing distaste for public performing, of the sports stadiums with their awful acoustics, and of the superstar grind, with its inherent lack of privacy.

On the road, Ronstadt was literally the only woman in a dysfunctional traveling circus full of men – her manager, her band, her crew. And although she sometimes got involved romantically with one of the boys, she was a reluctant center of attention. “It felt uncomfortable and awkward and unbalanced,” she recalls. “My first cousin Alisa was in the first female class they admitted to Yale, and I used to think about her a lot. I thought it was very comparable what she and I went through.

“The pressure, of course, is to adopt their swagger and their speech mannerisms, which I did. I just swore like a sailor. I adopted all the slang and everything, which you do. And it was very, very hard to clean up my language, especially when I have children in the house.”

And then … “I gotta tell you about drugs. I’m not gonna say I didn’t inhale, because I inhaled, I snorted, I this, I that. I didn’t inject. But I have some kind of a liver that just doesn’t metabolize drugs. It just won’t. I mean, I can’t take prescription drugs or drink coffee.

“So I have to say I tried most everything and didn’t like much of anything. But it was so much a part of the scene. I can’t drink at all; I never drank. Some people drink and say ‘I got a great buzz going, I feel really good’ and they get really mellow. I just throw up. And I have to go to bed for a long time. It’s like getting a bad case of the flu.

“I felt the same way about smoking pot. I just didn’t like it. After 20 minutes I’d feel like I wanted to peel my skin off with a knife.”

Her private life, too, was the subject of public scrutiny. After Souther, Ronstadt lived with writer/actor Albert Brooks, and was involved later with California governor Jerry Brown and Star Wars wizard George Lucas.

Reading about herself on the band bus, Ronstadt laughed all the time. “It was just so made up,” she says. “First of all, most of us didn’t have lives. We were on the road all the time. In the beginning of the book Heart of Darkness, he talks about how provincial sailors are. And we were just incredibly provincial.

“We’d get into these tight group dynamics. There’s some kind of a neuro-transmitter that’s released in your brain that’s incredibly pleasurable when you’re experiencing shared labor or shared endeavors. It really is fun and great. So we’d get into this tight little thing and it would kind of be ‘us against them.’ It increased paranoia and gave you this sort of strange fish-in-a-barrel mentality, and I don’t think it’s very healthy.”

In the 1970s, Ronstadt’s image was just as famous as her music. She was not only a great singer, she was a hot chick, and her album covers drove home the point again and again.

“I photographed OK from one angle,” she shrugs. “Those photographs are culled from thousands.”

Ronstadt offers no apologies. “Am I going to say I didn’t like it when someone thought I was cute? I was never beautiful, I was cute, and for some reason men liked me. I didn’t have a great figure and I didn’t have whatever you had to have to be like a model.

“People believe what they want to believe. When you’re trying to sell records, and the record company says ‘this picture doesn’t really look like you, but it will sell records,’ you say sure. Put a picture of a fire engine on the cover if you think it’ll sell records.

“Do I think it’s unfortunate that this culture forces that on women? Yes. We are taught that that’s what will sell. We aim to please. And I think it’s a shame.”

She drew the line when Rolling Stone photographer Annie Liebowitz “tricked” her into posing in nothing more than a skimpy red slip. Liebowitz, Ronstadt said, had shot her against red wallpaper – and the slip photo, depicting the singer lying submissively on a bed, her red underpants exposed – was taken during a break.

A week later, Liebowitz returned to Ronstadt’s home. “She brought the projector over and very politely showed us the pictures,” Ronstadt said. “We said ‘oh, we can’t use those,’ and she said ‘I didn’t say that you could choose them, I just said I could let you see them.’ At which point Peter unceremoniously threw her out of the house.”

So much for Rolling Stone. “I never had any respect for the magazine,” Ronstadt said. “I just thought I could respect her work.”

For her 1980 release, Mad Love, Ronstadt recorded a selection of edgy songs from Mark Goldenberg of the Cretones, and Elvis Costello. Less a conscious move into trendy “new wave” music than a reflection of the contemporary material she and the band were listening to on their long bus rides, Mad Love nevertheless sold considerably less than its predecessors.

“It’s just that she likes good music,” Asher points out. “And recognized how good punk was. And that isn’t the same thing as trying to jump on a bandwagon. I think it’s a genuine question of her excellent musical taste.”

The combination of boredom with her career and the desire to avoid repeating herself came to a head when Ronstadt accepted an invitation from producer Joseph Papp to co-star in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Pirates of Penzance on Broadway in 1981.

“When I was a little child, I knew all of the Gilbert and Sullivan songs,” she says. “And I really wanted to play only in a theater, only as a concert artist. I didn’t want to play in sporting arenas. They were clearly inappropriate places for music. And anybody that thinks otherwise is a fool.

“Those settings changed the music so profoundly, because all you can hear are those high, arching, ringing guitar solos. You don’t have a chance for subtlety. You’re not working with anything that’s real. You’re hearing echoes of echoes and ghosts of ghosts.”

She loved the 14-hour days of constant rehearsal, staying in one place and ordering out for lunch. It was so very different from what she’d been doing for 10 years.

“I grew up thinking I was a boy soprano, so I wanted to use my high voice. I never really got to it early enough. It’s a shame in a way, because had I over-developed the bottom part of my voice so much that it was really hard to get into that other voice.”

She followed the Pirates production with a film version, which she despises, and a “return to form” album called Get Closer – which, aside from its title song being turned into a toothpaste commercial, was not a success. Which was fine with Linda Ronstadt.

 

It Doesn’t Matter Anymore

In the old days, Ronstadt and Souther used to sit up late at night, after she’d returned home from her Troubadour gigs, and put on the Frank Sinatra album Only the Lonely. A collection of intimate and heartbreaking popular songs from the 1940s and ’50s, it was (and still is) considered the vocal record by which all vocal records are measured. Nelson Riddle’s aching orchestral arrangements were constructed around Sinatra’s impeccable phrasing.

Once Get Closer and the Pirates movie tanked, Ronstadt started thinking about what to do next. “After I went to Broadway, I was really dying to not have to sing rock ‘n’ roll,” she says. “What I wanted to do was work on my phrasing, and to get my musicianship cranked up a couple more notches.

“So I did what I always do – I go ‘What was before this? What’s this built on? Whose shoulders is this standing on?’” Her search led her back to Nelson Riddle, George and Ira Gershwin and Cole Porter. “There were people that I knew but I hadn’t really studied. So I started to study them, and the songs are so sophisticated, they’re complex.

“It’s like a Brian Wilson song – if you can sing it, you can really sing it. Because it’s written for a singer. So even though they’re kind of quote-unquote hard, if you can do it they’re easier than singing something that has a two-note range. Because you can get more out of it.”

She wouldn’t be the first rock singer to attempt the old standards, nor would she be the last. Still, she was determined to give it a try, and the first step, she knew, was to get Nelson Riddle in her corner.

“I think he was just dying to work,” Ronstadt remembers. “He didn’t particularly know who I was. I think he may have heard of me vaguely, but he didn’t know my work – nor much care, I don’t think. He liked some rock ‘n’ roll, but not very much of it. He wasn’t against it. To go from as complex an art form as he practiced to as simple an art form as that … he was a musician, so he liked and appreciated good music.”

Riddle pored over the enthusiastic Ronstadt’s suggested song titles, putting aside the ones he didn’t think she – or the orchestra – was capable of. “When he met me and heard me sing, he knew that I could sing,” Ronstadt says. “And he told me so. I didn’t create these songs in their original settings like Billie Holiday did, or Ella Fitzgerald, but I felt like they were really open to me for my interpretations, from my time, to tell my story. Which resonates with a lot of other people’s stories.”

Recorded with full orchestra, What’s New was released in November 1983, and its resonance was heard all across America: The album reached No. 2 in Billboard, sold multi–platinum and spawned two nearly-as-successful sequels. Ronstadt had re-invented herself once more.

Peter Asher, being practical as ever, had wondered aloud about making a standards album, let alone three. He considered the likes of Gershwin and Porter “elevator music, a lot of old boring songs from shows.”

Still he provided immaculate production on What’s New, Lush Life and For Sentimental Reasons. “I was on the side of the people going ‘This is a big mistake; it probably won’t sell,’” Asher recalls. “Which isn’t the same thing as saying ‘Don’t do it.’

“I did say that I thought the record company were right in their pessimistic view of whether anyone would buy it. And of course I and the record company were 100 percent completely and absolutely wrong.”

In the winter of 1984, Ronstadt appeared as Mimi in Puccini’s La Boheme, the grandest of Grand Operas, at New York’s Public Theatre. “I was just following music that I loved,” she says. “I was just chasing the things that I heard when I was little.

“I could’ve made a different choice when I was 14. I could’ve made a choice to become an opera singer, and then I would’ve only sung things like Boheme. I don’t know whether I would’ve become successful as an opera singer, although I have a big voice and a big range, and I’m musical so I suppose I would’ve had as good a shot as anybody going into that.”

Ronstadt, Harris and chum Dolly Parton had tried in the ’70s to make an acoustic country record based around their three-part fireside harmonies; Trio appeared in 1987, put three singles into the Country Top Five and climbed to No. 6 on the album charts.

The union was short-lived, however, and Trio II (1997) would have a long gestation period – due essentially to a falling out between Ronstadt and Parton.

For Sentimental Reasons was originally to have been a double album, but Nelson Riddle’s death in 1985 cut things short. Ronstadt and Riddle had planned to record in Brazil and Cuba with the maestro’s old friend Antonio Carlos Jobim (the Afro-Caribbean sound would permeate Frenesi, her third Spanish language album, in 1992).

With the success of the Riddle and Trio records, Ronstadt realized she never had to sing “Heat Wave” again if she didn’t want to. And she really, really didn’t want to.

“People think you’re sitting back thinking ‘well, what direction do I put my career next?’ And it really isn’t like that at all. It’s ‘I kind of like this song.’ It’s just like following lights in the swamp – I go ‘Ohhhhh. That.’”

Canciones De Mi Padre, a collection of traditional Mexican songs she’d learned at her father’s knee back in Arizona, appeared in 1988. “The Mexican stuff, I wanted to do from the beginning,” Ronstadt says. “But in the ’60s and ’70s, when I said ‘I want to make a Mexican record,’ they’d say well, Joan Baez cut a Spanish record and it didn’t sell.’ Oh. I got dead silence.

“So I’d cut a few songs in Spanish, but they weren’t the songs I wanted to do. I wanted to do traditional Mexican music. And you can’t just do one of those and put it on a pop record, because it just doesn’t fit.”

She says she knew the time was right “as soon as I got a chance to meet the guys that could play it really right, really authentic Mexican musicians … which I never had the chance to because they never went out of Mexico! And I was always on the road, playing in a hockey rink in Cleveland or something.”

Canciones De Mi Padre and its followup, Mas Canciones (1991) did not tear up the charts the way the Riddle records had, but Ronstadt didn’t care a whit. She had enough fame and enough money, thank you, and was pursuing whatever musical direction she felt like.

In 1989, following a performance in New Orleans, she and some friends went out to hear the Neville Brothers in a club, and Aaron Neville invited her onto the stage. They sang “Ave Maria” – it was the only song they seemed to know in common – and a friendship developed.

Less than a year later, the Ronstadt/Neville duet “Don’t Know Much” reached No. 2 on the pop charts. Her Cry Like a Rainstorm – Howl Like the Wind album, featuring four duets with Neville, made it into the Top 10.

With no interest in “momentum” after so many years, Ronstadt next turned out Mas Canciones and Frenesi. In 1993, she co–produced (with George Massenburg) Jimmy Webb’s album Suspending Disbelief.

She’s made a few more pop albums since, and in 1999 collaborated with Harris on Western Wall: The Tucson Sessions.

Her friendship with Harris, Ronstadt said, had been partially responsible for her shift away from country rock in the mid ’70s. “She was chasing what I was trying to do, and she was doing it so well. I’m not saying that it made me record differently, but I surrendered a little bit more willingly to going more toward rock ‘n’ roll.

“But it doesn’t matter, you know? Because to me, that was a profound moment, because it made me aware of the kinds of informed choices I was going to make for the rest of my life. It made me know that a certain amount of my values, and the things that I was trained and brought up with, were firm in me. And one of them was that if you see something you admire, you can destroy your own admiration of it by feeling jealous or competitive, or you can just love it. And I made that choice. And I have continued to do so.”

She’s sung with Pavarotti, Jagger and Kermit the Frog. She sang with Sinatra. On an early ’70s TV variety show, she even sang with Neil Diamond (Ronstadt does not remember this, but the author saw it).

Her children, ages 8 and 11, are her favorite collaborators these days. Ronstadt performs when she wants to – she does orchestra shows and Mexican shows, for the most part – but at the end of the day, she’s only seeking approval from two people.

“My son got hold of this new Best Of CD that came out,” she said. “They’d sent me a box of them, and they were in the basement.

He came running upstairs and said ‘Mommy, you sing oldies!’ And I said ‘Get that out of there!’ It just ruins my day if I have to listen to it. I just can’t bear it.”

Waylon Jennings: ‘I’m allergic to bullshit’

There it was in the news, like a welcome blast from a long-ago past: Waylon Jennings Walks Off CBS Talk Show. For an instant, it was the ’70s again, when Waylon refused to play on the CMA broadcast because they wanted him to shorten his song; it was the ’80s, when Waylon stomped out of the We Are the World recording session because Michael Jackson had asked him to sing in Swahili.

Stubbornness and insubordination, any old decade – hell, it has to be Waylon, a man who’s made a career out of speaking his mind, of not taking any guff, of doing things whichever way he pleased. Today, when its artists come stamped from a cookie cutter, smiling and kissing babies on command, country music sure could use a rugged individualist like Waylon, one of Nashville’s first “outlaws,” and subsequently the first to dare wonder out loud, “Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit’s Done Got Out of Hand?”

Like Jones, Haggard, Cash and the rest of the grizzled old guard, however, Waylon is considered old news in Nashville. Those who have written him off, however, probably haven’t heard Closing In On the Fire, his latest album on the independent Ark 21 label, or Old Dogs, his sublimely stupid collection of country comedy bits with Bobby Bare, Jerry Reed, Shel Silverstein and Mel Tillis.

Waylon Jennings is 61 years old, and although he’s starting to slow down, the life ain’t been squeezed out of him yet. Hell, just ask Tom Snyder.

BDY: OK, why did you walk off the Tom Snyder show?

Waylon Jennings: I had turned that show down twice because there were two guests on it. If you count the commercials and everything, there’s about 40 minutes of the entire thing. Well, they said ‘She’ll do six to eight minutes,’ the lady psychiatrist or whatever she was, ‘we’ll go to a break and then we’ll come back with you.’ That was the agreement I had with them.

I got there, and 30 minutes into the show I’m still sitting there. And that’s when I told them, you got 10 more minutes and then I’m leaving. I told everybody in the room to be ready, and 10 more minutes, it still didn’t look anything was gonna happen. And so I left.

You know, if I had it to do over, I’d do it again. It kind of turned into Keystone Cops there for a little bit, they were trying to get me back. They even demanded I be brought back by the driver. He said ‘They’ve ordered me back,’ and I said you think about the here and now, not about what’s gonna happen later. Because if you turn this car around, something’s gonna happen here.

 

It reminded me of ‘We Are the World.’ You walked out of that, too.

I got tired of everybody pattin’ everybody on the back. And here they come in with all these ideas, wantin’ to sing part of it in Swahili. I just got tired of all the bullshit, and I’m allergic to bullshit, so I left.

It was the same thing with Tom Snyder. I shouldn’t have been on the Tom Snyder show anyway, because we have nothing whatsoever in common.

 

Whose idea was the Old Dogs project?

That was Bobby Bare’s idea. Him and Shel Silverstein got together. Bobby’s the guy who kept callin’ Chet Atkins years ago, until he signed me. Chet signed me without even knowing what I looked like.

 

Maybe he wouldn’t have signed you if he knew.

Shit, no! Ugly is ugly. Anyway, I’ve known Shel for 30 years … but I was really sick at the time we started that project. The way we did the songs, every once in a while I’d call and say ‘Look, I guess I can come in and see if I can do a track.’ I could do maybe half a track, then go in and do the rest of it later.

 

Did you have the flu, or what?

I had a stroke. Some plaque came off in my bloodstream, and it went into my brain. Anybody could’ve had it.

But I went ahead and did it because Bobby asked me, and he’s a dear friend. For him to ask me, I’ll do it.

 

Are you feeling all right now?

I feel great now. I completely recovered from all of that. I went into congestive heart failure. I went out to Arizona for a while and kind of just worked at gettin’ back on my feet. And I did.

I had actually run into the wall, though, traveling and touring, so I’ve been off for about a year and a half. So I’m doin’ better now.

 

You said at one point you had thought about quitting, because radio was ignoring artists such as yourself. Had you really considered it?

You know what, I did. But then all of a sudden I started writing again, and I picked up the guitar and started tryin’ to play again. So as long as I feel like playing, as long as I like it, as long as I’m having a good time with it, then I’ll do it.

But they’re not going to dictate to me when I quit. Or how long I can stay in this business. The business is not going to dictate that to me.

I just read your new album reached Number One on the Americana chart. And then I heard it was your 72nd! How does that make you feel?

You know what? I don’t keep score. I appreciate anything good that happens to an album, but I think I’ll know when I’m over the hill. I can still sing, and I can still write good. And as long as that happens, as long as there are people out there who want to hear it, I’ll probably do something.

 

Is it frustrating to not get on the radio any more?

With the music that’s on the radio now, I do not want to be mixed up with that. I want nothing to do with that, and I don’t want to be known to be from this era. These tight Levis and these hats … I’ll tell you who are wonderful, and that’s the girls. The girls are gettin’ better material, and they’re workin’ harder at it. And I think they’re cuttin’ better records than the men.

 

I wonder if you ever regretted coming out clean on your drug problems?

No, I don’t worry about that. Because somebody might see it and maybe it’ll help ’em. That’s not a good thing. I did it, and there’s nothing I can do to change that. I wish I hadn’t. It’s just part of my life—if you take me, you have to take that too.

@1998 Bill DeYoung