A Guy with Kaleidescope Pipes

I bought this album for its cover. Look at it: It comes in colors, everywhere. It’s like a rainbow. In fact, it’s a bright psychedelic lovefest of colors, a cross between the Kinks’ Face to Face and the Chocolate Watch Band’s No Way Out. And check out Virgil Fox: He has pipes sprouting from his head. And that bow tie, might it have belonged to the Electric Prunes? While Into the Classics: Meditations and Sonic Spectaculars may have psychedelic connotations in the title, this is no psychedelic record. It wasn’t even released in the ’60s, during the psychedelic era, but the early ’70s. Virgil Fox plays the Aeolian-Skinner Organ—without accompaniment. And he’s not guiding you on a wild magic carpet ride into new sonic and sensory realms; he's taking you to church. Yep, Virgil was letting the flowers of his imagination sprout not in some incense-clouded harem, but in some incense-clouded cathedral. On this album, he sticks to the classics, working his dizzy fingers through Tchaikovsky, Grieg and Bohm. Psychedelic or not, his choice of material is inspired, his performance superlative. Just imagine yourself seated alone one lazy summer afternoon in the cool comfort of a gothic cathedral, the sun gleaming through stained-glass windows, letting dusty rays of beautiful colors shower down on you as you take in Virgil’s virtuosity. This record may venture down some well-trodden paths, but with a little imagination, you can set your sights for the center of the sun.

I wrote this piece a few years back. I pulled it out of mothballs (and gave it an editorial bath) after listening to Fox’s record on my hi-fi last week.

Wretched Records and Crappy Covers

This record goes to show that you can stuff a schlock-slinging goober into a leather jacket and put him on a motorcycle and he’ll still be a schlock-slinging goober. When kids tore the wrapping paper from this record on Christmas Day, where their parents saw good, clean, rockin’ fun, they saw a literal and figurative square.

This was released hot on the heels of Ruth Welcome's worldwide smash hit, Lo-Fi Lute.

Sadly, ol’ Dizzy Fingers never made another record. While promoting his LP in Africa, Cope was gunned down by ivory poachers who wanted his teeth.

“Hey, boys, before tonight’s gig, why don’t you say we all head down to the Sears Portrait Studio for our album close-up? We can shop for Toughskins afterward.” This so-called auspicious debut is so good that the LP’s original owner didn’t crack the seal—no doubt to keep it “mint.”

For every new album being stamped on wax these days there seems to be several more being reissued. Somehow I don’t think this record will ever get its 180-gram colored vinyl deluxe redux. Call it a hunch.

California Raisins: Still Ripe After All These Years

We’ve all been hearing about the existential and aesthetical crises besieging the music industry these days. It’s scary out there. Rampant illegal downloading, collapsing CD sales, shuttering retail stores, Lana Del Ray, that mystery substance seen running down Christina Aguilera’s leg at Etta James’s funeral, and now Whitney Houston’s death on the eve of the perhaps the most impotent, I mean important, music event of the year, the Grammys. Oh, the Grammys. Admit it, you watch it. Remember how you cheered when Natalie Cole beat out Nirvana for album of the year in 1992 by duetting with her dead dad? Unforgettable!

Today’s apocalyptic collapse reminds me of a time, not long ago, when the music industry last found itself teetering on the brink. It was the late 1980s. Michael Jackson was busy erecting Neverland. Madonna was making great films. Bono was brainstorming ways to exploit the AIDS crisis in Africa. Phil Collins was opening tanning salons across the U.K. Unsure their leading lights would ever return to the spotlight, label heads, industry insiders and that vampiric U.S. lobbying organization, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), met secretly in a White House bunker brainstorming a plan to save their jobs and restore their six-figure bonuses. Their solutions: Kip Winger and Milli Vanilli. Strokes of genius to be sure, but those short-term fixes would prove to be long-term headaches the beleaguered industry had not anticipated. Milli Vanilli were outed as fakes, and the popularity of Winger’s “She’s Only 17” had the unintended effect of causing an increase in statutory rape cases through middle America.

Meanwhile, Ahmet Ertegun, who had co-founded Atlantic Records and who, along with his brother, Nesuhi, had presided over some of the greatest recordings of all time from John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Ray Charles, Buffalo Springfield, Led Zeppelin and John Astley, was quietly nurturing a new act behind the scenes, a young yet wrinkled group of musicians bent on launching a back-to-basics revival of pop music. That act was the California Raisins.

Having successfully reintroduced America to the poop-stimulating wonders of rotten grapes via one of the most unforgettable advertising campaigns in history, the California Raisins, composed of Stretch, Beebop, A.C. and Red, sought to capitalize on their meteoric rise to fame. Now that they were in the spotlight—they weren’t about to wither; they’re raisins after all! They entertained sitcom offers, clothing deals, merchandising agreements, attaching their image to line of best-selling colon-cleansing products, including Super Colon Blow cereal. Alas, none of those things held much appeal. The California Raisins wanted to perform; they wanted to make music; they wanted to be onstage. The desire for rotted grapes, whether boxed in snack-sized portions or harvested in various states of decay from dumpsters, was surpassed only by the demand for a legitimate vinyl release of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” the song heard in all the TV and radio ads.

The interest was not surprising. “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was a song that represented so much promise when Marvin Gaye first recorded it 20 years earlier. But his version fell well short of the upper reaches of the pop charts. The problem was that Gaye wasn’t a grape, or a raisin. He lacked the emotional intuition, conviction, not to mention street cred, needed to transform the song into transcendental masterpiece.

Atlantic Records boss Ertegun recognized this and seized the opportunity of packaging the California Raisins into a pop music snack that would not only flush the bowels of a constipated music industry, but also delight and nourish music fans for decades to come. He invited the Raisins to his Los Angeles home studio under the auspices of having them record some low-key demos. He simply instructed them to have fun, play around with their favorite tunes, explore the space, etc. Later, if all went well, he’d sign them and bankroll the production of a proper studio album.

The California Raisins didn’t need to test the waters; their chemistry was undeniable, their musicianship unbelievable, their deliciousness unbeatable. They were ready. Nevertheless, they indulged Ertegun, and went about recording a dozen or so songs, including a stripped-down take on “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” In the small basement studio, the Raisins worked fast, faster than the raisin’s effect on the human digestive system. Within an hour, they delivered an album’s worth of songs with a working titled of Led Zeppelin 1. Ertegun was stunned by what he heard. The Raisins’ recordings of “Green Onions,” “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” “Tutti Frutti,” “Cool Jerk” could no longer be claimed by the forgettable artists who originally “popularized” them. No, these songs, especially the searing reworking of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” now belonged to the California Raisins.

Released in 1988, the Raisins’ debut LP, now titled Meet the Raisins, bowed at No. 1 and stayed there for three years. Every song on the album, including the studio outtakes, rehearsals, false starts and abandoned demos, topped the singles’ charts. In fact, for three straight weeks in 1989, all 40 songs in America’s Top 40 belonged to the California Raisins. The Raisins won a record 78 Grammys in three years. And their debut album was so good that it won Best Album three-straight years.

Everywhere they went, the Raisins were mobbed by fans—the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the Beatles. But the Raisins soon grew spoiled, figuratively speaking of course. Legend has it that they required that all raisins be removed from the trail mix and raisin bran they ate backstage. While the Raisins weren’t about to eat their own, raisin consumption throughout the world was such that grapes were no longer used for wine, juice, jelly or even grapes. To keep up with demand all harvested grapes were dehydrated and rotted into raisins. Naturally, greenhouse gasses quadrupled, setting off some pretty catastrophic environmental catastrophes across the globe. Oceans, rivers and lakes all turned brown. Cloud formations now consisted mostly of methane. Humans now had to submit to monthly emissions checks. And the smell, oh the smell.

Finally, the backlash came in 1992. We won’t get into all the details, scandals and betrayals here—not today at least. Suffice it to say, the sweet sun-ripened treat turned foul, its shelf life expired. And that was that. The California Raisins were no more—and were never to be seen in public, together or separately, again.

Now, some 20 years later, with the music industry again spiraling down the toilet bowl, who better than the California Raisins to flush out the toxins and bring about a renaissance? Sadly, the Grammys blew a huge opportunity last Sunday. Following Whitney Houston’s death, the Grammy people should have asked the Raisins to perform in her place so that, just as pioneering Natalie Cole did with her deceased Nat King Cole, the California Raisins could have duetted with a jumbo-tron animation of Whitney Houston. They could have sung a medley of Houston favorites, including “I’m Every Raisin,” “I Wanna Dance with Some Raisin” and her signature signature “I Will Always Love Raisins.” It would have been a poignant tribute—as well as an effective passing of the torch. There wouldn’t have been a dry eye (or nose—ah, cocaine) in the audience. And it would have been the most watched, instead of the second-most watched, Grammys ever.

And so the question remains: when can we expect the second coming of the California Raisins? Only Stretch, Beebop, A.C. and Red know for sure.

Set the Twilight Reeling

Greg Dulli Finds Redemption in the Twilight Singers
By Joe Ehrbar

EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview first appeared in the final edition of The Rocket, in October of 2000. I’m republishing it here, because, well, it was one of my favorite interviews and few people actually read it—most of the 85,000 Rocket issues were launched straight to the dumpster. During my time as a rock music inquisitor, I often avoided interviews with artists and bands of whom I was a big fan—I didn’t want to come off like a sycophant; I also wanted to spare myself the eternal embarrassment and disillusionment I’d no doubt feel should an idol interview end badly. This particular interview went pretty well, as I recall. Conducted by phone, my conversation with Greg Dulli lasted about an hour; maybe one day, I’ll transcribe the entire tape—before it crumbles to dust.

I’ve long admired Greg Dulli’s work, first as an Afghan Whig, then as Twilight Singer, later as a Gutter Twin. I regret not going to see him and his bands perform in the last decade. Perhaps I’ll resolve to get out more in 2012. One thing’s for sure, I’m excited by the recent news of an Afghan Whigs reunion. The band will make their grand re-entrance as the headliners of the ATP festival in Asbury Park in the spring. A tour will follow. Given the Whigs' Seattle history—they were among the original Sub Pop bands and Dulli lived here for a time—perhaps they’ll give us an encore.

Q&A with Greg Dulli. The latest issue of Chunklet magazine has been stirring up a bit of controversy for its cover story on the "The 100 Biggest Assholes in Rock." Charting high on the list is the Afghan Whigs' Greg Dulli at No. 24 (he beat out the likes of Isaac Brock and Mark E. Smith). While Dulli is down seven places from last year's posting, he's still considered a big asshole by the editors of Chunklet because, they say, "He thinks he's God's gift to women." Having only interviewed Dulli just once and over the phone-for this particular piece-I can't say that Greg Dulli is an asshole. During our recent conversation about his latest musical endeavor, the Twilight Singers, the singer was quite pleasant and candid and acted interested. I also can't vouch for Dulli thinking he's "God's gift to women"; the subject just never came up. If Dulli is guilty of anything it's his ability to make women swoon (or maybe, just one woman-my wife). As an Afghan Whig he's made some incredibly sexy soul music-all be it dark and tormented, but sexy rock 'n' roll nonetheless. Now with the Twilight Singers-a project that's involved the likes of crooners Shawn Smith (pigeonhed, Brad) and Harold Chichester (Howlin' Maggie) and English dance music kingpins Fila Brazilla, Dulli is immersing his soul singer talents into the wrinkled silk sheets of the night-where many romances begin and end. Much like the records cranked out by Motown in the '60s, the Twilight Singers' debut, Twilight as Played by the Twilight Singers (Columbia), is a bittersweet album, but it's also a bearer of soul music the likes of which you're not hearing these days.

The Rocket: How are you doing, Greg?
Greg Dulli: I've been better actually. I fucked up my back last weekend taking a bath.

The Rocket : Were you alone?
Dulli: Yeah, I was, actually [laughs]. I slipped in the tub and grabbed a towel rack and wrenched my back and spent all day Saturday in the hospital. It's bad. I've got to have an MRI in about an hour.

The Rocket : You must be swallowing some pretty sweet painkillers?
Dulli: Yeah, they're pretty sweet. They gave me Dilaudid on Saturday. I was in a Drugstore Cowboy state-of-mind all day Saturday, know what I'm sayin'? But since I had to do press today, I haven't taken any pills today. Right about now, though, I should take one.

The Rocket: So you're living in L.A. these days. How come you left Seattle?
Dulli: Honestly? The rain finally got to me. I love Seattle; I was there for six years, but for my health and state-of-mind I needed a little more sunshine.

The Rocket: While you were here, you began work with the Twilight Singers. How did this record come together?
Dulli: It took awhile. I started working on it three years ago.

The Rocket: Didn't the Twilight Singers start as a collaboration with Shawn Smith and Harold Chichester? Or, was it your idea?
Dulli: Oh, no, it was my idea. One thing I will state on that subject: Never try to get three lead singers in the same room.

The Rocket: I've had a bootleg copy of an early version of the album for about a year and a half-
Dulli: Oh, you have the demos? Uh-oh.

The Rocket: What I was going to say is that the final product of Twilight as Played By the Twilight Singers is significantly different and better in places than the original demos. It doesn't sound like it buckled under the weight of three distinct egos.
Dulli: It didn't because over the course of things one ego was destined to take over anyway. And I don't say that in an egotistical way, but it was my vision. And, honestly, I was bringing all of my best songs that I had at the time to the table and the other guys were kinda second-stringing it. And when you second-string it, the first team's gonna eat up the second team. It's not that those guys didn't have great songs in them, I just don't think that they were willing to part with them.

The Rocket: How much of the album was re-tooled in England with Fila Brazilla?
Dulli: The majority of it. Two songs got taken off: one of mine and one of Shawn's. Three songs ["Railroad Lullaby," "Annie Mae" and "Last Temptation"] took their place. I did three new songs in England. And of the eight original that remained, I re-did five of them.

The Rocket: What inspired this record?
Dulli: It was reclamation project. And what I was out to reclaim was a certain amount of my musical innocence. I felt like I was starting to bow under the expectations of a record company [Elektra] to the point of where it got so ugly that I had to leave said record company. And as a parting gift, they let the [Twilight Singers] demos out so that people such as yourself could hear them. It got so negative to point where I was starting to forget why you play music in the first place. A lot of music for me started out in a self-gratifying way. I made up songs that I wasn't hearing but wanted to hear. I think [this project] was to get back to that. I think Harold Chichester, in particular, who's been through the same wars I've been through, he was the most inspirational. He said, "Why don't you write songs that you want to hear again." That seemed like an anachronistic thought, but it was so right on that I took him up on his offer.

The Rocket: To me, it sounds like the soul record that no one's making today.
Dulli: Yeah, I was finally able to articulate what soul singing means to me. And to me soul singing is if the singer can make you feel like he feels when he's singing that particular song. That's what I really got in touch with. There's no chart toppers on this record, but it's probably the most pure recording I've done since I was a teenager.

The Rocket: It's funny, the liner notes to the advance promo CD of the album says that it was "conceived in your bedroom."
Dulli: That's where my recording equipment was set up.

The Rocket: Nice double entendre.
Dulli: It definitely is a double entendre. A lot of people have told me-and I've started to feel this way as I started workin' it out-"Well, this is kind of a mood record." And the mood is definitely sexual. And I've heard from people that they have used it in their seductive pursuits.

The Rocket: And with varying degrees of success? Or was it unanimous?
Dulli: I think a lot of these guys who are using it are using it on people that stuff like this has worked on before. So they're preaching to the converted.

The Rocket: As long as the seductees aren't listening too closely. The lyrics betray the music's sultry, sexual tone. It's full of heartache and heartbreak.
Dulli: Lyrically, I've always sort of been like that, which is why I think I was so drawn to Motown music in particular. There's a lot of jaunty musical tracks in the Motown repertoire. But if you strip away the words and read them on their own, they're pretty heart-breaking. A lot of Supremes songs are on a real jaunty, kind of doot, doot, doot, but when you take the words out....That's why Uptown Avondale [an EP of soul covers the Afghan Whigs recorded in 1993 for Sub Pop] was a big experiment for be because I started to hone in on that. I'm like, "These words are sad. What if you took these words and put them in a sad setting? You get a really devastating heart-breaker of a tune. More than anything, I think [the Twilight Singers] is a continuation of the Uptown Avondale principle.

The Rocket: It's that betrayal or underlying sadness or bittersweetness that makes the music compelling and affecting. Reggae and rock steady utilized the same formula.
Dulli: Oh yeah. People will hide heartbreak behind anything that will conceal it. I think it was pretty ingenious what they were doing, especially in Detroit.

The Rocket: Twilight as Played By ends on kind of an ambiguous note, with you repeating the chorus "Everything's gonna be all right." It can easily interpreted as something positive, uplifting. What do you think?
Dulli: There's a point in the "Everything's gonna be all right" where I start to wonder if it is going to be all right. I sort of wonder if it's not a desperate man trying to convince himself of a lie. In the time that I wrote that song, I was desperately trying to convince myself of a reason to continue on because I was psychiatrically in trouble-though, thankfully, I do not find myself in that spot right now. Bob Marley popularized that phrase, at least musically. It was definitely done with the full knowledge that he had done it. To me, it's a universal statement and one I could hang my hooks into. Honestly, the record helped me purge a lot of things, helped me move on, if not musically then palpably.

The Rocket: How difficult was the process of writing and recording the material while wrestling personal demons?
Dulli: I don't know what a nervous breakdown is, but from what I've heard I think I had one and was having during the writing as I was able to revisit it with the three new songs ["Railroad Lullaby," "Annie Mae" and "Last Temptation"]. These songs give the record some levity without taking it out of its context. The three new songs helped it sound more cohesive. They were strategically placed in the repertoire of the album to give it that feel it has now.

The Rocket: Was it painful trying to complete this record this year, to tap back into the mindset you had a couple years ago?
Dulli: Yeah, but when you confront something, you don't fear it anymore. Had I kept running from it-which, I'm sure the record company would have been fine with if I left it on the shelf.... I'm a completion junkie, I have to have closure on something in order to move on. Going back and listening to some of the [album's songs] and the B-sides, too, I was like, "Whoa, who is that guy?" I felt bad for him. When you can go back and have pity on yourself-but it's not self-pity because it's another version of you-that's kind of interesting. It was the sound of a person who did not like himself at all. Thankfully, I've overcome that. So, on the new songs, I had to go back to that other guy a little bit and help him out, help him at least connect the dots.

Chilling, Racist Sounds of Halloween?

You’ve probably seen this album over the years. Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House is the cornerstone of the horror soundtrack/sound effects genre; from what I can tell it’s been in print the longest and is perhaps the only horror LP relic to live on—undead—in the digital age. If you’re as old as me, or older, you probably had a scratched-up, dog-eared copy of the LP that Dad would dust off every year and blast from an open window to unsuccessfully frighten trick-or-treaters from your front porch.

Released in 1964, Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House contains all the requisite audio chills, thrills and spills of a Halloween record. There are dragging chains, howling winds, baying hell hounds, groaning monsters, creaking doors, blood-curdling screams and more. On side one, a narrator sets up each scary scenario before letting the sound effects take over to illustrate the protagonist’s imminent demise. It’s all pretty hokey and predictable—and low-budget.

But how is Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House racist? Glad you asked. At the end of side one is a track titled “Chinese Water Torture.” The narrator opens the track with an explanation of the torture method’s origins and then shuts up to let the water droplets do their trick of undoing the protagonist’s mind. With ten seconds remaining, the narrator returns one last time and, under the spell of bad taste, speaks in stereotypical, monosyllabic fake Chinese, rather exaggeratedly, too. “Ming, my, ywai hoi….” She goes on like this for a few moments before catching herself and feigning surprise, “What am I saying? I’m not even Chinese.”

Indeed, Chilling, Thrilling Sounds… was a product of 1964, a time when perhaps few considered such xenophobia to be, well, xenophobic. In the ensuing 50 years, attitudes have changed. We’re hypersensitive about race and culture—as we should be. We even go out of our way to out-PC one another. There’s no chance in Disneyland that anyone would let something of this ilk into today’s marketplace. (South Park’s another story.) Remember Song of the South? Disney pretends not to. So one might think that Disney would keep "Chinese Water Torture" forever buried in its storied haunted vaults (along with the bones of Walt). Song of the South it ain’t, but it’s still racist.

Curious, I decided to see if Chilling, Thrilling Sounds… has made the leap to digital. It has. It’s currently out of print on CD (though not hard to find), but it’s readily available for download on iTunes. Spotting “Chinese Water Torture” in the album’s sequence, I paid a buck to download it and see if the original piece remains intact, fake Chinese and all. I skipped to the track’s final seconds and to my surprise, “Chinese Water Torture” hadn’t been edited. Everything’s still there just as it was in 1964, a stupid, undead relic of Cold War xenophobia. Chilling, indeed.

Freaks, Geeks and Other Human Oddities

Tom Waits has spun a tangled web of yarns unlike any other singer/songwriter, in a career that spans four decades and two-dozen albums. Along his twisted, idiosyncratic journey through dingy piano bars, into the subterranean cabarets of Hamburg's Reeperbahn, over the rusty chain-link fences of roots music junkyards, and into a howling din of some post-apocalyptic carnival, Waits has introduced us to a motley crew of unforgettable characters. On October 24, Tom Waits releases his first studio album in seven years with Bad As Me. To celebrate the occasion, I thought I’d dig through the dusty stacks of Tom’s old songs and gather the assorted, often colorfully named characters he’s given life to over the years. What follows is a list of people who haunt his songs. Not everyone is included, but most of them are here, together in one place for the first time—grouped by theme, occupation, physical exploit, title, etc. So without further adieu, "Ladies and gentleman, under the Big Top tonight, Human Oddities!" William the Pleaser, Dave the Butcher, Blind Bob the Raccoon, Reba the Loon, Slam the Crank, Jo Jo the Dog Face Boy, KoKo the Bird Girl, Sealo the Seal Boy, Gyp the Blood, Lea Graif the German midget who sat in J.P. Morgan’s lap, Zuzu Bolin, Molly Hoey, George Schmid, Montclaire de Havelin, Zenora Bariella, Coriander Pyle, Evelyn James, Everett Lee, Joel Tornabene, Whitfield Faraday, Edna Millions, Scullion Childs, Eddie Grace, Melanie Jane, Bobby Goodmanson, Charlie DeLisle, Dicky Faulkner, Milton Malone, Shane Mahoney, Joey Navinski, Ronnie Arnold, Paul Body, Bill Bones, Red Pants, Pale Face, Ice Man, Black Rider, Eyeball Kid, Rosie, Charlie, Frank, Nash, Alice, Monk, Hans, Cath, Kathleen, Jezebel, Marie, Martha, Muriel, Matilda, Lucinda, Wilhelm, Willard, Miss Kelsey, Mr. Henry, Mr. Siegal, Mister Sorrow, Mrs. Carroll, Mrs. Strom, Mr. Knickerbocker, Mr. Weiss, Mr. Brown, Philly Joe Remarkable, Peoria Johnson, Saginaw Calinda, Georgia Lee, Dudlow Joe, Jockey La Fayette, Mike of the Weeds, Little Joe from Kokomo, Satchel Pudding, Lord God Mose, Golden Willie, Panther Marten, Bird Lundy, Chun King, Father Cribari, Captain Charon, Reverend Judd, Doctor Bliss, Doctor George Fishbeck, Horse Face Ethel, Poodle Murphy, Piggy Knowles, Birdy Joe Hoaks, Scarface Ron, Graveyard John, Funeral Wells, Bowlegged Sal, One Eyed Myra, Big Eyed Al, Tabletop Joe, Humpty Jackson, Knocky Parker, Buzz Fledderjohn, Falling James, Yodeling Elaine, Bum Mahoney, Golden Willie, Dutch Pink, Punk Sander, Tip Little, Dot King, Vic Rail, Peg Leg, Bill Bones, Boney, Shorty, Mighty Tiny, Poor Edward, Jack Chance, Jessey Frank, Aunt Mame, Uncle Emmet, Aunt Evelyn, Uncle Vernon, Dan Steel, Johnny Eck, Johnny O’Toole, Louie Lista, Robert Sheehan, Martin Eden, Grady Tuck, Abdel Madi Shabneh, Spidey, Cora Belle Lee, Grace McDaniels, Gerd Bessler, Mortando, Big Mambo, Big John Jizzum, Big Bull Trometer, Big Joe, Big Black Mariah, Big Black Ford, Big Black Johnny, Little Son Jackson, Lil’ Caesar, Old Brown Betty, Old Widow Jones, Old Blind Darby, Blind Jack Dawes, Blackjack Ruby, Nimrod Cain.

Rocky Mountain Sigh

A year before folk icon John Denver died after his experimental aircraft made an unscheduled water landing off the California coast in October 1997, I had the pleasure of interviewing him by phone in advance of a Spokane concert appearance. The John Denver I remember from the interview was not the lovable nature boy who sang “Sunshine on My Shoulders” and “Rocky Mountain High” and made a couple records with the Muppets but a hostile, cantankerous jerk. He was such an ass, his replies to my questions so testy, that I wrote “John Denver has come down from his Rocky Mountain high” as the lede of my story.

That was 15 years ago, when I was trying to make it as a journalist and music critic at Spokane’s daily paper, the Spokesman-Review. Had I the choice I would have gladly punted and let someone else write about the singer/songwriter/environmentalist/stunt pilot/wannabe astronaut. I remember at the time being worried about my credibility with the local punk rock scene and how writing about a washed-up middle-of-the-road folk singer wasn’t going to help it. (Stupid, I know, especially since very few in my perceived target audience read the paper.) But the editor assigned it to me and I accepted. I made arrangements with Denver’s publicist for a phone interview, and John agreed to speak with me from his Colorado home the following Monday at 8 a.m., which was a little bit early—I preferred rolling in to work at 9.

The only problem was that I think John thought we were to chat at 8 a.m. his time, Colorado time, Rocky Mountain time. And so he started calling at 7 a.m., probably as I was trying to will my lethargic body into the shower. By the time I arrived at work at just before 8, I saw the red light on my phone flashing angrily at me—informing me that I had a message. Three messages, actually, all from John Denver. Not sunshine-on-my-shoulders John Denver either, but a you-just-clear-cut-the-old-growth-forest-surrounding-my-palatial-estate John Denver.

7:01 a.m.: “Joe, this is John Denver calling,” said the voice, clearly annoyed. “I’ll try back.”

7:15 a.m.: “Joe, this is John Denver calling,” went the second message, the voice now sounding only few degrees cooler than piping-hot angry.

The third message came a half-hour later. It sounded as friendly as the second.

As I hung up the phone, it started ringing, sending a hot flash of panic coursing through my veins. With some trepidation, I answered the call.

“Joe, this is John Denver calling.”

His tone had only a hint of irritation. But I could already intuit that this interview was going to be a disaster. Trying to force a little cordial small talk, I threw out the first cringe-worthy softball: “So what are you up to?”

“Heh-heh,” he chuckled incredulously, “talking to you.”

I don’t know what was going through John Denver’s mind at the time. Clearly it was more than a scheduling foul-up. As the interview progressed, it became more apparent that he was not nearly as angry with me as he was bitter toward the music business. John Denver had sold millions of records in his prime, charted numerous hits in the 1970s, made a lot of people, including himself, rich. But by 1996, the hits had long since dried up, and he was unsigned in the U.S. and couldn’t secure a deal beyond one-off gimmicks—children's records or new recordings of the old hits, records that seemed well beneath his talent. (Denver had other problems beyond music, most notably a bitter divorce and two DUI arrests.)

Here’s what Denver had to say about the state of affairs with record companies: “I did an album for Sony a little over a year ago—The Wildlife Concert—and it’s pretty funny to me,” he said, no hint of humor in his tone, “that that album was a double album and it sold a quarter of a million copies. That’s a gold album. You know, it’s a double CD. That’s a big project, pretty successful, but not where they want to sign a record deal with me. Isn’t that interesting?”

Sony did however want Denver to make another album, an album that, as Denver described it, sounded a bit, well, sad. “[Sony] do want me to do another album and what they’re talking about—the example they’ve given me is something Kenny Loggins did, which ended up being a million seller—is a children's album.”

The album to which Denver referred actually materialized. Released it 1997, it was called All Aboard!, a children's album about trains, and it earned Denver a posthumous Grammy—his only Grammy.

The interview wasn’t a total disaster, but it was clear Denver wasn’t all that interested in my line of questioning. Perhaps I was too inexperienced or shy to ask more thoughtful questions. As this interview was to function as a concert preview, I hadn’t prepared to ask him more probing questions. Or maybe Denver just didn’t want play along that morning. Witness the following exchange:

“What is your Spokane concert consisting of—are you–”

“John Denver songs,” he blurted, before I could even finish my question. He didn’t elaborate.

Flustered, I countered with: “Are you gonna do another record with the Muppets?”

Denver softened, but only a bit. “Actually we’ve talked about that a little bit,” he said. “That was one of the most enjoyable things I ever did was working with the Muppets, and the thought of doing another television special with them along with an album is a great idea.”

Lucky for me (and John), the interview was a few minutes from its conclusion. After reading the resulting concert preview, my editor declined to have me review the show. I didn’t argue with her.