NMW Spotlight : Louvin Up Close

I thought I'd break tradition for this post and give you a little glimpse of my alter ego and the adventures of a performing songwriter. For my regular readers : don't worry, we'll be back to the chopping block next week. But for tonight Ninety Mile Wind goes "backstage" in Bethlehem, PA. for a first hand report on my show at Godfrey Daniels with the legendary Charlie Louvin.

The Silver Eagle was parked across the street when Larry Ahearn and I arrived for sound check. Larry is a manager who likes to travel with his acts, so he almost always delivers me to the door of my gig and makes sure sound check comes together on schedule. Charlie Louvin's band had traveled down from Woodstock NY where they'd done Levon Helm's Midnight Ramble show the night before. The bus's engine was still idling when we pulled up, indicating everyone was either sleeping or taking care of other business on board.

We faced some tough competition finding an audience for this show. The fourth game of the World Series was being played only 65 miles away, and The Who were also performing in Philly. But we were relieved to learn that the house was half sold out and walk ups were expected. Still, I'd figured Charlie would draw more people than the number of advance tickets we'd sold. Ramona at Godfrey Daniels gave us the same lament we've been hearing everywhere lately : show attendance is off by 30-40%, and it's the economy stupid.

Louvin's band sound checked first. When everything was set, Charlie got off the bus and came into Godfrey's wearing a gold Pittsburgh Steelers hat that Levon had given him the night before. He took the stage and exchanged a few comments with his eldest boy, Sonny, who plays rhythm guitar in the band. I heard Charlie say, "Where?" and he turned to squint in my direction. Then he stepped off the stage and came over to greet me. I introduced myself, not realizing Louvin is still as sharp as a pistol at age 81. "Yes, I remember you," he said, "we spoke on the phone a while back about your House song. Boy, you didn't leave nothing outta that one, that's a good song!" I should explain that Charlie cut This Old House (written by Thom Schuyler and myself) a few years back on a CD that's unfortunately now out of print.

Louvin and his band finished their sound check and I set up for mine with my percussionist and long time friend Tommy Geddes. Charlie was hanging around in the lobby when I decided to run through This Old House with Tommy. I had my eyes shut, and as I got to the second verse a raspy tenor voice joined me in harmony. I looked over and there was Charlie on stage next to me with a cup of coffee. He followed my phrasing almost perfectly and nailed the second chorus. When the song ended he leaned over and said with a grin, "Boy, you should be killed before you multiply!" I laughed and told him to feel free to join me for the song during the evening's set if he felt up to it. "I've got this head cold, but maybe I will".

After sound check we sat and talked about guitars until Charlie had to do a phone interview with a radio station in Australia. I decided to eavesdrop as he answered the questions that were coming from the interviewer. His eyes twinkled as he spoke about his storied past.

"Yes, that's right, we did a show in Alabama back then and Elvis was the opening act." A pause. "Well, yes, I met Hank a few times, I didn't really know him well, but I knew him." Another pause. "Well we used to harmonize all the time, we learned all the church music, shape note singing and the songs in The Golden Harp [a hymn collection published in 1868]" Then a longer pause and a sigh. "Oh yes, every time I sing I still hear Ira's voice singing his harmony parts." The interviewer asked him about his name. "Well it was Loudermilk. We was cousins of John D's, you know. So we took the L-O-U part, same as Loudermilk, and added the "V-I-N" from the VIN number on a car and came up with Louvin." He looked at me with a grin and winked, then spoke into the phone again, "Well sir, I'm in Bethlehem PA, where Jesus is from."

I went outside to get some air before the show started and found Charlie's bass player Mitchell Brown doing the same. We had a conversation about the bus that was still idling across the street. "That bus is a lease. Charlie's bus got totaled in a head on collision in New Jersey a few weeks ago," he said. Recalling that Ira Louvin died in a car accident, I shuddered and asked, "Was anybody hurt?" Mitchell held out a stiff forearm, "I broke my arm. Charlie was fine. He had an insurance check in his hand the next day and bought something, I don't know what."

The show started at 7pm. I was introduced by Steve, who also does sound at Godfrey Daniels. "Wow, lots of gray heads here tonight," I said. "We like that. Now, if you forget where you are there's a big sign behind me that'll remind you!" I did my usual 30 minute opening act set.
Here's the song list:

You're The Power
Even A Cowboy Can Dream
The Real Game
Where I Used To Have A Heart
Sugarcane Street
This Old House
If He Came Back Again

Larry was sitting behind Charlie on the benches in the rear of the room. Apparently Charlie slid forward on his seat as if to stand up and come to the stage twice during This Old House, but decided against it. Ah well, I can still say I once harmonized on stage with the great Charlie Louvin. After the show he caught my arm in the lobby and leaned into my ear, "Don't worry, I won't upstage you!" he said chuckling.

Louvin's set kicked off with a rousing version of "Worried Man Blues". He quickly followed with some Carter family and Delmore Brothers tunes. The band was tight, with lead guitarist Joe Cook stepping out in nearly every song to display a dazzling array of Telecaster tricks and hot licks. Kevin Kathey laid down a solid backbeat, although he was playing somewhat restrained to keep the volume low in the small room. Mitchell and Sonny locked into the groove.

Louvin's voice was weak in the mix at first. The combination of the slightly overpowered sound system and his head cold made his voice seem a bit frail. But the set picked up energy and the sound came together, and by the time he sang "This Damn Pen" (a great ballad he'd cut with Willie Nelson) his weathered tenor took command of the stage. He also gave me another shout out for This Old House, "I don't know how many times I've driven by an old abandoned house and wondered what kinda stories it could tell. He even got the extra key in that song!"

His repartee with the crowd was humorous and unaffected. He ditched political correctness at one point saying, "I'm gonna do this slow song. Normally I'd get down off the stage and go out there to get me some beaver to dance with, but not tonight."

Charlie Louvin has earned his accolades. His influence on country and bluegrass harmony reverberates down to today in the work of younger artists such as Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. It can even be found in the seminal country rock of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. It's a legacy that few artists of his generation can match. One wonders what will happen to country music when the last of these old giants is gone. One thing's for sure, they aren't making any more of 'em.













Thanks to Larry Ahearn and Tom Hampton for the photos.

Song or Sonic Collage

Ansel Adams used to say that before he took a picture he'd already factored every aspect of photography and dark room expertise into the shot. He knew what film ISO he'd need to use to get the proper effect, what Aperture and shutter speed would be required to capture the light and detail, what lens he'd use, what time of day the shot needed to be taken, where he'd probably have to dodge and burn in the dark room to get the light to pop, etc. Nothing was left to chance, even if chance ultimately played a role in the final product-- creative accidents still happened, but their opposite (creative disasters) were minimized. For Ansel Adams, "craft" and "skill" were paramount to the "art" of his pictures. The three were inseparable, and there were no shortcuts.

In today's world of digital photography, it's possible for anyone to achieve certain professional effects with the camera. No longer does the amateur have to study the craft of photography or spend years in the dark room learning about the volatility of chemicals and photo paper because virtually any effect or operation can be applied to a raw digital shot to give the photo some of the same effects it took Adams many hours to create. Because creative disasters have been virtually eliminated with "undo", creative accidents play a much greater role in the final products of amateur photographers. In general, there's more experimentation, but less knowledge of the fundamentals. More haphazard shooting because it's inexpensive, less planning of the shot.

Does this mean anyone can be Ansel Adams? Hardly.

Of course, this is a songwriting blog, so why am I writing about photography? I can think of no better metaphor to explain what has happened to the art of songwriting since "craft" and "skill" have gone the way of the dodging wand.

I was recently asked to coach a songwriting duo who were planning to do a CD. A friend of mine was producing the duo but he felt the songs were not up to par so he asked me to take a listen and make some critical suggestions. Once again I found myself in the position of trying to explain the difference between songwriting and something I call the sonic collage. The songs had some fine moments, but they weren't focused, they were full of lyric contradictions and irrelevant lines. The melodies sometimes had catchy phrases but they weren't repeated or they were in places that distracted from the main melodic themes (if there were any at all) or they didn't draw attention to the hook. The songs were all too long-- not just by commercial standards, but by any standard of human interest (the self indulgent factor). They were obviously written in a stream of conscious method, probably in less than an hour or two, with no re-writing attempted.

I made my comments to the pair in a carefully worded email. My friend said the duo was very interested in what I had to say, they even agreed with some of it, but ultimately they just wanted to get into the studio and cut the CD they'd already written. The money was burning a hole in their pockets and after it all, it was their record label...

Why study songwriting when you can make anything vaguely resembling a song sound good with Protools and judicious editing? I'm sure my friend will cut a decent CD, but they'll spend more time cutting, pasting and undoing than was spent writing the tunes. In fact it seems that a song is now just the vehicle that gets you to the cutting, pasting and undoing part. It's all about how soon you can get in there and piece it all together into the sonic collage, better known as the modern song. Then you can either go home and learn the song off the record that you've made, or else you just perform to backing tracks. And the best part : almost anyone can do it. All those boring years of study, all those highly educational creative disasters that can't be "undone", the lessons that teach you to do the work before you spend the money, the "skill" and the "craft" that goes into the art of song; unnecessary.

Unnecessary until one day you get on stage next to someone who has spent the time learning the skill and craft behind the art, and put the energy into the song before spending the money on the record. Then you will pull out your sonic collage and sing in earnest, trying to convince the audience they are being communicated to. But your sonic collages won't stand a chance against the real songs. The real songs will hit their mark while you send out lilting melodies and random thoughts like bubbles in the breeze.

Do you think I'm wrong?

Come and sit here on the stage with me...

copyright 2008 by craig bickhardt

Marriage In Meter

I had a friend once named Jack Keller. Jack passed away a few years ago, but I think of him often. He was a Tin Pan Alley trained songwriter, born and raised in Brooklyn. He took his craft to Hollywood for a while, writing for the Monkees and cranking out themes for TV shows, ultimately landing the theme songs for "Bewitched", "Gidget" and "Seattle". He wrote plenty of other hits, some you know and some you don't. He ended his days writing in Nashville for the same publisher I wrote for (EMI). This was back when EMI was just a fledgling company doing business as Screen Gems-Colgems-EMI in a little cottage at 1207 16th Ave South.

Jack could often be heard behind some closed door lecturing a young writer about his poor prosody, "Dat's not da hit ! Here's da hit (plunking single notes on the piano) da, da, da, DA, da, DA. Ya got too many syllables. Dat don't work. It's da marriage, I'm tellin' ya, da marriage!"

I wrote with Jack enough times to know that once he found "the hit", you didn't mess with it. He was a stickler for every line being perfectly constrained to the melody he'd composed. It didn't matter how good you thought your line was, if it didn't match syllable for syllable with his melody, he'd shoot it full of holes then calmly smoke his pipe until you thought of something better. His melodies were little gems of simplicity and distinction, nothing generic about them at all. Each note held it's place with purpose. But, man, did he ever insist on doing it his way.

Maybe you're saying to yourself, "What a stubborn guy". Thing is, he wasn't merely stubborn. He was right, maddeningly right. Every time I worked with him I learned more about the art of how NOT to compromise a hit melody for the sake of a line of lyric. His restrictions made me (gasp) a better lyricist! It forced me to find not just the right concept for a line, or the right rhyme, but the sequence of words that made the melody, concept and rhyme shine brightest.

Before you begin dismissing me with arguments about Bob Dylan and John Lennon, yes, I know. The discipline is broad. But hear me out for a moment. There are plenty of writers you can study to learn about loose meter, but few examples these days of the true Marriage.

You see, lyrics can to be both meaningful AND metered strictly. That is, in fact, the immortal challenge of both songwriting and poetry. Anyone can say a thought, but only a great writer can say it so concisely that it can never be said better again.

Classical composers use a rigid, almost mathmatical theme-and-variation approach to melody. Once the theme and variations are establish you don't deviate. Beethoven wrote his Ninth in the rhythm : "dit dit dit DAH. dit dit dit DAH." Not "dit dit dit DAH, dit di-dit dit DA-DAH". This theme business is one of the hallmarks of good composition. Many barriers have been broken since Beethoven, but we haven't always improved things. What is it that makes a song memorable to begin with? Isn't it a certain amount of repetition along with deceptively employed variations of that rhthmn? Are we really helping ourselves by pushing the envelope of theme and variation to the point where the average listener can longer even find it? The echoes are essential. The melodic echoes are the DNA of a melody. Without echoing themes a melody unravels too far.

I break the rules, too. I like Dylan as much as anyone and when I take liberties with the meter, I usually tell myself I'm following some branch of the songwriting tree that sprouted from his work. Sometimes I'm happy with the results, but many times my weak meter is just because I'm too lazy to get it right. Do you break up the Marriage with intent or out of laziness? Many writers seem to not know the difference. It takes some objectivity. You've got to know where that pulse lies and pick it up throughout the song.

The next time you're cramming all those extra syllables into your verse lines because you just need to get all the information into the song, ask yourself if it can be pared down for the sake of the meter, the pulse, the DNA of the melody. You won't be sorry you tried. Maybe you'll hear old Jack Keller's ghost say, "It's da marriage!"


copyright 2008 by craig bickhardt

Finding The Reverence

A friend of mine recently went to hear Jimmy Webb speak about songwriting. Jimmy talked about how the American songwriter is in decline because younger writers no longer study their creative ancestors.

We can debate whether this is a temporary trend or a sea change, but it's the premise of Webb's argument that interests me. There's a difference between pushing the art forward, and abandoning the past altogether. Sometimes what appears to be a clean break is actually a brilliant and rather large leap, but we must still be able to determine that it is a forward leap and not merely the abandonment of disciplines and principals that have governed the art of songwriting since the days of the Childe Ballad authors.

A song cannot be whatever we say it is any more than a novel can be four words and a cover. You might ramble from melody to melody with no sense of theme, weak symmetry, no fixed choruses, and I will admit that you've written something. But I would no sooner call it a "song" than I'd call a grocery list a "poem". Yet some have even attempted to get away with that hoax, and as a result poetry has also been in decline.

It isn't enough that a songwriter can claim an influence, he must also demonstrate what he has made of that influence. Dylan wasn't copying Woody Guthrie, nor was he just singing like him and abandoning everything Woody stood for in his writing. He was taking the leap forward, and in retrospect we can see it clearly today. When we look back from some future vantage point, will we clearly see the reverence for the past in any of the current songwriters on the scene? I can't name many I'd include on the list of reverential writers, maybe Josh Ritter, Brett Dennen, and a couple of others.

The field appears to be dominated by writers who lack the discipline or the reverence. They have the talent to sing and play instruments, they have the recording skills and the software to get it down, they have the drive and the incentive to be famous, and they have street teams on social networks to promote them. But having all these things seems to make them rather impatient with study. The one thing they apparently do not have is any abiding interest in what happened before they got here. Sure, they've listened to Sgt. Pepper and they've already stolen a few production ideas from that classic. They own a beat up copy of Blond On Blond from their parents' record collection. They listened to that LP long enough to discover that Dylan sometimes makes obscure allusions and that he writes a lot of songs with four or five verses.

But this is merely the "trappings" of influence, no different than donning a Nehru jacket and saying you're influenced by the Beatles. Influence in the reverential sense means being involved with more than the superficial aspects of the past, it means tracing the roots and analyzing the elements.

It's safe to say that never in the history of our culture have so many superficial similarities existed between the musical artists of today and the musical artists of a previous generation. Look at the clothes, hair styles, images and artwork and you'll see 1969. Listen to the CDs and you'll hear production that reminds you of the Byrds, the Beatles, "Positively Fourth Street" and Joni. But check out the songs. The lyrics are unfocused, the choruses unmemorable, the ideas lack the motive to really communicate. It reeks of self-indulgence. Simply put, no one has told these folks that they haven't worked hard enough, that they haven't written their best song, that they need to develop their instincts and hone their craft. No one has said, "No".

Could it be that the break down of the old model music industry is to blame for the deterioration of the American songwriter too? It certainly looks that way. In the past when a songwriter was told, "It ain't a hit, sonny" he went away and wrote a better song. Now that same songwriter just goes home and cuts a record. The resulting morass of mediocrity has lowed the standards of artist and listener alike.

Try as you might, you cannot become truly accomplished at anything without study. You may think songwriting frees you from that awful obligation-- the one you hated every night as you did your high school homework-- but it doesn't. I have studied songwriting as long and as hard as any doctor ever studied his profession. I've also studied poetry just as long and hard, because I believe it has a lot to teach me. My advice to all the young songwriters out there is this : take the time to really study and find some reverence for what got us here. Just because you feel an impulse to write a song doesn't mean you're ready to take on that responsibility (yes, you are responsible and accountable for what you put into this world). You must allow the well to fill before you draw water.


copyright 2008 by craig bickhardt