Producing Country - Michael Jarrett Music/Interview

Скачать книгу

date it to the advent of multitracking, when Nashville got its first half-inch, three-track recorders in 1958. That’s when the whole arena pretty much changed. Up till that time they were still recording to full-track mono tape. It was just a different medium than the lacquer.

       KEN NELSON

      The first hit record I made was in Chicago with the Dinning Sisters—“Buttons and Bows.” During that period, Jimmy Petrillo, who was the president of the Musicians’ Union, had threatened to strike, and in fact they were going to strike. All the record companies got panicky, and that’s how I actually got started with Capitol [Records]. They were all trying to get in as many [recording] sessions as possible before the strike. The Dinning Sisters were in Chicago, so I recorded them.

      Later, when tape first came in, the Dinnings came out to Hollywood. Lee [Gillette] did the session. I did the one in Chicago because they had no choice. They were booked with me. But after the Dinnings recorded with Lee, they left to go to the airport to catch a plane back to Chicago. Lee listened to the tape, and there was a mistake in it. So he grabbed a cab and ran out to the airport and got the Sisters back. They didn’t do the whole thing, only the part where the mistake was made. It saved them a barrel of money.

      THOM BRESH (guitarist/producer/Travis’s son)

      Lee Gillette [producer at Capitol Records] was asking him to write more folk songs. Travis was irritated by that. “You don’t write a folk song,” he said. “People write folk songs. They come out of the ground—the hills. That’s why they’re called folk songs.”

      Lee Gillette said, “Well, just write something that sounds like a folk song.”

      “That’s why I sarcastically wrote ‘Sixteen Tons,’” he said. “First of all, you can’t load”—and he was serious—“you just can’t load sixteen tons of number-nine coal. No man can do that. It’s like John Henry.” He says, “I just gave it [‘Sixteen Tons’] to Lee Gillette, and Tennessee Ernie Ford sold it.” Travis used to use this line. He said, “Never did like that tune till Tennessee Ernie Ford sold about 5 million copies. Then, I got to where I loved it.”

      You could not get him to say that he wrote “Dark as a Dungeon.” “It’s a tune I made up.” He would not use the word “write,” “write a song.” He’d say, “Well, I didn’t write it. I just made it up. That’s why they’re not folk songs, because I made them up. I just put into rhyme and story what I saw around the coal mine.”

      They inducted him into the Smithsonian Institution as a great American folk song writer. He wouldn’t go to the ceremony. They put him in, but he wouldn’t go.

      When he got the letter, he said, “When is this induction?”

      I’m using a fictitious date. “It’s going to be June 3.”

      “Write on the calendar over there, ‘Sick.’” He said there was no way he could go in there and take credit for folk songs when he made them up. And that’s just the way it was, period, the end.

      He said he wrote “Dark as a Dungeon” after making love to a pretty girl in Redondo Beach. “I came out of her apartment. I got on a motor-cycle. It was dark, and I looked up. There was a lone street lamp up there.”

      He said, “I was going to go back out to the San Fernando Valley, and I thought, ‘Oh no, I’m supposed to be writing some of those folk songs.’ I sat there on a Harley-Davidson underneath that street lamp that looked like a lone miner’s lamp in the darkness. That’s what it looked like as far as what I thought—the image. I sat there and said, ‘Okay, folk songs usually come from the Irish. How do they write?’

      “I wrote on a piece of paper, ‘Now listen ye children so young and so fine, and seek not your fortune in the dark, dreary mine.’”

      “I sat there,” he said, “and I wrote that verse in Redondo Beach on a Harley-Davidson”—or an Indian, I don’t remember which it was—“looking at a lone street lamp after making love to a pretty girl. That’s not a folk song.”

      But of course “Dark as a Dungeon”—if you look at it—is considered one of the great folk songs of that era. That whole coal-mining era was documented in music by Merle Travis. And that’s just the way it is, but to him that’s not the way it was at all. It’s just something that he knew something about.

      He could write about anything. He had a brilliant mind. He wrote all of those train segments for the old Johnny Cash TV show. If they did “Come On, Ride This Train,” he’d write the train segments. That was his job. They would say, “Travis, we need a four- or five-song medley on the B&O Railroad.”

      “That’s like taking candy from a baby,” he said. “I don’t do nothin’ except go to the library, read about the B&O, and tell different stories in rhyme. Any idiot could do that.”

      You try it. Go read a book and write five songs. “Oh, here’s a good chapter. That would make a good song.” To him, that was like getting paid for doing nothing.

      He wouldn’t take credit for anything. Grandpa Jones said one time, “He was too humble.” If you came up to him and said, “I sure enjoyed your picking Merle,” he’d say, “I don’t pick like Thom Bresh here,” and he’d point at me.

      Don’t compliment him. Boy, if someone said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, here he is—a legend in his own time,” he’d say, “I could just walk out right now and leave. Why do they have to say stuff like that?” It upset him, and he’d go onstage shaking. He never grasped what he’d done. He was a real interesting character.

       JAMES AUSTIN

      In our Roy Rogers Collection we put out a song—Dale Evans singing “Don’t Ever Fall in Love with a Cowboy”—which is really great. I found out about it through the family. They said, “Maybe you can help us find this song.” Actually, Cheryl Rogers Barnett, who is Roy and Dale’s daughter, said, “I’m trying to find this.” Some of the relatives of Roy, the granddaughters sing in a group called the Rogers Legacy. They wanted the granddaughters to sing that song: “We know about it. My mom’s talked about it, but I have nothing on it. I can’t find any publishing on it, no lyrics, nothing. But my mom says she did sing that song.”

      I called the Country Music Foundation, and they were kind enough to help us out. To put it in the [Rhino Records] collection, I needed a letter from the Rogers’s family saying that they, indeed, authorized the duplication of the recorded song. We found out that it was a great record, definitely worthy of inclusion in the collection. And it’s something that most people didn’t even know existed, and it was released as a single. It just fell through the cracks.

       INTERLUDE

       THE PRODUCER AS DIRECTOR

       STEVE CROPPER

      The jobs of movie producer and record producer are totally different. The movie producer is the guy that goes around, gets the financing, does all that sort of stuff. That doesn’t

Скачать книгу