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"Pretty good" is one way of
putting it. With more than a quarter-century of songwriting and
record-making under his belt, John Hiatt has created a remarkable body of
work that's made him one of popular music's most respected -- and beloved
-- artists. His voluminous album catalogue has won the loyalty of critics
and the devotion of fans, and his songs have been recorded by a dizzying
assortment of acts that include Johnny Adams, Asleep At The Wheel, Rosanne
Cash, Marshall Crenshaw, Rodney Crowell, the Desert Rose Band, John Doe,
Bob Dylan, Steve Earle, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Guy, Emmylou Harris,
Marti Jones, Albert Lee, Nick Lowe, Rick Nelson, Tracy Nelson, Willie
Nelson, the Neville Brothers, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Iggy Pop, Bonnie
Raitt, Linda Ronstadt, Mitch Ryder, the Searchers, Irma Thomas and Kelly
Willis.
Born in Indianapolis, in 1952 Hiatt grew up under the spell of Top 40
radio, and first blossomed as a singer/songwriter at the tender age of 11,
when he formed a neighborhood combo with two other precocious grade-school
tunesmiths. He cites hearing Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" a couple
of years later as a life-changing experience.
"It freaked me out, and I had to find out who that guy was," he recalls,
adding, "When I was 13 or 14, I spent about a year in my bedroom with
Blonde On Blonde, trying to figure out what he was doing. Dylan opened me
up, the way he opened up a lot of kids my age, to the possibilities of
lyrics. He was also my entree into a vast, immense world of music beyond
what was on the radio, and introduced me to all these great blues stylists
like Mississippi John Hurt, Lightnin' Hopkins and Howlin' Wolf."
By 1971, the teenaged Hiatt had quit high school and moved to Nashville,
where he won a deal with the prestigious Music City music publisher Tree,
which earned him a princely $25 a week. "At the time," he says, "I thought
that was the coolest thing I'd ever heard of, getting subsidized to do
what you love."
Hiatt was still a Nashville newcomer when he made his recording debut in
1972 as a member of White Duck, a country-rock quartet whose members all
wrote and sang. Hiatt joined the group in time to contribute a pair of
songs to the band's second and final album, In Season.
Hiatt was still a staff writer for Tree when he won a solo deal with Epic
Records, which yielded a pair of albums, 1974's Hangin' Around The
Observatory and the following year's Overcoats. Those promise-filled but
scattershot LPs found Hiatt flirting with an eclectic if unfocused
country/rock/soul/gospel sound and occasionally scoring impressively, as
on the former disc's "Sure As I'm Sittin' Here" and "Hangin' Around The
Observatory," and the latter's "Down Home."
In retrospect, the Epic albums preserve the sound of a raw talent still
searching for his voice as a songwriter and his sound as a recording
artist. "I was definitely still looking for a style," agrees Hiatt. "Some
artists are already fully formed at 21, but I wasn't. But I look back on
those records lovingly. Just to have the opportunity to get them out to
the public was pretty cool at the time."
Although Hiatt's Epic LPs came and went without making much of a
commercial dent, his stature as an up-and-coming talent was confirmed when
Three Dog Night scored a Top 20 single with "Sure As I'm Sittin' Here" in
1974. "It was pretty cool," Hiatt says of his first hit. "I bought a brand
new Toyota, and my salary at Tree went up. By the end of my time with
Tree, I think I was making 250 bucks a week."
His Epic releases and the Three Dog Night hit gave Hiatt enough of a
public profile that, after he ended his five-year stint with Tree in 1976,
he was able to spend much of the next two years on the road as a solo act,
playing club and college gigs and gradually coming out of his shell as a
live performer.
“It was not an easy thing, because I was so shy,” he remembers. “I was a
typical artist – an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. I was compelled
to perform, but I was so shy that it was painful to do it. I’d sit down on
stage, stare at my shoes, and not talk. It took me a long time to get over
that.”
By the time Hiatt reemerged on record, he’d overcome his shyness and begun
absorbing inspiration from the raw, confrontational energy of the emerging
punk/new wave scene. “I’d been playing solo for a few years, and all of a
sudden the Ramones came out, and I just flipped,” he says. “It was like,
‘Yeah, I get this, I totally understand where they’re coming from.’ And
then all the Stiff Records stuff – Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe and
Wreckless Eric – started coming from England, and I got all excited about
that, and started thinking about how what those guys were doing could
apply to my thing.”
Hiatt relocated to San Francisco, and then to Los Angeles, where he put a
band together – something he hadn’t done since before puberty – and soaked
in the city’s budding punk scene. “I’d be the first to cop to the
influence,” Hiatt confesses, “but I don’t think that that was a bad thing.
The Angry Young Man thing appealed to me in a big way – I had plenty of
axes to grind at the time.”
After establishing a foothold on the L.A. club scene, Hiatt signed with
MCA, for which he recorded a pair of albums, 1979's Slug Line and 1980's
Two Bit Monsters. Those discs – both produced by his then-manager Denny
Bruce – unveiled a newly focused artist who’d sharpened his verbal and
musical attack impressively, revealing Hiatt as both a pointed, economical
lyricist and a natural rocker.
Slug Line’s title track offered a defiant assessment of the artist’s role
in the music-biz pecking order, while the infectious “Radio Girl” was an
uplifting ode to music’s transcendent properties, and the emphatic tone of
“Washable Ink” offered a convincing balance to Hiatt’s more venomous
insights. Two Bit Monsters was a tad less angry and more contemplative
than its predecessor, a direction that was reflected in the sly character
study of “Pink Bedroom” and the tongue-in-cheek swagger of “It Hasn’t
Happened Yet”; interestingly, both of those songs would subsequently be
covered by kindred spirit and frequent Hiatt interpreter Rosanne Cash.
The MCA LPs nabbed Hiatt a passel of ecstatic press notices and a bit of
radio play, raising his general visibility and music-industry prestige.
“Yeah, that was sort of the start of something,” he says. “I still didn’t
really have my foot in the door, but I was starting to get a little
recognition.”
Though his MCA work helped put Hiatt on the map, by 1980 – the same year
that he contributed “Spy Boy” to the soundtrack of the controversial Al
Pacino thriller Cruising – Hiatt was expanding his musical horizons by
working in a supporting role with renowned guitarist and musicological
adventurer Ry Cooder. In addition to writing “The Way We Make A Broken
Heart” for Cooder’s Borderline LP, Hiatt lent rhythm guitar and backing
vocals to the entire album, and he and his live band ended up backing
Cooder on a European tour. Hiatt also played and sang on the 1982 Cooder
longplayer The Slide Area and contributed to Cooder’s memorable Tex-Mex
soundtrack for the Jack Nicholson film The Border the same year.
Also in 1982, Hiatt moved to the then-new Geffen label for his next solo
effort, the Tony Visconti-produced All of a Sudden, which sampled a
variety of styles, from the sleek synth-rock of “I Look For Love” to the
rugged rockabilly of “Doll Hospital.” The bruised love song “My Edge Of
The Razor” exemplified the sort of brutally insightful adult lyric at
which Hiatt was becoming increasingly adept.
After All Of A Sudden’s eclectic approach, Hiatt moved closer to staking
out a trademark sound with 1983's Riding With The King. The production of
the album’s 12 songs was split in half, with the team of Ron Nagle and
Scott Matthews (aka the Durocs) handling “side one” (including “I Don’t
Even Try” and “She Loves The Jerk”) and Nick Lowe overseeing the flipside
(which featured “The Love That Harms” and the haunting Elvis
Presley-tribute title track), on which Lowe’s band provides backup. Scott
Matthews and Ron Nagle also produced a soulful Hiatt/Rosanne Cash duet of
“The Way We Make A Broken Heart,” which was left off of Riding With The
King but is included here.
“I always kind of look at Riding With The King as the first record where I
really started to put it together,” Hiatt says. “I finally figured out
what I was about and got comfortable with the three or four different
styles that I liked to work in.”
But Hiatt admits that at the time, he wasn’t fully equipped to take
advantage of Riding With The King’s musical momentum, and that situation
adversely affected the quality of his 1985 release Warming Up To The Ice
Age. “At that point, my alcoholism and drug addiction had gotten so out of
control that I couldn’t sustain the artistic integrity that I sort of
stumbled on with Riding With The King,” he says. “The wholeness got
dissipated by my personal problems, and I think that kind of showed on
Warming Up To The Ice Age. There was some good stuff on it, but I was just
in such a crazed state that it was hard to know exactly what I was doing.”
Whatever its flaws, Warming Up To The Ice Age boasted some fine,
insightful compositions that would occupy prominent positions in the Hiatt
songbook for years to come, including “When We Ran,” “She Said The Same
Things To Me” and “The Usual”; the latter subsequently would be covered by
Hiatt’s idol Bob Dylan.
The end of Hiatt’s three-album stint with Geffen coincided with a trying
but ultimately triumphant period. “I was drinking and drugging a whole
lot, and eventually I got consumed by it,” he explains. “At the time I
subscribed to the whole tortured-artist deal. After Ice Age, I got sober
and came out of the dope and the alcohol haze. And lo and behold, all this
time and energy opened up for my art.”
Hiatt embraced sobriety soon after the 1984 birth of his daughter Lilly,
but his hard times continued with the subsequent suicide of his estranged
wife. “I had a year-old daughter, and I figured that I wouldn’t stand a
chance if I tried to raise her in L.A., so I moved with her back to
Nashville,” he says. “I had a tour that year for Ice Age, which was my
first tour sober. It was a scary experience, but I got through it and then
went back to Nashville and got on with the business of living and taking
care of my little girl.” In 1986, Hiatt met and married current wife,
Nancy, who already had a young son. “All of a sudden, I was married with
two kids, and life was good and I was writing good stuff.”
The hard-won wisdom of his previous few years was reflected on 1987's
Bring The Family, which he now calls “The start of my official career.”
Indeed, the album was both a multi-leveled breakthrough, with songs like
“Thank You Girl,” “Lipstick Sunset” and the joyously funky “Memphis In The
Meantime” drawing inspiration from the catharsis of exorcising personal
demons, and the challenge of building a stable family life. The cheeky
anthem “Thing Called Love” would become a smash for Bonnie Raitt when she
recorded it for her 1989 comeback album Nick Of Time, while the
heart-on-sleeve, gospel-inflected “Have A Little Faith In Me” would become
one of Hiatt’s most-covered numbers, inspiring readings by a multitude of
artists ranging from Joe Cocker to Jewel.
Bring The Family was initially financed by England’s Demon label, whose
Andrew Lauder offered Hiatt a well-timed opportunity to finally make an
album on his own terms. According to Hiatt, “He said I could sing in the
shower and they’d put it out, which was a nice vote of confidence after so
many years of dealing with Geffen and not really knowing what they wanted
or why they signed me.” Left to their own devices, Hiatt and producer John
Chelew corralled a stellar trio of past Hiatt associates – Ry Cooder on
guitar, Nick Lowe on bass and Jim Keltner on drums – to play on the
sessions. “We booked four days at Ocean Way Studios because that was about
all we could afford, and we made a record,” Hiatt notes.
The resulting album, released stateside by A&M, marked a new high-water
mark for Hiatt, thanks to the seamless emotional resonance of the material
and the adrenaline-charged support of the all-star studio band. But when
Hiatt hit the road to support Bring The Family, he was backed by a new
trio, the Goners – slide guitarist Sonny Landreth, bassist Dave Ranson and
drummer Ken Blevins – who lent a raw, bluesy kick to Bring The Family’s
successor, Slow Turning.
Slow Turning, produced by renowned studio veteran, Glyn Johns, arrived
soon after the birth of John and Nancy’s daughter Georgia Rae, who’s the
subject of the song that bears her name. “Tennessee Plates,” “Drive South,”
“Feels Like Rain” and the title song further explored the domestic lyrical
themes and rough-hewn musical vibe introduced on Bring The Family. 1990's
Stolen Moments, also produced by Johns, continued in a similar if less
sonically gritty vein on the likes of “Real Fine Love” and “Child Of The
Wild Blue Yonder.”
The Bring The Family/Slow Turning/Stolen Moments trilogy helped win Hiatt
a large and enthusiastic new audience, one that seemed to relate strongly
to the material’s lyrical concerns. “I was writing about what I as going
through and living through, being newly married with kids and a family,
all that stuff that I’d never known about before,” Hiatt states. “We were
punting, my wife and I, we really didn’t have a lot to go on. We both came
from families that were kind of screwy, so we were kind of making it up as
we went along. That’s where those songs were coming from, and I guess that
there were a lot of other people who were going through the same thing. I
think it had a certain feeling of being genuine, and maybe that’s what
people responded to.”
Meanwhile, the ongoing interest in the lightning-in-a-bottle Bring The
Family studio band culminated in the formation of Little Village, which
reunited Hiatt with Cooder, Lowe and Keltner in a group situation, with
all four musicians sharing writing duties and Hiatt, Cooder and Lowe
trading off on vocals. The quartet’s first and only collaborative effort,
a self-titled 1992 album on Warner Bros., contained some yeoman’s work,
and the band’s one and only tour included numerous impressive
performances. But overwhelming expectations and the pull of four solo
careers – and four individual schedules – combined to limit Little Village’s
future.
“It was a magic band,” Hiatt says of the quartet. “A band like that just
doesn’t come down the pike every day, so when it does, your natural
inclination is to want to keep it going. The record label wanted to bill
it as a supergroup, but it was the four guys who were least likely to be a
supergroup. And that kind of pressure was just too much for us. We tried
to be all democratic and co-write everything, and I guess that kind of
screwed it up too. But that being said, I thought it was a totally cool
album. It probably wasn’t ultimately the best we could do, and I’d still
love to have that chance, and I’d never rule it out. We did some great
shows – when we were on, it was scary. Some of our great shows were
stunning. Some of the bad ones were less so.”
Hiatt was solo once again on 1993's seemlessly rocking Perfectly Good
Guitar, produced by Matt Wallace. The title number was an adult rocker’s
been-there view of youthful rock ‘n’ roll folly, while the poignantly
cinematic “Buffalo River Home” demonstrated that Hiatt’s songwriting had
moved beyond strictly autobiographic subject matter. “I was sort of done
covering the family thing,” he reflects, “So with Perfectly Good Guitar I
opened up to where I could start to tell stories again. I also started to
go back to my life before that, because I wasn’t able to go back there for
a while.”
In 1994, Hiatt closed his productive relationship with A&M with the
release of his first live collection, the pithily if inaccurately titled
Hiatt Comes Alive At Budokan?, credited to John Hiatt and the Guilty Dogs,
in honor of his then-band of guitarist Michael Ward, bassist Davey
Faragher and drummer Michael Urbano. The live disc’s contents included a
smoking rendition of Hiatt’s “Angel Eyes,” which had been a Top 5 hit for
Canadian blues guitarist Jeff Healey six years earlier. Also in 1994,
Rhino issued Love Gets Strange: The Songs Of John Hiatt, a tribute disc
featuring 18 Hiatt compositions performed by an assortment of artists from
the worlds of rock, country and R&B.
Hiatt moved to Capitol for 1995's Walk On, which found him settling
comfortably into an accessibly rocking sound on songs like “Cry Love” and
“Shredding The Document,” which showcased the solid supporting chops of
Faragher, Urbano and ex-Camper Van Beethoven guitarist David Immergluck.
Little Head, released two years later, was somewhat spottier, but
nonetheless yielded a handful of gems including the evocative “Pirate
Radio.” Hiatt then began recording new material with the reconvened Goners,
but soon parted ways with Capitol and put that project on the back burner.
With the Goners album on temporary hold, Hiatt fulfilled a longstanding
desire to record an acoustic album, informally cutting a new batch of
songs live in the studio, over a four-day period, on the Tennessee horse
farm where Hiatt and family have resided since 1992. The result was
Crossing Muddy Waters, a compellingly forthright assortment of stark
accounts of loss, despair and hope, performed in loose back-porch
arrangements with Faragher and Immergluck. Such tunes as “Take It Down”
and “Crossing Muddy Waters” paint vivid portraits of characters wrestling
with the ghosts of the past. “I guess I’ve kind of lost interest in
writing clever songs, “Hiatt observes. “I seem to be writing simpler as I
get older.”
In a sense, Crossing Muddy Waters’ rootsy rural sound brought Hiatt full
circle, back to the folk and country-blues idioms he’d first discovered
via his youthful obssession with Bob Dylan. So it was appropriate that
Hiatt licensed it to the legendary folk/blues label Vanguard, while, in a
timely nod to technology, making it available for online download through
Emusic.com. The album soon won Hiatt some of the most enthusiastic reviews
of his career, as well as a Grammy nomination in the Best Contemporary
Folk Album category.
Crossing Muddy Waters’ appearance in the new millennium coincided with the
Top 10 success of Eric Clapton and B.B. King’s collaboration Riding With
The King, whose title song revived Hiatt’s Geffen-era chestnut with some
new lyrics specially written for the occasion by the author. The year 2000
also saw the release of yet another Hiatt tribute album, Rollin’ Into
Memphis: The Songs Of John Hiatt, on which a prestigious assortment of
blues and folk artists tackle Hiatt compositions.
The fatalistic tone of Crossing Muddy Waters contrasts the sunny frame of
mind that Hiatt – now a free agent with no longterm label ties and an
audience large and loyal enough to allow him to call his own shots –
presently occupies. “I love writing songs and making records, and I love
the idea that you can go out and play and know that people will show up,
“he says. “That’s a pretty wonderful feeling, having had years of playing
for 20 people in a club. Having people waiting for your next record, even
on a small scale, is a lot better than putting it out and not knowing if
anybody’s gonna care.”
Hiatt concludes, “I’ve been happily married for 15 years, and I’m enjoying
my life and my work as much as I ever have,” adding, “But the abyss is
never far away, and I guess maybe that’s the point.”
Scott Schinder
June 2001 |
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