Livin' Long Like This

Rodney Crowell's outsider art

By Don Allred

March 1, 2006

http://clclt.com/charlotte/livin-long-like-this/Content?oid=2359573

As he told it to his Goldmine Magazine interviewer Bill DeYoung back in ‘96: one August night in ‘72, young Rodney Crowell arrived in Nashville with $15 to his name. Crowell -- who plays the Neighborhood Theatre Saturday night -- was eagerly obeying Jim Duff, the mentor who'd encouraged him to leave his native Port Houston's music scene of canal bars, rodeo dancehalls and Holiday Inns, thence to sign with Columbia Records, and tour with Kenny Rogers & the First Edition. Although Duff had already sold off the publishing rights to Crowell's demo tape and vamoosed back to Texas, things turned out okay. Crowell stole his demo back from the publisher's office, and started playing for tips at a Nashville oasis, Bishop's Pub, also frequented by other resourceful, restive songwriters, including Texan expats Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt.

Said fecund scene is preserved in the 1975 documentary Heartworn Highways. A remarkable companion album (with more music than made it onto the screen) will be released by Shout! Factory on March 15. It includes "Bluebird Wine," which Crowell says is the first of his songs that Clark ever approved of (the late great, feted and fated, standard-setting outcat Van Zandt was a harder sell). Clark has denied wanting to be a taskmaster or teacher of Crowell, who he says taught him a thing or two. But Crowell, as he comes across in his own writing and in interviews, seems always to have felt the urge to both learn from and prove himself to some magical figure. "Bluebird Wine" euphorically celebrates being discovered by a woman who provides wine and creative inspiration.

Soon after writing "Wine," he met Emmylou Harris, who had been discovered and mentored in turn by another late great, Gram Parsons (nickname all too appropriate). In Crowell, still relatively unknown in Nashville, Harris seems to have found her own private Gram surrogate, her secret stash of soulful, song-filled, ceaseless striving. Eventually, Crowell pushed himself out of what he's called "the Great School of Emmylou," and spent several frustrating years as a solo artist, despite a spate of good reviews, starting with his 1978 debut, the driven Ain’t Livin’ Long Like This. He did have some hits, but usually when other people covered his songs. The stash wasn't secret any more.

In the early 80s, he found himself schooling (and being schooled by) Johnny Cash's young daughter, Rosanne. He helped her have hits, and he even, finally, had five number one hits off his own album, Diamonds And Dust. This strange winning streak proved to be a fluke, although he tried to come up with a winning formula -- like he and Cash were developing in her product. They both became sick of the grind. The couple drove themselves and each other to push beyond safe songwriting, this compositional daring eventually applying to their attempts to make sense of their marriage's wreck.

In 2001, Crowell made an album with his own money, rather than, as he now says, feel compelled to try and please a major labe one more time (symptomatic of what he calls "the sharecropper mentality", a biz-reinforced bit of his citybilly heritage). He cannily shopped it to a well-heeled, intelligent indie label, Sugar Hill. This album bore his old nickname, The Houston Kid, but it was really a mix of his own tumultuous youth, exploring some of the lives Crowell might've lived (before dying), if music hadn't provided some kind of stability.
(Not like the "stability" of his mercurial, stubborn father, who stayed away from Nashville, hewing to the aforementioned Houston dive bar zones, at times with a very underaged Rodney on drums---for novelty appeal, the fortunate son speculates.)
The Houston Kid conveyed no sense of anxiously overselling good material, as he'd tended to do previously.

Crowell followed this with Fate's Right Hand (2003), in which he tries to provide solace and sense to troubled friends, while struggling with his own paranoid compulsions on "The Man In Me." Last year's The Outsider is more overtly political, to put it mildly, but certainly redeems the clichéd aspect of "the personal is political." Viewpoints shift; moments, whole characters and whole lives melt away; but the people in these songs are connected, whether they want to be or not.

Although Crowell's mellifluous (Everlys to Beatles, Merle to Costello) twang is reliably flexible, as usual, the most startling track is his reworking of Bob Dylan's "Shelter From the Storm." The song's always seemed like grandiose self-pity, but suddenly here's Dylan's fantasy sorceress in eerie flesh: none other than Emmylou Harris, now trading verses with Crowell. Understandably, he sounds a bit spooked -- Harris keeps changing keys on him, yet they can still harmonize. You can tell Crowell couldn't stop singing if he tried, which he doesn't.*

Rodney Crowell & The Outsiders play the Neighborhood Theatre Sat., Mar. 4, 8:00pm; $20. www.neighborhoodtheatre.com.

*A longer version of this, with more info,  incl. updates: https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2006/03/scorceresss-apprentice_14.html