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Features Hiatt Ground Monday, May 26, 2008 Acclaimed Songwriter John Hiatt Is The Same Old Man – Brilliant. By Brian Wise.
‘Old days are coming back to me,” sings John Hiatt on the opening track of his new album Same Old Man. The autobiographical song chronicles Hiatt’s career and some of the musicians he worked with early on – Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Mose Allison, John Lee Hooker, John Hammond Jr and Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown.
“I don’t know what was so great about them,” he adds, “I played practically free. But I had nothing to live up to.”
It is easy to overlook the fact that Hiatt began his song writing career in Nashville back in the late ‘60s at the age of sixteen and that his first album, Hangin’ Around The Observatory, was released in 1974 when he was just twenty-two.
Even back in the late 70’s with albums such as Slugline and Two Bit Monsters Hiatt was penning songs like ‘Radio Girl’ and ‘It hasn’t Happened Yet’ that should have been hits for him but instead tended to be successful for others. (Rosanne Cash had a country hit with the latter song). ‘Riding With The King’ was to later provide the title track for the BB King Eric Clapton hit album.
But while he has been flying under the radar for most of his own recording career, Hiatt’s reputation as a songwriter is almost unparalleled. His songs have been covered by Bonnie Raitt, Eric Clapton and BB King to Iggy Pop, Three Dog Night, The Neville Brothers and even Bob Dylan.
With his acclaimed 1987 album Bring The Family, recorded with Ry Cooder, Hiatt finally managed to convert the kudos for his writing into attention for his solo work. This newfound attention continued for the following albums Slow Turning (which introduced Sonny Landreth & The Goners to his recording and touring regimes) and Stolen Moments. Another seven albums to 2005 (up to the Jim Dickinson produced Master Of Disaster) were not to yield a swag of hits but they provided plenty of fodder for other artists as well as allowing Hiatt to move between the rootsy semi-acoustic mode to a full-blown rock effort when he felt like it.
In September this year, John Hiatt will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award For Songwriting from the Americana Music Association at Nashville’s renowned Ryman Theater. He is in fine company. Past recipients include Wilie Nelson, Rodney Crowell, Guy Clark, Billy Joe Shaver and John Prine.
Hiatt’s latest album, the gritty Same Old Man (reviewed in Rhythms last month) features Goner Kenneth Blevins on drums, Patrick O'Hearn (who once played with Frank Zappa) on bass and North Mississippi Allstar Luther (son of Jim) Dickinson on guitar, mandolin and National resonator guitar. It is a stripped back and impressive outfit. Hiatt's daughter, Lilly, even sings harmony on two songs.
The sparse sound of the new album harks back eight years to the largely acoustic album Crossing Muddy Waters but the songs reflect an exceptionally happy John Hiatt - at ease with his life and able to reflect on it with some pleasure.
Hiatt was confident enough of the new material to showcase some of the songs during his recent Australian tour and to hear them back-to-back with some of his classics was a stern test that they passed with flying colours.
I am always loathe to read too much of the autobiographical into the songwriter’s craft but when I tentatively suggest to Hiatt that his new album reflects a happy, contented person he agrees.
“You know, the kids are up and out of the house,” he explains, “and my wife and I are kind of having the honeymoon we never had. When we got married we each had a child. We got married back in 1986 so we’ve always had kids. We just sent the last one to university this past year, so we finally had time for ourselves.”
“All of a sudden I was writing all these love songs,” he continues. “So it just kind of came out that way. That’s the theme.”
In some ways a comparison might be made between Same Old Man and Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind. It might not be quite so doom-laden but on Hiatt’s record the subject of time also crops up a lot.
“It’s mathematics,” laughs Hiatt. “The older you get, you’ve got a lot more in front of you than you do behind you - although I look forward to every day, of course. You do tend to try and add it up if you can.”
‘Old Days’ is an unabashed recollection of Hiatt’s younger days when he was out on the road plying his trade and learning his craft.
“I had the real privilege of being able to open for a lot of great acts in my early days,” he recalls. “I got to actually spend some time with those guys which is better than any school I could have gone to. So I consider myself very lucky to have spent time with those folks and been able to pick up some tips and hear some stories.”
Loudon Wainwright III, who was in Australia at the same time as Hiatt earlier this year, also told of touring with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and recalled the enmity between the famous pair.
“Yes, they sat as far apart as the stage would allow,” laughs Hiatt. “Of course, they hated each other because they loved each other, one would assume.”
Coincidentally, Luther Dickinson - who plays guitar, mandolin and National steel on Same Old Man - was also in Australia for the East Coast Blues series, this time with The Black Crowes.
“Luther’s a great player,” agrees Hiatt. “I saw him with the Black Crowes and he was blowing my mind. He was hitting it out of the park.”
While Hiatt had worked with Luther’s father Jim on the last album, this time around he wanted to highlight ‘the sound of the band.’ He wanted it to sound ‘as if the band was in your living room’ and so recorded it at his home studio in Nashville.
“I really enjoyed making the record,” says Hiatt, “and twiddling on the knobs.”
“I’ve always had a passion for the technical end of things,” he adds, citing his experience at racing cars for a hobby. In fact, his studio is in his old workshop. “It’s been fun over the years to learn how to capture sound.”
“It’s very stripped down and I wanted to keep it really simple,” says Hiatt of Same Old Man. “It sounds home-made but in a good way, I think.”
“We had a great time making it,” he continues, “ and it has that sense that sonically you are in the room with the band.”
When I suggest that Hiatt has again written some of the best songs of his career but that he must get sick of hearing that sort of thing, he leaps in and retorts, “No, I love that!”
I recall the time I was at Jazz fest with a friend some years ago when Hiatt played several new songs, including ‘My Old Friend’ (which didn’t pop up on an album until at least a year later). Stunned, my mate asked, ‘Where the hell does he pull these songs up from?”
“It doesn’t come easy, I can assure you of that,” responds Hiatt. “I think anybody who writes anything, including yourself, will attest to that. I am always trying to write, and I write songs regularly, but they don’t always add up to anything good – that’s the problem.
“Guy Clark has a great answer for ‘When do you know when it’s time to make a record?’ ‘Well, when I’ve got ten or twelve songs that I really, really like.’ That’s as good an answer as I can think of.”
“I pretty much pick up the guitar every day,” he adds. “I feel pretty weird if I don’t do that. I run my flag up the pole and if anything’s out there, hopefully, I can intercept it. I try to get something going at least, just to say that’s my job and I’ve taken a crack at it. But I don’t always get something accomplished.”
The album also contains some of the most vivid imagery of Hiatt’s career. ‘On With You,’ which has a similar chord progression to ‘All Along The Watchtower,’ also has what Hiatt calls a ‘funky sort of soul thing to it’ and one can imagine Al Green one day doing a version of it.
Then there is the playful Hiatt in action. ‘Our Time’ is a quirky song redolent with images of food and dining. ‘I woke up in a cold sweat and realised that we had never cooked one meal together,’ he sings.
“People underestimate our relationship to the way that love and food come together,” he explains. “It just occurred to me that we mark time in our lives with happy meals that we’ve had with our family, or dates that we’ve had. Then, of course, beauty is associated – at certain points in history it was all about voluptuousness, then it became a starving thing in more modern times. Food is important so that was my attempt to put them together – food and love.”
Same Old Man certainly contains a feast of imagery and enough musicality to keep even the most demanding of John Hiatt fans happy.
Hiatt says that he would like to come back to Australia with a full band before the end of this year. I can hardly wait.
Same Old Man is available through Shock Records.
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