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Features Still So Cool Sunday, July 13, 2008 Carlene Carter emerges from tragedy with a new lease on life.
By Martin Jones
I think the world is still reeling from when Carlene Carter burst forth from Nashville royalty with her self-titled debut in 1978. Was there ever a more promising prodigy? Daughter of June Carter and 'Mister Country' Carl Smith and raised by June and Big John, Carlene was a dazzling blonde bombshell to boot!
But Carlene made it clear from the beginning that she was never going to tow the line – in that respect, at least, she took after her trailblazing heritage. Rather than sitting out her days in the Grand Ole Opry, Carlene, already a mother at age 22, packed up and headed to London where she fell in with the likes of Graham Parker, Elvis Costello, and future husband Nick Lowe. The cluster of albums from this period, particularly the Lowe produced Musical Shapes (1980), were groundbreaking, exhibiting Carter’s penchant for mixing country with a rockabilly attitude and contemporary production and instrumentation. It’s a heady concoction that Nashville’s Music Row quickly adopted and set in stone as a contemporary blueprint.
The ageing Cash/Carter disciples breathed a collective sigh of relief when Carlene returned to Music Row in the late ‘80s, touring and recording as part of The Carter Family.
Despite her prolificacy, Carlene was yet to enjoy any real chart success. The ‘90s finally caught up with her brand of country-rock sass, and the music video age loved Carlene’s stunning looks. Her single ‘I Fell In Love’ and album of the same name were commercial triumphs, and earned her her own TV show. The album also introduced her to her next love, producer Howie Epstein, bassist for Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. As high as Carlene’s star soared in early-to-mid-‘90s, it seemed to crash just as hard. Carlene and Epstein were caught with heroin in an allegedly stolen car in 2001. Carlene was charged with possession.
Any attempts to clean up her life were dealt a series of shattering blows when, in the space of eight months in 2003, Carlene lost Epstein, June, Johnny and her sister Rosey. It is this period of tragedy, and Carlene’s subsequent recovery from the shock it caused, that is documented on Stronger, her first album of new material in 13 years. Dedicated to her new husband, Joseph Breen, and produced by John Mc Fee of the Doobie Brothers, with whom Carlene has enjoyed a strong relationship since recording with him on her second album, Stronger is a fun sounding album, despite all the tragedy leading up to it.
One of the striking things to me about Stronger is that you seem to have circumvented the usual Nashville channels in making the record.
Well it had to be done! (laughs) No it was only mainly because I made this record for myself. And I honestly didn’t make it thinking about anything to do with Nashville or LA or any of that junk… I just did it for myself. It was a healing thing for me.
You originally made a version of this record with John Carter Cash, is that right?
Yeah it was more putting down the songs that I had written and then I went out on the road and I started playing this stuff live and I realised that really what John Carter and I had done was not the finished record and, um, that’s it. That’s all I have to say about that (laughs).
It seems you’ve always had a musically mischievous streak, never wanting to be too traditional.
Honey I am just such a little bitch. (laughs). No I can’t say… well I have been mischievous, I am a little mischievous, I got a little wild hair up my butt I gotta admit that. But mainly that’s come from the way I was brought up and the women I was influenced by; my grandma, my aunt, my mum. They were all encouraged to be unique individuals and to not go along with what anybody else said. If someone had told my grandma, ‘oh no you can’t play the guitar that way. That isn’t how you do it,’ then what woulda happened? We wouldn’t have had that wonderful sound that she could do. So she always encouraged me with that, my mum always encouraged me to be just completely myself, so I got a lot of that from my family. And I got to work with the best entertainers in the world, I guess I learned a lot about that. And the main thing I learned was to be myself and be true to myself. And it wasn’t always easy, because record companies want you to be in this cookie-cutter mould thing, which I never fit into. I always would do something to screw that up and they would be mad at me and I would be called a rebel, but honestly I’m just trying to tell somebody a story, not trying to buck the system or anything. I’m just trying to play some music and have a good day.
You originally kind of fled Nashville in the ‘70s didn’t you, relocating to London and working with folks like Nick Lowe.
Well you know what, the cool thing was that was okay with my family, who were all considered country music royalty. They were all for that because I was brought up to be myself. And the reason I left was because I didn’t fit in to what was happening in Nashville and I don’t know if you know, but you put the two and two together and Big John was dumped from CBS not long after that because he wasn’t ‘happening’ any more (laughs). It’s just Nashville crap. I mean I love Nashville but I also hate it in so many ways. They’ve never really acknowledged my family the way they should have and the reasons they have acknowledged them in a lot of ways is because they could help but acknowledge them. But I don’t care about that right now, let’s talk about me! (laughs).
Well whose idea to re-do ‘I’m So Cool’ [from 1980’s Musical Shapes] for Stronger?
My little brother John Carter, I’ll give him credit for this, he came and saw me play live and that was my opening set number and he said ‘hey I really like this song’ and this is how far off the mark that was – he’d never heard it before!
But he said ‘you should re-record that’ so I’ve got to give him credit for that. The thing was I also thought after he said that, at that time it was my fiftieth birthday and I thought ‘you know what, I can sing this song like no tomorrow!’ (laughs). Then Mc Fee and I re-did it and his son played all this wild heavy metal guitar on it and Shane Mc Fee is an awesome guitar player! But it was sort of like rights of passage and all that, it made it all the more tongue-in-cheek the fact that I was 52 when I recorded it with Mc Fee.
And very much in its original spirit.
Yeah, well even more a little later on than when I wrote it. I was pissed off the day I wrote it when I was in my twenties (laughs). [There’s a great clip on YouTube of Carlene performing the song live in London in which she explains its original inspiration – two women confronting her about her flamboyant clothes.]
I just received a reissued version of Jesus Of Cool – it was an amazing period in London that late ‘70s very early ‘80s.
Oh My God. I could tell you stories darlin’! They need to put me and Nick on tour in Australia I think. We tell stories on each other! No Nick was great, he’s awesome. That’s the weird thing – me him and Elvis [Costello’s] records all came out at the same time; thirty years ago we all had similar guys in our bands and similar… I can’t even say what it is, I wanna say inbred (laughs). But it was so worth it.
And it’s really stood the test of time too.
Yeah it has. And you know what I’m the only one who’s still got my natural colour hair (laughs). I stopped bleaching my hair blonde, I totally became a brunette, and I was ‘shit I don’t even have any grey hair!’ (laughs). If people were to presume that I was grey or something because I had bleach-blonde hair, well now I have my natural colour there’s maybe five grey hairs. I don’t know what happened to Nick, he’s been that way for years. You know… and so it goes.
Well tell me how you met John Mc Fee.
Oh Mc Fee? Well I met Mc Fee largely due to Nick Lowe, and knowing that Clover had played on Elvis’s album. They kept talking to me about this band Clover – Clover this and Clover that – so I go to see them play, and they’re the band for Norton Buffalo – Norton Buffalo was this great American harmonica player. And I went to the Roxy to see them play because I wanted to see what a Ciambotti looked like. And John Ciambotti is the greatest player every in the world. So for Nick to tell me ‘you gotta go see Ciambotti play’ – so I go to see them and I’m going upstairs into the dressing room to meet the guys and it was 1978 and I passed Norton on the stairs and he goes ‘stay away from my band!’ And I’m like ‘well I’ll stay away from them but you haven’t told them to stay away from me!’ I was such a little bitch. I look back sometimes and go ‘what a little asshole I was!’ But the thing was that I made great friends that night with Ciambotti and Kevin Wells and John Mc Fee… and the next thing I knew they were my band.
So Mc Fee and I continued to like, even after they stopped being my band and you know Huey Lewis took over most of it, anyway, it’s like a long damned story, but Mc Fee and I always stayed close and stayed friends and we’re all still a family. I mean Kevin still plays drums with me most of the time. So it’s a funny old world how we find our little musical mates in the world and thank god I didn’t marry any of ‘em, it would have been horrible.
Stronger is available on Yep Roc through Shock.
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