ND #11 :: Sept-Oct 1997
Nashville, TN
Bobby Bare Jr.:
All in the Bare family
by Grant Alden
Bobby Bare Jr.
Photograph by Grant Alden
Bobby Bare Jr. was just 7 years old, but he remembers the last night the Ryman Auditorium was home to the Grand Ole Opry: “It was dark, and there were tons of people everywhere.” He was onstage, singing his duet, “Daddy What If”, with his father. They’d even been nominated for a Grammy, though the Pointer Sisters won that year. The Bares opened the Opry’s new home the following night, filmed a few spots for “Hee-Haw,” and then Bobby started school.
He returned to the Ryman some years later with Ken Coomer, who is now Wilco’s drummer. “We were bringing a piano in there for some cartage guys,” he says. “We’d be setting up Dolly Parton’s stage, or Brooks & Dunn had all these Marshall Stacks we’d set up. And that was the next time I walked in the door. Ken was talking about, ‘Hey, with Uncle Tupelo I opened up for Neil Young in Europe this year,’ and it just brought to my face how you can be that successful and still end up hauling pianos.”
Now 31, Bare has a degree in psychology, a penchant for mountain bikes, Waylon Jennings’ old bass, a freshly inked publishing deal (with Windswept Pacific), and a band. He lives where he has for some years now, in an attic apartment that is home to one or two other musicians, a large TV, a small collection of instruments, leftover furniture, fast food wrappers. It is comparatively neat, largely because his mother hired a cleaning service for his most recent birthday. A xeroxed photo hangs on the refrigerator, his father onstage at the Exit/In surrounded by Neil Young, Dickey Betts and Shel Silverstein.
Bare Jr. doesn’t seem so much to live in his father’s shadow as to bask in his glow, and for most of five hours that’s who we talk about: Bare Sr. and his favorite songwriter, Shel Silverstein, who is now his coach. “I’ve seen it written he’s a good guy in a business where good guys don’t finish first,” Bobby says of his dad. “There is no doubt that us kids were the most important thing to him, and therefore I’m sure his career didn’t get to be as monster crazy.”
That may explain why the youngest fellow ever to be nominated for a Grammy (he was five when they cut “Daddy What If”) has been so circumspect about pursuing a music career. “I was a drummer when I was 13,” he says. “Then I got a bicycle, and I didn’t do anything musical for a while. Went to UT-Knoxville and got a degree in psychology, and then moved back to Nashville and immediately went on the road with Mel & the Party Hats [a still-gigging cover band]. Working lights, selling T-shirts, tuning equipment, running monitors, everything. I did that for two or three years, and the whole time I’ve been writing songs. Writing really bad songs for probably seven years. Really horrible.
“No, it’s longer than that,” he laughs. “Stuff that I didn’t even like playing for myself, hardly. Until it got to where I’d at least play it for a girlfriend or something. We did our first show in September of last year.”
That leaves out a lot of evenings running lights at the Exit/In, playing bass in a metal band, a grunge cover ensemble he nicknamed Pearl Pumpkin Pilots, and the pitcher of water that accompanies him onstage. But it does all total up to the five-piece band that gigs regularly under his name. And it is an actual band, not the usual Nashville aggregation of unrehearsed friends and chart-reading acquaintances: Mike Grimes (guitar), Tracy Hackney (dulcimer), Dean Tomasek (bass) and Keith Brogdon (drums). Bare is losing the rhythm section to their other band, a Southern-rock outfit called Spoonful, and is unhappily auditioning potential replacements while simultaneously scheming to keep them.
Bare’s is a striking band, especially in Nashville where bands are particularly difficult to hold together. He has found a uniquely Southern way to recast grunge and a half-dozen other impulses in his own image. The opening song on one of his demo tapes, “You Blew Me Off” (the next line is “And it turned me on”) could almost be an early Mudhoney single, though he hadn’t really heard the band until some writer sent him a tape. That, and Mudhoney never thought to use a dulcimer in place of rhythm guitar.
Some of the songs (like “Mike Tyson”) tread dangerously close to novelty, and it’s not hard to tell Bare Jr. has Silverstein for a mentor. Nevertheless, he has found — is finding — a voice of his own that’s entirely worth listening to.
“Dad doesn’t really understand a lot of the stuff that I’m doing,” he says, and there’s a little twinkle in his eye just then. “Some of the lyrics are kind of eye candy; they mean something to me, and he can listen to them and kind of adapt to it. Most of it is straight-ahead Shel Silverstein-style hooky fun stuff that borders on, what is it called?”
Novelty?
“Novelty. That’s my biggest fear is that it ends up being seen as novelty. That’s the hardest line to walk. Everything I write I send it to Shel. I write it and Shel critiques it. He’ll call me and he will have gone through and told me everything. He’ll point out every spot that I was lazy, and he’ll tell me what he would do different. And it really helps keep it focused. It’s the luckiest thing in the world to have somebody like him to use as a focus, because you just get to where you’re going so much quicker.”
Not that Bobby Bare Jr. is precisely sure where he’s going just yet. “I don’t know,” he says, looking away. “I’ll sit down and try to write rock ’n’ roll, because that’s the funnest stuff, but as soon as I open my mouth or start strumming something, probably 60-80 percent of what comes out is 80 percent country. Real country, that I have a passion for.”
Later he will amend that, distancing himself from the c-word. “Call it Southern rock,” he asks. “I want to open up for 311 or something. That’s the kind of crowd that I like to get involved with. That’s where the fun’s at. It’s kind of like dad sold trucks, and I’m selling motorcycles.”
Whatever he’s selling, people seem to be buying. Bare Jr. is managed by Nashville newcomer Kip Krones, an American who lived in London for 16 years and managed the Moody Blues and the Outfield and folks like that. Not precisely the connections that come with having grown up next door to George and Tammy.
“They had a cool bedroom with big posts and big red velvet, pretty dramatic,” he chuckles. “Pretty dramatic neighbors, too. And then they moved away. Like eight years later I was at the house all by myself and George Jones was at the door. Knocking. And I’m like, Hey, what’s up? He goes, Uh, is Bare here? No. I’m George Jones. Tell him George Jones came by.”
He is laughing hard by now.
Still, he is not unaware that he’s in a unique position. Few struggling songwriters have Silverstein for a sounding board and get to hang out in the studio with Jerry Reed. Which is why, until this band, he fought against associating the Bare family name with his music.
“But it is my name,” he says, sighing. “Besides, the people I’m trying to reach have never heard of my father."
NASHVILLE, TN
Kevin Gordon:
He can’t get no…
Kevin Gordon couldn’t be more at home with his musical roots. The West Monroe, Louisiana, native inhabits the swamp blues, honky-tonk and rockabilly he heard growing up in the ’60s with the unassuming ease of a performer twice his age. The roots that lend Gordon’s music its tension are, rather, social and historical.
On Illinois 5 a.m. (Motherlode), his new seven-song CD, Gordon wrestles with the desire to transcend what he calls “that feeling of unwilled stasis” — a feeling born of entanglements such as home, work and family of origin. You hear it in the mortgaged dreams of “Company Car”. It’s there in the only half-joking “Blue-Collar Dollar”. But nowhere does Gordon express this longing for release as poignantly as in “Dissatisfied”, a wistful meditation on the ever-elusive brass ring that approximates Margaret Ann Rich’s “Life’s Little Ups And Downs”. “Baby wants a house and a car and a pony she can ride,” Gordon sings, his voice both weary and matter-of-fact. “She ain’t got ’em, she’s just dissatisfied.”
“That song is really personal,” admits Gordon. “The first time my wife heard it she was really upset with me, understandably, because it’s a pretty hard look. We’re driving through Belle Meade,” he continues, referring to the part of town where Nashville’s old money lives.
“We’re on our way to the Kroger in a rusty 1983 pickup and I turn and notice my wife looking out the window at the houses. And not that I’m not doing the same thing a little bit — that’s probably implicit, that desire not so much for the material things themselves, but for the implied peace that comes with that sort of situation.”
Gordon comes by this class-consciousness naturally. Although he grew up in a comfortable home — his mother teaches algebra, his dad works with computers — it’s his grandfather’s experience that resonates most deeply with Gordon. “My grandfather grew up in Smackover, Arkansas. He went to high school with Lefty Frizzell — just a wonderful cat who busted his ass all his life working in heating and air conditioning when he was smart enough, if he’d had the financial resources, to have gone to school and gotten out of that.”
As a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop whose poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly and Southern Poetry Review, Gordon is acutely aware of the distance he’s put between himself and his middle-class roots. “I had this wonderful little aesthete sort of existence in Iowa City,” says Gordon.
“You go to the bookstore, you go to the bar and you drink, and you talk about writing and you get up in the morning with a hangover and you write your poems. Part of that’s really wonderful, in that people are so passionate about ideas, but part of it’s just silly to me now.”
Perhaps, but in the midst of that indulgence, Gordon also played the economically depressed farm and factory towns of Eastern Iowa with singer-songwriter Bo Ramsey. As with his previous stint in the roadhouses of Northwestern Louisiana, that experience kept Gordon connected to the world of working men and women, something he doesn’t necessarily believe an artist has to live to portray.
“Forget lining up your bio to make it look like you worked in a factory for 15 years so that you can write a song,” bristles Gordon. “To me it’s either on the tape or it’s not. The tape doesn’t lie.”
Indeed, Illinois 5 a.m. — most of it produced by the E Street Band’s Garry Tallent — brims with empathy and passion. “Company Car” wouldn’t sound out-of-place on an album by Tallent’s former boss; “Junior’s Guitar” suggests Guitar Town-era Steve Earle; on “City of Refuge”, Gordon displays facility with the sanctified blues of Blind Willie Johnson.
Two Gordon originals not included on the album, both co-written with frequent collaborator Gwil Owen, have lately caught the ear of several roots music legends. Unreconstructed rockabilly great Sonny Burgess, who recorded for Sun Records in the ’50s, included a version of “Fast Train” on his self-titled 1996 CD for Rounder. All The King’s Men, an ad hoc supergroup anchored by former Elvis Presley sidemen D.J. Fontana and Scotty Moore and featuring guest stars including Keith Richards and Levon Helm, recorded “Deuce And A Quarter” for their Sweetfish Records disc released in August.
“It’s still a bit unreal,” Gordon says of these celebrity connections. “We didn’t even pitch those songs. They were from tapes that I’d made for Garry [Tallent], just some acoustic work tapes of songs that I wanted to put on my record.
“The next thing I know I’m in Oxford, Mississippi, doing a gig, and the phone rings: It’s my wife on the phone and I think something awful has happened. ‘There’s some weird message on the machine about Keith Richards cutting one of your songs,’ she says. And I said, ‘What?’ I’ve been here long enough that I don’t believe it until I hear it or see it in writing. Sure enough, three weeks later they cut it.”
— BILL FRISKICS-WARREN