Tell me about the "birth" of Durango. After all the records you've done over the years, are you still able to find new ways and break new ground when it comes to writing and recording music?
Yes. The first Coal Porters bluegrass effort, when we stopped being Western Electric due to our drummer's car accident, was a live album, the Chris Hillman Tribute Concerts. The next was How Dark This Earth Will Shine and it was recorded piecemeal, that is bit by bit. Not just the songs one by one over time but each part within each song, on that album, recorded over and over till it was correct. That is one way to get things perfect, yes, but it leaves you with a cold and sterile feel. I swore we would never do that again.
The third CD we made was Turn The Water On, Boy! and I had a member of the band, no longer with us, try to get us to record piecemeal again. Turn The Water On, Boy! Came out very well indeed and I am quite proud of it but it could have been even better if we had recorded it as live as possible. This is how everyone recorded till sometime in the 1960s when studio technology allowed such indulgences as endless overdubbing of each instrument onto its own track.
However I had just finished writing a book called Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, The Band & the Basement Tapes and I was fascinated that Dylan and The Band recorded that classic material completely live and in a garage (not a basement as I found out in researching the book) with a dog laying on the floor nearby and a old-fashioned stove coughing up coal dust every once in a while. In talking with Ed Stasium, the producer of the last Long Ryders album Two-Fisted Tales and Phil Spector's main engineer for years and years, he told me his son just engineered a Willie Nelson session and they still record that way; live with little baffling and few headphones. We chatted about Neil Young & Crazy Horse recording that way too, even today. So it was decided by Ed and myself this was the way to go. A live in the studio recording with few over dubs yet some great on the spot performances. Some vocals were done later but almost the rest of Durango is live, everything going at once and I feel strongly this is why the album is getting so many killer reviews.
What is the "mission" or "vision" behind ongoing adventures of The Coal Porters. Where do you want to see the music go?
I don't think of our music or anyone's music in these terms, sorry. I would like to see it go to the top of the charts but I suppose that is a lot to ask. If you want me to guess I could venture to say we'll do more of this mish-mash of punk attitude with traditional instrumentation but that is about all I could say.
The band sounds better than it ever has, very tight knit. What happens when you go into the studio? Does the magic happen right away?
The magic happens right away if the songs have been played over and over and over. Meaning there is little magic, mainly hard work and a lot of thought given into a project. We had played all the Durango songs live but this one of Neil's which is kinda a Neil solo song so all these songs tested live were fairly easy to get recorded. We knew, in other words, what we were doing, we did not sit around and say "what about this key?" or any of that stuff, we already had decided what key, what tempo and so forth. Then you add a world class producer/engineer like Ed Stasium, a guy who has recorded many, many gold records, and the task at hand becomes a lot easier. A lot!
About half of the band is from the UK. Is it your experience that English players approach bluegrass in different ways than American players?
Two of the Coal Porters are English, one Scottish, one Canadian and one Kentuckian, me. I would say British players not only approach bluegrass in different ways than American players I would say they approach music in a different way than American players. Period. One very noticeable difference is the Brit's are very hard to get excited or enthusiastic about any project. You know they are on the team when they keep on showing up. That's all you get emotionally, they won't say, indicate or give much away emotionally at all. Yet they arch eyebrows and in other ways show skepticism easily. If I was back living in Los Angeles and formed an act doing the same thing no one would show up at early rehearsals without going "oh man, this is such a cool idea..." and so on and so forth. You have a much more verbal, more openly supportive emotional safety net with Americans. This is cultural of course and I don't know why that is but it is certainly noticeable.
You've got some great people playing on this record, like Peter Rowan and Tim O'Brien and Ed Stasium producing the album. What do you think seasoned players like them can add to the band's output?
Seasoned players like Tim O'Brien and Peter Rowan draw the attention of some folks who like this kind of music to an album such as Durango, an album they might have missed had not they noticed Tim and Peter were on it. I know Tim a bit, he's a great guy, and I only met Peter Rowan once but we talked about Bill Monroe and he was incredibly cordial and I got to thinkin' later he might actually wanna be on our record anyway as we were doing his song! So they did performances we could not musically do and by doing so gave a de facto endorsement to our album...something I am extremely grateful for. This in turn leads some of their fans to check out Durango and that is all you could ask of anyone, to check out Durango as it is a fine album which quite frankly is worthy of exposure.
The album was recorded in the town of Durango, Colorado. What inspired you about that place?
We recorded in Durango because Ed Stasium lived just outside the town, we didn't pick it out of a list of studios or anything like that. If Ed still lived in New York City the album might have been called Brooklyn! However if there were ever two places which were opposites they would have to be Durango and Brooklyn. Or for that matter Durango and London. Durango is in the Rockies and it is high up and beautiful. If you have seen the cowboy TV show High Chaparral then you have some idea what the terrain looks like. Yet the town itself is one of those hip American towns like Austin, Texas or Chapel Hill, North Carolina full of ageing hippies and underpinned by a young hip college crowd from a university nearby. So the place was full of neat little shops and fun places to eat and drink.
Therefore, in a way, it was inspiring. By this I mean it focused us and inspired us to do our very best. We didn't really do anything different in Durango because of the merry surroundings of Durango. I could not say that because we knew what we were gonna do before the plane even landed in the USA. But it did push us to do our very best, you felt like you were in God's Country or something like that.
Where did the idea to cover Neil's Like A Hurricane come from? And how do you go about turning a classic song like that into a bluegrass song while still maintaining the integrity of the song?
A good song will stand up to any interpretation of it. There are reggae versions of Blue Moon Of Kentucky I love to bits for just one example. Our version of Like A Hurricane came about as a friend of ours at the Pocklington Arts Centre in Yorkshire was having a birthday party thrown for her by her friends and this birthday gal's fave singer is Neil Young so we were asked to work up a Neil Young song as a ;surprise for the party. This is the song we chose, it went over very well that evening and has been in the set ever since! I still enjoy playing it too, it is a cool song, the Long Ryders several times played it onstage with an act called Rain Parade so it brings back many happy memories for me.
The Coal Porters MySpace says "the world's first alt.bluegrass band". With all due respect - and I must emphasize that - aren't you "just" continuing what bands like Dillard & Clark, Country Gazette-era Burritos and to some extent the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band started doing forty years ago when they took bluegrass in a direction not previously heard, fusing it with rock n'roll?
I see your point but all those acts had drums, did they not? Country Gazette didn't, now that I think of it, but the other two did and also Dillard & Clark and NGDB had the heavy folk music influence. The Coal Porters are not a cross between rock and folk but rather what we do is perform traditional string band music with a punk attitude. You could say Gram Parsons got his bands to perform straight country music with a rock n' roll attitude and that Gene Clark's post-Byrds bands performed variants of folk music with a Dylanesque attitude, ours is definitely doing what the Long Ryders did with country music and country rock, the Ryders played that music with the attitude of guys who had been listening to the Ramones et al for seven years and that is what came out. Now the Coal Porters play string band music, or music such as old-timey and bluegrass, with the attitude and approach of folks who had heard The Cramps and The Slits and all that jazz.
Looking back on your own career, from the Long Ryders to Western Electric, your solo albums and The Coal Porters, do you see a kind of red thread going through everything you've done and the way you've done it?
The main thread I see running through it all is "critic's favorite...gets great reviews, has cult following". I would love to take things to the next level with Durango, it deserves a wider audience and the band is so much fun live, 'tis a shame for folks not to see it or, worse, to never hear about us.
I will say one other thing. There is an honest musical consistency and approach in what I have done. To put it another way, I saw an OBE or MBE given to a pop musician the other day. Fine. In a career retrospective article in one of the music papers about this particular artist I noticed he changed musical direction and image the way most of us change our socks. He'd been in some prog-rock band, then embraced punk, then gone skinny tie pop/new wave, the New Romantic...I mean it was embarrassing looking at this person's career, successful as it admittedly had been.
I am not that kinda artist. I primarily if not exclusively work in elemental, basic, roots music. The world will not have to suffer through my jazz-fusion album, my classic symphonic wet dreams or my tribute album to Mikey Dread.
Going back to the 70's and the LA country rock scene. You wrote the liner notes for the cd re-issue of Gene Clark's amazing No Other album. Do you think there's a bit of Gene Clark, the spirit of his genius, on every record you've ever done?
My early records didn't have much to do with Gene. I don't know how much the new one, Durango, does. He was a nice man, I liked hangin' around with him a lot but he never conquered his love of drink and certain drugs. He has a real disease with those things, a true battle and it is a complete tragedy he lost. When I thought of the idea of having him sing on that Long Ryders song (Ivory Tower from the album Native Sons – ed), he was just about at rock bottom, it was very sad. I mean it was hard to find him...back in '84 he was only renting a room, just a room, at a guy's house, he didn't even have the dough to rent an entire apartment. Musically speaking I was probably under McGuinn's spell more during that time and then about ten years ago I decided a cross between Steve Earle and Bill Monroe was just what the world needed. Or Gene Clark and Bill Monroe if you all prefer, ha.
Here's a question I'd really like to ask you. Last year, I did an interview with John Einarson about his Burrito Brothers biography, Hot Burrito. In that book, Chris Hillman - to some extent - demolishes the notion that Gram Parsons wasn't the lone mastermind of neither Sweetheart of the Rodeo-era Byrds or the Flying Burrito Brothers, and that Chris himself played an equally important role. I know you have high regards for both of them, having played tribute concerts to both of them and written the Gene Clark documentary, Fallen Angel, but what's your personal view on what the book tells us? Has time left us with a misleading picture of what happened back then?
I think two key things here: one), Chris Hillman is quite correct to point out he and Gram collaborated AS EQUALS in the Byrds and particularly in the Flying Burrito Bros. I have never ever understood people thinking or claiming, for example, Gram did all the main work on Gilded Palace Of Sin. That just isn't fair, Hillman co-wrote Sin City and so on, no question a 50/50 collaboration on that song.
Two), the John Einarson Burritos book is weak in that it keeps on presenting the Chris Hillman point of view...that is fair enough...but when I re-read it the second time again I was struck by the constant running down of Gram both as a person and as an artist. No doubt Gram was a pain in the ass to be in a band with but to go an entire book without ever representing a case for Gram or explaining why Gram was messed up (poor parenting by this folks, family alcoholism, etc.) is neither good journalism or good writing.
A few years ago you wrote a fine book about the recording of Dylan and The Band's Basement Tapes, and this year will also see the release of another Dylan biography, this one about his Rolling Thunder years. Why do you find these two periods in Dylan's career so interesting? I'm in no way disagreeing with you, but no book has handled its subject so meticulously.
The newbook is not out till June now and is called Shelter From The Storm. I put alotta work into it, I pray it does well. There are interviews with McGuinn, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Arlo Guthrie, T-Bone Burnette,multi-instrumentalistDavid Mansfield, writer Lary "Ratso" Sloman and various roadies and sound and cameramen. I even got to speak to tour manager Lou Kemp, Dylan's childhood friend from Hibbing. The Basement Tapes are interesting because, like the Beach Boys' Smile project, there was such an air of mystery around them, I felt I wanted to peel that mystery away. The "gypsy circus" period of the mid-1970s of Dylan's with the Rolling Thunder Review and Renaldo & Clara is equally unique: here we have a rock star who has always spoken of organizing a traveling road show with various guest artists coming and going and then, after years of chat, finally doing exactly what he said he would! And besides that I try to explain why on earth he made a movie at the same time he was on tour and so on. I don't have alotta answers to things in my songs but I try to have them in my books.
Final question. Yourself and The Long Ryders have often in the past been credited as the fathers of alternative country. What's your own opinion when it comes to being "judged" by history?
What about the Coal Porters being the founders of "alt-bluegrass"? I reckon we invented it, we sure as hell invented the term.
But in direct answer to the question I don't really mind so much as long as they spell my name correctly. And it is Long Ryders with a "y" and Coal Porters like a chunk of coal and not like the songwriter!
The Coal Porters’ Durangois out now on Prima Records. The band will also be playing at this month’s South By South West. More info at Sidgriffin.com and Myspace.com/TheCoalPorters
