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Hi Chuck. Thanks for doing this. Last year’s Let Freedom Ring! was, in my opinion, your finest solo record to date. What do you think made this record different from your previous work?
The goal for me has always been to write songs that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to sing in ten or twenty years. Out of all the records I’ve made, this one was definitely the most influenced by the time it was written in, but it still ended up feeling very universal. I don’t think there’s anything dated about it.
You recorded the album in Mexico City, and the process is now somewhat famous for having included pretty much everything from regular power cuts to you being right in the middle of the Bird Flu break out. How much did these circumstances influence the recordings?
Oh man, it was everything, really. I wanted it to be an adventure, but I couldn’t have predicted the power going out nine times a day, I couldn’t have predicted that we would have an earth quake or that we would land in Mexico City just as the Black Plague had arrived! I couldn’t have predicted those things, but I did know that it was going to be an adventure. Probably because I have watched too many Herzog movies. But the pressure brought everybody closer together in the studio, and I think you can hear that on the record.
Why did you actually chose to record in Mexico City?
I just wanted to go somewhere energized. I feel like the process of recording has gotten too complacent around all the technology and the availability of recording facilities, and I just wanted to go back to that kind of punk rock spirit where everyone’s crowded up in a room together, sweating and just playing the damn songs.
Let Freedom Ring! sounds, like you say, more energetic than both Age Of Miracles and Soap And Water. Was making a proper rock n’roll record something you had wanted to do for a long time?
Yeah. When we made those two records, I’d lay on the couch watching YouTube videos and thinking about whether we could get a children’s choir to sing on the record and stuff like that. Like I said, it just got too complacent, and the only direction to take music was back, really. But the thing is, I had always wanted to do that, to make a guitar based record. I just never had the material for that treatment. But I did for this record. I would never compare myself to Lou Reed or people like that, but this could be my “New York”.
So you wrote these songs for a guitar based album?
I was probably five or six songs into it before I realised that I wasn’t just writing songs, but actually writing songs for a rock record. That’s when I started looking at it as one piece. Any song that didn’t fit into the record would get tossed.
Tell me about ‘Dreaming Waylon’s Dreams’.
Well, it was mostly done on a kind of a dare. We were in a recording studio in 2006 and I was bragging to the others about how well I knew that particular record and how I could recite it all from memory. We cut one song and then we cut two songs, and suddenly we were recreating the whole thing. Initially it wasn’t anything I thought anybody would ever hear. It wasn’t until later that I realised that I had gone so far out of my way to separate myself from alternative country over the last ten years, but by doing this, I was reminded that ‘Dreaming My Dreams’ was actually the single biggest influence on me when I made my first solo record. So I went full circle with this record, and if you look at the cover of Waylon’s record, it even has the same sepia toned colours as my first solo record, “Brother Aldo”. In a way it was me kinda returning to folk-country music.
I know bootleg-versions of the album have been floating around on the Internet for a couple of years. Why the decision to give it a proper release now?
At a certain point, you might as well get in on the action. I wanted to make it available to all the Everyday Joe’s who don’t spend all their time trawling the Internet for bootlegs…
‘Dreaming My Dreams’ is certainly one of Waylon’s best albums, and you can’t really argue with taste and the fact that this has meant so much to you, but why this particular album? Why not ‘I’ve Always Been Crazy’, ‘Lonesome, On’ry And Mean’ or some of his old stuff?
Jack Clement, the producer of ‘Dreaming My Dreams’, was really the first guy that enabled Waylon to be more of an auteur, in the sense that he let Waylon pick his own material and use his own musicians. And also, on this record Waylon played most of the lead-guitar, so in a way it’s the definitive Waylon Jennings record, and it was a lot of how I model my own records. It’s got a little bit of r’n’b and some blues, and it also has some beautiful ballads and a lot of humour. It has it all, and if you listen to the first song, you can tell that the Stones were listening to it when they made ‘Some Girls’.
Waylon made that record as a tribute to his own heroes, and now you’ve rerecorded it as a tribute to your hero. Is that also one of the reasons you chose ‘Dreaming My Dreams’?
I didn’t choose it, it kind of chose me. If I was going to cover an album, it had to be an album I knew by heart, otherwise it would just be too much work. I didn’t want to have to learn anything. I ended up just trying to re-imagining it the way I remember hearing it.
How do you go about that? I mean, this album was made at a very distinct time in Waylon’s career when he was going through his famous Outlaw period, fighting Nashville with this very unique country sound.
The thing about the folk-country rock n’roll tradition, which I really love, is that I’m a connoisseur of the three-chord song, and what you bring to a three-chord song when you’re a performer and an interpreter, is really what matters. And that’s what’s great about folk and country music, it’s for everybody. I don’t think I could have done that with a record that came from a more European tradition. European records are meant to be played the way they’re written on the page, you know, like classical music. But this was a record that lent itself to interpretation. It’s just one of those things. You can look under the hood and find new ways to make the motor running.
From a European perspective, Waylon Jennings has often been sort of overlooked, perhaps even overshadowed by the likes of Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash and to some extent, even Merle Haggard. Do you feel that the Waylon Jennings legacy has been neglected by history?
You know, it’s kind of difficult for me to measure. I know that Waylon was a fighter, and I can relate to that. Willie’s approach was more Zen, and continues to be more Zen, and Willie’s the kind of person who doesn’t like to mess with the natural order of things. Waylon even talks about that in his book (Waylon – An Autobiography, co-written with Lenny Kaye –ed.), how frustrated he was with The Highwaymen that Willie just kind of let things roll over him. Waylon was his own man, and I relate to that.
There are certain parallels between the way Waylon approached country music and the way you have, both of you coming at it from different angles. Was that also part of the inspiration you got from him, his way of going against the grain, refusing to play by the rules?
Yeah, I’m always inspired by mavericks. And Waylon’s legacy and how he was able to do what he did within the machine, has definitely been an inspiration to me as. I’m equally inspired by people like Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, and how they were able to get out from the studio system in Hollywood, and that gave us people like Quentin Tarantino. These were all auteurs who managed to express themselves and still keep their skinny feet in the door of pop culture.
You worked with Jace Everett on his recent “Red Revelations” album, and he’s probably more connected with Nashville than you are. What is your relationship with the “established” country music industry in Nashville these days?
I’m not even convinced that I’m in the music business. My early records came out on British labels, so we would tour the UK, and when it came to North America, we would perhaps play the west coast or something. North America was always so vast, and I thought in my own way that if I ignored it long enough, it would actually go away. But Jace comes from the Nashville machine, and I don’t have anything against the Nashville machine, but very little of what I do overlaps with it. Around 1997 I had been dropped and I was broke and sort of strung out, so I made a couple of trips to Music Row and got some songs cut. And that sort of saved me. I don’t have any anti-Nashville feelings like a lot of other people are, because I’ve never lived there and therefore never had to endure the daily drudgery of it all.
From your early days as a member of Green On Red and up until today, how do you view your musical journey? What’s your own legacy?
I feel like it’s my nature to want to be a contrarian amongst the contrarians. The thing that’s appealing to me about alternative country is that it’s easy to play. It’s not necessarily easy to play well, but you know, it’s easy to play, and that’s why I got into music in the first place. I think I’ve been kicking against it ever since. Really, in my heart, I think that any kind of scene or movement or whatever you want to call No Depression or Americana, well, just any kind of music that can turn a kid onto Townes Van Zandt, Mickey Newbury, Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams, is a great thing. That’s how I learned about music. The Clash told me Allen Ginsberg and The Clash told me about Joe Ely and Joe Ely told me about Townes Van Zandt. That’s the great thing about Americana. You gotta fuck with people, but that’s cool! (laughs)
Chuck Prophet’s Let Freedom Ring! is out now on Cooking Vinyl. Dreaming Waylon’s Dreams is available on Décor Records. For more on Chuck, go to Chuckprophet.com
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