True to the Roots

by Monte Dutton

  If ever I desire another guitar—and that's undoubtedly going to happen—then I conclude, to paraphrase Jerry Jeff, that Vince Pawless, he's the man to see.

  To Thine Own Self Be True

  Austin, Texas I December 2003

  Slaid Cleaves lives in a modest wood house not far from downtown Austin. His travels have forced him to become adept at basic automotive repair, and the old van out front matches the image conjured up by some of the stories from the road he has posted on his Web site, slaid.com.

  Slaid.com. Perfect. A simple web site name for a songwriter who specializes in simplicity.

  Cleaves tells stories about simple people with simple problems into which they descended simply. There's sadness inherent in their plight but also a sense of hope. Cleaves's tormented people still have hope.

  "That probably started with me being such a Springsteen fan," he says. "I have an affinity for people who are struggling, and that's kind of stayed with me all this time.

  "Oh, it's definitely observations," he adds. "Things someone in my family has gone through, or stories I've heard. I'm inspired by movies and other beautiful stories. Most of my songs are observational. Usually there are one or two songs that are confessional."

  His latest compilation, Wishbones, includes a song inspired in part by Laura Hillenbrand's book Seabiscuit. "Quick as Dreams" is written from the perspective of a young 1930s era jockey who, many years later, in the twilight of life, composes an ode to a fallen colleague.

  Cleaves, like predecessor Jerry Jeff Walker, is a transplanted Texan, although he hasn't reinvented himself as a Texan the way Walker has. Walker is a Texan; Cleaves just lives there. But like Walker, he grew up in the Northeast—Walker in New York, Cleaves in Maine and Massachusetts—and like Walker, he found a musical home in Austin after kicking around and living somewhat the gypsy life.

  "I never thought of that before," Cleaves says. "I just met [Walker] last week for the first time. He organized a caroling thing and brought a bunch of people over to his house. We all got on a bus and went to the hospice and the children's hospital."

  There is an appealing naivete to Cleaves, so much so that there seems to be a disparity between his quiet personality and his song content rife with tempests and inner conflicts.

  This interview seems more notable for Cleaves playing off and complimenting my questions than, well, complementing them. He is almost painfully nice, and the answers are thoughtful. There just isn't much to them.

  I ask about his views on religion, and he replies: "Churches are political organizations. That's what it comes down to."

  Continuing on this theme, I offer my own view that people who suffer from aids are kind of the lepers of this age, to which he replies: "Wow, that's perfect, yeah. I agree."

  Maybe he plays all his cards in the writing of songs. After all, he makes money off those choice nuggets. He doesn't have to rhyme to stir the soul, though. Cleaves's Web site in cludes commentaries from the road that are masterful, most notably a tale titled "The Perfect Gig," which almost reads like a short story.

  "My folks were really into music," he says, finally elaborating a bit. "I lived in Virginia until I was five. My folks, from high school on, were real music buffs. My mom was into folk and jazz and some country. She was into Pete Seeger, Mahalia Jackson. My dad was more of a rockabilly guy: Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and others."

  I offer my notion that Elvis was overrated.

  "Yeah, songwriting wise," he says, "but Elvis was such an icon. He was so beautiful."

  Cleaves is almost itinerant in wandering across the country from club to club. Well, not always clubs. His schedule lists appearances at Unitarian churches in New England; the venues are as disparate as they are extensive.

  "I was on the road almost constantly for a couple of years, yeah, just because I had gathered up all the things I needed to tour, which I had always wanted to do," he says. "I had a band together, I had a record that was getting some airplay, and I had a booking agent, a little bit of history and a little bit of momentum. When my last record [prior to Wishbones], Broke Down, came out in 2000, I felt everything was in place for me to tour and take advantage of what I had going.

  "That was the album I had been trying to make for ten years. Everything just came together perfectly, and I started playing two hundred shows a year. I loved it. It was fun to see all the new places and to find an audience developing out there."

  What Broke Down gave Cleaves was a niche. It was an album that declared a sound all his own. It was popular in the folk community, although Cleaves doesn't really see himself as a member.

  "I just had all this music playing as a kid, and you know what? It was really Americana music, even though at that time there wasn't such a thing," he says. "Woody Guthrie. Buddy Holly. Buck Owens. Hank Williams. I had a good early start, good early influences.

  "Of course, I found myself getting into what everyone else was listening to at school. Through friends I came across Bruce Springsteen and the Clash. Those guys became my heroes: the Clash, Springsteen, Tom Petty, Tom Waits. From reading about them, I found out who their heroes were. I rediscovered Hank and Woody through those guys. I remembered hearing those guys: Hank and Woody, Buddy and Elvis. I came full circle, and I think that's what led me to becoming my own person music wise. 'Lost Highway' is a great song, and 'Long Gone Lonesome Blues' is one of my favorites."

  Cleaves went to college in Boston, at Tufts University. One can imagine him sitting with a guitar, playing for tips at some coffeehouse.

  "Looking back, you would think—but that's not the way it was with me," he says. "Growing up in a little town in Maine, I wanted to go to the big city. Boston was only an hour from where I grew up. So I moved to Boston and at the time, in the early eighties, I was still into Springsteen and REM, and then into hardcore shows. I wasn't really heavy into that, but that was kind of an exciting thing, kind of bubbling up at that time. I never really heard of a lot of music that I listen to now during my years in college. I was playing on the street corners, in Harvard Square, but I went to hardcore shows all around Cambridge and Boston. As soon as I turned twenty-one, I started going to rock venues and rockabilly shows. I really don't have deep roots in the folk tradition, other than some of the music I was exposed to as a kid. It was really more of a pop and rock and country tradition.

  "Yeah, I kind of am a folk singer now, kind of by default. I had a band in Maine, kind of a folk-rock band, an Americana band [the Moxie Men]. An acoustic guitar, bass, and drums. We did some Hank Williams, but we did a lot of wacky covers.

  "I moved here alone and got hooked up with the Kerrville [as in the Kerrville, Texas, Folk Festival] folks. It was only after I moved to Texas that I discovered more of the coffeehouse scene. That was my career for a few years."

  To Cleaves the irresistible allure of the road is enmeshed in drawing emotion from an audience, no matter the size.

  "I think one of the most wonderful things about being an entertainer is making a connection with people," he says. "Other things are secondary—if you're making money at a gig or not, if there are beautiful people at a gig or not—as long as you're making a connection. If it's a small crowd, or at a coffeehouse, or a club crowd, you can tell when you're making that connection. It's a beautiful thing.

  "Connecting with people is a two way thing, and that's what we're all after. That's what I'm after, anyway.

  "There's a great Springsteen line about not being able to tell the difference between courage and desperation. People who hang on long enough are the people who do well. Stick with it and work harder than everybody else. It's not necessarily the most talented people who succeed. It's the ones who stick to it and persevere. The ones who don't give in to defeat."

  "Connecting" is inherently about honesty, although that trait may complicate the means by which it takes place. Write the songs, then go out on the road and find the people who appreciate them. The collection of songs, all written by Cleaves, on Wishbones is achi
ngly honest. Coming up with a worthy successor to Broke Down wasn't easy. The prospect tortured him.

  "That's what I felt when I wrote this batch of songs for the new record," he says. "I've been worrying about how to write a new record. Broke Down was the record I'd been trying to make for ten years. As soon as I finished it, I knew the next one would be really tough. I'd kind of achieved this goal I'd been working on for a really long time. I just felt like the songs came together, and the record came together, and I had no idea what to do next. I knew I couldn't do anything better. It took a couple years of me worrying about it before I started writing again. I had to take the time to write and realize, after writing a bunch of crappy songs, that I had to start writing songs for my own needs and my own enjoyment.

  "I wrote a song about one of the chapters in Seabiscuit, which is such a beautiful book, so, you know, I wrote a song about jockeys. I wrote a song about illegal aliens. A friend of mine has quite a story to tell. They're totally uncommercial songs. I put little things away. I can't think commercially when I write. I can only think about what amuses me and what I find interesting."

  The most significant development in the whole interview is Cleaves's definition of Americana, the musical genre that is maddeningly difficult to encompass, what with the membership of everyone from John Prine to Steve Earle to the Jayhawks.

  "There are four or five different categories of Americana," he says. "There are people like me: singer songwriters with a folk country background. There are guys like Jack [Ingram], who are basically rock acts with a more storytelling, country style of songwriting. There is also the alternative, outside-the-norm, the Bloodshot Records, with kind of a rock background. All those Chicago guys, Robbie Fulks, and people like that."

  Cleaves pauses for a moment, perhaps considering whether to deliver the clincher.

  Then, finally, he says, "The only thing that I can come up with, the only common thing between all these Americana artists, is that we don't sell a lot of records."

  How's that for being brutally honest? But, wait, there's more. The vision isn't quite as pessimistic as it seems.

  "I call it noncommercial country," he says. "It's kind of selfdefeating, but I just think . . . well, the Dixie Chicks, if they weren't so popular, they'd be Americana. They're not because they're too big to be Americana.

  "I never even thought I was material for [commercial success]. I never thought I was talented enough, or original enough, to be a big star. I have this trade, you know, and it's enough to make a decent living and pay off my debts. It was really hard, the first ten years or so. I maxed out my credit cards, and it was hard on my wife and family. When Broke Down came out and had some air play, I was able to slowly start paying off my debts. With my next record I'll be debt free.

  "That's all I ever wanted."

  Not the Way They Do Things "Up North"

  Key West, Florida I November 2003 & 2004

  Havana is closer to Key West than Miami. A fair amount of Canada is closer to my home in South Carolina. The cultural difference is even greater.

  Where else in the United States does one encounter a rooster walking around, looking right at home, on a downtown sidewalk? Or a Chinese man explaining to a T-shirt salesman that the term flirt is not appropriate to the romantic process in his native land?

  Ethnic diversity is the norm, and it's an oversimplification to equate the context with the presence of Hispanics or the proximity to the Caribbean isles. For some reason there is a lot of French spoken in Key West. The waitress at a seafood restaurant explains, when I query her about her dialect, that she is from Poland, and one of the highlights of my two day visit is watching an Irish fiddler, one Bobby O'Donovan, sit in with singer guitarist David Goodman at the Hog's Breath Saloon.

  I want to take a four-hour boat trip to the Dry Tortugas, the site of an old American fort from the 1800s, but a few complications—we journalists never really get rid of them—intervene. So, for two nights and most of two afternoons, I wander around from watering hole to watering hole, listening to live music. The Dry Tortugas will have to wait.

  What mainly happens down here is "bumping into."

  For instance, I bump into Chris Clifton, a brilliant guitarist whose wife, Sherry, (a) owns Hickory Motor Speedway in North Carolina, and (b) is the sister of Teresa Earnhardt, the widow of nascar icon Dale Earnhardt.

  I bump into a very loud, tattooed, bald, and gregarious fellow from a seacoast town in the south of England. The bloke is positively entranced with Florida's appeal, he and his mates having partied their way from one end of it to the other.

  I bump into a relatively older woman taking her Pekingese for a walk and wearing a "Women do Have All the Answers" T-shirt. A woman I'm guessing is her daughter tags along. Based on a few minutes' observation, I can attest to the fact that the older woman positively rules the younger one.

  I also bump into the most incredible parade of powerboats, arriving in town for the annual races off shore. The sleek watercraft have more in common with the space shuttle than the standard conception of a powerboat. During the parade one boat, dubbed American Dream, features two cute young girls, perhaps ten years old, singing "The Star Spangled Banner" over and over as they wave little flags. Behind them, more mature beauties toss beaded necklaces into the crowd.

  I bump into an older man, painted silver, who is standing on the sidewalk impersonating a statue, holding a toy pistol from which he occasionally squirts water at passersby. Attached to his cowboy garb is a sign that reads, "Your coins are my livelihood."

  I work for a newspaper. Perhaps I should get one of those signs.

  The best music isn't always on the radio. It isn't always in a huge open air pavilion or indoor coliseum. Sometimes it's in a seedy little bar on a backstreet, and sometimes the performer makes his living not from royalties and fees but from the contents of a tip jar.

  Marc-Alan Barnette has written songs for artists like Shelby Lynne and John Berry. He conducts "song and performance evaluations" in Nashville to help other aspiring songwriters. He and his wife, Jane, who is a nurse in a small Alabama town, periodically travel here to play the 5:00 to 9:00 p.m. shift at the Hog's Breath Saloon for the week.

  David Goodman typically plays the Hog's Breath on Mondays and Tuesdays then heads back up the road to his home in Jupiter, Florida. "I've been around now for about thirty years singing songs and selling beer," he says.

  Rob Sweet is a small, slender man in his twenties from Lexington, South Carolina, who traded in a formal education for an informal one. There were times when he gave blood every few days just to help pay the bills. He wrote a song about it, aptly titled "Bleedin' the Blues." Sweet's learned a lot about life, sitting on a stool at Captain Tony's, mixing in the songs of John Prine, David Allan Coe, and Johnny Cash with a few of his own and selling a few CDs to the friendly, sympathetic patrons who drift in and out.

  Sweet is young enough still to be taken with the vagabond's life. He seems oblivious to any ambitions of widespread commercial success. He just does his thing, man. Keeping his head barely above water seems to be all he wants right now. Chatting with the beer drinking tourists between songs, he has a disarming honesty. He recounts a story about how he was once inspired by the experience of attending a Grateful Dead concert on acid. Stockbrokers and housewives nod sympathetically, and for a moment it is the young guitarist, looking older than his years, who seems to be living the good life.

  At the Hog's Breath, Goodman plays a blues version of the bluegrass classic "Rollin' in My Sweet Baby's Arms." An hour or so later Barnette performs a blues version of "Rocky Top." Barnette's own songs reflect the Nashville struggle. They are built around hooks. The clever turn of a phrase comes first, then the song is built around it. I don't consider that the best way to write a song, but it is the way that is most commercially accepted.

  Goodman talks about life's commitments and recalls his youth, when he set off in a sailboat with a band of friends, wearing little more than the clo
thes on his back, only to find out his mates had quite an extended trip in mind. It was the first week of June, and they told him they planned on coming home at the end of August. He actually returned home on September 17. And, yes, a song came from that rite of passage, one called "Isle of Trinidad."

  Sometimes, Goodman says, kiddingly, "I think maybe I could come back down to Key West and get a shopping cart [to live in]," and it seems right that to this free spirit that idea would be tempting.

  Key West is obviously alluring because the musical scene there is unique and irresistible. Perhaps that's because it has evolved all by its lonesome down at the end of a string of islands. Perhaps it is unique precisely because it is remote.

  A lot of it isn't my cup of tea. The tourist culture brings with it hundreds of respectable types who don't particularly care to empathize with acid trips. More than once I saunter into a bar only to be launched out the door by a tidal wave of Neil Diamond. Then there's the one joint where the guy onstage delights in screaming profane putdowns at the audience. I guess that's why the audience is there, but I've had a few beers and am feeling weary. I don't even have a chance to order another lager when the guitar strapped Don Rickles starts heckling me.

  I turn around, blurt something akin to "Hand me a microphone, asshole, and I'll give you a run for your money," turn again, toward the door, and walk out.

  Life's too short. I know I'll never get that kind of treatment from Rob Sweet or David Goodman.

  The quality of the bands at the raucous Sloppy Joe's is impressive, but it's all straight out of classic rock stations. Also, there's something just a tad depressing about watching all the forty somethings flicking their lighters at the umpteenth Doobie Brothers cover. Of course, they'd probably make the same observation about me. To each his own . . . we're all growing older.

  It's pretty hard to spend much time here without at least once hearing someone say, "We don't care how you do it up north." That wouldn't play too well if not for masses of the orthodox willing to renounce the company line for a few irresistible days and nights.