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Dolly parton H buck owens H jimmy webb H marty stuart H shovels & rope H the band perry H ricky skaggs
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Country 2
january 2014 • Issue 2
36
Dolly Parton The country icon who proved herself ‘nobody’s fool’ retraces her remarkable five-decade career.
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Buck Owens With his autobiography hitting the shelves, we celebrate the late king of The Bakersfield Sound.
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Shovels & Rope The tale of husband and wife duo Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst’s accidental success.
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Samantha Crain The otherworldly Oklahoman singer talks us through her existential folk-blues.
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Jimmy Webb He penned pop’s most potent heartbreakers, but he could raise hell with the best of them.
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Howe Gelb The adventurous
Dolly Parton
Arizonan discusses songwriting, Giant Sand and keeping things positive.
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Her glorious rise from doldrums to Dollywood.
Reverend Horton Heat The Texan psychobilly figurehead lists the original country shredders who inspired him.
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The Band Perry With global domination on their horizon, we meet the hitmakers who keep it in the family.
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Ones To Watch in 2014 Come meet tomorrow’s stars of twang.
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Trent Dabbs & Amy Stroup The songwriters behind TV drama Nashville reveal all. alamy, getty
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Ricky Skaggs A performer since the 62 Jimmy webb
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age of six, Skaggs preached the bluegrass gospel ever since.
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january 2014 • Issue 2
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The Grit News on the latest happenings in country, including tour info, new releases and details of who’s earning what, plus the skinny on some exciting new contenders coming into range.
23 Objects Of Desire
Eyeball and possibly win the ultimate country acoustic guitar, the Gibson J-200.
Marty Stuart
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The Nashville legend kicks off his exclusive new column!
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Marty Stuart The musician and photographer celebrates bad boys like Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash.
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Grilled We quiz the wonderful Lindi Ortega on her teen years, her Canadian roots and making it in Nashville.
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From The Horse’s Mouth The grisly tale of how Spade Cooley lost his mind and murdered his wife, in the words of those who were there.
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Playback Taking an in-depth look at Jimmie Rodgers’ Blue Yodel and how it changed the face of country.
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My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys Nashville-born, New York-based Laura Cantrell names the country artists who shaped her.
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You’ll find all the new and newly reissued albums, DVDs and books here in The Round Up. Our downhome panel of aficionados review and rate everything you need to keep on keeping it country… 104 albums 4 classicrockmagazine.com
114 reissues
120 stuff
From rags to riches, from holler to Hollywood, from country bumpkin to iconic one-woman industry, Dolly Parton’s story is the embodiment of the American Dream. On the eve of a new album and a world tour, the multifaceted artist reveals some of the biggest challenges and hurdles she’s had to overcome. Words: Bill DeMain
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alamy
Blonde ambition: Dolly set out to do things her own way.
dolly parton
alamy, getty x5
Main: onstage in Chicago, 1977. Below: she started appearing on TV as a little girl.
Voice of the beehive: in Nashville, 1965.
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ne day in 1975, Dolly Parton got the phone call that all songwriters back then dreamed about. Elvis Presley was making a new album and he wanted to record her song I Will Always Love You. A No.1 country Tempestuous partnership: Dolly smash for Dolly the year before, it was written with her co-star about what she calls “the painfully heartPorter Wagoner. wrenching time” spent with her singing partner Porter Wagoner. Significantly, it was also the first song Dolly penned for her own publishing company. honest, it wasn’t Elvis. It was the Colonel. And thank God I said no, because So the prospect of The King unleashing his gusty vibrato that song made me more money than all of the others I’d written put together. on that towering “I-eee-I…” chorus was doubly thrilling – it was sure If I’d given up half the publishing then I would’ve made half the money, but to be a crossover hit that would put the royal in royalties. much more than that, I would’ve lost half the pride in it. The fact that I wrote But there was a catch. and published the song by myself just made the whole thing more special.” “Elvis loved the song,” Dolly says. “So [RCA producer] It wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last that Felton Jarvis notified me and I was so excited. Though I’d someone tried to take advantage of Dolly Parton. Maybe had a few chances to meet Elvis, I never had. I think I just they were misled by the blonde wigs, the impossible curves, wanted him to always be the way he was in my mind. He the girlish giggle. She may refer to herself as a “Backwoods was so spiritual and out there anyway, I didn’t want nothing Barbie,” but as she made clear in one of her early hits, “this to blow the image. But they were inviting me to the studio dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool.” Her remarkable 50-plus to hear him doing my song. Then Felton said: ‘But Elvis year ride through the music business is like a slalom through has to have half the publishing on the song. Everything an obstacle course that she’s navigated with integrity, he records, unless it’s already a standard, he gets half the keen intelligence and a drive to constantly expand her publishing.’ I said: ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t give my publishing creative horizons and reinvent herself. While most of her Norah Jones to nobody. Not half, not 10 per cent, not any of it. If he contemporaries are either retired or recycling hit medleys for “The little twists and turns Dolly’s loves the song and the song is that good, then he’ll record tourists, Dolly is still moving forward, revealing new aspects voice takes, even when she’s it anyway. And if he don’t, well, just say that I’m flattered of herself, from writing a Broadway musical to founding singing a harmony for someone with the thought.’” a childhood literacy programme in Tennessee to keeping in else, are some of the most This song credit-sharing gambit had been going on since constant touch with three million followers on Twitter. Her magical moments I’ve ever heard 1956, when Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, realised new album, Blue Smoke, mixes the stripped-down immediacy on record. Of course, she’s also that the serious dough was in music publishing. Sadly, some of the acclaimed bluegrass records she’s made over the past an amazing songwriter and one writers sold out. Dolly didn’t. She recalls: “Everybody told of the most fun people I’ve ever decade with what Dolly calls “some more modern, rockin’ been around.” me I was crazy. ‘You’re saying no to Elvis Presley?!’ To be things.” And whether she’s pouring her still-supple classicrockmagazine.com 39
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Best known for penning stone-cold classics such as Wichita Lineman, and for his long creative partnership with Glen Campbell, Jimmy Webb also epitomised the rock’n’roll lifestyle. Here, he looks back on the crazy years of raising hell… Words: Max Bell
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hanksgiving Day, 2001. Jimmy Webb is just about to go on stage at Feinstein’s at the Loews Regency, New York. It’s a supper club event and the men in suits and the ladies in cocktail dresses are nursing Manhattans and whiskey sours, and occasionally someone will pop off to the restrooms for a refreshing toot, because, well, everybody does. Webb does too, or rather he did 10 minutes ago. Now he’s rubbing his fingers nervously and chewing his teeth. He’s made a big decision. He is going to clean up his act and perform live without a drink or Peruvian flake in his system for the first time since – what – 1966? “I was terrified,” he admits “I didn’t think I could go through the evening sober.” The door opens and in walks Kenny Rankin, the jazz singer whose version of Blackbird knocked Paul McCartney out to the extent that he got Rankin to perform it when he and John Lennon were inducted into the Songwriters Hall Of Fame in 1987 – a year after Webb’s own induction, incidentally. Rankin is a recovering alcoholic himself, one year straight. Webb spills out his dilemma. “I feel like I’m jumping off the edge of a cliff. Kenny reached in his pocket and pulled out his oneyear medallion and said: ‘I want you to hold this for me.’” Twelve years later, Jimmy Webb is sitting in a hotel room in west London. It’s Halloween and he’s dressed all in black. A big, burly guy with strong traces of his Elk City, Oklahoma, twang still evident and a rich burr beneath that almost sounds like Jimmy Stewart. A slow talker and mover, Webb is nursing his umpteenth Diet Coke of the afternoon. He eyes the copy of Reunion, the album he made with his best friend Glen Campbell in 1974, which Country has thrown on the table as an icebreaker. “Oh, dear Glen,” he says. “He’s been better. His health is good, more’s the pity cos he’ll probably live forever. But his short term memory is pretty bad [Campbell was diagnosed with advanced Alzheimer’s disease three years ago]. I don’t foresee any more tours or anything of that nature. The career has packed up.” 64 classicrockmagazine.com
He picks up the sleeve of Reunion and smiles. “I like this album but it didn’t sell and nobody really cared. That’s him and me in my front yard. We dragged a nine-foot concert grand into the garden. Jeez, was I ever that young? I’m laughing because Glen was forever cracking bad, tasteless jokes. We were an odd couple. I was like Karl Marx and he’s Genghis Khan but somehow we found common ground to make a lot of good music together for a long time. Honestly, without being smarmy, there’s a lesson in there: you don’t have to agree with someone jot for jot to get things done.” The Webb-Campbell partnership produced some of the most exquisite songs in pop history: By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Wichita Lineman, Where’s The Playground Susie and Galveston for a start. Campbell was Webb’s voice, but his muse was a young girl fresh out of Colton High School, California named Suzy Ronstadt, Linda’s elder sister. “Yeah I did write a lot of songs for and about her,” he recalls wistfully. “I dated her in high school and she married another guy.” The first Suzy song is Up, Up And Away, which Webb gave to The 5th Dimension. The most famous Suzy song is MacArthur Park, written about the place where they would meet by the duck pond and the children’s playground to hold hands. Where’s The Playground Susie is from the same locale. “Yeah, that’s right. If I was writing a musical that would be a good link. We used to take lunch in MacArthur Park, sandwiches and Cokes. I was crazy about that girl.” The relationship was pretty much over by the time Richard Harris took
Above: Jimmy Webb, composer of some of country’s most enduring songs, in the early 70s. Below: Glen Campbell performs on The Glen Campbell Music Show.
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jimmy webb the seven-minute MacArthur Park to No.2 on the Billboard chart in 1967. In 1968, Webb walked up to the podium at the Grammy Awards eight times to pick up his gongs for Up, Up And Away and Phoenix, which along with Wichita Lineman are among the most played songs ever. Indeed the ‘city songs’ define Webb as a stone cert So Cal genius on a par with his own heroes – Brian Wilson and Burt Bacharach. “I was writing blue collar tunes and Glen was perfectly able to interpret them,” he says. “Weird but true: I didn’t meet Campbell when Phoenix came out. I hadn’t even met him when I started writing Wichita. I’d spoken to him on the phone and seen him on TV. One day he called me from the studio [adopts perfect Glen Campbell bark]: ‘Hey Jimmy! You know that song we hit on? Phoenix? Yeah, well listen, and don’t call me Mr Campbell, I need another song right now. Write me another one about a town.’” Webb’s reply, “I think I’d rather not, I’m all done with town songs” was knocked back pronto. “Okay. How about something geographic?” Knowing he wouldn’t win this argument, Webb kicked out his 30 house guests, extinguished his joints and went to the piano. “An hour later I get a call from Glen. ‘How you doin’ with that song? Ready yet?’ ‘No, it’s not,’ I say. ‘I’m still working it out.’ ‘Okay, I don’t want to bother you then.’ An hour later the phone goes again. ‘How’s that song comin’ along?’” Webb sent what he’d done by messenger to producer Al De Lory. “I was very irritated,’ he says. “I told them it’s not even finished, it needs another verse. If you like it let me know and I’ll finish it off.” A few days later, no word. Then De Lory calls and tells Webb to bring his funky Gulbransen church organ – “the one with the bells and the fancy sustain thing” – to the Capitol recording studio. Oh, and Glen wants a word. “The song’s great Jimmy. Sounds real good.” Webb is aghast. “What, you’ve recorded it? Why? It isn’t finished.” Campbell laughs: “It is now. It just needs that organ part. Hurry up. Git down here.” The missing verse wasn’t needed since Campbell played his glorious guitar break, tuning his Fender down a whole step to D and pulling off his best Duane Eddy twang. The verses that did make it have caused many to believe that Wichita Lineman is the greatest pop song ever written. Certainly the devastating couplet, ‘And I need you more than want you/And I want you for all time’ will stand any amount of hyperbole. Talk about getting metaphysical on your ass. The song is enormous, the sentiments too huge to contemplate. Webb doesn’t mind it himself. “It stands up real well and it still sounds fresh. The arrangement wasn’t overdone. The strings were minimal. Nice little etchings that capture the landscape I’m describing, which is a place where you can stand on the flat and look 50 miles down the highway and in the distance is a mountain and you can almost touch it. Plumb flat. I wrote it about Oklahoma where I was born, rather than Kansas, and the lines of poles that line the road. It could be anywhere because there are lots of Wichitas in America on account of that being the name of an Indian tribe. It’s got to be considered one of the classics of country crossover, but that’s down to Glen and not me.” Not quite true, since the song is best described as the story of an ordinary man having extraordinary thoughts. “Yeah, thanks, but Glen’s my inspiration. He had a deep gift that is very heavy. He has/had a five octave range; he could imitate Elvis Presley or anyone else, or a train going by; he’s a natural born mimic. What people may not recall is that he has an unbelievable accommodation with any kind of instrument. A flute lying round? Bagpipes or banjo? He could play ’em all, and he’s not a bad pianist either. Vocally he’s unmatched. At one point he went on the road in ’64 and ’65 with the Beach Boys and sang Brian Wilson’s part [Wilson quit the road after freaking out on a plane ride from LA to Houston], and people were none the wiser… it’s very hard to sing like Brian Wilson – even Brian Wilson has difficulty doing it from time to time. In my life and my experience, Glen’s the most naturally gifted musician I ever met in his sphere; he may be the most naturally gifted musician who ever lived!”
“I was like Karl Marx and Glen was Genghis Khan.”
Below: Webb rocks the hippie look at the piano in 1971.
Webb’s songs were God’s gift to vocalists. So it seems strange that the world’s biggest star never had his turn. Why didn’t Elvis Presley record any of them? “He almost did,” Webb sighs. “He did sing Phoenix, it’s on a bootleg. He sang it at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, Arizona, and he also went to the trouble of having MacArthur Park arranged for a 50-piece orchestra when he played Las Vegas the very first time. I know because I was there every night sitting in the front and he got me to stand up [Frank Sinatra made the same request years later]. He also sang some lines of Park in 1968 on the NBC TV Special – the Comeback King. But Colonel Tom Parker wouldn’t let Elvis record my songs because he wouldn’t get his publishing cut. He didn’t like writers getting close to Elvis. Who knows, he might have been inspired to make a record with Merle Haggard! Parker called every shot. I saw it. And Elvis had this deep-seated fear that the Colonel had put a spell on him – the seventh son of a seventh son. And if he wanted to he could take off that spell and Elvis would be back driving a truck in Mississippi or Memphis. Parker reinforced that ‘I put a spell on you, son’ and there was strange shit at the Vegas shows. Before every concert, Elvis and the Colonel would go into a room for 15 minutes and nobody ever knew what was said in there. Was it prayer or voodoo or mumbo jumbo? Tom Parker was a carnie, a sideshow guy and who knew, maybe he could make cups float in the air. “And Elvis was virile and compulsive, he was monstrously famous and powerful, and yet he made all those crappy movies for Paramount for a million bucks apiece and he split the money down the middle with Tom. Who would make a 50/50 deal like that? If you were Elvis would you give Parker half? Or would you say: ‘Look Tom, I love you and you’ve been good to me and
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