History has not been particularly kind to Bobby Bare, at least so far, and in some ways this is hard to figure. After all, he stayed on the country charts from the early 1960s to the mid-'80s, a great run by anyone's standards; from '50s rock 'n' roll one-hit wonder to Americana geezer, he's now on his fifth or sixth career. Depending on how you define these things, he may have been the first artist to produce his own records, and was one of the first to record thematic albums.
From the early-'60s folk boom and the refining of the Nashville Sound through the growth of the Outlaw '70s, Bare was at or near the focal point of every major development in country music. He wrapped his flexible, grainy baritone around story-songs of every stripe, from knee-slapping novelties to soliloquies that came from some unsettling place out there beyond cold and lonely. His sorrowful '60s gems "Detroit City", "Miller's Cave", "Four Strong Winds" and "Streets Of Baltimore" were instant standards; in the '70s he scored with upbeat hits such as "Marie Laveau", "Dropkick Me, Jesus" and "The Winner".
Yet today, while his closest friends and colleagues -- from Harlan Howard to Chet Atkins to Waylon Jennings to Shel Silverstein -- have all won recognition more or less in line with their accomplishments, Bare is largely forgotten, or recognized largely as the father of alt-country rocker Bobby Bare Jr.
There are reasons, however flawed, for this. Bare was never big on cultivating an image; to the extent that he had one, it was as the songwriter's best friend, for his interpretive skills, or as the nicest guy in town, because he continued to get along with everyone in doctrinaire Nashville even when he was going against the grain. While many in his rambunctious crowd -- Roger Miller, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Joe Shaver, Waylon -- were testing the limits of alcohol, amphetamines and cocaine, Bare practiced moderation, favoring beer over whiskey and sleep over speed.
He's also a family man, married to the same woman since 1964 -- he and his wife Jeannie met when she was the "girl singer" in a show he took to Reno -- and around for his kids when they were growing up far more often than country singers normally are. He was never much for Music Row social and political hobnobbing, and he's always appreciated a good songwriter far more than an executive (with a couple exceptions) or even a fellow singer (ditto).
When Bare saw the writing on the wall as Nashville's youth movement picked up steam in the early '80s, he chose to quit recording at all rather than bang his head against that wall. Though he participated in a pair of late-'90s collaborations on Shel Silverstein songs with Waylon, Jerry Reed and Mel Tillis (under the group name Old Dogs), Bare's last official album under his own name was a 1983 Columbia release titled Drinkin' From The Bottle, Singin' From The Heart.
Until now -- and again, family ties are a big part of it. At age 70, Bare may yet get the last laugh -- as well as assert himself to a new audience -- with the recent release of his striking The Moon Was Blue, co-produced by his son Bobby Jr. with Music Row exile Mark Nevers, using their cronies as the backup band.
Paradoxically, the album sounds very different from previous Bare efforts, while following the same guiding principles. The music -- with its floating guitars and distortion, psychedelic sound effects, unorthodox background vocals and the like -- owes more to Bare Jr.'s Young Criminals Starvation League than to country. And yet none of the weirdness distracts; it's all used to frame Bare's knowingly mellow and weathered vocals, which in turn put all the emphasis on the song, the lyrics.
Most of those songs are pop and country standards from the 1940s and '50s (French cabaret singer Charles Aznavour's "Yesterday When I Was Young", "Love Letters In The Sand", "It's All In The Game" and "Shine On Harvest Moon" are probably the most recognizable). But he also draws from more modern songbooks for pop fare (Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin'") and country (Max D. Barnes' "I Am An Island").
As a whole, the album is reflective, or nostalgic, even -- the work of a man who's been around the block a lot more times than you and me. But it's catchy and somehow contemporary, too. The two Nashville-Sounding Old Dogs sets (one was sold only on television) dealt almost entirely with aging, directly but humorously; the left-field The Moon Was Blue is a more rounded, less obvious, contemplation. Plus, it's an object lesson in the notion that the child is father to the man.
"I knew it was very important to him that I do this, and he's my son and I love him so I did it," Bare declares one bright September morning. We're sipping ice water on the screened-in back porch of the ranch house outside Nashville that his family has lived in for the last 35 years; it overlooks Old Hickory Lake, scene of many a Bare fishing triumph.
He adds that he went into the sessions with no idea an album might ensue; he was doing it as a favor to his son. "But then I was having fun," he continues. "I didn't remember how much fun it was to get into a studio with no pressure and just hit a chord and start singing with young musicians with all their energy and enthusiasm. All that weird stuff Bobby Jr. and Mark did with the music, those sounds made me smile. And it helped pull me out of the funk I went into after Shel, Waylon and Chet and everybody had died."
Indeed, music-biz demographics weren't the only reason for Bare's long silence. The sudden death in 1999 of his good friend Silverstein, followed by that of Waylon three years later, slammed the door shut on more Old Dogs sessions. The death of Chet Atkins in 2001 added to Bare's sense that he was increasingly alone. Since the turn of the millenium he has been content to play maybe 50 dates a year to his traditional country audience here and in Europe, less if possible, and to fish maybe 50 hours a week, more if possible.
The night before this interview, Bare had taken the stage with many of the musicians from the album -- sans Bobby Jr., who was playing Seattle that night -- to introduce his new music to the alt-country crowd at the Americana Music Association conference in Nashville. Decked out in blue jeans and a jean-jacket, black T-shirt and hat, he was in good voice as well as typically good humor. ("I usually perform nekkid, but I'm wearing clothes tonight to cover up the hickies," he declared before launching his set with the dead-string guitar intro to "Detroit City".) His reception at the packed Mercy Lounge confirmed what Bobby Jr., who calls himself "dad's number one fan," had suspected all along.
"He's my father and I love him, but he's also such a great singer and performer, and he picks all the great songs; nobody else can do what Dad does," Junior said via phone a few days later. "I have to think that the reason he stopped recording is he just had no desire to go down to Music Row. But the musical world I'm in, I thought they'd totally get what Dad does. Nobody my age knows who he is or what he does, but somebody who likes something like Calexico would get Dad right away. And once we did get him away from the fishing poles, he was full of ideas and enthusiasm. He came alive in the studio and it was a blast."
So the Bares believe that the family that plays together, stays together. They have at least since the 1973 Silverstein-penned breakthrough album Bobby Bare Sings Lullabys, Legends And Lies, featuring 5-year-old Bobby Jr. singing a duet with his dad on the #2 country hit "Daddy What If". Bares were everywhere at his AMA Mercy Lounge gig. Wife Jeannie, a fine singer in her own right, watched from the middle of the room, whooping and cheering and dancing her own private little diddy-bop when she got carried away. ("I'm always like that when either of them plays," she confides backstage afterwards. "I figure if your wife isn't crazy about you, who's gonna be crazy about you? And if your mother isn't crazy about you...")
Though 29-year-old daughter Angelina, who was soon to be married, was kept away by her work for Dell Computers, 37-year-old son Shannon, whose insurance job just brought him back to Nashville from Birmingham, Alabama, was there. And though Bobby Jr. couldn't make it, his wife Megan and their 10-month-old girl Isabella came with Megan's father, Chip Young -- a producer, engineer and guitarist to Elvis, Bare Sr., and nearly everyone else who worked in Memphis and Nashville in the 1960s and '70s. Young also was a behind-the-scenes helper on The Moon Was Blue.)
Bare was born in Ironton, Ohio, in 1935; his own childhood family life was less cohesive, and doubtless helped shape his subsequent attitude. His mother died when he was 5, and with his father unable to provide for his kids, Bobby and siblings were sent to relatives and adoption agencies. Raised mainly by grandparents, Bobby was essentially on his own by age 15, doing day work and covering the country Top 40 in area bars at night.
In 1954, he and his steel player headed for Los Angeles with a fast-talker who said he could get them a record deal but really just needed somebody to provide gas money for his drive home from Ohio. Still, Bare and his friend found work in a club they went to the first night they were in town; before long, Speedy West got Bare his first record deal, with Capitol.
With producer Ken Nelson, he tried on styles from a remake of Buck Owens' "Down On The Corner Of Love" to Elvis-inspired tracks using slapback bass and echo. When his singles went nowhere, he switched to Challenge Records. He hung out with Harlan Howard, who already had some early hits under his belt, and Hank Cochran, who didn't. He and his guitarist took over a ballroom in nearby Riverside County, providing the house band and booking acts such as Lefty Frizzell and Johnny Cash. Then, in 1958, he got drafted.
When Bare returned to Ohio for induction, his fledgling career took a turn for the weird. With his friend Bill Parsons, he went down to King Records in Cincinnati to record a demo; Bare's side was an improvised talking blues called "All American Boy" that sent up Elvis' own Army career. The demo found its way to Harry Carlson of Fraternity Records in Cincinnati, who liked Bare's tune but was told it was by Parsons. Carlson released it under Parsons' name at the tail end of the year, and the single went all the way to #2 on the pop charts.
With Bare's blessings, Parsons toured behind the single while Bare was on active duty. "I told him I can't do nothing, I'm stuck here for two years, so just roll on, it's only rock 'n' roll, it'll be forgotten in six months," Bare grins. "And here we are still talking about it almost 50 years later."
After leaving the service, Bare returned to Southern California, recording more in a pop vein for Fraternity. He went that route both because of the pop success of "All American Boy" -- by now, Carlson and others knew the singer was actually Bare -- and because the record-biz contacts he'd made in the Army were mostly L.A. pop figures. Though he never had a hit, he came close several times, and was a blooming songwriter who contributed three songs to the 1960 Jimmy Clanton/Chubby Checker film Teenage Millionaire. He'd just signed as a song-plugger and writer with red-hot Central Songs when Chet Atkins -- at the behest of Harlan Howard, who was now in Nashville -- asked him to record country for RCA. Bare leaped at the chance, and Atkins became his guardian angel. "Chet looked after me, protected me from everyone else at the company," Bare says.
With a horn arrangement unlike anything else out of Nashville, Bare's "Shame On Me" peaked at #18 country and #23 pop. Then, nearly a year later, Bare heard Billy Grammer's single of a Mel Tillis/Danny Dill song called "I Wanna Go Home" on a rock station as he drove back to Hollywood from a fishing trip. He stopped his car right on Sunset Boulevard, tying up traffic for three minutes, to listen. "I thought it was the greatest song I'd ever heard," he says. "I guess I was homesick for a home I never had." The song, about a displaced southerner who was miserable working on the auto assembly lines of the Motor City though he insisted otherwise to the folks back home, struck a melancholy note of rootlessness and alienation that Bare revisited often in that phase of his career.
Recording in Nashville though still living in Los Angeles, Bare took the song to his next session, only to find Atkins had already chosen it for him. "He was uncanny that way," Bare recalls. "Nearly all the songs I brought him that were early hits, he already had 'em on his desk when I got there." They cut the tune and retitled it "Detroit City"; it shot to #6 country and #16 pop, and Bare had his career record on his second try. Even if it didn't turn out to be his biggest hit, the plaint was an anthem for several generations of postwar southerners gone north in search of work. It still sounds great today, Atkins' Nashville Sound production burnishing its timeless, almost traditional, feel.
Taking advantage of the urban folk boom, all of Bare's singles through 1964 followed a similar course, and all crossed over to the Hot 100. "500 Miles Away From Home" lifted Georgia folksinger Hedy West's arrangement of a traditional song done by modernists such as Peter, Paul & Mary and the Kingston Trio. For Cowboy Jack Clement's "Miller's Cave", Atkins and Bare relied on the obscure 1960 original by latter-day Memphis rockabilly Tommy Tucker (not to be confused with the R&B singer who hit with "Hi-Heel Sneakers" in '64) more than on Hank Snow's top-10 country version. "Have I Stayed Away Too Long" overhauled a Tin Pan Alley song previously recorded in 1944 by Perry Como and in 1960 by Jim Reeves.
Ian Tyson's "Four Strong Winds" came via Waylon, who Bobby had befriended after seeing him in Phoenix. "I've always loved his slow songs more than his ass-kicking Outlaw songs," Bare says. He first cut "Just To Satisfy You", the A-side of Waylon's second single for A&M, and then Atkins asked him to cut the flip, "Four Strong Winds", as well. Jerry Reed backed him on the recently-invented fretless dobro so effectively that it started a mini-craze in Music City. Atkins soon followed Bare's recommendation that he sign Waylon to RCA, too.
Bare's early albums embraced a dazzling array of material that allowed them to transcend Nashville's two-hit-singles-and-a-bunch-of-filler formula. He cut traditional and folk-flavored material (including several Bob Dylan songs), Charlie Rich obscurities such as "Long Way To Tennessee", Harlan Howard oddities ("Lynchin' Party") and more mainstream fare ("She Called Me Baby", two years before Carl Smith made it a hit), the best of rising writers including Willie Nelson and Hank Cochran, you name it. His own originals, such as "Passin' Through", held their own in such company. No doubt Bare could have been a first-class writer himself if he hadn't hit the road, a pursuit that tends to sap all available energy, privacy and focus.
So Bobby Bare was a song guy from way back. He began hanging out with Howard in Los Angeles before he even knew Harlan was a writer; when they first moved to Nashville in 1964, he and Jeannie stayed with Harlan until they found their own house. As soon as he settled in, he began running with the likes of Cochran, Nelson and Roger Miller.
Bare likes to joke that he's recorded more Tom T. Hall songs than Hall has; the two men reached Nashville around the same time and were connected to each other through Jimmy Keys, who was Bare's booker and Hall's publisher. Early on, Bare took Hall on the road with him, obstensibly to share driving, but mostly because "I just wanted Tom's company." Hall eventually became Bare's bassist and bandleader before becoming too much in demand himself, and the two men later shared an office. Though he'd recorded other Hall material first, Bare took the mystifying "(Margie's At) The Lincoln Park Inn", a did-they-or-didn't-they cheating song, to #4 country in 1969, and came back a year later with the first version of "That's How I Got To Memphis" (#3).
As more modern songwriters began trying to crack Nashville, Bare bridged the gap between old and new. He met Kristofferson through guitar pulls with Cash and Roger Miller and admits, "I couldn't really hear him, I didn't take him serious for a while." Then he heard "Loving Her Was Easier" on an unmarked demo; told it was Kristofferson, he first replied, "That's bullshit; Kris can't sing." Once convinced, "I just said, 'Oh my God,' and I wound up recording nearly everything he'd written up till then while I was on Mercury." That would be 1970-72, with both "Come Sundown" and "Please Don't Tell Me How The Story Ends" going top-10.
When Bare subsequently returned to RCA, his second single was Billy Joe Shaver's "Ride Me Down Easy". Billy Joe had "just wandered in one day" (actually, Harlan Howard sent him) when Bare was looking for writers for his new publishing company. "He's so strange it kinda spooked me," Bobby laughs, but after they'd talked a while, Bare began paying Shaver $50 weekly for his efforts. Kristofferson heard Shaver singing "Good Christian Soldier" at Bare's house and recorded it later that same morning; he then produced Shaver's first album. "Billy Joe's writing is so simple, and so cutting," Bare says, gazing out over the lake as a tour boat putters by. Then he shakes his head in admiration: "'Too much ain't enough/For old five and dimers like me.' Just brilliant."
And that, in a nutshell, is why Bare has always preferred hanging out with songwriters. "The writers were always brighter and more fun to be around, more aware of what was going on. You couldn't be in more entertaining company," he exclaims. "They were funnier, and I think they were more talented too. I bet if you ever took the IQ of all the really good songwriters it'd be through the roof."
Bare's output includes a surprisingly small number of straightforward heart songs or cheating songs, despite the fact that when he was coming up, it was hard to crack the charts with anything else. But he knew all along what he wanted.
"I have to have songs that paint vivid pictures," he explains, "because when I'm singing a song it's like I'm watching a movie. If I can see it evolve...if I'm doing 'Detroit City', as many times as I've sung that song, if I lose that visual in my mind, I just don't have the lyrics anymore, they won't come and I can't finish the song."
By the late '60s, things were changing at RCA. Atkins, who was running the Nashville office, eased out of production because the move to eight-track and sixteen-track recording meant he no longer had time. "(Margie's At) The Lincoln Park Inn" was their last single together, and Bare started drawing up to three different producers on just one album. He fled to Mercury for two-plus years, then Atkins wooed him back. "I told him they had too many producers over there, it was too confusing," Bare recalls, "and he said, 'Why don't you produce your own records?' Nobody had ever done that, but I said, 'I can do that'."
And he did, launching yet another phase of his career. When Waylon got wind of this development, he went to Jerry Bradley, who was then taking the label over from Atkins, and demanded that he be able to produce his own albums. Though select artists such as Porter Wagoner had already produced their own work uncredited, the Bare-Waylon one-two, combined with what Willie was doing out of Texas, amounted to the inmates taking over the Nashville asylum.
Ride Me Down Easy, Bare's first self-produced effort, produced a near top-1 in Shaver's title song, and then Bare got the idea that he wanted to find "someone who could write me a whole album that had a thread going through it, that made sense as an album." (He also had the savvy to know that if he got a dozen songs out of one great writer, two or three were bound to be hits.)
None of the usual Nashville suspects were up to the task. But cartoonist/humorist and children's author Shel Silverstein, who'd first met Bare while pitching songs to Atkins, and who'd already written hits such as "A Boy Named Sue" for Johnny Cash and "One's On The Way" for Loretta Lynn, turned out to be the man.
Bare told him his idea at a party at Harlan Howard's on a Saturday night, and that Monday morning Shel phoned from his home in Chicago to say he'd finished writing the album. Silverstein flew back to Nashville that day and began by playing Bare the cautionary "The Winner", a talking song that was not exactly a talking blues and not exactly a recitation either.
"It's a long song, but it was so funny I had to make him stop about halfway through so I could laugh a while before he continued on." Bare took top sidemen into the studio to "work on a few Shel songs to see what happens. And I did it completely different. I would sing in the studio and they would follow me."
The result wasn't country's first "concept album" -- Johnny Cash's Ride This Train had been on the market since 1960 -- but as a piece of modern American storytelling, Bobby Bare Sings Lullabys, Legends & Lies was something new and different. Bradley later told Bobby that if he'd known what the singer was doing in the studio, he'd have vetoed the whole experiment.
"Daddy What If", a sentimental dialogue between the father and 5-year-old Bobby Jr., tugged at conventional country heartstrings enough to break the double-album. But "Marie Laveau", as blackly humorous as "The Winner", gave Bare his first (and only) #1 country hit. And at more than five minutes, "The Winner" was long, but at more than seven minutes, "Rosalie's Good Eats Cafe" dwarfed it.
Lullabys, Legends & Lies broke all kinds of rules and still became Bare's highest-charting country album to date. The success of the father-son duet led to the 1974 follow-up Singin' In The Kitchen, another Silverstein-penned album featuring Bobby's whole family (daughter Cari died in 1976, at age 15).
Though never known for novelty songs during the '60s, Bare returned to them often once he hooked up with Silverstein. Some would argue he did so too often -- that whole albums of Silverstein songs were maybe too much of a good thing. But there's no doubt they put a twinkle in the baleful Bare eyes that used to stare from album covers (even when he was smiling, or trying to). Besides, it was hard not like to such novelties as Paul Craft's "Dropkick Me, Jesus", which is as spiritual as it is hysterical. Meanwhile, albums such as Hard Time Hungrys stayed right in tune with mainstream country's working-class ethos.
Cowboys And Daddys, released in 1975, balanced artier material such as Terry Allen's "Amarillo Highway" with hoots such as Ray Wylie Hubbard's "Up Against The Wall, Redneck Mother", creating a sweep that was unusual even in the Outlaw era. Onstage, Bare became a more outgoing performer, and his shows grew increasingly raucous into the 1980s. But he didn't live too far out on the edge, and that's doubtless why he's still with us today.
"There was a lotta craziness during that time, a lotta craziness," he recalls. "I watched all my friends doing lots of drugs, especially coke, and it was hurtin' 'em. I couldn't let myself get caught up in it, because I was married and had a bunch of kids."
When Waylon gobbled a handful of pills to keep going for several days, Bobby would shave just a taste off the edge, enough to keep him up and singing for a few hours, and then he'd go to bed. Among his friends, sleeping came to be called "the Bare disease." Having given up whiskey in the '60s, he managed to party sufficiently on a combination of Budweiser, Red Man and Skoal. And even at his peak, he played little more than 200 dates yearly, usually four a week so he could come home for half the week. Only when he toured overseas would he be gone for three weeks straight, and every year he took off all of January. To this day, he's never even had a serious illness. If Bare wasn't so damn much fun to be around, you could almost say he was no fun at all.
In 1978, under the new management of rock impresario Bill Graham, Bare switched labels to Columbia. The albums became patchier. Down And Dirty, which yielded two of that era's signature singles in the whimisical "Numbers" and "Tequila Sheila", was the most successful. The 1981 As Is, produced by a young and hungry Rodney Crowell, might be Bare's all-time best album; it features Crowell's band, with Albert Lee on guitar and Ricky Skaggs on fiddle, and songs by the likes of Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. In 1979, Bare helped Rosanne Cash onto the charts for the first time by duetting with her on "No Memories Hangin' 'Round". Starting in 1983, he hosted a three-year run of "Bobby Bare And Friends", a singin' and pickin' and talkin' show that's still the best regular program ever aired on TNN or its successor CMT (reruns, anyone?).
But when his contract expired and Columbia execs offered to renew, Bare neither accepted nor declined; he simply skipped the meeting. "I could have had record deals right and left, but I knew it was useless," he explains. "I'm not pissed off or bitter or nothing because that's the way it should be, that's the way it's always been. Young people control the business and the way the music goes, and I'm glad to see it. They got the energy, they're so eager, just like I was when I was in my 20s. Hell, I'd do anything back then to get a record deal and get played on the radio; I'd do whatever it took."
Still, he admits the Old Dogs albums came out of a conversation he and Silverstein had about how they couldn't listen to the radio anymore because all it played was kid music. Though they made the Old Dogs music for people their own age, they wound up getting their airplay on Americana stations. But when Shel's heart suddenly gave out at age 67, Bare was devastated, as was his family.
"Shel was the one we knew would live forever; he didn't abuse himself with drugs and alcohol. He did yoga and meditated and he walked or swam every day; he ate healthy. So when he was the first to go, it knocked me down for quite a while," Bare sighs. "And our kids, Shel was like...our kids all loved Shel, they grew up with Shel, he was family." Bobby believes Shel was a bigger influence on Bobby Jr. than dad himself (for the record, Junior gives them equal credit).
"Faron Young used to live right over there." Bare points across the lake. "George and Tammy lived right next door to us; Georgette was born there. John [Cash] lived right down the lake on the left. Charlie Walker once lived two houses over from here, and Hank Cochran and Jeannie Seely lived four houses down on the left. Merle Travis lived right around the corner and Harlan was right across the street."
He jokes about hearing loss and the like. "My wife heard this new album and said, 'Bobby, I'm so proud of you,'" he told an Americana Music Association audience during a lunchtime guitar pull with Hayes Carll, John Doe and Jack Clement. "And I told her, 'Well I'm tired of you too!'" But you can bet that Bobby Bare sometimes feels his age and is not so amused.
"That's something you don't really dwell on," he cautions. "Just kinda enjoy the day and be grateful that you're healthy and can do things that most of my contemporaries can't do. In my life I have never experienced the joy my two grandbabies bring; it's unbelievable, completely blindsided me. I told Bobby Jr. the other day, 'Of course I loved you kids, but it was nothing like this, this is pure joy.'
"My friends are almost all dead and gone, that's the trouble with living to be 70 years old. My turn's coming, all of us are, but meantime I'm gonna see my little grandbaby here in a bit and enjoy her, and then I'm gonna plan a fishing trip." For Bobby Bare, life -- and music -- after stardom is good.
John Morthland, who first interviewed Bobby Bare in the mid-1970s, shares Bare's concerns about aging, but so far so good.
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