Guy Clark & Mickey Newbury - Old friends

It's a cloudy January afternoon when I first get Mickey Newbury on the phone. "How's the weather down there?" he asks. I'm in San Francisco, he's in Oregon, and we're both patiently awaiting what excitable weather reporters have predicted to be another massive rainstorm.

It's ironic, though, that the first thing we talk about is rain, because it's something that anyone who spends time with Newbury's music quickly becomes familiar with. Sometimes drizzling, other times pouring, and occasionally crackling with thunder, several of Newbury's early albums are accented with the sound of rain, usually falling in the empty spaces between songs.

"The reason why I put rain on those albums," he explains, "aside from the fact that I liked the mood, was because there was so much hiss on the damn tape."

Along with the rain sounds, Newbury's albums from the late 1960s and early '70s (Looks Like Rain, Frisco Mabel Joy, and Heaven Help the Child are three of his best) are full of soaring vocals, echoing drumbeats and complex arrangements -- sometimes full and lush (with steel guitars, Newbury says, playing the string parts), other times delicate and minimalist. Surprisingly, though, these albums were not made in downtown Nashville recording palaces, but in a four-track studio in a converted garage. The studio was run by a Nashville session man named Wayne Moss, who was also a member of the group Area Code 615. While not exactly "garage" recordings in the rock 'n' roll sense, the operation was ground-level enough that white noise became a problem from so much "ping ponging" -- the process of transferring vocal and instrumental parts from one track to another.

"I would go back to my boat [Newbury lived at the time on a houseboat outside of Nashville] and listen to the album [Looks Like Rain], and it would never bother me. I was cutting it during the winter, and most of the time it was raining. I was laying in bed one night, and I had some wind chimes outside my boat, and they were dingling along, and I got to thinking: I come back here and listen to my tracks, and like them, and go back to the studio and the hiss drives me crazy. And the reason why is because rain sounds exactly like static. So when I put the rain in, it blended into the static, and it sounded like there was continuous rain. Your mind actually was fooled into believing there was rain in places there were no sound effects at all."

Everytime it rains, Lord, I run to my window
All I do is just wring my hands and moan
Listen to that thunder, Lord, can't you hear that lonesome wind moan?
Tell me baby, now, why you been gone so long
-- "Why You Been Gone So Long"

Mickey Newbury possesses a strong, versatile tenor voice that has to be one of the most beautiful to ever pass through Nashville -- full of dusty melancholy, sad longing, and a piercing, haunting glow. Since his debut album, Harlequin Melodies -- released in 1968 by RCA Victor (an album he says he "detests") -- Newbury has made 15 albums, up to and including 1996's Lulled By the Moonlight. Even during his heyday in the 1960s and '70s, however, Newbury was much better known for the songs he's written than for his own distinct versions of them.

From today's perspective, though, it's clear Newbury was a major player in a musical revolution of sorts that swept through Nashville during that period -- revitalizing country music with fresh ideas; acknowledging a broader range of influences (psychedelic rock, folk, blues, R&B); and ultimately winning the industry a much larger fan base in the process. Artists such as Newbury, Willie Nelson, Bobby Bare, Kris Kristofferson, Tom T. Hall and Waylon Jennings not only had sincere respect for country icons such as Hank Williams and Roy Acuff, but were fans of the music of such "outside" artists as Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Lightnin' Hopkins and Ray Charles. These influences couldn't help but seep through the pores of their songs.

"Yeah, there was just a handful of people who really did it, and they opened the doors for everybody else," says Newbury of the changes that took place in Nashville -- radical steps that included breaking away from the studio system (the Nashville Sound), writing songs that defied formalistic conventions, and adopting a more open-mind attitude toward music that spoke clearly to young and old people -- urban California folk fans and rural Southern farmers -- alike.

When Newbury chose to record his second album, Looks Like Rain, in Moss' converted garage studio, for instance, it was a defiant move -- and this was several years before the term "outlaw" (and the names Willie and Waylon) became chic.

"The president of Mercury told me he hated the album. And I told him to kiss my ass, I'd buy it back. Which I did. And I turned around and sold it to Elektra Records for $20,000 more than what I bought it for."

Originally released in 1969, Elektra re-released it in 1973 as a double-album package with Live at Montezuma Hall.

"Elektra Records was a great label when I signed [in 1970]. That's when Jac Holzman was running it. It was like a family."

Born and raised in Houston, Newbury has been writing songs on a professional level for nearly 35 years now -- at least since 1963, the year he pulled into Nashville and began working for the publishing company Acuff-Rose. Over the next 10 or 15 years, he saw some of the nation's top artists (Eddy Arnold, Ray Charles, Tom Jones, Andy Williams, Elvis Presley, Joan Baez, Kenny Rogers, B.B. King) record his songs. "San Francisco Mabel Joy", "She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye", "Funny Familiar Forgotten Feelings", "An American Trilogy", "Poison Red Berries" and "33rd of August" are just a handful of his better-known tracks. More than a few of these renditions topped the charts, which made Newbury one of Nashville's hottest properties at the time.

"I had a hit every year just about from 1965," he says. "By 1970 I had had enough success to retire."

In addition, Newbury landed tracks on popular albums, including Kenny Rogers' The Gambler, Joan Baez's Diamonds and Rust, and more than one Elvis Presley album. (Presley even turned Newbury's "An American Trilogy" -- an inventive, fused arrangement of the traditional tunes "Dixie", "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "All My Trials" -- into one of his signature songs.)

"You get a catalog like that, and it's like having an oil well," he said. "Because every time the technology changes, all of those albums re-sell."

And these weren't formula songs. "I know one of the biggest hits I ever had, 'She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye', the title was only in the song one time," says Newbury. "Everybody in the world said you've got to take the title and bang it in people's ears over and over again. And I never agreed with that."

Instead, the song focuses on a single moment -- a man waking up alone after a breakup -- and allows the subject to unfold gently. An emotionally complex mixture of sadness and spiritual strength, the words speak of his broken heart, but show that, at the same time, he knows she did all she could to make things work. "She didn't mean to be unkind," Newbury sings, "Why, she even woke me up to say goodbye."

"Somebody that can get up and write a song that says 'the sun is shining today,' when it's raining like hell outside, I don't understand that process," says Newbury. "I wish to hell I could do it. Be worth a hell of a lot more money. But I wouldn't get any satisfaction out of writing like that."

"San Francisco Mabel Joy", probably Newbury's best-known and most-recorded song, is another heart-wrenching tale. This time the protagonist is a "Waycross, Georgia, farm boy" who aches to see the world, hops a freight train to L.A., and meets "a girl known on the strip as San Francisco's Mabel Joy." It's about the collision of country innocence with the bitter, hard reality of city life -- a profoundly sad song that sends chills up my spine with every single listen.

"Everybody assumed that country people were ignorant," he says, getting onto a topic that has always irked him -- how country musicians and fans have typically been perceived by the rest of the world. "I'm country, and I'm educated. I grew up in the city, but when I visited all my kinfolks in Kountze, 90 miles from Houston, we're talking outhouse time and no electricity. So I was exposed to two different worlds. But I wasn't ignorant. I was also reading Ferlinghetti and Shakespeare, and listening to all kinds of music, from classical music to blues."

Hints of rural Texas country seep into almost everything Newbury has written and recorded -- trains are a recurring image -- but over the years he's dabbled in a wide range of styles. He says he was always more of a folksinger than a country troubadour (he never toured with a band), but he also cut his teeth in the 1950s singing in a vocal group called the Embers in black R&B and blues clubs across Texas (where he was known to people like Gatemouth Brown and B.B. King as "the little white wolf"). And he notes that two of his favorite albums are Pet Sounds and Rubber Soul. In addition, he's a huge fan -- and a friend -- of Ray Charles.

You can hear these and other influences mingling together in Newbury's songs: the silly, psychedelic rambler "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)", a hit for Kenny Rogers & the First Edition in 1968; "Cortelia Clark", a paean to a blind street singer who won a Grammy but died alone; and the upbeat, folksy "How I Love Them Old Songs". In one corner of his catalog is the painfully sad "Frisco Depot" and the spiritually exhausting "The Future's Not What It Used to Be"; but Newbury has also written out-and-out rockers ("Dizzy Lizzy", "Mobile Blue"), recorded gospel material ("His Eye Is On The Sparrow"), and says he's currently writing in "kind of an uptown blues, downtown jazz, whatever you want to call it mood. Songs like from the '40s." His current album, Lulled By the Moonlight, is dedicated both to Don Gant -- a good friend who worked at Acuff-Rose ("a lot of songwriters you'd never have heard of if it wasn't for Don Gant") -- and Stephen Foster.

The core of Newbury's style, though, is probably best represented by sweeping, near-epic songs like "Heaven Help the Child" (which references bohemian culture, Fitzgerald, and Paris in the '20s) and "San Francisco Mabel Joy." Shifting slowly from a quiet beginning to a grandiose finale, they're steeped in melancholy, and are musically and emotionally complex.

"People have referred to me as a poet a number of times," says Newbury. Considering his subject matter and his approach, it's not surprising -- yet he doesn't like it. "I'm a songwriter. I'm very satisfied with just being known as a songwriter."

Yes, Frisco's a mighty rich town, now that ain't no lie
Why they got some buildings that reach a mile into the sky
Yet no one can even afford the time just to tell me why
Here's this world full of people and so many people alone
-- "Frisco Depot"

It's partly a result of the unfortunate sway of time and circumstance that Newbury's songs are not well-known these days among newer generations of country fans. A big part of his obscurity, however, can be explained by the fact that he gave up performing 23 years ago. "I've got a bunch of kids, and it was hard staying away from them," he says. He also moved to Oregon -- where his wife is from -- which made traveling to gigs much more complicated. "It just got to be more of a hassle than it was worth." Plus, he says, by the mid-1970s, "the folk scene had gone away, and there was no place to play."

"Basically," he says, summing up the experience, "I'm a writer who sings as opposed to a singer-songwriter. I can sing four or five times a year and be contented. And that's what I've been doing." 

Currently, Newbury lives in an old farmhouse in Oregon's Willamette Valley with his wife and three of his children. He doesn't have a record label at the moment; in 1994, he helped found Winter Harvest, which released Nights When I Am Sane, a live acoustic album and Newbury's first in six years. (The label later also released albums by Steve Earle and Mark Germino, but recently went out of business.)

Newbury's newest collection, Lulled By the Moonlight, is a limited-release, 80-minute CD that's only available by mail order ($27.50; call 541-726-4173). He recorded the album in Nashville at a place called the Record Club, and has released it under the label name Mountain Retreat.

"I'm having to poor-boy it. I mixed it in one night, and did the graphics and the cover in two hours. Working like that is pretty hard, but when it's coming out of your own pocket, it's the only way you can do it. It costs so much money to cut these days it's unbelievable.

"I'm still old fashioned in the way I cut. If I go in the studio, and we don't get it in the first or second take, I pass it up." It's a method, he says, that he's pretty much always followed. "I can't go back and sing something over and over again. I don't know how in the hell anybody does it."

For people today who are proud fans of Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, it's almost ironic that Newbury's name often draws a blank stare. Because not only were these artists more or less contemporaries of his, but in some cases it was Newbury -- already an established songwriter by the mid-1960s -- who got them their start in Nashville.

For starters, he turned Roger Miller onto a brand new song called "Me and Bobby McGee", written by Newbury's good friend Kristofferson. ("I had to grab Roger Miller by the ears just to make him listen to it," Newbury recounts.) Though Janis Joplin's version is the most widely known, Miller's 1969 recording of the song was the first major turning point in Kristofferson's career.

He also helped win a break in Nashville for the late Van Zandt, an artist for whom Newbury has the highest regard. Newbury says he met Townes at Jones Recording Studio in Houston, a business in which Newbury was a silent partner.

"Anybody who can't recognize the genius of Townes Van Zandt, I don't want to spend more than five minutes talking to them about music," says Newbury firmly. "How could it get much better than 'If I had No Place to Fall' or 'Our Mother the Mountain' or 'Quicksilver Daydreams of Maria' or 'St. John the Gambler'?"

He speaks the titles of these Van Zandt songs as if they were Biblical psalms.

" 'The brown of her skin made her hair a soft golden rainfall, that spills from the mountains to the bottomless depths of her eyes,' " he says, reciting the line from "Quicksilver Daydreams of Maria" off the top of his head, slowly and with obvious reverence. "That's some of the most beautiful imagery I've ever heard in my life.

"So then you wonder why he was not successful. And the only reason why is because he didn't have the break -- the right people around him doing his deal. Because there's no doubt he worked, he was a road warrior. I got very frustrated trying to get his songs cut. I beat my brains out trying to get Johnny Cash to cut 'St. John the Gambler'. It would have been a smash by him."

"Mickey brought me up here," Townes told me during a 1994 interview. "He came and visited a gig I did in Houston, and he said, 'Man, you got to come to Nashville.' I said 'Sure, I'll go anywhere. I'll go to Wyoming, or Seattle...' "

The outcome of that trip was Townes' debut album, For the Sake of the Song, coproduced by Jack Clement and featuring liner notes by Newbury. "I didn't have to go through back doors," Townes went on. "I just came straight down the freeway. And it was because of Mickey."

Just as Newbury speaks of Townes' songs with the highest regard, Townes expressed an intense respect and admiration for his friend's music as well. "It was really funny trying to explain -- I can't call it 'explain' -- but I'd tried to tell Jeanene [Townes' wife] about the sound of Mickey's voice and the guitar on a good night at the same time. It's hard, you can't do it. It's like from outer space. I've heard about people trying to explain a color to a blind person. Like Helen Keller. There's no way to do it."

He picked his guitar up, shuffled down the walk
The cars uptown wound round the buildings at his feet.
Looking mighty proud, that old man, with his battered hat in his hand
Lord he sung a song that made me weep.
-- "Cortelia Clark"

During our long phone conversation, it quickly becomes apparent that Newbury's musical knowledge is immense. He speaks authoritatively of George Jones' voice ("the greatest chops I've ever heard in my life"), Lefty Frizzell's influence ("every kid that's singing right now is either mimicking Lefty Frizzell or George Jones"), George Strait's music ("You know what I hear in his voice? Sincerity"), and the once immense power of DJ Ralph Emery. 

And then Newbury gets on the subject of Ray Charles, who, he says, "did more for contemporary music than anybody alive. You remember 'Born to Lose' and 'I Can't Stop Loving You'? That was first time that that kind of blues treatment had been given to country songs."

He's speaking of Charles' groundbreaking Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music album from 1962, which skillfully blended blues, country, pop and R&B into a whole that was vibrant and genuine.

"One of the greatest thrills in my life was having Ray Charles cut my songs. But I've never lost my awe of him even when I got to know him. He is just such a...soulful person. I can't explain it. You'd have to be around him. Talk about charisma: He is the only person I've been around that I ever got that feeling from. When he walks in the room, you know he's there."

"It's been an interesting life," he says, pausing the conversation for a moment of reflection. "I've had the great fortune to be around people who have made the changes in music, who have really been the pioneers. Joan Baez was a pioneer, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson were pioneers, Ray Charles was a pioneer. I've been really lucky."

Today, Newbury continues to plan his future. For one thing, he wants to expand Lulled By the Moonlight into a much larger project, and get into a proper mixing studio -- which he hopes to do with the help of some friends in Hollywood. He still writes plenty of new songs as well.

"I never start with any preconceived ideas about what the song is going to say. I just sit down at the piano or with a guitar, and write what I happen to be feeling that day. You want to hear a couple of new songs?" 

The cordless phone crackles as he walks down a hall, opening and closing doors. He sits at a piano and punches a few chords. "Can you hear that OK?" And then he proceeds to sing two brand new compositions that are no less beautiful for being carried through hundreds of miles of telephone cable.

Do you ever have a longing for a pure and simple time
When all we had between us was a dream and one thin dime
And we were flat out on the highway with no place to be but gone
Some memories are better left alone

"Okay, that's a 3 o'clock in the morning song," he says of the tune, immediately jumping out of his singing voice and back into the conversation. "I bought this old farmhouse, and am in the process of rebuilding it. It leans, and it's old ... and I know exactly what every word in the song is talking about. I didn't sit down just to write lines; they all have a meaning to me. If I ever had to write where it didn't have, I wouldn't write."

Mickey Newbury albums

Harlequin Melodies/1968/RCA
Looks Like Rain/1969/Mercury
Frisco Mabel Joy/1971/Elektra
Sings His Own/1972/RCA
Heaven Help the Child/1973/Elektra
Live at Montezuma Hall/Looks Like Rain/1973/Elektra
I Came to Hear the Music/1974/Elektra
Lovers/1975/Elektra
Rusty Tracks/1977/ABC-Hickory
His Eye Is on the Sparrow/1978/ABC-Hickory
The Sailor/1979/ABC-Hickory
After All These Years/1981/PolyGram
In a New Age/1988/Airborne
Nights When I Am Sane/1994/Winter Harvest
Lulled By the Moonlight/1996/Mountain Retreat

Kurt Wolff is a freelance writer living in San Francisco who thinks 1973 was a great year for country music.