John Hiatt: "Have A Little Faith..."

John Hiatt: "Have A Little Faith..."

FEATURES

Bill Holdship

John Hiatt is onstage at the Roxy in L.A.; just him and a piano. It’s part of this international convention A&M Records is holding to celebrate the company’s 25th anniversary, and Hiatt has just finished what will probably be a one-time-only set with guitarist Ry Cooder, bassist Nick Lowe and drummer Jim Keltner, the same stellar cast that backs him on his terrific and wonderful new LP, Bring The Family. Hiatt’s telling the audience how, as a fat little kid growing up in his native Indianapolis, he would always listen to this strange radio DJ out of Tennessee named "The Hossman.” This DJ played mostly R&B and gospel music, and the music used to overwhelm Hiatt’s young mind with the way these performers could actually "get out” of themselves. He says he wrote the next song hoping to capture some of that spirit, and he launches into his simply beautiful ‘‘Have A Little Faith In Me.” On the new LP, the song always reminds me of a strange hybrid between Van Morrison (another white man with some black/spiritual aspirations) and a nice Randy Newman. Tonight, however, the song more than illustrates that Hiatt is capable of reaching territories previously only explored by some of his selfproclaimed idols: Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Mississippi John Hurt and Elvis Presley. The song’s one of those gorgeous and rare happy-yet-sad declarations of love in the “Stand By Me” tradition. No pointed barbs, no cynicism, no irony. Hiatt manages to “get out” of himself, and he makes it clear that this one’s from the heart and soul.

Boy, this is really going to confuse those people who’ve been trying to put a label on John Hiatt for years. How would you describe him? When Hiatt released his first two Epic LPs many years ago, people tended to see him in the classic ’70s “singer-songwriter” mold, and his continuous touring of the folk circuit over the years has only reinforced the label. “Yeah, that’s it, he’s a folkie.” Three Dog Night once recorded a song of his, but maybe that makes sense because they once covered Laura Nyro as well. On the other hand, a lot of country singers, from Conway Twitty to Rodney Crowell, have recorded his songs; in fact, Rosanne Cash’s latest single is a Hiatt composition. “Yeah, that’s it, he writes country songs.” On the other hand, when MCA released his excellent Slug Line LP in ’79, people heard this rock music and saw this “angry young man” persona in a classic sense of the phrase. Critics immediately tagged him "the American Elvis Costello,” and it was a label that lingered throughout several records on Geffen, even after he started drifting into a “no focus” limbo. “Yeah, that’s it, he was ‘New Wave.’ ” Yet, now he’s back with Bring The Family, an LP that celebrates traditional family values, and features songs about loving—I mean really loving—his wife and kids, all of which could sound mighty hokey in lesser hands. The old cynical humor has been replaced by some genuinely funny lines that stand on their own merit. This is brilliant. What’s going on here?

“I’m sure there’s plenty of fodder for the old confusion mill,” says Hiatt, who’s as amiable a person as you’d want to meet, “but, hey, I’m innocent. I never said, ‘This is what I do. Here it is.’ I’ve always said, I like this, and I like some of that’—and I let go. I have pretty wide musical tastes, and I’ve always operated from the assumption that other music fans do as well. I like trying different things, but you almost always fail when you’re trying to put a label on music. It’s hard to talk about music. It’s like talking about God or something. It’s more of a feeling kind of thing. My priority has always been to travel that distance between the head and the heart—and then try to get the head out of the way.”

“It’s hard to talk about music. It’s like talking about God or something. ”

How’d he feel about those Elvis Costello analogies?

“At the time, of course, I didn’t like it. It made me bristle. They had to compare me to someone, and maybe I was like him.” He laughs. “I don’t know. I’m sure he did influence me a lot. The times were unique, and that whole thing was kinda like a little bit of daylight for me. I got caught up in it, and I had some anger to vent. Elvis and I did eventually end up hooking up six or seven years ago. It was my pleasure to meet Elvis and Jake (Riviera) and Nick, and to discover that we all shared some of the same fondness for very similar kinds of music. So there really was a thread there, I guess.”

Just because Bring The Family often reflects a new happiness for Hiatt, that doesn t mean the record deals solely with the pleasures of the heart. There’s a lot here that has to do with survival, despair and the darker side of the heart as well. “Alone In The Dark” is a desperate and terrified howl from the depths of the soul with some real hard blues music to reinforce it. And “Stood Up” includes what is probably the most hauntingly sad line I’ll hear this year: “And now she’s standing in some corner of my heart behind the kitchen screen door.” Hiatt is no stranger to any of these feelings, having dealt in the past with alcoholism and drug addiction, as well as the suicide of his first wife which left him alone with their young daughter. This all makes the brighter points of Bring The Family that much more poignant and triumphant. After all, as Lou Reed has recently demonstrated, who better to understand and appreciate the joys of love than someone who has also faced the ugliness and horror the rest of the world has to offer?

“I had a long, long struggle with liquor, drugs and general crazy behavior,” he says. “But it’s been awhile since I had to deal with that, thanks to the help of many people. I‘m just in a much better place now. My life was literally given back to me because I was nearly successful in finishing myself off. I’m just grateful that I didn’t manage to do it. There was so much I was missing—and I didn’t even realize it.”

Music fans who haven’t experienced Bring The Family yet are missing a real treat, as it’s what we’ll simply call “American music” in as pure of a state as you can possibly get it in 1987. The LP was the brainchild of producer John Chelew, who also books acts for McCabes, a Santa Monica nightclub in which Hiatt has frequently performed over the years. Chelew thought Hiatt’s vinyl ventures never really matched the intensity of his live performances, so he suggested lining up a band of heavyweights, fronted by Cooder, and having them perform everything live in the studio.

“My attitude was ‘John, that’s a great idea. Call me if you can get it together,’ ” says Hiatt. “It sounded like a great idea, but—even though I wasn’t being cynical—the prospect that he could get it together seemed somewhat remote to me. He called me a week later, and said, ‘I got ’em lined up. All we need is a bass player. Who’s your favorite?’ I said ‘Nick Lowe.’ He’s the greatest white bass player I know. He said, ‘Well, let’s bring him over.’ I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of him in the first place. I guess this was such a low-budget project that an intercontinental flight didn’t figure into it in my mind. But we made it fit.

“My life was literally given back to me because I was nearly successful In finishing myself off."

“I think my songwriting is in pretty good shape. It’s probably the most direct it’s ever been. I think my singing’s in pretty good shape. So I brought that and some pretty good acoustic guitar playing to the project. I think everyone else came equally well-equipped. I’d love to tour with these guys. I mean, if it was up to me, it would be like ‘Hey, fellas, you wanna make it a band?’ That would be fine with me, and I’ll go on record saying it, but I don’t know how they feel about it. It was the most intense musical high I’ve ever had—and I’ve had a few over the years. But this really hit it for me. It was four days of some pretty intense music-making— and it was all live. There was one drum overdub on ‘Memphis In The Meantime,’ and maraca overdubs on ‘Thank You, Girl’ and ‘Like Your Dad Did.’ Cooder overdubbed a guitar and sitar on ‘Like Your Dad Did’ because we originally cut it as a three-piece after he’d left. There were also two harmony vocal overdubs. Everything else was live. I sang all the vocals live as we cut the track.

“That was a real departure in terms of making a record for me. Again, it was all Chelew’s idea, and it turned out to be a good one. There’s just no darn reason to spend a lot of money on making a record,

I don’t think. It’s gotten sort of like sports in that they’re throwing so goshdarn much money around. No wonder these guys are snorting coke. Everything’s gotten so out of proportion, it’s just out of whack. It’s crazy.”

Hiatt spent most of his “dark period” years in Los Angeles. Now he’s moved back to Nashville, the city he first came to at the age of 18 as a songwriter for Tree Publishing. He’s living there with his wife and two children. And they lived happily ever after...

"I’ve been through a lot of changing and a lot of growing up in the last couple years, and I think that has a lot to do with it,” he says of his new material. “I’m very happily married with two kids, and I very much wanted to be able to express that somehow. I’ll be 35 in August, and your priorities just sort of change as you get older. I never thought I’d be writing songs about my kid, or actually sitting down and struggling to put how much I love my wife into a song. That wasn’t in the cards as far as I was concerned. I guess a lot of things weren’t. But that’s the way things have turned out, and I’m grateful they have.

“Priorities just get shifted, at least they did for me. You know, that vamp in the nightclub with her 20-inch fingernails, she just doesn’t show up in my tunes that much anymore because I’m not there anymore. I’m much more in tune with a cub scout pack meeting of my daughter wanting a new purse.”

John Hiatt has a big grin on his face. “It’s a wonderful life, as Frank Capra would say,” he laughs. “And it doesn’t have to be colorized.”