The Houston Kid muses on feminine mystery, writing his memoir and the merits of letting go of the controls, getting grumpy and growing up in “the murder capital of the world.” BY ROB PATTERSON
RODNEY CROWELL made his first musical bones playing Houston ship channel juke ’n’ puke bars, and first emerged to national listeners in the mid-1970s as a guitarist and singer in Emmylou Harris’ Hot Band, writing songs like “Bluebird Wine,” “Till I Gain Control Again,” “Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight” and “I Ain’t Living Long Like This” for her first four albums — songs that made avid album-credit-scanners go, “Whoa, who is this guy?” In 1977, the sideman and songwriter stepped into the spotlight for his own debut, Ain’t Living Long Like This, a stunning opener for a career that’s been met with reams of critical acclaim and, with 1988’s blockbuster Diamonds & Dirt, no small amount of commercial success, either (the album featured a record-making five No. 1 country singles). Along the way, he’s continued to be covered by other artists and developed a reputation as a savvy producer, too, most notably on the first few albums by his former wife, Rosanne Cash.
But some of his very best work has come in the last decade. Beginning with 2001’s The Houston Kid and extending to his brand new Sex & Gasoline, Crowell has moved from strength to strength with four pointed and sometimes political albums that mark him as perhaps the last “new Dylan” of his generation. Whip-smart, Southwestern sly, modest and self-effacing, yet very powerful and utterly musical, he’s the Magic Man of Texas music in Nashville, who mastered the Music Row game and then transcended it. With at least three artistic eras under his belt at age 58, Crowell remains on any number of cool and interesting creative edges by following the Dylan dictum of “he who is not busy being born is busy dying.”
How is Sex & Gasoline based around “feminine power,” as the PR materials allude?
Well, feminine mystery. Let me see. Probably more the stormtrooper boots stomping all over feminine mystery. That seems to be what modern culture does. I think Dylan’s [last] album was called Modern Times. It sure does seem like modern times stomps all over feminine mystery.
I had a lot of personal issues going on with people close to me that sent me into, I don’t know, a research project that sort of turned into a collection of songs. It certainly was a mindset I was into there fairly deeply, so much so that with “The Rise & Fall of Intelligent Design,” I actually tried on narrating as a male speaking from a feminine point of view and back and forth. I was certainly exploring it.
Looking at your career, I see three distinct periods: Your first records were singer-songwriter albums, then you later cut albums on which you became a Nashville hit-maker, and then the albums you’ve made since The Houston Kid in 2001. Am I onto something?
That’s not far off. My first three records, I lived in California. Then I moved to Nashville, and the natural byproduct of that brought me to Music Row. So I took a shot at it with a record called Street Language, but I sort of missed it. And then sort of by accident, I made Diamonds & Dirt, just because I was thinking I wanted to exercise some of the music I grew up on, and rang the bell. You’ve kindly left out a period there. I took the better part of the ’90s off. Two reasons. One, I was a single father. And another was that I made of couple of records for MCA that … kind of embarrassed me. Because I found myself trying to go back and reclaim the country hit-maker thing. And my heart wasn’t in it, and the work showed that to me.
So life made it necessary that I pull the plug. But I think had I not had the responsibility with children I would have pulled the plug anyway, because I wasn’t happy with myself. I don’t blame anyone else. And then when I came out of that quiet five years, I had learned a lot. And this third and more recent phase that you speak of started with The Houston Kid. And I truly brought another mindset to the whole process when I came back. Now I’m starting to get a body of work going behind that new thought process or mindset. And I’m starting to learn from it. I think this new record that I’ve made was a necessity in and of itself. I actually went into the studio and made a record [before this one], and to me it felt like the opposing team was stealing the sign from my change-up, and I couldn’t get anybody out with all my old pitches. So I scrapped it and called Joe Henry, and said, you know, “I need to show up at your door. I need help, I need you to take the production, and I need to just play and sing.” And I’m glad I did.
People who follow me seem to like one group of songs or another. Somebody might say to me they like the group of songs on The Houston Kid or someone else might like Fate’s Right Hand. I’ve noticed that out there. And I’ve just come to a point in my creative process where — I’m going to keep making records, and it’s just going to be one group of songs to the next. Some people are going to like one group rather than another. As it should be.
But I’ll say this: I have no value judgments about this group of songs. But what I do know, for me — and a lot of the time, truthfully, the only pay you get out of making a record is what you get out of it — I just don’t think I’ve played or sung better than I do on this record. And that’s it for me. And I think that had everything to do with it all being live, all in the moment. I could do that with a producer taking the reins; when I’m producing my own records I can’t do that because I’m busy helping everyone else.
It must be nice to do that, especially since you’ve also produced other artists to great success. Does producing yourself feel like multi-tasking plus?
It’s three too many tasks. It came as a bit of relief to know that I could go in the studio for five days and come out with a record. It was so unlike me: I told Joe, “I’m going home, you mail me the mixes.” I’ve never done that.
How’d you feel when you got them?
This is great! It sounds great, you know? I was joking to the musicians at one time during the sessions, “You know, this is like how I’ve read and heard those stories about how when the Beatles were making their early records, they weren’t allowed in the control room. This is cool. Don’t anyone allow me in the control room!”
Do you have any idea whether there’s another era coming with you, and any inklings of what it might be?
Uh, how do you say that? I have an idea of something I want to do, an ambition for some music I want to make. But I’m working on another project right now that, I think, until I see its completion, it’s likely that it will then introduce the next phase of my career. It’s not musical at all, it’s something else. I’m writing a book. And I see the train, you know — the train’s coming down to end of the tunnel. I’m getting close to ready to find my super editor; I’ve worked really hard to bring it to a place where an editor won’t have to hack it up too bad. I’ve been really careful with that work. And I’ve been working on it intensely since I finished this record last October, exclusively since then.
Is that your memoirs that you’ve mentioned before? Or a work of fiction?
No, it is a memoir. I wouldn’t call it my memoirs, it is just a memoir. It’s kind of specific to a certain thing. I started it eight years ago. It informs what I do in a lot of ways, and I think once I see its completion, I’ll be standing at the next phase of what I’ll be doing musically. From where I sit right now, although I have a record I want to make and the songs are written, I have to bring this particular thing to a close, because it’s something I’ve been working on for a while. So that’s the only way I can answer your question directly, is, gosh, I don’t know. I know that Sex & Gasoline is a record that I had to make in the way I made it in order to find something new in my own recording process. And I enjoyed that. So having done that and then having completed the book, it’s surely going to lead me to the next phase of whatever it is I’m going to do.
I assume you’ve heard Kimmie Rhodes’s version of the song “Sex & Gasoline” on her own album, Walls Fall Down. What are your thoughts on it?
I like it that she made it a girl. [Chuckles] We talked about that. She said, “Hey Rodney, I went and made your song sound like a girl.” I love her. What a soul. That other song on that record — “This is the last seven seconds of the world!” [“Last Seven Seconds”] What a wild sense of humor she has. We are of like minds, she and I. Our conversations are often, “We are grumpy about a lot of the same things.”
Do you find, as I do, that one of the benefits of maturity is that you get a right to be grumpy with your AARP card?
Grump is an earned privilege.
I find it interesting, paralleling off the fact that you’re from Houston and your album is called Sex & Gasoline, that Houston is the petrochemical capital of the nation and, as lore has it, has more titty bars per capita than any other city in America. Coincidence or not?
I don’t doubt that. Having once been in the employ of a certain petrochemical company, and the amusements you go searching for after eight hours of that … you don’t go in search of high-mindedness coming out of a Shell Oil refinery. I love Houston. And I’ve tried to explain this to people: I love the city of my birth because I’ve never heard of another city that bragged about being the murder capital of the world. I knew people when I was a kid who’d be like, “I’m from Houston! Murder capital of the world.” I was like, “I don’t know if I’d have told that.” And then Pasadena proudly calls itself “Stinkadena.” And [they say] that the San Jacinto Monument was the world’s tallest outhouse, and that’s why all that horrible smell is over there. It takes a certain kind of audacity to stand behind that kind of cultural heritage. I stand behind it proudly.
What do you think are the things about your personality and character that are the most Texan?
I’m a liar. A bald-faced liar. For a guy who’s going to go to market with a memoir, I shouldn’t say that. And I gotta say that I adhere to the self-governing rules of the memoir. But people often ask me, I say this jokingly, “What is it about y’all songwriters?” You know what? Texas songwriters — we’re all born liars. The state was founded on a lie. Andrew Jackson sent Sam Houston down there and said, “Hey man, go hang around and gather ya up a crew of subversives for me and steal Mexico for me.” So they went down there — a bunch of opium smokers and alcoholics and ne’er-do-well guys on the make — and get it away from a disinterested Mexican government, and then build a monument to a bunch of crooks. The whole thing is based on a lie. I love it.
So you have to be a good liar to be a good songwriter?
Yeah. If the truth don’t rhyme, lie. You know Harlan Howard’s theory of three chords and the truth? Well, three chords and the truth and a lie if you need to make it rhyme.
Have you ever thought about moving back to Texas?
Yeah, I’ve thought about it. I made my sort of innocent pilgrimage to Austin right smack in the middle of the high-tech boom. I had called a real estate agent, who met me at the airport. I said, “Man, I remember those kind of 4,500-square-feet houses out there on the lake, that sounds about right.” And she says, “Well, OK, you’re talking about three-and-a-half million dollars.” And I said, “Three-and-a-half million dollars?” And she kinda caught my drift and, man, she shut down. She knew I didn’t know that since I was last snooping around Austin, things have changed. I sorta crawled back to Nashville with my tail between my legs, thinking, gawd, real estate is through the roof down there. And I talked to Ray Benson a little while later, and Ray in his old way said, “Aw man. Just hang on. All them prices are gonna come down.” So, to answer that, I always keep it in the back of my mind. Every time that I’m down there in and around Gruene Hall, I can’t help thinking, “Man, just up the river here I could set up shop and it’d be great.” So I always entertain it. I don’t think anybody from Texas doesn’t think that.
You might want to think twice of coming here to Austin. I call it the music career murder capital of the world.
Yeah, well, my career is something I don’t think can even be murdered. If I haven’t murdered it, something else can’t murder it.
