Sunday, May 01, 2005

A Chat with Narrows Fave Chris Smither

A little chat with Chris Smither I found on the globalvillageidiot.net.


CHRIS SMITHER
"Part of me wants to say it's gotten easier, and to a degree that's true. But there's another part of me that says it's just as hard as it ever was!"

Chris Smither has been around the block a few times. You can hear it in his voice. And you can hear it in his songs, where experience and hope mingle. But at 59, that's only to be expected. On Train Home , his 11th album, his distills everything into a remarkable collection of performances that manage to sound relaxed and intense at the same time.

"The basic tracks were recorded in the house," he explains. "We brought in a very high-end studio and set it up. It produced a comfort factor, a relaxed feel. I loved it, and David 'Goody' Goodrich really wanted to do it that way. He said he'd missed the intimacy in my studio records. He wanted people to hear them the way he first heard them across my dining room table."

So he simply played the songs, one after another. Then he'd take a break, and "then play them all again in a different order. We did that four times and we had them all."

But the New Orleans native, who makes his home in Boston, is used to performing; it's something he's been doing since 1966. During the early '70s he recorded three albums (one of which remains unreleased), and then "I just fell into all the worst kinds of drugs and alcohol, mostly alcohol. When I got tired of that, or it got tired of me, I sort of washed up on a different shore and started recording and writing again. And things have been pretty good since about '89."

Since that rebirth his music has mined a rich seam, and he's found a voice and style that's truly his own., showing excellent chops as both songwriter and guitar picker. Still, that's perhaps to be expected from someone whose first inspiration was a bluesman who tapped his own deep well - Lightnin' Hopkins.

"In the '50s and '60s I was really into rock'n'roll, and here was a guy who was playing rock'n'roll all by himself. IT just appealed. I never wanted to be in a band, I was always something of a loner. I was unsure of myself for one thing. I couldn't believe all this noise coming out of one guy with one acoustic guitar, and I couldn't imagine how it was done at first. After a while the lyric got to me. He was a wonderful storyteller. At the same time, there was nothing involved about it. There was a concision to it, a brevity of expression that spoke worlds. I even realized at an early age that it was the combination of the rhythmic aspect of it and it was all the things I liked about rock'n'roll, a synthesis of rhythm and simple lyrics that just hit home with tremendous power. And the ultimate beauty was that I could do it by myself. I didn't have to be involved with other people. Rock'n'roll lyrics didn't read well until the Beatles, Cream and everybody else. It taught me a lot about guitar playing and solo orchestration of songs. That served me well when I started listening to Dylan. Dylan was a guy very much like me. He started off playing blues - on his first record he was playing Blind Lemon Jefferson. And if you listen to what he does now, it's all informed by blues. That's me, too. It took me years to realize we'd followed the same path."

The discovery of music by the old bluesmen - often from the legendary Anthology of American Music - was a turning point for an entire generation of young musicians, what Smither terms "the cataclysmic fusion."

For Smither it came full circle with Avalon Blues , the tribute to the music of Mississippi John Hurt that was assembled by Peter Case. Hurt was Smither's "second bluesman, and at one time or another, I probably learned everything John Hurt ever did." He ended up covering "Frankie and Albert," in a version that fell together in about an hour, "so we ran over to a studio and laid it down. I sent it to Peter Case, probably within two weeks of when he called me. Then two years later I was doing a show with him in Chicago and he handed me an advance copy of the record."

And on Train Home's epic performance (among other wonderful covers and his own material) he takes on Dylan, with his own interpretation of "Desolation Row."

"That song stayed with me for years. There's a kind of intimate air of resignation about it that he never approached. He was still such an angry young man, he was like 23 when he wrote it. There's this quiet resignation about the song, and a bit of despair, too, but it needs to be recounted person to person. It's not a high dudgeon, declamatory thing at all. Goody told me he wanted to do it up, start off real simple and build into a big moment, then tail off. He said 'I want you to call your pal Bonnie [Raitt] and get her to work on it.' So I was calling in favors - and he was right. I've never asked her to do anything before, I wanted to have something that made sense for her to work on rather than marquee value. And that was it. She did a killer job. I never even saw. I sent her the basic acoustic version on disk. She went into the studio and laid down a whole bunch of stuff and said 'Take your pick.' And it was all good. It sounded like we'd been living together for 20 years."

There's plenty of his own material on Train Home, too, proof that Smither is the equal of all his inspirations. There's maturity, in the very best way, throughout his work.

"Part of me wants to say it's gotten easier, and to a degree that's true. But there's another part of me that says it's just as hard as it ever was! The only difference is that now you have the confidence that if you keep at it, it will happen."

Which could almost stand as a metaphor for Smithers's own career

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