“Welfare Music” and “Kerosene” in particular helped give the Bottle Rockets an early reputation as a band whose music had a relevance that went deeper than many of their contemporaries at the forefront of alt-country. While Henneman’s own tunes more often dealt with the ups and downs of romantic relationships, Taylor brought to the table a socio-political sensibility that was pointed without being heavy-handed.
In “Kerosene”, Henneman’s immediately catchy melody (buoyed by backing vocals from Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy, with whom Henneman was touring at the time as a roadie for Uncle Tupelo) counterweights the seriousness of the song’s subject — a family that was killed when their trailer burned down after they tried to use gasoline in a kerosene stove. If it sounds like the kind of song that might have grown out of a story in the newspaper, Taylor says it was something akin to that.
“It’s based on something that actually happened in the area,” he acknowledges. “They had taken the burned-out trailer and they had hauled it up near the old Highway 61. And I’d pass it every once in awhile, and it just haunted me. But, you know, writing something about that, you really have to watch it, because you don’t wanna get preachy.” Instead, Taylor simply painted the picture, letting the story stand for itself.
He was more direct on “Welfare Music”, in which he takes a thinly veiled jab at Rush Limbaugh: “Angry fat man on the radio/Wants to keep his taxes way down low/Says there oughtta be a law/Angriest man I ever saw.”
“I think taxes are the price we pay for being Americans,” Taylor contends. “Like everybody, I like keeping the money I make, but on the other hand, I think a lot of times it goes for things that are really needed. And it drives me crazy when people are so hateful and resentful of it. I just don’t think it’s American.”
Early on, Henneman, as the lead singer, often got credit for Taylor’s words, which left him feeling slightly misunderstood at times. Although he certainly identified with those songs — “Brian will not sing something that he doesn’t feel,” Taylor assures — he couldn’t quite reconcile himself with the Merle Haggard “Workin’ Man Blues” persona that was often being applied to his band.
“We have this mysterious idea of what we might be, and no one in print has ever figured it out,” Henneman says. “The problem is, some of the stuff that people have written in influential positions has steered it way off from what we’re thinking it’s supposed to be.”
In terms of who he identifies with as a songwriter, “I would say John Prine is my number one driving thing,” he suggests. “I think our band is best described in a John Prine and Crazy Horse kind of way.”
Henneman also cites Badfinger’s 1970 single “No Matter What” — “the first song that really made me want to play guitar” — as an influence on his songwriting, which may partly account for the band’s general gravitation toward short, punchy pop songs. (Six cuts on Blue Sky clock in at under three minutes, and that’s typical of the band’s overall repertoire.)
More recently, he’s been rediscovering a lot of other artists who made an impact on him in his formative years. When it’s mentioned that the music in the chorus of “Blue Sky” bears a striking resemblance to that of Jim Croce’s “Working At The Car Wash Blues”, he cops to having revisited Croce’s work lately, as well as that of the Lovin’ Spoonful.
Perhaps the most intriguing revelation, though, is his admission of fondness for the music of David Gates and Bread. This first came to light in an e-mail exchange many months ago, when Henneman proclaimed: “What’s funny, is when you get right down to it, David Gates isn’t THAT far away from Neil Young.”
Confronted with this statement months later, Henneman gladly owns up to it. “It’s true, I believe that,” he says. “It’s not the chasm that Neil Young lovers might think that it is, if you think about it. It’s that singer-songwriter heartfelt kind of a thing. With Neil, just naturally, it’s cooler, and it’s more shrouded with that hippie voice, you know. If he could sing [Henneman appropriates a whining drawl] ‘I wanna make it with you’ — you know, if he did that on Tonight’s The Night, nobody would question it! Nobody would ever say, ‘Listen to that sappy crap.’
“Neil Young always had a great melody, and so did David Gates. It’s just, David Gates had that sweet voice, and he had the production that they used. But you’ve just gotta imagine Neil Young singing it. And then it can work.”
Henneman had also confided, in the e-mail which sparked the conversation, that “Everything I Own”, one of Gates’ biggest hits with Bread, “is one of my favorite songs ever done, by anybody. It became even more amazing to me when I learned he wrote it about his dad.”
It’s far too late to worry about what anyone might think. “Dammit, I’m fortysomething years old, I’m old enough to admit that I liked it,” he declares. “Because when you’re a kid, man, it’s tough. If you’re a new-metal guy and you like the Backstreet Boys, you can’t friggin’ let that shit out!” He laughs heartily. “Now when you’re fortysomething years old, maybe it’ll be OK.”
Perhaps it’s just another way of being reborn.
ND co-editor Peter Blackstock is fond of David Gates as well, but marginally prefers Barry Manilow and John Denver. Even if he’s not fortysomething, yet.
