Oldham books his own sessions, and says he’s not that picky if the pay is right and his schedule is open. There’s no preparation involved. “Usually what happens,” Oldham explains, “is that when I hear the song, I’ll talk to the producer or another player and say, ‘What do you hear? Piano? Organ?’ The artists I’ve worked with can usually sit down with a guitar and give you a good picture of a song. So I try to key into that and embellish it with what I do. It’s all about the song, and all about the performance.”
Penn had a tougher time adjusting to life after the heyday of southern soul. Old Fame colleagues like Donnie Fritts moved into country music, playing keyboards for Kris Kristofferson, but Penn wasn’t cut out for Music Row. “I had trouble with country when it was good,” he says today, but the real issue was that R&B had changed. “We were country R&B,” Penn says. “Then it got more city, and in the ’90s, I don’t know why they even called it R&B. I wish I could stay current, but I decided a long time ago that, ‘Hey, you can’t stay up with it, baby, so just hang back here and do your thing.'”
Penn and Oldham had long noticed that European and Japanese audiences were informed fans of soul, just as they are of jazz. “Back in the ’60s and ’70s, they wanted to know who wrote the songs and who played on this,” Penn recalls. “It wasn’t just a star trip, like in America; it was about the making of the record.”
Peter Guralnick is an American author with a foreigner’s curiosity, and the 1986 publication of Sweet Soul Music was a valuable addition to music literature. When the paperback was reissued in 1991, it encouraged the release of some more great soul music. First Guralnick and Joe McEwen, an A&R man with a passion for R&B, produced a revelatory compilation called Sweet Soul Music: Voices From The Shadows. Then Penn and Oldham were enlisted to back Arthur Alexander on 1993’s Lonely Just Like Me, a fine album that was released months before the singer’s death. Finally, McEwen got Penn in the studio with his old Fame buddies to cut the excellent Do Right Man, a 1994 collection that confirmed Penn just might be his own best interpreter.
It was perhaps no coincidence that this revival came after Penn had kicked some long-standing problems with drugs and alcohol. It wasn’t the first time he had turned to the Lord for help; early on, he’d briefly quit music to work in Bible store.
“Something very strong was hitting me back in ’81,” he recently told Crossrhythms, a Christian music magazine, “and I haven’t forgotten how lost I was. I came to the end of my rope and I knew that was it. I had one foot over the grave, or I felt like it…but one prayer and he was there.”
Lest one worry that the born-again Penn has lost his sense of humor, he tells the same interviewer, “I sometimes pray for a song, and I say, ‘Lord, if you can’t give it to me, give it to my co-writer.'”
Not long after the release of Do Right Man, Penn’s new record-biz friends encouraged him to go see Nick Lowe when he played Nashville. “He came up to me,” says Lowe, “and said, ‘I’m Dan Penn,’ and gave me a card that identified him as a ‘writer.'” Lowe was charmed, and soon Penn and Oldham were engaged to open a series of dates in the British Isles.
“They really helped people to get my newer, low-key style, just hearing Dan and Spooner play these songs in this very undercooked way,” Lowe acknowledges. “And if you’ve got ears, it’s mesmerizing, and not just a couple of old blokes mumbling. Or, as Dan jokes about hearing one night, ‘Who are these old guys singing covers?'”
Moments From This Theatre was drawn from those 1998 dates, and Penn has been busy ever since. He produced an Irma Thomas collection in 2000 called My Heart’s In Memphis: The Songs Of Dan Penn, and he started building Dandy Studio in the basement of his Nashville home. Just this year, Penn has produced Bobby Purify’s Better To Have It (he also wrote all but one of the songs with Carson Whitsett and Hoy Lindsey, the same trio that wrote the title tune for Solomon Burke’s Don’t Give Up On Me), the Hacienda Brothers self-titled debut, and Greg Trooper’s Make It Through This World. Frank Black recorded Honeycomb in Penn’s basement, with Penn as engineer and Oldham playing keyboards.
“What drew me to Dan was that I wanted a more rhythm section and organ driven kind of sound,” says Trooper. “It also didn’t hurt that Do Right Man was still in heavy rotation in my CD player.” He says Penn’s best advice was to sit down while he sang. “He said, ‘Once you stand up, you start performing,’ and he was right, because when I sat there and read the lyrics, it took away some of my self-consciousness, and got me closer to the songs.”
Penn also brought his old friends to the studio to cut a record called One Foot In The Groove by Donnie Fritts, who’s lately gone through both heart surgery and a kidney transplant. The disc has yet to find a label, but one suspects the musical amigos gathered in the basement for reasons other than mere commerce.
“There ain’t no friend like an old friend,” says Penn, who’s been married to his wife Linda for 43 years. “They can make you mad, maybe, but you get glad, because they’re your old friend. Me and Spooner and Fritts have known each other for so long that they can just walk in a room and I’ll warm up.”
John Milward sings with the Comfy Chair, a Hudson Valley band whose repertoire includes “You Better Move On”, “I’m Your Puppet” and “The Dark End of the Street”.
