“People in Texas embraced Uncle Walt’s Band,” Ball says, “because that South Carolina sound was so fresh out there. To me, it was just what I had grown up with. But the first time I walked into a dancehall and heard that big band with all that hot picking and all those old Bob Wills songs, I fell in love. I had never heard anything like it.”
When Uncle Walt’s Band failed to grab the brass ring and Ball went back to South Carolina to lick his wounds, he couldn’t get that hard-core honky-tonk sound out of his head. And when he heard that Randy Travis single on the car radio, he knew he had to give it a shot.
Soon after landing in Nashville in ’88, Ball signed with Don Schlitz’s publishing company and found himself co-writing with another recent arrival, Allen Shamblin. “We were both new and feeling our way,” Ball remembers, “but one day in the office, he said, ‘What about a song called “Thinkin’ Problem”?’ I just loved the idea, because you hear the title and you know immediately it’s about a man who keeps reaching for a memory the way some keep reaching for a bottle. Once we had the title, the song just wrote itself.”
No one at Nashville’s record companies seemed to share Ball’s enthusiasm for the song, however. He got a deal with RCA as an artist, but his producers there wanted something more pop-oriented than the hard-core honky-tonk of “Thinkin’ Problem”. He cut nearly two albums’ worth of material for RCA, but the label only released a pair of singles before cutting him loose. (RCA finally released those old tapes as David Ball in the wake of Ball’s 1994 breakthrough.)
“RCA wasn’t looking for the Texas dancehall stuff I was most familiar with,” Ball explains, “so I put ‘Thinkin’ Problem’ in a drawer. I knew if I ever got another chance to make an album, that would be one song I’d want to do. In the meantime, I found myself traveling back to Texas to play the clubs there where I had a following. One night I decided to sing ‘Thinkin’ Problem’, even though the band didn’t know it. That’s how I came up with that introduction where I start singing before the band comes in.”
Back in Nashville, Ball got in the habit of writing all day at his publisher’s office on Music Row and then at quitting time crossing the street to the Idle Hour, a run-down hole in the wall. There, he and his pals would drink some beer, shoot some pool and sing some songs. One of those pals, demo producer Blake Chancey, dragged Dave Grau of Warner Bros. over to the Idle Hour one evening, and there between the pool tables and pinball machines, Ball sang the songs that eventually landed him a contract.
Chancey, who got the job as Ball’s producer, had no qualms about recording “Thinkin’ Problem”. It became the title song of the Warner Bros. album; as the first single, it shot all the way to #2 on Billboard’s country chart. It was followed by two more successful singles: the gentle heartbreak ballad “When The Thought Of You Catches Up To Me” and the uptempo honky-tonk number “Look What Followed Me Home”. The album sold more than a million copies and turned Ball into a most unlikely Nashville star for the ’90s: a well-weathered fortysomething with a heavy twang in his voice.
“It took me a long time to get here,” Ball admits, “and it was frustrating sometimes. When I first got to Nashville, I knew all about the ’50s; I thought Chet Atkins would be a great producer and Buddy Emmons would be a great steel player. I soon learned those people weren’t making hit records anymore, and I gradually learned what it took to get on the radio, which is what I’ve wanted since I was 15.
“I’m a big fan of the hit record. You can have a great song, and it won’t necessarily be a hit. To be a hit it needs to have an immediate, overall impact. And to do that, it has to be simple. When songwriters come to Nashville with their first batch of songs, you’ll often hear two or three songs in one song, but you don’t hear those songs on the radio. You have to tell one story and stick to it; if you can also have a deeper meaning, so much the better.
“When I had my hit, I did what everyone does when they have a hit,” he explains. “I went to work. I played every place you can play and, believe me, there are a lot of them. People always ask if I get tired of singing ‘Thinkin’ Problem’, and I say, ‘Hell, no. I think it’s one of the best country songs I’ve ever heard.’ People also ask if I was worried about following it up. I say, ‘No, but a lot of people around me were.'”
Ball’s next album, 1996’s Starlite Lounge, reflected his experience touring with Dwight Yoakam, boasting that bright-sounding, multitracked, neo-Bakersfield sound. Like Yoakam’s discs, Starlite Lounge sounds old-fashioned at first with its fiddle fills and its drawling vocals, but if you listen closely, you’ll hear a refusal to just sit back and absorb life’s blows. Instead, the music pushes back at the world with its punchy drums, its on-the-one rhythm guitar and its steely singing.
The second album didn’t sell anything like the first, however, and the third one got delayed by a change in managers and then the change in producers. Play will be the test: Was the success of “Thinkin’ Problem” just an aberration in country radio’s steady march toward the Hotel California? Or is there still room for authentic honky-tonk singing?
In the meantime, Ball hasn’t lost his alt-country connections. When Bob Dylan was selected to receive a Kennedy Center Honor in 1997, he had to choose three artists to sing his songs at the awards show. Dylan picked Bruce Springsteen to sing “The Times They Are A-Changin'”, gospel diva Shirley Caesar to sing “Gotta Serve Somebody”, and Ball to sing “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”.
“I’m not sure why he asked me,” Ball admits. “A friend of mine, Bucky Baxter, plays pedal steel in his band, and I did record ‘Miss The Mississippi And You’ on that Jimmie Rodgers tribute album Dylan did. I’ve always been drawn more to Jimmie Rodgers than the Carter Family because he had more rhythm and edge. In fact, I sang so many of his songs with Uncle Walt’s Band that I probably sold more Jimmie Rodgers albums than anyone in Texas.
“I was proud to be on the Kennedy Center show with Dylan. He’s one of the few artists I admire even though he doesn’t influence me. It’s not hard to see that his approach to music and mine are not the same, but we both deal in lyric and melody, and that’s where we find some common ground. The whole night was like that. They were throwing people together from many different paths — Dylan and Charlton Heston, Bill Clinton and Lauren Bacall — but we were under one umbrella. Dylan does the same thing in his songs, bringing people together like Robin Hood and Einstein and Cinderella.
“All my life,” Ball concludes, “versatility had been my strong point. I can play several different instruments and I can do all kinds of music — folk, bluegrass, R&B, Elvis, swing — but I found out that just confuses people. You have to present a very clear picture and say, ‘This is it.’ And I realized that the music I loved the most was that hard-core honky-tonk I had learned in those Texas dancehalls. That’s why I put that Webb Pierce song on my first album, just in case people didn’t know where I was coming from.”
If the musical freedom of alternative country means anything, it has to include the freedom to choose any direction at all — even the most mainstream, most commercial country music there is. And once you start dabbling in traditional country, there’s always the danger that you might get hooked. Before you know it, you’re mainlining Hank Thompson and John Anderson. When that happens, you have to decide what’s more important: the hipness quotient, or your gut feeling. David Ball went with his guts, and few things are more alternative than that.
Geoffrey Himes’ favorite souvenir from his first-ever Fan Fair this year was a “Hey Good Lookin’, What You Got Cookin'” potholder from the Hank Williams Sr. Fan Club booth.
