“So I was driving back, and the song ‘Take It To The Limit’ came on the radio. I actually had to pull the car over. When you’re looking for your freedom/And you can’t find the door/…Take it to the limit one more time. It’s kind of weird to have your life turn around on an Eagles song, but when I got back, I handed the car keys over to my girlfriend and said, ‘I’m leaving tomorrow. I gotta go back to Nashville.’ And I hitchhiked back.”
Enter the X-Rays.
Although he continued to write “quiet” songs, over the next several years Olney garnered a reputation as the leader of one of the stormiest rock ‘n’ roll outfits ever to set foot on a Nashville stage. According to Olney, his original idea was to start a country band, but the group he put together quickly morphed into something else.
“We had rehearsals and stuff, and it seemed like it was a country band, but then the first gig we did was really loud rock ‘n’ roll,” he says. “We had a fiddle player, so he immediately quit, and it became electric guitar rock. We did some ballads, some slow songs, but it would just get loud, all the time.”
Along with Pat McLaughlin’s group, the X-Rays helped pioneer Nashville’s new wave movement, and Olney’s star was clearly on the rise. The band released an album, titled Contender, on Rounder in 1981 (joining a roster that then included George Thorogood), and even appeared on “Austin City Limits”. Various incarnations came and went, but Olney remained at the group’s center, penning nearly all the songs and gaining notice as a charismatic frontman. He enjoyed the notoriety, but he also never felt quite at home in the guise of a dyed-in-the-wool rock ‘n’ roller.
“We got popular, and that was wonderful, to have people know who you were,” he says. “If I was feeling kind of down, I used to just go for a walk in town, and wait for someone to honk their horn at me. The experience of doing the X-Rays was great, and playing with the people I played with was wonderful. But it made me realize that rock ‘n’ roll is almost like a religion. You really have to throw yourself into it, and you can’t hold any part back. And I realized that there was a part that I was holding back, that I missed — and that was the quiet, Townes-like songs.”
If Olney was looking to throw off his rock ‘n’ roll persona, then Eye Of The Storm, his first solo album, achieved that goal with room to spare. Released in 1986 on Rounder’s Philo imprint, shortly after the X-Rays had gone their separate ways, the mostly acoustic album had a tentative quality, as if Olney were looking through bleary eyes at an uncertain future. And in fact that was the case, at least in some respects. Whereas with the X-Rays he had grown accustomed to playing to packed houses, as a solo performer he often found that his audience consisted of himself and the bartender.
“That was probably the time I felt most ‘down,’ in Nashville,” Olney recalls. “I was 36 years old — no spring chicken — and it was like, ‘What’s going to happen?’ That’s where I first recorded ‘If It Wasn’t For The Wind’, which was how I felt at the time. The good thing that came out of that is that I realized I was going to keep writing songs. It didn’t make any difference if I couldn’t see what the payoff was going to be; writing songs was just something I did.”
By the time Olney was ready to record his next effort, writing songs was more than just something he did, it was something that had blossomed into a full-bodied artistic endeavor. Deeper Well, released on Philo in 1989, became the pivotal album of his career. In Olney’s words, “Everything came together on Deeper Well”: the songs, the playing, the production, and ultimately, even the timing.
Emmylou Harris was looking for material for her 1993 album Cowgirl’s Prayer when her friend Kieran Kane gave her a tape of songs. “Jerusalem Tomorrow”, a tune from Deeper Well that had been brought to Kane’s attention by Kevin Welch, was on the tape. A prototypical Olney composition, “Jerusalem Tomorrow” tells the story of a Bible-era huckster-turned-Jesus-apostle who might — or might not — resume his huckster ways. Olney was in a particularly bad way when he learned, to his great joy, that Harris had chosen the track for inclusion on her album.
“At that time I had written another song that had just gotten ripped off,” he explains. “A version of it became a minor country hit. And I was so discouraged, thinking I had been in this town for so long, and that’s how they take notice of you, by ripping you off. It was very distasteful. Then, about a week later, I found out that Emmylou was doing ‘Jerusalem Tomorrow’. At that point it just seemed to me that I had to let this other thing go. Otherwise, I couldn’t enjoy the fact that Emmylou did my song.”
Two years later, Harris made the title track of Deeper Well the centerpiece of her landmark album Wrecking Ball. Her patronage also led to a Linda Ronstadt cover of Olney’s “Women Across The River” (on 1995’s Feels Like Home). Later, on their 1999 duet album Western Wall, Harris and Ronstadt recorded “1917”, Olney’s harrowing World War I vignette told from the point of view of a kind-hearted French prostitute giving comfort to doomed soldiers.
Throughout the ’90s, over the course of four more albums recorded for Rounder, Olney continued to sharpen his gift for inhabiting characters and offering up their stories without regard for tidy moral summation. Whether contemplating the mind of a Depression-era gunslinger (“Dillinger”), examining the psychic turmoil of the pardoned thief who shared Jesus’ prison cell (“Barabbas”), or expressing David’s regret at slaying Goliath (“If I Didn’t Know I Couldn’t Do It”), Olney’s empathy was such that he often came off as a medium visited upon by haunted souls from an epic past.
