“I’m so grateful for my path.
“I had been on the Don Imus show that morning, and played, and as freaked and scared as I was, just freaked into a calm and I felt like we really had a good showing there. I was on my way to interview with The Wall Street Journal, in the back of a limo, my first time to New York ever, with a publicist and coming off national TV and really like, whoa, here we go…and my cell phone rang, and it was my manager. I said, ‘What’s the radio thing look like today,’ and he said, “We didn’t get any adds.’ ‘We didn’t get any adds?’ He said, ‘Yeah, they pulled the plug on the single.’ Two weeks in, they pulled the plug on it.”
She pauses. “I’ll not be blindsided like that again.” Not angry, just taking notes.
“See, I was trying to get somewhere,” she says later. “Lots of music executives are already where they wanna be. There’s no sense of urgency surrounded by leather furniture and potpourri and insurance policies on everything. It is very hard to work with people who are content and aren’t really trying to do anything for themselves or their bosses. Like rich kids….But I couldn’t see that at the time. Now it helps me decide who I wanna pursue working with. They gotta be as hungry as me.”
That’s sort of how she got into the shoe business, the day job she won’t let go.
“Uhuh. Trying to hold onto it,” she says. “It’s one of these weird things that I know probably doesn’t make sense to people on the surface, but I’m very attached to this woman that I work for. She is an inspiration to me. Her name is Charlene Morrison, she’s still got the shoe cart where she’s fitted Tammy Wynette and Little Jimmy Dickens, and you know, she’s a real shoe legacy.
“And she’s an amazing woman, and she’s older, she’s single, and she’s a fireball. I love working for her. And she…needs me. She can’t double-click. She needs me. And we’re just attached….And I get 50% off on all my shoes!
“It’s a little strange to help people find shoes that I’ve shared the stage with, but, it’s not about ego, you know, it’s not to me.”
Rodney Crowell stops the conversation gently. “Did you guys talk about Tim Carroll?” Tim Carroll wrote (among other seminal alt.country songs) “Punk Rockin’ Honky Tonk Girl” while playing guitar with the Blue Chieftains, one of those scrappy ex-punk bands who provided the underpinnings for New York’s Diesel Only milieu in the early 1990s.
And then he moved to Nashville, where he’s done — and done well — about everything you can do without falling into a big pit of money. He and Elizabeth have been married and together for a good while now.
A little bit. We talked about Tim a little bit, but not too much. He has his own career.
“Well, then, I’m going to talk about him,” Crowell says. “I think Tim’s contributions to this record were really important, for me. And not to take anything away from Elizabeth.
“You know, Tim’s a punk rocker,” he chuckles. “He has a primitive sensibility that I really like. I felt like the things that he brought to the record were really big, really exciting for me. For example, if you look at ‘Don’t Go Borrowin’ Trouble’, the guitar solo on that. If you take any practiced, regular session guitarist, they wouldn’t have played like that. That drop of punk rock attitude put a sprinkle of spice on this record that I think sets her apart.”
Well, yeah. Tim’s a punk rocker, or he was, but that’s not what we talked about. We talked about how he’s her Buddy Miller, though that comparison came later (and if Buddy hadn’t been busy with Solomon Burke, he might’ve produced Balls).
Like many of us, Elizabeth Cook struggles to quiet and select among her creative voices. To focus. So, sometimes, Tim drives and she writes.
“It was Huntsville, Alabama, I remember best,” she writes. “I had a champagne hangover and a lot going on. It was a cold but sunny winter day. He just said, ‘Ya wanna go for a ride?’ Past that we probably didn’t say two words, not about where we were riding or anything till we got back to the house that night. Didn’t matter. Was totally beside the point and not important and we both knew it.
“To Huntsville, Alabama, McDonald’s drive-through and back up I-65. I wrote ‘Times Are Tough In Rock ‘N’ Roll’ and ‘Borrowing Trouble’ flying down the interstate in his truck. Getting that off my chest and a Big Mac, even though I don’t eat much red meat, was just what I needed.
“That night he set up a mike. I hopped on the stool and put chords to the melody in my head while he recorded it. Then I went to bed and he stayed up way into the morning putting on overdubs. That’s a man.”
ND co-editor and art director Grant Alden is saddened to admit that his daughter would rather go to Disney World than to Merlefest for her birthday. But she’s only four, there’s time.
