ND: That’s where you learned to produce, isn’t it?
GD: Henry Lewy was a good friend of mine, the engineer who did all of Joni Mitchell’s early records, and Stephen Bishop; he has this amazing discography. He was an older German guy that befriended me, and his wife was lovely. They were like a friendly aunt and uncle. He taught me a lot about the studio and recording.
I remember listening to a playback one time at A&M. I was sitting there smiling and listening, and he looked over at me and said, “Are you singing while you’re listening? In your mind, are you singing?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Well stop it! How can you listen if you’re singing in your mind? You’re cancelling it out.” You don’t think about things like that.
ND: Why Nashville?
GD: The publishing company I wrote for, Beachwood, got sold to Screen Gems. So the new head of Screen Gems sat down and listened to my songs, and said, “Well, this girl is a country singer, let’s send her to Nashville.” The guy that picked me up at the airport was a real charming young Texas boy named Richard Allen, and a week later we got married.
ND: How quickly after you moved here did you begin cutting songs as a solo artist?
GD: Immediately. I had a bad experience with the first producer that I did my [1978 self-titled] album with. Very bad. Very unpleasant. He took my guitar away from me to play “Grandma’s Song” for the band, and I said, “Don’t ever take my guitar away from me like that, that’s really embarrassing.” I mean, I can play my songs, I wrote them.
He says, “I don’t know that these guys want a woman telling them what to do.” You know, it was Nashville, 1977. At one point during the string session I made a comment — which was a really valid comment — to the string arranger, that the strings should go up on a line where they were coming down, and it was very anticlimactic. He said, “Why don’t you just shut up and leave the studio?” This is my record!
I went out, and I was fairly young, sat on the steps and cried a little bit. I had written eight of the songs, and had brought two songs as arrangements, the Carl Smith song, “Are You Teasing Me?” and a song called “Poison Love”, [made famous by] Johnnie & Jack. I felt like I was making a weighty contribution here. And being tromped on. So I decided I would never go in the studio with another producer, and I never have.
They set up studio time for me for the next album, and I said, “I’m telling you, I’m not going to do it.” I didn’t show up. And they freaked out. That’s where the reputation started in Nashville, “Well, Gail’s difficult, Gail’s destroying her own career.” And I said, “It’s really simple. It’s my music. If I cannot do my music my way, then I’ll let it rot.” I will not do it any other way.
And that’s not to say that I don’t love input, because I’m one of the producers that really looks for input from musicians. I was raised in a neighborhood of 19 boys, I have all brothers, I don’t have any issues with guys [laughs], and I like the feedback. I’ve always worked with the best musicians in the world.
ND: But your second record wasn’t much easier.
GD: I ended up going to Muscle Shoals and cutting the album [The Game]. It was my first production, and it was rough. I had a lot of trouble with the engineer, I found out he was stealing money from the budget, behind my back. So I called Henry Lewy on the phone, and I was in tears, telling him what was going on. Henry says, “I want you to go in the other room and fire him. And I will hold the phone.”
So I went in the other room and I said, “You’re fired. I want you out of here, you’ve been ripping me off.” I went back to the phone, and I was just freaked. And Henry said, “Remember one thing, Gail. Good music can always compensate for bad sound. But bad music can never compensate for good sound.”
II. COUNTRY CLAIMS TO BE FAMILY ORIENTED, BUT THEY’RE NOT.
ND: You were fortunate to be around a lot of good music, though.
GD: Oh, I was so excited, yeah, when Steve Earle’s Guitar Town came out. We were writing at Lorimar: Steve Earle, my brother, Gretchen Peters, Harry Stinson, me, it was so much fun. I’d go in there and hang out, and Steve’d go, “Yeah, Gail, I wish someday we could work together.” Because I was successful. And now I see Steve Earle out on the road packing some coliseum, and I go, Yeah, you and Garth Brooks will be calling me any day (laughs).
ND: You had a pretty good run on the charts, and then pretty much disappeared.
GD: Country claims to be family oriented, but they’re not. They wanted me to sell my kid down the river. They said, “Get rid of the kid, you need to be screwable, you need to look a certain way, the kid’s in the way.” They were brutal, the stuff that went on when I had that baby was brutal. Which is why I took 12 years and moved out to the country.
ND: When did you begin producing other people?
GD: I’ve always done production for people, but I started working for Jimmy Bowen in 1989. I was on Capitol Records and had an album out called The Other Side Of Love, which, strangely enough, is probably the best album I’ve ever had, and it was way before its time. It was sort of leaning bluegrass.
Bowen said [gruff voice], “Well, all the guys in L.A. love the album. That’s a bad sign. I think this album is just too hip for what we’re trying to do here.” And of course, the single came out the same week as Capitol released “Friends In Low Places”, so you can imagine how successful my single was. It was very sad.
So anyway, he came in one day, and I knew he was getting ready to drop me from the label. He walked in and he says, “Well, Gail, I’ve been thinking it over, I think you should be a producer instead of an artist.” I said, “Oh, then you’re dropping me from the label? I get it.” That’s how I came to produce Mandy Barnett.
ND: What happened with those sessions?
GD: I spent three years there. I cut probably two albums’ worth of material on Mandy Barnett, from the time she was 14. We’ve been friends that long, and my husband plays bass for Mandy, so we still see and hear quite a bit of Mandy. None of the projects that I did ever came out. I was very, very disappointed.
I did some stuff on Deryl Dodd, which was interesting. Bowen had asked me to take the Kinleys in the studio, so I recorded some demos with them, and I just thought they were really, really talented, but he wasn’t interested. James House and I wanted to do a project together.
I was spending a lot of time spinning my wheels, so I left. Went to Europe and met my husband. We got married, came over here, I had a house out in the country that was paid for. He said he really wanted to go out and tour, and work. So we sold the house, and we took the money, and we made the Greatest Hits CD. We actually made two albums with my house. I do stuff like that.
