“People have referred to me as a poet a number of times,” says Newbury. Considering his subject matter and his approach, it’s not surprising — yet he doesn’t like it. “I’m a songwriter. I’m very satisfied with just being known as a songwriter.”
Yes, Frisco’s a mighty rich town, now that ain’t no lie
Why they got some buildings that reach a mile into the sky
Yet no one can even afford the time just to tell me why
Here’s this world full of people and so many people alone
— “Frisco Depot”
It’s partly a result of the unfortunate sway of time and circumstance that Newbury’s songs are not well-known these days among newer generations of country fans. A big part of his obscurity, however, can be explained by the fact that he gave up performing 23 years ago. “I’ve got a bunch of kids, and it was hard staying away from them,” he says. He also moved to Oregon — where his wife is from — which made traveling to gigs much more complicated. “It just got to be more of a hassle than it was worth.” Plus, he says, by the mid-1970s, “the folk scene had gone away, and there was no place to play.”
“Basically,” he says, summing up the experience, “I’m a writer who sings as opposed to a singer-songwriter. I can sing four or five times a year and be contented. And that’s what I’ve been doing.”
Currently, Newbury lives in an old farmhouse in Oregon’s Willamette Valley with his wife and three of his children. He doesn’t have a record label at the moment; in 1994, he helped found Winter Harvest, which released Nights When I Am Sane, a live acoustic album and Newbury’s first in six years. (The label later also released albums by Steve Earle and Mark Germino, but recently went out of business.)
Newbury’s newest collection, Lulled By the Moonlight, is a limited-release, 80-minute CD that’s only available by mail order ($27.50; call 541-726-4173). He recorded the album in Nashville at a place called the Record Club, and has released it under the label name Mountain Retreat.
“I’m having to poor-boy it. I mixed it in one night, and did the graphics and the cover in two hours. Working like that is pretty hard, but when it’s coming out of your own pocket, it’s the only way you can do it. It costs so much money to cut these days it’s unbelievable.
“I’m still old fashioned in the way I cut. If I go in the studio, and we don’t get it in the first or second take, I pass it up.” It’s a method, he says, that he’s pretty much always followed. “I can’t go back and sing something over and over again. I don’t know how in the hell anybody does it.”
For people today who are proud fans of Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, it’s almost ironic that Newbury’s name often draws a blank stare. Because not only were these artists more or less contemporaries of his, but in some cases it was Newbury — already an established songwriter by the mid-1960s — who got them their start in Nashville.
For starters, he turned Roger Miller onto a brand new song called “Me and Bobby McGee”, written by Newbury’s good friend Kristofferson. (“I had to grab Roger Miller by the ears just to make him listen to it,” Newbury recounts.) Though Janis Joplin’s version is the most widely known, Miller’s 1969 recording of the song was the first major turning point in Kristofferson’s career.
He also helped win a break in Nashville for the late Van Zandt, an artist for whom Newbury has the highest regard. Newbury says he met Townes at Jones Recording Studio in Houston, a business in which Newbury was a silent partner.
“Anybody who can’t recognize the genius of Townes Van Zandt, I don’t want to spend more than five minutes talking to them about music,” says Newbury firmly. “How could it get much better than ‘If I had No Place to Fall’ or ‘Our Mother the Mountain’ or ‘Quicksilver Daydreams of Maria’ or ‘St. John the Gambler’?”
He speaks the titles of these Van Zandt songs as if they were Biblical psalms.
” ‘The brown of her skin made her hair a soft golden rainfall, that spills from the mountains to the bottomless depths of her eyes,’ ” he says, reciting the line from “Quicksilver Daydreams of Maria” off the top of his head, slowly and with obvious reverence. “That’s some of the most beautiful imagery I’ve ever heard in my life.
“So then you wonder why he was not successful. And the only reason why is because he didn’t have the break — the right people around him doing his deal. Because there’s no doubt he worked, he was a road warrior. I got very frustrated trying to get his songs cut. I beat my brains out trying to get Johnny Cash to cut ‘St. John the Gambler’. It would have been a smash by him.”
“Mickey brought me up here,” Townes told me during a 1994 interview. “He came and visited a gig I did in Houston, and he said, ‘Man, you got to come to Nashville.’ I said ‘Sure, I’ll go anywhere. I’ll go to Wyoming, or Seattle…’ “
