By his own admission, Hiatt is not the easiest guy to work with — or not work with. Before Little Village came together, only to fall apart, then lose all hope of reuniting when Cooder scored big with Buena Vista Social Club, Nick Lowe took pot shots at Hiatt in the press, saying he was the worst advertisement for giving up drinking. Hiatt also has been known to vent his anger at labels for not making him a bigger star.
That said, he has shown plenty of flexibility in striving to get his music heard by as wide an audience as possible. Partly to relate to the younger set, in 1993 he recruited bassist Faragher and drummer Michael Urbano (then the rhythm section of Cracker) and guitarist Michael Ward (from School Of Fish, and later the Wallflowers) to tour in support of Perfectly Good Guitar. That band, dubbed the Guilty Dogs, threw adult caution to the wind, pinning back ears with their all-out sound (documented on the 1994 Hiatt Comes Alive At Budokan disc).
Hiatt may take bilious aim at record executives who presume to know more about songwriting than songwriters, like the new Capitol president (“I can’t remember his name”) who advised him to write more choruses that didn’t repeat the same thing. On “What Do We Do Now”, one of the best songs on the new CD, he offers a choice rebuttal, repeating lines over and over to charged effect. But he understands what a difficult time this is for “adult alternative” acts such as himself.
“Big labels really are not in the music business anymore,” he said. “A big shift has occurred. Now, they’re committed to the entertainment business, to making the most sales in the shortest period of time. They couldn’t wedge me in between Limp Bizkit and Britney Spears.”
Offered a chance to record for the revived Vanguard in the aftermath of the Capitol misadventure, he immediately warmed to the possibilities. “I love the fact that the album is on Vanguard,” he said. “When I was 15 or 16, Vanguard and Verve were the two labels that counted the most. Vanguard had John Hurt and Odetta and all these other great players. It was committed to really exposing all the riches of American folk tradition.”
Before he was ever aware of folk music, he was playing guitar at age 11 in a rock band called the 4/5ths. His influences included Mitch Ryder, the Shondells and Little Stevie Wonder. “I played ‘Fingertips (Part 2)’ over and over in my basement for a year,” he said. By the time he was 12, he was doing his own songs.
“My idea of a rock band was decidedly American until Ed Sullivan. Seeing the Beatles, the Yardbirds, the Animals and these other really cool English bands changed everything. In tiny Indianapolis, I got to see the Yardbirds with Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. Here was this little 14-year-old seeing Jimmy Page playing his Les Paul with a fucking violin bow and going, what the fuck is that? I hadn’t gone into my Being John Malkovich doorway and discovered where all that music came from.
“It was the British bands that led me to the blues. That’s why Nick Lowe and I got along so well, I think. He was a kid in north England who had blues music blow his mind and make him feel really white. I started with British bands, went right to Bob Dylan doing ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and found the roots of everything in all these white guys playing Mississippi John Hurt and Muddy Waters and the electric thing out of Chicago. I totally responded.”
In gravitating to the blues, he never held his whiteness against himself. “I was a screwed-up Catholic fat kid,” he said. “I had breasts. When I went swimming, I was ridiculed by my peers. So I had the blues. I didn’t have to learn about that.
“For me it’s an internal thing. Anybody can put on a dark suit and sunglasses and go play the blues. But that doesn’t mean they can really play it. It’s that ring of timelessness, the weight of it that makes it so special. It’s something that’s not gonna go away. I aspired to that kind of thing, though not consciously.”
Where Crossing Muddy Waters will lead is up in the air. Hiatt, who has been touring with the Goners, was planning to go into the studio with them for another week to complete their interrupted album, which he hopes to get released next spring. He’ll also tour in support of the Vanguard album. And if the funding for another season of “Sessions At West 54th” is raised (at this writing, it hadn’t been), he’ll likely return as host. Whatever the future holds, his back porch won’t stop calling him.
“I really dig not being tied to any label,” he said. “It’s a great feeling, having all this freedom. I write a lot of songs, and being in this unfettered state allows me to really hit my stride. My creative process is similar to the way [Bring The Family and Crossing Muddy Waters] got made. There wasn’t a lot of planning. They weren’t part of a typical record company dance. On the new album, there wasn’t even a producer. We rolled the tape and let it be. We let the magic happen.”
Lloyd Sachs, entertainment critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, admits to having used John Hiatt’s “Back To Normal” as a post-breakup pick-me-up when he was a much younger man. Informed of this, the composer was greatly amused.
