Even more so than The Convincer, Lowe’s latest reiterates his fondness for vintage soul music. The track list includes his version of “The Other Side Of The Coin”, which he originally wrote for Solomon Burke’s Grammy-winning 2002 comeback album Don’t Give Up On Me. Watkins’ organ on “Hope For Us All”, the mellow mariachi horns that grace “A Better Man,” and the shuffle-and-swing of “Not Too Long Ago” (originally by Louisiana swamp pop act the Uniques) all reverberate with echoes of soul pioneers who’ve colored outside the lines: Dan Penn, Spooner Oldham, Tony Joe White.
This twist in the maturing Nick Lowe sound was something even his teenage self might have presaged. After all, as a youngster, R&B was very much his bag. “Like lots of other kids over here, I was a mod,” he says. “And we all liked this new music — well, it seemed new to us — this fantastic stuff beamed in from some planet. It was our own little language. If you saw someone walking down the road with a Joe Tex album under their arm, you would go up to them and start talking. You had spotted a friend.”
Integrating those driving rhythms and grooves into his own sound proved trickier. While the influence is audible in his ’80s work (particularly on 1984’s oft-overlooked Nick Lowe And His Cowboy Outfit), the elements feel a bit forced. “I went for the sort of obvious things,” he says. “I tried to pitch my songs high up, and affect this kind of black sound in my voice. And it just sounded terrible.”
Eventually he made the country-soul connection, via artists such as Arthur Alexander and Joe South. “Then I thought, ‘Well, I can do that.’ Because I like country & western, and I like soul, and I love that place where the two of them live, black and white, together. It makes sense to me. And you don’t have to make a fool of yourself there.”
The street runs both ways, too. Recently, both Howard Tate and the Holmes Brothers included Lowe compositions on their new albums.
At My Age also reiterates Lowe’s subtle strengths as a producer. Although this album, like everything he’s done since The Impossible Bird in 1994, was produced in conjunction with Neil Brockbank, it retains the simplicity that became his trademark producing such notables as the Damned, Elvis Costello and the Pretenders. (Chrissie Hynde remains part of Lowe’s camp, dropping by this time to sing on “People Change”.)
Lowe’s rather stripped-down sound came partially from his own aesthetic, but also from the well-timed lesson of a cutting engineer he met via Dave Edmunds. “This guy had a reputation for being quite blunt with his clients,” recalls Lowe, who tagged along with Edmunds one day when the guitarist dropped off some tapes, only to be rebuked by the opinionated engineer.
In pursuit of his own variation on the Wall of Sound, Edmunds had over-egged the pudding, and was told so in rather terse language. “Edmunds hit the roof, grabbed his tapes, and off he went,” remembers Lowe, who remained behind and dared to ask why the engineer was displeased.
“Back then,” he recalls, “everybody always used to say, ‘Make my record loud.’ That was the thing, to make it sound loud on the radio. Everybody thought there was some sort of secret process you went through.” The disgruntled yet savvy engineer told Lowe otherwise: “It all comes down to the arranging, and using as little as possible.”
The engineer pulled out a then-unreleased cut by the Four Seasons (either “December 1963” or “Who Loves You”, Lowe can’t recall which), and cranked it up. “And he said, ‘Listen to this, it is perfectly arranged: There are hardly any instruments on it, fabulous singing, a great song, the key is just right…’ He pointed out all these things out to me. I got a fabulous lesson from this rather grumpy little man, and it stood me real good stead.
“Shortly after that, I started getting production jobs myself, and putting what I’d learned to use, especially on [Costello’s] My Aim Is True. Some of those cuts are really stripped-down, but you get a drama going, and it draws you in.” It was the same purity of sound that had thrilled Lowe on sides by Johnny Cash and Otis Redding, and now he knew how to conjure it himself.
Working as a producer also prepared Lowe for the inevitable downside of a recording career, i.e. what comes after the hits dry up. “It was almost like I had one foot in the enemy’s camp as well,” Lowe says. “I could hobnob with management and record companies, people like that, and I knew how they talked about artists, which is largely with a great deal of disdain. So I knew what the score was, and that, like most people who aren’t Elton John or Cher — these strange people who seem to manage to have a pop career that spans decades — it would soon all be over.”
Yet if he was going to continue to earn a wage without resorting to pulling pints or laying bricks, Lowe knew he had to rack up certain accomplishments as a performer. And he did. There were a few chart successes, and the requisite appearances of “Top Of The Pops” and “American Bandstand”. When it wound down, he was ready — if not exactly excited — to go forge a new path.
“When my time was up in that respect, I was quite relieved,” he reflects. “I wasn’t a drug addict, but I certainly was an alcoholic, and I was absolutely exhausted and wrung out. I was relieved to see the ass end of it, really.”
By then, he’d amassed a fairly loyal clutch of fans who loved him for what he did. They love him for being Nick Lowe — even when he doesn’t, when he’d rather be somebody else.
“Friends tend to tell me to relax: ‘This is what you do. You’re not Howlin’ Wolf, and you never will be. What you do is what you do, and that’s what people like you for.’ I sometimes need reminding about that,” he figures. “I’m not fantastic, but I think I do a pretty good job.”
ND contributing editor Kurt B. Reighley is going to hold his breath until Nick Lowe And His Cowboy Outfit is reissued on CD or he turns blue and passes out, whichever comes first. He has long harbored a suspicion that Lowe was the inspiration for Prince’s “Darling Nikki” on Purple Rain.
