At the close of the ’70s, Lowe was on top of the mountain. The ’80s were another story. He continued to produce good records for other acts — The Fabulous Thunderbirds’ T-Bird Rhythm, John Hiatt’s Riding With The King, for example, in ’82 and ’83, respectively — and at least one very good one — blue-eyed soul man Paul Carrack’s Suburban Voodoo, in 1982.
But so many things were unraveling. Not long after releasing the marvelous party album Seconds Of Pleasure in 1980, Rockpile broke up acrimoniously, largely due to disagreements between Edmunds and Lowe.
As the decade progressed, Lowe drank too much, gave up producing altogether, and suffered periods of depression. Friends tried to snap him out of it (Costello got him to produce his 1986 album, Blood & Chocolate; Hiatt enlisted him to play bass on his comeback record, 1987’s Bring The Family), but with limited success. And, in 1990, his marriage to Carlene Carter ended in divorce.
It is perhaps to be expected that, throughout this rough period, Lowe’s albums were, in his estimation, “rather patchy.” “I was churning out records when I didn’t have enough good material,” he said in 1999. “I was seeking inspiration in a bottle….You can’t do that consistently, though, and sooner or later, normally sooner, you get found out.”
“I’ve always tried to do my best,” Lowe says today of the time. “But sometimes my best really hasn’t been much good….I wasn’t very good in the ’80s.”
There were high points, all the same. His Cowboy Outfit, a rock ‘n’ soul tour de force from 1984, is the finest of his ’80s albums. Both funny and heartfelt, the songs are first-rate, particularly “Half A Boy And Half A Man” and “L.A.F.S. (Love At First Sight)”, and the performances have energy to burn.
In truth, each of Lowe’s albums in the decade had its memorable moments: The delightfully juvenile kiss-off “Stick It Where The Sun Don’t Shine” from 1982’s Nick The Knife, for example, or the punning humility of “Time Wounds All Heels” from the following year’s The Abominable Showman. Many more songs, though, were simply generic. And others appeared to be more concerned with their clever conceits — as in, “(For Every Woman Who Ever Made A Fool Of A Man There’s A Woman Made A) Man Of A Fool” — than any sort of emotional payoff, a state of affairs that was beginning to frustrate Lowe deeply.
“I always wanted to do stuff with bottom,” he explains. “It’s an old-fashioned expression and means something with substance, something with real feeling. But at that time, it didn’t really come out right whenever I tried to do it. I was having too much fun or something like that.
“For example, I had a song called ‘Raining, Raining’ on one of my albums, not a very good one [Nick The Knife]. In the studio, I thought it was really good, but now I know it’s not thought out, not right, and it’s too fast. It’s a great idea, but I was so astonished that I came up with something quite poignant in the midst of this terrible time that I rushed it on to tape.
“In a way, I think I was waiting to get older,” Lowe says now. “That’s what’s unusual about my career; getting older suits me. I don’t mean the fact that I can’t read anything without glasses or that I creak when I get out of bed. I mean artistically. In this business, you’re supposed to do your best work when you’re a kid, and then you get worse and worse until you become a cartoon of your former glory, either getting laughed out of the place or joining some awful retro tour. But that doesn’t seem to have happened to me. I made some good records, sure, but I think it was more by luck than judgment. Judgment comes with age.
“And of course it certainly doesn’t hurt your writing to get your heart broken. As we all know, that’s a rite of passage that has to be endured and it’s absolute misery. But if you’re a songwriter, it’s brilliant raw material.”
