RT: Well, in Fairport we were very eclectic — to a fault. In ’65-’66, in the blues rack at the local jazz record shop, there appeared these Clifton Chenier and Hackberry Ramblers records, and we saw they were singing in French, with German accordions, on kind of blues songs. It was so bizarre! So we were very excited by Cajun music; it was one of the things that helped us to form our own ideas about playing our own traditional music.
ND: From then on, there would be an interest in your gang, and in the music you’ve come up with since yourself, in developing a kind of rock that was not blues or R&B-based. What was behind that choice of direction, originally?
RT: We were a bunch of suburban, white intellectual schoolboys, and we used to think about what it was we were playing. At some point we said, “We’re never going to play the blues as well as Muddy Waters, we’ll never play country as well as Hank Williams, and we’re never going to play soul as well as Otis Redding.”
ND: This was a bit of reticence and perspective that a lot of other suburban English boys notably didn’t have!
RT: Possibly true. We looked at the immediate scene, and there were 5000 blues bands! It was kind of a treadmill, and we wondered if we wanted to go down the same road.
We wanted to be more individual, and we stretched, first of all, by being more of a “lyric band.” We were very influenced by the Byrds and Dylan, so we said, “Let’s focus on songs that have strong, interesting lyrics.” We were performing songs by Leonard Cohen, and Dylan, Phil Ochs and Richard Farina — people from the American folk revival.
But then, at a certain point, we felt that we were still being imitators. We were an English band, but that was not what we sounded like; we were still imitating an American style. So we decided that what we should do, really, was take traditional British music and soup it up, bring it into the 20th century, make it something that’s vital to us and to our audience — and give people back their own tradition.
And that’s something at which, I’d say, we were only partly successful, the idea that that would become popular music. We had been hoping that it would be popular enough that people of Britain would not see it as a novelty, that they’d actually embrace it and say, “This is our rock ‘n’ roll.”
It’s a shame, really, that the classic lineup of Fairport with Sandy Denny never took the stage here [in the States]. I do think that if we’d toured the U.S. with that band, there would have been some interesting results.
ND: Is it true that you were asked to join both the Eagles and The Band at different points? Those were not exactly traditionally British organizations!
RT: Apparently, yes. Nobody approached me directly, but through the record companies or management, there was an approach from the Eagles. There was also, I think, a point where Traffic asked about me.
ND: That one seems more obvious; I doubt that there would have been a John Barleycorn album from them without the music you’d done earlier.
RT: That’s probably true. In terms of The Band, I was approached in the early ’80s after they’d split up and were putting it back together again, and couldn’t get Robbie. It’s a gig I could have done, as a guitar player — but I don’t think my heart would have been in it.
ND: Speaking of transatlantic influence, there is a theory — and I think this line of thinking has a point — that with your experiments in working out a sort of extended, hard, electric rock ‘n’ roll that was not blues-based, not R&B-based, you were, in effect, one father of modern alternative rock. After working with you so much, producer Joe Boyd goes on to work with R.E.M. and 10,000 Maniacs — a direct link — and before long Bob Mould and X and R.E.M. are on the Beat The Retreat CD salute to you. Do you accept that designation, as one conceptual father of alternative, who helped open a door for a new rock era?
RT: In a small way, yes. Maybe. I don’t think we were totally responsible for that kind of thing — but maybe a small part of it. Maybe. I make no claims!
ND: Well, when we get to your 1991 Rumor & Sigh CD, it gets nominated for a “Best Alternative” Grammy. There was such a thing, and there’d soon be Triple-A radio. If you were not precisely Nirvana, it did seem then that, in a way, the pop world had caught up with what you were up to.
RT: Yes to that — for the radio, I was treated pretty much as a new artist beginning in the ’80s, even though I was in my 30s!
ND: Those 1990s records, produced by Mitchell Froom, were from your ‘big label’ years — and they sounded notably different.
RT: A lot of that had less to do with Mitchell, and more to do with the label — the kind of pressure Mitchell was under to come up with a big drum sound. The record company was really saying, “If you want to get this on the radio, here’s what you have to do,” blah blah blah. And with the unspoken subtext being — or forget about your contract!
I think that the first couple of records that I did with Mitchell were overproduced, but after a while we got more comfortable with each other and found ways to get around the word from upstairs.
