In the liner notes to Young, Guitar Days, a 2001 collection of unreleased and live recordings from his first three years in New York City, Forbert remembers that scene: “One buzzing evening while busking on MacDougal, the face of Ravi Shankar passed smiling before me. There were hundreds of strong sensations and many cartons of cheap beer (with discount refills) from a dank little basement dive called the Red Witch. There were very late nights in the Hotel Earl and touches of home when the Roche sisters sang, ‘If you go down to Hammond, you’ll never come back.’ That would’ve been in Kenny’s Castaways, which was actually the first place to offer me a paying New York City gig.”
Forbert busked in Grand Central Station, hit open mikes at George Gerde’s Folk City, and eventually auditioned for Charlie Martin and Hilly Kristal at CBGB. While the idea of a young, acoustic busker opening for the likes of John Cale or the Talking Heads on the crest of New York’s new wave seems incongruent, Forbert remembers the scene differently.
“The interesting thing about CBGB was the variety,” he recalls. “There’s a lot of difference between Blondie and the Ramones, between Television and Suicide. All those groups were playing there at that time. It was kind of about variety. It wasn’t about CBGB defining the parameters of punk rock. I was a big John Cale fan and all; Paris 1919 is my favorite record. It didn’t frighten me; I was like, fantastic. I never felt I didn’t belong there.”
Forbert’s persistent presence at CBGB and the Greenwich Village folk clubs earned him a review in The New York Times and brought him to the attention of Danny Fields and Linda Stein, who were then managing the Ramones. While he was scouted by a number of record companies, Forbert decided to sign with Nat Weiss’ fledgling Nemperor label, which was tied to CBS.
“I was opposed to any overdubs and I wanted to pick my own producer,” Forbert says. “When I had meetings with people, I told them that up-front. I felt Nat was the most amenable to my concerns. I felt he wasn’t going to come back later and say, ‘I know I said this, but I want you to make this kind of record.’ I was very concerned about doing it my way. I didn’t want to go through a John Cougar phase.”
Forbert’s 1978 debut, Alive On Arrival, is a deceptively modest record, grounded in his acoustic guitar and jittery harmonica. It opens with “Going Down To Laurel”, a sweet reminiscence of treks to a “dirty, stinkin’ town” an hour south of Meridian. “Glad to take a chance and play against the odds,” Forbert sings, “and glad to be so crazy in my day.” But with his quavering, scuffed-up voice, and songs such as “Grand Central Station, March 18, 1977” (a realist homage to playing for change) and the forthright and homesick ballad “Tonight I Feel So Far Away from Home”, Forbert was too idiosyncratic, too unvarnished and too personal for John Cougarization.
His gift for wordplay and his harmonica rack, however, were all some writers needed to tag him with the too-easy “New Dylan” label. It’s not that Forbert hadn’t absorbed Dylan; but his voice and his songs had a sweet optimism, a lyrical embrace of the everyday and the commonplace. They never pretended to be more than the honest, direct, individual reflections they were.
A year later, Forbert released Jackrabbit Slim, and the leadoff track, “Romeo’s Tune”, became his only major chart hit, reaching #11 on the pop charts in early 1980. With a rolling piano hook played by Bobby Ogdin and a freewheeling vocal, the song was as much blue-eyed soul as it was singer-songwriter lyricism.
“We worked very hard to get that rendition of the song,” Forbert says. “We thought it was a hit song. It has a simplicity that’s also catchy. We recorded it three times to get it where we thought it should be.
“It’s all about the records. You have to have a good song, but if you don’t make a good record of it, who knows it’s a good song? Someone like Harry Nilsson can take ‘Without You’ and make it what we all know, as opposed to what Badfinger had on one of their records.”
On the back cover of Jackrabbit Slim, Forbert dedicated “Romeo’s Tune” to Florence Ballard of the Supremes, though the song was not written about her. “At the time it came out, I read that she had died in poverty in Detroit,” Forbert says. “I was like, What? Why not dedicate it to her memory? It didn’t seem like she had anything else.”
Though Forbert would never duplicate the commercial success of “Romeo’s Tune”, his career had kicked into an early overdrive. Little Stevie Orbit was Forbert’s third album in three years; in 1982 came his last CBS release, a self-titled record.
“I felt some kind of a busy schedule pressure,” he says. “Record an album and tour, record an album and tour, for four years. Nobody told me I could slow down; it was just go go go. It got to be a bit of a whirlwind, a bit of a merry-go-round. When I had the break with CBS and didn’t record for awhile, it gave me a chance to get perspective on what I was doing, and what I might want to change about making records, instead of thinking that I had to make a record a year. Maybe I thought it was the ’60s or something.”
Although he recorded a fifth album for CBS, Forbert’s relationship with the label had begun to deteriorate, and the album, originally slated to come out in 1984, has never been released (one track, “Samson And Delilah’s Beauty Shop”, surfaced on the best-of What Kinda Guy? in 1993).
“We couldn’t agree on anything,” Forbert says. “We didn’t have any communication, we weren’t on the same page. We didn’t have a working relationship, so everything went to hell. I just occupied myself with playing. I never thought, I’ve had it with this music business. That’s one thing, but I wasn’t going to blame music or blame songs for record company politics problems I encountered.”
In 1985 Forbert moved to Nashville, where he still lives. Though it was in some sense an escape from New York and a return to the south, it was also a musical impulse. “At that time, interesting things were happening,” he says. “There was a weird little scare in Nashville. You had Foster & Lloyd, Nanci Griffith, and Rosanne Cash making hit records. You might have had the Kentucky Headhunters, and Steve Earle had come out. People with singer-songwriter and rock ‘n’ roll sensibilities were a part of Music Row. I thought that was great.”
