Authors: Rosanne Cash
S
omeone once told me to perform to the six percent of the audience who are poets. I have this in my mind at some point every time I sing, but I often have to find that six percent by looking past those who are yawning, glazed over, distracted, unsettled; those who come to try to look through me to see my dad; and those who can’t respond to music but like the experience of sitting in a crowd with those who can.
Sometimes, onstage, I am also one of those people who are yawning, glazed over, distracted, and unsettled. At some concerts I have felt as transparent as a pane of glass and haven’t been able to hear the music I’m making. Sometimes music has been so painful to me that I want nothing more than silence and the sound of waves. Sometimes the need to please the audience rises in me like bile and ruins everything.
T-Bone Burnett, an old friend, once told Joe Henry, “Don’t stop working, just stop worrying,” advice that Joe passed on to me that has since become my mantra. Now, even when I do worry, I keep working. Work, I remind myself, is redemption.
When the time came to produce four demos to send to Ariola, I called Rodney Crowell. I had met him only once, at a party at Waylon Jennings’s house in 1976, when I was still attending Vanderbilt. He was at the party with Emmylou Harris, her husband and producer, Brian Ahern, and his old friend and recording engineer Donivan Cowart. That night, when everyone started passing the guitar around, Rodney and Donivan played a song they had just written called “Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight.” I was stunned. I thought it was just about the best song I had ever heard, and perversely my heart sank. Writing a song that good seemed so far out of my reach that I felt like giving up my dream of songwriting. I was rattled, and even a bit despairing. Susanna and Guy Clark, longtime friends of Rodney’s, were also at the party, and at some point in the evening Susanna introduced me to Rodney. He didn’t really seem to notice me, but I was riveted by him. Rodney had also written what I considered a definitive, world-class ballad, “’Til I Gain Control Again,” and he played rhythm guitar in Emmylou’s band. I had gone to see Emmylou at the Hammersmith Odeon when I lived in London and had taken note of the cute, lanky rhythm guitarist, never imagining that six months later I would be sitting in Waylon Jennings’s living room hearing him sing a new composition, and falling hard for him in the process.
I thought his particular sensibility would be perfect for what I wanted to do with my demos. I also thought it would be a way to get to know him and try to get him to like me. I don’t think I even understood what it meant to be a producer—I just knew he was a great songwriter and that if he could write those songs, we probably shared a similar musical aesthetic, or at least an aesthetic I could aspire to, and he could produce four songs for me. Years later, he always gave me credit for making him a record producer. When I called him, he said apologetically that he had never produced anything before. I told him that experience didn’t matter and that I knew he could do it, so we made plans to meet in Nashville, where he was living with his wife, Martha, and baby, Hannah. I was even more attracted to him after that first preproduction meeting. I remember telling June of my inner struggle over my growing fixation on him after we had met a number of times to work. When I asked her advice, she merely sighed and said, “Honey, if he’s married, it will never work. Just forget about it.” Odd advice, perhaps, given what had happened between her and my dad, but I tried to take it and to forget about Rodney. After the demos were finished, I sent them to Ariola, and they were pleased enough with the results that they offered me a recording contract, for the European market only.
Just before I left Los Angeles for Munich to begin the Ariola record, Renate came to see me. After we met with the lawyers who wrote up my contract, we made some social calls. Renate had made a point of introducing me to a wide variety of music when I lived with her in Munich. I’d seen Billy Joel at the beginning of his career, alone at a piano in a bar with only a few hundred people in the audience. I’d seen Bette Midler when she was first playing her character Delores DeLago, the mermaid in a wheelchair. (Some of the subtle, twisted humor was lost on the Germans, and I remember laughing louder than anyone in the audience.) But mostly we’d gone to hear jazz, as Renate was obsessed with it. I didn’t really get jazz, and it would be another decade before I came to appreciate it, but in retrospect that first introduction I got to jazz in Germany was very important, for I filed it somewhere in my mind until I had more life and musical experience to apply to the experience of listening to it.
Renate had a number of friends in Los Angeles who were in the jazz world, among them Herbie and Gigi Hancock and Jon and Maria Lucien. We went to Herbie and Gigi’s house one evening for dinner, and I was very quiet throughout—I felt at a loss to say anything intelligent or interesting to Herbie Hancock, who intimidated me completely. Renate started telling Herbie about my songs and how I was just about to make my first record. Then she asked if he would like to hear my demos, as she happened to have the tape in her purse. I was absolutely mortified and, flushing, protested, but Renate insisted. Herbie graciously accepted the invitation and after dinner settled back on his sofa while Renate put on the tape. He listened thoughtfully and nodded at me. “There’s something about your voice,” he said. Then he added, “Country music. I could get into that.” I let out a breath of relief, thinking,
At least he didn’t seem to hate it
. I begged Renate not to play it for Jon Lucien, and fortunately he was not there on our visit to his home, so we had a brief visit with Maria only. While I had no confidence in my vocal abilities at that time and very little in my songwriting, Renate’s lavish praise and encouragement, as well as her talking me up to everyone she came across, helped me develop at least a bit of assurance.
I wanted Rodney to produce the album, but Ariola was adamant that I record in Munich with a staff producer, Bernie Vonficht. So I returned to Munich and moved back in with Renate, and plans began for recording.
A few days before we were scheduled to go into the studio, I found myself unable to get out of bed. I couldn’t seem to get enough sleep, and when I was awake, I couldn’t think clearly. After a couple of days of this, Renate became alarmed and insisted on taking me to a doctor. “What’s wrong with her?” Renate asked, once he had posed a few questions and examined me. “She’s depressed,” the doctor said abruptly, and that was the end of the consultation. As he ushered us out, I began to accept the fact that I wasn’t entirely sure I even wanted to make a record. I had, I knew, been carefully avoiding reconciling myself to undertaking a project that, if successful, could help to make me famous. I wanted success, certainly, but I wanted it without the merciless exposure of a public life. I believed that I could be deeply satisfied and achieve success by becoming a great songwriter, but without being a performer. The idea of performing, of going on endless tours and living the draining, peripatetic life my dad was leading, was not appealing. From a very young age I’d spent enough time behind the curtain to not have any illusions about a performer’s life being one of glamour and excitement. The bone-crushing exhaustion, the constant vulnerability to media misinterpretation or even slander, and the complete obliteration of any semblance of a private life were not things I wanted for myself. My native reticence was not attracted to any part of it. But I did want the songs. I wanted to write them and I even wanted to sing them. I wanted to collaborate with other musicians, and construct arrangements and sonic textures and poetry, and get inside a rhythm and a beat, and go into the studio like a painter and create something from nothing. In the end, I wanted to do that so badly that I concluded that the benefits outweighed the attending risks, so I got out of bed and began sessions for my first record in the spring of 1978.
I went into the studio with Bernie and a band he had assembled, and though the first few days went relatively well, Bernie and I soon began to have some differences of opinion. Even though I was young and inexperienced, I had intuitive but very definite ideas about how I wanted to sound and what songs were right for me. My deep respect for great songwriters and my intense feelings about particular songs, songs I knew were pristine examples of true songwriting, were a guiding force in the studio when I found myself over my head and inarticulate about arrangements or sonics. This intuition became sharply focused when, midway through the initial tracking sessions, Bernie brought in a piece he wanted me to record called “Lucky.” I hated the song and said, as diplomatically as I could, that it was not right for me and that I didn’t want to do it. Bernie was equally adamant and we got into a heated argument, but I held my ground. The next day I showed up at the studio at the regular time to discover that he had called the musicians in an hour earlier to record the instrumental track, hoping that, on hearing it, I would capitulate and add my vocals. I refused again. He began shouting that the song would be a hit, and that if I wouldn’t record it, he would sing it himself. I told him to be my guest.
(Several months later, when the record was finished and released and I had gone back to Europe to promote it, I shared the pressrooms and television shows with another new artist and former record producer, Bernie Vonficht, who had had an enormous hit with a song called “Lucky,” as he had foreseen. Bernie looked at me warily in the pressrooms, as if embarrassed by his success, but I was genuinely glad for him. I wouldn’t have recorded the song even if I had known it would sell triple platinum. I knew I’d have to sing it for the rest of my life, and it wasn’t worth it.)
While making the record, I tried to forge friendships with some expatriate musicians who were working in the club and studio scene in Munich, but they all seemed to be so lonely. The experience was unsettling for me, for I had been thinking of moving to Germany and trying to make a living as they did, but the longer I was there the more frightened I became of the isolation I might encounter. I did become close with a woman named Lucy Neale, a dedicated roots-type songwriter who paid her bills by dancing and singing with a disco group. She was as talented as she was sweet, but a few years later she went back to San Diego to sell real estate. I am certain I would have had a similar trajectory if I had stayed in Munich. I still loved hearing music in the clubs and visiting the English Gardens and the outdoor markets, and I liked going to the casinos deep in Bavaria with Renate’s rich friends. And if I loved being away from the even starker isolation of Los Angeles, I knew I was still adrift.
After the record was finished, I returned to Los Angeles and waited, uncertain what to do with myself. One song, called “Thoughts from the Train,” which was cowritten by Lucy and Israeli pop star Igal Bashan, was getting some radio play in Germany, but it was not even close to being a hit, and it appeared that my recording career might be over shortly after its inception.
It was at this point that my dad stepped in, without my knowing it. One afternoon at his house on the lake, he had a meeting with Rick Blackburn, the head of Columbia Records in Nashville. As the meeting wound down, Dad said, “Listen to this record my daughter Rosanne made,” and put my eponymous Ariola album on the turntable. Rick told me later that he didn’t like what he was hearing at all, but halfway through that first song the phone rang and Dad left the room to take the call. Rick got up and put the needle on a different track, which captivated him immediately. When Dad came back, Rick impulsively told him that he was going to offer me a recording contract. Dad never told me the story himself, and if Rick hadn’t related it to me when he signed me, I would never have known how I came to be offered a contract with Columbia Records. I didn’t tell this story for another twenty years, as I didn’t want anyone to think I had gotten a recording contract only because of my dad’s influence.
My life started to change drastically. I was off the horrible hormone shots, and my weight had returned to normal, along with a more airy and ebullient sense of self. My relationship with Rodney, who had divorced, had become a romance, and we had begun talking about marriage. His own first record,
Ain’t Livin’ Long Like This
, had just come out, but he went back to Germany with me to do a little promotion for the Ariola album. During that trip I received an offer to do a midday show in an enormous circuslike tent with a few other artists in the countryside outside Munich, to be broadcast live over Radio Luxembourg. Ariola was adamant about the importance of this appearance, and they guaranteed an audience of five thousand people. I briefly wondered how they expected to get five thousand people into a tent in a rural area at noon on a weekday, but I pushed the thought aside. After a long drive into Bavaria, my car pulled up behind the tent and I was alarmed to see animals—circus animals—being led around by trainers. My heart jumped into my throat; what exactly had I agreed to?
I got out of the car and peeked into the tent, where approximately ninety people were seated in the bleachers of the vast space and a few animals were milling listlessly around the perimeter. Then the producer of the show explained to me, “You will walk to the center ring when they introduce you and you will lip-synch your song.”
Lip-synch?
I was dumbfounded. I asked, “What’s the point? If you’re just playing the record, why do you need me here?” He gestured to the audience. The ninety people had come to see
me
.
When I was introduced and walked glumly to the center ring, all ninety people swarmed the stage. I swallowed my humiliation and told myself I could do anything for three minutes; I had been scheduled for only one song. Here, on the German country circus circuit, lip-synching on Radio Luxembourg, I was a rock star. Here was my official entrée into a performing life of my own.
Thirty-one years later, in March of 2009, I returned to perform a concert in Munich—oddly enough, for the very first time. I spent two days catching up with Renate, who I had only seen a few times in the last three decades, and who fell easily into her old role of solicitous big sister on the day of the show, finding the right tea, arranging for taxis, practicing my meager German with me, and translating for the crew. It was an acoustic show, with just my husband, John, and me at the Muffathalle, a cavernous old hall. The event was sublime, with the small crowd of only a few hundred people feeling as close as family. It felt like a long-awaited reunion, with all the emotional depth of loss and redemption, youth and maturity, beginnings and endings. I had asked Renate to invite Bernie Vonficht to the show, and the three of us were in tears afterward. Bernie said that he had become deeply disillusioned with the music business and allowed that the choice I’d made at the time not to record “Lucky” was “good for you, and good for me.” A circle in my life became complete that night. If the young girl who was me in 1978 had known that over the next thirty-one years she would gain some real mastery over the things she most longed to express, if she could have been at the show at the Muffathalle in 2009 and felt the air buzzing with the chemical connection that can form between performer and audience, she could have saved herself a trip to the doctor before that first recording session, and many years of doubt and uncertainty afterward.