Diamond in the Rough (15 page)

In the end, we did at least some of the work in separate studios. I banished him from the vocal sessions, which I slugged out with an engineer for weeks and weeks. I produced one track on my own, “Another Long One,” and asked my friend Bob Riley to produce “Stranded,” both of which I’d written by myself.

One of the things I’d loved about all the records I grew up listening to was looking at the back cover credits for the guests who appeared on them, like when Joni Mitchell and James Taylor hooked up and sang for each other on “Blue” and “Mud Slide Slim,” respectively. In addition to the fine rhythm section we had, with the late T-Bone Wolk on bass and Jerry Marotta on drums, I got Suzanne and Lucy Kaplansky to sing on “Diamond in the Rough.” Soozie Tyrell played violin and sang on “Another Long One,” and Bruce Hornsby stopped by one day to play piano. Earlier that year Bruce had performed at a Grateful Dead tribute concert (oh, joy) at Madison Square Garden, one that Suzanne was performing at as well, so my managers, Ron and Steve, got me backstage. I was after Hornsby in particular, because I loved his record
The Way It Is,
and there he was. I handed him that same lucky, ratty tape that had gotten me signed to Columbia. I figured it was a long shot, but two days later I got a phone call from none other than Hornsby, telling me how much he liked the tape. He agreed to come in and play on “Something to Believe In,” and Leventhal and I behaved, for that day anyway.

It took nearly a year to make
Steady On.
We started the album in the fall of 1988 and finished the following spring, with Kevin Killen doing the mixes. Besides “Diamond” and “Shotgun,” these are the songs we recorded, along with how some of them came to be in the first place:

John gave me the music that was to be the title song. “Steady on” is an English phrase that means to steady oneself, and I heard it first as the title of a dance program I had a small part in by a New York troupe called XXY. John’s music seemed bouncy and purposeful, and I just knew that “Steady On” would fit as the chorus refrain.

I brought the song with me on a little beach trip to a friend’s house in North Carolina and got the first lines sitting by the ocean. I took it from there and just juxtaposed imagery of weaving and wandering that hopefully got pulled taut and straight at the chorus. At the time, I didn’t write many “fun” songs, but this one was light and had a smile. Even the doomed love affair in the second verse is left in the dust by the chorus. John’s production is superb here, from all the intricate percussive touches to the modal tribal yells he sings in the chorus. This song was debuted at the Newport Folk Festival in 1989.

The song “Stranded” started with the guitar part that opens it, which reminded me a little bit of “Waiting on a Friend” by the Rolling Stones. Often, if you can get one good line or verse right at the beginning, the song will be set up well for you. In this case, outer space came into play on the second line, so I had my little metaphor that gave me security. The song is another vehicle for my failing relationship with John, and I appreciate the tenderness and blameless quality about it. I wrote this one alone.

Another solo effort, and one I really feel I’ve underestimated over the years, is “Another Long One,” inspired by either John or the Doe-Eyed Dreamboat—I can’t remember which. This was an old song, something I started to write before “Diamond in the Rough” but didn’t finish until I got my songwriting legs under me. The first line makes no grammatical sense—“If losing sleep were any indication of the loving that I’ve missed …” I supposed it should be “If loss of sleep,” which sounds like it’s got a pole up its rear end. I let stuff like that slip by whenever possible if it’s something that just flies out. Better to leave it. There’s a line like that in “Shotgun”: “This is the best thing and the very most hard.” Huh? But it felt right; it came out of my mouth correctly. “Another Long One” speaks to that basic hard truth about yourself when all is said and done. My boyfriends weren’t perfect, but it was becoming clear to me that I had some pretty significant issues in the intimacy department. I was massively insecure for one thing, prone to self-righteousness, victimization, and obsession—hence the “little boys in my head sleeping tight”—tending to look on the dark side of possibility when I didn’t understand men (which was often), ultimately creating a no-win train of thought: “If I think that you are with me / Then I know that you can always change your mind.” This makes for long nights indeed. Just me and my well-intentioned spite. Not so cozy. The girls like this one. John thinks I’ve outgrown it, but it feels as right today as it did twenty-three years ago. I perform it often. And for the album I produced it myself with the wonderful percussionist Michael Blair, who literally beats on pots and pans here, the clanging of my own warped mind.

I’d say the cornerstone of
Steady On
is “Diamond in the Rough” and this theme of healing and recovery. “Cry Like an Angel” is a chip off that block. John had written it and even had some chorus lyrics: “I hear you callin’, you don’t have to talk so loud, / I see you fallin’, and you don’t have to walk so proud, / You can run all night but I can take you where / You can cry like an angel …” That was all he had, but it got me. It started with mandolin, and I wanted it to sound like a Band song—I wanted to hear Rick Danko sing it. That’s what I reached for lyrically, using colloquialisms like “It’s not so’s you’d notice” and “There were hard pills to swallow / But we drank ’em all down,” bringing in a mystery train and the wheels of ambition, the Friday night, dances, and even a band. The theme is self-discovery and the beginnings of self-reliance and a certain maturity gained as a result of having gone through the fire. So this song was about grief and the necessity of grieving. We can cry like angels when there are no words.

“The Story” is a good song. I’m proud of that song. I’m proud of it because it wasn’t easy to write, but I managed a lyrically beautiful portrait—albeit one-sided, I admit—of what was hard at home. The story that was mine to tell is of my experience growing up, and it was certainly fraught. My father was angry, my mother was trapped.

Whereas I tended to blame myself early on for any upheaval, in my teens and twenties the picture began to balance out more, due in no small part to the discovery of my sister’s friendship. She gave me some perspective no one else in the family could or would—maybe it wasn’t all me. So I wrote the song to her. I’ve got our father hiding in the basement and our mother being a housewife cooking for us upstairs. I put my mother in a cast-iron dress in an effort to be sympathetic about the role that she and her generation of women were forced to take on in the 1950s: expected to marry early, have children, and become housewives. It was as burdensome for my mother as for the next person, and she really had more potential and better ideas than were allowed her back then.

At the end, I used the color red as a tool for pulling some things together—one of them being courage, one of them being heart, one of them being my sister’s skin—she’s very Native American–esque. And using red as a metaphor, or as a symbol, for blood, which I say in the end is thicker than water. The family bond remains. After I got sober and entered therapy, it seemed as if all any of us had was our stories, and that we qualify to exist and to take up space and to tell them. This was mine. I was born to be telling this story. I do regret saying, “I seem to be nobody’s daughter.” I was going through a process of trying to define myself, and it was essential right then that I reject whatever version of “daughter” I’d played up until that time. The sick one, the troubled one, the one you shake your head over. It was time to let it go, and in so doing I lyrically disowned Mom and Dad. I’m sorry for that. Believe me, I’ve tried to stop loving my family. It doesn’t work.

When I was still living in my apartment in Greenwich Village, my father called out of the blue one day and said, “Write whatever you want to write.” I think in his own way he was letting me know that he knew it hadn’t been easy and that he was willing to accept some responsibility. A few years later, when I was living in Venice, California, he called again. This time he asked what it was like for me growing up. “If you still want to know tomorrow morning, call me back,” I said. I was really going to tell him the truth, and I wanted to be sure he wanted to hear it. I wasn’t sure if he would actually call, but sure enough my phone rang the following morning, and it was my father on the line. We had a short but healing conversation.

I hope I have outgrown all this at this point. Being a parent—if that doesn’t give you some perspective and a little bit of forgiveness, then you’re made of stone. It’s hard. I don’t care what anybody says. There’s no manual. I was forty-two when I had my child, so I don’t have the excuse of being too young. My mother and I are much closer now than we ever were. I know she’s proud of me. My parents moved to Austin when my sister was pregnant with Grace, so they also were there when Callie was born, and then when my niece Frances, Kay’s second daughter, came along six months later. They are called Mimi and Papa, which sort of represents a new birth for them, too, becoming grandparents. All of us have new roles now. It’s been enlightening to say the least, to have my mother watch me parent and for me to watch her grandparent. I imagine she gets a kick out of the countless ways I am baffled by this absurd responsibility, and I’m soothed to see how Callie, a little piece of me, loves her Mimi and Papa.

I still love playing “Ricochet in Time.” How did I know, drunk in Berkeley and working in stained glass, that I’d be traveling for most of my career? I was weary then, and when I’m weary now, like last Friday when I did two shows in a row at the One World Theater in Austin, “Ricochet” speaks for me and shores me up. Even the line about daydreaming in my room … well, it was about my attic room in California, but it’s totally about my hotel room now. I didn’t take too many planes or know too many names back then, but these days I sure do. How did I know? I just sat up in that room drinking beer and out it came, the first two verses, on my Martin D-28. Nearly ten years later, I wrote the last verse in New York on East Third Street. I’m still amazed it survived all that time and that it shows no signs of fading. Transformation and travel. It still gets me.

When I got home from touring Europe with Suzanne in January of 1988, I was beat but I was full, full of longing to be a star, full of the rain in London and the churches in Italy and the dark mornings in Stockholm. Oh, my goodness, I felt worldly. My view out the window on Third Street looked smaller. There was such a vast universe out there—how was I going to be part of it? I knew that the only thing for it was pen to paper. This was now my job. I had jet lag, and I couldn’t sleep. I played guitar and lit candles and longed for my life to start, longed for the crazy drummer who escorted me through Europe, longed to go back there. I played some chords and sang, “It is the dead of the night, the dead of the night”—which it was. Then I did something new. I became a character in my own song, someone not me. I became Eleanor Rigby, one of all the lonely people, who sat in her room in London at night alone with her pen and paper. She had a life, too.

John and I had a major tiff about “Dead of the Night.” He had written an interlude for the guitar solo where the song changed keys. It was beautiful, but he wanted to be co-credited as a writer on the song. I was ultraprotective of the stuff I’d written alone, mostly because I could hardly believe I’d even done it, and John’s wanting credit just about undid me in the power-struggle department. I reared up and told him he could shove his interlude, and he backed down. The interlude stayed, and I kept sole credit as songwriter. You can imagine how the room looked after that standoff.

For as long as I can remember I’ve kept composition notebooks, the kind with the black-and-white splattery covers. Not as a kid, but by the time I made my living in bands I was keeping them. I wrote down lyrics to songs I needed to learn, to songs I wanted to learn (think twice before you tuck into “It’s All Right, Ma”), set lists, phone numbers, and all the games we’d play between sets, our favorite being a complicated affair we called the Alphabet Name Game.

Then I started writing with John and the composition notebooks took on new meaning. I actually composed—badly, perhaps, but I did. I suppose I have fifteen to twenty of them. With each new record I’d start a new one, so I have all the drafts of the songs I’ve written and drafts of ones I’ve never finished, like “Hurricane.” Maybe one day I’ll finish it. They live in my music room in varying states of decay.

Steady On
was released on October 17, 1989, the same day as the earthquake in San Francisco. It was time for “the push.” It really amuses me now to remember my naïveté about the actual business of promoting a product—the product being me. I was on a huge label, Columbia, and they had the means to send me hither and yon to promote the record and to get me on TV, which was what they did. My little world was about to get much bigger.

I performed the song “Steady On” on both Letterman and Carson. It takes all day to rehearse for sound and camera blocking. Then you get dressed and made up, and then you wait till nearly the end of the show, when the music is slated to be taped. For three minutes you play your song on national television, and then you are done. It goes by
fast.
After the Carson show was over and I was walking back to my dressing room, Freddy De Cordova,
The Tonight Show
’s producer, walked beside me and thanked me for being on the show. I was still breathless and cooed back, “Oh, thank you for having me!” which must have been the oldest setup line in the book. He growled back, with a lascivious grin, “I’ve never had you!” Welcome to Old Hollywood.

A few weeks after I was on
Letterman
for the first time, I got a call from his producer; their musical act for the evening had canceled. Could I come in and do a song—like, right now? This is one of my fondest memories. I put on a thrift-shop green-printed minidress, some little black pumps, a Kangol hat because I was having a bad-hair day, slopped on some makeup and went up to the studio, walked onstage, and played “Diamond in the Rough,” solo, no rehearsal—not necessary, since it was just me. Playing solo was something I was 100 percent comfortable with. I don’t mean to brag, but after I was done, David Letterman announced on the show that he wanted to marry me. He never followed up, though, the big tease. I think it was the minidress. Now it was time to head out on the promotional tour.