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Rodney Crowell
Fri. Oct. 28, State Theatre, St. Petersburg. 8 p.m. $20.
Ignorance is the enemy and it wields a mighty sword/ It can cut you down in a blaze of glory/ It can nail you to a board/ If mercy and compassion only had a chance/ It could fill these holes we've dug/ But ignorance is the enemy and it's working like a drug. --Rodney Crowell, from "Ignorance Is The Enemy"
How does a songwriter work?
Rodney Crowell was hanging out drinking with a friend one night in Belfast, listening to a Bob Dylan album. It was 3 a.m. and the haunting ballad "Every Grain of Sand" was playing: I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea/ Sometimes I turn, there's someone there, other times it's only me/ I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man/ Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.
Crowell sat forward, confronted by Dylan's words, enveloped by emotion. The words "beautiful despair" flapped from the belfry of the songwriter's own mind. The pen in his hand began to move: Beautiful despair is hearing Dylan when you're drunk at 3 a.m./ Knowing that the chances are no matter what you'll never write like him/ Oh Brother/ Beautiful despair is why you lean into this world without restraint/ Cause somewhere out before you lies the masterpiece you'd sell your soul to paint.
"It just poured out of me. Spontaneous self-expression. Sometimes that happens," Crowell, the great Americana singer/songwriter, said by phone from his Tennessee mountain home. "Other times I really have to bring my craft to bear."
"Beautiful Despair" landed as a jewel in the diamond bracelet that is Crowell's 12th album, The Outsider, released this fall by Columbia. The third in a trilogy of personal albums that Crowell has produced this century, The Outsider finds the singer/songwriter at his very best; the disc is fueling the cross-country tour that brings the prolific songsmith to St. Petersburg's refurbished, de-punked State Theatre on Friday, Oct. 28.
The concert, featuring Crowell and his backup band The Outsiders, is the second in a series of shows that veer from the State's usual fare. "We want to bring roots music and singer/songwriter acts to this side of the Bay," says Gribbin, who's co-promoting the shows with Rob Douglas and Jack Bodziac. "We want to present artists whose records get played on WMNF."
According to Gribbin, new State manager Bodziac has cleaned the mud and the blood and the beer off the walls, put in neon lighting, removed all reptiles from the bathroom fixtures and made the legendary State more "user friendly," opening up opportunities to expand the musical format -- in the process tapping into some of what Skipper's Smokehouse has been doing in Tampa for decades.
"There are more than enough Americana acts to go around," says Gribbin. "This area can handle a second venue that brings in artists like Rodney Crowell, Guy Clark, Iris Dement and others. For folks on this side [of the bay], it's 40 less miles to drive. That's a good thing, too."
This is not to say that the State's previous edgier offerings will cease altogether, just that the venue is now a whole lot more pleasant for the uh ... discerning concertgoer.
Crowell says he's intrigued with the idea of performing in a club once known as a punk haven. "The young kids are the ones I'd like to talk to, wouldn't you?" asks Crowell, whose songs have been recorded by hundreds of artists, from the Grateful Dead to Andy Williams, from Emmy Lou Harris to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. "I like a lot of their music. Especially hip-hop. But it's a different art form. We can't put the standards for one type of music onto another."
Crowell harkens to his own upbringing in Houston, where, at 11, he played drums in his father's Texas honky tonk band. "Music was all around me, from the time I was a wee child," he says. "In hip-hop, these artists are coming from a similar place, but it is deep in the ghetto where I have never been and will never go. I am whitey and it is their culture. It's powerful. The thing about it is: We can't tell them what to do. They are going to have to monitor themselves the same as the Muslims have to monitor the terrorists."
Crowell landed penniless in Nashville in 1972, obsessed with songwriting. He fell into cahoots with the likes of Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Mickey Newberry and others. He also hung with famed Elvis bandleader James Burton, who taught Crowell musical arrangement.
From country classic "Till I Gain Control Again" (his first big hit, in 1974, sung by Emmy Lou Harris) to "Making Memories Of Us" (a recent No. 1, performed by crooner Keith Urban), Crowell has contributed mightily to the Nashville songbook. He wrote "Leavin' Louisiana In the Broad Daylight," "Ain't Livin' Long Like This" and "I Couldn't Leave Her If I Tried." (Even rodneycrowell.com can't name them all.)
"I've had a lot of commercial hits with other people, but I do not make it easy for the mainstream," he says. "I am very militant about my right to be an honest writer."
Ultimately, Crowell believes in artists: "You know I used to scoff at the poets and performers in the subways of New York City. Then I realized their music was different. They aren't so much songwriters as they are expressionists. I began to admire these artists for their absolute unreserved, unrestricted self-expression. Some of these kids are born with it and they recognize it. They are deeply moved and they write about it. No way that's a bad thing."
Peter B. Gallagher, who lives in St. Petersburg, is composer of the folk ballad "Dog Peter Gnats."
