Tom Russell

THE LONG WAY WEST

TOM RUSSELL TALKS TO ARTHUR WOOD

(from August 1997)

Why cut a part studio, part live album at this stage in your career.

I just wanted the record to represent my favourite contemporary cuts of the songs. The way we do them now. I wasn't looking to do a complete live album, because frankly they bore me. I think those albums aren't as enduring, except where you use just a few live tracks to give people the idea of what you sound like live. I also wanted to get Iris Dement and Nanci Griffith on the album.

The way I looked at The Long Way Around, was that it was a Tom Russell Greatest Hits package.

It was. Really what it's meant to do along with its brother album, which is the cowboy compilation called Song of the West - in the States, it was primarily for a lot of people who did not know what I did or who I was. To update them. The deal is, these are the songs the guy is known for, as well as some new ones, and this is the way he performs them now. And there are a lot of liner notes, because a lot of the original recordings have maybe fallen by the wayside. Thankfully, some of them are out over here on Round Tower.

Maybe it's already obvious, but why title this record The Long Way Around.

[Laughs]. Because that's the way I'm heading. That's a line from Beyond the Blues. It's kind of like I think I've taken a long way around, as opposed to maybe moving to Nashville twenty years ago. I would have had to beat my head against the wall to become a star. Or I could have married a movie star. As you know, I ended up working a long time in Norway. In fact, I worked all over the world in weird spots.

Was it through working on the Tulare Dust album that you got to know Iris Dement.

No, she actually opened a show in Kansas City for us about five years ago when I still had the band. She opened as a solo act. I think she had just recorded her first album, but she was still an unknown. As would happen, with Nanci too, within a year her career had taken off. She hit pretty well. The Tulare Dust thing helped her career a bit, because Haggard became so enamoured by what she did. For a while, he was supposed to produce her third record.

Over the years you have collaborated with a large number of other songwriters. Is there anyone new that you've been working with lately.

No. I bumped into Joe Ely recently and gave him some lyric ideas for a song. He said he might work on it, so that would be something new. Dave Alvin and I just co-wrote a new song called California Snow that I would imagine he will put on his new record. It's very much in the Haggard vein and is about a border patrolman down near the San Diego border in California. That's a good one, I think. It's written through the eyes of the guy himself - kind of an ageing cop. It's based on a true story. He finds a couple frozen to death up in the mountains because the Mexicans aren't aware that once you cross over and you go up into the high mountain range the weather can drop down to zero immediately. A lot of them end up freezing to death up there. It's told through the eyes of this ageing cop, who has seen too much of this stuff.

Can we talk a little bit about Song of the West .

We've gained this new alternative cowboy audience. It's growing out west. We've played the Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering which is a big deal. It takes place every year, in the middle of Nevada. At the end of January they gather about 10,000 people, and it's centred around western folklore, poetry and cowboy songs. We've done it the last two years and we're doing it again this coming year. The people who attend the gathering buy a lot of these records and tapes. In September we're doing a few more gatherings. I wanted to do the definitive cowboy record, so I gave Hightone a two for one deal this time. They're releasing Song of the West in September.

Not an overly familiar name perhaps, but at 51 Tom Russell has been one of the most significant figures in American folk-roots music for some two decades, regarded by many as a latter day John Stewart or a country Springsteen whose songs have documented the lives of the everyday dreamers and losers of blue collar America.

 Growing up in the late 50s and early 60s in California where the family had a small ranch in Topanga Canyon, Russell recalls being exposed to country music and cowboys by his brother (who became a full time rancher) but also seeing shows by such legendary folk and blues names as Mississippi John Hurt, Rambling Jack Elliot, Ian and Sylvia Tyson and the formative Dylan. Eventually stealing his brother's guitar, he began to write his own songs, starting his music career on Vancouver's skid row country bars in 1971 backing strippers and sword swallowers before moving to Austin a couple of years later to form a duo with pianist Patricia Hardin. They released two well received albums before calling it a day in 1979 with Russell abandoning music and moving to New York with a clutch of manuscripts to make his name as a novelist.

 The books never materialised, but he did keep writing songs while paying the rent working as a cab driver. One day he picked up Robert Hunter, lyricist for the Grateful Dead and sang him something he'd written, a Tex Mex short story about cockfighting called Gallo Del Cielo. It would become one of his best known songs and so impressed Hunter that he immediately arranged for Russell to open a series of shows for the Dead. Tom Russell singer-songwriter was back.

 Through the 80s, working and recording extensively in Scandinavia where, curiously, American folk-roots music has a huge following, Russell released a clutch of albums packed with such magnificent songs as Blue Wing, Veteran's Day, Walking On The Moon (on of the world's finest love songs co-penned with Katy Moffatt), Haley's Comet (about the death of Bill Haley), Navajo Rug (with Ian Tyson) and St Olav's Gate. Written in Norway while he and musical partner Andrew Hardin were playing the Oslo bars, the latter would be recorded by Nanci Griffith, giving Russell his first taste of real success and leading to a collaboration with Griffith on Outbound Plane, a song which in turn became a massive 1993 US hit for country star Suzy Bogguss.

 The release of the Poor Man's Dream album in 89 saw Russell's profile start to grow, a reputation consolidated by two albums with soul singer Barrence Whitfield and, in 1995, his involvement with Tulare Dust, a multi-artist tribute to Merle Haggard, one of his seminal heroes, that would top the US country charts. Enhanced by his dust thickened delivery, what emerges strongest throughout all his work is his keen ability as a storyteller, a master of the Western Gothic.

 "Maybe it's something to do with the Irish in me," he offers. "But I was also schooled in sociology and criminology which I actually taught in West Africa in the late 60s. I thing that both the desire to understand the social problems of street people and to be a short story writer seeped into my songwriting. I think of the songs almost as films and I do tend to write to a theme, there's usually a story in there somewhere."

 It's no surprise to hear him cite Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner (about whom he wrote on William Faulkner in Hollywood) and Raymond Carver as literary influences, all writers attracted to questions of rootlessness, identity and dark struggles with an unforgiving world.

 All these came together for Russell on The Man From God Knows Where, an ambitious and often incredibly moving 'folk opera' saga that drew on his own ancestral family background of Irish and Scandinavian immigrants and underlined his interest in the realities behind the mythologies of the West. .

 "I was absorbed by the strength of character it took to come across the ocean to settle in America in the middle of nowhere. Their history fascinated me and learning about them made me really understand where my father came from."

 He was, Russell says in the album's notes, a "horsetrader, furniture salesman, gambler, banruptee, prisoner, recovered alcoholic, survivor... an American character in a drama played out somewhere between It's A Wonderful Life and Death of A Salesman. He died broke, pride intact, with a few boxes of clothes and photos."

 Although there are songs, narco-ballads, about drug trafficking on the border and When Sinatra Played Juarez recalls when a time when this poverty wracked town of two million saw better days, perhaps inevitably after immersing himself in his heritage Russell's new album, Borderlands, finds him picking through his own life.

 "It came about from my love to El Paso about four years ago. I knew I wanted to write about the American-Mexican border but gradually my personal life began to seep between the cracks as my relationship broke apart and it also became about the emotional borders between men and women. I hadn't written a lot of personal stuff before but when you break up with somebody after 20 years then as a writer you have to go there. When I started to write Touch of Evil about the Orson Welles film that was set on the border my relationship was fine but I gradually rewrote it to become more specific about what was happening to me."

 Imbued with the passion of Mexican music, the album is veined with characters looking for new starts, beginning over, and Russell admits that it's probably a turning point for him too as a writer, a venture into new territory. And, after all these years regarded primarily as an award-winning songsmith, he's also becoming better known as a performer. But after three decades paying his dues would he now want the sort of wider critical and commercial fame that's eluded him so far but has been enjoyed by such contemporaries and kindred spirits as Joe Ely, Steve Earle and Nanci Griffith?

 "Well, I haven't written a lot of stuff that could be construed as commercial, but maybe the success of a John Prine and being able to sell a couple of hundred thousand records would be nice. I'm near that now and that would be fine for me. I don't have any desire to be a huge star. I just want to always be able to move forward with what I do."