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John Hiatt has rarely, if
ever, been a commercial success, yet the overwhelming majority of rock
critics with a reputation for excellent taste will tell you that Hiatt
should be considerably better known and successful. Hiatt is a critic’s
choice, but for whatever reason, he has somehow failed to become as
popular with record buyers as with the reviewers. This is the second
Twofer reissue by BGO of John Hiatt’s earlier years. The first, which is
still available, couples 1979’s ‘Slug Line’ album with 1980’s ‘Two Bit
Monsters’ (BGOCD 176), but this one goes even further back, to 1974 for
‘Hangin’ Around The Observatory’ and 1975 for ‘Overcoats’
This is how the sleeve note
on that first Twofer began: “The name of John Hiatt is well known among
those of discrimination and taste who enjoy the work of the maverick, the
artist who has failed to make the big time to the extent that he deserves,
yet whose career must be followed because one day he's probably going to
be huge. It's not just those with discrimination who admire Hiatt, but
also the record business, because Hiatt has been signed to a lot of big
labels - Epic, MCA, Geffen, A&M, Warner Bros (although that was a member
of an over-democratic supergroup of sorts)”. It’s a bit of a mystery…
There follows a chronological account of his musical career to around 1990
plus a few aspects of his real life. He was born in Indianapolis, Indiana,
in 1952, as one of seven children. Hiatt’s father, a salesman of kitchen
and school furniture, became ill, and Hiatt’s older brother took over the
family business, but at the age of 21, when John was nine years old, the
brother, who John idolised, committed suicide, and two years after that,
his father died. That was presumably why he started playing the guitar at
the age of 11 and joined local garage bands as a teenager - he told an
American writer that both Joe Lynch & The Hangmen and The Four Fifths did
quite well, but he might have been making it up (at least those names).
His initial influence was Elvis Presley, although he only heard Presley
during the 1960s because his sisters were fans. The Beatles also captured
the imagination of the adolescent Hiatt, who once said that after hearing
Presley's 'I Don't Care If The Sun Don't Shine', he decided to play the
guitar, working in groups of which he was the youngest member. Other music
which impressed him during his formative years included Bob Dylan, The
Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, all of whom
he heard on the radio. This was no doubt where he first became exposed to
black soul music, a love of which is clear not only in many of Hiatt's
songs and recordings, but also in his cover version on 'Two Bit Monsters'
of the 1966 soul hit by Jamo Thomas, 'I Spy (For The FBI)'.
To expand somewhat, Hiatt seemingly experienced a difficult childhood, and
perhaps as a result, found some comfort in music. He apparently wrote his
first song at the age of 11, and was initially influenced as a songwriter
by Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan – he listened to the latter’s ‘Visions Of
Johanna’ (from the peerless 1966 album, ‘Blonde On Blonde’, which in my
opinion, Dylan has never surpassed and probably not even equalled) to
distraction. In his situation, as an unhappy teenager in an averagely
dysfunctional family, Hiatt decided to opt for music, and left
Indianapolis as a teenager for Nashville (where ‘Blonde On Blonde’ had
been recorded a couple of years earlier, although that may not be
significant). He apparently drove to Nashville (several hundred miles)
when he could hardly have been an experienced driver, but arrived safely
and set about trying to get a job with a music publisher. Initially, he
was turned away by many companies, but eventually, after performing his
songs live while backing himself on guitar, Tree Publishing hired him at
$25 a week. Over the next few years, Hiatt wrote several hundred songs
which a website devoted to him quotes him as calling “an exercise in
songwriting”.
In a 2001 interview with Maurice Hope, Hiatt expanded on his move to
Nashville: “In one of my many attempts to leave home, when I was 17 I met
a folk singer called Bob Frank. I was so impressed with this guy, who wasn’t
country, but a folk singer who wrote his own songs and lived in Nashville,
and there was a publishing company that was paying him a little advance
every week to keep him going. A year later, I returned with that in mind,
and landed a job writing for the same company. I wasn’t writing country
music, and they knew that. Maybe they figured I would start making my own
records, which was my plan, and I signed for Epic during my five years at
the publishing company. Then I went out on the road pretty much for two
years straight after that. Here I was getting the opportunity to write
songs, and play for people”. Hope also asked what had been the first Hiatt
song to be covered: “It was a song that I wrote the year before I came to
Nashville, called ‘Thinking Of You’, and was recorded by Tracy Nelson. We
had met the year previous when she was in Nashville”. Around 1971, he
joined a group called White Duck, and performed on their 1972 LP, ‘In
Season’, but White Duck were less commercially successful than, for
example, Whitesnake (and possibly quite different musically). By 1974,
Hiatt had acquired his own recording contract with Epic Records, who
undoubtedly felt that he was sufficiently talented and different to be
given a chance. So they put him in Columbia’s Nashville Studios, where
‘Blonde On Blonde’ had been recorded, with producer Glen Spreen, who had
worked as arranger and sax player on Elvis Presley’s 1969 recording
sessions in Memphis (resulting in ‘Suspicious Minds’ and ‘In The Ghetto’,
among other tracks) and as a keyboard player on Eric Andersen’s ‘Blue
River’, as string arranger on Dan Fogelberg’s ‘Home Free’ (also soon to be
reissued by BGO as a Twofer with his second album, ‘Souvenirs’) and on a
couple of B.J.Thomas albums of the time, and later in the 1970s as
keyboard player and co-producer on ‘Go For Broke’ by Ian Matthews, four
albums by Rusty Wier and albums by Katy Moffatt and The Sutherland
Brothers. ‘Hangin’ Around The Observatory’ was one of Spreen’s earliest
production assignments for CBS/Columbia, and without wanting to criticise,
the album sounds at times as though both artist and producer lacked
experience. The backing band, described on the sleeve as The Hot Babies
Band, included Hayward Bishop (drums), Doug Yankus (from White Duck,
guitar), Theodore ‘Ted’ Reynolds (bass) and Shane Keister (keyboards)
along with Nashville pickers like drummers Larry Londin and Kenny Malone
and steel guitarist Pete Drake. In retrospect (with the benefit of
hindsight), the most significant song on the album is ‘Sure As I’m Sittin’
Here’, because it was covered by Three Dog Night, whose version was a 1974
US Top 20 hit. The Hiatt original includes backing vocals by The
Valentines, a male gospel quartet, while two of the other tracks,
‘Wild-Eyed Gypsies’ and ‘Little Blue Song For You’, feature backing vocals
by The Heavenly Spirits, a female gospel trio. The latter track seems to
bear traces of Philly soul, but with more invention and less repetition,
and thus less commercial appeal. Throughout the album, but particularly on
‘Rose’, Hiatt’s vocals are very stylised, sometimes almost to the point of
incomprehensibility, and on the title track, he uses heavily exaggerated
diction, but Shane Keister’s honky tonk piano is prominent on both this
track and on the opener, ‘Maybe Baby, Say You Do’, where he plays in a
very similar manner to his dynamic finger-busting performance on Joe Ely’s
‘Fingernails’. ‘Full Moon’ gives Pete Drake’s steel a chance to shine, and
(presumably) Doug Yankus plays several OK guitar solos. ‘Whistles In My
Ears’ is very much a country song, reminiscent to these ears of Steve
Goodman’s brilliant ‘You Never Even Call Me By My Name’. Overall, more
than thirty years later, Hiatt’s debut solo album sounds pretty good,
although when it was first released, it was probably far too
unconventional to make any commercial waves, and perhaps could be compared
with the early output of Graham Parker as a street sign pointing towards
punk/New Wave. The original sleeve notes to this album by Hiatt himself
and Bruce Harris suggest that the album title is a play on words, that
Hiatt spends time observing people, and gets his inspiration for songs
from these observations. Two singles were released from the album: ‘Sure
As I’m Sittin’ Here’/’Ocean’ and ‘Full Moon’/’Hangin’ Around The
Observatory’.
Clearly someone at Epic felt that ‘Observatory’ was sufficiently promising
to let Hiatt have another go, and the result was ‘Overcoats’, the sleeve
of which shows a smiling Hiatt (clad in an overcoat) standing in a lake
with water up to his waist. ‘Overcoats’ was again produced by Glen Spreen,
but this time was recorded at American Studios in Nashville, and no
backing musicians are credited unless they are some or all of The Refugees,
Tracy and the girls and The Grease Brothers. None of the songs on
‘Overcoats’ appear to have been covered, and critics, while enjoying parts
of it, apparently considered it too stylistically diverse to be successful
– and it wasn’t. However, again with the benefit of hindsight, this seems
either a very brave or somewhat foolhardy album – audacious in places,
eccentric (eg ‘I Killed An Ant With My Guitar’, which some consider to be
the stupidest song Hiatt has ever recorded, or the Mexican-styled novelty
song, ‘Down Home’) and slightly upsetting to the point where Hiatt’s
surreal notions are almost impossible to follow without the benefit of a
lyric sheet. In fact, both these albums could be immeasurably easier to
understand if we could easily hear what Hiatt is singing about. ‘Motorboat
To Heaven’/’Down Home’ was released as an unsuccessful single from the
album.
Unsurprisingly, Epic dropped him due to lack of commercial success, and
Tree Publishing followed suit, so Hiatt moved to San Francisco for 1976.
In 1977, after a whirlwind romance, he married his first wife, Barbara
Mordes, and they were living in Beverly Hills in 1978, when he met Denny
Bruce, who managed Leo Kottke. Bruce negotiated a record deal for Hiatt
with MCA. Which brings us to 'Slug Line', the earlier of the two albums
reissued as BGOCD 176, which was at least partially made with session
musicians, some of whom are well-known, like the quartet of drummers, B.J.Wilson
(Procol Harum), Bruce Gary (The Knack), Gerry Conway (Fairport family) and
Thom Mooney (The Nazz), but also with Doug Yankus (from White Duck) on
guitar. Most of the others who play on the album are less familiar names,
and the band which Hiatt took on the road to promote the album included
Steven T. (lead guitar, ex-Venus & The Razorblades, who maybe had
something to do with Kim Fowley ?) and bass player Howie Epstein, later
one of Tom Petty's Heartbreakers. ‘Slug Line’, which was produced by Denny
Bruce, who has also produced albums for Kottke, John Fahey, The Fabulous
Thunderbirds, Chris Darrow, etc., was released in 1979, and was no more
commercially successful than its predecessors. Three singles were
apparently released, containing the abum’s title track, ‘Madonna Road’,
‘Radio Girl’, ‘Sharon’s Got A Drugstore and ‘Washable Ink’, and of the
songs on ‘Slug Line’, ‘(No More) Dancin’ In The Street’ has been covered
by both Maria Muldaur and the late Dutch rock star, Herman Brood, while
The Neville Brothers covered ‘Washable Ink’ and Albert Lee covered ‘Radio
Girl’. The MCA deal was extended for a second album, 1980’s ‘Two Bit
Monsters’, which was again produced by Denny Bruce, and featured a quartet
of musicians: Hiatt (vocals, guitar), Shane Keister (keyboards), Howie
Epstein (bass, vocals) and Daryl (or Darrell) Verdusco (drums, vocals) –
Verdusco had appeared on Ry Cooder’s eponymous debut album and a 1978
Eddie Money album. Once again, three unsuccessful singles were released:
‘I Spy (For The FBI’ (Hiatt’s cover of the Jamo Thomas 1966 US hit/1969 UK
hit)/’It Hasn’t Happened Yet’, ‘Back To The War’/’Pink Bedroom’ and ‘Back
To Normal’/’String Pull Job’. ‘Two Bit Monsters’, despite its commercial
failure, included two of Hiatt’s most successful compositions: ‘Pink
Bedroom’ has been covered by Rosanne Cash, Albert Lee and Lou Ann Barton
and ‘It Hasn’t Happened Yet’ by Rick Nelson and Rosanne Cash.
Just as it had been with Epic, lack of sales led to Hiatt being dropped by
MCA, although perhaps another contributory factor to the demise of ‘Two
Bit Monsters’ was that Hiatt spent much of 1980 and 1981 as a member of Ry
Cooder’s band, as second vocalist and rhythm guitarist, appearing on
Cooder’s 1980 album, ‘Borderline’, his 1981 soundtrack album, ‘The
Border’, his 1982 album, ‘The Slide Area’, and also touring as a member of
Cooder’s band. Later, he also appeared on the 1985 Cooder soundtrack album
to the film, ‘Alamo Bay’.
This spell with Cooder was no doubt useful to Hiatt, who by then had made
four albums for two major labels, both of whom had dropped him. During
1980, he also divorced his first wife, Barbara Mordes, and married a
second Isabella Wood, with whom he moved to live in Topanga Canyon.
In 1981, he signed to Geffen Records, for which label he made three
albums: ‘All Of A Sudden’ (1981) was produced by Tony Visconti and
featured a backing band of Jesse Harms (keyboards), James Rolleston (bass)
and Darrell Verdusco again on drums, and included ‘I Look For Love’, which
has been covered by Rosanne Cash. ‘Riding With The King’ (1983) was an
album divided into two: the first half was produced by Ron Nagle & Scott
Matthews (who had a late 1970s band together called Durocs), with Matthews
the only musician involved, and the second half was produced by Nick Lowe,
who also played bass in a backing band which included Paul Carrack
(keyboards), Martin Belmont (guitar) and Bobby Irwin (drums). The album
included ‘She Loves The Jerk’ (covered by Rodney Crowell), ‘Girl On A
String’ (covered by Gail Davies) and ‘Love Like Blood’ (covered by Amy
Grant and her husband, Gary Chapman). ‘Warming Up To The Ice Age’ (1985)
was produced by Norbert Putnam, and used a basic backing band of Larry
Londin (drums), Randy McCormick (keyboards) and Jesse Boyce (bass), plus
an array of guest stars, mostly vocalists, including Elvis Costello, Bobby
King & Willie Greene (who had worked with Ry Cooder), Tracy Nelson, and
others, plus Shane Keister and other instrumentalists. No less than five
songs from this album were covered, and by some major names: Bob Dylan
covered ‘The Usual’, Steve Earle and US country act J.J.White recorded
‘The Crush’, both Katy Moffatt and Maura O’Connell did ‘When We Ran’, Dr.
Feelgood used ‘I’m A Real Man’ and Nonfiction cut ‘I Got A Gun’.
However, this period was not a happy time for Hiatt, as in 1984, despite
becoming the father of Lily, he fell into severe alcoholism, and in 1985,
soon after the release of ‘Ice Age’, his wife, Isabella, committed suicide,
resulting in Hiatt entering rehab later that year. In 1986, he signed with
A&M Records, a fourth major label in 12 years, suggesting that those
inside the industry could see his potential, even if record buyers were
less convinced. His first album for A&M, which was released in the UK by
Demon Records, was ‘Bring The Family’, and this proved to be the
commercial breakthrough which so many had predicted. Featuring an all-star
band of Hiatt, Ry Cooder, Nick Lowe and drummer Jim Keltner, the album,
which was produced by John Chelew, and spent four months in the US chart,
peaking just outside the Top 100, included two songs which have been
covered by major stars. The sublime Bonnie Raitt included ‘Thing Called
Love’ on her triple platinum 1989 US chart-topping, Grammy Award winning
Album Of The Year, ‘Nick Of Time’, and it has been a highlight of her live
shows ever since, while Joe Cocker, Delbert McClinton and Jo-El Sonnier
all recorded ‘Have A Little Faith In Me’, but perhaps the best track on
‘Bring The Family’ is ‘Lipstick Sunset’, which Ry Cooder takes into orbit.
Despite such connections, and while critically he has generally been
regarded as both consistent and brilliant, the man on the Wimbledon
omnibus has never heard of John Hiatt - unless he reads songwriting
credits on country albums, where the name of Hiatt is fairly common. He
wrote the title track of Willie Nelson's acclaimed 1993 album, 'Across The
Borderline', and other great songs which have been stand-outs on albums by
many notable country (and less often, folk or rock) names in the last few
years. His purple period in commercial terms as an artist was between 1987
and 1990, but to his fans, such as my chums in Sunderland, Tom Fielding
and Ray Dobson, every John Hiatt album is more than likely to include a
little gem, or probably several. As far as the perception of the general
public is concerned, Hiatt is caught in the most vicious of circles - he
doesn't get big hits, so nobody writes about him, and because nobody
writes about him, few know who he is or what he's capable of. existed.. In
the wake of ‘Bring The Family’s success, in 1989 Geffen released a
compilation album, 'Y'All Caught ?', which included a couple of tracks
from each of the MCA albums as well as from the three Geffen collections,
and was subtitled 'The Ones That Got Away 1979 - 1985'; obviously released
in an attempt to recoup some of their losses on an artist who they were
certain made excellent records which somehow failed to make commercial
waves, it once again failed to chart in the US, and may not even have been
released in the UK. Ry Cooder contributed a written tribute which included
intemperate appreciation of "John Hiatt's great songs, his
meat-on-the-bone guitar playing and his fuel-injector voice. He's the real
thing, and I've met a few - but only a few". Hiatt in some ways is rather
an enigma, or perhaps mystery is a better word.
The album's significant success on both critical and commercial levels
resulted in Hiatt joining A&M, who had licensed 'Bring The Family' and
subsequently signed him exclusively. 'Slow Turning' in 1988 became his
first US Top 100 album, and in 1990, 'Stolen Moments' peaked not far
outside the US Top 50. Both were produced by noted British studio legend
Glyn Johns. Hiatt was poised to finally go into orbit commercially, but
what seems in retrospect to have been a rather unfortunate episode may
have lost him much of the advantage so painstakingly accumulated over the
previous 15 years, when the quartet which had recorded 'Bring The Family'
(Hiatt, Cooder, Lowe & Keltner) decided to form a group known as Little
Village, whose first album and tour were generally regarded as
disappointing (although the album made the Top 100 of the US chart). The
problem seemed to be that where 'Bring The Family' had been Hiatt's album,
on which he naturally called the shots, Little Village was too democratic
for its own good. We await with impatient interest Hiatt's next solo album
whenever it emerges... In the meantime, if you've got this far, you should
find this collection containing 20 tracks and including 'Hangin’ Around
The Observvatory' and 'Overcoats' in their entirety a bargain, a
revelation, or both.
John Tobler, 2006 |
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