Composed (7 page)

Many nights have passed and many miles have been traveled between the circus tent and the Muffathalle, and thousands of dirty clubs and late shows, bone-rattling buses and grimy motels, and dressing rooms that smelled of piss and cigarettes. There have been nights of sitting backstage and staring at a face in the mirror exhausted to the point of being unrecognizable, and endless airport hallways I’ve walked at dawn, with a paper cup of milky lukewarm tea and a painful sense of longing for home. There have been audiences who were curious, restrained, drunk, ebullient, resentful, respectful, there to defend my dad’s honor or to try to catch a glimpse of him in my voice or face, or almost entirely absent. But through all of it, I worked hard, I paid attention, I sang to the six percent even if only two percent showed up on a given night, I sang to become better, I sang for the band if no one else was listening, I just kept doing it until it felt like home. I worked out a lifetime of self-doubt and musical and emotional vulnerabilities under the spotlight. Performing has been an enormous gift, cloaked at first in a mantle of risk and suspicion, only to reveal itself as the treasure I couldn’t even define in 1978. The arena I thought was a circus tent of humiliation actually held half the available light of what was intended for me, for my whole life.

W
hen the time came to record my album for Columbia, they agreed to let Rodney produce it. In February of 1979, we returned to Los Angeles to begin work. He had quit Emmylou’s band to make his own first record, but he quickly diverted his attention from the promotion of that record to the production of mine. We effectively adopted and slipped comfortably into the recording style, work ethic, and camp of the musicians surrounding Emmylou and Brian. Rodney hired Emory Gordy, Jr., to play bass, Tony Brown to play piano, John Ware on drums, Frank Reckard on guitar, and Hank DeVito to play steel guitar on the basic tracks. Hank was also a great friend and advisor duiring those first sessions. Later we added Ricky Skaggs, Albert Lee, Hal Blaine, and James Burton, as well as Emmylou and the Whites on background vocals.

We began recording at the Enactron Truck, Brian’s mobile recording facility, which was parked at a big, empty house on Lania Lane in Beverly Hills, just off Mulholland Drive. The artists, musicians, and hangers-on who came through there, and the late nights and the craziness—not to mention the great music created in the truck—became the stuff of legend. Brian himself was an almost mythic figure to me, and I had fantasies of Rodney and I becoming a creative duo of the same stature and originality as he and Emmylou. Brian could be mercurial and moody, but I had a deep affection and respect for him. (When Emmy and Brian broke up and she moved to Nashville, I feared that I might lose contact with Brian completely, and that almost proved to be true. I didn’t see him for another twenty years or so, until I was singing on a Maura O’Connell record that was being recorded in the Enactron Truck, which Brian still owned and by now had been moved to Nashville.)

Working in the Enactron Truck was like being in a submarine. Brian had a great old Neve recording console in there, and the sound was spectacular. During the recording sessions we set up the band to record the tracks inside the house—in the kitchen, bedrooms, and even the bathroom, which had a great natural reverb—and sometimes around the swimming pool, for the ambient echo. We did some overdubs inside the cramped truck, but most of the recording was remote. (The house itself on Lania Lane was more than a little unsettling, as a murder had been committed there. A young man had gone crazy and killed his entire family, and as no one subsequently wanted to buy it, Brian was able to rent the empty dwelling for recording. Occasionally, late at night, when only Rodney and I were there with an engineer doing overdubs, I was overcome by a creepy feeling and refused to go into the house alone.)

Rodney and I got married in the middle of mixing the record, and we delayed our honeymoon to Hawaii by three weeks in order to finish and master it. When I think about making that album, I am struck mostly by how young I was at the time—twenty-three years old—and how I had attitude but no confidence, passion but very little real focus. I learned a lot during the process: I learned how to listen to drums, I learned some breath control and how to sustain a note, and I learned about the layered process of recording—the basic tracks, the overdubs, the mixing, and the mastering. This precise sequence of events and the intricacies of recording itself had eluded me during the making of the Ariola record, as I had been operating from a defensive posture and wary of asking questions or appearing vulnerable. This was different; I now had a great deal at stake. I wanted to be certain not only that I created music true to who I was, but also that I understood exactly how I could achieve that technically.

In the late 1970s record making was like creating a sculpture or a painting. There was a lot of kinesthetic information, beyond the sonic, in the studio. Air and magnetic tape were the quintessential elements of the craft of analog recording. A recording console that was as big as a Volkswagen had to be turned on and warmed up, and lights and knobs and faders were manipulated to record and design music. Obsessive attention was paid to exactly where microphones were placed and how far away they were from the instruments. (In the late seventies and early eighties it was fashionable to place six or eight microphones around a drum kit to record every nuance of every beat. I was shocked when I went to sing a guest vocal on a record produced by the legendary Glyn Johns and saw that he had
one
microphone hanging above the drum kit. Rodney and I rethought our entire approach to recording after that experience.)

Big tape machines whirred in the back of the control room to capture what was coming through the board, and if you did too many overdubs or ran the tape too many times, tiny, almost microscopic flecks of iron oxide would start to flake off. (The horror story—probably apocryphal—making the rounds of Los Angeles studios at that time concerned Fleetwood Mac’s
Tusk
, which was released later that year. Engineer had told engineer until everyone in the recording industry had heard that they had run the tape so many times, for hundreds upon hundreds of overdubs and edits, that they were having to mop up little piles of oxide from the machine every day and that actual sonic holes were becoming noticeable in the tracks. We were thrilled by this cautionary tale, and I became obsessed with
not
running the tape.) Splicing tape was a technically exact art, and whenever we did edits I would hang over the engineer—in the early days, it was always Donivan Cowart or Bradley Hartman—and hold my breath while he twisted the reels back and forth until finding the tiny opening between notes to take a razor and cut the tape. “Come on. You could drive a truck through that space,” I’d encourage him.

There was no such thing as automation, so mixing was a “live” event, with everyone’s hands on the board. Brad took the rhythm section, Rodney took the guitars and keyboards, Donivan kept a close eye on the fades and tape speed, and I handled the vocals. We each rode our individual faders with held breath. Oftentimes, two of us would have a great mix and the third would need another take. Mixing went on for endless days and nights, and we often got to bed at six in the morning and started work again at two the next afternoon. I took engineering manuals home with me to study, thinking that in the future I wanted to write, record, and mix my own records, just as a painter might create a solo painting on canvas.

When we finished mixing, we took the tapes to the mastering lab. A vinyl “mother,” the prototype of the LPs that would be pressed, was created from the half-inch master, which in turn had been created from the two-inch 24-track tape. An initial pressing of twenty-five thousand records was made from that mother. I went to the lab and stood by the lathe as it cut my mastered record, and then we took it home to listen. (We mastered
Seven Year Ache
, my second album for Columbia, a few days after John Lennon was murdered, and I asked the mastering engineer to scratch a message—“Goodbye, John”—into the run-out groove of the mother vinyl. Now, whenever someone brings a vinyl LP of
Seven Year Ache
to a concert for me to sign, I always look at the run-out groove to see if it’s one of the original twenty-five thousand copies, and if the message is there. I’ve seen only one in all this time. I know Hank DeVito has a copy, but mine is lost.)

The entire process, start to finish, felt like a handcrafted work—turning knobs, pushing colored buttons, cutting tape, and making deep grooves into vinyl. The art and process of making records remained substantially that way until the advent of digital recording, when the language completely changed and the learning curve became very steep for me. I miss analog recording—the real start-to-finish process, not as a retro nod, as some people do on their way to digital—and the feeling of being so intimately connected to the experience.

We called the album
Right or Wrong
, after the Keith Sykes song that was one of the tracks, and the cover photograph showed me sitting on a coffee table with a small tumbler of red wine at hand. It was an honest photo. No stylist or art director had taken over with their own vision: It was just me, in my own clothes, at the end of a night of recording, with my regular hairstyle and my own glass of wine, which the photographer had given me when I got to her studio. It seems almost like a radical idea today. The record generated one hit—a duet with Bobby Bare on a song written by Rodney called “No Memories Hangin’ ’Round,” which reached number 11 on the country charts. It was a valiant effort, and had some of the insouciance and bravado that was part of my nature at the age of twentythree—and also the vulnerability, doubt, and self-consciousness. The only misstep was a cover of my dad’s “Big River,” which in hindsight I realize a woman has no business recording. That song is the definitive widescreen depiction of the male chase, fueled by the testosterone that underpins so much of great early Delta rock and roll. But even that misstep, in its own way, was truthful.

I had my first baby, Caitlin Rivers Crowell—the “Rivers” for my dad’s mother’s maiden name—shortly after
Right or Wrong
was released. (She was born at seven a.m., weighing seven pounds, seven ounces, and when she was about seven months old I began recording my second Columbia album, whose centerpiece was my song “Seven Year Ache.”) She was a dark-eyed, tiny beauty whom we called “Baby Elvis” because of her wild shock of black hair. I was overcome with emotion on becoming a mother, and shocked at how quickly, and permanently, my worldview changed. I was stunned to find how territorial I felt, how flooded with love and fear for the baby’s safety. I had been a free spirit, a nomad, someone who went back and forth to Europe constantly, who mixed records until six in the morning and liked to hang with the guys in the band. Suddenly I was walking a colicky baby in the middle of the night, obsessed about every burp and wheeze and cry. I adored my new baby Caitlin, but I didn’t have a clue about how to balance being a mother of an infant and a four-year-old stepdaughter with the demands of making and promoting records. My anxiety levels were off the charts. I was twenty-four years old when we made
Seven Year Ache
, and I was completely unprepared for the attention it would attract or the work expected of me as a result. I considered quitting—giving up making records—because I couldn’t envision how to manage my career and motherhood, and do either one reasonably well.

We recorded
Seven Year Ache
in North Hollywood in late 1980, with Albert Lee, Emory Gordy, Jr., Hank DeVito, and John Ware in the band. Rodney was by now in his element as a producer, and the album was an intensely collaborative experience. I remember there being a video game in the studio,
Space Invaders
—the first such game I had ever seen—and I logged countless hours on it in the downtime between recording tracks as an antidote to anxiety. The first single was the title song—probably the best song I had written up to that point—and it was a huge hit, reaching number one in the country charts the week of my twenty-fifth birthday and crossing over to the pop charts, where it reached number 22. The album also eventually rose to number one in the country charts, and two more number one singles followed from it—“Blue Moon with Heartache,” also my own song, and “My Baby Thinks He’s a Train,” written by Leroy Preston.

During this entire period I felt a constant slow burn of panic; I just didn’t know how to manage it all. The first television show I did after Caitlin’s birth, about the time I began recording
Seven Year Ache,
was a big Nashville variety program featuring a lot of stars, and I flew there from Los Angeles with Caitlin, who was seven months old. I was still carrying some extra baby weight, so I decided to wear a jacket by a wild Japanese clothing designer, which I thought would deflect attention from the ten extra pounds. The jacket was neon pink and made of a parachute-type fabric, with enormous shoulder pads. In Los Angeles, this style was considered avant-garde, but when I walked out onstage at the Opry House, the audience actually laughed at me. The host, Larry Gatlin, bemusedly said something to the effect of “What NFL team do you play for?”

I remember a birthday dinner in New York around the time
Seven Year Ache
came out with some journalists from
Rolling Stone
, a photographer, and various record company people. I didn’t have any help with the baby, whom I was holding on my lap in a super-chic restaurant where a baby was totally out of place. Everything began to feel surreal and out of sync. Was I really supposed to quit being a musician now and be a mother? Is that what the anxiety was trying to tell me—that I had to give up something? I didn’t want to end my career, but how did a person do both?

That summer, the summer of 1981, I was again pregnant, and Rodney, Hannah, Caitlin, and I moved from our house in Malibu Canyon to a beautiful log house in the woods outside of Nashville. I did not adapt quickly or easily to life in the South. Contrary to what most people thought, I had lived in the South only for a total of seven years of my entire life, and I had no memory of the first three years, having been a baby at the time. I was a California girl, in aesthetic and attitude. After years in Los Angeles, the pace seemed unbearably slow, and I couldn’t find a decent bagel or the kind of diapers I liked for Caitlin.

By December and January I was eating nearly a dozen oranges a day. Typically, I eat no more than four oranges a year, as I find them either too tart or too bland—and definitely too watery. It was one of the coldest winters on record, and the house stayed warm until it got down to about fifteen degrees; below that, the beautiful old virgin pine just could not hold the heat. For days on end, as the temperature hovered around zero, sometimes dipping below, we all stayed close to the stone fireplace in the great room. Rodney kept the fire going (a full-time job), and the little girls played quietly with their dolls on a green turn-of-the-century Chinese rug that had been rescued from an old brothel in western Kentucky. I sat in a rocking chair next to them, profile to the fire, a little melancholy, with a bag of oranges on my lap. I ate my way through a new bag each day, tossing the peels into the flames as I rocked. The wild, bitter aroma of singed oranges cut the somber iciness of the room and soothed me. It was my personal statement against the chill. I spent many long days like this.