{"id":14097,"date":"2023-03-27T07:30:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-27T06:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=14097"},"modified":"2023-03-18T09:18:50","modified_gmt":"2023-03-18T09:18:50","slug":"stars-on-the-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2023\/03\/27\/stars-on-the-water\/","title":{"rendered":"STARS ON THE WATER"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

for STARS ON THE WATER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Norman Warwick counts on Rodney Crowell<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I recently read the  name of Tina Eves Benitez as the by-lne for an article, about Rodney Crowell, in American Songwriter (https:\/\/americansongwriter.com\/) I knew I was in for a treat. One of my favourite journalists was writing about one of my favourite song-writers. This was going to what Goodreads call a good read !.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before I even started reading, though, I found myself drifting back a qyarter of a century or so to a late evening stroll along the then only recently re-gentrified docksides of Preston. I always thought of this as a hard town where it was necessary to carry a Gary Hall swagger and a watch-me walk and a shading of dust on your cowboy boots. Gary had been the front man of The Stormkeepers and if my memory is watching my step I think this must have been just after he had signed as a solo singer-writer for Roundtower, after three great albums with the band that deserved so much more success. I guess our High Noon stand off would have been a few weeks before he flew over to America on a recording mission that would change a few lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gary\u00b4s waist-length hair was swaying in a gentle evening breeze that was jingling the mast top bells of the berthed yachts  and fluttering the flags from various countries. We had enjoyed a pint and a beef-burger at a waterside pub and were wandering back to Gary\u00b4s house, when he suddenly pulled us to a halt. He had hardly taken part in any conversation since we had left the pub, preferring instead to listen through his I pad to some of the best of the Americana song-writers around, claiming he was preparing for his upcoming recording sessions stateside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what\u00b4s the best song Rodney Crowell\u00b4s ever written<\/em><\/strong>, Gary demanded in his I\u00b4m  not taking no for an answer tone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ian Johnson, of Stampede Promotions, who had known Gary longer and better than I, knew well enough by now to keep schtum, but oh no, I<\/em> dived in, because I loved Rodney Crowell\u00b4s work. To be fair, even I was surprised at the answer I gave but looking back immediately, and looking back nowack now, I remember that I gave the answer unthinkingly and absolutely subjectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am not sure how any of us are supposed to qualify songs and put them in some sort order of,\u2026.what, I mean what order are supposed to put them in?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I answered, Stars On The Water, I love that song.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The wind fell still, the flag fluttering fell silent and suddenly I was aware that Ian had turned away and that Gary had stopped walking and turned to look at me. I was heading for a world of pain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a8WHAT? ARE YOU MAD\u2019 DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT MUSIC?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well I hope so. I mean you\u00b4ve been picking my brains about Americana song-writers for nearly twelve months now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, all of the above remained unsaid. I knew there was a country song still out there, self-penned by the late Jim Croce, called You Don\u00b4t Mess Around With Jim and I su8ddenly feared there might be a more recently written one out there, too, called You Don\u2019t Talk Back To Gary Hall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, very carefully, and very, very politely, I explained and  amplified my answer, at least up to a whisper level, and said I thought the song had a great arrangement, good production values, a well-constructed linear narrative and presented an evocative image of a parochial lifestyle, with an irresistible chorus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Gary (left)<\/em><\/strong> was apoplectic, and had he been wearing his holster I think he would have drawn his gun and killed me dead. Instead, to keep these cowboy analogies going, he stood back and listened to my ramblings and excuses and apologies and as they say on those mean streets of Preston, he let me dig my own hole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, he put up his hands and called a truce and told me to listen to the track he had been listening to when he asked the question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Beginning to think I might after all escape with my life I was beginning to wonder what Crowell song had so inspired him and what could be so good as to so reduce Stars On The Water, a song that provided a number one hit for Jimmy Buffet and was also recorded by George Strait.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It transpired Gary had been listening to Border Radio by Dave Alvin. I had never heard it until then but it remains as beautiful and evocative now as it was on that first hearing whilst sitting on the dock of the bay<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember wondering where Gary had got hold of this. As far as I knew Ian and I shared a pretty eclectic taste in Americana and I had given Gary tapes and tapes of John Stewart, Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark and Ian had given him a similar amount of tapes by the likes of Ian Tyson and Emmylou Harris.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was aware of Dave Alvin and liked some of his stuff and though I hadn\u00b4t heard this particular song it was, I had to admit, beautiful<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The storm blew over and we got back to Gary\u00b4s place for coffee in big mugs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

All Music<\/strong> say of Gary Hall that he was born in Preston, Lancashire, England, Hall was raised in his parents\u2019 hotel in Lancashire and worked in various bands in Preston as a teenager. For six years from 1986, he worked with his band the Stormkeepers, playing around 500 gigs and recording his first three albums with them. In the nineties Hall split his time between England and America, making his solo debut in 1993 with What Goes Around. In 1995 he went to Nashville to record Twelve Strings & Tall Stories, on which Hall, Cathryn Craig and the British guitarist Mark Wilkinson tried to capture the feel of his live show. Traces of his musical heroes – Van Morrison, Gram Parsons and Tim Buckley – could be heard in songs such as \u2018Walk Slowly Through This Life\u2019 and \u2018The Queen Of Broken Dreams\u2019. During the same year Hall also produced Porch Songs for his fianc\u00e9e, Cathryn Craig. He subsequently launched a new version of the Stormkeepers and recorded the album Return To The Flame. In the late 90s Hall worked on two albums by Liverpool-based singer-songwriter Susan Hedges, who returned the favour by joining the Stormkeepers on their 2002 self-titled album.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The Stormkeepers were a superb banmd, with great instrumentalists and two wexcellent vocalists and writers in Gary and Mike Weston King who went on to achive critical and popular acclaim as half of a dueo called My Darkling Valentine.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The album Gary subsequently recorded in Nashville turned out to a collection of ten or twelve self-.penned tracks all of which stand today, more than twenty five years later, in my playlist of all time Americana,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having reconciled all those memories I turned to Tin\u00e1 article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

She wrote that, while living in Hermosa Beach, California in 1976, Rodney Crowell found himself on the wrong side of the law when the police arrived at his door one day and took him to jail. Temporary incarceration was the penalty for neglecting to pay a number of fines for ignoring the area lease laws for his dog Banjo, leaving the singer sitting in a cell alone, without a pen or paper. It was there where Crowell began \u201cwriting\u201d the words for his 1978 hit \u201cI Ain\u2019t Living Long Like This.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4The incarceration was a gift because it brought forming into almost instant focus a song that\u2019s performed more than anything by a lot of different artists, so kudos to me, being 25 or 26 at the time, getting taken to jail and realizing \u2018wow, I can work on this while I\u2019m in jail. Don\u2019t come get me too quickly.’\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without writing tools, Crowell composed the song, narrating his experience within the four walls<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He slipped the handcuffs on behind my back \/<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And left me reeling on a steel reel rack \/<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

They got \u2019em all in the jailhouse bab<\/em>y.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI had to remember it when I got out, but that was actually a lot of fun,\u201d laughs Crowell. \u201cIt was me literally lying on a steel reel rack composing in my head and trying to figure out how to access the memory. It was a good exercise. I don\u2019t recommend it, but for that particular moment in my life, it was a perfect storm.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The track, later covered by Waylon Jennings in 1980, was Crowell\u2019s second No. 1 hit and an example of the anecdotal tales he recalls in his latest book Word For Word<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Documenting parts of his earlier life and his days in music over the 50 years since he first moved to Nashville,\u00a0Word For Word<\/em>\u00a0gives more context to 150 of Crowell\u2019s songs through 50 pages of prose written by Crowell, all stories behind the songs, including \u201cEven Cowgirls Get the Blues,\u201d \u201cLeaving Louisiana In the Broad Daylight,\u201d and \u201cTil I Gain Control Again,\u201d and a collection of his songs covered by everyone from Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, Etta James, and the Grateful Dead, and those that became more well-known once covered, like Bob Seger\u2019s take on \u201cShame On The Moon\u201d, Tim McGraw with \u201cPlease Remember Me,\u201d and Keith Urban\u2019s rendition of \u201cMaking Memories of Us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Word For Word <\/em>also features previously unseen photographs, handwritten song sheets,\u00a0and other visuals from Crowell\u2019s life of songs, along with a foreword by author Daniel Levitin and commentary from his ex-wife Rosanne Cash.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ve written a lot of songs, and it just popped into my head that I should have a lyric book,\u201d says Crowell, \u201cbut I didn\u2019t want it to just be lyrics. I wanted to write some backstory to make the narrative not one singular pathway.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pulling from files of artifacts from his catalog and lyrics stored in his computer, compiling Word For Word<\/em> was an easier feat for Crowell since archiving his materials while working on his 2011 memoir, Chinaberry Sidewalks. <\/em>Over a year, Crowell centered in more on the stories to accompany the select songs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Anecdotes also reveal Crowell\u2019s tendencies to revise his lyrics over time, referencing a friend\u2019s story about a woman from Oklahoma City who visited the National Gallery in Spain and saw a man painting on a Guernica, and yelled to a guard to stop him. The guard responded, \u201cThat, se\u00f1ora, is Picasso, He works here.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNo doubt my friend\u2019s account, which is most likely untrue, is a variation on the famous Leonardo Da Vinci quote, \u2018Art is never finished, only abandoned,\u2019\u201d writes Crowell in his introduction. \u201cThat excerpt, I\u2019m not ashamed to say, applies to some of the records I\u2019ve made. As a songwriter, however, I\u2019m far more comfortable with the Picasso (right)<\/em><\/strong> yarn than the Da Vinci declaration. Revision is, for me, an open-ended part of the song-making process.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

photo 9 crowell Rewriting or revising songs is neither a maddening nor enlightening exercise for Crowell. \u201cRedirecting my narrative instincts toward writing prose sentences and paragraphs, and what I learned through revision, and through having an editor work with me, has made me a far more thorough songwriter,\u201d said Crowell. \u201cI learned that perfection does not necessarily equal inspiration. Some of my earlier songs that I wrote when I was in my early 20s \u2026 now if I got that youthful burst of inspiration, I would do a better job of it.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Technically, there\u2019s still something in capturing those first bursts of inspiration, for a song, he added. \u201cThe longer I work at it, the more I\u2019m aware that my inspiration comes from hard work,\u201d says Crowell. \u201cIt\u2019s more than lightning in a bottle, and that lightning, you cannot argue with it. I look at Dylan and his early 20s when he was writing, \u2018Mr. Tambourine Man\u2019 and leading to these bursts of inspiration, the likes of which rarely visit anybody. As we go on, we just have to keep working.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recounting memories, some of Crowell\u2019s prose may be slightly loosely based, but it\u2019s all part of the essence of the stories, and his songs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen it comes to fact-checking, I accept the re-sculpting of the memory,\u201d laughs Crowell. \u201cWhat I tried to hold on to is the truth of the story, and what it means, not necessarily whether all the details are true, because God knows I\u2019m gonna embellish. I\u2019ve been embellishing my whole life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u00b4t know if the song is included in Word For Word but I would be interested to see whether or not Crowell\u00b4s account \u00b4of \u00b4the song, Stars On The Water, that caused a furore between me and Gary Hall sounds to be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u00b4t know much but this I do know, \u2026whenever I hear that song with its lines like<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

<\/em><\/strong>When it’s midnight down in Mobile<\/em><\/strong>
Moonbeams on the bay
They come from miles around<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

to dance the jukebox down<\/em><\/strong>
And dig the good time sounds they play
All across the harbour
Night lights shinin’ in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It looks just like stars on the water<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, the lyrics I so love were actually written by George Strait (right) <\/em><\/strong>, so I\u00b4m not too sure what Gary and I were arguing about so fiercely. It would be fiar to say that Gary asked me what I thought was Rodney Crowell\u00b4s finest song and I just quickly answered with what was (and still is) my favourite Rodney Crowell song. So,\u2026 ok, it was a collaboration, but that didn\u00b4t detract in any way from my love of the song.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I am in fact aware of a strange contradiction in my attitude to all this discussion of what is best, what is favourite and who wrote what. My view on all this might be best summed up by something Hugh Moffatt (I think) once said to me in an interview, that \u00b4we must intend what we write for live years of travel\u00b4, and when we have done so , according to Roland Barthesian theory, the author \u00b4dies\u00b4 and the song belongs instead to the people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u00b4s one other issue that should be spoken about to settle all this waffle. Music is an unconditional love: I care very much and not at all about who wrote the song. Some music is irresistible and I still love some of Gary Glitter\u00b4s songs,\u2026 I know, I know, Do You Wanna Be<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ain\u00b4t Living Long Like This is a great song,\u2026\u2026but throw me Stars On The Water any day.  Like all love affairs, music is one of mixed emotions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for Gary Hall\u00b4s music, with and withpout The Stormkeepers?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

His songs are always well crafted with sometimes startling lyrics. Long Way From Home Tonight, recorded with The Stormkeepers, is a great example of both those traits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the other hand, that first album he recorded in Nashville, What Goes Around , includes the brilliance of Her Devls Kept Dancing and the superb She\u00b4s Out There Somewhere which is a strong vehicle for his massive voice and perfectly delivered vocals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Actually those two songs illustrate Gary\u00b4s perception and compassion and the yearning that his agent. provocateur manner cannot disguise. Chuck oput his discography and buy any one of his albums, and don\u00b4t tell him I said so, but you might well find a song as good as Stars On The Water.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am in fact aware of a strange contradiction in my attitude to all this discussion of what is best, what is favourite and who wrote what. My view on all this might be best summed up by something Hugh Moffatt (I think) once said to me in an interview, that \u00b4we must intend what we write for live years of travel\u00b4, and when we have done so , according to Roland Barthesian theory, the author \u00b4dies\u00b4 and the song belongs instead to the people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14109,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14097"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14111,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14097\/revisions\/14111"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}