INTERVIEW WITH 'COWBOY' JACK CLEMENT

In this latest blog I continue my look back at the articles and interviews I wrote for the Johnny Cash Fanzine I edited and produced between 1994 and 2019. This time it is back to December 2004 and my interview with 'Cowboy' Jack Clement, originally published in issue #41 of The Man in Black with additional images added. Please note that this interview is (c) Peter Lewry so please respect this and do not copy and use elsewhere. Thank you. 

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'Cowboy' Jack Clement worked with Johnny Cash who recorded several of his songs. In this exclusive interview he talks about his days at Sun Records, working with Jerry Lee Lewis, songwriting, Johnny Cash, his recent CD and much more.

I’d like to start by asking where and when you were born.

I was born in Downtown Memphis, Tennessee, Sunday April 5th, 1931 in St. Joseph’s Hospital, a Catholic institution. Well of course I was a Baptist at the time. My name is not John it’s Jack, Jack Henderson Clement. Therefore, I’m not being irreverent when I call myself Jack the Baptist.

I have to ask how the name ‘Cowboy’ Jack Clement came about.

Me and a couple of buddies were hanging out one night and we just started calling each other ‘Cowboy’. I was ‘Cowboy’ so and so, Allen Reynolds was Cowboy so and so and Dickie Lee, as I recall, was ‘Cowboy’ Red River Sylvester. I was a New Jersey cowboy named ‘Cowboy’Wallyaskey and the name just kinda stuck, mine did. We called each other ‘Cowboy’ for a while after that but somehow mine stuck, and I guess I let it.

And how did you get into the music business.

Well I organised a band and played at the local schoolhouse when I was about thirteen or fourteen, so I was in the music business from then on. Anytime you played the local schoolhouse they gave us a little money as I recall, so then you’re in the music business. Well that was back when I was about thirteen or fourteen and now I am seventy three and I am still doing the same thing I was then, getting up a band and playing at the local schoolhouse which is now known as the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. I’ve got this really fine band and we go down there and play once in a while and folks round here kinda like it, maybe we’ll be coming to your town one of these days.

Who were your early musical influences.

Eddy Arnold stands out more than anybody else because that’s when I really started to appreciate the singing part of it. I always liked the instrumental part of music too but Eddy Arnold is the voice that sticks out in my mind. I was singing his songs when I was thirteen or fourteen. I always liked Burl Ives, Roy Acuff of course, and his whole show. He had a great stage show, Roy Acuff and the Smokey Mountain Boys. They did all of this comedy stuff, they had props and they were great. The Delmore Brothers, they were on radio in Memphis, WMC, Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby. My father liked both of them, he would take me to the movies that had both of them guys in. Earl Scruggs, Spike Jones of course and, later in life, George Jones.

At this time did you intend to go into engineering and producing.

I never intended to go into engineering. Producing was something that came natural to me. Like I say I organised bands when I was thirteen and I still organise bands. To me that’s producing, I mean we would organise bands so we can go put on a show somewhere. I really think of an album as a show and so I am particularly attentive to sequencing and so on. I’ve always been into producing. As far as producing for record, I got interested in that after I got out of the Marine Corps in 1952. I went in when I was seventeen, 1948, and spent my last twenty-six months in Washington, DC which was a wonderful place to be. There were little nightclubs right across the street from where I was stationed, a special place called Marine Barracks. I was on the drill team and I got to hear that great big Marine Corps band all the time, that’s something I miss. That band rehearsed right there where I was stationed. Right across the street from the gate was a nightclub called the Band Box and up and down that street were little joints that I could go and play in and pick up some extra money. We had a little dance job on Saturday night and I was doing pretty well, so I was in the music business all the time I was in the Marine Corps, at least the last twenty-six months. After I got out I heard about Dot Records, an independent label in Galatin, Tennessee, and they had a bunch of big hit records and my favourite was the Mac Wiseman records. I found out that there’s a thing called record labels and you could go somewhere and have somebody press one up, put your name on it and put it out. So I got to thinking about that pretty early while we were trying to get something going with the band I had in Washington after I got out of the Marine Corps. When I got to Memphis I woke up one morning and Sleepy Eyed John, a morning disc jokey, said ‘here’s that record everybody’s been talking about, raving about’, and he played Elvis and of course that was a wonderous thing for me. I was hooked on Elvis right off the bat, because that was something really different.

Then I found out that it was on a label here in town. Memphis had a record label called Sun Records and they press ‘em up and get ‘em out. So I started getting interested in what Sam Phillips was doing. Maybe I could do that and I started thinking about putting together a record label. Along with my buddy Slim Wallace, who had a nightclub in Arkansas, we almost did. I had been sort of working my way through college and playing in his band every Friday and Saturday night. Slim had this garage and I said why don’t we get into the record business. We can buy this tape recorder from Sleepy Eyed John for four hundred and fifty bucks and build a little studio in your garage. So we did that and used it to practice in. We never got it to the point where we could actually cut a master in there but it was a place where we could make demos, as they call them nowadays. Worktapes, that’s a good name for them. When we actually got ready to make a record we rented a radio studio Downtown at WMPS and took Billy Lee Riley and two or three other people into the studio and I produced my first record which was called Rock With Me Baby and the back-side was Trouble Bound by Billy Lee Riley. Well I needed to get somebody to master it so we could have it pressed. At that time Sam Phillips was the guy in town who was known for doing that even though he was doing very well, he had sold Elvis by this time and was making a lot of money. He had a big hit on ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ but you could still hire Sam Phillips for fifteendollars a side to master something. So I started off with Sam by hiring him. I got him to make this master for me and when I went in to pick it up he said he really liked it and would like to put it on Sun Records. I said I’d have to ask my partner Slim. Sam asked me what I was doing and I said I was working at a building supply place but I didn’t like it very much and he said ‘maybe you should come and work for me.’ I said ‘maybe I should,’ and two weeks later, June 15 1956, I went to work for Sun Records.

How and when did you first meet Sam Phillips.

At the time Elvis was taking off Sam Phillips was almost as notorious as Elvis. Everybody in town knew who Sam Phillips was, he’s the guy with this record label, right here in town, Sun Records. Sometime around 1955 I called Sam and told him I’d been playing music in Washington, Wheeling, West Virginia and Boston and I’d like to come in and audition for him. So he set it up and I went in and he gave me a really good audition. I guess he spent an hour with me, I sang a whole lot of stuff. At that time I was more into Marty Robbins, Ray Price and bluegrass. I’d played a lot of music by then, played in several bands, lots of different kinds of music and I was pretty good. I think the conclusion was that I may have been too good for him, a little too slick or something. He was more into funk and I hadn’t discovered that wonderful word fully at that time. He told me I was welcome to come back and sing some more. I guess it was about six to nine months later when we had produced this record with Billy Lee and I went in to have it mastered. Going back to the question about engineering. I don’t consider myself an engineer. Engineers are the people that fixed that stuff all I did was operate it. I was one of the first of a breed of musician types running the control board. To me the console was a musical instrument and that echo thing was a musical instrument that’s how I played it, I was playing the board like a musical instrument of some sort.

And when did you start working at Sun Records.

I already answered that a little while ago but I’ll answer it again! I started working for Sun Records on June 15 1956. I remember that day because it was the same day that I entered the Marine Corps and same day I was discharged - June 15 1948 and June 15 1952.

We often read about ‘The Legendary Sun Studio’ and the ‘Sun Sound’ what do you think made the studio so special.

It was magic, that’s what it was, that’s the only way I can describe it. The studio was kinda live to start with and we didn’t have baffles, partial walls you put around the instruments, so everything just bounced off the walls. Problem with that, it just bounced back into the microphones. We put the drums at one end of the room and the vocal at the other.

The room wasn’t that large as I recall, only twenty-five feet long, eighteen feet wide and twelve feet high with these v-shaped things on the ceiling to deflect sound so that we wouldn’t have a parallel surface between the ceiling and the floor. There was a lot of leakage, but it was a nice leakage. In studios that are real dead leakage is not so good because it sounds kinda muffled coming back into the mics. I discovered twenty-five or so years later, working with U2 in that same room, what made it so neat. There was no separation it just all went together and you got to blend it right there in the room and bounce it off the walls. More than anything it was the playing that went on in there, the frivolity of it, the whimsy of it. There was young cats in there experimenting, learning how to pick, trying all this stuff and Sam all the while telling us he was looking for something different. We’d just go in the studio pick, sing, have fun, make tapes and then we’d go and eat next door at Taylor’s Restaurant. Sam never had an office there until later on when I built a room at the back but he didn’t use it. All the business took place at Taylor’s Restaurant. Sam and Johnny Cash would go in there and talk. Jerry Lee would drop by. What a great place. Best time I ever had, just a fun thing and I’ll never forget it.

You discovered and recorded Jerry Lee Lewis and worked with people like Roy Orbison. What were those early sessions like.

I already had this record I had produced by Billy Riley so I got him and those guys I had been working with into the studio and we started cutting some more tapes with Billy Lee. And then Roy Orbison came to town and Sam let me start working with him. Roy was just visiting at first but then a few months later he moved there. I spent a lot of time with him. We never cut a really big hit but we cut some nice records. I think my favourite was one called Sweet And Easy Love. Then of course there was Jerry Lee. It was about August 1956 and I’d been there since June. I was tinkering around in the studio and Sally Wilburn came from out front and said ‘there’s this guy who says he plays piano like Chet Atkins’. I said ‘I gotta hear that, send him on back.’ So Jerry came in and sat down at the piano and he played Wildwood Flower and it sounded like Chet Atkins playing the piano. It was nice you know. I said ‘do you sing, then sing me something.’ He started singing a couple of George Jones songs, Seasons Of My Heart and Window Up Above and it sounded wonderful. He was playing the piano and singing and it just sounded great. But it was country and we weren’t looking for country much in those days at Sun. Not the Nashville country, we didn’t have the players or facilities to do that. 

I told Jerry that I loved that stuff but we needed some rock and roll. He went back home and I played the tape for Sam and he loved it. A month later Jerry comes in, in fact he just showed up and he’d come up with a version of an old Gene Autry song called You’re The Only Star In My Blue Heaven which was a waltz. Then he’d written a song called End Of The Road and that was good. That was on a Monday and I said come back Thursday and I’ll have some guys here and we’ll cut some tapes. So we got in there and recorded his first record which was Crazy Arms.

Can you recall the first time you met Johnny Cash.

I can’t recall exactly, I know it was a couple of weeks after I went to work for Sun. He came in off the road and that’s where I met him. He probably came in to record and Sam was engineering. I remember I liked him right off the bat. I was already a fan because I loved I Walk The Line. His records prior to that I appreciate a lot more now than I did then. But when he came out with I Walk The Line he had me hooked. I was very glad to meet Johnny Cash and we sort of clicked right off the bat and I particularly noticed that he had this great sense of humour. He and I were similar in a lot of ways, around the same age, although I was about ten months older than him. We grew up listening to the same music, mostly out of radio stations around Memphis and some in Arkansas. We were exposed to the same music, all the country music and a lot of black gospel a bit of everything. It wasn’t long before he came in and started singing some of my songs.

You first worked with him, as a producer, in December 1956. Up to that point Sam had been producing him, why the change.

Sam was getting tired of running the board all the time. I was his first full-time assistant. He’d been strapped to that board for years and I came along and he seemed to like what I was doing. We agreed on most things although we didn’t have to agree, he was the boss. I cut tapes and if he liked them he would put them out. I done well, Jerry Lee started off real good. Johnny Cash and I were getting along and so one day he let me start working with John. He was keeping John to himself, he really liked him, liked working with him and admired him. I guess he was busy one day and let me work with him. One of the first things we cut was Home Of The Blues. It wasn’t a big hit but it did well.At that point John’s sales were starting to flag a little, he was still selling good but he wasn’t selling a million or so maybe one hundred or two hundred thousand.

You produced all of his remaining Sun sessions during which he recorded some great material including Big River, Give My Love To Rose and Country Boy. What was he like to work with.

Johnny Cash was wonderful to work with. I guess he is my all-time favourite. He loved music and he had a lot of energy for it, took it very seriously but he had this great sense of humour. An ideal combination. As I said he and I grew up in the same area listening to the same music, we were about the same age and we just liked the same stuff. I’d feel free to play him oddball stuff that nobody else would go for, things like Ballad Of A Teenage Queen, which we’ll get to later. Sam always hated that. Big River, that was the back side of Ballad Of A Teenage Queen, I played guitar on Big River and played bass drum at the same time. With my right foot I was playing the bass drum and I was playing the guitar on another microphone. Country Boy, I am not sure if I did that, Sam might have done that one. Give My Love To Rose I think I did, we did so many, I’m not sure about a couple of them, it’s been fifty years almost.

He also recorded two of your compositions, Guess Things Happen That Way and Ballad Of A Teenage Queen, and they both became major hits reaching #1 on the country charts. Can you tell us about the writing and recording of these two songs.

I wrote Ballad Of A Teenage Queen for me to sing myself and actually did a tape, it was going to be a record and Sam was going to put it out. It was like a Johnny Cash record, it had a vocal group on it and all those answer part. John came in and I played it for him and he loved it and wanted to record it which kinda surprised me. I would play him stuff not necessarily to record just because he might enjoy it. I always did that and he always did it for me and you’d be amazed at the songs Johnny Cash would sing that he never recorded like The Whiffenpoof Song, a bunch of Ink Spots songs, Mills Brothers songs and we’d sing a lot of that stuff together through the years.

He liked to be entertained and he liked something funny and Ballad Of A Teenage Queen was kinda funny, it was silly, it was a total fairytale. Sam hated it. He told me one time, a month or so before it was released, the more he listened to that the more he didn’t like it. Everybody around the studio liked it and Miss Taylor next door, and her daughter Rosemary liked it and Sam put it out and of course it was a big hit. But he never did like it. I wanted to do a follow-up but I wasn’t thinking about Johnny Cash again when I wrote Guess Things Happen That Way I was thinking more like Dean Martin or somebody. My role model for that song was Memories Are Made Of This and I heard the song as a sort of rumba rhythm. Anyway Johnny Cash came in and did it his way and I loved it. Then we got a vocal group in there. We had this barbershop quartet named The Confederates and a girl singer. And Wally, the bass singer, started singing ‘ba-do ba-do, ba-do ba-do’’ and I said let’s do that. So we did it and I wasn’t sure if Johnny Cash was gonna like that. So I hurried up and got the record pressed before he got back to town, but I think he liked it. I think Sam even liked that one. When I recorded a new version of it for my new album it was different. It was more like how I wrote the song. But I love the way Johnny Cash did the song and still do.

By 1958 he was planning to leave Sun Records and move to Columbia. Did this surprise you.

It did surprise me but he didn’t just leave we knew about it eight months or so before he left. It surprised me, because of all the people at Sun records Sam seemed to admire Johnny Cash the most. He would always tell me how great Johnny was and the authority he had in his voice, when he sang he got people’s attention. Just a powerful thing. He talked about how easy he was to work with. How he would go out on the road and write some songs, work them up with the Tennessee Two and come in and record them. He really admired Johnny Cash, he was his fair-haired boy actually. I think what happened Jerry Lee Lewis came along and John’s sales were dropping, still very good, but he wasn’t selling millions at that time, until Teenage Queen. Jerry Lee Lewis was taking off and Sam was putting all his energies into him. That was one of Sam’s weaknesses, that he couldn’t really concentrate on more than one artist at a time. There is something to be said for that. Johnny Cash came by one day and wanted to go next door to Taylor’s Restaurant and talk to Sam. He was busy talking to distributors and didn’t put him off but he was busy. Sam probably thought Johnny Cash would understand that and didn’t think much about it. But I think that little incident, maybe, is what sparked him leaving. And of course by this time he was selling lots of records and getting offers from people in Nashville, people who wanted to manage him and sign him to labels. He went over and signed with Columbia before his contract was up with Sun. It wouldn’t go into effect until his contract was over with Sun but in other words he didn’t give Sam a chance to bid on it. I remember another thing, Sam was paying people three per-cent which was honorable but not all that great. It was a starting royalty and Cash was wanting four per-cent to re-sign and Sam argued about it. Well I know Sam would have given him the four per-cent, certainly he would. But Cash felt he didn’t need to argue about it, he had these people in Nashville wanting to sign him, so he signed. And then, of course, Sam got really mad, talked about suing him and CBS for contractual interference. Finally they agreed that John would come in and sing a certain number of songs before he left. Sam dumped that job on me. I had to talk John into coming in and cutting them songs, unwillingly. John’s heart wasn’t really into recording that bunch of songs. I got everything out of him I could. Some of them were pretty good and some of them were not so hot, but that was my job. We got that done and he left.

At this time he was saving his best songs for his new label and recorded other artists material including several tracks by Hank Williams. Did this cause problems during his final few months with the label.

Yes it did, but somehow it didn’t affect my friendship with Johnny Cash. We remained friends forever and I never lost track of him. Although when he left Sun I didn’t see or hear from him for a while but I could always get in touch with him, I could always find him or get him on the phone. One day we were trying to get some songs and he was in a hurry and there was this Hank Williams songbook on top of the playback speaker out in the studio and I said sing me five Hank Williams songs real quick. Just you and the boys and I’ll keep the band real low and you sing them and I’ll get some people later to fix the music. I said we could do them in forty-five minutes so that’s what we did. And he cut these five songs and I kept Luther and Marshall back cause they weren’t that quick at learning songs. I just wanted to get them down and I figured I’d get some other guys in later and fix up the music. That’s exactly what I did. We couldn’t erase the band we had to keep it and add stuff to it. They weren’t the greatest things but they weren’t that bad. At least it was something. If we hadn’t recorded that there would have been nothing. I think they finally made an album out of it, Johnny Cash Sings Hank Williams.

Can you tell us about some of the other artists you worked with at Sun.

I did a session or two with Carl Perkins but he left after I’d been there about a year. I did lots of stuff with Charlie Rich and Barbara Pittman.

You left the label in 1959 and moved to Nashville. Why did you leave and when you arrived in Nashville what did you do.

I didn’t move to Nashville in 1959 I stayed in Memphis and started a record label, Summer Records. I never really got it off the ground. I put out a release or two. Fortunately I had some money coming in from Sun Records so I was living on that. Several years prior to that Chet Atkins had expressed an interest in me working for him in Nashville. I called him up and asked him if he would still like me to do that and he said yes so I worked for him for about a year and a half. But I didn’t move to Nashville I commuted from Memphis. I drove to Nashville about once a week for two or three days and I would work with different artists, people Chet didn’t want to fool with. After a year or so that wasn’t really going anywhere and I was tired of Memphis and Nashville and I wanted to go some other place and cut some different kind of music, some reasonable music. I wound up going to Beaumont, Texas. I went there in 1961 and during that time built a studio in Beaumont and recorded a million seller, Patches by Dickie Lee.

Over the years you have opened several studios in Nashville. Do you have a favourite of all the ones you owned and worked in.

I’ve built other studios, two in Memphis, one in Beaumont, Texas and I built four here in Nashville. I started recording in my house about twenty-five years ago but I built a place called Sound Emporium, it was known as Jack Clement Recording Studio back then, and it’s still there. Two studios, Studio Aand B, both are still in operation and I think Studio A is probably one of my favourite of the ones I built. We had a couple of really good echo chambers there, it was big enough and it was a nice looking studio. It was the first 16-track studio in town, it looked good and didn’t look like all the other studios. I built a third studio called Jack’s Tracks which is still in operation. I sold it to Allen Reynolds who produced all the Garth Brook’s records there. I think my favourite is the one in my attic, because I’ve got all the stuff to go with it, guitars, pianos and microphones.

You broke the colour barrier in country music by convincing Chet Atkins to sign Charley Pride and then went on to produce many of his albums. Was it difficult to get a black country artist on country radio.

At that time nobody had tried to get a black artist on country radio. Back when I was at Sun I used to joke about it. Sam had a white guy that sounded black so let’s get a black guy to sing country. I did try it but it just didn’t work. It wasn’t something I dwelled upon much. But when Charley Pride came along and I heard his voice I realised I didn’t have to teach him how to sing country he already knew how, he grew up singing country. He grew up in Mississippi and his whole family would listen to the Grand Ole Opry on saturday night. He loved Hank Williams and he was for real. There was nothing affected about Charley Pride he was natural, totally real and honest. I loved his voice, it was a wonderful recording voice. It had this great big sound to it. Something you could put a real fine country band to. So I agreed to produce his first record and pay for it. I rented RCA studio and hired a band and we went in and cut two tracks. There was Snakes Crawl At Night and The Atlantic Coastal Line. Well I told Chet, we were still big buddies, what I was going to do and that I would let him have first crack at it. He liked it a lot but two or three weeks later he said he didn’t know what they would do with it. I set out to get it on somebody’s label and after a while, not being successful, decided to press it up and put it out myself. I happened to run into Chet one day down at the RCA building and he asked me what I had done with that coloured boy. I said I hadn’t done anything yet but was thinking of pressing it up myself. He said he been thinking about that and we might be passing up another Elvis Presley. He was going to this big A&R meeting in LA and if I made him another dub of the thing he would take it out and play it for them. So I did that and he played it for them and they liked it. He came back and said we got a deal. So that’s when Charley Pride went on RCA. I went on to produce twenty albums with Charley. We did that over a span of about six and half years. Back then you would normally do between two or four albums a year with an artist. Nowadays they do an album every two to three years, or in my case I try to do one every twenty-five years!

In 1978 you finally released your debut album All I Want To Do In Life. Why did it take so long.

My first album took about two and half years to do. I started off saying you can cut a hit record in three minutes so why can’t I cut an album in thirty. So it took me two and a half years! Then twenty-six years later I’ve got my second album out.

Around this time you started working with John, as a musician, on his Gone Girl and A Believer Sings The Truth albums. Was this the first time you had met him since 1958 when he left Sun Records.

I never really lost touch with Johnny Cash. In about 1958 I was in Nashville and he had me play guitar on a lot of his sessions. I’ve played on a lot of his records all the way up to a couple of weeks before he passed. He wound up with a studio on his property in Hendersonville and I’d go out there and record, either playing dobro or rhythm guitar. We did a lot of that for the last six years. I wasn’t producing them but he just hired me to play guitar and of course I enjoyed it and enjoyed being around him. Like I say I never lost touch with Johnny Cash.

Then in 1980 you were back producing John, first on his Rockabilly Blues album, with Earl Poole Ball, and then The Adventures Of Johnny Cash. Compared to the fifties what was it like producing him again.

It was fun and the stuff I did on that first album with Earl, Rockabilly Blues, we did those here in my studio and The Adventures Of Johnny Cash was recorded here also although we finished them at Glaser Brother Studios because I didn’t have all the gear at the time that I needed.

So we cut the tracks here at the house and finished them at Tompall Glasers studio. It was an adventure, a lot of hard work and I made him sing them over and over a lot of times but he would do it, he had energy for it, he might complain a bit but he’d do it, he was a real trooper. A wonderful, wonderful man and I miss him everyday.

You have written several songs that John recorded including Gone Girl, I’ve Got A Thing About Trains and two humorous compositions Flushed From The Bathroom Of Your Heart and Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog. Did you offer him any other songs.

He recorded a lot of my songs - It’s Just About Time, Life Goes On, Down The Street To 301 and a whole bunch of other stuff. I would play him songs, sometimes just to entertain him because he liked to hear a good song whether he was going to record it or not. I always felt free just playing anything I wanted to, however silly it was, and just let him pick what he liked. Amazingly he liked a lot of it.

Throughout the mid-eighties you worked on most of his Mercury albums. I always felt this period of his career never received the critical acclaim it deserved. What did you think of the material he was recording at this time and why do you think it was overlooked by the critics and country music radio.

That was kinda the dark ages of music in a way. It was a time when they wanted to hear young artists and the kids weren’t getting exposed to Johnny Cash. Mercury was not that hot a label at that time, they didn’t have the mechanism or the power within the organisation or the will to promote him. They acted like they were but nobody at Mercury, other than Steve Popovich, was championing Johnny Cash. I think it was some of the best stuff we ever did during that period of time.

You have also worked with Waylon Jennings and produced his Dreaming My Dreams album, one of the best Waylon albums released. How did you meet him and what was he like to work with.

I first met Waylon Jennings in Nashville but I had heard a tape by him that Bobby Bare was playing everybody in town. Waylon was living in Arizona at that time and Bobby had heard him and played the tape to me. I loved it and he played it for Chet, he loved it but it took him a while to come around, but he finally did sign Waylon and he moved to Nashville. I think the first time I met him was at a Johnny Cash session. I liked him immediately, always liked his work and we became buddies. Later on I married Jessi Colter’s sister so we were brothers-in-law for a little while. Waylon was a monumental talent and should have been a super superstar he should have been king of the cowboys in my opinion.

We worked real hard on Dreaming My Dreams, we were trying to do something different. He had been fighting with RCA but they finally let him produce his own records which means he could get a producer, so he got me. We did that at Tompall’s studio. It took a few months but we got it done and he always told me he thought it was his best album and it is certainly one of the favourite albums I have produced. That song Dreaming My Dreams, I have always loved it and I sing it on my new album.

Twenty-six years after your first album you have finally issued a follow-up. Can you tell us about the track selection and recording of the album.

No Expectations, that’s something we recorded about fifteen years ago. It was just a fun take we done one day, kind of a warm-up thing. It was always a good song to warm the band up with if we did it at that tempo. It’s a Rolling Stones song but I don’t do it anything like them I do it like a guy named Jim Rooney. He used to play in my band and he had this version pretty much like what’s on my album. When I got ready to put it on this album all I did was re-sing it and mix it. Ballad Of A Teenage Queen we recorded back in 1981. I was trying to do another album so it was my session and Johnny Cash was singing with me on it. Those are the original vocals. The only thing I added before we released it was another ukelele and little bit of drum by Kenny Malone. The rest of the stuff we did over three months starting back in January 2004. I tried to do a variety of things, to be different, like a musical adventure by going from a waltz to a polka. We do have one polka in there and it’s called Drinking Carrot Juice. I just love polkas and I know a lot about the style. I like accordions and I happen to know the best accordion player in the world and he lives close by. Recently I had him here adding some accordion to an Eddy Arnold album I’m recording. Eddy is eighty-six now but he’s decided to come out of retirement and do an album. We’ve been working on that for a few months.

The album features ‘Cowboys Ragtime Band’ a reference to the players you have known for years. Can you tell us about some of the musicians who appear on the album.

‘Cowboys Ragtime Band’ consists of Kenny Malone, my drummer. I’ve been working with him since around 1972/73. Then there’s Bobby Wood playing piano and keyboards and I’ve known him since about 1959 in Memphis. Since then he’s become one of the ace session players around town, played on all kinds of hit records. He played on a lot of Elvis’ stuff he did in Memphis. He is a wonderful player and can play anything and he loves to do it. There is a wonderful bass player called Dave Roe who has been in the band for a couple of years. He played with Johnny Cash and can play just about anything. Very versatile and he don’t mind ‘slapping.’ Some bass players don’t like to ‘slap’ it anymore but I like a bass player who likes to ‘slap’ it when you need too. Then there’s Shawn Camp who’s a very talented artists in his own right. Billy Burnette, who is the son of Dorsey Burnette who was a very famous rock and roll singer and songwriter. Billy has spent a long time in Memphis and LA and he’s a very good musician and singer. He was on the road with Fleetwood Mac for about eight and a half years. Then we’ve got Jay Patten who plays saxophone, clarinet, guitar and mandolin. Steel player on this album is a guy named Al Angelo. He does the engineering at the Ford Theater. Most of the album was done with this band. We do everything from No Expectations to Brazil, we do Tennessee Waltz to Dreaming My Dreams, Drinking Carrot Juice and a few other polkas. Steel Guitar Rag, just a lot of fun stuff. (not all these tracks appear on the album-ed). We do have the Jordanaires singing along on some stuff and a couple of girls.

There are two tracks recorded with John - Guess Things Happen That Way and Ballad Of A Teenage Queen. When and where were these recorded.

Guess Things Happen That Way was recorded here in my studio about two years ago, about six months before he passed away. Ballad Of A Teenage Queen we did that here about 1981.

I believe you have finally recorded Guess Things Happen That Way the way you originally intended is that correct.

Pretty much like I wrote it. It’s sort of a rumba. I patterned it on Dean Martin’s Memories Are Made Of This and that’s sort of the sound I had in mind when I wrote it. Cash had his interpretation of it which was super duper and it was a big hit. I pretty much do it how I originally wrote it.

You also covered tracks that you either originally produced or were recorded by other artists you had worked with. I am thinking of both It’ll Be Me and Dreaming My Dreams by Jerry Lee and Waylon respectively. Had you considered any others.

When I was putting the album together I considered a lot of things but I settled on It’ll Be Me. I’d been fooling with the song ever since I wrote it and could never get it to feel exactly how I wanted it. One day when we were doing the album we were messing around with it and Bobby (Wood) came up with this swing beat that I kinda liked and I thought that was it. I was never completely happy with Jerry Lee’s version of it because I thought when he recorded it he didn’t know the song well enough. Even though we recorded it a couple of times we never quite got the beat that we could have got although it was a good record. That song was the back side to Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On. Sam thought it was going to be the a-side. For me it was free ride, the single sold a million or more and it is one of my better known songs in Europe, Australia and other places around the world. Dreaming My Dreams, I always loved that song and I guess I was one of the first to sing it to Waylon. I produced it with him. I still sing it the way I hear it.

The not so serious side shows through on tracks like Drinking Carrot Juice. In the sleeve-notes you describe the song as “a love song about carrots.” Is there a story behind the song.

Well the story behind the song is that I was drinking a lot of carrot juice at the time. Somebody convinced me that was the thing to do. It was a lot of trouble though, you had to buy carrots and you leave the skins on them, so you have to scrub them down good and run them through this grinder. Then you had to clean the thing. It was a pain in the neck and I was getting my wife to do it and she hated it. I wrote a song about it and then I think she hated me.

I’d like to go back to John and ask about your involvement on American IV: The Man Comes Around. You played dobro on the closing track We’ll Meet Again. Did John ask you to play on this track.

I played the dobro on one cut on that album, American IV: The Man Comes Around, John asked me to play on it, in fact he recorded that one song here in my studio. He was doing most of his stuff in his studio out in Hendersonville but he came over one day and recorded that. He then asked me to put the dobro on it and I did.

Was this the last time you saw John.

I saw John a lot after that, like I said I was recording with him fairly regularly at his studio right up to a couple of weeks before he passed away.

Although he had been ill for some time his death was still a shock. How did it affect you.

When Johnny Cash passed away I wasn’t really surprised because he’d been in the hospital for a week or so I think. What surprised me was that he was in the hospital in the first place. Last time I had seen him, which was a couple of weeks prior to that, I’d been out to record with him and he looked great. I couldn’t get over how good he looked, he’d looked pretty sick prior to that but he looked good and sounded great and I thought he was going to make a full recovery. Then a couple of weeks later I get the news that he is back in the hospital and that surprised me. But when he actually passed by that time we were all pretty well aware that it was going to happen. It was a big loss for me because of all the people I have ever known that man was as good a friend as I ever had and I miss him everyday.

You appeared at the Memorial Show in November 2003 and performed Guess Things Happen That Way. I was fortunate to be invited to the show which was an emotional event, especially at the end when all the family came on stage and sang We’ll Meet Again. Was it easy choosing which song to perform.

Well I also sang Ballad Of A Teenage Queen and told the audience that Sam Phillips always hated it. But it wasn’t easy to pick which songs to sing at that event. I read some quotes from an unfinished book that caused me to get a little misty.

You have been a major part of John’s career for so many years and I want to ask if you have a special memory or story you could share with us.

Every memory I have of Johnny Cash is special. There are little funny things like one day at Sun when I first noticed he had this wonderful sense of humour. We were talking about going next door and getting some coffee but he didn’t say that he stands up and says “I think I got a little too much blood in my coffee system.’ I remember funny little things, the whole lifetime experience is what I remember.

I’d like to thank you Jack for taking time to talk to us and good luck with the new album.

Well thank you and thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure, I’ve enjoyed it and hope I didn’t ramble too much.

DO THEY KNOW IT'S CHRISTMAS? @40

Throughout the 1980s there were a number of charity singles released including You'll Never Walk Alone (The Crowd) for the Bradford City Stadium Fire, Let It Be (Ferry Aid) for the Herald Of Free Enterprise Disaster At Zeebrugge, Ferry Cross The Mersey (Gerry Marsden, Paul McCartney, Holly Johnson and The Christians) for the victims of the Hillsborough Disaster and Living Doll (Cliff Richard, The Young Ones and Hank Marvin) for Comic Relief. All of these went to number one in the UK Charts and raised much needed money for the various charities but none had the effect or sales of Band Aid's 1984 charity single Do They Know It's Christmas?

Released forty years ago, on 7 December 1984, and in celebration we look back at the recording, release and how it raised awareness and money for Famine in Ethiopia.

A BBC News report by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 about the famine crises in Ethiopia inspired Do They Know It's Christmas? The BBC were the first to document the famine who described it as, "... a biblical famine in the 20th century" and "... the closest thing to hell on Earth."

The report showed Claire Bertschinger, a nurse, having to chose which children would receive the limited amount of food available and those who were too sick to save.

The report shocked the UK and prompted the British public to donate to relief agencies like Save The Children. The disaster also affected Bob Geldof, of the Boomtown Rats, who had watched the report with his wife Paula Yates.

At the time Geldof said, "I really couldn't handle it, you know. I think it was that particular clip where it showed you this nurse and she had to chose 300 babies from a total of 10,000, and in effect those 300 were going to be given some sort of liquids that they had in the camp, and the rest of the 10,000, well, they were going to die."

He went on to say, "It was this sort of random decision between life and death that really got me. So it just affected me pretty badly, and I started to think, well I know a hell of a lot of people, I must be able to get something organised."

It all started because of Bob Geldof... The man bellowed and blustered at anyone and everyone he could get his hands on to make this thing work. He shouted at people so that his word could be turned into food for Ethiopia.

A few days after the BBC report, Yates was at the Tyne Tees studios in Newcastle presenting the music show The Tube and one of the groups appearing on the show was Ultravox. The bands frontman Midge Ure was chatting to Yates in the dressing room when she received a call from Geldof who asked to speak to Ure.

During the conversation Geldof said he wanted to do something to help end the suffering in Ethiopia and they agreed to meet for lunch. A few days later they met and the idea to make a charity record was conceived.

Midge Ure recalled the telephone call, "I was up in Newcastle recording The Tube when Bob Geldof called me. I did it because anybody in the music business can exploit their position to help a good cause like this."

The first job was to write and record the song and one of the biggest challenges to overcome was to write and record it in time for Christmas, a matter of just a few weeks away! 

Bob Geldof and Midge Ure chose to write an original song rather than record a cover version. The reasoning behind this was to avoid having to pay royalties which would reduce the amount of money raised.

Ure went away and over several days in his home studio composed a Christmas sounding melody on a portable keyboard and drum machine which, when played to Geldof, he remarked that it sounded more like a TV theme.

The next day they joined forces and worked on the song with Geldof playing acoustic guitar and adding lyrics that were based on a song Geldof had written for The Boomtown Rats, with the working title It's My World.

With a tape of Geldof playing guitar, Ure continued working on the backing track back at his home studio adding his own melody as a chorus. A sample of the drums from the 1983 Tears For Fears track The Hurting was used for the intro while both John Taylor and Paul Weller visited to add bass and lead guitar which both Weller and Ure felt did not fit and so was not used on the final recording.

Ure added a guide vocal and the only change he made to Geldof's new lyrics was on the line 'And there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas time.' Originally it was 'There won't be snow in Ethiopia...' but Ethiopia didn't fit due to the amount of syllables and he replaced it with Africa.

The next stage was to gather musicians to work on the project. Geldof called Sting and Simon Le Bon who both agreed to participate. A chance meeting with Gary Kemp in London resulted in both Gary, along with the rest of Spandau Ballet, Martin Kemp, John Keeble and Tony Hadley all agreeing to be involved.

With some of the biggest bands around offering their time it prompted Geldof to comment, "It suddenly hit me. I thought, Christ, we have got the real top boys here, all the big names in pop are suddenly ready and willing to do this. I knew then that we were off, and I just decided to go for all the rest of the faces and started to ring everyone up, asking them to do it."

It wasn't long before the list of people happy to help read like a who's who of the current pop music scene...  George Michael, Francis Rossi, Rick Parfitt, Boy George, Paul Weller, Paul Young, Phil Collins, Bono and Sara Dallin, Siobhan Fahey and Keren Woodward of Bananarama.

It was not only the lead singers, as members of the various groups were not going to be left out and these included... Pete Briquette, Simon Crowe and Johnny Fingers (Boomtown Rats), Andy Taylor, John Taylor, Roger Taylor and Nick Rhodes (Duran Duran), Chris Cross (Ultravox) and Dennis Thomas, Robert 'Kool' Bell and James 'J.T' Taylor (Kool & The Gang). All of the artists offered their time free of charge.

Pop band The Thompson Twins were out of the country and unavailable but offered to donate part of the royalties from their single, Lay Your Hands On Me, to the charity.

Everyone knew that this record had to be a success. It went beyond their personal careers and personal views.

Apparently only three people refused to be involved and Geldof declined to mention who they were.

It wasn't just artists that Geldof approached and also contributing to the project were various UK music magazines including Smash Hits, Sounds, Melody Maker and Music Week, who offered advertising space to promote the single, Phonogram Records (Geldof's record label) who would release the single, and PolyGram who would deal with the distribution. Peter Blake, who created the iconic cover for The Beatles album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, would design the single's sleeve.

Geldof had approached Trevor Horn to produce the record and he was agreeable, but as an in-demand producer who had achieved three number one singles for Frankie Goes To Hollywood during the year, said he would need six weeks or more. This would mean missing the Christmas market and although he would go on to produce the 12-inch version it was Midge Ure who would gain the producer credit.

However, Horn did offer the use of his Sarm West Studios in Notting Hill for free for a 24-hour period on 25 November. I recently visited the area and the following photos I took show the studio building today.

Geldof and Ure arrived at the studio around 8am on the morning of Sunday 25 November and the press were already there to record the event. The session was scheduled to start at 10.30am and the press captured the artists as they arrived.

The Daily Mirror were given exclusive access to the studio and one of their first jobs was to capture a group photo, which was taken by staff photographer Brian Aris, and would appear in the next days issue creating publicity for the record.

With everybody assembled Ure played the back tracking and his guide vocal to the artists. The decision was made to record the ending of the song first and with every artists in a large group they sang the final few lines over and over again... 'Feed the world, let them know it's Christmas time again.'

Tony Hadley was then chosen to record his solo section first, not without some apprehension. He later said it was nerve-wracking having all his contemporaries standing around watching him.

One by one each artist laid down there own solo segments as Ure recorded their efforts and kept notes about which sections would be used in the final mix.

Both Simon Le Bon and Sting had recorded a vocal at Ure's house during the time spent working on the backing track. However, Le Bon wanted to re-record his part so as to be part of the moment. Meanwhile Sting added his words again to provide harmony vocals to his earlier recording.

Bono was at first reluctant to sing the line 'Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you' but Geldof managed to persuade him.

Despite having written the song both Geldof and Ure chose not to sing any solo parts although they did join in for the finale.

A the time a comment summed up the feeling about the record and what it was aiming to achieve... "Hopefully if the fans of the people who are here today and have played on the record go out an buy it, then it'll be number one, and for once we'll have a record there that's for a good cause."

Most of the backing track had been completed by Ure before the session but on the day of recording two additional musicians would feature. Phil Collins of Genesis played some excellent drumming on the recording while Duran Duran's John Taylor played bass guitar. Collins waited till most of the vocals had been recorded before laying his parts down. Ure was happy with the first take but Collins asked to do a second take which was used on the record.

The last person to add their vocal to the song was Boy George who was in New York and nearly didn't make it to the session. Geldof had called him the day before insisting he attend. George managed to take the last flight of the day on Concorde and turned up at Sarm West Studios around 6pm and went straight to the recording booth and added his lines to the song.

The planned B-side, Feed The World, used the instrumental track onto which Christmas messages from the artists who had been at the session, and those who were unable to attend, were added. David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Holly Johnson along with Stuart Adamson, Mark Brzezicki, Tony Butler and Bruce Watson, all members of Big Country, who were not able to attend the session recorded messages for inclusion.

Although Annie Lennox's name would appear on the sleeve and a message from her was meant to be included on the B-side it arrived too late to be used.

At the end of the day and after the recording session had finished. Geldof recorded his own statement which become the last message on Feed The World.

His spoken-word piece said, "This record was recorded on the 25th of November 1984. It's now 8am in the morning of the 26th. We've been here 24-hours and I think it's time we went home. So from me, Bob Geldof, and Midge, we'd say, 'Good morning to you all, and a million thanks to everyone on the record. Have a lovely Christmas.'"

While all this additional recording was taking place, Ure started working on mixing the track.

Comments from some of the artists show why they were more than happy to be involved in the project and these are just a few...

"I'm delighted to be here. When Bob rang to ask us to turn up we just dropped everything. It's a great idea and it shows, I hope, that we care. Just buy it, for everyone in Ethiopia." (Simon Le Bon)

"The fact that I did it speaks for itself. It's obvious why I did it." (Boy George)

"People always talk about helping out, but I am very happy that I was physically able to do something to help, over this disturbing problem." (John Moss)

"It's the sort of project that if you're asked to join you immediately say yes. I thought it was right, and I wanted to be involved in it." (Rick Parfitt)

"The reason for my participation in the project should be obvious. I have always tried to help out with worthwhile causes where and when in the past. I was very flattered to have been asked - and I didn't expect such a lively and prestigious turnout." (Phil Collins) 

The day after the session Geldof appeared on the BBC Radio One Breakfast Show hosted by Mike Read. During his appearance he promoted the record and stated that every penny raised would go to Famine in Ethiopia. Radio One also played the record every hour, much more than any other A-listed single would receive.

Within a week of the recording of Do They Know It's Christmas?, and before its official release date, it had racked up advance orders of more than 250,000 and within a few days the orders placed by the record shops had reached one million.

To meet this demand PolyGram, who were distributing the single, utilised all five of their pressing plants in Europe.

Do They Know It's Christmas? backed with Feed The World (Catalogue Number FEED 1) was released on 7 December, costing just £1.35,  and entered the UK charts at number one the following week. It sold more copies that week than the rest of chart put together, an outstanding achievement.

Trevor Horn produced a 12-inch single which had a running time of just over 6 minutes compared to the 7-inch single which ran to just under 4 minutes.

Actual sales reached over a million in the first week, and by the end of the year the single had shifted more than three million copies.

Wham's festive release, Last Christmas, was kept off the top spot by Do They Know It's Christmas? and they donated their royalties to the charity.

In the USA it was released on 10 December and sold almost two million within the first two weeks. However, due to differences in how the charts were compiled, it failed to reach number one and peaked at #13 on the Billboard Hot 100.

The record did reach number one in more than ten countries worldwide including, Australia, Norway, Netherlands, Austria, Canada, Denmark and Ireland.

Despite the support and time given for free from everyone involved there was one issue that would infuriate Geldof following the release of the single. The British Government refused to waive the VAT charged on the sales of the single! It was only when he publicly stood up to Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister at the time, that the Government did a U-Turn and donated an amount to the charity, equal to what had been collected in tax.

Within a year, and far exceeding Geldof's expectations, the single raised more than £8 million. 

Re-released a year later, in November 1985, it reached #3 in a newly remixed version by Trevor Horn. It had an updated B-side, One Year On (Feed The World), which began and ended with a telephone message from Geldof and throughout the track, Ure talks about what had been bought with the money raised so far.

By 1989 worldwide sales were over 11 million and in the UK alone it had sold almost 4 million by 2017.

Most singles released around this time had an official video produced. However, due to time restrictions, a video was made using just the footage from the recording session. Normally a video wouldn't be shown on BBCs flagship music show, Top Of The Pops, until it had charted, meaning it could not be shown on  the 29 November episode. Geldof contacted Michael Grade, BBC 1 Controller, and persuaded him to run every programme due to be broadcast before that weeks TOTP to start five minutes earlier. This allowed the video to be broadcast before Top Of The Pops started.

The UK music press had mixed feelings about the song. NME wrote, "Millions of dead stars write and perform rotten record for the right reasons." Unfair and to be honest, typical of NME. Meanwhile Sounds felt the song was, "... far from brilliant but you can have fun playing Spot the Star."

They all seemed to be missing the point of the record. Melody Maker seemed to follow the familiar pattern when they reviewed the single saying, "Inevitable, after such massive publicity, the record itself is something of an anti-climax, even though Geldof's sense of universal melodrama is perfectly suited to this kind of epic musical manifesto. Midge Ure's large-screen production and the emotional vocal deliveries of the various celebrities matches the demonstrative sweep of Geldof's lyric, which veers occasionally toward an uncomfortably generalised sentimentality which threatens to turn righteous pleading into pompous indignation." They ended the review with, "On the other hand, I'm sure it's impossible to write flippantly about something as fundamentally dreadful as the Ethiopia famine."

There was also criticism from other quarters. Various sources criticised it's colonial western-centric viewpoint, condescending stereotypical descriptions of Africa and one publication even deemed the lyrics as racist and demeaning towards Ethiopians.

Even Bono was hit with criticism for his line, 'Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you.'

Over the years both Geldof and Ure have responded to the criticism. In his autobiography Ure wrote. "It is a song that has nothing to do with music. It was all about generating money. The song didn't matter, the song was secondary, almost irrelevant." Geldof, speaking in 2024, said, "This little pop song has kept hundreds of thousands if not millions of people alive." Responding to the criticism of the lyrics he went on to say, "The alleged 'colonial tropes' of the lyrics were in fact 'empirical facts', and that hunger remains endemic in Ethiopia, water is scarce and rain is increasingly unreliable due to climate change."

Despite the unfair criticism Do They Know It's Christmas? was an important record which achieved much more than anyone involved could ever have imagined. It helped save millions of lives and bought worldwide attention to what was happening in Ethiopia.

The following year Live Aid would raise even more money but that is a story for another day and one which I might cover in a future blog.

LINDA RONSTADT - MAD LOVE 1980

By 1980 Linda Ronstadt was enjoying herself and had plans to expand her talent into other areas. “I’m not going to do rock and roll forever,” she said at the time. Asher was looking at other possibilities too. He was considering Broadway as well as producing a rock musical starring Linda and although she seemed interested he remarked, “It’s all vague at this point.”

What wasn’t vague, at least to Linda, was the direction her next album would take. She would see in the new decade with a new look and attitude. She was ready to move on, to break from the past and predictability and was planning a number of surprises. The first people would see of this newly found desire to expand was when she appeared in public sporting a cropped ‘punk’ hairstyle.
 
By the mid-seventies many rock stars from the previous two decades, now in their late-thirties and forties, had little to say to the new generation of teenagers, many of whom were unemployed. Likewise many of the groups around at that time, Abba, The Bee Gees and Queen did not appeal to the vast number of youngsters who were looking for something different. The punk rock movement, spearheaded by bands such as The Sex Pistols, emerged to challenge these groups and would take a stranglehold on the UK music scene.

The music, which was raw, negative and occasionally full of obscene lyrics, was often shouted over melodies that had little or no tune. It also had its own associated fashion, safety pins through the ear and nose, chains, mohican hairstyles and outrageous clothes.

However, it was a fairly short-lived movement and many of the punk groups survived into the eighties by developing a more sophisticated style, groups like The Clash, The Jam, and the Stranglers. At this time its American version, new wave, lent a respectable aim to the movement allowing it to continue.

Linda’s new album would signify America’s partial acceptance of this new music form. If any more evidence was required that the album was also a means of appealing to the UK market and new wave followers they needed to look no further than the three Elvis Costello tracks she covered.

Art Fein, who worked for a variety of record companies, including Elektra/Asylum where he worked in the publicity department, remembered seeing Linda at a Clash concert taking notes before she started work on the album. She also took time out to check what was going on in the clubs in Los Angeles and New York. She caught shows by Pat Benatar and Debbie Harry, of Blondie, and made her mind up that this was the route she should take.

To recharge her batteries there had been a break of close to fifteen months between finishing her last album and starting the new one. Sessions for the album, which took place at Record One in LA, commenced in late-October 1979 and ran through till January the following year. Among those musicians appearing on the album were many who had collaborated with Linda in the past, Dan Dugmore, Mike Auldridge, Bill Payne, Russ Kunkel and her manager, Peter Asher.

Two members of the group The Cretones, Mark Goldenberg and Peter Bernstein, also appear on the album. Goldenberg, as well as the composer of three of the tracks, shares the electric guitar duties with Dugmore, while Bernstein plays acoustic guitar. Danny Kortchmar, who would tour with Linda, also doubled up on electric guitar although, like Bernstein, does not feature on many of the tracks.

Danny Kortchmar won fame, or notoriety, playing guitar for West Coast artists like James Taylor, Carole King and, of course, Linda Ronstadt. He also co-wrote songs with Jackson Browne and branched out into record production with his first credit being on an album with Carole King’s daughter, Louise Goffin, in 1979. “The producers I had worked with as a guitarist really did a lot to prepare me,” he explained in an interview. “Especially Peter Asher, Linda Ronstadt’s producer. Peter really encouraged all the musicians he worked with to think like producers, to play parts a producer would tell you to play. After working with him for so many years, I felt I was pretty qualified to produce.” One of his favourite places to work in was Record One, owned by Los Angeles producer, Val Garay, and home to many of Ronstadt’s sessions.

Providing backing vocals on the album were, Kenny Edwards, Andrew Gold, Waddy Wachtel, Nicolette Larson and Rosemary Butler.

Peter Asher also produced the sessions but it was Mark Goldenberg who was truly at the helm. His arrangements were heavily dominated by fuzzy guitars, organ, bass and drum while this time the vocal back-up is kept to a minimum. “I’m more excited about this album than about any other one I’ve done,” she said once the recording was over.

A single was issued in January 1980, How Do I Make You backed with Rambler Gambler, and became a top ten pop single in the United States. Rambler Gambler was not included on the album and sounds like it was recorded much earlier than the rest of the material.

With its country feel, it was no surprise that Rambler Gambler appeared on the country charts, albeit only reaching #42. The sessions were still underway when this single was issued and more than likely there was no other material from the sessions available when considering what tracks to use. This may be why they went back to what appears to be a much earlier recording.

Released in March 1980 Mad Love, Ronstadt's tenth album, went platinum within a couple of months and during its 36 week residency in the album charts it would peak at #3. In the UK, where they may have expected better things from the album, it failed miserably.

The track How Do I Make You was nominated in the ‘Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female’ at the Grammy Awards but was beaten by Pat Benatar with her track Crimes Of Passion. Success also came her way when she was a joint winner in the ‘Best Recording For Children’ category for her contribution to the album In Harmony/A Sesame Street Record.
 
The album artwork was far removed from previous efforts. Gone were the sexy, provocative cover photos. This time Kosh, who had designed many of her album sleeves, went for a shocking pink and black graphic with a photo of Linda with her new cropped hair style.

Mad Love, Cost Of Love and Justine were all written by Mark Goldenberg and had all appeared on the Cretones album Thin Red Line, released at almost the same time as Mad Love. All three are well-handled by Linda and feature excellent support from the band, especially Goldenberg’s guitar playing, Bill Payne on organ and Russ Kunkel on drums.

Linda once again turns to Elvis Costello for three tracks covering Party Girl, Girls Talk and Talking In The Dark. These were good performances although she seems to struggle more with these songs than she did on the Goldenberg tracks as well as her earlier recording of Costello’s Alison, which had appeared on her 1978 album Living In The USA.

With a great drum intro How Do I Make You is without doubt one of the highlights on the album and was written by Billy Steinberg. He was one of the most successful songwriters of the eighties and nineties and, along with co-writer Tom Kelly, had written five number one singles including Madonna’s Like A Virgin and Cyndi Lauper’s True Colours. As Rolling Stone would point out in their review Ronstadt sounds like she is trying to imitate Debbie Harry from Blondie.

Two tracks date back to the mid-sixties, a soulful cover of the Little Anthony and The Imperials hit Hurt So Bad and the Hollies I Can’t Let Go. Despite being vintage tracks they both fit perfectly on the album and this is down to her ‘new wave’ interpretation.

However, the outstanding track on the album is her reworking of Neil Young’s Look Out For My Love which is as good, if not better, than his original.

Many critics compared Linda’s efforts to the new wave energy of Pat Benatar who had achieved success in the US with a succession of hit singles, including Hit Me With Your Best Shot, Love Is A Battlefield and We Belong and three top five albums, Crimes Of Passion, Precious Time and Get Nervous.

Benatar trained as an opera singer and went on to become a major hitmaker in the early eighties finding success with both mainstream rock and powerful ballads that focussed on personal relationships and sexual politics.

Linda laid herself open for a lot of criticism for going down the ‘New Wave-Punk’ road. Many reviewers picked up on the fact that maybe this was the wrong sort of material for her to record. Stephen Holden, in his review in Rolling Stone wrote “Mad Love’s theme is passion – not the reflective, yearning romanticism that’s infused most of Ronstadt’s best work, but brutal, nervous, teenage sexuality,” and went on to say “No matter how tough she acts, she can’t help sounding pretty.” He also criticised the production, feeling that it was too mechanistic and that it would be hard to imagine the songs performed live because everything is so high-tech. Summing up, he reckoned the album wasn’t a major exhibition more a fascinating failure.

Rock Critic Richard Meltzer was more scathing and savaged the album in his review calling it “even more corrupt, gawky and anachronistic than such regional stalwarts of sixties-revisionist new wave as the Naughty Sweeties”, an LA band that played many of the local punk shows. He went on to say that it was the “nadir of retrograde, psuedo-punk rock.”

Producer Peter Asher pointed out, as printed in Goldmine magazine in 2003, that “it’s just that she likes good music and recognized how good punk was, and that isn’t the same thing as trying to jump on a bandwagon. I think it’s a genuine question of her excellent musical taste.”

Stereo Review, while echoing many of the comments in Rolling Stone, thought that, while sincere, Ronstadt probably wasn’t taking it that seriously although they felt it was “a well intended, spirited almost plucky little album.” Understanding that music styles come and go and new wave would soon be superseded for the next craze, along with Linda’s ability to turn her hand to many different styles, they ended their review with the comment, “Linda Ronstadt can go back to being Linda Ronstadt any time she wants to, and the rest of the new wave can’t.” How true that statement would become.
 
In March and April, to promote the album, Linda undertook a lengthy US Mad Love tour with Danny Kortchmar as special guest.

Backing her on the tour were, Kenny Edwards (guitar, banjo and backing vocals), Dan Dugmore (guitar and pedal steel guitar), Danny Kortchmar (guitar), Bob Glaub (bass), Bill Payne (keyboards), Russ Kunkel (drums), Peter Asher (percussion and backing vocals) and Wendy Waldman (backing vocals).

Opening on 22 March with a show at the Capital Center in Landover, Maryland the tour would find her playing concerts across America including dates in Raleigh, North Carolina, Lexington, Kentucky, Nashville, Tennessee, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Detroit, Michigan and St Paul, Minnesota.

There were sell-out shows in Pittsburgh, Detroit and St Paul with crowds of between 12-16,000. These and other concert dates on the tour made regular placings in Billboard’s ‘Boxscore’ chart that detailed top grossing shows. During the tour live promotional videos were filmed for both ‘How Do I Make You’ and ‘Hurt So Bad’.

In his review of her 3 April performance at the Municipal Auditorium in Nashville, Walter Carter, in the Tennessean, wrote: “Just the presence of Linda Ronstadt on the Municipal Auditorium stage Thursday night was enough to charm a sold-out audience into extended applause, and her singing through the 95-minute performance only heightened the sensation.” He had nothing but praise for the band, who had no trouble in switching between her new hard-edged material and her old country songs of the past few years. He recalled that people were throwing bouquets of flowers on stage, prompting Linda to laugh and comment “Does this mean I’m going to be a bride... I doubt it.” There were probably many disappointed males in the audience!

She was also taking time out to support presidential campaigns, not least that of her then current boyfriend Jerry Brown. In December 1979 she had played two benefit concerts, along with The Eagles and Chicago, in San Diego, to raise money for Brown.

During her Mad Love Tour, on 21 April, she played a show at the Five Seasons Center in Cedar Rapids, Idaho, in support of Gary Hart’s senatorial bid in Colorado. Reviewing that particular show The Cedar Rapids Gazette wrote, “Linda Ronstadt appears to be the new record holder for the most standing ovations given a performer in one 90 minute concert at the Five Seasons Center. She received too many to count.” 
 

 
Following the Harrisburg Three Mile Island nuclear incident in 1979, in which a faulty cooling system caused radioactive gases to be released into the air, she had taken part in a benefit on the steps of the State Capitol building in Pennsylvania on 29 March 1980.

On 24 April, at the Television Center Studios in Hollywood, the show was filmed for a special to be broadcast by Home Box Office (HBO), the American subscription TV service.

The special was considered by many fans to be a high point in her career and the electrifying performances of many of her current and past hits captured America's most popular female rock singer at the peak of her career.

Meanwhile, further singles were issued following the tour. Hurt So Bad reached #8 while I Can’t Let Go just failed to hit the top thirty. By mid-1980, Linda had racked up enough hits to release a second volume of hits which included two tracks from Mad Love.

Over the years the HBO Special has been made available, albeit unofficially, on various video, DVD and CD releases.

The first official release of any tracks from the show was in 2017 when the 40th Anniversary edition of her 1977 album Simple Dreams featured three bonus tracks, live recordings of It's So Easy, Blue Bayou and Poor Poor Pitiful Me.

It would be a further two years before Linda Ronstadt's first official live album would be released. Live In Hollywood, released by Rhino Records, was released in February 2019 and featured the following songs... I Can't Let Go, Willin', Just One Look, Faithless Love, Hurt So Bad, You're No Good, How Do I Make You, Back In The USA and Desperado along with the three tracks, previously available on the aforementioned Simple Dreams release, It's So Easy, Blue Bayou and Poor Poor Pitiful Me.

There were many great performances on the album with a six-minute version of You're No Good being one of the highlights. The song, written by Clint Ballard Jr., had been recorded by Linda back in 1974 for her album Heart Like A Wheel and was a song she had been closing her shows with back in 1973. It was band member Kenny Edwards who suggested she record it.

There were three tracks from the Mad Love album, I Can't Let Go, Hurt So Bad and How Do I Make You and the remaining tracks were from earlier in her career and some of her best known songs. From her 1973 Don't Cry Now album came Desperado, both Willin' and Faithless Love were originally released on Heart Like A Wheel in 1974 while Just One Look and Back In The USA were from 1979's Living In The USA album.

 

Reviews were positive with Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic writing, "These 12 tracks casually illustrate her facility with both soft rock and old-time rock & roll, and if the set list leans heavily on oldies, the combination of guts and polish makes her renditions memorable.

Hal Horowitz of American Songwriter praised her vocal delivery saying, "She's in terrific voice throughout with a few standout performances like the closing Desperado - a knockout, dramatic vocal accompanied only by Payne's piano - and a powerful take on Roy Orbison's Blue Bayou, has anyone done that song better?" 

Also concentrating on her vocals was Jim Harrington of Mercury News, "Her vocals are strong, clear and convincing as she moves through such winners as It's So Easy, Just One Look, and Poor Poor Pitiful Me. And the stunning version of Blue Bayou... wow. That's one for the time capsule."

There were many more great reviews but in his On The Records review Phil Bausch captured it perfectly in just a few words, "It's important that recordings like Live In Hollywood exist to remind the world Linda Ronstadt once possessed one of the greatest rock and pop voices of all time."

The physical CD, Live In Hollywood, was a welcome release for fans but only featured twelve of the twenty tracks performed during the HBO Special and it would be another five years before the whole concert would find a release, albeit in digital format only.

 
Released in October 2024, Live In Hollywood Deluxe, was only available as a digital download and marked the first time the complete performance had been available. It is unknown if there are any plans to release the whole concert on CD in the future but a physical copy would be welcome.

It has been reported that following the TV taping in 1980 plans were made to release her first live album but for years the master tapes were unavailable or lost. It was only a chance conversation between John Boylan, producer of the album, and an audio engineer from Warner Brothers Records that would result in the tapes being located.

The audio was specifically mastered for streaming and downloading to ensure the best possible quality for the listener. The whole album sounds excellent with Linda's powerful vocals to the fore while every instrument and backing vocal is clear and perfectly balanced. 

The eight previously unreleased songs included, four from the Mad Love album, Party Girl, Look Out For My Love, Mad Love and Cost Of Love along with Hank Williams classic, I Can't Help It (If I'm Still In Love With You), the Holland-Dozier-Holland composition Heat Wave, a 1963 hit for Martha and The Vandellas, which Linda recorded for her 1975 album Prisoner In Disguise and Silver Threads And Golden Needles, a song she had recorded twice previously, firstly for her 1969 solo debut Hand Sown... Home Grown and again in 1973 for Don't Cry Now. One song performed at the show and finally released was Lies, originally released in 1965 by The Knickerbockers, it was a song Linda had already recorded in the studio but would not release until 1982 on her Get Closer album.

Mad Love was a complete departure for Linda Ronstadt and while she would return to her county, country-rock and rock roots in the future she would also venture into new genres. Over the next few years her career would find her working with Nelson Riddle on a trio of albums featuring classic standards from the 1940s and 1950s and returning to her Mexican roots with albums of Mariachi and Spanish music.