A Conversation with Jack Williams (continued)
JW: And the trouble is, you go into the Bluebird, and you may hear some guy on a Sunday night, on a writer's night up there, and he'll come to the middle of the song and he'll say, "Now, this is where a harp solo is going to happen when we get this thing cut, and it's going to have this here." And you know what? I want to take a rotten tomato and hit him. I mean I want to say, "Look, man, you're playing the song. I'm here to hear the song finished. If your song wasn't done or should have been done by somebody else who's got a harp player, then you shouldn't have presented it to me. The buck stops here. This is you. Play this damn thing."
PM: "You got a guitar in your hand, now do something with it."
JW: That's right. Play me the song and make it complete. Let me hear the whole nine yards. And so I always say that when you come to listen to me, the buck stops here.
One of my favorite moments in Nashville was a time where we did a showcase at Diamonds in the Rough. You remember Diamonds in the Rough?
PM: I remember that.
JW: Okay. It was my band that I had at the time, and it was back when I had my Song Dog album. We went in there and we just didn't take the usual showcase route. People came in there, and I was just really pleased and astounded at how people were reacting to my band. And folks would come up and say, "Man, do you know how long it's been since we heard a rehearsed band, a band that actually plays together all the time and works out stuff?" They said, "We're hearing stuff that we don't hear. We hear Jonell Mosser with some of the best pickers in town, and they've got music stands there." And I have to say that I did hear Jonell one night with some great players. But they were reading, and I felt like as she played, she was feeling so good, it was like she was pulling along a horse that was pulling a cart of big rocks.
PM: [laughs]
JW: These great players were being so wonderfully precise, and so wonderfully perfect, but she had something she wanted to do, and these people could not keep up with her. And I felt sorry for her. But I heard that, in Diamonds in the Rough, when people came up to me, and they said, "Man, you guys are just cookin'. This is just totally different." And yet there were a couple of guys in the band who could have never made it as studio players, could have never been the A-Team. But the thing is that this band whooped ass.
And in walks, on the first song, the president of Mercury Records, that's his name? It's something like Buddy something. Well, it doesn't matter. This guy walks in. And the way I know that somebody came in was a bunch of heads turned. And then they turned to each other, like "What's this guy doing here?" Everybody was kind of realizing this was showcasing and somebody who really wants to hear what's going on has showed up. Well, this guy was a real nice fellow. He stayed through the whole damn show until the second to the last song. And he had to leave before the last song, so he left word with the waitress, he left word with her to say that he really enjoyed it, and he apologized for leaving, because he was enjoying himself so much. And as we played the last song, we looked over toward the door and he was peaking in.
PM: [laughs]
JW: And it was the president of Mercury Records. And I saw people looking--and I just was getting this strange education about people, and the nature of that town. Because we weren't there so much for that. I'm not sure what we were there for, I just remember that we were there to play, and we were there to play hard and see what we could get done. Anyway, the guy from Mercury Records called me the next day and said, "Man, I hadn't heard music like that in so long. I love it so much, but I wish to God I knew what I could do with I it."
But I just noticed the audience. And I just wondered, when I go there now and I play, what are they hearing? What are they listening to? Are they just sitting back and closing their eyes? And when I sing about South Carolina in the summertime, do they go there with me? Or what are they listening for? Are they listening for the craft of songwriting? What a terrible waste.
And I feel like the people in Music City have had their focus arrows pointed toward the commerciality, toward all of the elements of commercialism, of either show biz or the business, so much so that I'm not sure how many of them there are in town who could literally listen to a piece of music with their eyes closed and hear it without that influence. And it's kind of like, you watch TV, what do you get? You get the most emotional moment in the whole thing, and they break and they go to a commercial. And all of a sudden there's some guy talking about something else. You don't get that moment to sit back and relax and enjoy. You don't get the artist sitting there telling you more. You don't get your breath taken away and then have a chance to slow down and feel it. Emotions are thrown out at you--"Check this out. Look at this." Bam! "Hey, sex, tits, hey." Wham! Wham!
And I can't think like that. I can't even watch TV anymore because of that, because they've gone to that nobody-out-there's-got-an-attention-span way of thinking. continue
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