A CONVERSATION WITH DARRELL SCOTT (continued)
DS: And that's how we came to Nashville. The record was either going to come out or not, it was either going to do okay or not. This house was affordable, we could make that switch. I knew I didn't want to fall back into honky tonk world. And somehow, I wanted to use my brush with the high horse to see what was possible here in Nashville. Because I knew there was an underground of great writing, that it was more than what was on the radio. And I knew that a lot of the greatest songwriters in the world were sitting right here, and the best artists.
So we came down, and the first year we had no money, and ran the credit cards all the way up. We took the money out my wife's early retirement fund and lived on that. I knew we were supposed to be here.
PM: You ran right though her early retirement.
DS: Yeah, we did. And after a year of that, I started getting some sessions as a player.
PM: I've seen your discography. It's so deep, it's comical. How did the session calls begin?
DS: I'll tell you. There was a guy at EMI named Blake Chancey.
PM: Wow.
DS: Right. Obviously, Blake's gone over to SONY, and he's done great things over there. He's a very cool person. His dad, Ron Chancey, was a producer. He did a lot of classic Conway Twitty, the Oak Ridge Boys, and a lot of jingles. So, Blake passed my name on to Ron, who started calling me for jingle work.
PM: So, Blake Chancey was the first guy to hook you up.
DS: Absolutely. He kept us alive, truly. And Verlon would always hire me for every session he had, and I started doing shows with Verlon. It sort of expanded from there. But I played on lots of jingles for Ron, beer jingles and Eggo, all sorts of stuff. We'd come here with a one and a half year old child, and we started our second as soon as we got here.
PM: How about the house, did it have all the plumbing and electric, and all that?
DS: Yeah, but it didn't have heat or air conditioning. We lived there a good six or seven years without air conditioning. We got central heat about three years ago. The first year we went out and got propane wall heaters, that helped a lot. The other thing was that my dad had built a CA house in Tennessee, with a flat roof that held water. We had leaks and buckets all over the house. So we were working on the house and try to keep that going, and the session work from friends floated in at a rate that seemed to keep us going. When I got here, I had a $350 Alvarez Yairi Acoustic, that's what I had for an acoustic axe. I was an electric and steel player.
PM: A $350 Alvarez, that's funny.
DS: No kidding. For sessions, I would borrow Verlon's Taylors. And I started getting more calls to play acoustic. Not more calls, I started getting some calls.
PM: Your acoustic rhythm playing is so good. So many acoustic players here don't have a nice rhythm sound. The way Family Tree starts, I want to play that for people and say, "This is what it's supposed to sound like when you strum an acoustic guitar."
DS: But you know what? I know for a fact that for the first three years of sessions here, I was pissing drummers off. My time wasn't their time, it wasn't metronomic. I'd never worked with a metronome ever, and I wasn't about to start. At the same time, I could tell I was falling short of what they wanted in that regard. That's a fact, literally. And the day it all changed was the day I went into the studio with Kenny Malone and Roy Huskey Jr. Suddenly, this invisible click track appeared in my phones, but it wasn't really there. Then all that insecurity of not measuring up or being with the drummer metronomically fell away, and it was just music, as opposed to just time. Time is a part of music, it's not music in and of itself. Kenny Malone has been central to my education, on many levels.
PM: He's a deep person, aside from his musicianship.
DS: Yeah, he is. One of the greatest gifts I've had in coming to Nashville is getting to know Kenny and playing with him.
PM: My friend Jack Irwin, who co-produced a record I did with Kenny and Michael Rhodes, had a story about Kenny Malone.
DS: Kenny played that record for me, he was very proud of that.
PM: That's nice of you to mention, we did some good work together. Jack told me that some years ago his best friend back in Pittsburgh hung himself, and Jack was really broken up about it. Although he didn't really know Kenny well, he was moved to call him up and talk to him about it. Whatever Kenny said to him on the phone that day really put him back together, and helped him get on with life in a way that he never forgot.
DS: That sounds like Kenny, alright.
PM: And you guys are biking friends, right?
DS: Yeah, he gave me my bike. It's an English made Raleigh from the 70s, a classic. It's this big steel frame thing that I can get up on, I'm a big guy. He got it in barter as part of pay for a session. The guy said, "I'll give you ___ dollars and the Raleigh." And he passed the Raleigh on to me. And then got me way into it.
PM: So we did finally finish that question about how you came to Nashville, right? [tape runs out, I flip it over.] continue
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