A Conversation with Elizabeth Cook (continued)

PM: I don't know anything about Jeff Gordon, who produced a lot of those cuts. Who's he?

EC: Oh, he's the mystery man. He's a well-kept secret, too secret. He runs the Nashville office of the company called Carlin America. And Carlin America is a giant publishing company based out of New York run by Freddie Bienstock. They have all the Starday and King record collections. They have Meatloaf, "What a Wonderful World," blah, blah, blah. But in that Starday and King collection, they have a Nashville office, because they own the first five George Jones albums, and all this great old country catalog, which is all on vinyl, lining the walls in his office.

PM: Wow.

EC: I met him on the premise that he was looking for a traditional girl country singer to come in and re-demo some of his catalog. So I came in and met him, and he offered me a deal there that day. I got to sign a publishing deal with him. And then I just quit--left my, for the time, lucrative job at Price Waterhouse to move into the office and sleep on the floor, and drink beer and--

PM: Move in the office and sleep on the floor. Really?

EC: Yeah.

PM: Right from Price Waterhouse to his floor. Ain't you something?

EC: I had a great apartment in Bellevue with a swimming pool, everything else, but I was not happy. And yeah, I left Price Waterhouse, broke up with my boyfriend that I was seeing--who was this shady old bartender guy--and then moved into the office and just sort of went under his wing, where he gave me the creative space and freedom to write by myself a lot, and sort of discover--

PM: You just changed your life, like that. [snaps fingers]

EC: And then immediately I wrote "Demon Don't Get in Bed with Me," "Mommy, You Wanted to be a Singer, Too," "Dolly, Did You Go Through This?" all these things that I didn't even know--I mean, I did not come to him with some back catalog. It was completely off his gut feeling that he signed me, he thought that I could write.

PM: And you must have blown his mind when you churned out these songs.

EC: He was very happy. He was very, very happy with me, and that kept me wanting to do it more.

PM: Holy jeez.

EC: And he wanted to be a producer. He wanted to produce me.

PM: And he hadn't been a producer up to that point.

EC: Not really. He kept trying to break in, and he was all around it, and he had acts that he would develop that would have major label deals, but then, ha, here would come the big bear--

PM: Right. Then they'd move on.

EC: Here would come an A & R guy, producer guy, with the big salary that slaps his name on the backs of all the records and elbows him out of the way.

PM: And take all the credit, yeah.

EC: And that happened repeatedly. So I was yet another act going through the process, and he developed me, and just gave me a haven to do that. I mean, there were not a lot of publishing situations--

PM: And you were the first true blue partner that stood by him and his name got on the record, and all that stuff.

EC: Well, then--yeah--we started going to the studio, trying to get deals off the demos that he was cutting on me. And the demos from those sessions became the first independent album, the Blue album.

PM: Right.

EC: So I got that. And then, right before we were putting that together, I got on the Grand Ole Opry. Then I had Blue come out, so the timing was really good. Then Atlantic signed me based on that. And so then we began the process of making the Hey Y'all album. Then he kind of got unhired by the president of the record company for the job of producing the album. And he was sort of okay with that. He was like, "Maybe I'll co-produce it, maybe I'll just be the publisher. But I'm in, I'm here to support, or whatever." We were close, very close.

PM: Right.

EC: And he saw me through that, but quietly. I know it was hard for Jeff to watch a lot of what happened, for his four years of work.

PM: Right. Because when you made that first record that started at Atlantic and went to Warner Brothers, I mean, I'm sure it was thought at the time that, "Hey, this is going to be big. This is going to be a return to real country music," and the scene probably looked ripe. But then when it came time, as so often happens, they apparently just didn't know what to do with it.

EC: Yeah. I don't know if they even thought about it and decided that they didn't know. [laughs] I think they were all so busy worrying about their jobs and what was going to happen tomorrow--I mean, it was like, "Are we going to get here in the morning and have our computers boxed up, or what?"

PM: Yeah. And that's how they earned the name the "Artist Protection Program" there for a while.

EC: Yeah. Well, you could get on it--and I could have stayed on that label. I could probably still be on that label, if I chose to be. I don't know, maybe it's arrogant to say that. But I did not see how it was going to advance my career. Even knowing I was probably going to lose my nice little publishing deal, I had to go to the president of the company and ask to be released from my contract.

PM: And who was your publishing with at the time?

EC: Warner Chappell had gotten me from Jeff's company.

PM: Right. So when the Warner Chappell deal ended, why didn't you resume some kind of a publishing arrangement with Jeff?

EC: Well, I think that he couldn't resign me, then. I mean, there were people above him--

PM: Yeah, right.

EC: It's not necessarily all his choice.

PM: Got it.

EC: And I think they had put four years into me, and they had bought all of my catalog that they felt like they needed to have.

[laughter]

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