Carlene Carter Fan Club: Press

(This article is from the archives of Baby Ride Easy, the Carlene Carter fan site run by Doug Stalnaker 2003-2008.)


A lot of people in the country music business are glad that Carlene Carter came back; that these days she's making country records, having country hits, and being a country personality.

That's just a fact with some very good reasons behind it. Carlene's a pretty wonderful singer and songwriter, for a start, and also she's the daughter of two pretty well-esteemed country legends and the granddaughter of another who was pretty much the music's founding mother; and then, too, hers has been a comeback of significant distances; the places from which she's returned are pretty far away. So really, Carlene's isn't the usual mildly pleasant showbiz-success-after-setbacks story, and the reaction of those who care isn't the usual modestly tickled gee-that's-nice. The pleasure of seeing this particular 'new face' again feels special and runs deep: It's the joy of welcoming a favorite daughter, long prodigal, back into the fold.

The basic outline of Carlene's life so far is, then, a circle beginning and ending in Nashville. She was born there as the offspring of a short-lived union between two popular Grand Ole Opry perfomers of the day, June Carter and Carl Smith; she grew up there and on the country tour circuit of which the city was and is the center, under the care of her mother, her stepfather, Johnny Cash, and the storied ladies of The Carter Family, including her legendary grandmother Maybelle; she stayed there until the end of her teens, by which time she had borne two children in two failed marriages and acquired a thorough education in the basics of her trade (creative writing at Vanderbilt, honky tonk technique and etiquette at the Exit-In); and now, in her mid-30's, she's back in town, living in Mother Maybelle's old house, the home of her early childhood. She is close to both her parents both geographically (her father, happily retired from show business, has a ranch outside Nashville) and emotionally.

Her years away were as active as her years in town. There was almost a decade based in London with her third husband, the great English pop-rocker Nick Lowe, until she and he separated a couple of years ago; and there was a long and increasingly debilitating drug and alcohol addiction which climaxed in her choice of sobriety, also a couple of years ago; and there has been fully six albums worth of music which, while occasionally brilliant and always interesting, didn't begin to achieve its creative or commercial potential with any consistency until 1990, when I Fell In Love came out sounding just plain old, wise, wild and wonderful. That album launched Carlene's 'new' country career very effectively, and moreover it was such a lovely piece of work that you could easily find yourself agreeing with many of its reviewers: Even after all those years, all the false starts and wrong directions--all the turmoil, turbulence and flat-out trouble in Carlene's life and career--this music was worth the wait.

Carlene comes walking jauntily into the joint, very casual and easy in blue jeans and a denim shirt, with her hair in a natural, no-nonsense ponytail--a working rig, not her trash-chic, retro-bimbo-cowgirl state look--and we sit down for an early dinner and interview.

The joint is the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset Boulevard in the lushly monied region between West Hollywood and Beverly Hills (chosen because it's right down the hill from the home recording studio where she and her producer, Howie Epstein of Tom Petty's Heartbreakers, are working on the follow-up to I Fell In Love, and it's okay: a gussied-up New York diner transposed to the City of Dreams. Carlene's thoroughly at home, of course, as she is in most cosmopolitan environments. Her distinctly down-home accent and her dimwit hostess character notwithstanding, this ain't (and never was) no hick chick from the sticks.

I congratulate her on I Fell In Love, noting, among other things, how very clearly it stood out from the pack in both country and rock--no 1990 record sounded at all like it either lyrically or musically--and she seems pleased.

"Well, that's good, I guess. You know, I was listening to John (Cash) accepting an award the other night, and he said, 'Even though people were always criticizing me for being different, I never compromised myself musically, and I was always myself.' That really hit home with me, because I spent years thinking I was doing the right thing by trying to fit in to this or that. I always got real influenced by where I was at, and the kind of music going on around me, and who I was working with, the musicians on my records--whatever they thought was hip, slick and cool. But then, as soon as I kind of grew up enough to know that I couldn't be anything except what I am, that's when I started making real good music. And funnily enough, people started liking it a whole lot better."

She pauses. "Sometimes it's scary, though. I find myself thinking, 'Can I do this? Nobody does this! Maybe this is wrong!' You know, second guessing myself. But I'm trying to learn to quit that."

She doesn't disown any of her previous work, even albums as far from her present reality as the fast, brassy (and pretty good) Euro-dance disc, C'est C Bon, or the ragged Blue Nun (named after the brand of wine she and Nick Lowe and their friends were swilling at the time), and she is in fact justifiably proud of the country-rock ground she broke with Musical Shapes in 1979. Still, though, she agrees with the critics that the style of I Fell In Love is where she belongs.

The process of finding that style began with her mother and her aunts, Helen and Anita, altogether The Carter Sisters. After she returned from London to Tennessee, Carlene worked the road with them for almost two years, and, singing those sweet harmonies on those lovely old songs--the same deeply rooted, enormously influential music those same women were making around her when she was just a tot--she began to get the idea that country wasn't as uncool as she'd been thinking it was (and she had been thinking that; in her 20's she'd been much more anxious to shed the family heritage than embrace it). She found herself feeling more comfortable as a Carter Sister than she'd ever felt on stage, and also she really appreciated country audiences. "They're so nice to you," she says with a touch of wonder still in her voice, echoing the amazement of many a performer accustomed to the raunch and rudeness of rock.

The final piece fell into place when she came to a basic realization about herself as an artist. She'd already proved that she could write whatever good, commercial songs the market demanded (acts as different as The Doobie Brothers and The Go Go's have had hits with her material), but "I wanted to write about what I knew about, which was all this, the whole country world I was raised in. And really, you can't write a song about riding in a hillbilly Cadillac with your grandmother, and have them play it on rock radio. Nobody gives a damn."

The song "Me And The Wildwood Rose" is the one she's talking about, an achingly moving memoir of Maybelle seen in the eyes of a child and held in the heart of a mourner. It's a clear, wonderfully evocative song which tells you just what it was like for a little girl snugged down on quilts on the floor of that touring Cadillac with her family all around her (Maybelle driving), and you feel just the sense of love and loss that grown woman means to communicate: the warmth of childhood happiness remembered always, the chill of childhood security gone long ago. And of course this gem of a song both reflects the theme of The Carter Family classic it echoes and gives us the answer to the question that classic poses. Yes, with Carlene back home in every important way, the circle will be unbroken.

Carlene's work with The Carter Sisters coincided with the beginnings of her recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, and for her that was both very fortunate--you'd be hard pressed to find a more sobriety-encouraging environment than a cocoon of Carter women--and very nice.

"I got to go back and be a kid again, you see," she says, "I left home so young that I never quite got my kid stuff out. I mean, in those two years I got to be with Helen and Anita. I used to cry to stay with my Aunt Helen when I was a little kid! And they taught me so much in those two years, just with the grace with which they do things, and their humor; they laugh at everything. It was wonderful to be with them as a grownup, and not be dulled to it by not being sober."

That jogs my memory, and I recall a day at the Cash/Carter house when June Carter told me, with great joy, about her daughter's then-new sobriety. "That makes a full set, Patrick!" She laughed, "All my babies are sober now!" (June's 'babies' including, in this context, her husband as well as her daughters and stepdaughters.)

Carlene grins when she hears that. "You know," she says, "I remember my mom being around then saying to me, 'honey, you're doing all the things I always knew you could do.'"

She looks down at the table, and her grin becomes a long, reflective smile of pleasure. It's a good moment, the kind that happens from time to time as a person emerges from the darkness of addiction and alcoholism.

We talk for a long time about recovery, but the subject isn't something either of us wants to overemphasize. The differences in Carlene stoned and sober are obvious enough--she made I Fell In Love sober, and Warner Brothers trusted her to do so, and now she's taking exceptionally good care of business as opposed to "hiding out in my house, peeping out the window" (or pushing up Tennessee daisies)--and so we'll confine ourselves to concluding remarks: what Carlene sees as the biggest change in herself since she quit drinking and drugging.

I guess I'm not scared that I'm doing the wrong things anymore. I'm not all filled with guilt, because I'm really trying my best to be a good person. I took an awful lot for granted before, and I lost an awful lot--I think God wanted to tach me a lesson about that--but now it's all coming around again. I think everything comes back the way it should be if you try real hard to be upright. Don't you?"

One of Carlene's great fears was that she wouldn't be able to write sober. That fear was groundless, though. The first song she wrote in recovery was "Easy From Now On," and if you've heard that tune, you know exactly how it stacks up against her previous work; it's one of the best two or three songs she's ever written, and its spirit is second to none. And maybe its title is prophetic, too.

Career-wise, things have certainly been falling into place rather easily. Her alliance with Howie Epstein has turned out to be just the right move, both professionally and personally--she and he work very well indeed together, their union amounting to more than the sum of its parts--and her other main professional relationships, with manager Bill Carter (who also manages Reba McEntire and Rodney Crowell, among others) and with Warner Brothers Records, have also thrived. By getting these people into her camp she's achieved a combination of business savvy and muscle, and createive support and freedom, which any recording artist would envy.

Things are going well, then, and looking better all the time. Her job as the host of the VH1 country video show, Carlene Carter's Nashville, is in its early days, but that should turn out okay, too; a few tens of millions of affluent, relatively sophisticated new viewer/listeners might be quite healthy for the progress of a country artist with Carlene's winning combination of great looks, unique image, and killer music. Overall, then, she's in the same kind of perfectly aligned market position as her buddy Marty Stuart: way cool enough for the cool, way country enough for the country, and just flat-out loaded with talent. Whether she'll go the distance remains to be seen, but you have to admit that the odds aren't half bad.

In the country market, of course, radio airplay will be the deciding factor in Carlene's career, and she's a little nervous about that. "I think I'm gonna have to keep proving myself over and over," she says. "I think the programmers are afraid I'll turn around suddenly and do some rap record, you know? Like, 'Isn't she married to some limey or somethin'? Isn't she one of them punk rockers?' I understand that, and I really can't blame them, but I'll just keep doing what I'm doing and hope for the best."

The album she's working on now, she says, is very like I Fell In Love in most ways, the most significant difference being "a little more melancholy to it. I think this is a bit more of a grownup record. There was a certain high-spirited kind of frenzy to I Fell In Love, but now I'm more interested in opening up the direct channel from my heart to the tape recorder."

Which might mean, I hope, more songs like "Me And The Wildwood Rose" and "Easy From Now On," the latter a complex, spellbinding little trip about survival, self-preservation and freedom: one of those songs which never really tells you what the story is--what's happening to the singer, or what just happened to make her sing--but which communicates its feelings just beautifully, and suggests far more than it says. It was written to do just that, Carlene says, Allusive writing is her natural style.

We get into the subject of writing now, and again we talk a lot, so again I'll cut to the chase. Carlene admits quite freely that although she enjoys performing her music and gets a kick out of hamming for the video camera (the latter a family trait; her mother is also a comedienne), she's really a writer at heart.

"The best feeling I ever get is when I've written a song that I know is good.," she says. "Even if it's not something commercial or something we can put on an album, just something I need to do for myself, it's like the best sex in the world. It's like the best drug you could ever take. It is the all for me. It would break my heart if someone told me I couldn't write songs anymore. If they passed a law that you couldn't do it, I'd make 'em up in my head and keep 'em in my hair. It's the thing that I love, above all, above everything."

Carlene speaks with such force that I find myself going for lightness--there's a movie concept here, I say; cadres of heavily armed songwriters eluding brain police in sewers, abandoned fallout shelters, Ozark caverns--and Carlene laughs and goes along with the gag. Still, though, one must honor her passion and recognize its result: She is one of our time's most effective and powerful songwriters.

More supportive evidence for that claim, as if you needed it, is contained in the song "Guardian Angel," another of the quieter gems on I Fell In Love. It was written, Carlene says, two times: first in London in 1984, when she was drunk and crying over the suicide of a person very dear to her, and then as she worked on I Fell In Love, "to make the song more real to me now. There were things about myself I wasn't willing to admit then, and now I am."

The essential message of the song remains the same, though: Through all her trials and troubles, and the wreckage she has wrought on herself and others, Carlene has had protection.

"It's true," she says. "Even in my times when I was really lost, I always felt like there was something watching over me that was going to get me through, to ge me to the place that was safe and good for me." And it did.