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Hot Potato interview

1980, Hot Potato

If you ask John, he's not sure about that at all. He doesn't really know. Yup, his conversational demeanor is as up front and disarming as his singing and songwriting.

Hot Potato: Do you think you are strange?

John Hiatt: I wouldn't have any idea. I shudder to think, I shudder to think...

HP: (in the "Rolling Stone" record review of "Two Bit Monsters") they got you as being not very likeable...

JH: Unlikeable.

HP: ... A dark person ...

JH: Which I thought was quite an observation considering that asshole had never even met me. That's pretty incredible gall on his part.

HP: That was his opening line.

JH: Yeah, it's amazing. Did you see the letter in the next issue? It was from a friend of mine, John Hadley. I was really happy he wrote that. Serves that guy right.

HP: (the letter) says you're much closer to Quasimodo than Elvis Costello.

JH: Yeah, right.

HP: Do you have the problem of alienating people who could probably do you a lot of good? Do you come on kinda strong?

JH: I'm sure I've alienated my share, but as I get older...

HP: Are you mellowing out?

JH: Not mellowing out, but I'm making conscious attempts to be a little more graceful in my relationships with people. Looking back, in retrospect, I've made a few mistakes in my tendency to be headstrong. I might have let more than a few things slip away. I'm not bendin' over backwards for anybody. I'm pretty clumsy with people, and it's a problem.

HP: Do you think your songs are an open display of what you feel, what you think, the way you operate?

JH: I don't know how open it is. Unfortunately, there is always this tendency to go into it as far as you can but there is still a shroud around it, for safety's sake, I guess... I don't know for sure. It's tricky trying to expose just enough, not enough to where you are gonna get killed, if you know what I'm saying.

HP: I like to have to wrestle with a song, when I listen to it. Whether or not I got what the writer intended out of the song, the song was still a challenge.

JH: That's always the question. That's the whole idea. Songs were meant to be provocative in that way. They are so open to interpretation. There's the treat! There's the payoff!

HP: If you had a choice, would you provide lyric sheets with your albums?

JH: I do have a choice, and no, I wouldn't. My whole theory behind that is that when I was a kid working with combos and we'd bring whatever record home -- Marvin Gaye, f'instance -- and try to get the words to "You" or "I Heard it Through The Grapevine" or whatever, there were no lyric sheets and I got the lyrics. It's a little bit of work, but certainly you can do it. The whole problem with the lyric sheet -- and I've done 'em before on "Overcoats" -- the problem is that people take the lyric sheet out while they're listening to the record. They read the lyrics, and all of a sudden there is all this emphasis put on the lyrics. It's like, "Oh, gosh..."

HP: They tend to separate the music from the lyrics.

JH: Exactly, and song lyrics aren't meant to stand on their own.

HP: In fact, they look kinda dopey.

JH: More often than not, sure. It's just one part of the song. They are not poetry, or any of that kind of shit. That is why I don't do it.

HP: I've spent so many days with my ears two inches from the speaker...

JH: Yeah, right, turn all the bass off, turn all the treble up ...

HP: Did you have bands in high school?

JH: I had bands in grade school, oddly enough. I started playing when I was eleven years old, so I was putting bands together with boys who were sixteen and seventeen because nobody my age played.

HP: Did any of them grow up to be Roadmaster or anything?

JH: Roadmaster!? No, I never knew Toby Myers or Asher or any of those mod guys. In fact, those guys probably came and laughed at us. We were always kind of the shit band in town, I'm sorry to say.

(Editor's note: Roadmaster was an Indy band popular on the midwestern club/college circuit. Toby Myers was the bass guitarist with Roadmaster in their late '70s heyday. Within a year after this interview, Toby joined the John Cougar band, and to this day he remains the bass player with the modern-day John Mellencamp band.

"Asher" is Asher Benrubi, whose stage name was/is "Adam Smasher." He was the electrifying front man of Roadmaster in the early/mid- '70s. A natural entertainer with an outrageous stage persona Asher's vocals were gruff and bluesy, and his range was limited. The band dumped the Smash to get a national recording deal with Polygram, opting for a more generic '70s Midwestern rock sound, a la Styx or REO Speedwagon. Undaunted, Smash went on to gain national prominence as a radio personality. His son, Adam Benrubi, is an actor appearing regularly on the TV series E.R.)

HP: What kind of covers were you doing, or were you writing at an early age?

JH: I was! I was writing songs and we did a few of mine, usually a set, and we would do Mitch Ryder songs -- I loved Mitch Ryder ...

HP: Were you the typical teen band?

JH: I don't think we were typical. We had pretty broad tastes. Some Stones stuff, some of the weirder Beatles songs like "Baby's In Black" ... their oddball harmony numbers ... lots of Mitch Ryder ... I liked him a lot ...

HP: John Cougar says that he really has to have control over his band, musical control, because it is his name up on the marquee ... that if the band is bad, they can drift off into nowhere and everybody will just say, "John Cougar sucks." Do you have that kind of thing sitting on your shoulders?

JH: Do I rule my band with an iron fist? This band that I have together now is the first band that I have been happy with. The band I had last year touring with the Slug Line album was pretty bad. It was all I could get together at the time. My problem has always been that I don't hang out with musicians. I don't even like them. As a rule, they are amateur people, if you know what I mean.

HP: They are not professional in "Life."

JH: Yeah, right. I don't now how else to put it. They are usually stupid -- I hate to stereotype, but, bottom line -- they are generally quite boring. If you aren't talking about them, or music, they don't have anything to say. So I never hang out with them. That is a problem when you go and put a band together, because you don't know any of these jerks.

HP: I'm not in a position where I have to look them up. If anybody wants me to do something for them, they have to find me.

JH: With me, I'm the one that has to find them, so it is hard. I met through Daryl Fedusco, the guy who's drumming for me now, this bass player, and first I told them, we'll get another guitar player, then I said no, I'm getting to the point where I hate electric guitars, I hate electric guitar players. They are all assholes -- every one I've ever dealt with. I don't want another neurotic, fucked up, eternal youth lead guitarist, please. Let's find a guy that plays organ, Hammond organ, that isn't fifty years old. So, he knows this guy that's great, and he's in between gigs. These two guys come over and it just clicked, immediately. Amazing. That has never happened to me before. Everybody was right on top of what I was doing. They understood it, and, had something to give to it on their own, which is more than you can hope for.

HP: The band leader, or the band's namesake doesn't want all the burden of creativity piled on him.

JH: Of course not. I'm not a fool in that respect. I don't want to do it all myself. I know that the best creative endeavors are collaborative by nature. The idea is to find the best guy in that particular thing: the best engineer, the best producer, blah, blah, blah. You put your heads together and you come up with this wonderful stuff. That's the notion. So, I've never been a hog as far as I want all this my way; it is just that I never listened to anyone else because I always thought they were full of shit. That's the problem, finding someone whose ideas you respect. I have with this band.

HP: There are musicians out there who aren't following the endless wave of eternal youth and girls after every gig.

JH: I got no gripes against that. What it comes down to is there are a lot of bad musicians around, period. I don't mean skill-wise. I mean they just don't know what the hell they're doin' with their instruments. Whatever your style of playing is, or however adept you are technically really doesn't matter. The idea is to make your instrument sing, like a human voice. So, that is what we are all trying to do. We are singing, essentially.

HP: You deserve a lot of respect for doing what you did and when you did it.

JH: I'm twenty-eight and literally I don't know what I'm doin'. Honestly, I'm supposed to make another album, but no great mysteries have been solved, I assure you, in the last ten years. I'm still living day-to-day, hand-to-mouth, barely enough to pay my rent. I haven't made any money, that's for sure.

HP: So many people are living that way, but they also have jobs they don't like.

JH: It's bad, and it's hard to avoid and I am lucky in that respect, I guess.

HP: A lot of the experiences in your songs sound like they should have happened to a kid in his late teens, early twenties ... like the situation in "Pink Bedroom" ...

JH: That song is sort of an extension of "Take Off Your Uniform" on "Slug Line." It's writing about young girls and their situation, but it's from an older man's point of view. That was its intention. I was strictly an observer.

HP: I've noticed that when you talk of girls it's either "you" or "she;" "she" being much more objective, much more the observer, and also much colder, cutting and cruel ...

JH: But in "Pink Bedroom," for instance, I see nothing but tenderness in that tune. I have all the empathy in the world for this girl. Because, she gets it in the end, you see. That tune is just suggesting that the whole growing up process of girls in America is one big set-up, sucker punch, pulled by God knows who.

HP: American music is so steeped in R & B. In fact, if it was up to the Europeans way back when, we'd still be accenting the first and third beats of every measure. Playing like a marching band...

JH: Interesting. Thank God it's not up to the Europeans, eh? Fuck 'em, man. Fuck those Europeans! All they do is come over and steal our music! Screw 'em! (Much sarcastic laughter).

HP: When you get up onstage, do you become another person?

JH: No, I'm the same guy.

HP: Do you become more aggressive in your demeanor? Do you say things you normally wouldn't say?

JH: Being onstage is an illusion. It's theatre, essentially, and that is just fine. The idea is to create something that suggests everyday life without mirroring it. It's entertainment, for God's sake, that's all.

HP: Ever since you were in grade school you were taught to search for information and go forth to seek out and destroy ... become a data bank. Look at People magazine. Trash. But I read it! What's wrong with me?

JH: It's too bad that you read it.

HP: I'm just one of fifty million people who read that scuzzy piece of trash.

JH: Scuzzy indeed. I'm happy to say that I don't. That's a magazine that I can't get myself to purchase. At the same time I'm not the type that can say "And I don't watch TV either," because I do. We didn't even have a TV up until about six months ago, but since we got the damn thing, it's like a cancer in your house.

HP: Do you find yourself ...

JH: Sitting there, throbbing. For a lot of people, I think it's just a friend. It has gotten to the point that Americans can't stand not to hear something.

HP: They should talk to one another.

JH: That's a lost art. You can go back to the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries and read books from that era when people knew how to speak to each other and convey actual feelings, and had a grip on the English language. We lost that years ago.

HP: What do you think is the common misinterpretation about you, your songwriting?

JH: I don't know, because there are so many. The problem I have with the press is when you read a piece and you realize, a couple of sentences into it, that this guy is not even writing about you, didn't even pay attention to you! It's all his idea, what he thinks. It's all self-serving bullshit. There's millions of writers like that. Journalism in America is in a pretty sad state.

HP: It's like a lot of things in America. They go for the cheap shot, the catchy line, instant fame ...

JH: It's all this big, long chain: writers are bad, but the publications are bad; but what does it matter 'cause nobody reads. It's weird. Since the electronic media has such a grip on everybody, the written word ... it's a lost art.

HP: Everybody's famous for fifteen minutes. A book makes it to number one on the bestseller list for months, then two years later can't be found -- no libraries stock it ... I mean, "Scruples" ... really!

JH: Trash with a capital "T." It's the same with a lot of music. It's a disposable society.

HP: But it was the same in the past. You remember the Bachs, Mozarts, Wagners, but there was disposable music back then. It's the same here. I wonder what's going to stick around from this age? "Slug Line." Put it in a time capsule.

JH: Right. "Hello. We are the children from earth. This is one that nobody bought. Here you go!"

HP: "Send more Chuck Berry!" ... Hey, I'll try not to make this article too sleazy.

JH: Good! Fine!

HP: I'll keep it in tune with what you like to read.

JH: I wouldn't get that ... don't aspire to such brilliance ...

HP: Don't worry ...

JH: Hey, I'm kidding ... I'm joking!

HP: I'm just a two bit feature writer.

JH: Well, I'm just a two bit monster.

© 1980 Hot Potato