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.)


BALLAD OF A TEENAGE QUEEN
Carlene Carter
Warner Bros.
BSK 3204
by Andy Wickham

One rainy Sunday there appeared on my television--somewhere between Jimmy Swaggart and The Sam Yorty Show--the image of Mary Magdalene by the Sea of Galilee. TV Guide revealed that I was watching a film about the Holy Land by Johnny Cash. Mary Magdalene turned out to be June Carter.

Today, Carlene Carter, her eldest daughter and an angel of the honky-tonk variety, sits before me looking as if she just popped out of one of stepfather's hits. Perhapes you remember how it goes.

"There's a story in our town
Of the prettiest girl around
Hair of gold and eyes of blue
How those eyes could flash
at you..."

She is a striking girl with an aquiline beauty which makes you think of fields of bluegrass. Her eyes really are the color of cornflowers. She is wearing a neat jacket and slinky black pants and on her small, shapely feet are high-heeled slippers. A family heirloom sparkles on her right hand while a button on her lapel endorses "Nick Lowe--Pure Pop For Now People." She is 22 and her first LP comes out this month.

Dulcimers Playing What is fascinating about her, apart from the mysterious blend of past and present which she embodies, is her complete self-assurance and the serenity with which she tells her story. It is a tale rooted so richly in the stuff that real pop is made of that it is almost impossible to recount without bursting into a medley of Golden Oldies. When she speaks, in the slow, musical tones of northeast Tennessee, you can almost hear dulcimers playing.

"Nick Lowe calls me C.C.," she says, "and Billy Bremmer calls me Petty Cash. Really my first name is Rebecca but I like Carlene."

She was named for her father, Carl Smith, whose heart songs haunted every honky-tonk in the late '50s. He is a tanned, leathery figure with keen blue eyes, once billed as "The Country Gentleman," and on his album covers he is usually seen riding a horse or leaning on a white picket fence in denims and a staw stetson. He raises quarter horses on his farm in the Tennessee Valley and is clearly a man from Marlborough County.

Though he and her mother parted when she was two, Carlene regards Carl with pride and affection. She says she would have adopted his surname for her career were it not for the wish of her grandmother Maybelle that she should carry on the Carter name.

Carlene was raised by June, whose life has been a spirited example, in the country tradition, of triumph over adversity fueled by religious fervor. Though Carlene remembers her past, she is not enslaved by it and if there have been distressing moments she seems, like her mother, always to have kept on the sunny side.

One of her songs contains: "Who needs words with eyes like yours?" This could be applied to Carlene herself who is not inclined toward verbosity. Consequently her childhood flashes by in a series of sparkling cameos.

There is her meeting Elvis at the age of two. "Mama was in New York at the same acting school as Elvis, and on Sunday afternoons he used to roll me around Central Park."

There is her first public performance at the age of four. "It was Johnson City or Chattanooga. I went on stage with my cocker spaniel and sang 'Waterloo' and 'Charlie Brown'."

There are Rosey, Ezra Carter, and Rip Nix. "When Mama and Carl split up, Mama rarried Rip Nix and they had Rosey. We lived together in an old house in Madison, and Maybelle would come 'round to play cards. She really misses Ezra since he passed away. He was her husband and A.P.'s brother. He was a retired mail clerk on the trains. Things didn't last with Rip Nix. I hear he's now made millions in cement."

Genuine Outlaw She first met Johnny Cash at her eleventh birthday party. "He bought me a pair of roller skates, so I figured he was okay."

She did not at first feel quite happy about him as a prospective parent. "Mama set me and Rosey down," she recalls, "and said, 'Now girls, I'm in love with John and we want to get married' and we just looked at each other and wnet 'Uurrrgh!' But then, me and Rosey had this meeting and we wanted Mama to be happy so we decided to help her out."

Cash was gaunt and sunken-eyed in those days, coming to the end of a harrowing battle with pills, a genuine outlaw as distinct from the fancy-dress variety. The story of how June Carter helped him solve his problems and how Ezra showed him the Way of the Lord has been told elsewhere and nowhere better than in the Cash autobiography, Man In Black which includes a fetching illustration of a teenage Carlene looking every bit the cheerleader she was soon to become.

Johnny Cash married June in Franklin, Kentucky. rosey and Carlene were flower girls and Merle Kilgore, eagle-eyed author of "Wolverton Mountain" and "The Great Drinking Bout," was the best man. Cash had four girls of his own and the family moved to his lavish spreak on the Old Hickory Lake where their neighbors included Roy Orbison, Red Foley, and Lester Flatt.

Carlene was now 14, struggling with Math and History but flashing her cheerleader thighs up and down the football field at Hendersonville High.

"Sometimes I'd bring guys home to play pool," she recalls, "other times we'd go to the concerts or drive-ins. Most nights we'd just circle around the Shoney's burger stand. We liked the Beatles and the Stones. I was a good girl--the worst thing I did was wear make-up."

At 15, she married for the first time. She says she loved the boy in question who, of course, worked in a candy store. "He had a moustache," she says, "and most guys my age couldn't even grow one."

Her parents like him because he was starting college and aiming for a degree in Business Administration. They were not dismayed by Carlene's youth. "Mama always told me that life was pre-ordained," she says, which seems to be another way of saying "Que Sera, Sera." There are worse philosophies.

Following a huge wedding with 700 guests and a honeymoon in the Virgin Islands, Carlene's daughter was born and christened Tiffany--"because John thought it was a real classy name." The little family lived in a trailer behind the Cash house. Carlene went to Belmont College to continue her piano studies, began writing songs, and made occasional appearances with the Carter Family on the Cash Show.

Usually Carlene would sing "Silver Threads & Golden Needles." Her husband continued to study, paying his way with janitorial jobs for her parents. Alas, they were too young and theirs was not the first teenage wedding to end in D-I-V-O-R-C-E. C'est La Vie.

At 19, Carlene remarried, this time a songwriter under contract to the House of Cash publishing company.. "He was tall, dark, and handsome," she says, "but he was just too possessive." This marriage lasted three years and produced a son for Carlene named John Jackson. Now she lives in a ten-room house in Nashville with both her children and a close girlfriend who looks after them whe she isn't home.

After the failure of her second marriage, Carlene signed up with House of Cash and began to make the rounds with her songs. At a recording session for Guy Clark she met Rodney Crowell who was writing songs and playing guitar for Emmylou Harris. He invited her to come to one of Emmylou's concerts in Los Angeles at which she met the genial Ed Tickner. Tickner is Emmylou's manager and before that he managed the Byrds. Sometimes he reminds me of Moshe Dayan though he has twice the vision.

Clower's Bucks Intrigued by Carlene, Tickner invited her to a Warner Bros. cocktail party. This took place in the penthouse suite of a huge skyscraper in downtown Nashville around which a zeppelin floated, flashing the names on the Warner Country roster clear across Tennessee in large gold letters through the night. It would not be true to say that Carlene was the star of the party. That honor would go to Jerry Clower who wore white bucks and avoluminous suit of pillar-box red and enchanted everybody with his tales of Yazoo City. But she came close.

"I felt like I was on exhibition," she says. "In the elevator on the way out, Eddie said: 'You were a hit. Are we in business?' I said 'You bet!' The next day I had a phone call from him. 'I think it would be a good idea,' he said, 'if I heard you sing!'"

Her new album was recorded in London and is very much the brainchild of Tickner's partner, a curious Welshman named Martyn Smith who says little but seems to know a lot. Smith had been an agent for Brinsley Schwarz, a pub-rock band named after its leader which ran a line in country songs ("pub-country," says Tickner who believes in the possibility of everything). Brinsley himself played lead guitar and the prominent singer and writer was Nick Lowe whose badge of honor Carlene now wears in her lapel. The group made an album and the record company shipped them to New York for a premier performance at Madison Square Garden. Unfortunately, there was an excess of hoopla. Ads peppered the trade papers; jetloads of freewheeling British journalists descended on the Big Apple in dirty raincoats; verbose biographies cluttered up the mail. Not for the first time, the critics sharpened their teeth on expensive canapes and the boys returned to England, humbled but defiant, to release their swansong album Despite It All. And despite it all, Brinsley and his friends have resurfaced to become the chief purveyors of pure pop for now people. Since Carlene is a now person who sings pure pop, most of them can be heard somewhere on her album. Nick Lowe plays bass on one track and sings on another. The main rhythm section consists of members of Graham Parker's Rumour. Dave Edmunds weighed in with some of his Rockpile. Brinsley himself produced it all with Bob Andrews. There are songs by Parker, Crowell, and Carlene herself.

When I objected ot the title of a song called "Alabama Morning" on the grounds that had the composer lived in Pismo Beach she would have had to come up with a legitimate adjective, I was told that "It's all in the feel" and that's certainly true. The songs are tough and torchy and far, far away from the Blue Ridge Mountains of A.P. Carter. Yet there is something spell-binding about Carlene's voice and the way she sings them, about they chugging, rolling rhythms of Brinsley and his group.

"Never Together (But Sometimes Close)" is her new single, a fixating blend of rockabilly and reggae for which Tickner has yet to coin a description. It is already a hit in England. Next comes a round of parties and a tour and plans for more recording, this time in Nashville. Meanwhile Carlene can often be seen twinkling in and out of Burbank premises. People keep dreaming up new excuses to invite her back.

It is time for her to leave my flat and I feel like saying, as Frost said to Nixon, "We've been through a life." Instead I ask her the question which few of today's pop luminaries will answer honestly.

"Do you want to be a star?"
"Yes," she replies, smiling radiantly.
"Why?"
"I just think that's what I'm supposed to be."
As she leaves, the song keeps humming around in my head.
"Dream on, dream on teenage queen. See you on the movie screen."


MISS CARTER SPEAKS By Nick Tosches

N.T.: What's Johnny Cash really like?
C.C.: He's a good guy. He is. He's my pal.
N.T.: Did you think about using him on the album?
C.C.: Yeah, we had talked about it. When it came right down to it, there wasn't many songs he could've done anything on.
N.T.: Why did you cut the album in England?
C.C.: I wanted to do something different.
N.T.: Did it come out different?
C.C.: Yeah.
N.T.: Do you like old-timey country music, the sort of stuff in your Carter Family background?
C.C.: I love it. That's how I started. My mother, June, taught me to play guitar.
N.T.: What's your album sound like?
C.C.: Not too country.
N.T.: Is it loud?
C.C.: Yeah, some of it.
N.T.: Do you live around here?
C.C.: Yeah, in Hendersonville.
N.T.: Any good bars there?
C.C.: There's Dicky's. That's just beer and hamburgers. I don't ever go there. I usually come into Nashville, hang out at the Gold Rush.
N.T.: You like to read?
C.C.: Yeah, I like romantic novels, stuff set in the eighteenth century or something. I like Susan Howatch a lot. I've read two of her books. I'm readin' another one now.
N.T.: How 'bout television?
C.C.: I like TV. When I'm tired, I watch TV.
N.T.: What's your favorite show?
C.C.: I really like movies. I like Saturday Night Live. I really go in for movies more than anything.
N.T.: What'd you think about TV in England?
C.C.: It has its good points. I don't like it because it turns off so early.
N.T.: The bars there close early, too.
C.C.: Well, we stayed in a hotel with a twenty-four-hour bar. That was the only good part about the hotel. You could eat twenty-four hours.
N.T.: The first recording you did was on a Johnny Cash album, right?
C.C.: Yeah. The Junkie and the Juicehead (Minus Me). Not too thrilled about that.
N.T.: Do Johnny and June like the album?
C.C.: They haven't heard it yet. They're in Jamaica. I'm goin' down there tomorrow with a tape. A cassette.
N.T.: What's your favorite color?
C.C.: Blue.