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.)

Carlene in New York, supporting her latest (and best) album by granting interviews hither and thither. The interview opens nicely, casually (there are family connections: I know her stepfather, Johnny Cash, and she knows my brother, Peter Carr). We chat about England, where she lives now and I lived then.

Carlene lives in Chiswick, and almost genteel outer neighborhood of London, with her husband Nick Lowe (English, famous, the rocker / pure-pop / rockerbilly singer / writer / producer / Rockpile co-leader) and her daughter Tiffany, the result of her first Nashville marriage. Nick Lowe is Carlene's third husband, and she's already and at last genuinely in love, he'll probably be her last. The couple and the daughter appreciate the quiet curved rainsoaked streets of Chiswick, with their big detached houses and small wooded gardens and high private hedges and top-quality local schools and courteous store-proprietors known locally as "shop-keepers" (butchers, grocers, greengrocers, chemists, what-have-you). Carlene says that Tiffany is already "sounding like a little Limey" and that Chiswick is nice because not much happens there, and she can send Tiffany off to school all by herself with no worries about whether or not she'll get there safely. With their varied rock 'n' roll schedules, Carlene and Nick most often meet in the bedroom or kitchen in the early hours of the morning, when even the mice in London have given up trying to stir ( London, unlike New York, is an early-night town). They stay up long enough to send Tiffany off to school, and then they go to sleep. When Nick's not there--when he's becoming obsessive in the studio or he's out on the road somewhere in England or the rest of the world--Carlene goes to bed by herself between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m., the rocker's witching hour. Carlene says that she love England in general and Chiswick in particular, and that she has no plans to leave in any foreseeable future.

A description of Carlene and her history: first, the woman herself.

She is obviously, instantly, beautiful. She has the tight, clear Carter complexion, the high and prominent Carter cheekbones, the steel/sky-blue uncanny Carter eyes, and the strong funny Carter mouth. You can see the mother in the daughter (at times, you can even see the daughter in the mother); overall, the face is not so much Southern Belle-serene as bad-girl exciting; it's a character's beauty she has. If the arrangement of planes and colors and textures weren't so almost perfect she could perhaps be one of the boys. This is not to say that she is not classically gorgeous (she is); the point is that Carlene's intelligence, her humor and her funk, emerge quite obviously through her class Anglo-Saxson complexion, her rangy bodily lines. Today, in character at the interview, she wears an ersatz leopard-skin semi-mini dress and a creased-up old leather bomber's jacket. Her hair, straw blonde with darker traces, is banged and wild and long and shaggy in an individualistic adaptation of the Anglo-American au courant Vogue new wave mode. She looks for all the world like a smart Gene Vincent groupie, a college girl slumming in the motorcycle dives, a high-bred country punk.

Her history is similarly startling. Born the daughter of Carl Smith and June Carter, she went to live in the Cash/Carter empire when she was almost a teenager. Life in the Cash/Carter household was odd but relatively normal. There were stepsisters all over the place (Rosanne Cash was the closest to Carlene), and while June Carter was able to be a real mother by dinto of working the road only ten days a month at most, Carlene's main grownup friend was Mother Maybelle Carter. In the eternal tradition of the Fun Grannie, Maybelle taught Carlene how to play poker, how to bowl, how to fish, and how to use a guitar. In the eternal tradition of the teenage daughter-daddy, Johnny Cash had very little to do with it all.

At the age of fifteen, having become pregnant by her first boyfriend, Carlene got married and left the nest. The marriage did not last ("I hardly remember it at all," says Carlene), and by the age of eighteen she was once more married, this time to Jack Routh, a House of Cash songwriter. A son, Jackson, resulted.

During her second marriage, despite certain jealousies on the part of her husband, Carlene became more and more involved in the art and business of songwriting. The marriage did not last, but the songwriting did. At first, her concern was to sell songs to other artists, but after a taste of the performing life in Nashville joints such as the Exit/In and a fortunate hookup with Emmylou Harris's management, she procured a recording contract with Warner Brothers Records and set about the business of becoming a full-fledged writing/recording star.

Her first album, 'Carlene Carter', was something of a surprise to those who didn't know her. Recorded in London with members of The Rumour, English rocker Graham Parson's band, it was not a country album. It featured, for instance, the rock-vamp classic Never Together But Close Sometimes. Eyebrows around Nashville were elevated considerably, the press corps scuttled towards their typewriters, and two standard classes of headlines--standard images--were perpetrated. The first was "Daughter Of Country Dynasty Deserts To Limey-Land"; the second, prompted in part by promotional films for the record and Carlene's slightly outrageous stage show, read "Daughter of Dignity Does The Dirty Boogie."

This type of thing offended Carlene somewhat, but at least it got her name in the papers and formed some sort of image, which in the music business is infinitely preferable to no image at all. She continued to live in Nashville, running with the young, semi-radical "Elliston Place set" and doing quite well for herself.

Her second album, 'Two Sides To Every Woman', was, like so many second albums, something of a fiasco, but by the time her third, 'Musical Shapes', arrived on the marketplace, she had married Nick Lowe, settled into the Chiswick life, pulled various elements of her personal and professional life together, and became almost a fixture on the music scene in her own right.

'Musical Shapes' is a tough album, and it's also revealing. Produced by Nick Lowe with most of his usual English buddies (including his rockabilly alter-ego Dave Edmunds) in tow, it features no less than seven songs written by Carlene herself. Her previous albums were mostly written by others. Together with Nick Lowe's extremely sympathetic production, this fact leads to the notion that perhaps 'Musical Shapes' is a much more accurate account of what Carlene wants to do with her music than either 'Carlene Carter' or 'Two Sides To Every Woman.'

"Yes," says Carlene, "that's what it is." The first one was OK, but it was the producer's first production job, and I think it kinda got away from us. The point was to make a country record with a rock band, which is a really hard thing to do, and it didn't work too well. The second--well, it was a mess. I did it in New York with a bunch of session people, and it seemed to me like it was one of those 'oh, let's cross her over' deals. I can't even listen to it now. But this one was different. First, Nick's a great producer--he knows country and he knows rock, and he's totally obsessive about getting things right. Then, he really gave me my head, y'know? I mean, I was as much in control as he was. Also, he never worried about 'Is this song country or is it pop or is it rock?' He just did it."

The album is quite a joy. Nick and the boys, Englishmen infatuated as only the English seem to be with the lost sounds and textures fo classic American late-rockabilly music went nice and easy on the instrumental backup but stayed very much on the rhythmic ball, supporting Carlene to a T. Carlene, in turn, sophisticated her songs, injected far more country-type feeling than ever before, and sang with greatly enhanced control and subtlety. Many of the songs are tight, incisive, and highly intelligent, revealing a fine eye for both female and human concerns.

All this said, then, we must turn to other matters. As Carlene asks, "Don't you want to hear any gossip, Patrick? Country Music is kind of a gossip magazine, isn't it?"

Well, yes, it is, so let's have some gossip.

The obvious gossip starter is, of course, the subject of Carlene, marriage and men. One hardly knows where to begin, so one begins at the beginning. Why did Carlene get married at the age of fifteen?

She gives me a pitying look. "Well," she says, "there's only two reasons why as fifteen-year-old girl gets married--she's either stupid or pregnant. I was both." She adds that it was her first serious sexual experience which got her pregnant.

"How did Mom and The Man in Black take the news?" I ask.

"John took it pretty well," she says. "He was the first one I told. I couldn't tell June, I just couldn't, so I told John first, and he told June. In many ways, Momma's really naive. Like, after she knew, she went out and got all this information about birth control for me. It must have been real hard for her, but she did it. I dunno--maybe she learned more than I did from it."

Oh. Yes, maybe. We already know about the fate of that first marriage--Carlene says that she hardly remembers it--but what about the marriage to Jack Routh? Is it true that the marriage dissolved because of professional rivalry?

"It was partly that," says Carlene, "but it sure wasn't because I was jealous of him. It was just weird. I mean, he's weird." She adds that Southern men tend to want their wives to stay home and be humble, and she snorts disdainfully when she remembers her first meeting with Ralph Emery, the famous big-time radio personality and Nashville hotshot. His greeting to her was, "Oh, yes, you're the girl that did Jack wrong."

She also remembers the scene in the courtroom when, once married to her little sister Cindy, Jack Routht won custody of his and Carlene's son, Jackson. Here was a situation in which the ex-husband of the big sister was fighting her for custody of her-and-his child so that the child could live with him and the little sister. Carlene says that the judge didn't know about the big sister-little sister arrangement until the decision was made, and recalls the pain of listening to Cindy testifying against her.

Carlene wrote a song about it all, 'Too Bad About Sandy.' Some of the lyrics go like this:

Sandy lost her head to
a man with no heart
Believe me I know
'cause I inflicted his scar
I'm not ashamed
'cause I'm not to blame
It was purely self-defense that shot
that sucker down in flames.
Love that cold cash
Love that cold hard cash
Why mess around with
American Express?
I'm in the low life
Love that sweet low life
Glad I'm not mad
It's just too bad about Sandy.

Another line asks the question "Who would've thought that lightning could strike this family twice?" Carlene notes that the song was "a way of expressing my feelings from a distance" and adds that this kind of complication was one of the reason why she was so glad to leave Nashville behind her. "There's just too much family stuff going on," she says. "Life's complicated enough without all that."

Now, of course, she's out of it. After she and Jack broke up, she spent a while "doing the boys--I'd never really done that before, and it was crazy," and then fell in love with Nick Lowe. Now she's leading the Chiswick/on-the-road life. Though she and Nick don't get to see a whole lot of each other, and somehow she regrets that, she realizes one of the subtler points of modern marriage; absence makes the heart grow fonder, while also allowing it the freedom it needs for itself. It is tacitly admitted during the interview that just a little is enough. These days, she says, she's genuinely in love with Nick, and she doesn't want to compromise that situation, and so she doesn't mess around when she's on the road. She's jut put together a new band, and "one of the requirements is that they all have to be real cute. That's for the girls in the audiences, but it's also for me. Not to touch, though--just to look at." She remembers going to a Linda Ronstadt concert once. "I was listening to Linda," she says, "but I was looking at the band."

All of this raises the question of the bad-girl image, which to some extent she seems to encourage, both onstage with her patently punk-sexy show and offstage with much frank talk and frequent use of naughty words (which have been deleted from this article in view of Country Music readers' delicate sensibilities). It doesn't really matter a lot--the double standard for men and women raised in the South is, after all, a double standard, and sex appeal is three-quarter of the whole music/celebrity game anyway--but, for instance, was she a bad girl when she was a teenager?

"Well, no," she says, "not really. I mean, I smoked in the back of the bus and wore real short skirts and cussed a lot, but I didn't fool around. First time I did, I got pregnant, didn't I?" She adds that these days, she doesn't cuss quite as much as she used too--"though it's kinda hard not to when you're always around musicians, especially English ones"--and she remains mortified by one of her more spectacular faux pas in the cussing regions. It happened at New York's Bottom Line club when right up there in public, from the stage, she introduced a song by saying "let's put the c**t back into country!" This was just peachy--really got a laugh--but the problem was that both Johnny Cash and June Carter were in the audience. Carlene says that she didn't know they were there, and almost fainted when one of her band members told her. John, she says, seemed quite upset even though she apologized profusely, while June, in response to Carlene's "Momma, I'm sorry I said that word," replied, "what word?"

That's the gossip, then. The interview proceeds along less questionable lines--Carlene misses Rosanne Cash a lot, she wants to have a baby with Nick, she despises "crossover" artists, she feels that she's religious but she doesn't go to church, and she's real glad that John made the Hall of Fame at long last--and then we part on good terms.

Later that night I see Carlene hanging out at the Lone Star Cafe, where her friend Rick Danko is playing. She's bopping around, having lots of fun, being more or less one of the boys.