| 'Ballad Of A Teenage Queen' (Page Two) |
| 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." |