| 'Carlene Carter's Back In Town' by Patrick Carr for Country Music |
| 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 escept 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. |
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