| 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. |
| 'Carlene Carter Goes To England, Brings High-Bred Country Punk Back To The USA' by Patrick Carr for Country Music Magazine |
| 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. |
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