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David Olney
The Rockzillaworld Interview
By Marianne Ebertowski
 The late and legendary
Townes van Zandt once wrote about him "A songwriter myself,
I have considered David a benchmark of sorts." The late
and legendary Johnny Cash recorded his "Jerusalem Tomorrow,"
so did the likewise legendary, but luckily still very much alive
Emmylou Harris. From Steve Earle to Linda Ronstadt, everybody
loves David Olney's songs - and everybody loves David Olney.
Soft-spoken, with his inseparable hat on unruly grey hair
and his warm brown eyes, Olney is every inch the gentleman people
told me he was. What's even better, he remembers my review of
The Wheel: "bizarre, mysterious and strangely disturbing,"
he grins, "yeah, I remember that. I took it as a complement."
And so he should. We have managed to find two trustworthy looking
chairs in the "dressing room" of cultural center Toogenblik
in Haren, a rather dismal suburb of Brussels where airplanes
seem to fly over every ten minutes, shaking the miserable looking
grey houses on their foundations. Usually the place serves as
a meeting point of sorts for the local youth, which explains
the presence of a worn-out table-soccer table, more battered
chairs and tables and a heap of unidentified broken things.
In spite of its rugged appearance, the place radiates a certain
blue-collar charm. It smells of the hard work the people who
run the place are investing to keep it going. If it comes to
singer-songwriters in the capitol of Europe, this is still the
place to be.
Olney has just played a marvelous gig for twenty people, which
means the place is crowded. Sitting on a barstool under a naked
light bulb, interrupted by planes and church bells welcoming
the new priest of the neighboring church, he had opened his show
with "If My Eyes Were Blind," my favorite Olney song.
He seems to be pleased to hear that. "The song helps
get me over my stage fright," he admits, "and it's
so indicative of what I do. It's got a lot of death and falling
apart in it, but it's basically an optimistic song." The
first time I heard it, it was in the version of Dutch singer-songwriter
Ad Vanderveen who recorded it on his album The Moment That
Matters with Olney singing on it. Olney is pleased with
the result and hopes to work with Vanderveen again. "I
really respect his writing and he's a brilliant singer and player,"
he enthuses.
David Olney, now 55, got his first guitar when he was 14.
"At the time, folk music was big in the United States and
that was a nice time to learn how to play, because the songs
were simple and you could learn them and you didn't need a band.
Then Bob Dylan hit. That changed everything. The emphasis was
on writing the songs yourself and pretty soon that became the
main deal. So, I started to write my own songs and most of those
songs I wrote sounded like old folk songs, which was good. But
then, in 1972, I met Townes van Zandt in Athens, Georgia. When
I heard the songs he was writing and I saw all the different
things you could do with a song - that really helped me find
my own voice instead of trying to sound like somebody else.
I guess a little bit I was trying to sound like Townes. He had
a big, powerful influence over me to the point that in the beginning
I just had to back off a little bit, because I felt if I got
too close I would never write my own songs. I talked to him a
lot in '73 and we became friends when he moved back up to Nashville
in '76. I run into him and we hung out together, but I never
was as close to Townes as Guy Clarke or others. The friendship
I had with Townes was largely based on the fact that I liked
his songs, and I think he liked mine."
Olney, a born Yankee, moved southwards when he was 18 years old
to go to college in North Carolina - where he did a "Gram
Parsons" or, in his own words "was drinking a lot of
beer whilst being supposed to be an English major."
"My mother was from North Carolina," he explains
his longing for the South, "her family was from the South,
so it wasn't foreign land to me. But by the time I was 18, most
of the music that I liked was from the South. It just seemed
like a magical place to me. So I went down there to go to school
and was doing music a whole lot. At a certain point, I decided
that music was what I wanted to do - so I dropped out of school.
The town I was in was Chapel Hill, NC, which was a great music
town. There were places to play so you could get out and get
your feet wet a little bit.
When I dropped out of school, I started working in a candle
warehouse, stacking candles, and Bland Simpson (currently professor
of English at. the University of North Carolina and co-writer
of "Chained & Bound to the Wheel") came by. He
just got married and he needed a job. So me and him were stacking
candles all day and then he said he was going up to New York
having written a bunch of songs. A few months later, he phoned
up and said there were people interested to make a record with
him and he wanted to start a band, would I come back and play
guitar, and so I did. That was in 1970. When I was writing things
for The Wheel I wanted to write a song on King Lear and
when I was writing this I was noticing that the chords I was
using were different from what I normally do. First I thought,
wow, this is great - I'm breaking through, then I suddenly noticed
that the melody was from a song I was doing with Bland Simpson,
and I thought, well, I better get hold of him. I hadn't talked
to him in years. I heard that he was teaching at the University
of NC, so I called him down there and I said, I need to give
you half the publishing on this, and it was a nice way to get
reacquainted."
Originally, Olney wanted to be a rock'n'roller.. It was Townes
van Zandt who saved him from this fate.
"It was the sheer quality of his lyrics, filled with
such emotion and richness of imagery. They were coming from
the folk tradition, but they were just completely stunning and,
though very personal in a way, they weren't self-absorbed. Yesterday
I played in Kent, England in a school where I was supposed to
give a workshop on songwriting. I didn't really know what to
say, so I came in and just said: this is about the best song
I've ever heard "Poncho & Lefty" and I played it
for them they were fifteen years old kids - and then I
went through every line , saying why it works and what makes
that song so cool."
Olney's southern-bound travel brought him to Nashville in
1973 at a time when
Kris Kristoffersen, Waylon Jackson, Willie Nelson were making
it big with their "outlaw music." Another reason to
go to Nashville was that he knew people who lived there "so
he could sleep on their couch."
"It was time for me to make a move one way or the other
with music and standing still wasn't doing me any good. I was
24 years old and it was time to not just talk about it, but to
do something about it. That's why I came to Nashville. Country
music now is in a really sorry state seems to me, but I there
is a sort of underground scene that is really quite good. There's
a bunch of really brilliant writers and some great players.
When you make an album, you can get people like Mike Henderson
and Mark O'Connor to play on it."
Does it bother Olney that he's become a singer/songwriters'
singer/songwriter instead of becoming a star in his own right.
It would have saved him from playing at an obscure club at the
outskirts of Brussels for 20 People with a naked light bulb dangling
over his head like the sword of Damocles. David Olney smiles.
"If you only measure yourself by the success of people
like Bruce Springsteen, everybody's gotta be a failure. To me,
being successful is writing a good song, and I'm pretty comfortable
that I've written a few good songs. In fact I've gotten to the
point where it's so difficult to become super famous, it's almost
as if when you get that famous, then there must be something
wrong with what you're doing or maybe that's just an adjustment
I had to make, because I realized I wouldn't be that famous.
But I really want you to understand: I can play this job and
can talk with you afterwards, I can go have a beer with those
folks, I can make friends. If I were really famous I couldn't
do that. I would have to do the gig, get a bodyguard, go back
to the hotel, that doesn't sound like fun, though the money"
In Olney once defined songwriting as "digging for bones
without breaking them." So, where do you start digging for
a bone and how do you avoid breaking it?
"I've never been a disciplined writer who sits down between
nine and twelve. I just wait until something hits me. I try to
read a lot. I try to observe things. There's a part of my head
that, no matter what I'm looking at, is trying to figure out
how to write a song about it. And I have a sort of routine,
it's almost like some weird courtship. I made hundreds of tapes
with music by other people: there will be Townes on, there will
be Steve Earle, Gillian Welch, there'll be Blondie and Mozart
and Beethoven. There'll be Dylan Thomas reading his poetry.
Anything I like I put it on there and I just walk around and
listen to a song, a poem, to something. And I know there's something
in there that I wanna do. Maybe it's the bait to catch the fish,
you now, but it gets me excited about music. And I just listen
to that and sit down at some point to play the guitar. Sometimes
you hit a chord and you go: oh I ever heard it that way, and
something starts coming in. I'm a pretty rational person, but
there's certainly an element of the unexplainable, a kind of
magic going on."
David Olney usually writes his songs from a third person's
perspective. He has written from the perspective of a lot of
historical figures from Jessie James to Jesus.
"I never covered Jesus, "he protests. " If
you look at Jesus artistically, he isn't very interesting, because
he's perfect. There is nothing you can really say. A bunch
of people have written hymns, so they've already said it. But
if you can cast your eye a little bit to the side, then you can
look into the relationship. Without Jesus, Judas would be just
another asshole. There's a song about Robert Ford/ Jessie James
and it's the same kind of guy who betrays the other one. You
can see this kind of dance, both of them working together, both
of them just doing their job, which goes back to Poncho and Lefty:
"Poncho needs your prayers, that's true but save
a few for Lefty too." It just pops out like in "Jerusalem
Tomorrow." Right at the time when I wrote that song, there
were all those sex-scandals involving TV-evangelists like Jim
Baker and Jerry Lee Lewis' cousin, Jimmy Swaggert. That was
what I was getting at. I started from writing "Man you
should have seen me back then" It was just a line from
a guy who enjoyed life. That was all I knew about him, but he
had my interest and I just kept writing things. And I thought
it was taking place in the American West in the eighteen hundreds
and I couldn't go any further. I had this guy in the desert and
didn't know what to do with it and then I thought, well I just
move the desert to the Middle East and then the whole thing went
'wow' and I think that song works, because it is kind of surprising
how it unfolds. It was surprising to me when I was writing it,
so it will probably gonna surprise people when they listen to
it. The times I have a story in my head - beginning, middle
and end - it just comes out flat."
That's what the best writers say: you can plan plots, but
then, suddenly, characters start to develop a life of their own.
"Yeah, that happens a whole lot. You write a song and
you have it where you want it. Then you go out and play it, sometimes
for years. And one night you're singing it and suddenly you sing
a line differently and it's just as if your unconscious is saying:
you just never got this line right, sorry to break in here, but
this is how it is supposed to go. It is a very spooky feeling.
Writing strictly about yourself is just too easy. It's not
particularly very interesting. You have to come to the point
where you have to get yourself out of the way and then the really
interesting stuff comes in. On the other hand, there's no way
no matter what you write about not to write a personal
song. You made it up."
The highlight of David Olney's writing from a different perspective
is arguably "Titanic" where he describes the disaster
from the iceberg's point of view. For Olney that came naturally.
"Well, I was at a point where I wasn't making any money
playing music and I was desperately trying to figure out a way
to do that. So I was starting to go listening to Nashville writers,
regular writers. I thought: I gotta learn how to do this, these
guys are making money. And I went to hear them play and I just
hated it. Then I went home and sat down to write something like
that and all my unconscious was going: 'no.' The weirdest songs
started coming out. I started writing about the Titanic from
the iceberg's point of view and part of me started going : that's
not gonna make any money, but the other part was going, fuck,
that's great, you know, finish that song ! And if you think
about it, if you decide to write about the Titanic and you're
looking for a point of view, then it's not that weird to think,
well, what would the iceberg think about it? Once you accept
that idea, you just write it down. You know the sort of magnetic
quality of disasters: it's like fate. If you run your car into
a tree, it looks like it was planned all along; only the tree
knows what's going on"
Which brings us to David Olney's latest album, the "bizarre,
mysterious and strangely disturbing" The Wheel,
a thematic album, almost a concept album, a word that "rings
all my wrong bells."
"At the time, I didn't have a record deal and I was just
going crazy," Olney explains. "I went over to a guy
who owned a studio and I said: let's just do something. We recorded
two or three songs and I took the tape home to listen to it.
Then I noticed there was something thematic in these songs that
I wasn't really aware of - they were just four songs that I picked
out to do. There was this revolution stuff going on and then
I went back to find songs to go in with that and I wrote some
new songs. You're right: you can't write a concept album, because
what happens is that when you got this concept and you write
songs to fill in with the concept, they're not gonna be really
good songs. But to get something as vague as "things in
a round" that gives you a little wiggle. Also, there was
a guy when I was in New York in the 1970s with Bland Simpson,
who would hang out on the street. He was a blind guy, dressed
up in a biking outfit and his name was Moondog (www.moondogscorner.de).
I thought he was just a nut, but then I was in a record store
and I saw this album and I suddenly occurred to me that that
was that guy. One of the things he did, he wrote a bunch of
rounds, which are really interesting. He was a real classical
musician and some of the musicians on that album were jazz guys
like bassist Ron Carter who is a jazz giant. That album was
done back in 65 or 64. It's very strange music, but it's pretty
cool. Anyway that just happened to be something I had run into
and it kind of fit in with what I was thinking about: they were
rounds. That's why I tried that round (You wheels that hold
me on this highway, oh keep me safe and keep me going) which
isn't very good, but good enough for what I can do."
Apart from Bland Simpson, the hapless listener stumbles over
two other names as surprise-contributors to The Wheel: ex-child
star Janie Ian who co-wrote "Boss Don't Shoot No Dice"
and actor Gwil Owen whose name is featured as co-author of "Voices
On The Water."
"I ran into Janice in a restaurant in Nashville, but
to me she is a famous person, so I'm not gonna go up and say,
hey, let's write a song together. But I knew her enough and
liked her enough to say hello to her and I think she said, let's
get together and write a song. And it was not like she did a
couple of details it was a real cooperation. I really
would like to get back together again and write some more with
her. I met her for the first time about ten years ago when I
was playing folk festivals, but we never sat down to write, so
it was really a nice experience.
Gwil Owen used to hang around Nashville for a long time. We
were playing at some places where he showed up and said, I really
like your music and, let's try to write something. We would sit
down and try to write things from scratch. That's very awkward.
So, now, when I have a song that I can't finish, I take it over
to Gwil. He's really good at that and he lives nearby."
Most American writers want to write "the great American
novel.'' Does Olney have the ambition to write 'the great American
song'? Is there anything like that?
"No, no. I guess I can't help to sound like an American
when I write, but my experience of coming over here to Europe
has really influenced my writing a lot in songs like "1917"
and others. I just want to write a good song. It's gonna sound
American, because I am an American, but I want the song to translate
to other people from other countries. It's not that important
to me to be just associated with one particular area. If I look
at Townes van Zandt about whom a lot of people are saying he's
a Texas writer to me, he blew through that, to me he's
just a human writer. His songs can go anywhere, to people in
China or wherever. If the emotion is true, you can play any
place. There's no American emotion or Belgian emotion, there's
just human emotion. Of course, there are cultural influence,
but that's your surfboard, that's not the ocean. The experience
of coming to Europe and have people here listening to my songs
is certainly humbling. It's a remarkable thing, it's very moving."
It's time to take our chat out of the chaos of the "dressing
room" and continue it in the cozy atmosphere of the bar
room. Nursing a couple of deceptively innocent tasting Belgian
beers, we get involved in a very scholarly debate on accents.
With my seemingly untraceable accent, I could have been a good
spy, Olney suggests. I wish I had met this guy earlier in my
life: I might have had a career! Before we can exchange our
theories about accents and identities, Olney gets "wheeled
out" by his Belgian hosts. It's bedtime for David. Tomorrow
there will be another show in another town. May the wheels keep
him safe and going.
*www.davidolney.com
Contact Marianne Ebertowski at ebertowski-at-rockzilla.net
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