Hard work, patience pay off for John Hiatt

by Derek Caney

Wednesday, October 10, 2001, Reuters (New York)

People are always asking John Hiatt for advice. "Here's my advice: Work hard ... " The 49-year-old songwriter says, adjusting his low-slung guitar.

"Be patient." He smiles at the audience at Jones Beach Amphitheater, the Atlantic Ocean stretched behind him on the Long Island, N.Y. shoreline.

"And maybe, if you're lucky, the king of the blues, B.B. King will record a song you wrote 18 years ago."

And with that, John Hiatt and his band tear into "Riding With The King," a song he wrote in 1983 and was indeed recorded by B.B. King and Eric Clapton for the album of the same name released late last year.

Hiatt's songs have been recorded by everyone from Bob Dylan to Roseanne Cash to Iggy Pop to Bonnie Raitt. And while Hiatt probably has several filing cabinets full of great reviews, he has yet to score a blockbuster hit from one of his own recordings.

"It used to bother me when I was younger," Hiatt told Reuters in an interview backstage before the show. "But now, I think it's thrilling. And it's certainly helped financially over the years. The way I look at it now is that it allows me to do what I love doing: writing songs, making records and touring."

COMFORTABLE WITH DIFFERENT STYLES
It's hard to pigeonhole John Hiatt. He deftly combines country-rock arrangements with a cracking R&B-based backbeat and a weathered Mississippi Delta blues styled voice.

His lyrics range from sentimental love songs to paeans to eccentric antiheroes to harrowingly personal tales of his own struggles with alcoholism.

Hiatt is currently finishing a U.S. tour opening for B.B. King and will start European tour later in October. His latest effort "The Tiki Bar Is Open," released last month on Vanguard Records, reunites him with his powerful band, The Goners.

The sound, anchored by bass player Dave Ranson and drummer Kenneth Blevins and propelled by the soaring slide guitar playing of Sonny Landreth, demonstrates a versatility missing from some of Hiatt's recent efforts. On "Tiki Bar," the band moves seamlessly through elements of punk rock, rhythm & blues and country genres.

The trio backed Hiatt on his 1988 album "Slow Turning." But the Goners soon went off in different directions. "There really wasn't any reason we split," Hiatt said. "I wanted to try some different stuff."

Hiatt got his start in the music business in the early 1970s as a songwriter with a Nashville publishing company for $25 a week. "That sounded amazing to me at the time," he said. "I didn't know anything about publishing rights. I was just happy if I could eventually make records."

His first success was "Sure As I'm Sitting Here," which was a Top 20 hit for Three Dog Night. While his own albums from that time garnered some critical acclaim, they met with little commercial success.

He had moderate success in 1983 with "Riding With The King" and in 1985 with "Warming Up To The Ice Age," which contained "The Usual," covered by Bob Dylan, and a duet with Elvis Costello on a cover of the Spinners hit "Living A Little, Laughing A Little."

But his personal life was slipping into a haze of alcohol and drugs. "On 'Riding With The King,' I felt like I was starting to hit my stride. But I couldn't sustain it because I was so addled by liquor and drugs. I don't even remember making 'Ice Age.' That was the beginning of the end for me."

He managed to sober up eventually, but shortly thereafter his wife committed suicide, leaving him with a daughter to raise by himself. He would eventually remarry, however, and out of that domestic bliss would spring the finest album of his career, "Bring The Family," in 1986. The album included "Thing Called Love," a hit for Bonnie Raitt in 1989.

"I was finally starting to feel something after basically being dead for a while," Hiatt said. "I was also in the throes of enthrallment with my newfound family life and I was totally caught up in it."

Hiatt, a tall, broad-shouldered man with slicked back hair, breaks into a grin, which appears to take 10 years off his age.

LEAVING CAPITOL
In 1995, Hiatt found himself with yet another record label, Capitol. But after two albums with decent reviews and little sales to show for it, the label lost interest in his third effort, which would become "The Tiki Bar."

"The company was changing key figures and the guy who was coming in was caught up in teen pop," Hiatt said of his parting with Capitol. "I tried to tell him I was 48 at the time and I didn't do pop. But you never know, a couple of tattoos or a couple of implants ..."

"Tiki Bar" shows a broader range of songwriting skills. While his humorous and autobiographical lyrics remain, some of his new songs reveal scenes and images rather than telling linear stories.

"Looking back over the last 10 to 12 years, my work has become less autobiographical and a little broader in terms of the stories," he said. "It's more like pieces of my life over a long period of time."

On "Tiki Bar," Hiatt points to "Everybody Went Low" as a recent example. "When I was a kid in my late teens, we used to hang out with this crowd of people and sit around people's basements, signing songs to each other, drinking bad wine, smoking bad dope and getting bummed out about s---."

But like many songwriters, he remains cautious about over-analyzing the process.

"I don't really think about the lyrical content too much," he said. "It's usually the last thing that comes up when you write a song. What seems to happen is the music kind of shakes loose something.

"I was sitting in the back of the bus right before we started this interview and I got this little chord thing going. And it came out as this flat folk melody. 'When I get myself together babe/I'm gonna carry you down the line."'

He laughs nervously. "The story of my life, right? Don't hold your breath, babe

For more information and merchandising, go to www.johnhiatt.com.

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