Climbing inside John Hiatt's head

by Hal Horowitz

ca. 1997 - The Music Monitor

"Maybe it's been a blessing to me that I've never had a big hit. 'Cause I've never had anything I've had to live up to," laughs John Hiatt dryly. "I think that's a good thing." Spoken with the wry wit and understated charm that's infused all of his albums, Hiatt is nothing if not self-effacing. His songs have been covered by a dizzying and wildly eclectic array of performers, from Bob Dylan to Iggy Pop to Willie Nelson, and he's written major hits like Rosanne Cash's version of "This Is The Way We Make A Broken Heart," and Bonnie Raitt's "Thing Called Love."

But since those Billboard-charting songs weren't released under his own name, Hiatt still remains something of a well known cult figure. Which apparently suits him just fine. Squarely in his mid- forties, he's recently spent some time pondering where he stands in life. And he's pretty happy. "It's really great. We had the year off this year and it afforded me a bit of time to reflect about where I was and where I was going, not only professionally but in a lot of other areas. Call it a sabbatical. And it gave me the opportunity to look at where I was at career-wise. It's a pretty cool place, and an unusual place, where I've been doing this for 20 years as a songwriter, and probably 15 as a serious touring act. I can go out and headline anywhere, depending upon the market, from 1000 to 5000 seaters. I think I've built up some kind of weird little trust or understanding with the audience that they know that if I'm gonna put out a record, it's gonna be the best that I can come up with at a given time. And I think touring-wise we've built up a reputation for delivering something live that you can't get at home. There's such a premium on that kind of thing these days because so much stuff is sent via TV and computer and CDs that it's nice to be able to go out and hear something that's created just one time. I think people still appreciate a show where you're putting yourself into it."

Geez, don't ya just want to grab the guy and hug him for being so honest? And there aren't a lot of folks in his age bracket that are still out there and not only making music, but in Hiatt's case, making the best music of their careers. This year, Steve Winwood, Paul McCartney, James Taylor and even John Fogerty--all approximately Hiatt's contemporaries--have new albums that don't come anywhere close to matching the fire and passion of their previous work. Meanwhile Hiatt quietly released Little Head. Its songs live up to the humor, honesty and emotional sincerity of his past work better than most artists in his singer/songwriter genre and generation.

Like last year's Grammy-nominated Walk On, Little Head's tunes were all written on the road, something he wasn't used to doing earlier in his career. "I think it's sorta flip-flopped because I made a somewhat conscious decision back when we were touring Perfectly Good Guitar that here I was on the road--we toured that record for about 14 months--it was a lot of hard touring, and I just got so bored and so depressed that it occurred to me that you can pick up a guitar and alleviate some of that boredom. So it was out of boredom that I started getting busy and writing songs and it became a habit. It's a good way to fill up that dead time and make something out of it. So that's how it started and it kinda just seemed with my family growing up, three kids getting older and demanding more attention, that it was easier to find that solitude that's required to write on the road than it is at home."

Writing Little Head' songs on tour gave Hiatt the itch to record them on the road too. "We'd have a day off, and I'd tell our sound guy to find a studio that suits us and we'd set up like it's a gig, but we'd just roll tape. We recorded about eight things during the Walk On tour and two of 'em made this record. The rest of it we did in Los Angeles at a studio called the Village Recorder that Fleetwood Mac's Rumours was recorded in. It has a good vibe to it."

And vibe is what Hiatt is all about. Even though he's a Nashville area resident, he feels that Music City's studios don't have the right feel for what he's after. "There's a lot of great studios here [in Nashville] but there's kind of a funny studio aesthetic at work here that doesn't quite jibe with the racket I make. It's all clean and concise and microscoped and fretted over and worried about. A little too tight in the sphincter." I break down laughing, not only because of the truth of that off-color metaphor, but because it's a perfect turn of phrase for a guy who names his new album after another body part on the opposite side of the male pelvis.

What makes Little Head different from other Hiatt albums is the looseness of the sound and the easy-going nature that delivers a natural swing to his rock and roll. "This record differs from my other ones in that all of the vocals are recorded live. I tend to sing off of what's happening musically. And the players tend to play off of what I'm singing. We've found in our playing together for the last few years that this band seems to work better when it doesn't know what it's doing. I love what Neil Young said when people told him, 'That Crazy Horse...they can't play...' and Neil said, 'Well..not with you!'"

Even though making albums and touring is what Hiatt loves, it's his well covered catalog of songs that put bread on the table during the leaner years. I wondered if he had ever heard a version of one of his tunes that he thought missed the point. "Well see it's not like I ever really have a point. I figure fiction is open to interpretation. Certainly music is. So any attempt at least merits your praise for having made the attempt. I like some better than others though. I love Iggy Pop's version of "Something Wild." I love Bob Dylan's version of "The Usual." I thought it was thrilling to get songs cut by those guys whose records I bought. Mitch Ryder recorded one of my songs and he was one of my heroes. Growing up in the midwest and blue eyed soul it was all about Mitch Ryder."

The mention of Buddy Guy's cover of an as yet unrecorded by Hiatt composition "Where Is The Next One Coming From" (the song that Ryder did) gives us a sneak peek at his likely next project. "We're talking about doing a double CD with one disc being covers of my tunes, and the other being my versions. One of the things we wanted to accomplish was to cut a couple of songs that had been covered but that I had never recorded. And that would be one to consider. I've never gone back and recorded old songs for my own records because I'm always writing and I always want to do the new stuff."

But for now, it's Hiatt and his Little Head tour that's first priority. Hiatt digs the sound of his tough Nashville Queens quartet and with a strong batch of new tunes and a literal plethora of old ones to choose from, you can bet that no two shows are ever the same. Hiatt's positive attitude and disarmingly honest persona shows that no matter how much acclaim he's gotten, he'll never let his little head do the thinking.