John Hiatt: The Best of John Hiatt (Capitol)

`John Hiatt, this is your life!': Singer-songwriter found catharsis in compiling new best-of album

by Jay Orr

October 11, 1998, The Tennessean

artist photo John Hiatt's newly released collection, The Best of John Hiatt, charts his emergence as a major singer-songwriter, but the songs tell only part of his personal saga.

Hiatt and country singer Patty Loveless share a bill at 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Ryman Auditorium. Hiatt will be performing with bassist Davey Faragher and guitarist David Immergluck, members of his most recent band, the Nashville Queens.

The event benefits Cumberland Heights, an alcohol and drug treatment center. A Williamson County resident, Hiatt is a recovering alcoholic, sober for 14 years.

The earliest tunes on the new record come from a time when Hiatt was still an alcoholic and drug user. Others come from his first years in recovery, when his domestic life began to stabilize. The disc also covers more recent fare including two new tracks, Love in Flames and Don't Know Much About Love, cut earlier this year.

"Once you start compiling past stuff there is a cathartic quality to the proceedings," Hiatt observes during a recent lunchtime conversation. "Kind of unbeknownst to me at the time, once the CD collection was put together and I got the test CD, it was a little bit like, `John Hiatt, this is your life!'

"I was sort of marveling at all the wonderful times I'd had and wonderful opportunities to record with these great musicians over the years, the number of cool musical situations I've been fortunate enough to find myself in, more than anything."

An Indiana native, Hiatt came to Nashville to join a band, White Duck, and play on their second album in 1971. He signed a solo deal with Epic and made his first solo record, Hangin' Around the Observatory, in 1974. With his career taking off, Hiatt relocated to Los Angeles. He recorded two albums for Epic, two for MCA and three for Geffen.

Although already a respected songwriter, it was on Hiatt's 1983 album, Riding with the King, that he "broke the code" as a recording artist, he says, using a blend of blues, rock 'n' roll, country, R&B and gospel to "settle into something that finally made some sense."

The album's title track, inspired by news of Elvis Presley's death in 1977 and produced by Nick Lowe, remains one of his favorites and it appears on the new collection. But he wrote it, Hiatt admits, during a period when he was "totally bombed out of his mind."

Hiatt's drinking started early and he pretty much knew from the beginning that he had a problem, though he didn't want to admit it to himself, he says. "I didn't drink like my friends. We'd get half-pints of cherry-flavored vodka, go to the alley and get loaded and then go to somebody's party. I remember looking at the kids who were drinking with me. I could see that they were getting drunk, but they weren't any different. I felt like, when I got drunk, I was a completely different person."

After years as a "run-of-the-mill rock clown" who got "caught up in the alcohol and the drugs," Hiatt was traveling in 1984 along the Mississippi Gulf Coast after a visit to New Orleans. Eager to get drunk or high, he found he could do neither. He "crashed and burned," Hiatt says. Crying uncontrollably, he called his wife and admitted he needed help.

"That was the beginning of recovery for me," he says.

Hiatt checked into a treatment center for four weeks. "It's a perfect medical response to a medical problem - alcoholism and drug addiction are diseases, medical problems, that need to be dealt with on some level from a medical perspective," he says.

After four or five months of treatment and sobriety, it came time to hit the road again. "I had to go back to work and pay for the friggin' treatment center," Hiatt says. His dates were in Europe, which was "like the road times 10. ... You're away from anything remotely similar to home. I'd done Europe many times. I'd also done some of my heaviest drinking, drugging, debauching craziness."

For the first time, he forced himself to go in front of audiences straight, without using alcohol or drugs to dull his anxieties about performing.

"It was a freaky experience," Hiatt recalls. "It was like learning to live for the first time. The first couple of weeks of the tour, every night, I would get on stage and it was like I'd have all these little voices in my head going `You fake! You phony! You don't have anything to give, you're not present and accounted for. You're not any good.' Somewhere, about two or three weeks into it, I started enjoying it."

Hiatt began to understand all over again that performing was about getting outside of himself, about trying to bridge the gap between himself and his audience, about trying to share in some form of communication.

"At first the music sounded like s..t and then it started sounding beautiful to me again," Hiatt observes. "Any fresh-caught drunk getting sober will tell you everything starts to come to life. That can be wonderful and very scary. You've been numb for several years. All of a sudden you're feeling things and you don't know how to deal with it."

Eight months into his sobriety, Hiatt's first wife committed suicide. The two had been married three years, but the marriage was pretty much over, he says.

They had a baby daughter. Sober, he was better able to deal with the devastating loss.

During his last days as an alcoholic, his songwriting suffered along with his performances, Hiatt admits, and after getting sober it took a while to find his muse again.

"I wasn't exactly crankin' `em out the first six months or a year. In fact, it may have even been a year or two before I really started writing again. But other things happened. I hadn't read books in years. All of a sudden I was reading as much as I could get my hands on, as fast as I could read it. A lot of other things were happening in my life that I guess ultimately added up to, within a year or so, being ready again."

Hiatt moved back to Nashville in 1985 and it "felt like home." Within six months he met his current wife, Nancy, and after six more months they married. Hiatt's daughter was 22 months old. Nancy's son was 8 years old.

His next album, released in 1987 under a new contract with A&M, was titled Bring the Family and included Hiatt favorites such as Have a Little Faith in Me (covered by Joe Cocker, Delbert McClinton and Jewel, among others, and re-recorded on the new best-of), Thing Called Love (recorded by Bonnie Raitt in 1989 for her Grammy-winning album, Nick of Time and included on the new best-of in the original version) and the funky Memphis in the Meantime (also on the new album in its original version).

Sober, Hiatt seemed to hit his stride quickly. Domestic themes suited him, but so did road numbers like Drive South and Buffalo River Home or quirkier tunes like Tennessee Plates and Perfectly Good Guitar (the title track from his 1993 album). His recent work has earned Grammy nominations and Nashville Music Awards.

"Music to me is still the big be-all and end-all," Hiatt says. "I just love it so much. I love being able to make it, being able to write songs. These days it's much more about the doing, the playing with the players, the writing of the songs, the making of the records. It's about the work way more even than the results."

Jay Orr <living@tennessean.com>
The Tennessean, 1100 Broadway, Nashville, TN 37203