Breezy Stories: A Chat with Danny O’Keefe
With a new retrospective release, the renowned singer/songwriter revisits a remarkable career
Danny O’Keefe’s been making music for well over 55 years.
His seminal song, “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues,” provided him with his big breakthrough after it was covered by an iconic array of artists, among them, Elvis Presley, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Cab Calloway and many others. From that point O’Keefe’s career was off to a successful start, beginning with the four albums he recorded for Atlantic Records, followed by two for Warner Brothers Records and tours with Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Jimmy Buffett, Linda Ronstadt, Loggins and Messina, Maria Muldaur and the Hollies.
Along the way, his songs found their way into the hands of other artists, among them, Miranda Lambert, Leon Russell, Alan Jackson, Waylon Jennings, Leo Sayer, Donny Hathaway, Judy Collins, Jackson Browne, Alison Krauss, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Maria Muldaur, Glen Campbell, Gary Stewart, John Denver and Nickel Creek, among the many.
AUDIO: Donny Hathaway “Magdalena”
“I was so pleased that so many of my songs found a home with so many other artists, many of whom were favorites of mine,” he reflects. “That’s the beauty part of it, that someone would hear something in your song that connected with their lives and experiences. Really the greatest thing that happens to you as a songwriter is when other performers or other writers or other artists find something of themselves in your work. That’s the greatest compliment you could have, even more than the monetary rewards sometimes.”
Those are stellar accomplishments to be sure, but while some may think that O’Keefe’s career is in the rear view mirror, that’s hardly the case. He’s maintained a prolific release schedule that’s taken him into through the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, the last two decades of the new millennium and up to the present day. It’s not that he doesn’t pause to look back. Indeed, his new album, a bountiful double album aptly titled Circular Turns, revisits 17 tracks he recorded from 1999-2017, while also an entire live disc featuring that aforementioned classic “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues” and other standouts from his remarkable repertoire.
It’s also his first new album since 2020’s Looking Glass and the Dreamer, an acclaimed and inspired effort that brought him a hint of renewed recognition.
O’Keefe credits Len Rico, president of Sunset Blvd. Records with inspiring the idea of re-recording his earlier offerings, given the fact that the songs haven’t been widely available in their original incarnations.
“All the songs that I still play have some currency to them,”O’Keefe remarks. “The arrangements are essentially the same, but the nuances within them vary depending on if you’re playing them with a band in the studio or live on an acoustic guitar. Either way, for me, they still have those pictures, those stories that they tell, and that waswhat was important about them in the first place.”
Consequently, the studio side includes new arrangements of O’Keefe classics such as “The Road,” “Angel, Spread Your Wings,” and “Magdelena,” among the others.
“He had a list of songs that he liked,” O’Keefe recalls. “Evidently, he had been listening to them for quite a while. So he said, ‘We think this would be a good idea to put it out.’ He also had heard the show from 2016, which I did at a friend’s venue in St. Paul, and we decided to add that to the, to the package, given the fact that most people haven’t had a chance to either see me play or hear what I do when I’m working with just one guitar.”
Notably, the first single from the new album is O’Keefe’s take on a song he wrote with Bob Dylan, “Well, Well, Well.”
AUDIO: Danny O’Keefe “Well, Well, Well”
“It’s not as dazzling as might appear,” O’Keefe admits. “I was signed to his publishing company by a woman by the name of Tina, Tina Snow, who was Tom Snow’s daughter, and she was running the West Coast office of Bob Dylan’s Publishing Company. I think that she had found a box of Bob’s demo tapes. I’m not sure about all this, because I kind of got told a story that Bob had this song, but he hadn’t finished it. He wanted to see if I could write lyrics to it. I don’t know if that’s true — that could have been just something that she pulled out of thin air — but it didn’t matter. I was so excited that anybody wanted me to contribute to the writing of a Bob Dylan song. So she sent me up to tape set and it was just a very crude demo. Basically, two chords were all that were in it. At one point, you can hear Bob off microphone just talking to the band. That’s all there was to it. It was very simple. It wasn’t really a song at that point. But I thought I’d never get another shot at a copyright with him so, I just took the opportunity. I kind of thought it was a joke in a way. And I took the two chords that he had — sung spoken whatever on the tape, and added another verse and made a song about groundwater. There’s a certain amount of tongue in cheek, and yes, but it’s also a hugely important issue that occurred before fracking became generally known about and the damage that it does to our groundwater. So eventually, it became, something that had, for me, anyway, a fairly powerful statement to it. It began kind of as a throwaway song and then it just sort of became the icing on that cake.”
The obvious question is, did he every hear from Bob?
“I think he liked the song,” O’Keefe responds. “When he heard it, he took it to Mavis Staples and then she cut it. Several other people have cut it over the years, including Ben Harper. So I think Bob was happy with it, but I have never heard from Bob.”
No matter. Taken in tandem, Circular Turns offers an introduction to O’Keefe’s work for those who are yet unknowing, as well as an excellent opportunity for long time fans to reconnect. Notably too, the new album spotlights several songs cowritten with others — among them, Michael McDonald, Viktor Krauss and Tim O’Brien.
“When I started going to Nashville in the mid ‘90s, part of the deal in Nashville was all about co-writing,” O’Keefe explains. “That way you get two publishing companies involved, and your odds of getting a cover are greatly improved. I wasn’t opposed to that. Plus, it’s interesting to write with other people, rather than simply being in the room alone and trying to figure out an idea. Somebody brings an idea, and you have a conversation, and the conversation becomes musical, and then it becomes lyrical. And those guys that I wrote with there are all master players in their own right. Just to hear what their idea was and to see what the pictures were was so enlightening. It’s the pictures that you’re you’re trying to find in order to tell the story.”
Clearly then, O’Keefe has never failed to find his muse.
“I started hanging out in the Minneapolis coffeehouse scene,” he recalls. Right. “That was a huge influence for me. I found all the stuff that I’d kind of been listening to, even as a kid — Leadbelly, the Weavers — all of that stuff that I listened to as a child. And all of that stuff kind of reconnected into the folk boom, that was just starting to happen at the early ‘60s. Plus, I always wanted to play guitar. And that was the impetus for me. I begged and borrowed guitars until I finally got one of my own. And then I was off and running.”
Indeed he was. He was signed to the budding Atlantic Records label by its founder, the legendary producer and influential record executive Ahmet Ertegun.
“We were trying to put a band together in L.A., with some members of another band that had been in Seattle and we had drifted down to L.A. to get into the business,” he says in retrospect. “We used to go hang out at Charlie Green’s office. He managed Buffalo Springfield, Iron Butterfly, Sonny and Cher and a bunch of others. He had a great list of artists, and most, if not all, were on Atlantic. So Charlie Green had a great relationship with Ahmet. They were talking one afternoon while the rest of us were just kind of hanging around in the office. Charlie told me to get my guitar out and play something into the phone. I didn’t know who was on the phone, but I played ‘Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues.’ And that was it. I went about my business. The next day, Ahmet came to the office. But because Charlie was trying to pitch a band, and we weren’t any kind of real band. There were three of us, and if you’d given us the gear and enough money, we would have been a good band. But the band never happened.”
That could have been the end of the story. O’Keefe returned to Seattle completely discouraged. “I was broken. We were broken, I had to figure out something. So I called Ahmet, and he took the call and said, ‘Send me some music.’ I had a Webcor tape recorder, so I just sang some some songs into the recorder and sent the tape off to Ahmet. I didn’t hear anything for three weeks or so, and finally, pretty much out of desperation more than anything else, I called him up. And Ahmed took the call and said, ‘Well, I didn’t hear much on that tape you sent me.’ I said, Well, you heard ‘Good Time Charlie.’ That’s one of the two songs that I played into the phone. So then he said, ‘Okay, what do you want to do?’ And I replied, ‘I want to make a record on Atlantic Records.”
Apparently that was enough to convince Ertegun to take a chance. “He said, ‘Okay, we’ll go to Muscle Shoals, and of course I had no idea where Muscle Shoals was or what it was. They sent me a plane ticket and off I went to Muscle Shoals, Alabama and recorded five, six songs there with the guys who eventually became known as the ‘Swampers.’ Later, we went to L.A. and cut another five or six songs. And that was the first album, Danny O’Keefe, that was on Cotillion Records, a subsidiary of Atlantic. It wasn’t particularly successful, but it was my introduction to the world with a real record company. So I’m eternally grateful to Ahmet for that.”
The equally iconic Arif Martin produced O’Keefe’s second album, O’Keefe and looking back, it’s clear O’Keefe is thankful for that even now. “He was one of the finest gentlemen I ever met, he says in retrospect. “It could have been very intimidating, but Arif was a very gentle man, very kind. You could always be kind of swayed to his way of thinking, but he did it in such a gentlemanly way that you just kind of agreed with him, because you thought that there was a better idea than what you had. He had the expertise and experience behind him.”
As for his future plans, O’Keefe said he has a number of other songs that he’s ready to record if circumstances permit. “If this album does well enough, hopefully Sunset Boulevard Records will want another one,” he suggests. “I have about, I don’t know, more than 20 new songs. I’d love to record them as well. I don’t think I’m going to make very many more albums. But I do have a couple albums worth of brand new songs that we can do.”
He’s less certain about the prospect of a tour. “We can look at whenever anyone is interested,” he allows. “It’s obviously too late this year. Otherwise, we’ll see if there’s enough demand. Next year. I’d love to go out there. I love playing, but I don’t think I’d take a band. It would probably be just me and a guitar. So we’ll see if there’s a reason to do it.”
AUDIO: Danny O’Keefe “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues”
- All Back to Sam’s Place with Little Feat - May 24, 2024
- Soulshine: The Allman Brothers Band’s Where It All Begins at 30 - May 3, 2024
- Billy Tibbals Lives For Rock ‘n’ Roll - May 2, 2024
You May Also Like
-
March 19, 2014 -
-
April 6, 2019
