At His Age: Nick Lowe Turns 75
Looking back on the career of the Abominable Showman
It was one of the most naïve questions I asked early in my rock journo career.
It was in November of 1980 and I was sitting backstage pre-show at the Orpheum Theatre in Boston with Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds. They’d put the band Rockpile together and were touring with good friend Elvis Costello.
I was fan, particularly of Lowe’s solo work – the first LP, Jesus of Cool (UK) aka Pure Pop for Now People (U.S.) and Labour of Lust. I asked about their initial impetus to do what they did: What made them pick up their axes, write songs and take to the stages of, well, wherever hall would have them. I was 23, Lowe was 31, Edmunds was 36.
So, when it all began, did they have something they just needed to get out, some burning insight or message through music that couldn’t be stamped down?
They both looked at each other, mock-quizzically, took a couple of beats, looked at me and said – and I’m paraphrasing here, “Dear boy, it was about the chicks. Always about getting chicks.”
Writer smacks head (figuratively). But, of course, it was.
Years later, talking to Lowe, I revisited my awkward question and got a laugh. Yes, that was what got him into this business, pretty typical reasons, really. “When I first started out,” he said, “like most people from my generation, it had nothing to do with ‘art.'”
Aside from the always-on-their-mind female factor, he said, “You just wanted to be famous.”
Adding, with a chuckle, “It’s amazing how quickly I lost that.”
Before going too far forward: Rockpile, what was Rockpile? At the time, the band had been around, in one hazy form or another, for eight years. But the recently released Seconds of Pleasure was the first bona fide Rockpile album.
The name first arose in 1972 when Edmunds titled a solo album Rockpile and christened his touring band with the same name. But Edmunds soon immersed himself in studio projects and Rockpile faded away.
In 1975 Edmunds joined forces with Lowe, whom he met while producing a Brinsley Schwartz album, and the name was later revived for Edmunds’ 1977 U.S. tour with Bad Company. The next year Lowe used it for his “solo” tour. Then Edmunds used it for another “solo” tour. So it went.
To make matters even more confusing, Edmunds and Lowe were solo artists, too, and played and recorded under a variety of other names (including the Disco Brothers, the Tartan Horde and Nick Lowe’s Last Chicken in the Shop), but until Seconds, never did a Rockpile record grace the record shelves.
Edmunds told me, with a laugh, “It’s a very fluid unit. It’s a very loose, comfortable situation. It’s a vehicle that’s available.”
While Rockpile was there, Lowe’s claim to semi-fame came as a solo artist, and to a lesser degree as a punk rock producer.
In 1977, as the three-chord punk explosion of anger and outrage was shaking London, Stiff Records staff producer and pop chameleon Lowe – late of the pub rock band Brinsley Schwartz – snuck through with a little ditty called “I Love My Label” on Stiff’s first sampler album. With sweet sarcasm dripping from gorgeous, melodic hooks that could have done Steve Miller proud, Nick sang, “My label always loves to hear some pretty chords on its records, like these ones/ She’s always pleased to hear some of these melodies, so I sing ’em some.” With one song, Lowe had carved himself out a niche: In the eye of the vitriolic punk hurricane rested a bastion of pure pop. (Wilco subsequently covered it in 2011. Kinda timeless.)
Back in the early solo days, Lowe churned out a slew of perfect pop songs: “(I Love the Sound of) Breaking Glass,” “Heart of the City,” “So It Goes,” “Marie Provost,” “Cruel to be Kind” (his only U.S. Top 20 hit) and “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding.” I thought of him as Paul McCartney, albeit with a nod and a wink. Melody: cheerful. Lyrics: witty, sly semis-subversive.
But don’t call it art. Lowe considered his tunes “garbage music.” “If you approach it as garbage music,” he philosophized, “in other words, it’s just here today and gone tomorrow, you stand far more chance of coming up with something good. It’s only looking back that something lives on.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” he continued, “it’s ideas that are exciting. It’s not the marvelous synthesizer sound or the wonderful spread on the stereo. The average guy in the street doesn’t know anything about whether the bass drum pedal’s squeaking. All he knows is where there’s emotion coming out of the speakers.”
And for that quick-hit production technique he got the nickname “Basher.” His resume included Pretenders, the Damned, Graham Parker, Dr. Feelgood, (wife/ex-wife) Carlene Carter, Johnny Cash, numerous Costello LPs
He was also dubbed “the Jesus of cool” by an English rock magazine, so naturally he nicked that phrase, selecting that over-the-top praise as the tongue-in-cheek title of his solo debut album.
Lowe’s memories of those new wave days are pleasant ones. “Wonderful, we had a ball,” he said. “The thing is that the most fun you can have in this business is being just about to make it — not actually making it and not being unknown. Those two aren’t fun. If you can sustain that happy state for as long as you can, you can really have fun, and that’s sort of what we did.”
Lowe toiled for more than a few labels in his day, and was in the early 90s found himself sacked from Warner Bros/Reprise. He took it in stride. “I woke up one morning and couldn’t understand why I was kind of downhearted,” Lowe said then. “This also having coincided with this stroke of luck I had with The Bodyguard soundtrack.” Luck, indeed! The Lowe-penned “(What’s So Funny About) Peace, Love and Understanding” showed up on the blockbuster album – 18 times platinum in the U.S. – earning the author a handsome royalty.
“I suddenly thought,” said Lowe, “`Well, hang on a second. Why don’t I just kiss goodbye to my days with the major labels and be a big fish in a small pool? Warner Bros. is the best major label there is, and I’ve just been sacked and I don’t want to be a poor relation to some other bunch of big pop acts.’ “
Twenty years after that “Jesus of Cool” thing, as Lowe was definitely into another career phase, I asked, “If he was once the Jesus of Cool, what might he be now?”
“Well, I feel, um, I suppose I feel a bit of a grand old man of Rockdom,” he said. His hair was gray, his music less sardonic and more heartfelt, his audience aging with him. Indeed, the month we talked he was profiled in, of all places, Esquire.
In 1994, Lowe tapped into the rich vein of American country music on The Impossible Bird. But, he said, “I don’t think it’s that much of a departure. I think there’s been country music in all my stuff in the same way there’s been R & B in the stuff that I’ve done. I’m drawn to where those two meet. It’s a place I feel very comfortable at.”
In 1998, Lowe was touring behind the Dig My Mood album, one that indicated he was very much an artist who’d turned a corner, made a transition. The Impossible Bird pointed that way and Dig My Mood took Lowe’s remaking of his sound and vision a step farther.
Wit and irony, once primary tools of his trade, were on holiday. Low was caressing, massaging the lyrics. There was no big walloping backbeat.
“I’ve sort of done enough of that,” Lowe explained, prior to a U.S. tour supporting the album. “I can’t imagine where I’d ever do that again. Europe seems to be perceiving what I do now more favorably, but I’ve noticed over here there’s been a number of people who are genuinely kind of aggrieved — `Where’s the rock?’ — and I don’t like to see people disappointed at my shows. But if they are, they’re happy to drop by the wayside and find someone else for them to relive their youth through.”
The pop tunes that still make the cut in concert, Lowe said, “are any of those songs I can play convincingly on an acoustic guitar – if the lyric isn’t too sort of callow and kidsy. If it’s too kidsy, I can’t really pull it off.”
Thus, even though fans shout for it, you wouldn’t be hearing “Marie Provost” at a 21st century Lowe show. It’s a song based on the true story of an actress who died alone and whose corpse was eaten by her pet dog. Key lyric: “She was a winner/Who became the doggie’s dinner/She didn’t mean that much to me/Oh, poor Marie.”
“People ask for that one a lot and it’s ‘Oh god ….,” Lowe said, admitting “It’s a good record and good at the time. But it’s a rather cheery tin-pan melody, telling that horrible story.”
Career assessment/status as an elder musician: “I’ve been at it a long time, but I don’t feel very retro. I think I’m starting to get the hang of it. I think when you’re just doing what you did when you were a kid — well, it’s so unseemly when you see the old geezers doing that. It just looks awful.”
Dig My Mood was an often somber, melancholic, bittersweet effort. There was plenty of nuance and atmosphere. A country tinge. It’s had the intimate feel of a rainy, late-night session. It featured Lowe singing, “The friends I’ve had are so-called now/They slipped away somehow,” and commiserating about being “lost in lonesome reverie,” about feeling “so tired,” in need of a holiday. It’s not the blues, but feels like the blues.
Had Nick Lowe become a sad sack?
Not at all. “I certainly don’t try and put my diary to music,” said Lowe. “It is not an autobiographical thing. That is of no interest to me. I like pop which is `made up,’ but having said that, I love singing and writing songs that have got some bottom — I don’t mean bass, I mean substance, and in order to do that you’ve got to know what it feels like to be blue. If you are blue, you can’t write any songs let alone go into the recording studio and do them. But you’ve got to get in a sort of mood. My stick is that I think depression is an illness, but being blue is a rite of passage, and it’s, in some way, kind of a glorious feeling.”
Lowe’s last album, released in 2013, was Quality Street: A Seasonal Selection for All the Family.” As any self-respecting singer-songwriter might, Lowe – who turns 75 on March 24th – thought that a Christmas album was a dodgy proposition.
“It was always seen as rather tacky and sort of vulgar,” said Lowe, just prior to a 12-date U.S. tour to promote the album, playing with his soon-to-be-steady backup band, the masked Los Straitjackets. “Although having said that, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Christmas records. It’s just that it was the stuff for me to listen to, not to actually make.”
VIDEO: Nick Lowe and Los Straitjackets perform “Christmas at the Airport” on CBS Saturday Morning
Lowe puts his tongue in a familiar position, in cheek. “When it was suggested to me that I might like to do a Christmas album,” he continued, “my initial reaction was one of horror – that my record company could have thought that an artist of my stature could possibly wish to have their hands soiled by this terrible, commercial nonsense. But that feeling lasted for about a minute and ten seconds – as long as an early B-side.”
(Indeed, one of Lowe’s best songs from his early career was the B-side of the 1976 single “So It Goes,” / “Heart of the City,” which actually clocked in at 2:02.)
“Suddenly, I changed my mind completely,” Lowe said. “I thought ‘What is the matter with you? This could be a really great opportunity to do something really fun and good; I could try and do a Christmas record that people might want to listen to more than once.’”
“What I was looking for,” Lowe said, about making the album, “was really good songs that we could adapt. That’s a little more than a tall order, but we found a few.”
Lowe covered Wizzard’s “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day,” – a top Christmas tune in the UK for years – and he solicited suggestions from friends. He did Roger Miller’s “Old Toy Trains,” the traditional “Children Go Where I Send Thee” and “Silent Night,” among others. Lowe’s pal Ron Sexsmith contributed “Hooves on the Roof,” and Lowe wrote or co-wrote three more, including the wry “Christmas at the Airport.”
“I wasn’t intending to [write]” Lowe said, “but the first one came and I couldn’t sort of help it. I found myself sitting in an airport about two days after they asked me to do this and I was nursing a slight hangover. As sometimes happens, you can feel sort of creative in those circumstances and I was waiting for my flight and I had most of it written by the time I got back to Heathrow.”
I wondered, when he toured how songs from Quality Street would factor into the set. He set they’d certainly comprise a chunk of it but he’d be playing some of his chestnuts, too, like the once-obscure, now ubiquitous “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding.”
“I love to play it,” Lowe says. “It’s a song you can play any way you want to pretty much – any kind of treatment. I play it differently from night to night. At the moment, it’s sort of a mid-tempo, R&B/Arthur Alexander style [song], but it might go back into mid-period Bob Dylan style as I was doing it a month or two ago. With the Straitjackets it will have something else.”
Of its genesis with Brinsley Schwartz. Lowe said, “It was just an album track. Declan – Elvis – brought it to people’s attention much later on.”
Lowe and Costello were longtime friends, with Lowe producing Costello’s first four albums. The song was the final track on Costello’s 1979 album, Armed Forces. There has always been some murkiness about the song’s thrust. It was written before the punk era, as the hippie daze waned, but Costello’s full-bore rendition came roaring out of the gates on the heels of punk. Was the singer upbraiding the punks for their cynicism, their professed hatred for the hippies? Was it ironic? What did the songwriter intend?
“I think it was initially intended ironically,” says Lowe. “Times were changing and the original idea was sort of ironic, with an over-the-top title. But at the same time, I always think it was the first original idea I ever had. Up to then my songs were – to my ears anyway – very obvious [as to] where I got the ideas from. I was rewriting the people who I admired, which is how most people start.”
After a time, Lowe said, he developed a style. “But,” he added, with typical self-deprecation, “when I thought of ‘(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,’ I was astonished I’d come up with an original idea. I’ve never heard anyone say it before and I thought it was really great. It is, let’s face it, a bit of a mouthful So, even if it was ironic, something in me told me to keep it a bit opaque and not overwrite it and fill it up with look-at-me, aren’t-I-clever puns and stupid stuff which I was prone to do.”
Over the years, the song has done well by Lowe’s bank account. A version by Curtis Stigers was included on The Bodyguard soundtrack, the best-selling soundtrack in history. “It was a big payday for everyone involved in that movie,” Lowe said.
And so, over time, Lowe has evolved into a different sort of artist – more country and roots-based and more on-the-surface sincere. Lowe says the reason for the evolution was twofold: 1) He’d matured as a songwriter and 2) he realized he would not to be forever young.
VIDEO: Nick Lowe “And So It Goes”
“I found myself looking at the fact that I was getting older,” said Lowe, speaking ten years ago, “and I never thought I’d be doing it [playing music] into advancing old age and I don’t think any other of my contemporaries did either. Nowadays, you can’t move for old men shuffling up on stage doing what they did when they were in their 20s. But it was quite a shock when I realized I was going to be one of them.
“So, I consciously tried to figure out a way of avoiding having to keep on doing what I did a kid for my audience, having to re-play my youth for the entertainment of the people who were getting older as well. I wouldn’t be able to move away from it. We all know people who have had to do that and it’s not a very pleasant sight to see.
“I thought, ‘I want to figure out a way of doing something where I can take advantage of the fact that I’m getting older, use it so it will be a bit of a part of my act.’ It wasn’t a great stretch. I like the same music now as I did when I was a kid. I never liked ‘rock’ music as such. I always liked rock ‘n’ roll music. Without going into a tiresome discourse about the difference between [them], I definitely know it when I hear it. Rock ‘n’ roll is pretty easy to play at an advanced age. And I love the ballads, the country music.
“I can perform my thing and not just be some wacky guy from the ’70s. I think it’s a good show and it will cheer people up and it’s funny and saucy at the same time.”
But what about life on the road? More fun when you’re young, less so as time passes, right?
“Well, it’s not something I look forward to,” Lowe said. “But the good stuff that will come out of it will outweigh any discomfort. I’m not so decrepit that I can’t put up with banging my shins on a piece of cheap hotel furniture.”
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