DAVE'S DIARY - 23 JANUARY 2005 - NOTORIOUS CHERRY BOMBS
CHERRY BOMBS GIVE LIP SERVICE
"She used to call me baby, I thought she was such a lady/ but my how things have changed since times moved on/ I'd give her my last dollar and now all she'll do is holler/ oh my life has become a country song." - Its Hard To Kiss The Lips At Night That Chew Your Ass Out All Day Long - Rodney Crowell-Vince Gill.
 The Cherry Bombs |
Where's the
best place to road test a new song - in the shower, of course?
Tim McGraw and singing spouse Faith Hill did it with his latest hit
Live Like You Were Dying and Rodney Crowell and Claudia Church followed
suit.
This time it was the Notorious Cherry Bombs self parody Its Hard To
Kiss The Lips At Night That Chew Your Ass Out All Day Long.
"My wife came home right about when we finished it, and we sheepishly
played it for her, and she said she loved it," Crowell, 54, revealed
recently.
"I didn't believe her, and I later heard her singing it in the shower.
I called Vince and said it's okay to play for Amy Grant because I heard
Claudia singing it in the shower."
The group, eighties band for Crowell and first singing spouse Rosanne
Cash, liked the spoof so much it reprised it on its self titled disc on
keyboard ace Tony Brown's label Universal South.
"It was Vince's idea," Crowell says. "And he's damn sick."
"I make a big ole ass woman," Gill adds of the video in which
he frocks up.
The band dedicated its disc to drummer Larry Londin who died at 47 in
1992 - Eddie Bayers takes his role but Londin's drumming is mixed into
the reprise of entrée Let It Roll, Let It Ride.
Other originals are guitarist Richard Bennett, steel guitarist Hank DeVito
and Brown who worked with Elvis before joining Emmylou Harris's Hot Band.
TONY BROWN RETURNS
Brown joined
Cherry Bombs for a 2002 reunion after recovery from a life-threatening
head injury sustained earlier in the year when he fell down stairs in
Los Angeles.
Brown's accident played some role in the reunion.
Gill says, "We had planned to do it even before his accident. All
it did was make it wait for a while until he got better."
Bassist Emory Gordy Jr. produced many albums for wife, Patty Loveless,
and George Jones, Bill Monroe and Matraca Berg, and is replaced by Michael
Rhodes.
John Hobbs guests on keyboards, Jim Horn sax and Gill's daughter Jenny
harmonises on her dad's tune Dangerous Curves.
Although the singalong and entrée satirise band members and radio
they also included new songs that would be chart heat seekers if the lads
were young radio studs.
Crowell tune Making Memories Of Us, was also cut by Keith Urban
on huge selling fifth album Be Here.
KEITH URBAN AND CROWELL
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"They
were recording across the hall from us," Urban says. "I'd
already been pitched the song, and I loved it, obviously." Although Keith was surprised to learn Crowell recorded the song he understood why. "At least Rodney's honest with me," Urban says. "He said, 'A lot of times, artists say they're gonna cut a song - and they don't. Or they cut it - and it doesn't make the final album. Or they say it's gonna be a single - and it never is.'" |
Urban
rejected suggestions he ask Crowell to give him the song exclusively.
"I had people saying, 'Tell Rodney to leave it off his record,'"
Urban says. "I said, 'He wrote the damn song! He can do what he likes
with it. The song's a love letter to his wife that he wrote for Valentine's
Day. I'm not going to tell him he can't touch that song.' Good Lord!"
Gill's Oklahoma Dust has a Cash-like feel, Crowell-Gill co-write
Dangerous Curves explores infidelity and bluesy Forever Sunday
by Gill reeks of the sixties Nashville Sound.
Vince unshackles his balladic image by singing lead on a steamy murder
ballad Heart of a Jealous Man, penned with the late Max D Barnes.