DAVE'S DIARY - 10 OCTOBER 2004 - GILLIAN WELCH

THE LIFE OF BRIAN, GILLIAN AND DAVID

"I am an orphan on God's highway/ but I'll share my troubles if you go my way." - Orphan Girl - Gillian Welch.

Sydney roots music promoter Brian Taranto - mine host for tours by artists diverse as singing Texan crime novelist Kinky Friedman and Louisiana legend Tony Joe White - has struck gold.

Taranto earned the admiration and envy of rival promoters with his mix of urban and rural gigs for Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.

But not even tight rope walker Taranto was expecting to sell out the Gippsland gig at Meeniyan and spa country concert at Hepburn Springs within hours of going on sale.

Well, actually the accompanying accommodation was snapped up well in advance of the ticket sales.

With cyber chat room chatter dating back to autumn there was an air of not so hushed expectancy all through the long wet welcome winter.

So when the concert press release from Byron Bay publicist Kylie White lobbed at the community radio and the print media outlets the cyber chatter clucked into over drive.

The 280 seat Meeniyan and 320 seat Hepburn Springs Palais venues fell faster than a Saddam statue.

City slickers wanted to be seated into the comfort of the rural rump rather than stand in the St Kilda colossus Prince Of Wales.

This left locals with a big decision - if they missed out on tickets they had to travel to the big smoke.

Well, the first two shows at the POW, owned by a pair of Warrnambool born brothers and families, sold out promptly so a third was added.

Now, if that sells Brian could give insatiable city fans alternate gigs in the backblocks of The Otways, the Harrietville high country or for those with modest petrol budgets the You Yangs, just off Highway One en route to the home of the greatest team of all.

And down at Meeniyan, the buffs could arise at 5 a m and apply the teat cups to the Friesians, always wired and inspired for their first spring milking of the day.

The tour begins at Brisbane Tivoli on November 1 - Melbourne Cup Eve - and ends at
Meeniyan Hall on November 14.

CLICK HERE for full dates in the Gig Guide.

NO SHOCK FOR SHOCK

The concert sales reaction is good news for Taranto - his publicity budget is trimmed with no need for advance interviews. So is the duo's backstage rider. Welch brings her own tea bags. Brian might need to stock up on kettles with strong elements, especially for rural gigs exposed to the elements. It's too late to reincarnate The Singing Kettles - the mountain reared duo from outside of Scottsdale in the wild north east of Van Diemen's Land. This is good and bad news for the duo's local record label Shock. Interviews are likely to be less frequent and later. < David Rawlings & Gillian Welch

So, as a courtesy to Nu Country viewers and readers, we will fill in a few of the gaps with some personal background on the combatants.

Welch and Rawlings first won exposure here on community radio - specifically Nu Country - when artists diverse as Kathy Mattea, Emmylou Harris, Trisha Yearwood, Cyndi Boste and Tim & Mollie O'Brien covered their songs.

Those artists spoke of their discovery of their music when Welch drove around Guitar Town in a pick-up truck, loaded with their demo tapes.

"It was a 1966 F-100 with a 352 motor, three on the tree, and an eight-foot bed," Welch recalled, "you could put a whole sheet of plywood in it."

Rawlings spent all the money he had come to town with on his pick-up - a farm truck from an orange grove in California and inherited by someone in Nashville.

The California sun dissolved the finish, so the truck is several colours, mainly orange, green, and grey.

"It looks as if it were covered with lichen." Welch said.

This was long before the famed Coen Brothers O Brother movie and T Bone Burnette soundtrack ignited sales charts with minimal mainstream airplay.

That story has been told many times.

And, of course, the embryo of duo discs Revival (1996), Hell Among The Yearlings (1998), Time The Revelator (2001) and Soul Journey (2003).

So here's some personal info to fill in the dots.

RAWLINGS ROOTS

Music, because it was math-based, and I was good at math, I wasn't intimidated."

He and his friend learned Heart of Gold, by Neil Young. They came in second at the talent show, and the next year they won.

GILLIAN AND MINDY

"My mother was just a girl seventeen/ and my dad was passing through, doing things a man will do." - No One Knows My Name - Gillian Welch-David Rawlings.

Gillian Welch, like latter day country folkie Mindy Smith, is a New York born orphan raised by creative, caring adoptive parents. And, like Smith who debuted with her version of Jolene on Dolly Parton tribute disc Just Because I'm A Woman, she lets her songs speak for her. No One Knows My Name is about her birth parents.

Her mother was a college student in New York, and her father was a musician. By the time she was delivered, her adoption had been arranged.

Gillian was born in New York in 1967.

Welch's parents claimed her the day after she was born, and, honouring rules imposed on the adoption, they sent a friend to the hospital to collect her.

Over the years, they have learned two things about Welch's mother and father, which they told Welch while she was visiting last Christmas.

Her father was not from the South, so far as they knew, but he was a musician; in fact, he was a drummer.

And, from an address they had been given, it appeared that her mother, the college student in New York, may have grown up in the mountains of North Carolina.

Ken and Mitzie Welch already had a daughter, Julie, who'd been born in 1961.

She and Welch are close, a graphic designer living in California and also teaching improvisational comedy.

Julie's birth was difficult, and Mitzie wasn't eager to go through another pregnancy.

According to Welch, when they approached adoption agencies "the agencies said no dice because they were entertainers."

Ken Welch had been a performer since childhood, in Kansas.

He had begun piano lessons at four, but the teacher soon told his parents she couldn't do more with him until his hands were large enough to span an octave.

"I couldn't reach an octave on a piano, but I could on an accordion," he says.

By the time he was seven, he was tap dancing and playing the accordion throughout "Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa, the remains of the old RKO circuit," he says.

Eventually, he attended Carnegie Tech, now Carnegie Mellon, in Pittsburgh, where he studied painting. He met Mitzie at an audition.

FROM KANSAS TO NEW YORK

They moved to New York separately. She sold handbags at a store on Broadway, and made twenty-five dollars on Sundays singing in the choir at Norman Vincent Peale's church.

She auditioned for Benny Goodman and got the job, but she had only a few weeks in which to learn Goodman's repertoire. She ended up writing lyrics on the palms of her hands and on her fingernails.

As the comedy team Ken and Mitzie Welch, they appeared in clubs where Lenny Bruce also performed. Bob Newhart was once their opening act. They had their most public success on the Tonight Show, when Jack Paar was the host.

They performed a slowed-down version of I Got Rhythm. Mitzie faced the audience and sang, and Ken stood with his back against hers, playing the accordion.

By the time the Welches adopted Gillian, with the help of their doctor, Ken was writing music for television shows, and Mitzie was working in commercials and on Broadway.

When Welch was three, her parents moved to Los Angeles, to write music for Carol Burnett Show.

As a little girl, Welch came home from school one day weeping because she had been reprimanded in art class for making a black outline around snow.

CARTER FAMILY

At Westland, the students gathered every week to sing folk songs and Carter Family songs, with Welch accompanying them on guitar.

"On the tapes from the period, she sounds the same as she does now, except that her voice is higher," Rawlings said.

Welch's parents bought songbooks for her, and, sitting by herself in her room, playing guitar, she made her way through them.

When she got to the end she wrote songs of her own, "about ducks and things," David said.

"Like a kid who writes poems, and they go in a drawer."

Welch attended a high school called Crossroads, "where I get way into ceramics and art and stay hours after school building things and they let me," she said.

"And I run like crazy - cross-country and track."

Welch made the all-state team for the mile and was invited to run in the national trials.

"But if I'd gone I'd have got my ass kicked," she said.

"They were in Texas, and I didn't do well in hot weather. Really, my sport was cross-country. I discovered the longer the race, the more I moved up in the field. I don't run that fast - I just go, very rhythmic. I'm endurance."

Welch said that her favourite English teacher had gone to Princeton, so she applied, without telling him. But when he heard that she'd been accepted he told her that she wouldn't be happy there, and she went to the University of California at Santa Cruz

BERKLEE COLLEGE

In 1990, a friend of Welch's parents wrote a recommendation for her to the Berklee College of Music, in Boston. It was the same college where famed West Texas panhandle producer and musician Lloyd Maines sent his youngest daughter Natalie en route to her role as singer for superstar trio the Dixie Chicks.

"Her parents make the situation happen. But on the other hand it's in Boston, so they don't have that much control," Rawlings said.

"All right. So Gill goes to Boston, and of course she's useless at Berklee."

"It's a jazz school."

"And she's a primitive."

"I felt like a Martian," she said. "I'm out of my peer group. I have no friends. I'm in my room listening to brother-team music."

"One of her teachers looks at the way she makes a C chord and says, 'If you keep doing that you'll be a cripple in a few years.' But she stays for two years and majors in songwriting, and the songwriting program is just starting to flower."

Welch and Rawlings began going out with each other at Berklee.

They met in a hallway, while waiting to audition for the country-band class.

At Berklee, Welch overcame her shyness about performing, she said, "because you had to. In every class, you had to do things in front of about twenty people."

STEAM IRON IN GUITAR TOWN

When school was over, Welch said, "I looked at my record collection and saw that all the music I loved had been made in Nashville - Bill Monroe, Dylan, Stanley Brothers, Neil Young - so I moved there. Not ever thinking I was thirty years too late."

For a while, Welch made beds and cleaned bathrooms at a bed-and-breakfast.

"That was a good job for me," she said.

"You can't listen to the stereo, because you're moving from one room to another, and the vacuum is too loud; there's no entertainment, so you have to provide it. I would write. Plus, I had a forty-minute drive there and back, and I have always been able to write when I'm driving, if I'm by myself." She brought home tablecloths and napkins to iron. She and Rawlings lived in the same apartment building, and sometimes, if Rawlings needed money, he did some ironing, too.

PUBLISHING DEAL

In 1994, Welch signed a publishing deal, and then devoted herself to trying to get a record contract.

Her publisher sent tapes of her and Rawlings to Jerry Moss, at Almo Sounds, in Los Angeles, and in 1995 her manager Denise Stiff - also manager of Alison Krauss - went to L.A. to see him.

Welch played for him in his office. Behind his desk, Moss began quietly singing harmony with her. When Stiff heard him, she thought, Those are David's parts. Jerry's heard them on the tapes, and if he's singing them he's missing them.

She never again felt uncertain about Rawlings's role.

Even so, once Welch and Rawlings were signed to a recording contract the question they heard most often was "Who are you going to get to play guitar on your record?"

WRITER'S NIGHTS

Welch and Rawlings swung from the ropes on the creative and highly competitive writer's night circuit in Nashville.

"How you'd find them is look in the paper," she said. "If it wasn't a highbrow place, the ad simply said 'Writer's Night,' and if it was a highbrow place you'd see the names of all the writers booked.

"One night, I walked around with the cigar box collecting the money, because there was no one at the door, which says something about how determined I was - do you think our show was worth the money?"

At the end of a side street was a small, two-story brick building with a little sign that said Pub of Love.

"Tuesday nights," Welch said. "Probably forty people."

Down by the river, near the Ryman Auditorium, where the Grand Ole Opry was the Silver Dollar Saloon.

"One time I came down here to a writer's night by myself," Welch said.

"November '93. Dave has travelled back to New England for Thanksgiving, and I'm here by myself. This night, I'm late, and the guy grudgingly puts me on the list.

'We've got a lot of people,' he says. He works his way through the writers. I'm waiting. The crowd's thinning out. Once the writers play, they leave, and whoever came to see them, their friends, they leave, too. Finally, it gets to be about eleven-thirty, maybe coming up to midnight. The bartender and me are left. The guy says to me, as he's leaving, 'Will you turn off the sound system when you're done?'

"Most of the things that might have been discouraging have their pathetic and funny sides, too," Welch said. "Usually, it was all right. No one kicked me out. They would listen, but they would always say, 'Don't you have any happy love songs?'"

BLUEBIRD CAFÉ

Welch fondly recalled her days at the famed Green Hills venue Bluebird Café - locale for the movie Thing Called Love in which Pam Tillis, Trisha Yearwood, Kevin Welch and Dale Watson had cameo roles. "We're heading for the Bluebird Café, where you'll laugh when you see it, because it's in a strip mall," Welch said.

"The Bluebird was very important in our coming-up," Welch said. "It was the scene of where I got signed for my writing deal, actually."

She moved a step to the side and pointed. "Right there," she said. "Over by the cigarette machine."

Welch is bemused by controversy of being daughter of musicians in Los Angeles and claims she has no right to play music regarded as reserved for people who grew up in poverty or, anyway, among labourers.

Welch's narratives are accounts of resignation, misfortune, or torment. Her characters include itinerant labourers, solitary wanderers, misfits, poor people plagued at every turn by trouble, repentant figures, outlaws, criminals, soldiers, a moonshiner, a farm girl, a reckless beauty queen, a love-wrecked woman, a drug addict, and a child.

She is sympathetic to outcasts who appeal to God despite knowing from experience that there isn't likely to be any. Their theology is ardent and literal. They are given to picturing themselves meeting their families in Heaven, where mysteries too deep to comprehend will finally be explained.

HEMINGWAY

Rawlings compares Welch to Ernest Hemingway.

"You read The Old Man and the Sea, and you like it," he says.

"Then you find out that not only is the man who wrote it not a commercial fisherman, he isn't even a Cuban. Do you not like it now?"

Welch says that the first time she heard bluegrass music she felt stirred as she never had by any other music. She has said that it makes no sense that she plays relic music deeply influenced by a part of the country she did not live in until she was grown. More than a few of her songs have the harsh modal structure of the ballads sung in the mountains of North Carolina in the nineteenth century.

Her reaction reflects having sung folk songs as a girl and played the guitar at school, and a pleasure that surfaced when she was reminded of it - a sense memory, that is.

In any case, to explain the anomaly posed by the difference between her upbringing and her tastes she has told interviewers, somewhat sheepishly, that she has wondered whose blood runs through her veins.

She has even considered which musicians might have passed through New York in 1967.

She has imagined her father as Bill Monroe or Levon Helm, the drummer in the Band, who was from Arkansas.

After all, the first instrument she played was the drums, and now and then she still plays them.

LOSE THE GUITAR PLAYER

Welch decided that if she wanted a career as a songwriter she would have to make the weekly rounds of songwriters' nights at the clubs.

Rawlings was working with other musicians, but he agreed to go with her.

"Just sort of to accompany me because you have to sit there and wait, and it's not a good time," she said.

When they began arranging her songs, they realised that, "instead of the Stanley Brothers or the Blue Sky Boys, or any of the brother acts we've listened to - lead singers and a tenor - we have a difference," Welch said.

"We have a lead singer and a baritone singer."

Because Welch was intent on establishing herself as a songwriter, and because their arrangement began informally, and Rawlings was playing with other people anyway, she says it didn't occur to them to name the duet; they performed simply as Gillian Welch.

Almost from the start, people tried to separate them. After about a year, Welch found a manager, Denise Stiff.

"I must have had a hundred people say to me, 'Lose the guitar player,'" Stiff said. Rawlings draws too much attention from Welch, they said. Or, he plays twenty notes where ten will do. Or, with a band behind her she could be the next Alison Krauss

FENDER ESQUIRE

In 1997, Rawlings bought a Fender Esquire, an electric guitar, and wanted to use it, so he and Welch got a friend to play drums, and Welch played the electric bass and they began playing clubs as the Esquires.

They never announced their performances, and not many people came.

They played songs by Neil Young and the Rolling Stones and others and Rawlings sang most of them.

The Esquires brought to their gigs a complete book of Dylan songs, and once during each evening the audience was allowed to shout out a number.

Welch and Rawlings picked one, then turned to the corresponding page in the Dylan book and played whatever song was on that page. Rawlings says that, for the most part, their playing was "a two on a scale of ten." They last played in 2002.

"The Esquires' big gig was New Year's, because no one would ever hire me and Dave to play New Year's," Welch said. "So we were always free."

top / back to diary