Rodney Crowell
The Houston Kid (Sugar Hill)
The stories I had hidden all those years were the blood and bone of it. To get it down, to tell it again, to make sense of something—by god just once—to be real in the world, without lies or evasions or sweet talking nonsense.
Dorothy Allison wrote those lines in the preface to Trash, her first collection of stories, but they could just as easily have come from country singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell. Or they might have inspired Crowell, who was reading Allison’s wrenching autobiographical novel Bastard Out of Carolina while he was making The Houston Kid, his just-released musical memoir about growing up the only child of sharecropper parents amid the squalor and violence of Houston’s East End.
“I had to strip away everything,” Crowell says, running a hand through his graying thatch on a snowy night back in January. “I had to make this record myself, out of my own pocket. I’m just a poor, white-trash kid from Houston. When a record company pours buckets of money on my head, I start thinking, ‘I’m the indentured servant. I’ve got to start doing this or that for the man.’ I had to get that out of my system before I could get down to doing the thing that I’d been wanting to do for a long time.”
Crowell’s story after he left Houston and came to Nashville in 1972 has been widely documented. There are his years as a hit songwriter, his stint in Emmylou Harris’ Hot Band, his own string of critically acclaimed albums, his 12-year musical and marital partnership with Rosanne Cash, plus his taste of stardom when his 1988 album Diamonds and Dirt (newly reissued by Sony/Legacy with five bonus tracks) became the first record ever to chart five No. 1 country singles.
The side of Crowell’s life people didn’t know about, though, were the painful childhood stories he’d kept locked away inside and didn’t get around to telling until, pushing 50 and no longer an industry darling, he made The Houston Kid. The result, a sonically expansive record that spans Anglo-pop, Texas songster balladry, and neo-rockabilly bop, is a stark yet sweeping song cycle that conveys much the same raw-boned truth and intensity as Allison’s Trash, the clutch of stories that formed the backbone of her epochal Bastard.
I[t] wasn’t [exactly] me...or really any of the people who’d been there, but it had the feel, the shit-kicking anger and grief of my life. It wasn’t that whiny voice, but it had the drawl, and it had, too, the joy and pride I sometimes felt in me and mine.
No less than those cited at the beginning of this piece, these lines, also from the preface to Allison’s Trash, strike at the heart of The Houston Kid—most obviously Crowell’s use of a composite, semi-fictitious narrative voice to tell its stories. Which isn’t to say there aren’t plenty of his own experiences in the songs on the record. That’s Crowell’s liquored-up father beating his mother in “The Rock of My Soul” all right, but that’s not Rodney who ends up being a chip off the old block and serving time in a Texas state prison. In other words, The Houston Kid functions as something of a microcosm, a window into an oppressive yet at times noble corner of the world that could be almost anywhere that cruelty and privation threaten to but can’t quite crush the human spirit.
“The narration is autobiographical in the sense that it’s in the first person,” Crowell explains. “But that narration comes as much or more from the environment I grew up in. Take ‘The Rock of My Soul.’ The beginning of that narration is truly my experience, but at a certain point, I needed to up the dramatic stakes, and that’s where I annexed a couple of kids I knew from six houses down the street who lived under even more violent circumstances than I did. They didn’t have music like I did and, like father like son, those kids did become petty criminals.”
A somewhat dicier example is “U Don’t Know How Much I Hate U,” an ambivalent kiss-off that finds the Houston kid dressing down his ex-wife. The song has already had people wondering if Rodney is talking about his real-life ex Rosanne Cash—including, according to Crowell, Rosanne herself. “[She] heard that song and called me and said, ‘Did you write that about me?’ I said, ‘No, not at all. You’re the mother of my children. I don’t have that kind of venom. That was an adopted character stance.’
“There again I put myself in the mental framework of one of the kids from down the street and tried to say what he, out of his dysfunctional, violent upbringing, would have said. There was a lot of misplaced anger, and a lot of alcohol and violence, where I grew up.”
It’s hard enough to open old wounds the way Crowell does on much of The Houston Kid, but what’s maybe even trickier is to do so without romanticizing your pain, indulging in self-pity or self-mythologizing, or just coming off as self-conscious. Mainly, Crowell sidesteps these pitfalls by singing with a mostly flat affect, as well as by casting his songs in taut, lean settings and with an unvarnished sonic finish. But it also didn’t hurt having his friend and coproducer Steuart Smith there to tell him when he was about to step in it.
Not to be counted out here either is Crowell’s gift for finding the humanity inherent in the most desperate or absurd situations. It’s a predilection that suggests that, as much as he couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there, the east side of Houston remains dear to his heart.
“I’m predisposed to being tenderly attached to what happened there,” Crowell admits. “I’m writing a memoir right now [The House of Norvic Street], and through that process I’ve found that what I’m really the most drawn to is the humor. For example, my crazy drunk uncles who are always taking down telephone poles in their car and miraculously walking away from it only to put another car in the ditch. You could look at them like, ‘Oh, those crazy tragic figures,’ you know? ‘Who are these insane idiots?’ Or you could look at them as God’s chosen people with a notion about what they’re trying to accomplish with 17 cents in their pockets. Seventeen cents in their pockets and a whole lot of big ideas. To me, there’s a humor in that that’s just so poignant.”
Even J.W., Crowell’s abusive father, the man he rather conflictedly calls “the rock of my soul,” comes off as having a certain dignity. J.W. doesn’t just elicit his son’s sympathy; he also seems to be someone with whom Rodney identifies. “Oh, I identify with him, all right,” he responds when asked about it. “No question about it.”
Crowell also received his earliest musical education from his father, a man he considered a musical savant who knew and could play every country or folk song he heard, and with whose band Rodney apprenticed as an 11-year-old drummer. Nevertheless, it was the way Crowell’s mother Cauzette, a.k.a. “Miss Cozy,” exulted in words—in the convergence, meaning be damned, of sound and sense—that instilled in her son a passion for the sort of plainspoken yet poetic language that oozes from The Houston Kid, especially from the freewheeling “Telephone Road” and the Corso- and Kerouac-inspired “Highway 17.”
“She bounced words around the way people used to bounce beach balls around at rock concerts,” Crowell says of his mother, who died just a little over two years ago. “And she would watch ’em, and I would sit and watch her bounce words, watch her entertain herself with the sound of words. I don’t think she was necessarily as enthralled with what they meant as with how they sounded.”
Crowell claims that it was his mother’s love of language, along with his father’s encyclopedic musical knowledge, that predisposed him to become a songwriter. Yet without question, his greatest musical epiphany came that summer morning when Rodney, on the verge of turning 6, heard Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” on the car radio while heading out on a predawn fishing trip with his father and grandfather. It’s an experience Crowell reanimates in “I Walk the Line (Revisited),” a track from The Houston Kid that incorporates lyrics from Cash’s original and boasts a vocal cameo from the Man in Black himself.
Crowell says he always figured he’d write about the experience, but in prose form. Yet after carrying around the idea in his head for years, he finally wrote it up as the verses to a song. The lyrics for the chorus, however, didn’t come until much later, and then only by accident.
“I had this melody for the chorus,” Crowell recalls. “I was sitting around tinkering with this dumb-ass Music Row chorus. ‘Oh, the first time I heard Johnny Cash sing when I was a kid, yadda yadda yadda.’ Then I thought, ‘Here my verses have integrity, and I’m trying to turn this into bullshit. I ain’t never gonna get this.’ Then one day it dawned on me that the meter of my chorus melody and the words to the original song worked perfectly. So I picked up the phone and called John and said, ‘We just wrote a song together and you didn’t have to do nothing.’ And he’s sitting on the other end of the line, and there’s this long silence.”
Cash, who is also the grandfather of Rodney’s kids, eventually warmed up to the idea enough to join him on the recording—a performance that amply confirms Crowell’s instincts about writing the song to begin with. And even if the song is more carefree and upbeat than much of The Houston Kid, it still comes from much the same place as the rest of the album—the need, as Allison puts it, “to get it down, to tell it again, to make sense of something—by god just once.”
