At 18 I went out in the world. I thought I knew it all. On that tour I was back in my home state of Maine and making $12, sometimes $15 a night. I thought, man, this is the life. This is it….But if I could go back and find that boy, knowing all the things that would happen to him, I’d tell him, ‘Boy, stay and sing with your family. They’re not going to be there very long. Yeah, you stay home and sing. Be happy in your little town.’
– Dick Curless
I was going to write a blog about Dick Curless – I was going to write a book (well, that’s a little bit of an exaggeration – but I just might some day!), but then a friend of mine sent me this video. It’s pieces from a documentary that Dick’s son-in-law, Bill Chinnock, the other Asbury Park singer-songwriter (as I understand it, Danny Federici and Vinny Lopez started out in his band – but you’ll have to ask Bob Santelli about that), was going to make. The documentary never happened, Bill died in 2007, and as you’ll see, this isn’t even a trailer for the very soulful, not to mention historical film that I’m sure Bill would have made (you wouldn’t believe how extensive the history of country music in Maine is, going back to before the debut of the Grand Ole Opry and incorporating, of course, Hal Lone Pine and Yodeling Betty Cody, parents of the legendary Lenny Breau, whose brother Denny plays on the Dick Curless album that was going to be the occasion for this blog.)
Anyway. As I’m sure you’ll see, much of the video is taken up with the making of the album, and a disproportionate amount of the footage is devoted to an interview Bill did with me at the same studio, Longview Farm, where it had been recorded in 1994. I was just a witness, really – I was there as a fan and to write notes. Jake Guralnick produced, Bob Kempf engineered, Nina Guralnick took pictures, and a very soulful band, led by Duke Levine, with a rhythm section made up of Billy Conway on drums and Mudcat Ward on bass, contributed mightily to the proceedings. But it was Dick, sixty-two at the time and an extraordinary singer whose national hits had never really done justice to his talent, who set the emotional tone for the session, dominated as it was by his almost ethereal conviction that what we were all doing in that room was important.
I’m not going to even try to reproduce my own and everyone else’s feelings here. They come through, I think, in the video, as does Dick’s quiet certitude, his confidence in the musicians, his belief in the enterprise on which we were all embarked. At the same time it became increasingly clear that Dick, who needed to take frequent rests, wasn’t well. There were a number of points in the course of the December session when Dick would announce half-jokingly, “This may be my swan song,” but whether or not we fully believed him (and I don’t think we did), that wasn’t what gave the session either its intensity or its spiritual dimension. That was all Dick. It was the way in which he conveyed his belief in each and every one of us, his unshakeable conviction that there wasn’t a single person in the room who didn’t have something of importance to contribute.
This was all driven home to us by two songs in particular. The first was Dick’s version of “Silent Night,” given a unique twist by Dick’s heartfelt recitation about the selection of the littlest, loneliest, scrawniest Christmas tree (yet another entity whose significance was tied to neither stature nor appearance) on which he got every one of us not just to sing along but to sing along with feeling. (This has never been issued, for better or worse.) On the second, Ivory Joe Hunter’s “Since I Met You Baby” (translated here into “Since I Met You Jesus”), he called for a spiritual offering in the way of a solo from each of the players. This certainly brought the rhythm section up short, but Dick explained that this was always a highlight of his live show, and he had no doubt that every one of them would come up with something both meaningful and worthwhile. “Just give me what’s in there,” Dick coaxed them. “You never know what’s coming out.” “Oh, that’s good,” he would say encouragingly to each of the players in turn, and while the song was actually being recorded, there was at one point a moment of such utter lostness and tranquility that it almost made you want to cry. Even when it was done and everyone was listening to the playback, Dick still was not through. “Oh gosh,” he declared with utter sincerity, “you guys are something else.”
When I sent the finished album to Sam Phillips – well, I talk about it in the video, but here’s what I’ve written about it in my biography of Sam. Sam had loved the Charlie Rich album that we had done a number of years earlier – he had been generous and lavish in his praise. But this was his reaction to Dick’s album when I saw him at the Jerry Lee Lewis 40th Anniversary in Show Business $100 a plate celebration (as it turned out, what you got was a commemorative plate labeled “not suitable for dining” and no food, just a cash bar – and at the end of at least six hours of inspired non-stop entertainment by the honoree himself, some very wrecked people).
“Now did your son, Jake – now tell me the truth now,” Sam said with that teasing repetition that he called upon for the purpose of both orotund declamation and social discourse. “Now, come on, now, you tell me, did your son Jake” – he paused as if to savor the single blunt syllable of the name, then to my utter astonishment lifted me a few inches off the floor in full view of the Jerry Lee Lewis German fan club – “did he really produce that album on Dick Curless?” I tried to swallow my surprise and assent to the proposition. “Well, you know how much I liked that Charlie Rich album?” I nodded mutely. “Well, this is even better!” And while I suppose there could have been any number of ways to take Sam’s statement, from my point of view there couldn’t have been any way to top it.
Dick died just a few months after the session. He was in the hospital for much of that time, and maybe because both Dick and the album itself had come to mean so much to all of us, no one seemed able to come up with a suitable album title. We just couldn’t think of anything that would do justice to its scope, its grandeur, its human vulnerability. A few days before he died, Dick named it himself with a phrase from his beautiful version of Merle Travis’ “I Am a Pilgrim” that could be taken, I suppose, as both its message and his sense of his own life’s journey. He wanted it to be called Traveling Through.
I really am going to write more about Dick Curless some day – it’s a story with some of the same broad application and fragile delicacy (think Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” – that was Dick’s story) as the album. But in the meantime pick up on this video, and listen to the music. Dick Curless: Traveling Through.
L to R: Peter Guralnick, Dick Curless, Jake Guralnick, Nina Guralnick
HOW 'TRAVELING THROUGH’ CAME TO BE
by Jake Guralnick
In 1994, after making the Sleepy LaBeef album “Strange Things Happening,” Maine native Michael ‘Mudcat’ Ward, called me a few times and suggested we get the same team together to record Dick Curless. It is not uncommon that the end of the recording process has an emotional component, not unlike the last day of summer camp— where everyone’s promises to keep in touch are unlikely to be kept. But a few months later, at my job at Rounder Records, when I heard the receptionist announce over the intercom that Dick Curless was on line 5 for owner Ken Irwin, I took it as enough of a sign that I should pick up the call.
Dick was pretending to be after a Merle Travis video that we distributed, and I was pretending to be taking a message for Ken—but our mutual obfuscation was quickly revealed. Dick wanted to make a record, and I asked him to send a demo of the type of stuff he wanted to do. A few days later I received a DAT tape of 5 songs of Dick playing and singing by himself. All I really knew of him was that he was known for his incredible Truck Driving record – “Tombstone Every Mile” – and that he wore an eyepatch. Both were unimpeachably cool credentials—but did not prepare for me the emotional depth of his singing, and his funky, self-taught fingerpicking guitar. A little research revealed that Josh White was his primary musical influence, and that he (mostly) had not played on his own records since early in his career when he recorded for the Event label.
I went to the three Rounder owners, and asked them if I could record Dick Curless. To their eternal credit, there are certain records that Rounder made that never had a chance of turning a profit but that seemed like they were important to do for historical posterity. This was one, and they agreed to a small budget. I wrote Dick a letter outlining how I wanted to produce his record—probably most impressing him that I wanted him to play & sing live on all the tracks. We went back and forth—I wanted to use the rhythm section of Mudcat and the very soulful Billy Conway (best known as the drummer for Morphine) from the Sleepy sessions. I also had recently met Duke Levine—who seemed like the absolute perfect guitarist for this session. Dick agreed to all these players and had only one thing he insisted on: that he bring Denny Breau to play guitar. Denny was the younger brother of Lenny Breau—and they were both the sons of Hal Lone Pine & Betty Cody— Wheeling (West Virginia) Jamboree regulars, RCA recording artists, and an Opry touring act. And Lenny had played in Dick’s band as a teenager. Although, I couldn’t really see where Denny fit in—we had Duke to play lead, and Dick’s incredible acoustic—I agreed, figuring Dick wanted Denny there to make himself more comfortable. Turns out I was wrong—Dick brought Denny because he thought Denny needed it (he was in some sort of rough patch in his personal life), and Denny was more than essential to the sessions.
The engineer for the Sleepy record, Bob Kempf, struck an incredible deal with Long View Farm—a very famous residential studio in North Brookfield, MA where the Rolling Stones had once rehearsed. Amazingly, Dick had played his first professional gig at a Grange Hall in the very same North Brookfield. And when I brought in Tim Bowles, a friend of Duke’s from Worcester, to play steel for a couple of days, it turned out Dick had been friendly with Tim’s father—a singer on the New England circuit with the familiar name of Buck Owens (not THE Buck Owens, but a New England touring act with a coincidental name). We all lived, ate and worked together for a few days—the band scrambling to learn and rehearse the songs in the few takes before Dick’s performance began to flag. I have a running recording of the sessions, and if I listened I’d no doubt hear Dick, after delivering yet another devastating vocal that had us nearly in tears in the control room, saying, “Was that alright, Jake?”