Getting to the heart of Chris Knight's songs

By Grant Alden
http://www.nodepression.com/
October 1, 2008

This is all about Chris Knight and why you should listen to his new album, the one called Heart Of Stone, and why it may be the best album he's ever made even if nobody much cares at this point. But it's a long story, and it digresses some.

It begins here: After sixteen months in Los Angeles, I flew to Nashville blind and rented an apartment in Tusculum, at the edge of town, from an old man named Guy P. He had lost his wife to cancer, and so he looked for people to talk to, but he warned me that he heard poorly and I should take care not to creep up behind him because he'd think I was Charley, and he might kill me. He was a big man, a powerful man, even in his 70s.

I lived in one of two apartments above a three-car garage in his back yard. He'd built the garage to work on his RVs and his trucks and whatever else kept him sane, and the original apartment had been meant to house his son and his son's new wife, only the boy had a heart attack and a stroke, and the new wife, a nurse, left.

As we got to know each other a little, I heard a few stories, mostly having to do with his capacity for rage – doors he'd splintered at the Veterans' Administration and his attempts at suicide, which included gnawing through an IV. I never complained when he found it necessary to completely disassemble a pickup truck beneath my bedroom one night, swearing at each bolt as it added another bruise to his hands.

Does this make clear that I liked him, though I knew on a bad day he might do me harm? I did. He tried hard to be a good man, and managed best he could by his lights. Another story: He left his wallet at the bank, and a customer followed him until she got his attention and gave it back. So he bought her dinner, insisted on it, even though, as Guy P. put it, she was colored.

He is, in short, exactly the sort of fellow who dwells in Chris Knight's songs: Angry, conflicted, self-destructive, and unexpectedly self-aware.

Guy P.'s rules for his tenants were simple: No loud parties, no wimmin stayin' overnight. Since I knew nobody, this did not seem to be a problem. Later, when his insurance company had reason to look at the place and told him it could house only one tenant, I managed – as we sometimes tell the story, nearly ten years later – to get married ahead of the eviction notice.

A few days after Maggie was born five and a half years ago, I ran into Guy at Lowe's, but we did not speak; rather, I walked the other way, and did not intrude. He was in a wheelchair, having finally yielded both feet to diabetes, as he had yielded his sanity to two tours in Vietnam. That first stint, he said, involved a detachment to the CIA, who employed him as the first man out of the helicopter door – he'd been a paratrooper, a farm boy from Pennsylvania – when rescuing downed pilots in Cambodia, where the U.S. officially was not dropping bombs.

The second song on Knight's new album, "Hell Ain't Half Full," isn't about that. But it could be.

When Guy P. built his son's apartment, he had apparently forgotten to leave room to run the plumbing. Which was only a problem if one forgot that the living room was a step up so as to accommodate all those pipes. Somehow that step made that space, which was the Nashville office of No Depression for some years, not entirely stable.

And that's how I came to hear Chris Knight, see. One of the publicists I trusted, one of the few freelancers who chose clients on merit not money, had sent me a four-song cassette tape of his demos. Part of what came to be called The Trailer Tapes, part of which finally came out, fixed up some by Ray Kennedy, in 2007.

The tape fell on the floor, or the whole stack of them did, and for whatever reason – because it had the right business card on it, I suppose – I put it in, and went back to work. And then my head spun back, for there was this song: "If I Were You", a sharply written morality play, a short story in song form, a gut-wrenching bit of unflinching social commentary. It was and is an amazing piece of work.

If not a blessing, for it is not entirely clear that Chris Knight has written or will write another song that good. Or, maybe, having heard that, we now expect it of him and are less receptive to anything else, and can no longer be surprised by the eloquent bleakness of his vision.

Anyhow, Knight had played at the Bluebird and had come to the attention of Frank Liddell, who signed him to a publishing deal, and then Liddell came to have an A&R job at Decca, so he signed Knight, which might have been a mistake for all parties because Chris Knight is one hell of a songwriter, but surely to goodness nobody ever thought he'd be a country star.

At least nobody paying attention. Which included Liddell, but there they both were in the belly of the beast taking the best shot they could aim.

So Decca sent out this four-song cassette to acquaint writers with Chris Knight, whose songs split the difference between John Prine and Steve Earle, and then, in 1998, released a self-titled album which Liddell co-produced but which somehow didn't include Knight's best song, "If I Were You." It didn't fit, no matter how they recorded it, Liddell told me, and I believed him. Still do. But.

(But...they should have made an album on which that song fit. Only then it would have been too much John Prine and not enough...whatever was selling that season. Ah, well.)

It isn't a bad album, but it has a jaunty, uptempo beat that is clearly at odds with what the songs are saying, and all the guitars say everything's going to be OK while the words make it pretty clear that's not the case.

Apparently they thought Chris Knight could be a country star. They shot a video for the lead single, "It Ain't Easy Being Me". They saddled him with a band of strangers, and one night I drove down Nolensville Road to the old Jack's Guitar Bar to hear that band walk through a bunch of songs that only Chris cared about, and it was clear he was uncomfortable and even more clear that he hadn't learned yet how to work with a band. Especially a band of strangers.

(I note while fact-checking that Allmusic.com lists a 1994 album, apparently titled Chris Knight And the Midnight Gypsies, on the SPV label, so maybe he had led a band before, maybe he arrived in Nashville a little less rough around the edges than he seemed the day we had lunch at Brown's Diner.)

Which isn't to say Knight hasn't gotten enough country cuts to make it worth keeping a mailbox: Randy Travis, Blake Shelton, Ty Herndon, Montgomery Gentry, and the Great Divide.

Fine.

Knight didn't make any more albums for Decca, which folded back into MCA. He made two for Dualtone (the first one has a version of "If I Were You" on it), and has made three more (counting the The Trailer Tapes, which I guess was technically made for or at least paid for by Decca) for Drifter's Church.

They're all here, sprawled on my desk, along with a couple bootlegs of demos that went around Nashville because I wasn't the only one who thought he was somehow special, that his songs could explode at any good moment.

For a long time I thought Chris Knight was my James Talley, immortalized by Peter Guralnick in his irreplaceable Lost Highway. Talley made some albums for Capitol, came to the attention of Jimmy Carter, and played one of Carter's inaugural balls. I always felt like the Talley piece lodged in Lost Highway was a crumb left behind for those of us stubborn enough to follow it, that it was the one place where Talley would be remembered and rediscovered.

And so when we published the first anthology of stories from ND, I insisted (against no complaint) that Knight be there. Because I want him to be remembered.

All of which is a too-long preface, too much explanation for a website when the whole game here is quickly to get you to listen to his new album, to remind you that Heart Of Stone is in the marketplace and that Chris Knight is still worth listening to. Increasingly worth listening to.

Heart Of Stone pairs Knight again with long-ago Georgia Satellite Dan Baird, who produced (or co-produced) both Dualtone albums. I would have bet Knight would ultimately settle into being an acoustic songwriter, closer to John Prine than a rocker like "Copperhead Road"-era Steve Earle, but as with many things, I was wrong.

His songs are still far too grim for country radio, but for the first time he sounds really comfortable singing in front of the kind of rocking country band which is now the norm. (It is, incidentally, a first-cabin band, with Mike McAdam and Baird on guitars, Michael Grande on drums, Keith Christopher on bass and Tammy Rogers on various strings and backup vocals.) You could hear some of these songs on country radio in other hands, played a little faster with happier guitars chiming in.

Slipped in at the ninth track is a song called "Maria", which goes back to those Trailer Tapes. It hasn't changed a bit – hasn't been revisited, rewritten, reimagined – though it's better played, and fits quite comfortably among his current work.

You'll have to slip past the opening track, a perfunctory bit of brunt bragging about the road warrior's life ("Homesick Gypsy," one of the songs you might imagine as Tim McGraw album cut). "Hell Ain't Half Full," a co-write with Gary Nicholson (who produced the last one, Enough Rope), is exactly the kind of scarred emotional territory Knight draws far too well:

Get up in the morning
Fall out of bed
Go down to the basement
Cook up a little meth
All the young folks love it
Coming back for more
Ain't it good to be working
Got your foot in the door.

Well, now. That seems a pretty solid liberal critique, something the Bottle Rockets might have cut a decade ago.

And then the next stanza:

They chased God and Jesus
Out of our schools
And everybody's living
By their own set of rules
Yeah, they're preaching on the corner
Nothing good to say
Better think of something boy
Come the judgment day.

Hard to know what Knight believes, how much of that is simply a very good character study. Either way, it's a fascinating song. A hell of a song. A hellbound train wreck of a song.

One more lyrical fragment, this from the title track:

Well I got drunk with Daddy just the other night
He said he was glad to see I turned out all right
I hear people saying like father like son
I don't think about it much but I worry about it some.

That last line, more than the broken cars and broken hearts which populate all of Knight's albums...that last line...yeah. I live on the other side of Kentucky from Slaughters, where Knight is from, and I'm still and always will be a foreigner in these parts. But that last line, I know that guy. Most of the men I know have spent their whole adult lives trying not to be that guy, one way or another.

Nah, one more stanza, which might serve as my momentary mantra:

Well I used to run from the past
But the world got to spinning so fast
I run from the future now
I run as fast as I can
Trying to be a simple man
I just want to slow down.