Grant's Ramblins

Grant Peeples and the Roland Stowne Interview

The Roland Stowne interview with Grant took place over several days in early January. This is the first installment. Roland Stowne is an independent writer and critic living in Canada with a dog.

RS: So it’s a new year. Word has it you have a new record in the works.

GP: Yea, I’m raking songs into a pile right now.

RS: You’re in the selection process?

GP: It’s more culling than selecting. Separating wheat from chaff. That kinda thing.

RS: You want to share any details? Does the record have a name yet?

GP: “Pawnshop” would appear to be the name of the new record. I was going to call it “The Bush-Madof Economy.” But my friend, Donna Mavity, suggested Pawnshop. I was able to cut the title down to its core meaning and context: “Pawnshop.” Same thing as “The Bush-Madoff Economy.” Just less words.

RS: You sound angry. Still. I figured you’d be happy about the new Presidency.

GP: Sure, I’m pleased Obama won. But Bush hocked the soul of our country. Sold our blood at that seedy looking plasma place between the porn store and the homeless shelter. Took the money and bought hookers and crack, threw an eight year sleep-over party for all his pals. The question now: Will a 700 billion dollar French kiss give a hard-on to the same economy Bush gave a 7 trillion dollar butt buggering to?

RS: Aside from your vulgarity, you might be accused of hyperbole here, you know. All that being as it may, will the new record---any of the songs---offer any solutions?

GP: Are you kidding? Gimme a break. It’s a record, man. I’m just an artist. Any time a work of art offers any ‘solution’ other than pure unadulterated revolution, it’s not a work of art, it’s….I don’t know. What? Toilet paper, maybe?

RS: All of this sounds confrontational, bleak and negative. Don’t people want to hear some songs that aren’t so sad?

GP: They’re not sad. They’re hopeless.

RS: Happy, then. Don’t they want to hear some happy songs?

GP: Sure they want to. Some do, at least. The same ones who were buying properties with adjustable rate mortgages and trying to flip them and make a hundred percent profit. So, I’m not of a mind that they deserve happy songs. And I don’t really care about those people. I can’t relate to them, really. Besides, I try to keep my songs about what is. As it is. Not as it oughtta be. If people want Paxil or Wellbutrin in their ear canals, then they're gonna have to buy somebody else’s record. I got nothing for them. Sorry.

RS: So---excuse my smile, but: do you think you can make a living doing this?

GP: Truthfully, I think I’m pissing up a rope. But I don’t have any choice. I got a big mirror in my bathroom that I stare into every morning when I’m checking out the wear and tear. The mirror don’t lie, you know. And I’ve got peers and a small cadre of
fans--- “in the high-one, low-two figures,” as Jack Saunders would say---who would know immediately if I tried to bullshit some songs past the gates.

RS: The gates? Are you talking about Nashville?

GP: I'm just talking about what I would see---“who” I would see---in that mirror, if I started painting houses instead of painting pictures of the glass houses I see crashing down around us. But, yea. I go to Nashville pretty much every month.

RS: Why? I mean, don’t take this the wrong way, but do you really think you are writing songs for contemporary country radio?

GP: You’re damn right I do. Just because a song doesn’t sound like something you hear on the radio, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t belong there. And it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t relate to the people who are listening to that radio. I don’t want YOU to take THIS the wrong way, but…Nashville needs me.

RS: (laughs) You must know that you are sounding….grandiose. Are you not worried about how this is going to read? That you are going to sound full of yourself?

GP: Grandiose? I drove a thousand miles round trip this week for a $200 gig in Miami. Slept in the back of my Honda Fit. I bought that car because it gets 35 miles to the gallon. That’s what I’m doing these days. Grandiose?

RS: Okay. How about ‘self-important’?

GP: What difference does it make? Does any of that negate the truth of what I’m trying to tell you? Look. Taylor Swift sucks. I'd walk naked through the lobby of BMI in my cowboy boots saying that. Hell, LOTS of people know it. But it’s like the King has no clothes. With the noted exception of Jamey Johnson, I haven't heard any ball-clank coming out of Nashville in decades. Every now and then they cough out a flag-waving-bomb-the-bastards song that keeps them feeling like they’re not a bunch of pussies. But other than that, its insipid piss-water they’re squeezing out of the tube.

RS: You DO know that this interview is going to be read by millions of people.

GP: I can't help that. That’s your gig. Me? I’ve sold less than two thousand records in my career. Bob Marley said: “A hungry man is a dangerous man". The library shelves are full of poetry that doesn’t get read. That ain’t poetry’s fault. That’s the poet’s fault. I accept responsibility for my audience, which is small. But you have to accept responsibility for yours, which is inflated.

RS: I’m not sure where you are really going with all that. Regardless, some will say that with this kind of talk you are burning a bridge.

GP: I like the " scuttle-the-ship " metaphor better. John Conquest has a thing he tags on to every mailing he sends out: “You’re not getting older. The music really does suck.” I mean, have you LISTENED to contemporary country radio lately?

RS: Yes, but have you seen how that format has grown and developed. Many have seen this as a Big Tent?

RS: What I’ve seen is how the sausage gets made in Nashville. A couple of middle-class, suburbanite, college dweebs who’ve never shot dope or spent a night in jail or had their truck repossessed meet for a ‘writing appointment’ on music row at 10:00 a.m. They show up in Banana Republic dress, with their Blackberries and laptops and their Starbucks Coffee in hand, all ready to write a song. And they do. Invariably the song is about sweet tea and front porches and trains and tractors and a bunch of anachronistic bullshit that they have zero relationship to or with. But then some fuzzy-nut pretty-boy with a pitch corrector and a cowboy hat that hasn’t got any sweat stains on it records the song. And then a bunch people who haven’t breathed through their noses in something like ten years stop sipping coffee out of Styrofoam cups at a focus group in Missouri long enough to all agree that the song sounds just like the shit they’ve been hearing on the radio, and so they give it a thumbs up and the song makes it into the rotation and, eventually, the charts.

RS: So…you’ve taken it upon yourself to change the model?

GP: When a snake bites you, what’s the first thing you do?

RS: What do you mean?

GP: I mean: What’s the first thing you do?

RS: How about, seek medical attention???

GP: Wrong. First thing you do is you kill the snake. Jack Saunders taught me that.

RS: You’re just sounding bitter. Not just sounding, but even your body language is
aggressive, agitated. One might wonder if maybe this isn’t a good path for you.

GP: Bitter? I got lots of character defects, man. But begrudgement ain't one of them. Don’t confuse begrudgement with nausea. A month or so back there was Kid Rock, Jessica Simpson, Jewel and that Hootie the Blowfish guy all in the top 20 of the country music charts. A Big Tent? I don’t think so. Nashville’s a blind hog searching for an acorn.

RS: And you think you fit the bill? You're that acorn?

GP: There is no bill to fit, man. They’re clueless. Tom Hutchison got me a meeting with one of the heavies at ASCAP a few months ago. The guy leaned back in his chair and put his sissy pointy-toed shoes up on the desk and said: “Twenty-five years ago we were making music for the guys who were in bars at midnight. Now we’re making music for women who are driving to work at 8:00 in the morning.” That’s such utter bullshit. How do they let that guy keep a job?

RS: What he said didn’t even raise an eyebrow from you? Didn’t you even scratch your head a little? Think about the market he was talking about?

GP: The market? Look. The modus operandi of Nashville is to give people exactly what they liked last month. Just follow that scenario out for a decade or so. See what you got. For years it actually sorta worked because you had people crawling out of corners. People like Waylon and Mickey Newberry and Cash and Hag and Billy Joe Shaver and Gary Stewart. That kept things fresh, made the horizon worth looking at. And there were DJs and program directors that played those guys’ songs because the songs spoke to them. But Nashville and Clear Channel have got all the rat holes stuffed now. That gives them control over the bland fruit cocktail they’re making. There are no DJs any more. There’s no difference between what they call a DJ and that woman that talks to me on my GPS. “Re-cal-cu-late-ing.” And program directors are just spitting out the bile that focus groups regurgitate. It’s incestuous, and if you look at the eyes and teeth of the babies they’re making, you can tell it. The breeding stock’s gone soft. The mutations are grotesque.

RS: And you want in? You want in that scene that you describe?

GP: I told you. I just want to help. I’ve got an anti-venom. And the truth is --- I’m a bit positive about the future. If not for me, for the industry.

RS: And what’s that positive out-look based on?

GP: The fact that we are probably headed for a world depression. And that the record industry was asleep at the wheel when the internet happened, and so now they are really hurting because of it. Then there’s the fact that Clear Channel is laying off people right and left because revenue is off so much. In other words, all the MBA models are melting in the heat of the kitchen. This is all positive. I wrote a song in the 90s called: “What This Country Needs Is A Good Depression.” Maybe that’s the real summation of what I’m saying.

RS: Now you are sounding mean-spirited. You have to know that.

GP: Why do you say that? Can’t you see that I just feel bad for the people who switch on their radios and have to listen Walmart-McDonalds music. I heard this hotshot Nashville music publisher say a couple of years ago: “If I’m listening to a song, I don’t want to have to turn down the TV and tell the kids to shut up so that I can figure out what the song is about.” That’s the mentality that’s at the switch.

RS: And your point?

GP: The point is if I was writing songs like you hear on contemporary country radio, why would I be taking them to Nashville? They’ve got thousands of those songs in catalogs, and thousands more being written every week. That’d be like hauling coal to Newcastle. If I’m going to drive up there and show what I got, it’s gotta be something they ain’t seen or heard. Or what’s the point? When somebody’s drowning you don’t hand them a glass of water.

RS: Haul coal to Newcastle? Beat your head against the wall? Piss up a rope? Blind hogs searching for acorns. Scuttling ships. You sound like a man in need of a metaphor.

GP: Well, you got that fucking right. At least.

Grant's review of 2008 - December 30, 2008

Roland Stowne Interview - January 25, 2009