Endless Rejection

Lucinda Williams in the 80s

I love Lucinda Williams. I was semi-obsessed from 1988 through the 90s. But I've listened to - and very much enjoyed - each of her albums.

I also enjoyed reading her recent memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You. It’s great. It’s incredibly raw and doesn’t hold back. It’s funny and fascinating, but it’s also very uncomfortable at times. She describes abuse in various forms, sexual assault and shocking violence. It’s a very powerful book.¹

I suppose I could try to write a book review, but I’ll spare you that. My review would be very positive, telling you to go read it now. That is not, however, what I want to write about. As usual, I want to write about the music business: a story of endless rejection.

After spending time in the Houston area, Williams set out for Los Angeles in the early 80s. She was embraced by the L.A. club scene, in my opinion one of the most vibrant local music scenes of all time. Punk cross-pollinated with country, funk, and glam rock to produce some of the most interesting groups and artists of all time: X, The Blasters, Los Lobos, Dwight Yoakam, Blood on the Saddle, Gun Club, The Dream Syndicate, the list goes on and on.

She met some people in the music business who helped her cut demos and shop to labels. One of the guys is David Hirshland, who is still an executive I’ve encountered numerous times professionally. Another was Greg Sowders from The Long Ryders (there’s another one), whom she married for a short time. I’ve known Greg for years.

Every single label in Los Angeles and Nashville passed on her, and always for the same reason: She was too rock for country, and too country for rock. Eventually she caught the ear of an executive at Columbia Records who offered to pay all her living expenses for six months while she cut a demo for Columbia’s consideration. She made a very expensive demo with high-profiled session players. Columbia ended up passing, same reason given.

Then Hirshland shopped the Columbia demo to every label that had already passed on her once, and they all passed on her again. Too rock for country. Too country for rock. End of the road.

That’s when the story gets interesting (at least for my geeky brain). By then, 1988, Lucinda was a popular L.A. club act, and her Columbia demo had made the rounds to the point where it is circulating outside the label offices. College radio stations started to play it, and an underground buzz developed. Rough Trade Records received the tape and reached out to Lucinda directly. She knew the label, understood the opportunity, and agreed to make a record on the initial phone call. The self-titled album (her third after two obscure Folkways releases) was recorded and released within six months. I heard it and fell in love with it the week it came out in the fall of 1988.

In a convoluted way, the tape went viral. I understand that sort of vitality because I used to inhabit that world. Young hipster music fans are always looking for something to lift up and champion. When a person with influence talks about a band, people listen and then they tell others. Within the limited network of connected people, it could happen in a day. The next level would be somebody writing about it in a ‘zine or talking about it on college radio. That’s how bands used to light the spark that led to actual popularity. Viral, no Internet required.

Perhaps the mainstream music business wasn’t ready to mess with the rock and country formulae that worked; but the audience was. Labels passed because they didn’t know the market, or believed that one didn’t exist. The market found the music as it moved from influencer to influencer. Maybe somebody at the label without power heard Lucinda’s demo and thought it was great, but their jackoff boss didn’t get it. That happened every day in label land, and for that matter it still does. Then the person without power dubs the tape, sneaks it out the door, and plays it for their roommates. The roommates get it, and they dub their own copy. It travels. Eventually it ends up on Geoff Travis’s desk, and Lucinda finally has a record deal that makes sense.

The Rough Trade story is great, but things got messy. Without going deep into it, she went from label to label in a deeply frustrating process that coincided with the painful breakup with a longtime collaborator, Gurf Morlix. She claims that Gurf won’t speak to her to this day. She tried to make amends, but he wasn’t interested. I know enough about inter-band dynamics to know that is dark.

Now that Lucinda’s genre, whatever you want to call it (and yes, I’m good with the term Americana) is so well-established and mainstream adjacent, it’s wild to think how far we’ve come in 30-odd years. I’ve always had a taste for a mix of country and rock n’ roll. I sat on my dad’s knee and listened to Sweetheart of the Rodeo and Music From Big Pink. The first album I bought with my own money was Eagles Greatest Hits. I’ve loved all sorts of music, but that’s a sound I’ve loved since I could understand what I was hearing.

Considering the way things work now, it is so wild that so many people could miss an artist that great. Go back and listen to that self-titled album from 1988. It is great, front-to-back. Every song is amazing. The fact that it took a British guy completely outside the U.S. country and rock business to hear it is wild. My 21-year-old ears heard it and loved it instantly. I worked in a record store and played it because I loved everything on Rough Trade. I was shocked when I realized it was kind of a country record. But it made me love the label more, and the artist instantly. It’s one of my favorite musical memories of some of my favorite music, and every single label in Los Angeles passed on it because it didn’t fit in a fucking box. Incredible.

1. I “read” the unabridged audiobook, read by the author. Read is in quotes, because my wife doesn’t consider listening to audiobooks to be reading. But I disagree, especially because I sometimes have the physical book and the audio book and I read whichever format is handy. Lucinda’s audiobook is really special because she has a that awesome drawl, but also because she often recites her lyrics as poetry. She really gets into her recent songs, and almost raps them in meter. They’re so musical, it’s almost like some sort of wildly creative remix of the songs.