LARRY SCHWARTZ
His stepgrandfather ran fruit stands, sold bootleg liquor and drove a big, red International truck. Steve Young would accompany him to the Atlanta Farmers Market to buy produce.
On one trip, they breakfasted on grits, biscuits “and the works” in a little cafe in a town called Villa Rica. It was there that he slipped a coin in a jukebox and, while his grandfather was flirting with a waitress, first heard Elvis Presley sing Lawdy Miss Clawdy.
He’s still in awe of that song. It is among 11 tracks on his new album, Primal Young, that features an old photograph on its cover of his burly grandfather, Milton Arlin Horsley, in front of Horsley’s Fruit Stand, Carrolton, Georgia.
The album was recorded in Encino, California. But the project was coordinated by Melbourne-based Shock Records, which specialises in American roots music.
A spare masterpiece, he sees it as a significant departure from his critically acclaimed 1993 album, Switchblades of Love. It is also somewhat different from the album of songs set in the American west he’d intended to record when approached by Shock.
“I tried to give them something that I thought they wanted,” he says, “going back to old forms, in a sense. The roots of things, so to speak. Some Appalachian influence and stuff like that …
” I think that this album reflects the old, poor, real south that I knew growing up. A lot of it is gone (but) it still exists to some extent.”
He covers Sometimes I Dream from Merle Haggard, Tom T. Hall’s Clayton Delaney, Frankie Miller’s folksy Blackland Farmer, and Worker Song, a track he associates with one of his favorite performers, Scottish folk singer Dick Gaughan. Scotland is a Land is one of his own songs that reflects
his interest in his Celtic forebears and a longstanding passion for 18thcentury poet Robert Burns.
“In high school I was the only kid who loved literature,” he says, “and I loved Burns and I used to study those dialects. I love the music and the spirit of Ireland and Scotland.”
On his fourth visit here, Young has a strong following in Australia, nowhere more intense than in Melbourne. He attributes it largely to support by local musician and writer Keith Glass, who has written that Young is “truly one of the great singers, guitar pickers and songwriters alive today”.
Lucinda Willliams has rated him “in a league with Dylan and Hank Williams” as a songwriter and said he “sings like an angel”.
At 57, Young is probably best remembered for his early 1970s song Seven Bridges Road, which has been covered by the Eagles, Eddy Arnold, Rita Coolidge, Joan Baez, Firehouse, Ricochet and Ian Matthews, whose version he particularly admires.
Hank Williams Junior made famous his Montgomery in the Rain. “That song intrigues me. I wonder, `How did I write this …”‘
Waylon Jennings made Lonesome On’ry and Mean his own. “That became a very big part of his commercial image,” he says of Jennings. “That song to me was a bit of a joke, actually.”
Young was raised in Georgia, Alabama and Texas, but travelled north to Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, at the time of the folk boom. “I had never really been out of the south and it was quite a shock to encounter New York City,” he says.
“It was quite an educational and sometimes bewildering experience. I mean, in places like Boston, I couldn’t even understand what they were saying. “
After a stint back in the south, he headed off to California and recorded with the illfated Tim Hardin, Van Dyke Parks, Gene Clark, Chris Hillman, James Burton, Bernie Leadon and Gram Parsons.
“I always got the sense from Gram … that sort of tragic, frail, southern thing,” he says.”At that particular moment in time, I was trying to not do any drugs. I was trying to clean up. And Gram was very involved in it. So, really, I put a little distance there, you know.”
The Los Angelesbased musician sees himself as a wandering recluse. He has a strong interest in the American Indian heritage on his father’s side and their respect for the land. He hasn’t partaken of drugs or liquor in many a year, but delights in saying: “I’m not really a Buddhist because I
don’t want to give Buddhism a bad name.”
Young insists he has no misgivings about his failure to capture the limelight.
“I think I created my own obscurity in a sense,” he says. “My theory is, looking back at it all, is that it is my unconscious creation, that I did not really want fame.”
The British critic, Michael Gray, recently described Young as “one of the essential links between rebellious country music of the 1960s and ’70s and the alternative country sweep of today”.
He sees the irony in being described in terms of contemporary tags, from roots to alternative country. “Yeah, I think it’s kind of funny,” he concedes. “I mean, from my point of view, I’ve just done my thing and then other people kind of thought out what it is.
“I have my ideals about it and I see that it was a combination of American, southern, old, traditional music. It’s country, folk, blues, gospel, even early rock. People say I was some sort of pioneer in this or that or the other. But, I mean, you just kind of do your thing.”
The Age, 26th of November 1999
Larry Schwartz Writer 