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The album practical leaps off the record rack. In bright, happy colors and in a variety of familiar geometric shapes, the cover beckons like an old friend, but one you can’t place.
Turn the album over and it all comes back. Why it’s those old popmeisters, Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds. Together in this band, Rockpile. Now, where have I heard that name before…
Rockpile has been around in one hazy form or another, for eight years. But the recently released “Seconds of Pleasure” is the first bona fide Rockpile album.
The name first arose in 1972 when English pub rocker Dave Edmunds titled a solo album “Rockpile” and christened his touring band with the same name. But Edmunds soon immersed himself in studio projects and Rockpile faded away.
In 1975 Edmunds joined forces with Lowe (whom he met while producing an album by Lowe’s old group, Brinsley Schwartz) and the name was later revived for Edmunds’ 1977 US tour, with Bad Company. The next year Lowe used it for his “solo” tour. Then Edmunds used it for another “solo” tour. So it went.
To make matters even more confusing, Edmunds and Lowe played and recorded under a variety of other names (including the Disco Brothers, the Tartan Horde and Nick Lowe’s Last Chicken in the Shop), but until “Seconds” never did a Rockpile record grace the record shelves.
Two and a half years ago, when Nick Lowe’s Rockpile opened for Elvis Costello at the Orpheum, I asked Dave Edmunds just what this ubiquitous-but-nebulous Rockpile was anyway.
“It’s a very fluid unit,” he said, with a laugh as he tried to sort out the tangle. “It’s a very loose, comfortable situation. It’s a vehicle that’s available. Nick wanted it this time for this tour. Last year I had an album out, Nick didn’t, so I needed a band.”
Ah, but in 1980 the fluid vehicle has become the solid Rockpile. With “Seconds of Pleasure,” guitarist Dave Edmunds and bassist Nick Lowe chuck their solo careers and, with drummer Terry Williams and guitarist Billy Bremner, become Rockpile, a band that finally releases a record and goes on the road (they’re at the Orpheum Saturday).
Is it time to get serious about this rock ‘n’ roll career business?
“No, we can’t,” says Edmunds, who, with Lowe, was on the phone from Chicago last weekend. “We keep laughing every time we get serious about it.”
Well, is it any different?
“It’s no different at all. Still the four of us.”
Lowe basically agrees. “My last album, a bit of the one before that and Dave’s last three albums (including the soon-to-be-released “Twaing”) have all been Rockpile. But either Dave’s been singing all the tunes or I’ve been singing all the tunes.”
Lowe says he’s considered himself part of Rockpile “for ages” but Edmunds’ contract with Swan Song Records prohibited the group from recording under that name. With Edmunds finally out of that contract, Rockpile blasts off with their melodious, hard-driving pop, shuffling influences from rockabilly to Stax to mid-‘60s rock.
So, finally, Rockpile has gotten down to business. By officially joining forces are Lowe and Edmunds cracking the whip and committing themselves to conquering the pop music world?
“We’re really quite lazy,” says Lowe. “We never rehearse and when we come to do an album we just go in there and just sit around talking for a while until someone decides to pick up a guitar and says, ‘Well better get on with it.’”
Lowe shudders at the thought that he might be considered an established artist. “No, no, no,” he exclaims. It is very easy to feel like the whole world is at your feet if enough people pat you on the back and tell you how great you are. In fact, it’s not true at all. Rod Stewart is established, Elton John is established. I don’t see myself in that sort of bracket and, frankly, I don’t really covet that position.”
Not that he wants to be any kind of antistar. “Obviously, I like people to like what I’m doing. What’s the point in doing it otherwise? I might as well just have a job working at McDonald’s and just play for myself in the evening.”
Still, he wants his options left open. “If I have to make another record I don’t want to be in a position whereby I have to churn out the same sort of stuff because I know it’s going to sell. I like just being able to dip me toe in the water when I fancy it.”
In 1977, as the punk rock explosion of anger and outrage was shaking London, Stiff Records staff producer and pop chameleon Nick Lowe snuck through with a little ditty called “I Love My Label” on Stiff’s first sampler album. With sweet sarcasm dripping from gorgeous, melodic hooks that would do Steve Miller proud. Nick sang, “My label always loves to hear some pretty chords on its records, like these ones/She’s always pleased to hear some of these melodies, so I sing ‘em some.” With one song, Lowe had carved himself out a niche: In the eye of the vitriolic punk hurricane rested a bastion of pure pop.
But don’t call it art. Lowe, who produces Elvis Costello’s records, considers his tunes “garbage music”. “If you approach it as garbage music,” he philosophizes, “in other words, it’s just here today and gone tomorrow, you stand far more chance of coming up with something good. It’s only looking back that something lives on.
“As far as I’m concerned,” he continues, “it’s ideas that are exciting. It’s not the marvelous synthesizer sound or the wonderful spread on the stereo. The average guy in the street doesn’t know anything about whether the bass drum pedal’s squeaking. All he knows is where there’s emotion coming out of the speakers.”
Edmunds concurs. “The premise, or the idea, takes about five seconds. How much time you put into it after that is … well, if you put too much time into it then you lose it.”
Edmunds, a Chuck Berry and James Burton (Everly Brothers guitarist) fan, says, “The best guitar solos ever played were all in 12 bars or maybe less.”
With “My Sweet Lord,” George Harrison wrote a pleasant song and ended up being taken to court for it. Harrison’s melody line was strikingly similar to the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine.” The former Beatle was sued and branded a rock ‘n’ roll thief.
Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds are also thieves, but they’re both proud of it and craftier. It’s mentioned that Lowe might have borrowed a descending line in “Heart” from the Doors’ “Touch Me.”
“I don’t know too much about the Doors, “ he says, trying to be helpful. “That song does sound like you’ve heard it before. That sometimes happens with me. I’d be the first to admit it if I know, but I never…”
Then, perhaps as appeasement, he offers his “When I Write The Book” as “sounding like every Stax number, but none of them.”
Over to Edmunds. Dave, was the guitar line in “Deborah” swiped from the Kinks’ “Victoria?”
“No, I’ve never heard ‘Victoria!’” Edmunds semi-screams. But, hardly one to plead total originality, he quickly volunteers, “I’ll tell you where I nicked the delivery from – ‘My Little Girl,’ the Crickets.”
Lowe’s calling card has been pop irony – he is a master of juxtaposing a bouncy melody with a biting lyric, of marrying an upbeat and innocent musical feel to a suggestive or outrageous sentiment. Last year’s hit “Cruel to be Kind” was essentially light fun, but when Nick sang, “It’s a very, very, very good sign/ You’ve got to be cruel to be kind,” one naturally wondered what degree of cruelty Lowe was hinting at. On “Seconds of Pleasure,” Lowe wrote six songs and seems to have toned down his penchant for ironic twists. (The other six songs were written by people outside the band.)
He agrees. “It’s not as overt anyway. I don’t really think of them in terms like that. It’s as if they pop out, they’re in the song. If they don’t, they’re not.”
It is suggested that perhaps his marriage to Carlene Carter, step-daughter of Johnny Cash and daughter of June Carter, has made him less cynical toward life and love.
“Oh,” says Nick, springing to his own defense. “I’m still extremely cynical about it, but sometimes it’s quite good fun to see if you can actually do a real one, if you know what I mean.”
A genuine, straightforward, non-ironic love song?
“Yeah, as sort of an exercise really. It’s all very well bleating on about pop – ‘Oh, yeah I’m so cool man’ – but it’s sort of like an inverted snobbery.”
Lowe, who says when you’re married “things are different – I can’t get up to all the mischief that I’d like to,” adds that the Cash/Carter family has been “very kind to me.
“Obviously,” he says, “I’m just looking at his from soft of an outsider’s point of view, but if there is such a thing I suppose they’re the royal family of country music and so, I, being English, might as well be a Filipino when it comes to that.”
Still, The Man In Black was impressed by Lowe, and Nick’s “Without Love” is on the latest Cash album. Lowe says Johnny and June spent last Christmas with Carlene and him in London and Cash recorded the song in Nick’s basement studio with Nick and friends. “It was very good fun,” Lowe recalls. “I believe what happened was John took the tape back to Nashville and put onto the mix his guitarist going donk-donka-donk-donka-donk – his stamp – and that was it.”
Both Edmunds and Lowe believe their unpretentious brand of rock ‘n’ roll will weather the changes of the music scene, though Edmunds mentions he was once quite uncertain.
During the mid-‘70s period of flash and glitter, Edmunds says he thought his simpler style of music, rooted in the American rock ‘n’ roll of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, might be too out of touch. But if he was worried once, now he’s just amused. In fact, Edmunds notes that he also thought he also might out fashion when the British invasion hit during the mid-‘60s . “When the Beatles came out, I thought ‘Uh-oh,’ but, you know, that’s just insecurity which you learn to overcome.”
As for goals … when we talked in 1978, Nick Lowe laughed and defined his long term goal this way: “I just want to make my pile and get out.”
Has anything changed?
“Exactly the same now,” he says. “No, really as long as it’s still fun I’ll carry on as long as people want to hear the records I’d like to make.”
Then, unable to dodge the self-deprecating jab, “I’m jolly grateful to even have a job in the music business at the moment the way things are going.”
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