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When Nick Lowe started out in rock 'n' roll, it was with a tennis racket in front of the mirror miming to Eddie Cochran records.
He wasn't thinking about making the top 20 or cashing royalty checks. As a kid, he just wanted to get on a stage and show off in front of people by playing the elemental music he loved — the golden-era stuff of such greats as Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers:
Mr. Lowe, English and all grown-up at 36, is still preoccupied with messing around" with American rock, blues, and country music. (He'll share his pure pop distillations at 8 p m. Saturday at the Uptown Theatre. Tickets cost $12.50 plus a service charge.)
In a recent telephone interview, Mr. Lowe philosophized on the state of pop music, discussed the trials of record-making with his friend Elvis Costello and told the story behind the dissolution of the late, lamented Rockpile — the band that died when he and Dave Edmunds stopped having fun.
Not that Mr. Lowe hasn't been busy enough since then. He and his band, Cowboy Outfit — ex-Rumour guitarist Martin Belmont, ex-Sinceros drummer Bobby Irwin and former Ace and Squeeze keyboardist Paul Carrack — have spent much of the last two years playing for Mr. Lowe's admirers around the world (including growing audiences in Australia and New Zealand). Mr. Lowe wouldn't have it any other way.
"I get the most out of playing live, airing out the songs," he said. "Some of my contemporaries think I'm crazy, but I look at Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash. The older they get — it's like when you hear a young person singing the blues, it sounds ridiculous. But Muddy Waters, rest his soul, the older he got singing 'Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl,' it sounded better and better."
Mr. Lowe formed his first group, Sounds 4 Plus 1, in 1963. That was followed in short order by a stint in Kippington Lodge, which in a final effort to avoid oblivion changed its name in 1969 to Brinsley Schwarz (the name of the group's guitarist).
That band's roots-rock and early r&b approach laid the foundation for the English "pub-rock" movement in the early 1970s. As lead singer and bassist, Mr. Lowe wrote most of Brinsley's more than 60 recorded songs.
In 1977, he hooked up with Mr. Edmunds, a 1950s rock-archetype singer/guitarist, to form Rockpile. They were joined by Billy Bremner on guitar and drummer Terry Williams (now with Dire Straits) in a churning, melodic rock 'n' roll band that caused fans' hearts to flutter and feet to move.
Unable to record under the Rockpile name for contractual reasons, they played together on Mr. Lowe and Mr. Edmunds' solo albums until the 1980 release of Seconds of Pleasure, the first and only LP to appear under the band's name. Little more than a year later, they called it quits.
"After awhile, the fun went out of it," Mr. Lowe said. "When you take that away from a band, all you've got is three chords which audiences have heard 5 million times before.
"If you play very structured music, like Yes, it doesn't matter if you hate the bass player. With our thing, so much of it was the feeling between ourselves. When that ended ... It looked like we could have cracked in America, but we just stopped enjoying it."
For all his devotion to music, Mr. Lowe isn't one to ignore its negatives. In fact. he can view the trappings of his profession with bracing realism.
"Pop music is nonsense," he said. "It's piffle, as we all know really. The beat is the exciting thing, what makes you go crazy. Anyone who gets influenced by what some spotty pop singer is saying, they're crazy to think that."
He's also quite discerning — although some might say old-fashioned — when it comes to his personal taste in music.
"It's worrisome in a way that so many musicians, especially over here (in America), aren't aware of their roots. The synthesizer seems to have taken over completely. It's a shame. I don't care for it at all.
"It's a complete losing battle, of course. There's no going back for it. You have the specter of perfectly competent musicians making plenty of garbage. Pop music now is so antiseptic and tame. On the rare occasion that I hear my records on the radio, they seem out of place."
But Mr. Lowe doesn't get depressed over the counterproductive realities that he sees in the music business.
"I don't lose one minute of sleep over this," he said. "I shall continue doing what I do whatever happens. I like the way it is actually. I feel like I'm the sort of voice of your regular rock 'n' roll fan. Besides, I think that in order to be a huge superstar nowadays, you've got to have something more than musical talent.
"It used to be — when there was a lot of money floating around — that indolent, horrid rock-star people could afford to hide from real life and do their drugs and employ people to keep the real world away.
"Now you've got to keep on the case. Look at Bruce [Springsteen] or my mate Huey [Lewis, who produced the Lowe-penned chestnut "I Knew the Bride (When She Used to Rock 'n' Roll)" on Mr. Lowe's current LP, The Rose of England]. They're at it all the time. I value my own private time."
Behind the scenes, Mr. Lowe is a prolific record producer. He has helped to shape the sonic output of many artists, including the Pretenders; John Hiatt; his ex-wife, Carlene Carter; and the Fabulous Thunderbirds.
"I think I'm very good at getting musicians that are much better than me to do what I tell them," he said. "I can hear stuff in my head, and I can explain it to people, and they seem to listen and understand."
His most notable partnership has been with Elvis Costello, for whom he produced six consecutive albums (1977-81) of diverse, stimulating rock 'n' roll angst.
Mr. Lowe said that he would produce another album for Mr. Costello and his band, the Attractions, in the near future. He hopes to instill the same vivacity and urgency that the partnership so successfully transferred to vinyl in the past.
"He's a notorious mind-changer," Mr. Lowe said of Mr. Costello. "For all I know, he might have gone off the idea. But I imagine that's why he's asked me to record with him again. I genuinely try to make him not so careful, make him keep his rough vocals. I like to hear him wailing a bit, which embarrasses him. I always tried to get him to sound soulful."
Mr. Lowe has fond memories of working with Mr. Costello on the song "Watching the Detectives."
"I liked it because that was the last track I did with Elvis — even though it was quite an early one — that he did exactly what he was told. After that, he sussed me out a bit when I tried to tell him what to do."
Mr. Lowe's last chart success was the 1979 single "Cruel to be Kind," which reached No 12. Although he wouldn't mind another hit record, he feels more than adequately sustained by his small, but dedicated, audience.
"I wouldn't like to be in that position — to have that enormous pressure of selling 18 million of your new record and everyone saying you're on the way out," he said. 'I'm really glad I'm not Boy George. The position he's in, people get sort of worn out on him. I feel like sort of an observer and not part of the music business. I like it like that."
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