An Evening with Big Head Todd & The Monsters, Volume-1

From: Southwest Stages
Length: 58:23

An Evening of Music and Interviews with Big Head Todd & the Monsters, recorded live at the Historic Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, NM. Read the full description.

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Playing: An Evening with Big Head Todd & The Monsters, Volume-1
From: Southwest Stages

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The Historic Lensic Theater is just off the plaza in the heart of Santa Fe, NM. This program features live music and an interview with Guy Clark by Southwest Stages guest host Luther Watts. This program first aired on Southwest Stages 4th year of programming in the Fall of 2007.

Songwriting legend Guy Clark doesn't merely compose songs; he projects images and characters with the kind of hands-on care and respect of a literary master. Clark works slowly and with strict attention to detail, and has produced an impressive collection of timeless gems, leaving very little waste behind. The emotional level of his work, as well as the admiration and esteem of his peers, consistently transcends sales figures and musical genres. Using everyday language to construct extraordinary songs for more than 35 years, Clark continues to be the type of songwriter whom young artists study and seasoned writers, as well discriminating listeners, revere.

Born in Monahans, Texas, on November 6, 1941, Clark grew up in a home where the gift of a pocketknife was a rite of passage and poetry was read aloud. At age 16 he moved to Rockport, on the Texas Gulf Coast. Instructed by his father’s law partner, he learned to play on a $12 Mexican guitar and the first songs he learned were mostly in Spanish.

Moving to Houston, Clark began his career during the “folk scare” of the 1960s. Fascinated by Texas blues legends like Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins and steeped in the cultural sauce piquante of his border state, he played traditional folk tunes on the same Austin-Houston club circuit as Townes Van Zandt and Jerry Jeff Walker. “It was pretty ‘Bob Dylan’ in the beginning,” Clark said. “Nobody was really writing.” Eventually, Clark would draw on these roots to firebrand his own fiddle-friendly and bluesy folk music, see it embraced as country and emerge as a songwriting icon for connoisseurs of the art.

Moving to San Francisco in the late 1960s, as social unrest was erupting through racial and generational fissures, Clark worked briefly in a guitar shop, returned to Houston for a short time, and then moved to the Los Angeles area, where he found work building guitars in the Dopyera Brothers’ Dobro factory and signed a publishing agreement with RCA’s Sunbury Music before pulling up stakes and relocating to Nashville in 1971.

The following year, country-folk singer-songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker, then newly ensconced in Austin, released an eponymous album featuring the Clark composition “L.A. Freeway,” which became an FM radio hit. In 1973, Walker released Viva! Terlingua, recorded live in a Texas dance hall and including Clark’s ballad “Desperados Waiting for a Train.” As much as any others, these two Clark songs may arguably be said to have set the tone for a musical revolution that was first known as progressive country. By 1975, many of the revolutionaries would be defined as the Outlaws. Like the Bakersfield sound of the 1960s, the new sounds were a reaction to the formulaic rigidity and paternalism of Nashville's record producers and label executives.

In this alternative musical world of the late 1960s, inspired by the storytelling poems of Robert Frost and Stephen Vincent Benet, Clark began to write what he knew “with a pencil and a big eraser.” “L. A. Freeway,” for example, blueprints his fish-out-of-water experience in Los Angeles. “Desperados Waiting for a Train” is based on his memory of an oilfield worker who was a resident of his grandmother’s hotel. Like almost all his songs, then and now, these two early masterpieces are expressions of personal memory and experience, further characterized by words that have a melody all their own.

Clark’s move to Music City, one of three cities where Sunbury had offices and where his pal Mickey Newbury would make him welcome, proved fortuitous. Clark and his wife, Susanna, would become the axis for a groundbreaking fraternity of singer-songwriters for whom Nashville felt like “Paris in the ‘20s.” Among them were Newbury, Van Zandt, Rodney Crowell, Billy Joe Shaver, Steve Earle, Dave Loggins and David Allen Coe. Bonded by their egalitarianism, the troupe’s favored sidewalk café was the Clark’s dining room table, where they gathered frequently for “guitar pulls” and show-and-tell song swapping sessions, and where they celebrated their successes and facetiously threatened to kill whoever had presented the best new song. Susanna Clark, a talented painter, tossed her brushes aside for awhile, joined the invasion and began writing hit songs herself.

In 1975, after using his big eraser on his first try at cutting an album, Clark made his recording debut on RCA Records with Old No. l, ten critically applauded originals built to last, including “L. A. Freeway,” “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” “Texas, l947,” “Instant Coffee Blues,” “Rita Ballou,” “She Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” “Let Him Roll,” “A Nickel for the Fiddler,” “That Old Time Feeling” and “Like a Coat From the Cold.” On the cover, the songwriter is pictured with his wife’s painting of his chambray “work shirt,” customary attire emblematic of his values. During the next 20 years, Clark would continue to record albums that worked like a stun gun on other artists in search of new songs.

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This program features an hour of Music with Big Head Todd & the Monsters with special guest Hazel Miller, recorded live in February of 2006 at the Historic Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, NM. The Historic Lensic Theater is just off the plaza in the heart of Santa Fe, NM. The show features great live music and interviews with the band by Southwest Stages' host John Strader. This program first aired on Southwest Stages 3rd year of programming in the Fall of 2006.
BIG HEAD TODD AND THE MONSTERS - Though his band has racked up seven studio albums and countless miles since he first picked up a guitar as a Colorado teen, Big Head Todd and The Monsters front man Todd Park Mohr still uses the word “discovery” when he talks about writing songs. He says of “Blue Sky,” from the group’s forthcoming album, All the Love You Need: “We befriended this guy who’s in research and development for NASA, and he asked us to come up with a song for their launches. But I’m not the kind of person who can say, ‘Okay, I’ll write you a song about a particular topic.’ A few months later, though, I discovered a piece of music I knew would be great; I just sort of fell upon it.”

More than anything, it’s Mohr’s excavation of his imagination that continues to drive Big Head Todd and The Monsters – singer-guitarist Mohr, bassist-singer Rob Squires, drummer-singer Brian Nevin and keyboardist-guitarist-singer Jeremy Lawton. The fact is, BHTM could have begun resting on their laurels back in 1993, when their Top 10 singles “Bittersweet,” “Broken Hearted Savior,” “Circle” and “It’s Alright” pushed the album Sister Sweetly to platinum certification. However, Mohr says, “I’ve fought throughout our career not to be a one-trick pony, to be the kind of band that has depth and diversity in its catalogue. I’m a fan of this band, and I’m constantly looking forward to what comes next.”

Asked how All the Love You Need – produced by Grammy winner David Bianco (Tom Petty, Mick Jagger, AC/DC) – departs from the band’s last studio album, 2004’s Crimes of Passion, for instance, Mohr begins, “There’s a punk-rock element.” His assessment is unexpected considering the disc’s expansive melodies, diverse arrangements and sophisticated wordplay. “It isn’t so much the angst or anger of it,” he clarifies, “but a rhythmic aggressiveness, especially on songs like ‘Spanish Highway’ and ‘Fortune Teller’ and definitely ‘Beautiful Rain.’ I’ve always loved the spirit of punk rock.” He pauses, then deadpans: “I guess you could call those tracks ‘punk-rock epic ballads.’”

The title track, too, finds Mohr challenging himself, venturing into uncharted thematic waters. He diverges from the traditional love song with the tale of a woman who takes him by the hand and says, “Let me let you in on a secret/ You’ve already got all the love you’re needing/ In your heart, in your mind, in your imagination/ You’ve already got all the love you need.”

This rather revolutionary notion was inspired by Mexican writer Don Miguel Ángel Ruiz. Mohr explains: “In his book The Mastery of Love, he imagines a magic kitchen, where you have all the ingredients to make anything you want. It’s a metaphor for our inability to see what we have and have faith in it. There’s so much love in our hearts to give and receive but we just aren’t willing to believe it or act on it. That’s a really powerful idea.”

Mohr is particularly fond of Spanish art and literature. “It tends to be very dramatic and romantic,” he illuminates. “There’s a tremendous emphasis on death and tragedy and this classic macho outlook.” “Spanish Highway” is among the more personal outings on All the Love You Need. Written while he was mourning the death of his mother, the song returns to the image of an empty runway. “It’s about life’s departures,” he says. “The plane has flown off and you’re left standing there alone.” “Spanish highway, driving back to what belongs to you, longs for you,” Mohr sings of the aftermath of loss.

He informs that Bruce Springsteen, whose work with The E Street Band has surely influenced Big Head Todd and The Monsters, has himself been influenced by the richness of Spanish culture and storytelling. Coincidentally, the narrative of the standout All the Love You Need track “Fortune Teller” came to Mohr in a dream obliquely related to Springsteen. “It was the vibe of his early stuff, running around in Jersey, to bars and pool halls with this friend of his, this poet who was so in love with one of Bruce’s girlfriends that he took the rap for her after she killed her abusive husband. The dream was so vivid,” he relates. “I wrote the song from the poet character’s point of view.”

Mohr stresses the involvement of producer David Bianco (who, in another bit of serendipity, recorded Springsteen’s tour for Darkness on the Edge of Town) in the creation of “Fortune Teller.” “We really benefited from David’s musical vocabulary on this record,” he attests. “He has a great feel for the mechanics of songwriting and arrangements. One of the records he did that sold us on working with him was Tom Petty’s Wildflowers. It has that sound where you just hear a band playing but with this heightened sense – when you close your eyes you can see the musicians playing together live. He doesn’t pile on the sounds; he just brings out the essence of what’s there.”

The essence of Big Head Todd and The Monsters – a rootsy, emotionally direct variety of rock ’n’ roll that lends itself particularly well to a live setting – has been winning fans since Mohr, Rob Squires and Brian Nevin started playing together in high school (Jeremy Lawton joined in 2004). Needless to say, the three never expected to be in the same band at this late date, but, as Mohr points out, “It was a really fortunate combination of musical personalities, and we’re still partners in every sense of the word.”

The band spent seven years developing their chemistry and amassing a following, boosted significantly by the independent releases Another Mayberry (1989) and Midnight Radio (1990), before being “discovered” by the listening public at large with 1993’s Sister Sweetly. After a major-label stint (Sister Sweetly, 1994’s Stratagem, 1997’s Beautiful World), during which the trio increasingly found itself frustrated artistically, they reclaimed their independent status (2001’s Riviera, 2004’s Crimes of Passion). “If it were not for our ability to do things for ourselves, we would have disappeared a long time ago,” Mohr allows.

Among the chief perks of independence is, of course, the songwriter’s freedom to pursue his muse, but it also enables a uniquely committed relationship with BHTM’s fans. “We love playing music for people,” Mohr states matter-of-factly, “and we don’t need a record company standing between us and the fans. We got rid of the middleman and we’re still here and we’re doing great business.”

Much of that business involves touring. BHTM calibrates carefully the number of dates they perform each year (among them their annual throw-down at Denver’s Red Rocks and yearly New Year’s Eve blowout) to make sure everyone’s happy – not least of all themselves. “There was a period in my life where I was on tour nine months of the year,” Mohr reveals. “It felt endless; it just wore me down. I was a very unhappy person. Now, we play about 35 dates a year, plus a lot of festival shows, and we really enjoy it. I do like traveling. For 20 years I’ve watched the country go by. It’s a magnificent place, and I feel very lucky to know it as well as I do and to have made fans and friends all over. That’s the way it should be.”

The band is so devoted to its fans, in fact, that they’ve logged three fan excursions, two cruises to the Caribbean and a land-lovers jaunt to Hawaii. “We play a bunch of shows, and we never play the same song twice, which we all love,” Mohr says. “We don’t make any money off the trips, but we have a blast and there’s really no better way to get to know your fans.”

Still, for Big Head Todd and The Monsters, remaining connected to their audience means taking creative risks and inviting their longtime followers to grow alongside them while also welcoming new fans into the fold. “We’re never going to be one of those bands that relies on their hits,” Mohr says. “I think All the Love You Need is the best record we’ve ever done. I’m enjoying being a performer and a songwriter more than I ever have, and I think that’s the payoff for making new music, discovering something fresh and interesting and ultimately, worthy of our fans.”

(Biography) from www.bigheadtodd.com

Todd Park Mohr (Guitars, Vocals)
Rob Squires (Bass, Vocals)
Brian Nevin (Drums, Vocals)
Jeremy Lawton (Keyboards, Steel Guitars, Vocals)

Playing: An Evening with Big Head Todd & The Monsters, Volume-1
From: Southwest Stages