When you think of the top tier of truly great soul singers, the names that come quickly to mind are Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Sam and Dave. The list has two qualities that are immediately striking: everyone is black, and all came from the same generation, one that started singing sometime in the 1950s.
John Hiatt is a great soul singer. Though he is somewhat younger and considerably whiter, Hiatt, along with Van Morrison, is one of a mysteriously fading breed: the white soul singer. Hiatt possesses one of those sawdust and smoke kind of voices seemingly anointed to sing soul.
“I don’t know about anointed,” said Hiatt, with a rich chuckle in an interview this week. “I think if you want to call it fate, or whatever the hell – I just feel like it was something I was kind of born to do. I don’t mean it to sound like I am some kind of brilliant genius. I just mean I would be doing this, whether it was professionally or not – I’d be writing songs and singing, even if it was just in my backyard to my friends or just to my family. I love it.”
His songwriting career, at its outset, was inspired by a little girl named Beth Ann. It was 1963, Hiatt was 11 years old, and his friend had a big crush on Beth Ann. Hiatt had just begun playing guitar, so at his friend’s request, he wrote a song in her honor and performed it at a party.
“Beth-Ann was the kind of girl who was rather precocious and well-developed in certain places, if you know what I mean,” Hiatt said in an earlier interview with the Guardian newspaper. “She had the attention of all twelve-year-old boys, so I wrote a song about her….My referrals to her considerable developments were unmistakable. Her boyfriend, who was already at high school, a big guy, a football player, an enormous fellow in the eyes of twelve year old boys – even if he probably only was fourteen – was also at the party. Afterwards he came backstage and punched my lights out.”
Hiatt would experience much harder knocks before he was even a teenager, as both his father and his oldest brother died. He threw himself fully into music. Looking back, Hiatt marvels at that time of his life.
“I was fortunate to come up in a time where there was this sort of renaissance of music that just kind of exploded within a 15-year period of the 50s and early 60s where things just went bonkers, you know, with all this music,” Hiatt said. “Teenage America, we had just never heard that before…I mean, you had everything, from rock and roll bands, young white kids across the country, regional rock, to soul music from Memphis, Georgia, Motown, from Muscle Shoals, then the English rock bands, then the Beach Boys out in California. It was like the whole nation and the whole world was making this unbelievable music…we were just swept up in that time.”
At the age of 18 – after hearing a surpassingly strange record called 650 Area Code on which Nashville country pickers played Beatles songs – Hiatt packed up his Corvair and drove south to Music City. He received a job with a publishing company as a songwriter for $25 a week and would write 250 songs over the next five years.
“If I’d been a country songwriter, I’d a probably learned a lot more, and quicker, but I was kind of a round peg in a square hole,” Hiatt said. “But I learned a lot…and I fell in love with Nashville pretty much immediately. It was a whole other world. It was only 300 miles south of Indianapolis, but culturally it was just completely different.”
He wouldn’t become renowned for another 20 years, when in late 80s his albums Slow Turning and Bringing the Family established Hiatt as both a songwriter and soul singer to be reckoned with. His song “Thing Called Love” was a bonafide hit for Bonnie Raitt in 1989. He has since been nominated several times for Grammy Awards and has become recognized as what the LA Times described as “…one of rock’s most astute singer-songwriters of the last 40 years.” In September, he will release his 21st studio album, Mystic Pinball.
The songs, Hiatt said, just keep coming, something for which he is deeply thankful.
“Yeah man, when I get one in the boat, I am outside raising up my hands, going whatever force delivers that kind of thing I am extremely grateful, thank you,” he said. “It’s hard to have a bad day and be grateful at the same time. And I’ve had enough fricking bad days.”
“You know, man, it’s a beautiful life,” he said. “I wake up in the morning, I go ‘Man, whoever is running the show here, thanks for another day.’ I shouldn’t have been alive this long, according to a doctor I saw when I was about 32. He said, ‘You know if you keep up your current lifestyle, you probably aren’t going to make 40.’ And at the time I was so miserable I thought, well, that’s about all I can handle. So here I am 60 years old, so I look at is I’ve had 28 years of gravy, pretty much, as Raymond Carver called it in one of his poems. In fact, the poem is called ‘Gravy.’”
Hiatt’s characters are often like those from a Carver short story, often mired in brokenness, heart-worn yet oddly hopeful. He said his writing is influenced not only by his musical idols – the aforementioned soul singers – and not only by books, but by the found poetry of daily life.
“You pick up stuff so many places,” Hiatt said. “I am in Cincinnati right now, and I took a walk, and you know just sitting around drinking coffee and sitting on a bench and there are people walking by and you overhear things – two homeless guys were talking about their respective baseball teams, just real passionate, one was a Red Sox fan, talking about this that and the other thing, this World Series, that World Series. And I’m sitting there thinking, man, these guys know a lot about baseball. It was like, man, that is a whole other world.”
John Hiatt plays Saint Rocke Sept. 4. $60. 8 p.m.
