May
2
Nashville, U.S.A., revisiting…
Sure, it was nice sharing “Do It Again” with the folks at the Nashville Film Festival – and particularly meeting a 14-year-old music savant from Chattanooga named Isaac – but my best memory of Music City had to be hanging with Ray Kennedy.
He’s the master producer who formed one half of the Twangtrust with Steve Earle. The Trust produced, along with a slew of Lucinda Williams and Earle records, one of my favorite albums of all time, 6 String Drag’s “High Hat”. Ray’s also a great musician in his own right with a wonderful, Merle Haggard of a growl. I’d love to hear him record another solo record.
I first connected with Ray because he co-produced the last Ray Davies record, “Working Man’s Cafe,” and I was so pleased with the results. What’s his skill? To me, it boils down to Ray having a way of making everybody sound natural. There’s certainly a wonderful crunch to his sound, at times, but there are other records he’s worked on that are almost bare. Great producers, I think, are like great editors. They’re self-confident enough that they don’t need to leave thick fingerprints over a song. (Unlike, say, Mitchell Froom or Jeff Lynne.) In a way, the great producer is there to make us forget about the process and focus entirely on the artist
Pretty early on, I figured I wouldn’t have time to meet Ray in person. The film festivals are pretty demanding, with mixing-and-mingling, attempts to catch particular movies, and the race to the free buffet.
Then it dawned on me. I heard Peter Noone was in town, so I tried to find him. Something seemed delicious about recruiting him to go to see DIA. But I couldn’t get to him. Then I met the extremely hairy Oak Ridge Boy-slash-artist named William Lee Golden in the hospitality tent. I’m not really a fan of his music or his art, which is kind of a cross between Leroy Neiman and Bob Timberlake, but it seemed amusing to go up to him, stare in his eyes, and tell him how much I admired his work, which I did. I kind of wanted to tell my friends back in Boston I’d met an Oak Ridge Boy.
But it showed me how absurd it was to meet Golden and not get out to Ray’s studio. I called and he said, come on by.
My pal Liesl, a fantastic singer who worked on the Full Frame staff, lives in Nashville and said she could swing by in her truck and take me over to Ray’s studio.
The first thing you notice when you walk in is the wall of guitars. He’s got a 1959 Fender Jazz Bass proto-type that was the first four-string used by the Everly Brothers, a 1961 Les Paul SG purchased from John Fogerty, a 1955 Strat (the second year ever made), a 1951 Fender No Caster (pre-Telecaster), a 1964 Rickenbacker 330 electric 12 string… you get the picture.
He also showed us the 1950 Gibson J-200 that Ray Davies played all over “Working Man’s Cafe.”
Here’s a picture of Ray with the guitar:
Ray also has lots of guns, one of which he let me point at the studio wall. He let us into his “tent,” which is in the middle of the room with the studio controls, and played a promising track by a group called Edens Edge.
I was lucky enough to have Ray come to the screening and he seemed genuinely impressed, which meant a lot to me because I know he wouldn’t have told me he liked the film if he didn’t like it. We went out for a midnight dinner and talked Kinks and family and a bunch of other things. It was great conversation, great sweet potato fries and made me glad I’d stepped away from the festival one night to hang with Ray Kennedy.