Another Review

[Mimi]

Hi Rudies, just found this on

http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=4342

Music: Flesh and ‘Bones’ Janis Ian
by Gregg Shapiro, 2004-03-10

** Janis Ian at Old Town School of Folk Music, (773) 728-6000, April 25th

At the time that I interviewed Janis Ian in early February of 2004, her live CD, Working Without A Net, was number seven on the Outvoice top 40 album chart of LGBT music. Her previous studio album, God & The FBI, was also a longtime presence on the Outvoice chart. All of that bodes well for her new studio disc Billie’s Bones (Rude Girl/Oh Boy). A Janis Ian concert at the Arie Crown Theater in Chicago was one of the first live music shows I ever attended as a kid and as I was beginning my career in journalism in 1993, Ms. Ian was the first person I ever interviewed. Therefore, it meant a lot to me be able to speak with her again, especially about an album as wonderful as Billie’s Bones.

Gregg Shapiro: Working Without A Net, the live disc you released in 2003 is not your first live set. There was The Bottom Line Encore Collection from 1995, for example. Do you have a fondness for live albums, and if so, what is the attraction?

Janis Ian: It’s the first live album that I’ve released that I had control over that is actually culled from the best shows and the best takes. In that sense, it’s real different from the Remember album that was done over a period of two shows and is out of print, or The Bottom Line Collection, which was recorded at a time when live recording wasn’t anything to brag about. The opportunity to do a live double album that was culled from the best shows we could find was attractive to me. And the opportunity to use that as a bridge, because I hadn’t had an album out in a couple of years, to satisfy the fans who were waiting for Billie’s Bones, was also really attractive to me. Beyond that, I think it’s nice for fans to have a memento of shows that’s as close to the actual shows as possible. That’s the feeling that we were going for.

GS: You have a fascinating record label history, having recorded for Verve, Columbia, and Windham Hill, to mention a few. Both Working Without A Net and your amazing new studio disc Billie’s Bones are on your label Rude Girl, released through John Prine’s Oh Boy Records. With Oh Boy’s incredible roster, do you feel like you have finally found a label on which you feel at home and have a connection?

JI: Yeah. I had the opportunity to go with Oh Boy back in ‘92. We went with Morgan Creek instead because Oh Boy didn’t have anything approaching their (domestic or) international distribution, and it was really important to me to have that international distribution. What we did this time was go with four separate companies. Oh Boy for America and Australia and three others around the world. It’s a real good blend for me because Oh Boy is much respected. It’s a small company—there are only seven employees, which means I can get a hold of somebody to find out what’s going on, unlike at Windham Hill. The chance of everybody being fired, like everybody was with both my albums at Windham Hill is next to nil. I think that it’s an opportunity for me to work in an environment where I have complete control over the creative end and a fair amount of control over the rest without making anybody angry at me.

GS: No discussion of your new CD would be complete without first talking about the title track. In it you sing about Billie Holiday, “I would tell her how I’ve yearned to be worthy of the grail/All these years and all I’ve learned is just how brilliantly I fail.” What can you tell me about your relationship to Billie Holiday?

JI: I felt there was a connection from the time that I first heard her. In that mystical way of a 12 year old, I thought that the fact that we were both born on April 7 meant something deep. She’s just the best. I don’t think there’s another singer out there who can touch her. She and George Jones, I’d say. To try and come up to the standard that Billie hit is a worthy endeavor, although fraught with difficulty.

GS: You’ve been living in Nashville for a number of years and Tennessee really comes through loud and clear on the new disc. It is especially audible on “My Tennessee Hills,” a duet you sing with Dolly Parton.

JI: I’d been fooling with the song for about six years, unable to write a verse. Then one day last January I sat down and thought, “Well, I should write this like a George Jones song.” The minute I thought that the song just wrote itself over a period of a couple of days. I really wanted to do it as a duet. My partner said, “Dolly would sound great on that.” We called her and (laughs) much to everyone’s shock, she said yes. It was one of the best studio experiences of my life. She’s a pro from the word go. Just amazing to work with; a real pleasure.

GS: Buddy Mondlock, with whom you co-wrote “Amsterdam,” is also a part of the Nashville songwriters’ scene. What was your co-writing experience like?

JI: Buddy’s great! We wrote that song back when he first came to town about 10, 12 years ago. He’s just a wonderful resource in this community and a wonderful person to know. We love Buddy around here.

GS: There is another interesting collaboration on the disc, the song “I Hear You Sing Again” …

JI: … my co-write with Woody (Guthrie). ... The Guthrie Foundation approached me and asked whether I would write music to lyrics of Woody’s that went unfinished. I said that it depends on the lyric obviously, send me some. It also depends on whether I feel like the lyric needs work, because those lyrics are really tied to the time. Nora Guthrie sent me 13 songs to choose from and none of them did a whole lot for me but two. The minute I saw “I Hear You Sing Again,” I thought, “I need to write this one. This one’s mine.” It was just a perfect fit. That song, again, wrote itself really quickly. I didn’t expect that it would go as fast as it did.

GS: Matthew Shepard continues to be a source of powerful music. Like you, both gay band The Aluminum Group (“Motorcycles”) and straight emo band Thursday (“M. Shepard”) have songs about him on their new CDs. Can you say something about your contribution to the canon of songs about Matthew?

JI: I think I was disturbed that so many of the songs about him made him heroic and made it like, “Well, this was a terrible thing, but on the other hand, good came out of it.” While that’s true, that wasn’t the issue for me. The issue for me was just the horror of it; that this could happen at all. I doubt that if Matthew had the choice, he would have chosen this, no matter how famous it made his name. I wanted to talk about that part of it and just find a way to cope with my own personal reaction, which was, like everyone else’s, absolute horror.

GS: Is there a Janis Ian Columbia-years box set lurking in the wings?

JI: I doubt it, just because Columbia won’t do it with us. Sony doesn’t have any interest in working with us on it. They just want us to approve some piece of crap that they slap together (laughs). The albums are being re-released in every country but North America. There will be a best-of (collection) called Souvenir out, in every country but North America, this coming fall. It will have “At Seventeen” and “Fly Too High” and “The Other Side Of The Sun” and “Jesse” and all of the other hits. People will be able to buy it off Web sites such as Amazon or Amazon UK. But, unfortunately, Sony is a very big company that has no interest in working with smaller companies.

GS: What can people expect from the Janis Ian concert tour of 2004?

JI: They can expect a lot of good guitar work (laughs). And they can expect a combination of the old songs and the new songs. We’re taking out some songs that I’m really tired of doing, like “Jesse.” We’re leaving in “At Seventeen” and I think I’m going to start doing “Stars” every night; a bunch of stuff from the new CD. I try to keep it a blend of the old and the new. I’ve got 20 or 23 albums out in general release, in one form or another, so I don’t really feel the need to go out on tour and do every song from the new album. I’m just trying to pick the best songs from the entire catalog.

[Mimi]

... and didn't know this one...

it's from http://www.abc.net.au/rn/musicshow/stories/2005/1361816.htm

Janis Ian
|

Janis Ian discusses her long career as a singer and songwriter.

Andrew Ford: We're beginning this hour of the program with a very special guest.


In the 1960s, (I think it's important to do a little bit of history here, because there may be some people here who aren't aware of the history of my next guest). In the 1960s, at the age of 15, she wrote and recorded a song called 'Society's Child', about inter-racial marriage. This was a tremendously scandalous thing to do in 1960s America. The song was ignored by radio stations, it was banned by a few of them, and it was Leonard Bernstein, no less, who invited her to come on television and sing the song, after which it became what the French call a 'succes de scandale'.


She married a man she met at a peace rally, which is the kind of thing one did in the late 1960s. She retired from performing, she divorced, she made a comeback, and with this comeback finally ended up with a couple of Grammies, an album called 'Between the Lines', and a song called 'At Seventeen', which was even bigger than 'Society's Child' had been.


Since then, she's retired again, she's come back again, and she's married again, this time to a woman, and she had to go to Canada to do that. She still writes songs about controversial topics, one day they'll make a film about her, but in the meantime, Janis Ian's here herself.


APPLAUSE


Janis Ian: It feels a little bit like I just heard my obituary. This is a song that's based on an incomplete Woody Guthrie lyric that his daughter asked me to finish.


SINGS/APPLAUSE


Andrew Ford: Janis Ian, singing at the Port Fairy Folk Festival, a song called 'I Hear You Sing Again', which was composed by Woody Guthrie and Janis Ian.


Janis Ian: Or Janis Ian and Woody Guthrie.


Andrew Ford: So, you got a phone call?


Janis Ian: I did, I got a call from Woody's daughter, Nora, who I knew through her brother Arlo, and she said, 'How would you like to write a song with Woody Guthrie?' And I said, 'Isn't he still dead?' But it turned out that he had left some unfinished lyrics, and there were some similarities. His mother had been sick for most of his life, and my mother had multiple sclerosis, and she'd been sick for a lot of mine, but both our mothers were the ones who got us our instruments, and introduced us to music, and didn't laugh at us when we said we were going to be folk singers. So the song really hit a chord with me.


Andrew Ford: She's been doing this a lot, Nora, hasn't she, I mean Billy Bragg's had two albums, I think .....


Janis Ian: She has, it's great.


Andrew Ford: And John McCutcheon's been putting music to her Dad's lyrics. She must have an attic full of them.


Janis Ian: I don't know about an attic full, but I'm sure there's plenty stuffed under the bed.


Andrew Ford: Yes. You don't think she could be writing them herself do you?


The song features on your CD 'Billie's Bones'.


Janis Ian: That's correct.


Andrew Ford: Yes. Tell us about Billie.


Janis Ian: Billie Holliday to me, she and George Jones are just the two great singers of my lifetime, and Billie Holliday in particular, although I suspect that she was not someone that I would have wanted to meet, is just a great, great singer, and I've spent my whole life kind of trying to come up to the mark that she set for honest singing, and an honest show, and I realised in the writing of that song that you can't every come up to your heroes' mark, so all you can do is try to do the best you can, which sounds horribly clichéd and stupid, but for an artist it's a real revelation to realise that you set your own standard and that you don't have to constantly be looking to your heroes.


Andrew Ford: Yes. You say in the poem, which you wrote a long time ago, from which this song kind of takes its title, its inspiration. You're standing on the bones of others, which is a nice kind of distortion of standing on the shoulders.


Janis Ian: That's a jazz expression that I think I first heard from Sarah Vaughan. She said, 'Girlfriend, we all stand on someone's bones, just be careful you don't trip.' And it's true, I mean as a singer you're normally influenced by so many hundreds of different sounds and people, but you hit an age, I'm approaching my dotage and getting to that point where, as Baez says, I'll be legendary just by virtue of having survived my contemporaries. And at that point you realise that you really are standing on the bones of a lot of people who've influenced you and the whole point of that chorus in the poem was that it's a long hard climb, but the higher you get the further you can see. One hopes, anyway.


Andrew Ford: We go back 30 years -


Janis Ian: I know, you've done a little too much research here. 'Married to a woman', no, 'married to a man', no, 'broke', no, 'having a career', no, 'having a hit', no, 'not having a hit'. Sounds like the National Inquirer.


Andrew Ford: Well now you're the -


Janis Ian: In your defence, it's all true. There was that moment with the aliens.


Andrew Ford: Well you're the person who's been hanging out with Howard Stern recently, I mean if we're talking National Inquirer.


Janis Ian: He's very tall.


Andrew Ford: Tell us about this. You and Howard Stern, it's not you would think an obvious connection.


Janis Ian: I think I can't really talk about it legally. Such an unfortunate incident.


Andrew Ford: You've been going on his show, haven't you?


Janis Ian: I have been going on his show, yes, and actually it's very strange to me, because what he does as a radio person is great shtick. I don't know if you have that word here, but Yiddish, 'shtick' means just kind of 'Hi Ladies and Gentlemen, isn't it great to be here?' That's shtick. And he has great shtick, but when you get him off camera, he's so nice, and he's one of the few famous people who actually bothers to remember my partner's name, which of course endears him tremendously. He christened her at one point 'Mr Lesbian' and that was kind of - well, we won't go there, either.


Andrew Ford: But his audience, I mean I would have thought the Janis Ian audience was kind of college girls, or people who used to be college girls.


Janis Ian: You don't see a huge cross-over?


Andrew Ford: Exactly. So you're talking to Howard Stern's audience.


Janis Ian: You know, I think the great thing about someone like me doing a Howard Stern show is that it's not my audience. It's an audience of primarily pubescent and just pre-pubescent boys who are basically experiencing what they would hope to experience in a locker room when they got a little older. And for them to see somebody like me who is openly gay, who is comfortable with it, who is monogamous, who is also much more interested in being an artist than being gay, frankly, I think that's healthy, and we had it borne out when we played New York a couple of years ago, and there were a bunch of kids with all kinds of stuff in their faces, and one of them came up to me and said, 'Ma'am, we were going to go see Pearl Jam, but you were on Howard'. It's hard to argue with success, you know.


Andrew Ford: Is that true?


Janis Ian: It is true.


Andrew Ford: When you did 'At Seventeen', there must have been huge pressure on you to be something, I mean for the record industry.


Janis Ian: Well I was, I was the girl in 'At Seventeen'. I think the pressure came later when they wanted 'At Nineteen' and 'At Twenty-two', you know. It's, all clichés aside, it's a real pleasure to have a song like that in your catalogue, because I sing it at festivals like this, and I see 5,000 or 6,000 people singing it back at me, or mouthing the words, and I realise that I've been in people's living rooms for years, and that's amazing that people will trust you with their hearts that way. It's a great thing.


Andrew Ford: The topics, I mean when I was giving your obituary before and mentioning the song that you wrote at 15, I mean it seems astonishing now, doesn't it, that a song about interracial marriage would raise an eyebrow.


Janis Ian: You know, it was the '60s, and particularly in America, it was a time of huge turbulence, and people talking about things that just had never been spoken about out loud. From being gay, to incest, to whatever, you know it was a time for breaking down barriers, and in that sense, I don't think the song would be a hit now, because it's just not that controversial. Or it would get played, which would be maybe not a hit either, I don't know.


Andrew Ford: But you've moved with the times, I mean you find new areas which may be considered -


Janis Ian: Which no-one talks about. You know, I figure I am 53, and I woke up one day about 10 years ago and I realised suddenly that I would never be the youngest again, I would never be a prodigy again, nobody would ever be stunned that I could write songs, or that I could sing again, and I thought, Well shoot, then I'd better do what I do better than I've been doing it. And so really that's all I try to do now. I don't deliberately try to write about topics that are controversial, I come from two leftish parents, and a fairly red diaper background, and I think that's just what I gravitate towards.


Andrew Ford: You're in favour, I read somewhere, of free music downloads. Why?


Janis Ian: Well let me qualify that, because that keeps getting me into trouble. I'm in favour of the dissemination of as many different types of music as possible by whatever means possible. I'm not in favour of songwriters and publishers and producers and musicians not getting paid, but I do think that someone like me, like the song I just sang, you can go to my website right now and download it for free, because I think it's a wonderful song, and I want people to hear it, and everybody doesn't have $15 or $30 to spend on a CD, and I think that artists should have the right to choose whether they want to do that or not, as opposed to the record companies and corporations dictating it.


Andrew Ford: But when you say that you're not in favour of people not getting paid, how do people get paid?


Janis Ian: Well in my instance, what we found is that the more free downloads we offer, the more merchandise we sell from the website.


Andrew Ford: So it's like karma?


Janis Ian: So it's karma, what goes round comes round, and we have a foundation and you can donate from a $1 on up to the foundation, the foundation gets about $400 a months from people who download it, so it all works out in the end. You know. I understand why Britney Spears would be worried about it, I mean that's a different thing, but for somebody in my position who has not a huge, huge career and not a big hit record, free downloads are one way to get people to try out the music and then maybe come to a show, or maybe buy a CD, maybe not, but at least they will have heard something different from what they're hearing, you know, it's a MacDonald's world right now, I mean there's what, 40 song being played at any time. That's not a lot of music.


Andrew Ford: It's been very good to meet you, Janis Ian.


Janis Ian: Thank you, Andrew.


Andrew Ford: And I think our audience has enjoyed meeting you as well.


Janis Ian: Thank you.

[Mimi]

Don't know why I did't find this one earlier...;)

JANIS IAN: BREAKING SILENCE


by Lydia Hutchinson

The sign that hung on the studio door simply read, "You have nothing left to lose." For Janis Ian, who was behind those doors recording her first album in twelve years, that was no catch phrase. It was a clear and concise statement of her life.

Breaking Silence, her new album released on the Morgan Creek label, is dark and moody, filled with the kind of vivid images that pull the listener in close, and then hit them hard. A skill which Janis has whittled into a fine art.

Born a second-generation American, Janis considers herself a true American success story. "My people came here to get away from persecution," she says. "All the reasons we were told as we were growing up that America was formed were exactly why my family landed here." Her grandparents were immigrants who worked at menial labor. Janis was born in 1951 on a New Jersey chicken farm where her parents worked, and her father later became a music teacher while her mother became an administrative assistant to a university dean. "I'm the first person in my family to own a house, so it really is the American success story to me."

Janis achieved her first hit with Society's Child, a song about racial discrimination, at the tender age of fifteen. The song was banned by radio because of its controversial nature and it wasn't until Leonard Bernstein featured her on his TV special and called her "a marvelous creature" that it became a top-ten hit. Society's Child established Janis Ian as a writer of substance, but because of its political nature she had threats on her life and there were areas of the country where she couldn't tour—all at an age when simply trying to grow up is a struggle. She left the music industry at eighteen and returned in 1973 when Roberta Flack had a hit song with Jesse. Her 1976 album, Between the Lines, was nominated for five Grammy awards (the most any female artist had received at once), and produced what she says is her career song, At Seventeen.

As a child star in the '60s, Ian's memories include Janis Joplin sending her home from parties where drugs were being used, and "hanging out" with Jimi Hendrix trading guitar and organ licks—on the night Martin Luther King died. Her life has been such a fascinating journey that three major offers have been made for her autobiography, but she claims she doesn't remember enough to write it. "I have some big blank spots in my early years because they were so rough," she says. "I keep saying if any fans out there have any old ticket stubs I'd like to know where I was!"
In the late '80s, Janis discovered that her accountant had failed to pay her tax bills for seven years. The government took her house and her savings, and left her with her clothes and instruments. So she sold her piano and stage clothing and moved to Nashville in 1988 to "begin again."

Did you find Nashville a sort of healing place?

Very much so. I arrived here with 4 pieces of furniture and my records in storage in L.A. I had three guitars, my clothes, and my song notebooks in the trunk of the car, and I had me. I rented an apartment over a parking garage. The songwriter's community of Nashville had basically said "why don't you move here...we could use people like you here," and they really made me feel so welcome. My first Christmas in Nashville I lived with Don and Polly Schlitz. And Thom Schyler was great. Virginia Team from Team Designs would show up at my door with coffee and donuts in the morning. People knew I was going through a rough time and they were really nice. The Bluebird was always open-armed to me. So it felt good. And it felt great to be out of L.A.

How did you dig yourself out of the hole you were in?

I really look at it that I lucked in because I had bought real estate in California when Seventeen was a hit, and it was worth half of my debts. And then for three years, my business manager, Al Hagaman, and I just tried to dig me out of the hole. And it got the point where you can't dig because you can't go on the road because they attach all of the receipts. And you can't publish or sign a contract because they attach all of that. So in '91, Al put together a deal where I sold my catalog from 1972 to 1979 to Toshiba EMI for a very high figure and that paid the rest of my debt and provided me with a serious down payment on a house and really got me the ability to start over.

see http://www.taxi.com/faq/songwriting/janis-ian.html for the (long) "rest" of it!!!

[Dee]

Thanks, Mimi.

I enjoyed those, especially the third one – lots of in-depth info and background in that one (yes, I read the whole thing). ;)

[Anna from Dublin]

Thanks Mimi; enjoyed those - and yes I read the whole thing too!

[Roady]

I just love reading Janis' interviews. Thanks for sharing your finds Mimi!

[Mimi]

From the Hutchinson article above: "Her life has been such a fascinating journey that three major offers have been made for her autobiography, but she claims she doesn't remember enough to write it. "I have some big blank spots in my early years because they were so rough," she says. "I keep saying if any fans out there have any old ticket stubs I'd like to know where I was!""

;) :confused: :)

Obviously Janis has changed her mind in between!

Mimi

[aabram]

I've printed one of them out, and shall read when I'm not where I am at the moment (online)and I've emailed all of them to me so that I can print them out in the future :) This is such fun finding out everything. I have clearly led a sheltered life :rolleyes:

[Darlene]

Thanks Mimi, I also read every word. It gave me much insight into the troubles Janis had. I knew a lot of the facts in the interviews, but not with such detail. I know partly why Janis is so great, she has lived her songs. Thanks Janis for sharing yourself with us.
Peace, Darlene

[aabram]

There have clearly been some very bleak years for Janis, Darlene. Knowing this just makes me kick myself all the harder for not following her sooner, but I'm here now, and all the happier for being here

Annabel

[aabram]

Here's the one you want :)

Annabel