Talking To...Kimmie Rhodes
Texas singer songwriter Kimmie Rhodes now resides in Austin with her producer husband Joe Gracey and she regularly tours the UK and Europe. Fatea had the chance to talk to Kimmie *(and listen to her wonderful Texas accent) about her music, her collaboration with Willie Nelson, her thoughts on Obama, carving her own path and how growing up in Lubbock, Texas, shaped her.
KR=Kimmie Rhodes HM=Helen Mitchell
HM: Hi Kimmie, thanks for agreeing to talk to me.
KR: No problem. I recognise you, we've met before.
HM: Yeah, last year, here at the Cluny. It was my birthday and you sang 'Love and happiness' for me!
KR: That's right, I remember, your friend had told me the night before then he emailed me to say thanks right after you did!
HM: Okay, can I start, Kimmie, by asking how you got into music in the first place?
KR: Well, when I was about six years old, I was singing and my dad noticed it and we started a gospel trio with my brother and my dad and me. We sang at Church and I sang at school and I was always in choir. A lot of the music in the churches in the South sounded a lot like Willie nelson's country music. So I was influenced at an early age by going to church and singing at school like a lot of people do.
HM: Just the music that was around you?
KR: Yeah, what I was hearing around me, too. In those days radio was different. I grew up in a town called Lubbock, Texas and back in those days - it may be different here but the DJs in America tend to be more commercially driven now and they play from a list that's made up for them, but back in those days, the 'level of cool' of a DJ was knowing about what was coming down the line and what the hot new record was and DJs were actually celebrities based on knowing about music and finding out about it and there was a lot of great music going on. I didn't really have a notion of any kind of music, it was all just music to me. It was just music. You could turn to one station and you might hear Ray Charles and on another station you might hear Billie Holliday and on another station you might hear Buddy Holly and on another station you might hear George Jones. The music being played on stations then was still kind of genre driven like it is now but it had kind of a more organic feel to it. There wasn't even such a thing as talk radio so you could turn to any station and find something to listen to and I never stayed on one particular kind of music; we just used to spin the dial 'til we came to something we liked. So I had a lot of different influences early on. Then , you know, my dad always played country music and as I got older I loved The Beatles and then my mother liked to take me to theatre and always bought the latest vinyl from whatever the new big New York show going on was; so there was just a lot of different musical influence. I think that's what I always loved about The Beatles - I know in the early days they were very heavily influenced by people like Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry but then as they grew and put out records, they crossed over so you never knew what they were gonna do next. I know that had a lot to do with George Martin's influence. I think Louis Armstrong was the one who always said "There's only two kinds of music; good and bad." Really, I have always felt that way and I still do.
HM: Didn't Beth Nielsen Chapman once say that, too; that music shouldn't need to be pigeon holed into a category - that good music is just good music?
KR: You know, the more advertising and sales and ratings, and those kind of things have become the tail that wags the dog of commercial music now. That's not to say that there's not some good commercial music because there really is some great commercial music. There's also the thing to some degree where if someone follows their heart and it leads onto something that hits. Nobody really knows what makes a hit and nobody can ever know what makes a hit. What happens is if somebody gets onto something and everybody likes it and everybody buys it; you see it in clothing, or bread, or soft drinks, or anything, it just takes off and then everybody jumps on the bandwagon and wants to have one of those. It's always been that way to some degree and that's understandable but there's a line between making music for commercial reasons and making music because you make music and between writing songs for commercial reasons and writing songs because you write songs. There is a way to straddle both sides of that line, so really it's just a balance. When Chuck Berry was writing songs, he had a really good sense of wht made a good commercial song and had a lot of appeal and it was a hit - it was really great music, really great commercial music. It's like anything, there's the one hand then there's the other and you find the place where you wanna be, where you wanna exist, somewhere within those hands. You find your spot on the rainbow when you find what colour you are.
HM: I like that image a lot. So what colour do you think you are?
KR: That's a great question, I've never been asked that before. The colour that I am changes. Right now I'm somewhere between blue and yellow so I guess that makes me green.
HM: Why green?
KR: Because if you mix blue and yellow you get green.
HM: (laughs) yeah, I mean...
KR: (laughs) That was the art question! I'm a little bit blue but optimism to me is yellow...I'm not really really blue and I'm not really really sunny either, I'm somewhere in the middle. Let's say I'm green with a forecast of yellow! Hopefully.
HM: I like that. So, what was it like growing up in Lubbock? I've been there so I'd be interested to hear your take.
KR: Growing up in Lubbock you made your own fun. It was a farming community and in those days farmers could do very very well. It was the plains which just go on forever, flat, so it makes it really great for farming.
HM: It is incredibly flat, isn't it? I couldn't believe it.
KR: It's as flat as it gets. It does not get any flatter. That makes it really good for farming. Also Lubbock sits on top of a big, giant water reservoir called the Yana ?, so whether it rains or whether it doesn't, water can be brought up from the ground. The thing they had to watch out for is storms called pails. The community would thrive when the farmers were thriving and would not thrive when they were not. It was an economy based on cotton. Like any community there was sort of a collective consciousness and there I think people are really attuned to the weather and what it brought there. The weather can be really hard. Sometimes the wind blows and the sand blows and sometimes it rains mud.
HM: Really?!
KR: Yeah, it rains mud from the sky. It can be very very harshly cold. I think growing up in Lubbock even from my very first memory, I was always completely aware of the elements, so the sky always seemed really big to me. When you're on flat land you just don't know - the weather can change and become sweet and beautiful or completely horrendous. There would be days you couldn't even see your hand in front of your face as the sand would just get in everything and in your eyes. So the elements can be really harsh there. Everybody's always aware of that so I think growing up in Lubbock might be a little harder than other places - certainly being in Lubbock was a lot harder than being in Austin is. A lot of the musicians I know moved from Lubbock to Austin because it was just a friendlier environment. In the time period I was growing up there was also the hippy era and Rock and Roll had happened and was blossoming and then you got a real blend between Texas borders from Mexico so there were a lot of Mexican families there. There was always that Tex-Mex influence, even though we were up in the Panhandle, about as far from Mexico as you can get in Texas. A lot of Mexican immigrants came in to work in the cotton fields. That element found its way into everybody's music. It's kind of a fishbowl, you know; a fishbowl with a lot of sand in it. (laughs) As far as answering the question of what it was like growing up in Lubbock, that excludes any personal or family, that's just the best answer I could give about the actual place. There's kind of the Southern Baptist religion thing there so that was an element in the community and then there were some real hard drinking, down on their luck people that had come there to try to make a living and weren't faring so well. There was always a dichotomy of people. There were two kinds of different people, you know, there was this line drawn between the really, really religious and the people that were outside of that. For example in Lubbock, to buy alcohol you had to go outside of the town, outside of the city limits, even to buy beer.
HM: yeah, where my friend lives in MS, you have to go across to AL, to buy liquor.
KR: Yeah, you still see that in some places. It all coloured my upbringing as we were both. We went to church on Sunday and my dad would drive out of town to buy beer. It was challenging to be in a community where you were asked to be one kind of person or another.
HM: Kind of being pulled in 2 directions.
KR: Well, you weren't pulled in 2 directions as such but there was always a feeling of being pulled two ways. We knew who we were. When we went to church we went for the music, not to be told what to do. It's kind of a weird place. I always felt that the elements in general caused people to have an edge, it colours their mental perspective, like the winds in France.
HM: It was actually in Lubbock where I saw the most spectacular rainstorm - fork and sheet lightning, thunder and rain so heavy it was bouncing off the sidewalk into the motel room when we opened the door.KR: yeah and you get hail and balls of ice the size of baseballs and tornadoes, so you never know which you're gonna get. There's an edge to Lubbock that I think the elements cause. That edge kind of finds its way into your development.