TAKE THIS JOB AND LOVE IT: ROBBIE FULKS EARNS HIS PAYCHECK

It's funny how simple the business of making music can be. Like this. A fan decides there should be a tribute album to the honkytonk hero of her late husband. Fan then sends an email to a current artist whom she considers a favorite and asks if he'd be interested in producing it, saying she has $50,000 for funding. Current artist agrees. Current artist then reaches out to his own favorite singers, rounds up a house band that includes the honkytonk hero's esteemed pedal steel player, hashes out two weekends of studio time and rolls tape. Tribute album done.

True story.

The facts, please.

The honkytonk hero: Johnny Paycheck, perhaps best known, for better or worse, for the novel 1977 hit, "Take This Job And Shove It," but considered by those who know better as a bona fide country great for his grit and uncompromising in-your-face, outlaw approach.

The fan with the vision and, perhaps most importantly, the coin: New Jersey resident Fran Pelzman Liscio.

The current artist and project producer: left-of-the-dial country provocateur Robbie Fulks.

The bad ass house band: Paycheck's indispensable collaborator Lloyd Green (pedal steel), plus Redd Volkaert (guitar), Joe Terry (piano), Hank Singer ( fiddle/mandolin), Dennis Crouch (bass), and Gerald Dowd (drums).

Fulks' favorite singers called to duty: Neko Case, Al Anderson, Marshall Crenshaw, Gail Davies, Dallas Wayne, George Jones, Mavis Staples, Hank Williams III, Jim Lauderdale, Dave Alvin, Johnny Bush, Billy Yates, Bobby Bare Jr., Mike Ireland, Bobby Bare, Radney Foster, Buck Owens, Jeff Tweedy, and Larry Cordle.

The finished product: Touch My Heart, A Tribute To Johnny Paycheck, from Sugar Hill Records.

The unconventional origins of Touch My Heart paved the way for a uniquely rewarding experience for Fulks, who, while counting Paycheck as a favorite, didn't come to the project as if it was some sort of longtime dream to honor him in such a way. "I was hired to do that record, I didn't really choose it, which is a key to its success," he says. "It was a dream…just floating along on a cloud for six months. The fact that Fran was the genesis of the record rather than somebody thinking, 'Oh this will be a neat idea, let's see if we can get people to mail in tracks,' and the combination of a good-sized budget, the total freedom that she offered, and her enthusiasm made it a singular experience. She would hang around the studio and sit in awe of Lloyd Green and all the people that were walking in and out and make everybody feel great about what they were doing, unlike the usual backbiting record label kind of guy."

The enthusiasm carries over into the performances themselves, which range from Neko Case's rollicking set opener "If I'm Gonna Sink (I Might As Well Go To The Bottom)" to Hank Williams III's cryptic "I'm The Only Hell My Mama Ever Raised," Mavis Staples' uplifting "Touch My Heart," the playful, quasi-superstar turn (Bobby Bare, Radney Foster, Buck Owens, Jeff Tweedy) on "Take This Job And Shove It," and countless other show-shopping vocal turns.

And, thanks in great part to the Fulks' concept, in which nearly all the artists used the same band in the same studio (Fulks himself took advantage of the opportunity and used the band on songs for his next album, now completed and being shopped to various labels), Touch My Heart is a rare example of tribute album that boasts a considerable sense of continuity. Little need to hit the "forward" button on your CD player.

-- Neal Weiss, August 24, 2004
 
MoMZine: Why you? What made Fran approach you?

Fulks: I guess she was a fan of both [Paycheck and me]. It's just on of those weird things, she's not really on the inside in country music, she's not in the Nashville scene, she's in New Jersey. Her take on country music reflects more where she's at than any real world thing, she's in that sort of punk underground scene that reflects a New York City understanding of country music. For instance, she thought it would be great to have David Johansen and Iggy Pop and people like that sing on it. I guess that ties into why she thought that somebody like me would have anything to do with Johnny Paycheck. She sort of wanted to guide the record a little bit in that direction and I resisted it and it was just another instance where she was just so congenial to work with. Anytime we had a disagreement she just kind of allowed me to prevail. It was really an unprecedented, beautiful working environment. I had some good and bad times making records but this was the greatest environment that you'd want. It makes you want to re-order the business so that it's run by private patronage rather than a record company.

MoMZine: What's your relationship with the music? When did you first come to it?

Fulks: I have a lot of Johnny Paycheck's records, probably 100 of his songs in my head and I just think he's just one of the greats, one of the six or seven best honkytonk singers of the last century. Fran didn't know that my love of Paycheck ran that deep. It just happened to work out that way. Johnny first hit me when I was just opening up the whole box of country music in the mid '80s, when I was already an adult. A fiddle player that I was working gave me a couple records of Johnny's and said, "Well if you think this is the guy that sang 'Take This Job And Shove It' and appeared on The Gong Show," which is pretty much all I knew of him, he said "I've got a real surprise for you." I put on the cassette and I was really blown away, instantly. The Little Darlin' music is so universal and the playing, especially Lloyd Green's, is unlike anything else in country music.

MoMZine: What is it about his sort of honkytonk that's special?

Fulks: I was talking about this with Lloyd the other day. Lloyd quoted Johnny when somebody asked him what made those records different. He said, in that sort of simple country way, "Well I sang those records with an attitude and Lloyd Green played 'em with an attitude." And Lloyd said, "Well that just about sums it up." I think the key really was in the interplay between Lloyd and Johnny and the fact that those guys, who obviously weren't insiders, were sort of looking to succeed through kicking ass and standing out by being different. And they also happened to be lucky enough to record at a time in country music where the standard was to record a group of instrumentalists performing a song in a room quickly, which has really led to the best musical results, compared to any other method, I think, that's been used. So, all those things along with [producer] Aubrey Mayhew being the overseer and being the chief ass kicker -- his attitude was just to make a mark with those records and mix and master them in such a way that they would almost sound annoying, that they would really stand above the competition with their darkness and piercing-ness of the steel tone and a couple other respects.

MoMZine: So how did you approach it? Did you try to match artists with songs?

Fulks: One of the reasons that I just crow about this record so much, like I wasn't involved with it, is because in a way I wasn't that much involved with it. I didn't pair people with songs, I just called people that I was really a fan of their singing, people I thought were great vocal interpreters, which applies equally to George Jones as it does to Larry Cordle or Neko [Case], and certainly Mavis [Staples]. So I just called and for the most part they picked their own songs. I did send ["Touch My Heart"] to Mavis and asked her to sing that particular song but most people in country music are well aware of the breadth and quality of Johnny's work and most of them are excited to think about which song to pick out.

MoMZine: Talk about the experience of having such greats as George Jones and Mavis Staples in the studio.

Fulks: Well it's kind of out-of-body. My response to a situation like that is just to laugh. The absurdity of sitting in a control room and listening to George or Mavis sing and being in the position after the take of saying "Let's re-sing this line," or "Oh, just one more time, you're just warming up now" -- I'm not gonna say any of that crap to those people. All those guys just know what they're doing so well and they are much more aware of their own instrument and their own capabilities than I am, so certainly, with the real heavy hitters like Mavis and George, my approach would be just to get them on the first take or two, listen back with them and then be open to any changes that they wanted to make, but not to force my own opinions too much.

MoMZine: Any artists or performances that surprised you in any way?

Fulks: Hank III really surprised me. I wasn't involved with that [session], he couldn't make it in because he couldn't work it around his tour schedule, so he ended up mailing me his vocal, and he totally re-imagined "I'm The Only Hell My Momma Ever Raised" from the ground up. The first time I heard it I was not even that pleasantly surprised by it, it took a while to grow on me. After I had listened to it a dozen times and I realized its incredible worth and the incredible creativity that he put into it, I thought, well this is gonna be the lynchpin of the whole record. Obviously he sounds like Senior, and all that's cool, but that song has a country-ness to it that is really valuable to the record. As much as I like all the other tracks they're slick in a way, they're not from the holler, and that thing is from a really dark holler.

MoMZine: Talk about the version of "Take This Job And Shove It." It's definitely the beacon and perhaps the most cliché thing about Paycheck, the one thing that people on the perimeter might know about him. So, how do you approach it how did you decide to have Buck, Bare, Radney Foster and Jeff Tweedy sing on it?

Fulks: I was inclining toward not including that song on the record and I said to Fran one time, "Do you think that it would be too willfully strange to omit that song?" And she said yes. That's like one instance where she did prevail. But nobody was picking it. Who wants to do that song, you know, in the sense of either standing up to the iconic nature of the song or just singing an overdone song. Luckily, Buck picked it, it was the one he most wanted to do because I guess he sings it a the Crystal Palace in Bakersfield when somebody has a retirement party, so he was well familiar with it. But Buck couldn't leave Bakersfield because he's a stay-in-one-place kind of guy at this point. So I mail him the track, he mails me back the vocal and requested that there be another singer, maybe a duet situation with [Jim] Lauderdale or something like that, to make it stronger. And at that point I started to think about the kind of track that we recorded and the Monday Night Football-event kind of tracks that people sometimes do in Nashville. There's some video that we were watching in the studio the weekend that we were recording it that had Marty Stuart and Earl Scruggs and Paul Shaffer and Steve Martin and a bunch of weirdoes like that in the studio and they're trying to a super-event out of some songs. And I thought, maybe it would be cool if we did that with this song because it's such a candidate for that kind of treatment, but maybe we could do it with A), a group of singers who could stand up to the iconic nature of Buck Owens's vocals, and B), a weird, unusual group of people that would resonate with the lyric of the song, people that were individualistic and bold people. And so that's how I thought of those three guys.

It was a really interesting day in the studio. We had Buck's vocals on it but then we had those three guys standing around a single mike and the interplay alone between Bare, Sr. and Radney Foster was really hilarious. Bobby Bare was trying to goad Radney into replacing the word "sucker" in the song with "cocksucker" and I think Radney was kind of amused by the idea at first but as Bare continued to needle at him, told him to sing "motherfucker" and other words in place of the word "sucker," he just sort of started blocking him out and trying to concentrate on what he was doing. Bobby Bare Sr. is still the bad boy of country music.

MoMZine: Is there a common thread that attracts you to all these artists featured on the album?

Fulks: They're all great singers. Somewhere somebody said there was an emphasis on including songwriters as well as singers but I would disagree with that. Al Anderson, in my opinion, is up there with anybody else on the record as a singer. I just think he's an unsung American treasure. I'm just a total fan of anyone who sings on the record.

MoMZine: Did you learn anything new about Paycheck while working on the project.

Fulks: Not so much. We didn't really even talk about Johnny. We had so much work to do over those two weekends that we didn't tell stories so much. I think Paycheck strikes me as the kind of guy who was enigmatic and laconic and a lot of the stories that are fun to tell about him rise out of his self-narcosis, which makes you wonder if his weirdness is ingrained or artificially induced.

MoMZine: You recorded in two weekends with a house band. Was that out of necessity or for aesthetic?

Fulks: Everything was the way I wanted to do it and the house band idea got from a record that Gail Davies did on Webb Pierce a couple years before that that I contributed to. I thought that was just a good way to tie it all together. Definitely the idea of farming out tracks is, in my opinion, a really bad way to go about it because there's no quality control and you're sort of counting on people's good graces to oversee their own thing and to submit it on time, and it's just no fun. This way you get to shape something and you get to record country music the way it's really supposed to be recorded, with an emphasis on performance quality and performance intensity that you can only really achieve when there's spontaneous interplay and live performance.

MoMZine: What's the biggest Paycheck-ian trait in your own music?

Fulks: I think he had a mischievous streak and a tendency to say that one word or deliver that one formulation that was deliberately aimed to be provocative. I guess I do emulate that quality in him and in a couple other people. I think that's a really cool quality in country music, and it's in R&B and hip-hop and other kinds of music too -- the idea of provocation isn't exclusive to country music.

MoMZine: Would Johnny Paycheck have been made for these times?

Fulks: Oh, absolutely not. I mean, he'd be recording for Bloodshot Records and selling 8000 records.

MoMZine: What's the message you'd like people to get out of this record?

Fulks: I'd like them to go back to the original records and hear how brilliant Paycheck was. I think one of the common threads in a lot of things I have done in my life in the last 15 years is to try to push country into that place where it's appreciated in the same way that music like jazz is appreciated. I saw in the newspaper where Roy Haynes was coming to town to play at a place called the Chicago Jazz Showcase for a $20-$25 ticket. I thought, well that's great, wouldn't it be cool if Connie Smith was coming to the Country Music Showcase for that ticket price. But that's something that is not going to happen for the time being because country music isn't appreciated in quite the same way. It really ought to be, the [success of] O Brother… points out one more time how much more inclined educated people are to appreciate acoustic music than electric. Well, once you plug in a dobro or guitar it doesn't make it less of an art form. Lloyd Green is every bit as high an artist in his field as Dizzy Gillespie was in his. I think it's just a matter of educating the elites on the artistic value of country music. On a purely musical level, country music does not need to take a back seat to jazz. I think jazz players understand that and other people should too.