BOB MCDILL: Art & Commerce: Threading a Masterful Career

During your time in Nashville, do you think the standards of writing improved?

Oh, they improved. I think it’s a much higher standard now. There’s still some things I don’t like. I don’t listen to the radio anymore at all, but I did listen to the CMA Awards or something accidentally a few months ago, and I heard about three really good songs in a row. They were all rock/country fusion, which was always something I liked and tried to accomplish. I was never one of those purists or a traditionalist. If you look at all the phenomena in the music business, it’s mostly people who have fused two or three things together, all the way back to Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams.

Is the songwriter as central as he used to be?

No.  They used to say that Memphis was a musician’s town and Nashville was a songwriter’s town, and it was; the songwriters and publishers were very important. Now you’ve got probably 10 times as many as you did then and perhaps there are more good songs and songwriters are more expendable.  I think now the real power lies with the artists. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not.

In your experience, was collaboration always beneficial for a song?

It’s not always beneficial.  If you get stuck and can’t finish something, it really is helpful. It’s difficult for two people to work together and try to create the vision of one person. There are going to be two visions there, I’m afraid. Songwriting by committee is rarely ever great art.

You’ve been quoted as saying that “you can’t write country music looking down your nose at it.” Did you start off looking down on it?

Yes. I learned to like it and respect it. And then, once I got inside that bubble and knew and understood it and could write it, then I looked for ways to fuse it with other things and do more. I was in Nashville for a long time before I understood it. I just sort of had an epiphany when I heard that George Jones song, “It’s Been A Good Year For The Roses.”  There was something in it I never noticed before. There’s an anger, sort of a silent, quiet rage that’s right under the surface. Who knows why? Maybe it’s an anger at trying to make your way in a world with a certain degree of helplessness.

You’ve had a long relationship with artists like Don Williams and Dan Seals. Was having a reliable place to bring your songs a good thing?

Back in my heyday, my publisher Bill Hall was very plugged in with record producers like Bill Sherrill and Jerry Bradley.  They all played cards together and Bill saw them all the time.  It was not that my songs had to be pitched to a specific artist. I had the whole town to write for. With Don Williams, that was my personal relationship, and my relationship with Dan…but other than that, they were more or less written for anybody.

I wonder if that’s so true now. It seems like songs are more often pitched to specific artists now, as opposed to just writing a good song…

I think so. I think if you take that a step farther, singers now want the song to be about them. It didn’t used to be that way. I remember that we pitched “Good Ole Boys Like Me”…before Don Williams did it. Waylon Jennings heard it and he said, “I really like that, but I can’t do it…my Dad was the Church of Christ preacher.” I didn’t say anything, but I thought, “What the hell’s that got to do with it? It’s not about you, Waylon…” That was the first time I’d noticed that, and now it seems to be all that way. I hear tales from people in the business that nobody wants to tell a story or assume a role anymore. And maybe the fans have forced them into that.