From The Archives: Bobby Bare, Eminently Cool

In 1962, Chet Atkins signed Bare to RCA records, where he recorded “Shame on You,” “Detroit City” (written by Mel Tillis) and the traditional song “500 Miles Away From Home.” All three were hits on both the country and pop charts. By the early ‘70s, Bare switched to Mercury Records, where he made crossover hits of Tom T. Hall’s “That’s How I Got to Memphis” and Kris Kristofferson’s “Please Don’t Tell Me How the Story Ends” before re-signing with RCA for Lullabies, Legends & Lies.

A collection of tall tales and folklore, Lullabies, Legends & Lies spent 30 weeks on the Billboard county chart and produced the number one hit, “Marie Laveau.” Nashville’s first concept album, the album is remembered today as an antecedent of the outlaw country movement. In the ensuing years, Bare broke most of country’s rules. He covered rock & roll songs, such as The Rolling Stones’ “Last Time,” and continued to collaborate with Silverstein.

The pair’s compositions grew increasingly bawdy (Down & Dirty’s “Tequila Sheila,” for example), but were hits nonetheless. Through it all, Bare’s experiments never seemed contrived; his fusion of pop, folk, country and novelty tunes was just an extension of who he was and what he liked.

“It was the natural thing to do,” Bare explains. “It’s just taste-your taste in music. I loved all kinds of music, as you can tell from listening to this [new] album. I was probably the very first Elvis fan; I loved 50s rock & roll. Actually, it was country. Chuck Berry is as country as you can get. I could hear a lick on a Ray Charles record and use it on a country record. I think everybody was doing that in the ‘60s.”

Appropriately, Shel Silverstein’s “Ballad of Lucy Jordan,” which was recorded by both Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show and Marianne Faithfull (spell check), appears on The Moon Was Blue. The song–about a half-mad, middle-aged women who realizes that she’ll “Never ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair”–appears on the record as a rolling lament. Bare’s plaintive vocals are accompanied by a boogaloo drumbeat, Carol-Lee Singers (spell check)-style vocals and piano arpeggios. A soaring trumpet plays over the vamp at the song’s end.

“I think the greatest lyricist I ever knew was Shel,” Bare says of his friend. “He was brilliant. Of course he only had about three melodies, but that didn’t matter.”

Another old friend of Bare’s, Max D. Barnes, contributed the only new song to The Moon Was Blue. Titled “I Am an Island,” the song’s simple sentiment makes it sound right at home next to the record’s classics.

“I am an island/drifting on the sea/‘til you come back to me,” Bare sings. Barnes, who wrote classic country hits such as “Chiseled in Stone” and “Don’t Take It Away,” passed away last year.

“There’s one new song in there that Max wrote that he gave me right before he died. I love Max’s writing and singing. [When I got blocked], I used to call up Max…he lived over here by me…and I’d run by his house, and we’d sit down and work it out. He was so good; he could work it out immediately.”

The rest of the songs on The Moon Was Blue will sound familiar to all but the youngest music fans. The record begins with Wayne Walker’s much-interpreted “Are You Sincere?” a song Bare first recorded during his years with Mercury. The new version will be included in the upcoming Quentin Tarantino-produced film Daltry Calhoun, starring Johnny Knoxville and Juliet Lewis. It features a refrain reminiscent of vintage girl groups like the Shangri La’s, and likewise, the horn section on the well-known “Shine On Harvest Moon” brings to mind the campy orchestras of Lawrence Welk and Ray Conniff.

That said, The Moon Was Blue isn’t completely retro. For example, the record’s version of “Am I That Easy To Forget?” a song credited to Carl Belew (spell check), W. S. Stevenson and Shelby Singleton (and recorded by Englebert Humperdinck, among many others), begins with Nevers’ trademark guitar feedback. The feedback is one of the rare reminders that the The Moon Was Blue backing tracks are the work of younger players. In addition to pianist Crow, the lineup includes occasional Lambchop member Paul Burch, upright bassist Dennis Crouch and Last Train Home drummer Martin Lynds.

“What the band does, well I just let Bobby [Jr.] and Nevers work on that,” Bare says of his backing group, which surprisingly captures the spirit of the classic Nashville sound. “Those musicians were people that I didn’t know, though I might have met one or two of them. It all felt good to me. There wasn’t anything on there that offended me, but I don’t know if that’s good or bad. That’s just the way it happened. They do music differently; they’re freer with what they do.”

Though The Moon Was Blue‘s reliance on classic tunes is a welcome change of pace, the fact that it contains no recent Bare material is largely a matter of convenience. Like a lot of great songwriters, the craft doesn’t come as easy to him as it once did.

“All I need is an idea and a chorus to get started,” Bare says. “Nowadays I get tons of ideas but not at the right time. And I don’t have the energy I used to have. I’m sure all the older songwriters will tell you that. (Both John Prine and Tom T. Hall have, in fact, admitted to increased occurrences of writer’s block during their later years.) It takes energy to write songs; that’s why it’s impossible to write on the road. If I hadn’t started having hit records, I’d probably have written many, many hits instead of just a few. You have to have time alone to write, and that’s what you don’t have when you become a star. These days, I’ve got to have a reason to write-a project or something. I don’t just sit down to write songs.”