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Music Preview: Story song guy With 'Broke Down,' things are looking up for Slaid Cleaves Friday, February 09, 2001 By Scott Mervis, Weekend Editor, Post-Gazette
How tough is it trying to break into and out of the Austin scene as yet another alternative-country singer-songwriter? Well, just a little more than a year ago, Slaid Cleaves, doing his damnedest to avoid a real day job, was plying his trade as a human guinea pig for a local pharmaceutical company.
WITH: Rod Picott.
WHERE: Presented by Calliope: The Pittsburgh Folk Music Society at Carnegie Music Hall, Oakland.
WHEN: Tomorrow at 8 p.m.
TICKETS: $20 advance, $22 at door. 412-394-3353.
"That was my main source of income," says Cleaves, speaking from the back of a van traveling from New Jersey to Virginia. "It's really not as bad as it sounds. It's a little scary the first couple times, but it gets really routine after a while and you learn how to avoid the scary studies and do the simple ones. I knew all the dangers and risks. If they pay double the original money, you know it's really nasty."
Several months after his last experiment, Cleaves would turn up on Triple-A radio stations like WYEP with a haunting Americana sound, breaking through with a record called "Broke Down." Now, he's on the road and as more and more fans turn up at his shows, those days at the drug clinic fade further into the past.
"I've been plugging away for a long time and making small steps toward success," Cleaves says, "but with 'Broke Down' it was a bigger step. For a long time I played for friends and family. Now, when I start a song, people start clapping. That's weird. And singing along, strangers singing along, that's never happened."
Cleaves, 36, originally hails from Berwick, Maine, where he grew up idolizing Bruce Springsteen. He and his friends even had a band called the Magic Rats, taken from the song "Jungleland." During his college years, a girlfriend who had the nerve to break up with him on the plane leading him to Cork, Ireland, where he began busking and soaking up the music of legends: Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Johnny Cash.
He returned to the States in the mid-'80s and settled in Portland, Maine, forming a band called the Moxie Men, which, he says, mixed Replacements-style originals with covers by Husker Du, Hank Williams and Mahalia Jackson. Tired of playing the same old places, he headed south for Austin in 1991 to make it as a singer-songwriter -- just a face in the crowd.
"Man, that was tough," he says of breaking into the Austin scene. "Long struggle, basically of eight years of spinning my wheels, of paying my dues. Playing on the street, playing open mikes, working my way into the more prestigious open mikes. That alone took a year or two. It's just a fact of life that there's a lot of people playing music and there's a limited amount of audience and the people are spoiled by a long history of great music in Austin, so in order to stand out, you have to do something really well and different from anybody else."
It helped, but not too much, that Cleaves won the best new artist competition at the Kerrville Folk Festival in 1992 (following in the path of Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle and Robert Earl Keen). After a pair of self-released records, Cleaves signed to Rounder and issued the more polished and critically acclaimed but still not commercially viable "No Angel Knows."
In writing the follow-up, he started to realize that he was compiling too many songs about desolate characters: the single mother pawning her wedding ring in the title track; the rural couple losing their child in "Cold and Lonely"; the lonely drinker at the "Horseshoe Lounge."
"I was a little concerned at first, 'cause it is pretty bleak," he says. "For a while, I thought maybe I should try to write some happy songs. Then I realized, that's what's missing in lot of music today, a certain tragedy or suffering or sadness. And in hopes of trying to move people, I thought I'd make it as sad as I could."
For "Breakfast in Hell," Cleaves even went back in time to create a classic folk story song out of the legend of Sandy Gray, a logger who went down in the falls near "the mouth of the Musquash River" in Ontario.
"I never thought I'd be writing a traditional-style folk song like that," Cleaves says. "But I was presented with the details of that story and I made it a challenge. I said, 'If I can't write a folk song with that story, I should quit.' I made it an exercise for myself to fit those words into a folk-song style. I'm thrilled with the way it came out. I didn't think it would fit on my record, but somehow it did."
The song stands out so much that if that's all you've heard of Slaid Cleaves on 'YEP, you might call him the "story song guy."
"That would be great," he says. "We were just saying that people don't look to music for story songs anymore. They get something different out of it, so I feel I'm the last of a breed."
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