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Texas Music
Winter, 2006
TROY CAMPBELL
Long in the Sun
by Richard Skanse
When singer-songwriter Troy Campbell was a kid growing up in
southern Ohio, he used to walk down a hill near his house to
fish at a stream called Twin Creek. The creek was
crossed by a road called Route 4, and the road was crossed
by a railroad track. Campbell would find his favorite
spot in the middle of it all and revel in the sensation of
movement - water, traffic and trains - all around him.
"I was out in the sticks, but it felt like things were going
everywhere," he recalls, "And that is when I was most
happy."
Campbell conjures this memory in an attempt to explain the
lyrical themes of "desolation" and "hope-filled abandonment"
that seem to recur again and again in his songs, from his
punkish roots in the Ohio-formed Highwaymen, to his later
Austin incarnation, Loose Diamonds, and through the first
records in his solo career. But the image of Campbell in the
midst of things going in all different directions and
itching to follow them all at once serves just as well as a
metaphorical self-portrait. Though he's spent the bulk
of his life since his late teens pursuing a music career,
Campbell began diversifying his portfolio over the last
couple of years by diving headlong into film production,
animation, and most recently, helping to orchestrate and
document the comeback of one of his biggest heroes,
psychedelic rock legend Roky Erickson.
None of which seems to have distracted him in the least
during the writing and recording of his latest solo album,
Long in the Sun.
"When Troy comes in to make a record, he's focused on
making a record," notes guitarist/producer
Gurf Morlix, who helmed both Long in the Sun and its
predecessor, 2002's American Breakdown
at
his home studio in Austin. The challenge, suggests
Morlix, isn't keeping Campbell on track so much as it is
just keeping up with him. "What's going on in Troy's
brain is going on about 10 times faster than what's going on
in my brain, or maybe the brain of anybody else that Troy
knows. So while you're responding to one questions,
he's had like 10 other amazing thoughts that he didn't even
have time to get out. His brain is just moving so
fast, sometimes I couldn't stop laughing because he'd be
singing a vocal and he'd throw these lines out that were
just so...obtuse."
"The only time Gurf would stop me," laughs Campbell, "would
be when he had to say, 'I know you're really going for it,
but I don't have a clue what you're saying there. You
think you maybe want to change that line?' Then he'd
lock me in the room and I'd sit there and I'd work on it,
and when he believed it, then he'd let me out. That's
kind of how it worked."
Campbell's process of re-thinking his lyrics - compounded
with his 11th-hour decision to record a cover of Woody
Guthrie's "Along in the Sun and the Rain" - gradually
shifted the record away from its original concept as a
song-cycle about two brothers set against the bleak backdrop
of the meth-amphetamine scene Campbell grew up around in
Middle America. Trace elements of that
album remain in two of
Long in the Sun's most foreboding tracks, the
cautionary death-row lament, "Killing Time in Texas" and
"Ball and Chain" and even the theme of world-weary but
dogged determination reflected in the Guthrie tune.
But even in light of Morlix's observation that "there's
darkness woven all over inside of what Troy does," the trio
of effortlessly catchy pop gems that open Long in the Sun
("Famous", "I'll Let You Know" and "Runnin' Round Like
Lovers") sets it apart as the brightest sounding album of
Campbell's career. Its a sharp contrast to the
meditative American Breakdown and his willfully
experimental solo debut, 1999's Man vs. Beast, as
well as the three free-wheeling but intense roots-rock
albums he recorded with Loose Diamonds in the 90's.
There's still the constant tug of war between hope and
desolation, but the but the buoyant melodies lend more heft
and pull to the former.
His sharpened sense of pop songcraft and lyrical directness
aside, though, Campbell's uncommonly powerful and
distinctive voice remains his most striking instrument.
Honed in childhood by singing along to his Korean-born
mother's beloved Sam Cooke and Freddy Fender eight-track
tapes, the country music favored by his "white/American
Indian hillbilly from Kentucky" father and all the 70;s
classic rock he could grab off the airwaves, its a marvel of
strength and grace, as assured cradling a tender ballad as
it is punching through a wall of blazing guitars. It
was the latter that gave him the confident to form and front
his first rock band in his teens, long before he had a clue
what he was doing.
"The Highwaymen were raw; we were as punk as punk could be -
I didn't know how a guitar worked." he says. "I just
thought I should be in a cool band. But I felt like,
no matter how shitty my guitar playing was, I could always
out-sing the crowd. I would make that the instrument
of destruction. And that as long as I was with my team
- with my brother (bassist Mike Campbell) and Scrappy
(fledgling guitarist Jud Newcomb) - we may not have been the
greatest technicians, but we were undeniable, and that was
more important than being technically good. We were
making art."
After changing their name to Loose Diamonds - as much an
acknowledgement of their rough-around-the-edges ability as a
concession that "The Highwaymen" in Texas meant Willie
Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and Johnny Cash
- Campbell and Co. achieve only cult success in Austin and
rest of the country, but nonetheless landed several tours in
Europe, even opening for Bob Dylan for a couple of dates.
They also made a lasting impression on Bruce Springsteen and
his wife, Patty Scialfa, who stumbled into an early 90's
Highwaymen gig in New Orleans/ "We heard you guys
outside, and we just thought we should come in," the Boss
told them after the show. "You got that high,
wide-open sound. I just love it!" Years later,
when Campbell was reintroduced to Springsteen after one of
the E Street Band reunion shows in New Jersey, Springsteen
told him that he and his wife had made a point of checking
in on Loose Diamonds' career via the internet and purchased
all of their records.
"You've got a rare voice," Springsteen told a stunned
Campbell (and his even more stunned girlfriend at the time,
fellow singer-songwriter Patty Griffin). "Don't ever
quit. I got my eye on you."
Loose Diamonds had recently folded, but Campbell gave
Springsteen a rough mix of Man vs. Beast and left
their second meeting with a renewed sense of purpose.
But years later, after wrapping up a tour in support of
American Breakdown, he felt compelled to stop and
reassess his career yet again. "I was just physically
and mentally exhausted, and I thought, 'I don't want to go
out on the road again - I don't want to sing unless I want
to sing. I'm going to do something else; whatever
comes to me, I'm going to embrace it."
That day he got a call from a friend, file producer Anne
Walker-McBay. She wanted to use on of his songs in a
film her husband was directing, Levelland, and wanted
to see if Campbell could also help secure rights to some 36
other songs by some of his favorite artists, including The
Replacements and Roky Erickson. "Nobody told me that
it would be really hard - they thought I'd only get half of
them," says Campbell. But I poured myself into it and
got really good at music-rights clearances."
Then came a call from another friend who wanted to know if
Campbell knew anything about filmmaking himself, because she
wanted to make a documentary about her 90 year old father
and the New Orleans big band he played with in 65 years.
The Campbell-produced short, A Place to Dance, won
the audience award for Best Documentary at the Austin Film
Festival and is currently being expanded into a
feature-length film. Meanwhile, Campbell's also teamed
with Austin animator Dano Johnsons, with whom he's formed
Collection Agency Films to produce quirky cartoons like
Tall Tales and Other Big Lies, in which grizzled music
veterans like Ray Wylie Hubbard narrate their most
outlandish anecdotes from the road. Campbell is
currently pitching Tall Tales
as a TV
special to CMT, while Collection Agency Films has created a
series of Internet campaign spots for Texas gubernatorial
hopeful Kinky Friedman. The Hubbard and Friedman
shorts can be found at
www.TroyCampbell.com/film.htm or at
www.CollectionAgencyFilms.com.
Most recently, Campbell's been working with another Texas
music icon, Erickson, helping the reclusive rocker stage a
long-awaited comeback, already marked by his headlining
appearance at last summer's Austin City Limits Music
Festival. And he's working on Richard Linklater's new
film, Coyote. "I do all the visual clearances,
which means I buy pornography and Mexican soap operas,"
Campbell laughs. "Like if the script says, 'Greg
Kinnear is watching a soap opera with his maid,' I have to
find one. That's my job, because somebody called and
said, "We heard you can figure out anything..."
As for where and how his music - namely, his commitment to
return to the read behind Long in the Sun - factors
in among all of this, well, Campbell's got that figured out,
too. Simply put, his myriad extra-curricular pursuits
of late have only helped to rekindle his passion for making
music for music's sake. With different projects moving
him in multiple directions at once, he's found his happy
spot again.
"I used to think things like, 'If my record doesn't sell,
then I'm shit,'" he explains. "But I don't think that
for a second these days. I've learned a lot after
making other types of art, in that I'm best when I just go,
'You know what? I just need to sing, and I just need
to connect with people, but I don't need to make this my
life.' I have a life and this is part of my life.
But its a part that I now really look forward to."
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