By Richard Cuccaro

It was mid-April. We were driving out to Stonybrook University through an intermittent downpour. Our old Canadian buddy Jory Nash was sharing a bill with Rod Picott. When we got there, we found out that the storm, which covered the entire Northeast, had dumped huge amounts of snow in upstate New York, all the way to Toronto. Jory simply couldn't make it. My significant other was disconsolate. I was disappointed for her, but still eager to hear Rod for the first time. By the show's end I was grateful that I got to hear Rod for the entire time. We'd see Jory again on another occasion.

In the opening number, the sound of his voice, a soft rumble, drew me in. Promo notes state: "Barbed wire lyrics wrapped around whiskey and gravel vocals" I don't hear whiskey and gravel. I hear a voice that knows what it is to be wounded by life. There is a chunk of heartbreak in the the notes as they bend. By the second song, this feature article began to write itself. He'd co-written songs with Slaid Cleaves and sang one of them now… "Broke Down." Suddenly, I wasn't just listening to a story of a couple, their lives tragically shattered. I was living inside of it. I sat in the room with the lovers lying still. watching the cigarette burn on the windowsill. Rod was singing it from the inside and he pulled me in there with him. And he'd do it over and over again. I'd heard Slaid sing "Tiger Tom Dixon's Blues," but here again, when Rod sang it, I felt I was living the story for the first time. It was, after all, the true story of his great-uncle.

Rod's friendly, self-effacing on-stage patter made me wish I were his friend, maybe have a beer (or three) with him. He related how he'd known Slaid since they were six or seven, had been in a band together, how awkward Slaid was as a youngster… not the striking presence he is today. There were a couple of road anecdotes about his backup fiddler, the dazzling Amanda Shires (also vocalist and fiddler with the Thrift Store Cowboys). Was I envious? No way! Not me! We talked later about a feature. He said OK.

So, I got Rod on the phone in mid-June, and this is what we learned: Rod  was born in 1964 and spent his childhood in South Berwick, Maine. Asked about early musical influences, he said,

"I was listening to AM radio pretty heavily by the time I was six years old. A station in Dover, New Hampshire. There was a huge span of whatever was popular, from Bing Crosby to Led Zepplin. When you're  a kid, it's instinctive. You respond to music. I liked Hurricane Smith's 'What Would You Say,' a 30's swing-type number. Later on, I wondered what it was I liked. When you get a little bit older, you become a bit more aware of how you're being perceived. You start aligning yourself with things that you want to represent you. You identify yourself with the music and it speaks for you and then you can't enjoy things with the freedom you used to. You align yourself with a certain kind of music. It's so much fun to be a kid and figure out the difference between Led Zepplin and Rush."

A couple of years after trying with a cheap Japanese guitar for a few months, trying to plunk at it, make some sense of it, he put it down. At about 13 years old, when he was in junior high, a kid across the street played pretty good electric guitar. He said that if he had a bass player, they could play tunes together. Rod got a bass through school and started playing in a band with his friends.

"I just fell in love with it. Started learning riffs, The concept of being in a band was just huge. Having someone play guitar over the top of it."

The experience gave him a place to explore why people like certain things. I remarked that so many of the featured performers in Acoustic Live have had experience playing in a band. Rod agreed that it's helpful and gave some reasons why: "If you're playing with a lot of other people and people are revolving in and out of your life, you're exposed to lots of different concepts and styles of music. Why something's good and why it's not. You do all that arguing. You have people to throw ideas up against. They shoot them down and you shoot other people's ideas down. There's that constant growing. If you play with people who are better than you, you're constantly striving to keep up and to learn. All the different styles of music, too. People have different tastes. It's always a compromise. You have to learn songs you don't really like. You have to learn why does somebody like this? What's going on in here that somebody's getting off on? It broadens you."

Throughout high school, Rod had his garage band. He says, "We were all buddies… that was sort of like my little gang. We hung out together, we snuck beers together, we smoked pot together. We played in my father's garage. We played a couple of shows… every once in a while we'd find some kind of show to play. We'd go do it. When high school was over, I thought, well if I want to be a musician, I have to find a job. The only jobs at that time, was playing in a cover band. If you wanted to play, and make a living that was what you did."

Between the ages of 18 and 19, he played in a cover band. He says,

"It was the worst year-and-a-half of my life. It was really horrible; soul-killing. You had to play what everybody wanted to dance to. It wasn't all horrible… you could do a couple of ZZ Top songs or stuff like that, but you were just at the mercy of what the club was." He quit the cover band and resolved to never play in cover bands again. During that time, he'd been writing "in bits and pieces." with the idea that  he was going to write songs and have his own band. He was determined to find and form groups with other like-minded musicians who were into songwriting. It meant that he had to work in construction doing sheetrocking to support himself while he learned the craft of songwriting and kept improving as a musician. The music he made wasn't enough to survive on, but "it sure was a whole lot more fun." There was a distinct split between Rod's need to make money and his desire to fulfill himself musically.

"It was the mid-80s. I was living in Portsmouth New Hampshire. It was a good time to play original material. The punk thing had sort of played itself out but had filtered into pop music. There were all these cool bands with singers that had a lot of style but weren't necessarily great singers. To grow up hearing Robert Plant, and think to yourself, 'well, there's no way I could do that…' There's no way I'm gonna sound like Marvin Gaye or Robert Plant or Otis Redding. But with the punk thing, you could sort of invent a voice for yourself. The lead singer of the Psychedelic Furs, Richard Butler, was not a great singer but sounded so cool and communicated something really wonderful in an original way. So it was a great time for experimenting and finding your own voice and making something up.  There was a lot of bad pop music right then, but there was a lot of freedom. Those were exciting times. It was a lot of fun to write songs and go and record 'em. The first band I was in, we had a lot of fun in the studio. We'd do things backwards, and mike electric guitars that weren't plugged in. We would have so much fun. I remember filling up a big bottle with water and putting marbles in it and recording that, just for sounds… soundscapes. It was not a good band. We didn't have good songs, but we had a lot of fun in the process. That sort of played out over 3, 4, 5 years. I was in my mid-20's. I got tired of compromising, trying to write songs with other people. I started envisioning how I might do it on my own and still have it be musical."

Rod supported himself doing construction - sheetrocking -- until he was 35 (he's 42 now). Therefore, he has done music exclusively now for seven years.

"I moved to Colorado for a few years and met a songwriter out there — Stephen Allen Davis. Stephen's songs have been cut by many diverse artists, including Joe Cocker, Diana Ross, the Divinyls, Meatloaf, John Hiatt, Kenny Rogers, Tammy Wynette and Reba McEntire. He had been a staff writer for different publishing companies in Nashville. That opened up a whole new concept for me. That you could be a songwriter. My conception of songwriting was that you did that to be in a band. Not necessarily a performer. I always struggled as a singer, so it was appealing to me. I started investigating all these people who were just writers and dwelled on writing with that in mind. I was living in Boulder, still working in construction.

“I spent a  fair amount of time busking on the streets, trying out my songs. I just fell in love again with the process of working on songs. It was a huge change, going from being like a kid who wanted to be in a rock band to being a song writer. Where the song is really naked and there's nothing else. There's just chords and melody and rhythm and nothing else. Just the basic pieces.

“It was a huge shift in how it worked. I went from writing mediocre, interior-driven poetry, which is what a lot of bands do, to trying write stuff which is really narrative and detailed.

“It takes a lot more discipline to write like that. In a way, it takes a lot more balls, because it's very naked. You don't have that mind-set of 'well, it means something to me or this to me.' People still interpret it and make it their own, but the story has to mean the same thing to everybody. It was real scary. If you're trying to write songs for other people to sing, there needs to be some sort of sense of narrative and clarity. So somebody else can take the thing and communicate with it.

“If you're just plunking down four or five chords, the lyric has got to be really strong, to carry it, unless the melody is really monumental. I started listening to different people, like Steve Earle, who writes such amazing narrative songs… how it worked. Those things all rub off on you. Over time, you absorb it and it becomes like a flavor. Even his phrasing. There's a lot of it on the first and second albums."

The song "Haunted Man" on the album Tiger Tom Dixon's Blues, brilliantly written, sounds almost exactly like Steve Earle. It's worthy of being among Earle's best work.

    Sleep don't come round here no more

    there's too much reminding me what I had before

    On your pillow I can smell your hair

    left your dress there on the floor

    but you don't love me anymore…

    but as I stand I'm a haunted man

    that's what I am a haunted man…

Gone to Nashville

This guy [Steven] had been a staff writer in Nashville. He was the only guy I ever met who had done that, so that was the path I followed. I didn't know anybody in L.A. or New York. And Nashville seemed like, well, it's what? A half a million people in the metro area, so 'I can deal with that.'  I just… I don't know why… I don't know what made me think I could do it. I didn't know a soul in Nashville, but I felt like I could do it, somehow. So, I sold everything I couldn't fit into the truck and drove to Nashville. I got an apartment, moved my girlfriend down and started doing it. And worked really, really hard at it. I was workin' eight hours a day and then comin' home and workin' four and five hours every night. I went to all the open mics. Stayed out night after night, watching the morning sun come up. I don't think I had, maybe two good songs. Just worked really hard at it. I was very self-critical and aware of where I was at as a writer. And what I needed to do. I had a lot to learn I just put my head down and kinda did it. I think a big part of growing and getting better and pushing yourself is trying to find that honest bone inside that you can trust. So you can tell the stuff you're doing that's good from the stuff that's not good enough. It's real hard in any profession. Being able to be self-critical and know when it's good and when it's not good enough."

Rod doesn't write with the same commercial appeal as Stephen Allen Davis (see "Highway, Highway" by Davis -- it's killer) He did it his own way, and it's an artistic revelation, but the world has been slow to take notice.

The Fireside Whiskey Hour

"About 3 or 4 years in, I got a little bit of, I wouldn't say, attention. I would go to these song critiques and open mics and stuff. Even though I was really bad, I think there was some little something in there, I think that people would say, 'he's not very good, but there's something there.' I started doing this weekly show called the the Fireside Whiskey Hour."

"I would book it as if it was a show, with five or six acts. Sometimes bands, usually just solos with guitars, sometimes duos. It was in the basement of a pizza joint. It was such a blast. I met a lot of great people — and some people that weren't so great. As it started to become a thing, that people wanted to play, it got to be more fun. Then I could sort of pick and choose. I had people that were doing pretty well that wanted to come in and hang out at it. It was a great little community. We would bring whiskey in and pass it around. There were people who would misbehave and come in and get drunk. It was very loose. It was totally up to me what I wanted to book. So it was just a lot of fun to be part of that, to have a little community. I stopped doing it. I played it out. You can only do that sort of thing so long, before you become that thing. I didn't want to become 'that thing.'"

"So I wound it up and right about then, I think I started working toward making the first record. I had gotten turned down, I think, by every publisher in town at that point. They all said the same thing. 'You really are a good writer, but the stuff just isn't pop enough. People don't cut these kinds of songs. Just figure out a way to be making records.' So that's the direction I went."

Writing with Slaid

We were always buddies . We were friends since we were little kids, seven, eight years old. Slaid was the keyboard player in the garage band. He wasn't a singer. He was very shy as a kid. We always remained friends. We'd always argue and fight about music, what was good -- about 90% we liked the same stuff. About the time I moved to Nashville, he moved to Austin. Around the same time. Within a year or so. I think he moved to Austin first and then I moved to Nashville. We had already started writing together a little bit.  We'd written a couple of songs together. One of them was pretty good.  We stayed in touch. When he would drive through where I was, we'd write together and when I would drive through where he was, we'd write together.… to work on ideas.

Tiger Tom Dixon's Blues

   Tiger Tom Dixon had a gift from god

    he could hit you quick he could hit you hard

    In a world where a man's hands are put to the test

    Tiger Tom Dixon's hands were the best…

    after humbling that man Tom would tie one on in spite

    kick back into a whiskey like it was an easy chair

    drink to anything that the devil may care…

"My great uncle was a boxer. He fought under the name Tiger Tom Dixon. That was the one song that I wrote in Colorado that I moved to Nashville with. That song is quite old. That was one of the things I was exploring when I was re-teaching myself how to write songs. Looking for things that would motivate me to get behind and sing. Some of it is just those words. It's such a great name. There was something powerful about the story. There's something so poignant and heartbreaking about somebody who has the potential to do something really amazing and wastes it. It's all true. I basically just told the story and made it rhyme. He wasn't around. I had written he song from all these second-hand recollections. He was my father's uncle. It seemed that it was an important story to my father. The importance of it rubbed off on me."

"There was something dark and sad and funny to my father about when he would go to see his uncle when he was dying in the hospital. He basically just drank himself to death. They talked about how the doctors would say, 'just give him all the whiskey he wants. He's going, just let him be.' Things were a lot looser back then [late 40's]." The key to writing a great song, it would seem to this author, is for the songwriter to get a close relationship to the material. There's no doubt that Rod has done exactly that. He sees clear through to the essence of living and puts it down and puts it out there. As he says so eloquently: "People's lives are really important. They're huge, you know? The chances you get. The things that don't work out. It represents the same thing to everybody. You see pieces of yourself in those stories. That's the thing." I asked Rod if he fell prey to the "romantic breakup just to get a song" syndrome. He replied,"I had a big argument with one of my buddies once who claimed that people who are artists suffer those problems in a bigger way than other people. I don't think that that's true. If you're some kind of artist you have an outlet. If you're an artist, you may be more prone to be dramatic about it [laughs] because it's part of your communication. "I'm not immune to that lot… It's maybe an exaggeration to say it that clearly… I'm not immune to inviting trouble into your life just because it's comfortable having trouble in your life. It seems like it's part of it for some people. I've been one of those people and have struggled not to do that.

Work Shirts and Turpentine

   ankle boots, clip-on tie

    you're going to church

    and don't ask why

    mama's mad and blowin' smoke

    walk through the kitchen

    you could choke

    face against the window screen

    they're drinking beer and talking mean

    uncle Fred and uncle John

    throw the cans across the lawn…

    funeral parlor, parking lot

    look in the window, don't get caught…

There's lots more in there and it's gripping. The effect of this song was so real, I asked Rod how he came to write it. He said: "That's purely a description of my childhood. I did a radio interview and the DJ asked me what it was like growing up in South Berwick. I was describing the town. He said, no, not what was the place like… what did it feel like? I just started thinking about that idea. What did it feel like… what would that song sound like? So that's were that song came from. We used to walk home from school, like you would do if there was a funeral parlor on your route. I was just tellin" a little story."

Yeah. Just tellin' a little story. Like Kerouac. Like Ferlinghetti. Like Bukowski.

So, a little warning. This man's songs will break your heart. If you're at all jaded about singer/songwriting, you'll fall in love all over again. This man's road is a path worth following, whether you're an aspiring writer, or if you're simply a listener who likes a good story inside a good song. Step inside. Rod's waiting.

Web site: www.rodpicott.com