Things Change for Lonesome Bob (2002)

 

NOTE: Here's an interview I did with Lonesome Bob, aka Bob Chaney, for Country Standard Time back in June 2002. The interview was timed to promote his second solo album, Things Change. Unfortunately, it was Lonesome Bob's last album to date, but he continues to perform shows in and around Pittsburgh, where he now lives.

Just call him Lonesome - Bob, that is. Look at him quickly, and it's hard to believe that Robert Chaney - aka Lonesome Bob - a big lumberjack of a man at 6-foot-4, is capable of the songs he writes and sings with rocket-fire force, undiluted and straight to the heart.

The man on the cover of Chaney's new album, "Things Change," is bald, bearded and fierce, clad in boots, faded jeans, sunglasses and a black sleeveless shirt. He towers imposingly over a cloudy industrial setting - smoking, pissed off, ready to get the hell off work.

But listen to "Things Change" or his first album, 1997's "Things Fall Apart," and you'll know big Bob of Nashville with the extra large voice is capable of much more empathy than you would have ever thought at first glance.

Perhaps, the character who most seems to exist on a different planet than that rough man on the cover is the Volvo-driving office worker in "Heather's All Bummed Out." Heather's blue, and it's hard to explain why, Bob sings, other than she's 35 and running out of time. She looks for love on the Internet and fails miserably: "There's something missing from her life and today it's making her cry/and she'll never take another chance, and that's the crying shame."

The biggest crying shame is that not more people know Chaney's music. Compare him to fellow Americana musician Mike Ireland (who recently released his first effort in four years, the excellent "Try Again"), another guy whose reward for laying it all out emotionally seems to be indifference from record buyers.

However, Chaney's music is even more emotionally raw than Ireland's countrypolitan confessions. He simply rages and rocks, soft and hard, with humor and sadness. Hell, he actually has warnings on "Things Change" and "Things Fall Apart," telling listeners to avoid taking songs like "Plans We Made," a dandy murder ballad duet with Allison Moorer, or "Got Away With It," a dandy murder rocker with Moorer, too seriously. They're just songs, after all. 

But it's hard not to take songs like "Where Are You Tonight?" or "Dreaming the Lie" seriously. These songs are among several on the new album that deal with the death of Chaney's son, Zachary, who died in 1998 at age 18 of hepatitis, contracted after he used a dirty needle.

"I sit, I stare, I wonder, I swear," he howls on "Where are You Tonight?" (the vocal was recorded in one take) as you find it impossible to ignore the suffering of a father. He played the song live just once at an in-the-round in Nashville.

"People were pinned to the back of their chairs," Chaney says.

He grew up in Mount Ephraim, N.J., a "classic suburban" town outside of Philadelphia, where he graduated from high school in 1974 and learned to love the Grateful Dead. "I deprogrammed myself from being a Deadhead," he explains.

After high school, Chaney attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he played basketball for two years. By 1984, five years after Zachary was born, he moved to New York City and joined the Ben Vaughn Combo as a drummer. As a member of the combo, he played songs like "Lookin' For a 7-11" "blotto, balls to the wall, as crazy as you can make it." Vaughn, a high school friend, has gone on to do the music for television shows like "That '70s Show" and "Third Rock From the Sun."

After the group broke up in 1988, Chaney began his brand of country music around New York. "I was looking around New York City, where there are a chunk of people big into country. People told me you're not never to get anywhere playing country here. All of the country music industry is in Nashville...I was told I needed to come down here if I was serious enough about it."

In 1994, he decided he was serious enough and made the big move to Music City USA. Once it got there, it wasn't exactly what he expected. "I guess I should have listened to country radio to at least know what to expect," he says. "Robbie Fulks ran into the same thing, with a publishing deal where you basically write bad songs for people who suck. Robbie left before the next wave (of talented musicians) came to Nashville."

That next wave includes people like Greg Trooper, Gwil Owen, Tim Carroll, Phil Lee, Tommy Womack and Moorer.

"We're the same 12 people at each other's gigs," Chaney says.

He established a special musical relationship with Moorer, who sings on both of Chaney's releases. Bob remembers the first time he heard her sing.

"My draw just dropped," he says. "It was like, 'Where have you been?' It was amazing. And I really haven't worked with anybody else since."

He and Moorer even performed together on the Grand Old Opry at the Ryman Auditorium. "They're over really fast," Chaney says. "You think about it. This is going to be cool. What am I going to wear? I hope I don't fuck up."

There was a tense moment, however. 

"I walked up to sing the first line, and the monitor's not on. There's a panic. I thought, 'I'm going to suck.' It's a really great way to break the ice."

After "Things Fall Apart," Checkered Past, which released the album decided not to exercise its option on Chaney and set him free along with fellow Nashville artists Tom House, Paul Burch and Womack. "We all scrambled and found new homes in varying lengths of time," he says.

One year after "Things Fall Apart" was released, Zachary died in April 1998. "It was hard to put one foot in front of the other," he says, "much less make a record."

He eventually got back to writing songs and completed "Things Change" with former 20/20 guitarist Steve Allen serving as co-producer. The album was released this spring on Leap Recordings. Chaney says he's pleased with the results. "I'm looking forward to getting sick of it."

 

Workin' at the Car Wash: Michael Schultz Returns to Milwaukee

Big, big news in Brew City. Milwaukee native and legendary film director Michael Schultz is returning home this weekend, and you can catch him at the Oriental Theater on Saturday. 

Milwaukee Film is paying tribute to the 86-year-old with screenings of Car Wash (3 p.m.), Cooley High (7:30 p.m.) and Last Dragon (8 p.m.) Schultz will appear for Q&A sessions after Car Wash and before Cooley High, which will also include an awards presentation.

I was very lucky and honored to interview Michael Schultz in 2022 for Wisconsin Public Radio, and I’m thrilled he is coming to town. All three movies are well worth seeing. Cooley High is the best, and certainly the most acclaimed, but there’s something about Car Wash that draws you in every time, and it’s not just Norman Whitfield’s funky ass theme song performed by Rose Royce.

I asked Schutlz about the joy the movie brought to audiences, including me, when I interviewed him, and I wanted to share some of his comments about his experience making the 1976 movie starring Richard Pryor, Bill Duke, Ivan Dixon, George Carlin, Antonio Fargas and others. I talked to Schultz for more than an hour, and, of course, I didn’t get to use everything from the interview in my radio segment and web story. So, here’s a little more about Car Wash, a music-filled movie that wildly tells the story of a Los Angeles car wash over the course of a single day.

Coming off 1975’s Cooley High, a film that had combined comedy and drama to devastating effect, Schultz was unsure initially he wanted to follow up with Car Wash after reading Joel Schumacher’s script.

“I almost turned down the movie because it was just all sorts of humor, slapstick, kind of what I call bubblegum comedy,” he said. “And I was talking to a friend of mine, Suzanne de Passe, who was like Barry Gordy’s right-hand person. She had discovered the Jackson 5 and all that. And I said, ‘Suzanne, they offered me this movie, and I’m going to turn it down.’ She said, ‘Are you crazy? It’s like, if it’s not what you want, take the job and make it what you want,’ which is some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten.”

Schultz went forward and set out to put a “spine of seriousness” in Car Wash to balance the comedy. But at the time, he said, “dramedies” were not the rage they have become, and Universal Pictures did not understand why he wanted to make changes.

“They said, ‘you can’t do that,'” Schultz said. “'You can’t mix comedy and drama, or comedy and melodrama, or whatever you want to.' I said, ‘Why not?’ Because I came out of theater, and I knew from the experience of Cooley High, which was all comedic in the beginning that led to some serious drama at the end, and how effective that was on the public in terms of storytelling.

“So, all through the making of that movie, I’m fighting with the studio to have the film end the way I wanted it to end,” he said. “So, I built this throughline between the old school ex-convict, Lonnie (Ivan Dixon), and the young revolutionary, Abdullah (Bill Duke). Because again, like in Cooley High, the bond and love between young black men. But this time, I wanted the father figure to save the young revolutionary and learn from his experience, and the studio just hated that idea. So, I convinced them to let me shoot the film in chronological order, which is almost never done in Hollywood.”

Shooting chronologically can be less efficient and can result in a loss of time and money, he explained, but Schultz thought he could convince them to accept the ending he had planned if he did that way. But he told executives he was shooting chronologically because he had been influenced by Robert Altman’s approach in Nashville.

“I said, ‘Look, I've modeled this movie after Nashville, and like Robert Altman was doing multiple stories in audio, I’m doing multiple stories in the visuals that we might be seeing something happen, you know, through the glass of the of the car window, that’s as much a part of the story as the people who are talking, you know, and there’s no way to keep track of that if you don’t shoot in order. But the real reason was, I wanted to keep trying to convince them that the way I wanted to tell the story was the best way to do it.

“And the hardest part of convincing them was the scene at the end of the movie where Abdul was coming in to rob the place and Lonnie stops him. They embrace, the revolutionary cries, breaks down and all that.”

According to the 1978 book Creative Differences: Profiles of Hollywood Dissidents by David Talbot and Barbara Zheu, Schultz was given only 28 days to shoot Car Wash, and he exceeded that time limit by about 10.

“It’s so finally I’m going to one day over schedule, two days over schedule, three days over,” he said. “The head of the studio calls me and says, ‘Schultz, you finish the damn film.’ I said, ‘Yeah, if you let me shoot it the way I want to shoot it, OK?’ Go ahead, because they figured they could change it in the editing, right?

“So, that’s kind of how it kind of came to be. So, yes, it was joyful. It was a lot of fun. I got Richard Pryor to do a dick part, you know, yeah, and the Pointer Sisters, and that led to a whole experience of working with Richard on other movies.”

Schultz told the authors of Creative Differences in 1978 that he was about 75% happy with Car Wash and the movie “has its values.”

Roger Ebert praised the movie for its “tremendous sense of life.” “It’s one thing to have an idea like this — a zany, sometimes serious day in the life of a car wash — and another thing to make it work,” Ebert wrote. “But the screenplay and the direction juggle the characters so adroitly, this is almost a wash-and-wax M*A*S*H.”

Pauline Kael, meanwhile, ripped Car Wash, writing, “it has no more class than a Hostess Twinkie, though it, too, might make you gag a little.” However, Kael also knocked Norman Whitfield’s music in her review, so she was obviously out of her mind when she watched the movie.

People have certainly wanted to return to the vibrant 1976 world of Car Wash, as it has enjoyed cult success and attempts to revive it over the years. A pilot for a TV version of the movie, starring Danny Aiello, was made in 1978, and a roundly dismissed remake came out in 2001 with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.

The movie’s energy, the perfectly selected cast, most especially Dixon and Fargas, and Schultz’s passion and determination make Car Wash feel so right-on -- even if "you might never get rich.”