Riding with John Hiatt

In his heyday, John Hiatt wrote songs about cars and girls with a fine wit and a firm grasp of rock and roll essentials. On the eve of the Grammy awards last Saturday night, the Americana Music Association organised a celebration of his career at the Troubadour in West Hollywood. I read about it in Bob Lefsetz’s newsletter, and wished very much that I’d been there.

The evening began with various luminaries performing a selection of Hiatt’s songs: Lyle Lovett (“Train to Birmingham”), Michael McDonald (“Have a Little Faith in Me”), Joe Bonamassa (“Perfectly Good Guitar”), Tom Morello (“The River Knows Your Name”), Cedric Burnside (“Icy Blue Heart”), Joe Henry (“The Way We Make a Broken Heart”), Hiatt’s daughter Lilly singing “You Must Go”, and various members of Little Feat — Bill Payne, Fred Tackett and Kenny Gradney — doing “Slow Turning”. Los Lobos presented one of their own songs, “Down by the Riverbed”, to the recording of which Hiatt had contributed vocals. Maggie Rose sang “Riding with the King”, one of the best of the many songs inspired by Elvis Presley.

Then Hiatt himself took the stage, singing “Memphis in the Meantime”, “Across the Borderline”, and — with Brandy Clark — “Thing Called Love”, the song that gave Bonnie Raitt a top 10 hit in 1989. I’m guessing that its inclusion on her five-million-selling Nick of Time probably earned its composer more than the rest of his copyrights put together.

When I first saw Hiatt, it was at the Apollo Victoria in 1980. He was a member of Ry Cooder’s Radio Silents, stepping into the spotlight to give a memorable rendering of O. V. Wright’s R&B drama “Eight Men and Four Women”. The next time was in 1992 with Little Village — a short-lived supergroup comprising Hiatt, Cooder, Nick Lowe and Jim Keltner — at Hammersmith Odeon, where their repertoire included “Don’t Think About Her When You’re Trying to Drive”, Hiatt and Cooder’s great heartbreak ballad.

In between times, he’d made a bunch of solo albums, of which the best received was 1987’s Bring the Family, which established the template for Little Village and included memorable songs: “Memphis in the Meantime”, “Have a Little Faith in Me” and “Lipstick Sunset”. It was the first of his four albums for A&M, and the second of them, Slow Turning, released in 1988, remains for me one of the very finest albums of that decade. Maybe it’s even one of the last great albums of classic guitar-led rock and roll with roots firmly planted in Chuck Berry and Hank Williams.

The album’s solid backing band includes the slide guitarist Sonny Landreth, and there isn’t a weak song among the dozen tracks. In the fast-moving “Tennessee Plates”, Hiatt joyfully channels Berry’s gift for storytelling and wry humour, while “Drive South” is the sort of song that makes you want to put the top down and step on the gas. “Trudy and Dave” is a great little story about a couple, their baby, a pistol and a laundromat. In “Georgia Rae”, he even gets away with serenading his infant daughter.

Best of all, “Icy Blue Heart” is a beautiful ballad with one of the great barroom lyrics: “She came on to him like a slow-movin’ cold front / His beer was warmer than the look in her eyes / She sat on a stool / He said, ‘What do you want?’ / She said, ‘Give me a love that don’t freeze up inside.'” But the singer knows all too well what will happen next, when he turns a heart “that’s been frozen for years / into a river of tears.” The metaphor is sustained through every line.

Hiatt has released 15 solo albums since Slow Turning. Some of them include fine songs, like “Perfectly Good Guitar” “Terms of My Surrender”, and “The Most Unoriginal Sin” (which opens thus: “What there was left of us / Was covered in dust and thick skin / A half-eaten apple / The whole Sistine Chapel / Painted on the head of a pin”), and fine musicians, including Doug Lancio, currently playing guitar in Bob Dylan’s touring band, and the brothers Luther and Cody Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars. On the most recent, Leftover Feelings, released in 2021, he shares the spotlight with the dobro genius Jerry Douglas.

His albums are always worth hearing, because he’s a fine craftsman steeped in the blues, country music and bluegrass. But Slow Turning is a pinnacle, one that never gets old.

* The photo of John Hiatt, taken by Jack Spencer, is from the cover of his album The Open Road, released on the New West label in 2010. There’s a nice piece on Hiatt by my old colleague Neil Morton here: https://www.herecomesthesong.com/post/2017/08/22/john-hiatt-the-goners-the-most-unoriginal-sin