Greg Brown Road Trip
A good song can take you places. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Iowa singer-songwriter Greg Brown appeared with his compadre guitarist Bo Ramsey in March 2009 at the Harris Theater at Millennium Park in Chicago. Brown is in the upper tier of Americana singer-songwriters along with John Prine, Lucinda Williams, Pat McLaughlin, and Dan Penn. Brown makes every word count and his phrasing dips into rural blues like a baptism.
The Chicago show was a benefit for the PACTT (Parents Allied with Children and Teachers for Tomorrow) Learning Center, which assists children and young adults with severe autism. Many autistic kids connect with music and some PACTT clients were in the audience that evening. They experienced this gifted musician who wrote “They All Went To Mexico,” covered by Willie Nelson and Carlos Santana, “Spring Wind,” covered by Jack Johnson, and many others.
And then there’s “Blue Car.”
“Blue Car” is an ethereal blues-influenced ballad about a car that travels down from a mountain, fueled by reflections from when the car was new. It appears on Brown’s 2000 “Covenant” album.
My girlfriend at the time was someone who loved road trips. Part of my job at the Chicago Sun-Times was blue highway travel and she seemed up for anything: Memphis, Natchez, Ms. Eureka Springs, Baltimore, and Springfield, Mo. There’s always that. She went to school at the University of Iowa so she was familiar with Brown.
She was sick that night. She was tired and had chills but she wanted to see the show. I recall holding her which is quite a gesture for someone who is not into public displays of affection. We almost made it to the end of the show and I’m sure that within 36 hours she was back at her job as an elementary school teacher for Chicago Public Schools.
I haven’t talked to her in a couple of years, but if I had I would tell her that what may be two of Brown’s final concert appearances take place on Feb. 16 and 17 at the Englert Theatre in Iowa City. The gigs are billed as the “Greg Brown Retirement Show” with Bo Ramsey. Both shows are sold out.
Brown is 73 years old. He married singer-songwriter Iris DeMent in 2002. They live on Brown’s family farm in Hacklebarney, a hilly region of southwestern Iowa. I’ve visited the farm in coal country and talked to Brown a couple of times about songwriting, but never asked him about “Blue Car.” I am unaware if his car was blue or his mood was blue. But I was driving a blue Pontiac Sunfire in the early 2000s so both sides of the song worked for me.
I was recently going through scrapbooks and bent road maps and came across some Brown stuff I never wrote. In the early 1970s the Platters’ late manager and producer Buck Ram hired Brown as a songwriter when Ram lived in Las Vegas. The Platters vocal group had major hits like “Only You (And You Alone)” and “The Great Pretender.”
“I must have been 19 or 20,” Brown said during a 2004 conversation in the oak-and-walnut barn he restored into a studio. “At that time I was playing with a trio. We were playing at bars around the Midwest. Our (female) singer had been in an all-girl rock band. I think they were called Fanny. They had been in Vegas and Buck (a native Chicagoan) heard them. When we got together as a trio, she sent a tape to him.”
So, in the early 1970s, Brown did a writing residency at Ram’s compound for four months. Brown’s trio also played the smaller Vegas lounges. “It was surreal,” he said. “We’d be out at one of the clubs and they’d put the spotlight on us. Buck was looking for another Platters. (Ram also brought the Penguins to Mercury Records.) There were probably eight different bands that had soloists he was developing. He hired me as a songwriter because he had all these bands he was trying to get going.”
Brown tried his hand and pop, rhythm and blues, funk and even the soft rock of the period. “He and I did co-writes,” Brown said. “I don’t know what became of them. But Buck would tell us funny stories. He’d tell us about ‘The Great Pretender’,” and Brown dropped into showbiz speak, “Yeah, I wrote that on the crapper. I was sittin’ there at the Sands.’ He was a real character.”
Bo Ramsey (L) and Greg Brown, circa 2019
There’s only been a handful of interviews where I tossed out song titles and asked the songwriter to share the backstory. I did it with Curtis Mayfield and John Prine. I did it with Brown on “Laughing River” which he included in his December 2022 retirement show in Minneapolis. I’m a huge fan of minor league baseball and “Laughing River” is about a career 20-year minor league player who trades in his old bat for a fishing pole.
“I was doing a gig around Traverse City, Michigan,” Brown told me. “I do a ‘Fishing Tour’ every year where I go up to Wisconsin and over to Michigan. I went across the UP and came down through Northern Michigan. I had a big car. I’d stick my guitar and fishing poles in the back. I’d been driving along and thinking about this story about a minor-league baseball player. I was getting disgusted with professional sports. I played all the sports when I was a kid. I no longer sensed team spirit and the good things I learned about sports. It made me kind of sad.
“I became more interested in minor league sports. There was still a little funk and a little joy. I had this theme going about a guy who developed his career in the minor leagues and I thought I’d better pull over and stop the car. I saw this sign that said ‘Laughing River.’ People later told me it was the Laughing Whitefish River (near Laughing Whitefish Falls State Park, several miles south of Lake Superior), but all I saw was ‘Laughing River.’ That was it.” Brown snapped his fingers and added, “I wrote that song besides that river on the hood of that car.”
Cars will take you to the most exceptional destinations. Sometimes a foregone conclusion is at the bottom of a mountain, other times there is sudden magic on a two-lane sunrise. But the journey is always memorable. I’m driving to Iowa City on Feb. 15. It’s becoming more difficult to see at night. And I’m still searching, but the light of good music always moves me forward,
I don’t know a lot of Greg’s catalog but think “Skinny Days” is as good of a song that exists in the American songbook. Your road trip sounds wonderful.
Thank you Paul, “The Poet Game” is another good one. Thanks for writing.