Mike Cooley has gone and done it now.
For years now, Cooley-wannabes have been trying to rip off his crunchy hook-laden riffs and ass-blistering leads (while doing the dangling cigarette/bottle of Jack/lookin’-cool-and-lost-in-the-groove demeanor thang) in their attempts to capture his essence. What many don’t realize about the Drive-By Truckers’ singer/songwriter/guitarist is that he’s just being Cooley: there’s no poses, no clichés, no commercial-driven moves … Cooley’s going to be Cooley whether the setting is the Late Night With David Letterman studio with the Truckers or his living room with a banjo.
The Fool On Every Corner takes the listener damn close to that living room: recorded over three nights this past March, the new live release is pure Cooley: the man, his guitar, and his voice. (He’s even “ditched the pick,” as we will talk about.) Without a “support group” – Cooley’s own term for playing in a full-band setting – there’s no place for him to tuck into when he’s playing the tunes on The Fool On Every Corner … and none needed. Of course, if you’re real-as-hell to begin with, the solo acoustic setting is a natural one for you.
It’s going to be a hard act for all those wannabes to follow, though.
On the eve of the release of The Fool On Every Corner we had a fun conversation with Mike Cooley, discussing taking chances on stage, divine intervention, and that drunk guy in the front row. You know the one.
Ladies and gentlemen; boys and girls and children of all ages – Mike “Stroker Ace” Cooley.
BR: The last time we talked was almost two years ago and you were back home resting up after trying to put your head through a wall over in Belgium.
MC: (laughs) Oh, yeah …
That was the Trucker tour from hell when everyone was sick and you finally collapsed – “Plum wore out,” you told me at the time. I’m hoping things are going a little bit easier for you these days.
Compared to that, things are going pretty damn good. (laughter)
I imagine you’ve been hearing plenty of this already, Mike, but you ought to be tickled with the way this new live album came out.
Yeah, I’m happy with it – and we had a lot of fun doing it, too.
So, if I have it right, the songs on the album are from a three-night Georgia run: two shows in Atlanta and one in Athens, correct?
That’s right.
Obviously, longtime Trucker producer David Barbe was on board rolling tape – did you go into those shows with the intent of getting an album out of it?
No – not initially. I think we might have talked about it, but David just wanted to record them anyway since I was right there in Georgia. And then the ball got rolling on maybe turning it into an album.
David is just plain good at what he does, isn’t he?
Oh, yeah – he’s got a great ear.
Sure does. Was the Baxendale your primary guitar for those nights?
Yeah – two of them, actually.
The one with Wes Freed’s “Cooley Bird” on the front …
And then there’s the one I usually use for acoustic stuff at Trucker shows; it’s got a cutaway and just a plain blonde finish.
And did you just use the on-board pickups or did you mic the guitars as well?
For the recording, we used mics. To get it loud enough for the room, we used the pickups, but we recorded through the mics.
It’s a great sound. I know you say at one point between songs, “I’ve never played this place before and always wanted to.” I had to laugh because most folks would’ve gone to a venue that they knew to make a live recording.
Well, if we’d really been making a big deal out of it, I probably would have. Most of the tracks on there came from night two in Atlanta, which isn’t as good-sounding of a room – it wouldn’t even make my list of places to record a live album, but lo and behold …
When I started going back through and listening, I said, “Holy shit – I thought this was the worst-sounding of the three nights and almost everything on the album is going to come from it.” (laughter)
The album does flow and feel like a single show – room noise; interaction with the crowd …
Yeah, the sequence was pretty easy to come up with – it almost sequenced itself. You go through and say, “Ah, that’s not very good; I played that too fast; I oversang that …” and then you take what’s left. The sequencing was a breeze – and Jim Demain that put it all together did a great, great job.
How much did the song choices vary between the three nights? And how did the fact that you were recording affect the set lists?
You know, I don’t really keep up – I don’t really do a set list. Lately I’ve been doing two-night stands, so usually I’ll make a list of what I didn’t play on night one and try to make a point of leaning a little heavy on that for night two. But I can’t really remember … I think there were quite a few that were the same all three nights.
Do folks’ expectations of the “Cooley character” ever get in the way of the performance – especially in the solo acoustic setting? Like they’re expecting you to act worse – or maybe screaming “I effing love you, man!” in the middle of a tender song?
Actually, night two in Atlanta was kind of like that … which was one of the reasons why I didn’t think any of that show was going to make it onto the record. There was a guy just really, really drunk right in front of me, and he was being that guy you’re talking about. I wasn’t really mad at him – I imagine he probably woke up the next day and somebody told him how he was. He probably felt bad about it.
But strangely enough, you can’t really hear any of it. I was expecting him to be all over it, as loud as he was, but nope – for whatever reason, the mic didn’t pick him up. Maybe it was divine intervention. (laughs)
I’m always listening for a “Whipping Post!” moment – some call-out from the crowd that ends up preserved for posterity on an album.
Yeah, well … he got a little difficult. There was one segue that we ended up not being able to use when he’s yelling, “You got me through my twenties, man!”
And I’m like, “Ohh- kay … I don’t need any more information than that.”
My hero is the guy who hollered out to you after “Eyes Like Glue”: “Play what you want to play!”
Sometimes I make the mistake of asking what they want to hear. I kind of like it if there’s a general consensus on a song – it eliminates me having to decide what to play next. But sometimes you just hear white noise (laughs) – about ten different titles all jumbled together.
That’s when I just say, “Okay – okay, I’ll just pick something.”
That’s the cross to bear for having written too many good tunes…Do you still get nervous before going on?
Yeah, especially with this solo thing. You’re by yourself; you don’t have your support group – that’s really what a band is – and there’s always that fear of “What if I bomb? What if I get out there and I can’t do anything?” You know it’s not going to happen, but it’s still there, you know? “What if I just fall apart?”
But I’ve gotten better about that; that’s been part of my goal – at least to do it until I get comfortable. Although I don’t think you ever want to get 100% comfortable; I think those nerves work to your advantage.
Sometimes I get nervous with the band these days – and I didn’t in the past. Maybe I’m feeling there’s higher expectations or something. Nothing bad … and nothing like playing solo. It only lasts for, like, the first two songs.
If there is someone who’s been an obvious influence on your fingerpicking style, I can’t tell you who it is from watching you.
No, it’s kind of what I came up with on my own. I had someone who was teaching me some stuff when I was a kid and they were showing me one of the standard songs – that Merle Travis/Chet Atkins-style, Nashville-style, fingerpicking thing – and I never could get it. But I got the concept of it. And over the years it kind of evolved out of mostly a combination of laziness and incompetence – if I pick up a guitar at home and there’s not a pick within arm’s reach, I wouldn’t get back up to look for one.
I really started falling in love with the way it sounded. A lot of the people whose sounds I really liked turned out to be using their fingers, you know?
My way of approaching it is just from doing it and doing it. When I started working on playing these solo shows, that’s one of the first things I figured out: ditch the pick. Strip things down and try to find an approach to playing these songs that would make them interesting without the band. That was the obvious path that jumped out in front of me: ditch the pick.
Jeez – there’s the obvious title for a tour right there: “The Ditch The Pick Tour.”
Yeah – really! (laughs)
The songs like “Marry Me” that are flat-to-the-floor rockers with the Truckers were originally written on acoustic, though, right?
Mostly.
But the arrangements you’re using now are pretty much for this solo setting?
Pretty much. And I have to have all the songs written down with a note off to the side because I’m putting them in different keys; maybe using a capo – which I don’t do with the band. Some of them I drop down a step so I’m not pushing my voice so hard. It sounds good with the band, but it sounds kind of silly if you’re pushing real hard with just an acoustic guitar by yourself.
There’s a moment in the beginning of “Three Dimes Down” where you allude to something you’re thinking about … and then later in the song – after you pull off the segue into Bob Seger’s “Rock & Roll Never Forgets” – you say, “I can’t believe it worked …”
I was going over those lyrics in my head as I was playing that intro … I extended the intro even longer than normal so I could go through them. And then I said to myself, “Yeah, I think I can do it.”
You really hadn’t pulled off that segue before?
Hell, no! I didn’t believe I knew the words – and they still might not be right.
I always figured where the guitar quotes Seger’s tune on the original Trucker version of “Three Dimes Down” that you’d pulled that off somewhere in the past.
No … and I went back and forth for days when we were finishing this live album: “Oh man – I can’t do that … aw, fuck it; let’s leave it.” And for some reason it works.
Well, there – history in the making, boys and girls. And why the cover of “Behind Closed Doors”? I mean, it’s a great tune, but what made you choose to play it at these shows?
I’ve always loved that song; I love Charlie Rich. When I was getting ready to do these shows, I was listening to a Charlie Rich album and I thought, “Hey that’d be good.” I was actually looking for something to cover; something to spice the show up a little bit; throw something out there that they weren’t expecting me to do. I’ve always got my ears open in case there’s something else that comes along.
As far as your own songs go, the album does a nice job of offering a spread of tunes from over the years.
Yeah – it really was a matter of what came out the best over those three nights.
Comparing some of the older songs to your newer ones – has your approach to writing changed?
The approach hasn’t, but what comes out has, for sure – and that’s just from living life.
I know you’ve been told this plenty over the years but you have a great knack for coming up with those one-liners – whether it’s in your own voice or a character’s – for doling out those one-liners that are perfect for tattoos and bumper stickers.
Thanks. We’re all in the bumper sticker business. (laughs)
Where did the new song that’s on the album, “Drinking Coke And Eating Ice”, come from?
That’s kind of a hodge-podge of stuff I was thinking about over the last couple of years. I ended up just kind of sewing some of those lines together – they were all jotted down on different pieces of paper. I’ve written a couple of other things that kind of drew from that same line of thinking.
I recorded a demo and said, “You know, that’ll probably never be a Truckers song, but it’d be great if I could do it on the album and have an original song that nobody’s heard.” I thought I’d let it have a life there.
And it does – it works on a couple of different levels: it can be a woman’s personal story or it can be a metaphor for what’s going on all around us right now.
Oh, yeah – it was. Some of those lines and entire verses were words that came out when I was thinking about something else … I had a different image in my head.
You always downplay your banjo abilities when we’ve talked before but … you’re pretty good.
Thanks. It’s just the same as I play the guitar – it’s just five strings and a different tuning, you know?
When did you first try “Cottonseed” on the banjo?
It was for those shows – I was thinking that it might be cool to play one or two songs on banjo … whatever worked, you know? And when I got to “Cottonseed”, I was thinking “Do I really want to do this one for these shows?”
And then I said, “Banjo!” And there it was.
There’s something about the banjo that takes the tension that’s already in “Cottonseed” and cranks it up a notch or two.
Yeah, it really does.
Were there any songs that you had your heart set on being on the album – ones that you were really hoping would make it?
Actually, there were two songs – “Birthday Boy” and “72” – that I recorded solo in the studio … I’m going to release them at some point. It was a shame, because I had a really good version of “Birthday Boy” and we just didn’t get it. David said I played it really well one night in Atlanta, but the computer went down.
So I said, “Screw it.” We went in the studio, set up one mic and I did both of those songs. We might release them online … really different, really cool versions. “Zip City” is another one that didn’t make it on there – I didn’t have a version of it at the time, but I have one now that I’m happy with.
It’s got to be hard to pick and choose – and somebody’s favorite is always going to be left off.
And the other thing was – and I didn’t do it on purpose – once we had it pretty much done, I asked Jim what the total running time was. He told me 40-whatever minutes – and Barbe immediately goes, “That’ll fit on one LP.”
I hadn’t planned it that way; luckily, I didn’t have another song to put on there. (laughs)
Me, I was hoping Space City would be on there. The fact that it isn’t saves me from sitting by the woodstove bawling my eyes out one more time.
Sorry. (laughs)
Looking ahead – some more solo Cooley?
Yeah, I’ve got a couple this coming weekend in Austin. I’m going to do some more of these shows next year, too – we don’t really have anything nailed down yet.
And it looks like there are some Truckers shows showing up on the calendar – including a 3-night New Year’s run.
Yeah – at the 9:30 Club in DC. I know we’re all looking forward to being back with the band again. It’s been a long time, man.
And Matt Patton will be on bass?
Yeah, Matt fits in well – both his playing and his personality.
That’s part of the deal isn’t it? It’s a family.
You got it.
Well, cool. Mike, congratulations again on this new album … maybe the next one will be that album of Johnny Cash covers we talked about a while back.
The market’s pretty saturated right now – we may have to wait on that one.
Fair enough. I’ll let you go; thanks for taking the time to talk – and keep doing what you’re doing ‘cause you’re doing it awfully good.
All right, man – thank you.
*****
Brian Robbins invites you to sit in the front row and yell all you want over at www.brian-robbins.com
