A Word on Words; 3806; Janis Ian

liz from nashville studio way celebrating offers literature and ideas for more than three decades this is word on words with johnson don johnson in the once again welcome to word on words my guest today is genesee and nominate for granted at the time he was sixteen a singer songwriter also earned a permanent place with a musical and cultural consciousness with seventeen it was the quintessential fondly awkward teenager and he's here today to talk about societies jobs a relentlessly honest account successes and failures and hopes and dreams are extraordinary like janice welcome to work it's great to have you here to talk about the society's child unless just didn't talk about what made you absolutely smashing started it as a teenager the thing

is economists and you know there's the talent which you're born with and i think that's why most songwriters tend to be humble because we realize that we are born with it you don't burn it or by other even richard sometimes but the culmination of the top and then just a series of circumstances i never wanted to do anything to be a singer and a songwriter and i kept trying to get to that goal and i finally met the reverend gary davis his wife took a shine to me and he had me open a show and somebody saw me and took you to a lawyer who took me to a producer and two weeks later we recorded societies and irises history society's child that you tell about where that song came from cover up or confront well thank you hoops so is so touch is a human cordon around the story of bushel i think i say in the book that i understand better now from the vantage point of having grandchildren and

watching a lot of children grow up that a parent doesn't want a child's life to be any harder than it has to be as like his already hard enough but at the time i was fourteen and i was riding a bus living in east orange new jersey all black area and i saw a black and white couple of kids that meant they were making to the lies on the bus now what's at remaking that they were they're obviously very taken with each other and everyone on the bus was glaring at them and they are oblivious animal is thinking i wonder if these people who have the courage to see this through because that was such an unusual thing it's nineteen sixty five to see black white couple being open even in the northeast where i was so i got home and i started thinking about it and then started writing the song and then decided girl probably would camp out in the end it's such a song

is the sentences the hearts are and back then it wouldn't be that controversial book back to back then people just lost their minds people were well so tight over that song and people would people would treat me as i tried to go up on stage people it stopped in the street say tennessee and i'd say yes they'd spit in my face it was just staggering how i can imagine a nissan doing that now i can imagine a song but maybe there are some places where there are still some people who will feel that same way again and i think the songs i think he was very threatening and i didn't realize the impact until people started telling me about it ten fifteen years ago and i remember one boy said it wasn't that they were forbidden to listen to it but he remembered his mother at her weekly coffee clash with her friends all of them saying what would you do if your childhood

home a black it would you let them date how would you stop them he said it became a talking point for his neighborhood on long island i hadn't even realized that you know we talk about a dozen years after brown versus board of education we've heard schools at the same mission over a decade and more and the song hits and hits it hits being butted heads it becomes big gradually and it carries his own disc jockeys are the one dollar of song color than a tough time and still everybody in the industry who had anything to do with the nose it's a classic it's a great record it's as much the record is the song was produced by shadow morton who was coming off of the shangri las and i was known for making epic records it had some of the finest players in your city on it

and it's a great record i say that because i was the heir and i helped with the arrangement that it's really more shadows record than it does mine my song well let's talk about where it goes from there because that's an induction some extraordinary life and it is for sure a family your parents were very open minded they are not talking to you people together no my one of our closest friends visiting ann romney in their children they were a mixed race couple my parents were both first generation americans my grandparents came here from russia and poland for the american dream now let's say that i am the american dream i am the second generation american kid who through hard work and talented gets a determination made it and that's the goal that my grandparents held my parents there were also very liberal they

believed firmly that in school desegregation they've marched against vietnam so i was raised as i guess something close to what we now call a red diaper babies they weren't technically communists but my mother was a socialist menace chapter the cuts get i get i can never quite get it straight but she was a firm believer that people were essentially good and would do good given the opportunity that everyone deserves the right to an education health agencies still controversial health care and that everyone should be allowed to climb as far as they possibly could be they black white to christian whatever and down sometimes it is not very popular it strikes me that your music throughout her career reflect and

their family culture concert i realized how much until i read the book i hadn't really understood what a strong influence that are truly devoted comes through i'm glad it's terrorism but much love and being who you were becoming the war involve a struggle was an industry that was i'm not as culturally and lands' end up in control that is treating to control your own creative output use it in there and it's on a metaphor for much of what the answers men's movies and that's north of rock n roll was a fire and then third in iowa well this comes off blows the country weigh in and and the country and the music blows the country where you know the next generation is ryan brings a generation together and those those

years the sixties were stolen we still around and back was a race war were still involved in a very meaningful and bloody and killing an end and the country is at war if you read this book and you realize that music industry were of the rules since it was a war between i think what the sixties that on the surface look like the music industry was a microcosm for the sixties looked like from the outside it is a war between the old and the young and the music business was a war between the entrenched are not entrenched particularly with folk music coming along people like me weren't well before me dylan baez saying all we need is a great song we don't need pretty costumes we don't need makeup we don't need beautiful lighting we need a great song it's

not that different from any in great upheaval in an art world war and in areas the arts but it was concurrent with the rise of fm radio which suddenly made the same music available all over the country the rise of the fifty thousand watt station wsm was the first at the rise of the counter culture if you will i mean you know all this better than i do well listen listen you know and it's right near one of the miners if you didn't live through that era and another thing i realized was writing the book if you are fortunate her i'm fortunate enough to be born in the seventies or the eighties mean you really missed a lot because it was a cool or what was that's exactly right being inside an industry and my by people who weren't willing to admit they admired what you're about

long introduce you to a whole new world of town people who had talent people had achieved people who were stars amazing and access that thane brings his pit extraordinary the access the flame brings is truly extraordinary and suddenly you'd bump into somebody who was a solo and you realize the fall that celebrity you're a celebrity you do realize the new name i just went to this with vince gill and then a year and a half ago as sort of know vincent passing that he passed me somewhere in a restaurant in a dentist and i thought oh my god and skill arguably one of the great songwriters of my time as many awesome but again and again from zero still a huge deal let's talk about

let's talk about that life itself as for him and it can be very exploitive and you got caught affront on the time with companies and at times you find that they were generous and time to find that they were less than joyous and sometimes main reason we're good people just like people but it's a rollercoaster and its and its financial life and death of times it is and i think that the hardest thing is an artist to understand that this is an artist you want a home you long for home you grow up on a little disconnected from everybody around you because in your mind is just in a different place and in your record company when i was growing up was part of what you look to as a home your publisher might be part of what you look to as a home and of course everyone has to leave home but it's usually not

really taken in that and that's that's unfortunately the norm with record companies who do learn as you get older and have a little more time and space are driven by dollars they're a business it's hard to understand and separate out there that you're a commodity but you can still be human while being a commodity and it's ok to be a commodity so long as you understand and it was very hard for me i think that in kids coming up and business nowadays at the taylor swift knows that almost from the time the start but we eat my generation started from the much more naive place of all you know overall wonderful we all want the world to be better we have it's like the politics who knew that those politicians and the entrenched powers that be would go to those lengths to stay in power we would never have believed that and that i think in a way it's the same to him with any industry will

do is documented in the books and so that's actually read it it has its own wife i loved reading and i hated reading it because when you're hurt in there in your hurt your candor that it was refreshing if you're relying on and if i didn't like you know for one it's going to be a factor yeah well you know he was yes he was crazy but it's it's in one of the things the book gave me was some distance from the anger i felt at him cause he was pretty abusive and very big and i was stuck and i went from being what i say in the book one of those women who would look it abuse women's stories and go i'm smart and wealthy and talented will never happen to me and then it happened to me and i saw how you get sucked in

and then how the hooks get tight and it took me many many years still to get those books out but one of the things that gave me that was wonderful was some distance from the anger that i felt at him and it didn't help that he was only going to have to say and for those of you just joining us we talk about it you know what would you say the breakup of your parents' marriage prolonged your marriage to people no i don't think so i don't think so i know people whose his parents divorced when they were younger than go into their own marriages for the attitude i'll never get a divorce how am i think i stayed married to tina in part because there was a lot of good team in a genuinely loved him in part because the books when in so deep that i

didn't even realize how co opted i had become and in part because of very badly wanted to have children with him and part of the dissolution of the marriage was when i realized that i would never have children will be able to bear children and he refused to adopt story it involves human sexuality well yeah i can i think i had always been in love with women before except for my first boyfriend peter robinson and then with you know i fell over the man i see no dichotomy in that icy nothing strange about it but for a lot of people it's very confusing that you can actually in the va by the gender and for me i know i know that my tilt is toward women and having been with pat now twenty years i'm assuming it will be the rest of my life i would say i'm firmly rooted in that but i'm not comfortable quantifying my sexuality by saying i am this or i'm that because anybody who reads a book you know

well i think it's i think it's a vital part of my life it's like and i we thought that iraq more sociological songs than political as political as society's child may have become it's really a social song just like it's seventeen is a social song jazzy do social songs and in that sense i mean maybe i'm just getting tired as i get older and you realize that so much as an accident at birth or sexual tilt your religion your nationality it's our accident of birth so how can you get crazy over those things yes i think it does i'm not sure it makes sense for everybody but anybody listening two sides are reading it as you explain it has to come through for them and understand it is it is it isn't difficult cultural phenomenon is society and won the society itself is struggling with the accident and i would think any body

anybody that questions about it could read society's child oh emotions there is no pretense there is in this book there is no pretense it is it is it is sometimes you know very well i mean i have a hard time chomping on a bandwagon be it being gay been to spin whatever thing that the only band wagon and comfortable with as being a songwriter because i really didn't know about that everything else it an accident at birth or something that i don't understand myself so how can i make judgement calls about it but i would hope that somebody reading the book would come away with what i hope to accomplish with people who listen to my music which is a very live and let live attitude and also that has my partners says right pollyanna had it i really didn't think that his triumphs i really do believe that people are essentially good that given the

chance they will do that and that given a chance we can all rise to to be the most that we can be that sounds ridiculous but they really believed that it doesn't only commercially let me ask you about they're sometimes in the book that are really good ones the money is there or the famous or adulation as they are in this time and i have great fun but and there are moments when you are absolutely flat broke almost destitute those say ann fairfax adding in a little apartment on the floor crying and telling him and broken things have been flush but that's the music industry you know it's a law that one i lecture sometimes i always say this is the business of failure this is not the business of success you will fail many many more times than to succeed and for those of us who who don't understand that and you think about michael jackson who

i am was a climate the same time i was one thriller came out that his biggest concern was keeping the thriller if the next album can be the one previous he was very i don't know how you can fail after forty million albums sold i would be so thank you very much i'm going to do something else now for the rest of my life cause i don't have to earn a living but for most people the measure their success in things like statistics on another thing that you learned reading a book like that is that that has nothing to do that money has nothing to do with the industry itself did you petition and if you're willing to accept that judgment is valid that levee for it but i've never been fortunate enough to have a string of success that lasted long enough that the industry considered me successful i was only successful by a fluke society's child was a fluke at seventeen was what twelve years later ten years later that was a fluke fighter i was a fluke and i think the one thing the industry agrees on is that i'm a

success as a songwriter but and financially not the wind elton john is underway carole king is so i learned early to measure my success by my own yardstick ella fitzgerald that i was a great singer on your success and speaking of somebody who said janice i mean you tell when you're walking along the streets and becomes an election janice as you know they know my dad in that you have to decide pretty early on in the arts i think what you're going to measure your success by is going to be my own standard and the judgment of your peers or is it going to be by the industry standard and i was forced to decide that it would be by my peers because i realized i was never going to have the kind of career that billy joe let's you know i live in a chanel no no fun of song and then a lot of this here and i know

and occasionally hear a story about a fallen got up in the middle and i couldn't sleep simon wrote a classic i know in writing the book that for youth songwriting can be a work in progress like as a were terribly pretentious is inside them but do you were getting a songwriter it is work and brains ideas that are there and then a vagrant and then return one of the best examples in my life and that is a song called my tennessee hills i started it for five years earlier had a chorus about the tennessee hills got nowhere put it aside for five years later was looking through no no book of the dead and thought oh my gosh that's a georgetown song reddit that they finished it and then got singing with dolly parton but this thing that people

usually don't realize about that is that it wasn't that i wrote it that day it was the forty years before that it retirees sit down to write a song you're sitting down to practice every time he finishes song you've finished your practice session so when inspiration hits in the middle of the night it's usually because their motors well oiled and you're ready for inspiration can get anybody and they don't know what to do with it because the motors not on one of the cool things that nashville's attitude as songwriters is that there's no shame in writing three sons week and nobody hearing that because you figure that sooner or later the white the one that somebody will hear you written songs for films and on ms streisand but a reasonable fear here as in that song and i might see an athlete and i think the ovens is a well long month of the fifth year was he cut the

sea called and she said hi this is me and it it's indicative of her level of fame that i knew exactly who it was morris oh my gosh and she was doing a star is born want to know what i write the music and dr shipp one of my favorite all time films judy garland oh my gosh yes in chief stephen of the conversation saying something like oh that's great when he had an idea give the calm will talk about it and i in my naivete said well i want to call you and talk about it i'll be writing the song and she said well so we can discuss the ladies and i said it again with no malice intended why would i want to discuss a song with you you're an actress i'm a songwriter and needless to say it didn't editor of the song but i have to say the next i ran into she was very nice to me and i hope to god he's forgotten about a hawk like a great story but the book is filled with great stories stories with

joplin and hendrix stories with my own eyes the stories with stories with nashville your spouse you know we know within about a minute left you why'd you pick nashville as a place to come to write a song it was the weirdest thing john what was i set foot here in nineteen eighty six to write i have been centered on a publisher alfred hit the tarmac at the old airport and i thought man whoa i that was the weirdest thing because i had no connection to nashville but i felt that home from the minute i landed here city's been very very good to me and why have you stayed well my partner's hear my friends are here my life is here it's a good community i all the things people say i really ultimately because at home here that's where race affect an area of the road long enough that

you enjoy the road where i enjoy the real work that is you know i'm fifty eight i'm not twenty eight and it's a lot harder every year i'd rather stay home a pretty deprived me is that there are people out there whose joyously you hear from news duel won you write songs for the movie quote unquote it's a beautiful thing to be back i hope so we wrote them thanks so much allison is still iranian to untangle you for watching and johnson go forward own words he threw