“Wait, I think the stairwell is over there,” said a San Francisco Chronicle editor, accompanying me to the paper’s book-review department. “I’ve actually never been down there.”
The wry editor and I were leaving the newsroom, a fluorescent hive of conversing reporters and editors. Down we descended into the basement and into a scene right out of “Norma Rae.” We stood in a windowless lunchroom, a grim assembly of colored-plastic tables and vending machines. The few folks eating their sandwiches here were clearly not the Chronicle’s executive staff. A sign on a far wall said “Book Review,” followed by an arrow.
We headed down a dimly lit hallway, past a janitor’s office, a storage space with extension cords on the floor and an abandoned copy-machine room, and finally arrived at a stockroom. Inside, pressboard shelves sagged with books. The floor was piled with padded envelopes stuffed with a lot more.
Near the door, and behind a small desk, sat 30-year-old book editor Oscar Villalon, who less than two years before was slaving away at the Chronicle’s copy desk upstairs. Now he sat by himself typing titles from publishers’ catalogs into a dingy computer. If the wry editor and I didn’t know better, didn’t know how smart Oscar is and how hard he works, we could have mistaken him for a stocky receiving clerk, waiting on the morning delivery of steno pads.
Oscar and I were glad to meet, as I often write book reviews for the Chronicle, but we had only spoken on the phone. In person, he was garrulous and enthusiastic, telling me how much he loved the new Peter Carey novel about Ned Kelly, how great Carey was on Australia’s violent prison system and its own Wild West days.
But Oscar was also nervous. Earlier, when I called to ask if it was OK to stop by, he said he positively couldn’t say anything about the recent shake-up at the newspaper. Now, as if to protect himself from any slip of the tongue, or to prevent me from asking a question, he talked about new books without pause.
Oscar’s anxiety stemmed from the Chronicle’s action, two months earlier, to do away with its pullout, 12-page book section and demote book reviews to the back of its Sunday entertainment section, a tabloid called Datebook. The book editor at the time, David Kipen, was shifted to “book critic,” responsible for reviewing two books per week, and Oscar got the job of overseeing Sunday’s seven book pages, which now fall between “Dining Out” and “Get Together,” the personals.
The Chronicle’s Sunday circulation is a little over half a million, making it the most widely read paper in the Bay Area. And it’s not the only metropolitan daily to trim its book coverage this year. The Seattle Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the Chicago Tribune, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Boston Globe have all put their papers on a diet by cutting back on book reviews. Even the nation’s most influential Sunday book supplement, the New York Times Book Review, killed two pages, resulting in the loss of six “In Brief” write-ups and one full-page review.
The reason for the cuts is not exactly front-page news. In our “age of corporate newspapering,” as the American Journalism Review calls it, the $60 billion-a-year newspaper industry is “now culminating in a furious, unprecedented blitz of buying, selling, and consolidating of newspapers.”
To keep hitting those high quarterly profit targets, conglomerates such as Knight Ridder, which owns more than 50 papers, including the Mercury News; the Hearst Corp., which owns 30 papers, including the Chronicle; and the New York Times Co., which owns the Boston Globe, are streamlining costs at every turn — including personnel. Knight Ridder and the New York Times Co. alone have laid off a total of 2,900 employees this year.
The guiding philosophy of newspapers today may well be epitomized by this comment from Wall Street media analyst Lauren Rich Fine: “Until you can show me that your subscribers are willing to pay more money because of the quality, I sort of feel like the average reader isn’t that sensitive to the quality at a certain level, and you really do need to make decisions that sometimes seem short-term in nature, because you chose to go public, and shareholders really do deserve a return.”
When newspapers were independently owned, quality did matter. Good editors could please small segments of their communities, like people who love books, because the money in the balance wasn’t a frightening amount. Now, paranoia rules in newspapers because the big company’s billions are at stake. Editors are now under extreme pressure to tap the widest possible audience. As a result, they are abandoning the journalistic risks and literary quirks that once made the morning paper feel alive and important.
The mad drive to stay in touch with the mass audience has also put newspapers under the reign of almighty market research. Ask executive newspaper editors why book coverage is among the first elements to go and they direct your attention to their focus groups, which they insist show that book reviews rank lower in readers’ esteem than the Wednesday column on flower arranging. Whether focus groups accurately reflect what people really want is beside the point. Book reviews are being cavalierly dispatched by newspapers because they have become disposable.
Now that’s the place to pause. After all, you might think newspapers would benefit from courting their community’s most passionate readers. People who read about books, not to mention those willing to crack a book itself, are inclined to ignore the putative enemy, TV, and get their news by reading — that is, from a newspaper.
But in their frenzy to gain a mass readership, pump up ad revenues and keep shareholders happy, newspapers end up dissing their most sympathetic audience. You have to admit that seems a little soft in the head. Cutting book reviews from newspapers is like Porsche saying, “Our customers really love to drive, so let’s install lousy shocks in the chassis and make the engine sputter at high rpm.”
For those with a sense of humor, this cockeyed approach to publishing is a shining example of how the corporate world has completely warped the value of the written word. For those who believe that newspapers should be a lively part of America’s literary life and culture, that book reviews help keep us hungry to read, well, it’s not quite so funny.
What happened in San Francisco reveals how editors, their eyes glued on the bottom line and market research reports, have become blind to their actual community. One focus group told Chronicle editors that readers wouldn’t mind losing the stand-alone book section because they couldn’t find it in the bulky Sunday paper anyway. But that theory didn’t hold up too well when another focus group found that readers wouldn’t miss the book section because they immediately pulled it out of the center of the Datebook, where it obscured the movie section.
Nevertheless, the week after the Chronicle canned the stand-alone Book Review, readers pounced on the paper with more than 400 e-mails and calls. Local lights like Stanford literature professor Diane Middlebrook and novelist Herbert Gold led the epistolary charge. They reminded the Chronicle, politely at first, that the Bay Area had a few readers in its midst — teachers, physicians, scientists and writers — a few internationally renowned universities and even a few hundred bookstores.
And then not so politely. When Hearst took over the Chronicle last year, Gold said, “They promised they were going to produce a ‘world-class newspaper.’ By eliminating the book-review section and making more space for entertainment gossip, they are producing a world-class disgrace.”
The Chronicle’s top editors claimed they were surprised at the reaction. “Astounded, really,” said senior editor Narda Zacchino. “The number and passion of complaints we received were beyond anything we got over other changes in the paper.” If executive editor Phil Bronstein “had anticipated this kind of reaction to doing away with the stand-alone section,” she said, “he wouldn’t have done it.”
It might be surprising that a major metropolitan paper wouldn’t anticipate an angry reaction from a community that loves books. But it’s only surprising if you don’t know that top editors — “just another replaceable face in the management constellation,” in the words of the American Journalism Review — are now holed up in their shaded offices, where word from the outside is often communicated in the PowerPoint presentations of hired consultants.
Newsrooms have become cultures of fear — “the fear of offending readers,” said Charles Layton, who has conducted a nationwide study of the negative impact of market research on newspapers. Layton is co-editor of a new book on the newspaper industry, “Leaving Readers Behind,” and was a foreign affairs and magazine editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer for 22 years.
Editors now rely on the safety in numbers — demographic studies and reader polls — to determine what stories to pursue and what sections to keep or cut loose. But pre-business school journalists would like to tell the world that market research is a pitiful tool for guiding a newspaper. Ask a bunch of readers what they want, and results inevitably skew toward the middle. Independent or original views are ignored when hunting for a consensus.
And today, the consensus in boardrooms, where editors and marketers meet, is that advertisers are in love with young people, who supposedly do nothing but go to movies every night and so can’t get enough articles about Reese Witherspoon. To editors, Layton said, in his slow, ingratiating drawl, “book sections appeal to a small, elite, older readership — not a real high priority.”
Layton doesn’t doubt that book reviews rank low in reader polls. But in his view, newspapers have a responsibility to operate like a supermarket, offering a variety of enticements to a wide range of people, including fresh book reviews. Interestingly, he added, given newspapers’ hallowed traditions of editorial integrity, newspaper managers don’t want to be viewed as indentured servants to lordly profits, and so hide behind their polls. “It’s nothing but a fig leaf for their cuts.” Although, more recently, executives don’t even bother citing the research, Layton said. “The attitude now is, ‘Fuck it, let’s just cut costs.’”
And make room for ads. The Chronicle, in particular, was anxious to clear the Book Review out of the middle of the popular Sunday Datebook to make room for double-truck movie ads. What’s more, editors at the Chronicle and other papers claimed that financing a stand-alone book section is now prohibitively expensive, as the downturn in the economy has also affected book publishers, who aren’t buying as many ads.
True? Not at St. Martins, said John Murphy, vice president and director of publicity. “Our ad budget has climbed every year.” It’s just that the bulk of ad money goes to promote potential blockbusters. And often goes in one fell swoop, as a full-page ad in the New York Times Book Review runs around $40,000. In fact, Murphy had just come from a meeting where the discussion was whether to spend $25,000 on a quarter-page ad in USA Today to back a new thriller by Stephen Coonts.
Book industry insiders vehemently deny newspaper executives’ claim that the viability of book review sections depends on their ability to attract book industry advertising. Sports sections don’t rely on ads from Major League Baseball to justify their publication, and business sections don’t rely on ads from the New York Stock Exchange, so why should book reviews be tied to the likes of Random House and Simon and Schuster? “Sports and business are of interest to the general public, just as books are, and therefore part of what a newspaper should cover,” said Gold. “Newspapers don’t get advertising from Bosnia. But they still publish news about Bosnia.”
In truth, book review sections have always been alien departments within the American newsroom’s just-the-facts culture. Jimmy Breslin in a dusky bar, drumming information out of a jaded district attorney, a no-bullshit metro reporter doggedly piecing together the mayor’s ties to a crooked port developer — these are the icons of the daily newspaper, not a pasty-faced bookworm poring over the latest catalog from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
“For the most part, shoe leather and the ability to jawbone are the most important things in the newsroom,” said Steve Wasserman, book editor of the Los Angeles Times. “Ruminative thought and the ability to paint a larger cultural picture get little respect. They are seen as dispensable sideshows.” Michael Skube, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic, put it more bluntly: “Editors read newspapers. They don’t read books.”
Layton added that at most newspapers these days, “the book editor sits by himself in an isolated room without much clout. He’s not even visible to newsroom editors. So in terms of the internal politics at a paper, book sections are that much easier to cut.”
“Yes,” I said, thinking of Oscar in his stockroom office, “I got that impression.”
While book reviews rank as steerage in most of the nation’s dailies, they still merit first-class treatment in the Sunday New York Times. In the Los Angeles Times, too, though certainly without the same national profile. But the two Times papers are not free of the financial pressures that squeeze other newspapers; indeed, the Los Angeles Times is owned by Chicago’s mighty Tribune Co., which also publishes Newsday and the Baltimore Sun. But according to the papers’ respective book editors, anyway, book coverage has the full support of the papers’ top editors.
Charles McGrath, editor of the New York Times Book Review, said he was forced to cut two pages earlier this year because, during the current advertising slump, his section was “expected to do its fair share of belt-tightening along with the other Sunday sections,” including Arts and Leisure, Week in Review and the magazine.
Would the New York Times consider saving money by getting rid of the stand-alone book section and folding it into the rest of the Sunday package as other papers have done? “That would never happen at this paper,” said McGrath, who oversees a staff of eight editors. “There has been a historical commitment from the publisher and newsroom to support us. Books are part of culture, and culture is part of the news. So we cover books just as intently as we cover sports or theater or anything else.”
Wasserman, who has been the Los Angeles Times book editor for nearly five years, sounded a similar chord. “I’m proud to report that I’m fortunate to work for men and women of vision. They understand quality and excellence in reporting and know that includes a vibrant book section. They know that an engaging book section raises the journalistic stakes for the city, the newspaper and readers.”
After listening to numerous journalists who have practically apologized for wanting to cover books in their papers, and paranoid editors who won’t dare speak on the record about their bosses’ real view of books, McGrath’s and Wasserman’s self-assured comments sound refreshingly civilized.
As, in fact, does San Francisco Chronicle senior editor Zacchino. After 31 years at the Los Angeles Times, where she was the one to hire Wasserman, Zacchino arrived at the Chronicle a few months ago, only to be thrust into the role of flak catcher for the cancellation of the Book Review. In Los Angeles, Zacchino, on behalf of the Times, started an annual weekend book festival that consistently draws over 100,000 people. Now at the Chronicle, she plans to produce a similar book fair for Bay Area readers. She is also a driving force inside the Chronicle to revive more Sunday book reviews, either in a new tabloid or in a separate broadsheet adjacent to the opinion pages. The voices of 400 readers, she said, were definitely heard: “So there’s a good possibility we will restore some of the reviews.”
Unfortunately, Zacchino’s views are not typical of newsroom czars. Book criticism is an increasingly endangered beat in a chain-dominated newspaper industry now permanently fixated on the bottom line. Its pleasures are too quirky and cerebral to easily fit newspapers’ marketing formulas. Books are the fountainhead of our culture, the idea and entertainment source that stimulates debates on everything from the Burr-Hamilton duel to the most riveting home run. But, with few exceptions, newspapers treat book criticism as filler, good for a few column inches when the Backstreet Boys review runs short. “It’s horrible,” said Layton. “And don’t expect newspapers to stop dumbing themselves down. As it is, they no longer connect us to the world, only to a shadow of it.”
But there is a bright side. As newspapers lose their most literate customers and recede further into cultural irrelevance, we can spend more time in the one place where the world does live radiantly in words. You got it: We can read a book.
Sam Shepard is wearing black slacks, a black mock-turtleneck sweater and a glossy black leather jacket. The legendary cowboy of American theater looks dressed up. Like he’s heading down to the chapel on Main Street. In fact, what he’s doing is looking nice for the theater donors milling about this San Francisco party, located in a chic restaurant on an industrial slice of the bay.
Outdoors on the patio, under an unusually clear night sky, Shepard stands by a heater that glows like a street lamp and chats with a covey of Armani-clad socialites. It’s a stunning sight, really. For not only has Shepard steered clear of the public since gaining renown as the second coming of Gary Cooper in “The Right Stuff,” he has made the pitfalls of fame a critical theme in many of his four dozen plays. After his “Buried Child” won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1979, he said he “got a greater feeling of accomplishment and pride of achievement” from winning a roping contest in a rodeo.
After three decades in the theater business, though, the 57-year-old playwright knows firsthand that private donations are what keep regional stage doors open. He knows a little celebrity glad-handing seems to loosen the purse strings of the well-to-do, especially the new media-doused generation of the young and the rich here in Yahooland.
Besides, he holds a genuine affection for San Francisco’s Magic Theatre, which produced his new play, “The Late Henry Moss,” and where he worked as playwright-in-residence in the late ’70s, when he wrote his famous “family” plays: “Curse of the Starving Class,” “Buried Child” and “True West.” But even if this party is making him think he would rather be home on his Minnesota horse ranch with his partner Jessica Lange, their teenage daughter, Hannah, and son, Walker, he has plenty of celebrity support
As promised, the dream cast of “The Late Henry Moss” is here, too: Sean Penn is play-wrestling with his kids near a banquet table; Woody Harrelson is chatting up a female journalist as he lifts a beer off a waiter’s tray; and Nick Nolte, decked out in a knee-length seersucker coat and ratty Panama hat, looking like he just washed out of a Thomas McGuane novel, is holding court with a story about, if my eavesdropping is accurate, the thrills of cross-dressing.
As the party swells with San Francisco’s requisite band of stars — Robin Williams, Don Johnson, Bob Weir — it grows positively giddy with that strange celebrity vortex that sucks people toward the famous but stops us short of actually talking to them. As fans, our greatest fantasy about celebrities is that they would really dig us as friends if they could get to know us in casual conversation in some cedar Montana bar. But rather than risk discovering that Sean Penn or Sam Shepard doesn’t care one way or the other whether we too love Cormac McCarthy and John Ford, we don’t dare breach their personal spaces — their auras, really. It would be too humiliating. It’s safer to leave them framed in fantasy. And in most cases, rather than deal with the predictable anxieties of their audiences, celebrities prefer to circle in their own orbit.
Again and again, Shepard has written brilliantly about being trapped by the images others have given him, that he has given himself. “Keep away from fantasy. Shake off the image,” lectures the gangster rock star Crow in “The Tooth of Crime.” The inability to connect with others through the skeins of our illusions is a driving theme of Shepard’s passionate, violent work.
But — outside of his plays, anyway — he has done little complaining or explaining about his image. Which is one reason why he remains such a magnetic presence in person. It’s sentimental, a little hagiographic, probably, to call artists mysterious. But as Shepard drifts through this party, it’s precisely his elusiveness that makes it so hard to take your eyes off him.
My curiosity finally gets the best of me and I walk over to Shepard to ask how he’s holding up as the evening star. Besides, I have a special passport to cross the fan-celebrity threshold: A week before, I had interviewed Shepard on the telephone, so I have a painless excuse to introduce myself.
“Oh, pleased to meet you,” he says in his dulcet, country-and-western drawl, remembering, I think, our previous conversation. At the time, he was staying at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, taking a break from playing a small role in a John Travolta spy movie called “Swordfish.”
Up close, Shepard is tall, gaunt as an aging rancher and still as classically handsome as the moment he appeared on-screen as the laconic, fatally ill wheat farmer in “Days of Heaven.” His hair is thinner now, more of his forehead is revealed, and his sharp nose and high, Native American-like cheekbones, along with the lines in his weatherworn face, deepen the wisdom of his sad blue eyes.
As friendly and accommodating as Shepard seems, though, his conversational manner is clearly schooled by his spiritual mentor, Samuel Beckett. Yes, he agrees, the celebrity thing does feel a little off the charts tonight. But he doesn’t mind it for a while. “I think Armani put up a lot of money for the party,” he says. Don’t blame him, though, for jump-starting the celebrity machine to gain attention for his new play. “I didn’t set out to cast movie stars,” he says. “It just happens that every single one of them is a dynamite actor. The fact that they’re movie stars is something else.”
“The Late Henry Moss” hasn’t opened yet. So I tell Shepard from what I’ve read about its plot — two rival brothers trying to piece together the details of their alcoholic father’s death in the New Mexico desert — that it sounds like a dramatization of one of the stories from his collection, “Cruising Paradise.” In that story, set in New Mexico, the author’s father staggers out of a bar into the middle of a road and is killed by a car. Later, the author finds, among his late father’s belongings, a pile of unmailed letters, one of which is addressed to him. It concludes: “See you in my dreams.”
“Did that really happen?” I ask. “It did, yeah,” Shepard responds. The 1989 story was indeed a blueprint for “The Late Henry Moss,” which was inspired by his father’s death in 1984. “It took me five years to even consider writing about it,” he says. “Finally, I came to the point where I thought that if I don’t write about it, some aspect of it may be lost.”
Since the stories in “Cruising Paradise” aren’t labeled as autobiographical, but read as if they’re lifted out his journal, I can’t help asking Shepard about the hilarious “Spencer Tracy Is Not Dead.” The most underrated quality of Shepard’s writing is that it is really, truly funny. So was he really driven to a movie shoot in Mexico in a metallic blue limo by a German named Gunther, who was wearing a tuxedo, cummerbund and fluffy shirt? Did they really get pulled over for speeding in El Paso and have the car stripped by the drug police?
Shepard smiles, crow’s feet spreading across his temples. “Yeah. They let the air out of all the tires so we couldn’t go anywhere. Popped the hubcaps. Went through all of our luggage. Yeah, that’s true.” The shoot was for the movie “Voyager,” based on the novel “Homo Faber” by Max Frisch. “Have you read it?” asks Shepard. “I think Frisch is one of the best modern writers.” In fact, I have. But before I say anything, I see Shepard is looking across the patio. “Well, I gotta go meet Sean,” he says. “Nice talkin’ to you.”
As the party wears on, Shepard remains insulated by friends, eating dinner with Philip Kaufman, who directed him in “The Right Stuff,” and talking with musician T-Bone Burnett, whom Shepard has known since 1976, when they were both members of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. “He’s the only one on the tour I’m not sure has relative control over his violent dark side,” Shepard would write about Burnett. “He’s not scary, he’s just crazy.”
Toward the end of the night, Shepard and the lanky Burnett join the dinner jazz band, the Randy Scott Trio. A drummer since he was a wayward California teenager, Shepard gets behind the kit; Burnett commandeers a microphone and they knock out a version of the novelty country hit “Long Tall Texan.” As the remaining partygoers head out the door for home, Shepard bangs his way through Chuck Berry’s rickety classic “Too Much Monkey Business.”
“I was never one to live in the past” is the first and last line of “The Late Henry Moss.” In between, Shepard has crafted his most moving, certainly most tender attempt to resolve a son’s agony over his abusive, alcoholic father’s death.
The play actually caroms between two brothers who, contrary to their opening and closing line, live trapped in the past. One is pinched, nasty and repressed (Penn), the other sodden, pitiful and ultimately loving (Nolte). Their drive to piece together the arc and fall of their father’s final bender is a desperate desire to spring themselves from the traumatic memories of him viciously beating their mother — memories they blame for shaping the estranged courses of their own wanton lives.
“The Late Henry Moss” is fueled by Shepard’s curt, charged dialogue and a boisterous, comic-relief performance by Harrelson as a bewildered taxi driver with clues to the patriarch Henry Moss’ final days on a fishing trip. As Moss himself, who appears through flashbacks, veteran stage and movie actor James Gammon literally is the damaged alcoholic looking into the spiritual emptiness of his guttersnipe life. “I thought I’d killed her,” he finally confesses of beating his wife. “But it was me I killed!”
In many ways, “The Late Henry Moss” reprises themes, characters and stage devices that have long defined Shepard’s writing. But despite the critics who pounced on the parallels to bolster their dim opinions that Shepard was treading old ground, the play represents a beautiful, elegiac summary of the themes that have tortured Shepard to create one of the most prolific and original careers in the American theater.
“The Late Henry Moss” is not Shepard’s best play. Penn either misinterpreted the role of Ray Moss, badly underplaying his simmering resentment, or Shepard needs to sharpen Ray’s portrait as a control freak on the edge. The character never catches fire and so when he does erupt in anger the effect is a dud.
But no matter. Nolte’s and Gammon’s final showdown is spectacular. It begins as a squonking duet of guilt and regret and takes flight on a simple melody of forgiveness. The smoky, gravelly timbre of Gammon’s and Nolte’s voices is so eerily similar that during their emotional sparring they seem to change sides, to transpose into one another. The son becomes the father and in the process discovers his own heart.
After the anger and recrimination between them ebbs, Gammon collapses in bed. With what seems like his own last breath, an exhausted Nolte asks his father if he wants something, “a blanket, maybe?” It’s heartbreaking. Earlier, Gammon had posed, “Peaceful, that would be something, wouldn’t it?” But a son’s peacefulness is what we take away from the theater, a gift from Shepard that has been a very long time in coming.
The New Yorker’s John Lahr, who has written about Shepard for more than two decades, was alone among critics in pointing out that Shepard’s fictionalized father made his first appearance in 1969 in “The Holy Ghostly,” when he was called Stanley Moss. Lahr doesn’t state as much, but “The Holy Ghostly” and “The Late Henry Moss” serve as perfect bookends of Shepard’s plays. In between lies the evolution of the playwright’s art, a search through pain and illusion, memory and history, for transcendence and peace.
“The Holy Ghostly’s” plot can be summarized as: “Father? Yes, son? I want to kill you.” With its loopy songs and syncopated language, mad witches and mean motherfucker sons, it’s wonderfully representative of Shepard’s early plays, the huge batch of one-acts that seemed to pour out of him before he settled into the more complex and reflective “Buried Child” in 1978.
Living in a cold-water flat on the Lower East Side and bussing tables at the Village Gate, Shepard at 26 years old was living and writing close to the bone. He didn’t care if his work was perceived as autobiography. From the mouth of the horn-mad son to the father, who cries out that he’s dead inside, these were the words that the young writer just had to say in “The Holy Ghostly”:
For eighteen years I was your slave. I worked for you hand and foot. Shearing the sheep. Irrigating the trees, listening to your bullshit about “improve your mind, you’ll never get ahead, learn how to lose, hard work and guts and never say die” and now I suppose you want me to bring you back to life. You pathetic creep. Hire yourself a professional mourner, Jim. I’m splitting.Before he does, though, he pulls out a gun and shoots his father in the stomach.
Shepard these days advises fans not to get too excited about his early plays. Says he in “Sam Shepard: Stalking Himself,” a fine video documentary that made the PBS rounds in 1998: “They were chants, they were incantations, they were spells, or whatever you want to call them. You get on ‘em and you go. To say they were well-thought out, they weren’t. They were a pulse.”
And the erratic heartbeat in most of them was pumped by Shepard looking back in anger at his 1950s childhood on a small avocado ranch in Duarte, Calif., a town outside of Pasadena that was no more than a suburban remnant, thrown up with leftover building materials that developers had little use for. Duarte “was a weird accumulation of things, a strange kind of melting pot — Spanish, Okie, black, Midwestern elements all jumbled together. People on the move who couldn’t move anymore, who wound up in trailer parks,” Shepard told Rolling Stone’s Jonathon Cott in 1986.
Shepard’s parents had always been on the move. His father was raised on an Illinois farm and later joined the Army Air Corps. Shepard was born Samuel Shepard Rogers IV in Fort Sheridan, Ill., in 1943. Following the birth of his two younger sisters, the family moved to South Dakota, Utah, Florida, Guam and South Pasadena before settling in Duarte. Shepard’s mother was a teacher and his father held a series of odd jobs while he attended night school to also be a teacher.
“My father had a real short fuse,” Shepard told biographer Don Shewey. “He had a really tough life — had to support his mother and brothers at a very young age when his dad’s farm collapsed. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one. It was past frustration; it was anger.”
More often than not, Shepard was the brunt of that anger. So when he read about a small traveling theater coming through Duarte, Shepard, who had become smitten with acting in high school, and had scratched out poems about despair in his dead-end town, signed on for the ride. Performing Thornton Wilder plays in New England churches? Sure, why not? When the Bishop’s Company Repertory Players landed in New York, Shepard got off the bus.
Perhaps the one thing to know about Shepard’s maturation as a writer is how diligently and obsessively he worked. It’s something that seems to get obscured in all the romantic stories about his affair with blooming rock poet Patti Smith and their collaboration on the play “Cowboy Mouth,” his stint as a drummer in the acid-dipped folk band the Holy Modal Rounders, in, really, all the ink spilled over Shepard’s Hollywood image as an “intellectual loner,” as “Voyager” director Volker Schlondorff described him.
In New York in the ’60s, Shepard lived with the son of the great jazz bassist, Charlie Mingus Jr., who had also grown up in Duarte. “He never stopped writing,” Mingus said of the times when Shepard wasn’t reading Beckett, Pirandello, Edward Albee and Harold Pinter. Shepard “would walk into a room and close the door, with the clacking of the typewriter and all. Then he would come out with a play in a box that the paper came in, a ream of paper.”
Dennis Ludlow, who helped build horse fences and a barn on Shepard’s small Northern Californian ranch during the ’70s (and who played supporting roles in Magic Theatre productions of “Buried Child” and “Fool for Love”), tells me his most indelible memory of Shepard is of the restless playwright writing in a pocket-size notebook. “He was always writing down what he heard in bars, stores, everywhere,” says Ludlow. Later, one of Shepard’s playwriting classes presented him with a carton of the tiny writing pads.
Still, Shepard’s early plays were scintillating rock riffs without accessible verses and choruses until he met New York director and acting teacher Joseph Chaikin. He “had a tremendous influence on Shepard,” writes Shewey. “The values he espoused — his steadfast faith in the priority of art over glamour, show business, wealth, and fame” — left a lasting impression. Shepard told the Paris Review that Chaikin helped him understand there’s “no room for self-indulgence in theater; you have to be thinking about the audience.”
Under Chaikin’s counsel, Shepard began doing something he had never dreamed of before: rewriting. “Joe was so persistent about finding the essence of something,” says Shepard. “He’d say, ‘Does this mean what we’re trying to make it mean? Can it be constructed some other way?’ That fascinated me, because my tendency was to jam, like it was jazz or something. Thelonious Monk style.”
Chaikin’s influence blossomed in Shepard at about the same time the playwright was tiring of his ragged band of pop culture outlaws: drugstore cowboys and gunslinger rock stars, bluesy swamp rats and speed-freak gamblers. In the mid-’70s, after living for a year in London, Shepard settled in countrified Marin County, Calif., with his wife O-Lan, an actress, and young son Jesse. They shared a house with O-Lan’s mother, Scarlett, and Scarlett’s husband, photographer and writer Johnny Dark. With Magic Theatre actors and directors, writers and musicians coming and going, Shepard felt at home in this “very strong community of artists,” he tells me. “It was energetic and intense in a way that I had missed from New York. I don’t think I’ve really come across that situation again. There was something really great about the Magic experience.”
At home on fertile new artistic ground, and committed to a new seriousness in his writing, Shepard stopped heeding every impetuous urge and began listening to voices arising from a deep and wide rift in his heart — the emotional space surrounding his family, “particularly around my old man,” he says. “I was a little afraid of it, a lot of that emotional territory. I didn’t really want to tiptoe in there. And then I thought, well, maybe I better.”
Of course, Shepard didn’t exactly tiptoe in there. As everyone knows who has seen his trilogy of family plays — “Curse of the Starving Class,” “Buried Child” and “True West,” which he wrote in a creative burst of three years — Shepard ripped the door off the hinges, smashed the toasters and exposed an incredible torment at the core of postwar American families. Sons and fathers, mothers and daughters, aunts and uncles — all were splintered by a never-ending race for never enough money, by base sex and ambition, by inevitably mounting layers of frustration. At least that’s how it felt as we sat, awestruck, in the theater.
Most remarkably, Shepard forged his own concentrated, explosive language. The fury was still there, but now the words were stripped of pretension. Shepard created a colloquial poetry of exposure, rhythms rising in an endless crescendo. Here, in the crucial moment in “Buried Child,” the diffident Tilden is telling his son’s girlfriend about his sickly father Dodge:
Tilden: We had a baby. He did. Dodge did. Could pick it up with one hand. Put it in the other. Little baby. Dodge killed it…. Dodge: Tilden? You leave that girl alone!
Tilden: Never told Halie. Never told anybody. Just drowned it.
Dodge: Tilden!
Tilden: Nobody could find it. Just disappeared. Cops looked for it. Neighbors. Nobody could find it.
Dodge: Tilden, what’re you telling her! Tilden!
Tilden: Everybody just gave up. Just stopped looking. Everybody had a different answer. Kidnap. Murder. Accident. Some kind of accident.
Dodge: Tilden you shut up! You shut up about it!
Tilden: Little tiny baby just disappeared. It’s not hard. It’s so small. Almost invisible.
In 1983, Shepard could admire the critical and popular success of his family plays. John Malkovich and Gary Sinise had mounted a daring production of “True West” that he truly loved. His romantic affair with Lange was deepening, and he was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor in “The Right Stuff.” At the same time, from the set of “Country,” which he was filming with Lange in Iowa, he wrote Chaikin a letter: “Something’s been coming to me lately about this whole question of being lost. It only makes sense to me in relation to an idea of one’s identity being shattered under severe personal circumstances — in a state of crisis where everything that I’ve previously identified with in myself suddenly falls away.”
When he lived in London, Shepard became enamored with the writings of Russian spiritual master G.I. Gurdjieff. So his sharp sense of being lost, of having his identity shattered, no doubt represented to him a kind of pure state of inner being. It is an empty place, a chaotic and frightening one, but it is a place free of illusion, a place where everything a public artist, a celebrity, has been told he is doesn’t hold. The one predominant and enduring theme in Shepard’s work is the agonizing struggle to fill that empty space with love.
Listen to him in his story, “You I Have No Distance From”: “I can’t remember what it was like before I met you. Was I always like this? I remember myself lost … But you I have no distance from. Every move you make feels like I’m traveling in your skin.”
The evolution of Shepard’s personal life is shown in technicolor in the tract homes and desert huts of his plays. In the absence of love and connection, the booze flows; relationships come crashing down. The explosive “Fool for Love,” in which lovers and half-siblings May and Eddie rage at each other in jealousy — “You know we’re connected May. We’ll always be connected” — can easily be seen as the end of Shepard’s marriage. Indeed, that year (1983), he permanently left O-Lan to move in with Lange. His divorce was final in 1984.
Given the tempestuous turns his characters have taken under endless emotional storms, it’s no wonder he has remained a relatively private man. The search for love and transcendence is a fragile business in the public world of movies and popular theater. Someone always wants to tell you where to go. The allure of Shepard’s elusive nature is that he has never stopped searching alone.
And we can only admire his devotion. He tells me he acts in movies only to support his writing. “No way,” I say. “You’re Sam Shepard.” Says he: “You can’t make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by.” He does at times enjoy sinking into a role, but, just the same, he would rather be on his ranch sinking fence posts, playing with his kids or writing in his small room next to the barn.
Like his characters in “The Late Henry Moss,” Shepard is “not one to live in the past.” He has not resolved the anguish that fathers and sons heap upon themselves, but he has peeled away a great deal of the despair, exposing an “ember of hope.” Clearly, Shepard has traveled a long way from blasting his fictional father with a revolver to comforting him quietly with a blanket.
But at 57, the angular, elusive cowboy is not going soft on us. He is still riding alone across a mesa, it’s just that now he believes that out there, somewhere, is a deep, enduring peace. In his great 1985 play “A Lie of the Mind,” he seemed to doubt he would ever find it. But now, it appears, the winds of change have worked their wonders. “You know, those winds that wipe everything clean and leave the sky without a cloud. Pure blue. Pure, pure blue.”
The last time I saw Jimmie Dale Gilmore, the most poetic and lovely country singer in America, he was playing on a little wooden stage hammered up on the perimeter of the walkway to the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California. Just around the corner from Gilmore, 8,000 people were listening to Confederate Railroad, an indistinguishable group of guys in tight jeans with long shag haircuts, singing their current hit, “Simple Man,” a Lynyrd Skynyrd song. Well, I thought, here is American culture crystallized under the summer sun. The rare, original artist, enchanting a handful of fans with his heartbreaking, tender voice, is being drowned out by a bad ’70s cover song at a “Summer Country Festival” sponsored by Seagram’s.
“It was a little odd,” says Gilmore in a soft, slow Texas drawl when reminded of that moment. “But I’ve been playing for such a very long time that I have an extremely thick skin about all of that. I’m just so aware of how the music business works. There’s a small core of intense music lovers who seek out something special, but most people are happy to go along with the crowd.”
Mind you, Gilmore is not criticizing the folks who walked by him. “I mean, to tell you the truth, I’ve probably done that myself,” he says. “I bet I’ve walked right by somebody that years later I had the chance to hear in a different context and went, ‘Wow, this is great.’ ”
But then, it would be out of character for the 51-year-old singer, whose marvelous fifth album, “Braver Newer World,” has just been released on Elektra, to criticize anyone.
Jo Carol Pierce, the first of Gilmore’s three wives and an idiosyncratic — not to mention outright randy — Texas singer and songwriter in her own right, has said that Gilmore “really is a true sweetheart. I don’t think that I’ve ever heard Jimmie say anything bad about anybody. . . . It’s a kind of sweetness in the genes, I think.”
That essential sweetness is transformed into tranquility, a cycle of yearning and acceptance, in Gilmore’s music.
With a precise intelligence, he uses the perfect blend of Americana to bring his songs to life: melodies from country and western, rhythms from swing and rock ‘n’ roll, fills from folk and bluegrass. Gilmore’s voice, an eerie, plaintive, lyrical warble, can turn a single prosaic line like, “Have you ever seen Dallas from a DC-9 at night?” into a celebration of the city’s splendors and a lament for its discontents.
So many new country artists, either those who have risen through the ranks of Nashville, like Garth Brooks, or alternative rock, like Son Volt, sound like literary critics with guitars — their performances are glosses on their heroes. But Gilmore is the artist himself. His songs feel fully lived in, like a joyous Whitman stanza. To borrow a line from novelist Richard Powers, Gilmore’s voice sounds as if it had never “inflicted hurt, nor accepted hurt as this world’s last word.”
Ironically, the one false step in Gilmore’s career was the single that was supposed to be his breakthrough: his recording of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” from the 1993 album “Spinning Around the Sun.” The only contemporary singer capable of lowering listeners into the grave of Williams’ loneliness, Gilmore sounds stylized covering his mentor — precisely the opposite of how he sounds when he sings his own compositions or those by Joe Ely and Butch Hancock, friends from his native Lubbock, Texas.
Gilmore’s beautiful twang, for some reason, has remained off country radio and on the margins of commercial success. “There are a lot of program directors at country stations who are fans of mine,” he says. “And they have outright told me, right to my face, ‘I love your music, but we can’t play it because it’s just too different from what our audience is used to.’ It’s kind of a silly way for them to go about it, but it’s something I have to live with.
With his new album, “Braver Newer World,” Gilmore wanders even further afield. “I made a real deliberate decision to become a lot more experimental and get unshackled from the ‘country music’ label,” he says. “There are a lot of people who would like my music, but are turned off by the whole idea of country music. This time around, I wanted to show that I came from a more diverse background. I’ve always had every bit as much a love for rock and roll and blues, for Elvis, Chuck Berry and Robert Johnson, as I had for country.”
“Braver Newer World,” which was produced by T-Bone Burnett and recorded in Los Angeles with such fine musicians as drummer Jim Keltner, is not a total departure from Gilmore’s previous work, however. The rockabilly may be a little more pronounced than the folk music, but the legendary artists who Gilmore has evoked since he formed his first band in Lubbock in the ’60s — Buddy Holly, Hank Snow, Roy Orbison — are still wandering through his rhythms and melodies.
Some of the album’s lyrics, particularly in “Borderland” and “Outside the Lines,” seem to acknowledge Gilmore’s position outside the mainstream. For example, when he sings “I painted myself into a corner/But footprints/Are just about to become part of my design,” he seems to be making peace with his place on the margins.
“I guess that’s true,” he says. “But my attitude, and I’ve had this attitude for a really long time, is I am a type of rebel, but I’ve never been an angry rebel. I’ve just gone my own way. “See, I feel there’s a common humanity among everybody. But if your criticism of society is that it’s unfeeling and unresponsive and unpleasant, well, then, it’s sort of absurd to turn around and fight it with those very same approaches. I think being judgmental is about the worst thing anybody can be.
Gilmore’s background is as eclectic as his music. Part Irish, part Native American, Gilmore studied philosophy at Texas Tech. In 1974, after dropping out of college and going nowhere in local bands, Gilmore gave up music. For the next six years he lived in the Divine Light Mission in Colorado, where he was a disciple of the teenaged Guru Maharaji. Feeling inspired to “integrate my spiritual life and life in music,” Gilmore returned to Texas. Although his personal turmoil wasn’t entirely behind him, he began to get his career on course, playing in clubs and bars in and around Austin, where he now lives.
His first two albums, “Fair and Square” and “Jimmie Dale Gilmore,” recorded in 1988 and 1989 for Oakland’s Hightone label, cast him as a staunchly traditional country singer. His next two albums, “After Awhile” and “Spinning Around the Sun,” recorded for Elektra, are fleshed out with a wider range of instrumentation, yet one which grants them an effortless grace.
Perhaps because of his spiritual background, Gilmore’s work is often labeled “Zen country music.” “I thought it was hilarious the first time I heard it,” he says. “But now it’s become a regular attachment. Technically, I’m not a Buddhist, but I’ve got so many friends who are, and I’ve been associated with it for so long, that people always call me that… I’m not ashamed of it, but it’s slightly inaccurate.” Gilmore has been an avid reader since he was a teenager, when Somerset Maugham’s “A Razor’s Edge” was his favorite book. He is particularly drawn to science and comparative religion; after working his way through Einstein and immersing himself in Vedanta philosophy, he strives these days to keep up with the cosmologists who link quantum mechanics and Eastern philosophy.
“I love science,” he says. “I love the idea of knowing what’s cut-and-dried. What’s hard and fast and true. But when you get into the realm of feelings and emotions, well, that’s something that science can’t touch. And that realm is so much better expressed by metaphor and analogy. And in a lot of ways that’s the whole function of good songs. I sometimes see them as therapy for the world at large.”
the last time I saw Jimmie Dale Gilmore, the most poetic and lovely country singer in America, he was playing on a little wooden stage hammered up on the perimeter of the walkway to the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California. Just around the corner from Gilmore, 8,000 people were listening to Confederate Railroad, an indistinguishable group of guys in tight jeans with long shag haircuts, singing their current hit, “Simple Man,” a Lynyrd Skynyrd song. Well, I thought, here is American culture crystallized under the summer sun. The rare, original artist, enchanting a handful of fans with his heartbreaking, tender voice, is being drowned out by a bad ’70s cover song at a “Summer Country Festival” sponsored by Seagram’s.
“It was a little odd,” says Gilmore in a soft, slow Texas drawl when reminded of that moment. “But I’ve been playing for such a very long time that I have an extremely thick skin about all of that. I’m just so aware of how the music business works. There’s a small core of intense music lovers who seek out something special, but most people are happy to go along with the crowd.”
Mind you, Gilmore is not criticizing the folks who walked by him. “I mean, to tell you the truth, I’ve probably done that myself,” he says. “I bet I’ve walked right by somebody that years later I had the chance to hear in a different context and went, ‘Wow, this is great.’ “
But then, it would be out of character for the 51-year-old singer, whose marvelous fifth album, “Braver Newer World,” has just been released on Elektra, to criticize anyone.
Jo Carol Pierce, the first of Gilmore’s three wives and an idiosyncratic — not to mention outright randy — Texas singer and songwriter in her own right, has said that Gilmore “really is a true sweetheart. I don’t think that I’ve ever heard Jimmie say anything bad about anybody. . . . It’s a kind of sweetness in the genes, I think.”
That essential sweetness is transformed into tranquility, a cycle of yearning and acceptance, in Gilmore’s music. With a precise intelligence, he uses the perfect blend of Americana to bring his songs to life: melodies from country and western, rhythms from swing and rock ‘n’ roll, fills from folk and bluegrass. Gilmore’s voice, an eerie, plaintive, lyrical warble, can turn a single prosaic line like, “Have you ever seen Dallas from a DC-9 at night?” into a celebration of the city’s splendors and a lament for its discontents.
So many new country artists, either those who have risen through the ranks of Nashville, like Garth Brooks, or alternative rock, like Son Volt, sound like literary critics with guitars — their performances are glosses on their heroes. But Gilmore is the artist himself. His songs feel fully lived in, like a joyous Whitman stanza. To borrow a line from novelist Richard Powers, Gilmore’s voice sounds as if it had never “inflicted hurt, nor accepted hurt as this world’s last word.”
Ironically, the one false step in Gilmore’s career was the single that was supposed to be his breakthrough: his recording of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” from the 1993 album “Spinning Around the Sun.” The only contemporary singer capable of lowering listeners into the grave of Williams’ loneliness, Gilmore sounds stylized covering his mentor — precisely the opposite of how he sounds when he sings his own compositions or those by Joe Ely and Butch Hancock, friends from his native Lubbock, Texas.
Gilmore’s beautiful twang, for some reason, has remained off country radio and on the margins of commercial success. “There are a lot of program directors at country stations who are fans of mine,” he says. “And they have outright told me, right to my face, ‘I love your music, but we can’t play it because it’s just too different from what our audience is used to.’ It’s kind of a silly way for them to go about it, but it’s something I have to live with.
With his new album, “Braver Newer World,” Gilmore wanders even further afield. “I made a real deliberate decision to become a lot more experimental and get unshackled from the ‘country music’ label,” he says. “There are a lot of people who would like my music, but are turned off by the whole idea of country music. This time around, I wanted to show that I came from a more diverse background. I’ve always had every bit as much a love for rock and roll and blues, for Elvis, Chuck Berry and Robert Johnson, as I had for country.”
“Braver Newer World,” which was produced by T-Bone Burnett and recorded in Los Angeles with such fine musicians as drummer Jim Keltner, is not a total departure from Gilmore’s previous work, however. The rockabilly may be a little more pronounced than the folk music, but the legendary artists who Gilmore has evoked since he formed his first band in Lubbock in the ’60s — Buddy Holly, Hank Snow, Roy Orbison — are still wandering through his rhythms and melodies.
Some of the album’s lyrics, particularly in “Borderland” and “Outside the Lines,” seem to acknowledge Gilmore’s position outside the mainstream. For example, when he sings “I painted myself into a corner/But footprints/Are just about to become part of my design,” he seems to be making peace with his place on the margins.
“I guess that’s true,” he says. “But my attitude, and I’ve had this attitude for a really long time, is I am a type of rebel, but I’ve never been an angry rebel. I’ve just gone my own way.
“See, I feel there’s a common humanity among everybody. But if your criticism of society is that it’s unfeeling and unresponsive and unpleasant, well, then, it’s sort of absurd to turn around and fight it with those very same approaches. I think being judgmental is about the worst thing anybody can be.
Gilmore’s background is as eclectic as his music. Part Irish, part Native American, Gilmore studied philosophy at Texas Tech. In 1974, after dropping out of college and going nowhere in local bands, Gilmore gave up music. For the next six years he lived in the Divine Light Mission in Colorado, where he was a disciple of the teenaged Guru Maharaji.
Feeling inspired to “integrate my spiritual life and life in music,” Gilmore returned to Texas. Although his personal turmoil wasn’t entirely behind him, he began to get his career on course, playing in clubs and bars in and around Austin, where he now lives.
His first two albums, “Fair and Square” and “Jimmie Dale Gilmore,” recorded in 1988 and 1989 for Oakland’s Hightone label, cast him as a staunchly traditional country singer. His next two albums, “After Awhile” and “Spinning Around the Sun,” recorded for Elektra, are fleshed out with a wider range of instrumentation, yet one which grants them an effortless grace.
Perhaps because of his spiritual background, Gilmore’s work is often labeled “Zen country music.” “I thought it was hilarious the first time I heard it,” he says. “But now it’s become a regular attachment. Technically, I’m not a Buddhist, but I’ve got so many friends who are, and I’ve been associated with it for so long, that people always call me that… I’m not ashamed of it, but it’s slightly inaccurate.”
Gilmore has been an avid reader since he was a teenager, when Somerset Maugham’s “A Razor’s Edge” was his favorite book. He is particularly drawn to science and comparative religion; after working his way through Einstein and immersing himself in Vedanta philosophy, he strives these days to keep up with the cosmologists who link quantum mechanics and Eastern philosophy.
“I love science,” he says. “I love the idea of knowing what’s cut-and-dried. What’s hard and fast and true. But when you get into the realm of feelings and emotions, well, that’s something that science can’t touch. And that realm is so much better expressed by metaphor and analogy. And in a lot of ways that’s the whole function of good songs. I sometimes see them as therapy for the world at large.”
