A Conversation with Jon Tiven, Plus Sally Tiven and Kent Agee – HuffPost 9.19.12

Mike Ragogna: Jon, what have you got to say today?

Jon Tiven: Hey, how’s it going everybody?

MR: Jon, you’ve been working steadily with many great artists but let’s talk about your latest project.

JT: The album is called Shortcuts To Infinity/Symptomology, and it’s a collaboration with transcendental poet Stephen Kalinich. This whole thing germinated from a trip I took did India in 2006, right after I produced a record for a guy named P.F. Sloan who wrote “Secret Agent Man,” “Eve of Destruction,” and 26 other top-tenners in the mid-Sixties. We became fast friends in the early nineties, and he said, “I’ve got to introduce you to my friend Stevie Kalinich, who wrote lyrics for Brian Wilson, Dennis and Carl. He’s a great lyricist.” We all went to India together, and Stevie is hysterical, like one of The Marx Brothers. I mean, he’s 70 years old and he was just running around like…now. I mean, he’s not a young pup but he’s got all this energy and he just writes lyrics all the time. He cornered me in a dull moment in the ashram in India and said, “Ah, I’ve got this idea for a song.”

MR: Which is where most ideas come from, apparently; ashrams in India. (laughs)

JT: It felt like Ishtar at the time. I asked if he wanted P.F. Sloan to get involved and he said, “No, no, he won’t be bothered with this. This will be just you and me.” So we wrote the song called “Everything’s Exploding” and I did a demo of it when I got back to the United States in my studio in Nashville and I sent it to him. Me and my wife, Sally Tiven, played all the instruments — Chester Thompson on drums, Sally on bass, me on everything else. I didn’t think much would come of it until a couple years later when he called me. He said, “My label that I do my spoken word records for wants me to do a music record. I’m going to use all my friends like Carnie, Wendy Wilson, David Marks from The Beach Boys, and all these Beach Boy connected people. I want to use that song we wrote together.” I said, “Terrific. Who’s going to sing it? I figured he’d get Al Jardine or someone with a really great voice. He said, “No, you’re going to sing it, and we’re going to use your recording.” So I sent him the track and he had the engineer who produced this record, who produces a lot of the Brian Wilson stuff. His name is Mark Linett, an extraordinarily gifted guy who has since become a friend of mine. Mark mixed it and made me sound human. I hadn’t sung in 30 years on a record. Mark has been Brian Wilson’s producer/engineer for some time, and the work they’ve done together is extraordinary, so I have enormous respect for his talent, and he’s a great person. But I really didn’t feel like singing on a record again.

MR: Why not?

JT: Because my first experience as a singer in a recording project was so negative. I had the world’s worst producer. Instead of nurturing me, he was trying to manipulate me and I wasn’t really the right guy to try that on. I never got paid, and it was just unpleasant for me, so I just decided that was the end of that tune.

MR: This was the group The Yankees?

JT: I was the singer and the songwriter and it was pretty much my solo effort. everyone else who was involved in that record seemed to escape unscathed. I felt like being in front of a band made me lose perspective and control, and I decided that I wasn’t going to sing anymore, just play guitar. I’d had enough of lawyers and dealing with record companies as a “front man.”

MR: You were in the Jim Carroll Band, too. Let’s keep going with your history.

JT: I loved his first record and I joined as a guitarist and keyboardist shortly before the making of the second album. I wrote the title song “Dry Dreams” with Jim, and we did some songs after the group that went on his greatest hits. Around the same time, I was working and playing with John Belushi. I met him the day I auditioned for The Jim Carroll Band and Jim was his favorite artist. John passed before we got to record any music together, but I was teaching him how to play guitar and we did a gig at the Lone Star Café in January before he passed. Then I was in a group with Al Franken & Tom Davis, we did a film and a video together. From that, I went into writing and performing with Don Covay and then producing with B.B. King. A very strange and interesting career trajectory took me where I am today.

MR: What was your experience with Don during those years?

JT: Don was fantastic. I’ve known Don since I was 16, visiting Mercury Records, trying to figure out what the music business was about. He wrote some of my favorite songs — “Mercy Mercy” for the Rolling Stones, “3 Time Loser” for Wilson Pickett… tons of ’em. He was doing A&R there and was signed to them as an artist as well. We were friendly, but we didn’t really know each other particularly well then, but in 1985, I got invited to Steve Jordan’s Christmas party and Don walks in we renewed our friendship. He had just gotten over his wife’s passing and was working with the Rolling Stones on their Dirty Work record, and I said, “Do you want to get together and write some songs?” and we got together and we wrote and wrote. He was just a tremendous mentor to me. We did some gigs including one at Ron Wood’s club in Miami with Woody, Bobby Keys and Harvey Mandel joining us.

Then in 1990, Don made a record for Island Records that I played on and Sally played on, and that he produced himself. The record company made him jump through all these hoops. Chris Blackwell loved it, but Denny Cordell said, “Well, it’s not quite ready,” and basically, it pushed his blood pressure to the point where it affected his health. He had a stroke in 1992 and has been in a wheel chair since. After his stroke, we made a new Don Covay record called Adlib. He was fully engaged in the process, but he couldn’t do justice to his old songs so we had other singers that helped him like Paul Rodgers, Dan Penn, Ann Peebles, Huey Lewis… I can’t say enough good things about Don Covay. He’s my idol and my rabbi in the music business, just a beautiful human being and as far as I’m concerned, and one of the top five songwriters of rock ‘n’ roll.

But let’s not get too sidetracked with my history, I should finish my Stevie Kalinich story. He made this record with all these other people on it, California Feeling, and the track that I sung on, “Everything’s Exploding” seemed to get a lot of attention. He and the record company approached me six months after the record came out. They said, “Let’s do an entire record of Tiven- Kalinich songs.” I said that I was game and asked him who was going to sing this time. He said that it would have to be me. I said, “I’ll try to rise to the occasion as long as Mark’s behind the board, I know that he could at least make me sound like a human being.” He went beyond that. He made me sound superhuman and alien on this record.

MR: And these days, I imagine there are challenges there.

JT: The Beach Boys are a little more adept at their vocal instruments than I am, and the way we were writing is unique. Stevie is in California and I am in Nashville. When I am not working on a specific project, I’m writing music for whatever. So I’ve got literally hundreds of tracks that I’ve written in between my productions that I don’t have here for a particular purpose except for, “Hey when I get a nice opportunity, this will be a nice piece of music to throw an interesting lyric on.” He starts sending me a lyric every morning and giving me a perfect opportunity to put some of these tracks to higher use because he’s a transcendental poet. He doesn’t write love songs, he writes about everything else. No boundaries.

MR: Apparently he believes in elephants?

JT: He believes in elephants. And he’s not one of these stuffy nose-in-the-book poets who only worships the intellect. There is a song called “Cul de Sac,” whose lyrics go, “I scratch my balls…”

MR: …which, of course, bring us to this other track, “Don’t F**k With Me.”

JT: After we delivered the first 5 tracks to the label, they insisted on a 2-CD set, so we made the second CD from a point of view of two 24-year-olds. They’re animated, and their names are Jack Hashtag — that’s me — and Reverend Stevie Nobody, and we call our group Yo MaMa. We have a video that’s out there called, “When I Leave my Body.” These guys have no dignity, no shame, they don’t care if they get an audience or not. They just want to have some fun. So Stevie sent me these lyrics and by the time we finished the record, we had over 200 completed songs to choose from for the final 30.

MR: It’s good to know that there’ll be many, many follow-ups to this album.

JT: We now have over 500 songs. We could release a box set every year. I used to produce Ellis Hooks. We made 6 albums together and ended our recording relationship amicably in 2007 because he wanted to try without me. Recently, he called me and said, “I really like that Yo MaMa record you sent me, I want to make a record with you.” I said, “That’s fine, but I have a new lyrical partner who is a part of that and wants to be a part of this. He said, “That’s fine.” So Stevie, Ellis and I are making a record in September, it’s going to be an Ellis Hooks/Yo Ma Ma record and we have chosen 15 songs from the other 470 new songs that we didn’t use from the record and Ellis is rewriting the melodies. It’s quite a remarkable record.

MR: Oh, and look, we have Sally Tiven here. Hello, Sally, how are you?

JT: Sally’s the bass player on bass-ically all my projects.

Sally Tiven: Yes, but I do have an alias for this record.

MR: What is it?

ST: Honk.

MR: Excuse me?

JT: It’s a name that Dan Penn gave her. He said that Sally “really honks on that bass,” and it stuck.

MR: Jon, let’s not be shy about your productions. You’ve worked with Steve Cropper, Pickett, Alex Chilton, Little Milton, Frank Black…

JT: I was counting on osmosis to make me whole.

MR: Would you look at that, someone else just joined us. Why, it’s Kent Agee. Kent!

Kent Agee: Hey Mike, how’ve ya been?

MR: I’ve been fine. Just the other day, I was listening to “Higher Ground” by Barbara Streisand — I really wasn’t, but let’s pretend I was — it seems that one of its songwriting credits reads “Kent Agee.”

KA: Yes, I barely deserve that.

MR: You’re being modest.

KA: Steve Dorff wrote the music, George Greene, who was a great lyricist and was my closest friend for years, had written the lyric in a rare, bland moment. George couldn’t finish the lyric. I happened to be around and he asked me to finish it. It was a lucky place to be at the right time.

MR: Kent, you’re just in time for us to talk some more with Jon Tiven. (laughs) We should inform readers that we’re pals too. Okay, Jon, what are some of your favorite projects that you’ve worked on?

JT: The Steve Cropper record that I produced last year was a tribute to The Five Royales, and it had a lot of guest singers on it. Steve Winwood did a fantastic job with “30 Second Lover,” and we also recruited Sharon Jones, Dylan LeBlanc, Betty LaVette; that was a fantastic project to work. Steve is one of my best friends and one of my favorite people to work with, and he is also on the Yo MaMa record on one track because we had to have him. Also, on the Yo MaMa record, and also on the Steve Cropper Dedicated record, is Brian May, who is one of my oldest friends in the music business. We met in the early seventies before Queen’s first album came out, and I was sent to the UK to cover Foghat for Zoo World magazine. Brian and I had about a 7 1/2 minute piece of music we wrote in New York on a whim, and I was always trying to find something to do with it. This YO MA MA record gave me enough room and Steve gave me a fantastic lyric called “Out of The Darkness,” and it’s basically a Brian May tour de force

MR: Who else you got? Come on, cough it up.

JT: Wilson Pickett has got to be a high watermark in my career ’cause he is just an unbelievable singer. He could sing anything you could think of. He could go beyond it. He was just a great guy, he was just a funny guy. He was really tough on a lot of people, but he was just lovely to me and my wife. He just treated us great and it was just a fantastic experience being around someone with that spark. I will treasure that memory forever. Frank Black is someone that I’ve worked with on four different records, three albums, and an EP. The most recent one was an album from Frank & Reid Paley, a duet record, that we did at my house in two days. I also produced the Honeybomb record, which was an incredible treat with all the musicians on that — Reggie Young, Buddy Miller and David Hood. That was when I really got to know David a lot better than I had previously, even though I had worked with him before. We did the follow-up, Fastman Radarman, where I got to work with Carol Kaye, Jim Keltner, Ian McLagan, etc.. Frank Black has got extra honey, so he attracts sweetness from all these accomplished musicians that want to work with him. I’m just happy to be a part of that because his music is just so fantastic. Again, he’s a great person to be around, a very generous, creative spirit.

MR: Don’t forget Alex Chilton.

JT: I produced Alex Chilton’s first solo album after Big Star split up, originally an EP calledSinger Not the Song, which expanded into Bach’s Bottom. Not exactly a fun time for me, but you don’t make an omelette without breaking heads. I mean eggs. Nobody was seriously injured, but I had to duck more than once.

MR: (laughs) You’ve worked on a few tribute albums.

JT: Yeah. 6 or 7, something like that.

MR: So when you’re working with these various artists, it’s from personal relationships, but it’s also from reaching out to these guys on your end too, right?

JT: Yeah. It’s hard separating my social life from my work.

MR: What has been the most surprising result of having relationships with some of these great artists? Have you found that interacting with them creatively has enhanced your creativity as well?

JT: Absolutely. The most fun for me is to get someone who’s got this great idea for a song — and they’ve got most of it — but in their mind, there’s something missing from this song. They will then play me some of it and it becomes so obvious where the song should go, and I show them. All of a sudden, I’m co-writing with Paul Rodgers or Steve Cropper or Mick Taylor, and I’m pinching myself. At the same time, I’m thinking, “Wow, I’m writing a song with Steve Cropper!” It’s really good for the self-esteem and it’s really good to see those sparks fly. I got spoiled really early. When I got to write with Don Covay, for me, that was the beginning of my musical nirvana. Together, we could do no wrong. We had other people recording our songs — Huey Lewis, Robert Cray, and Otis Clay all covered one of them, “He Don’t Know.”

MR: Nice run there.

JT: We had some success, ya know? It was really great for Don because it had been a while since anybody had done a really good version of one of his post-Atlantic songs. It was very exciting for him. On the other hand, you meet someone new who is completely green about the process like Dylan LeBlanc who I think is just incredible. I actually found him and brought him to Rough Trade Records. When we get together and write, it’s amazing because he’s just 23 years old and the stuff to me that I would take for granted is like a brilliant revelation to him.

MR: Kent — who just happened to wonder over here, no, not really — how do you get inspired to write a song and how do you jump into action after that happens?

KA: There’s the mystery, right? When I had my rock band together, I was working purely from inspiration. I would wait for something to find me. It was usually a line. I would be driving in my car and a line would float into my consciousness uninvited most of the time and it was always not the title line of a song. It was then a line that I would just chase down and find out where it wanted to go. That’s still how I work when I’m working from inspiration. But when I started writing as a professional songwriter, I knew that if I did leave it at that, I wouldn’t produce enough and I may not get any better at the craft itself. I began to co-write, specifically to take care of that angle of it. That’s a different process. I mean, co-writing, for me — for 15 years, I was co-writing twice a day, sometimes three times.

MR: Who were some of the people that you would co-write with?

KA: Everyone in town, one time or another. I have favorite co-writers now. Earl Bud Lee… what happened to him?

JT: He had a very big hit recently, “Who Are You When I’m Not Looking” by Blake Shelton. It went to number one, so that was really good for Bud. He’s a wonderful talent and beautiful person who went through some very difficult times and it’s great to see him coming back into his own.

MR: Hey, what is your advice for new artists?

JT: My advice to new artists is keep writing and writing, keep getting those creative thoughts out there, write all the songs that are in you because you’ve got to write the bad songs as well as the good ones. Number one. If you don’t get the creative energy out of your system, it manifests anxiety. It’s better that you write the song than you have the anxiety stuck in your system. You’ve got creative energy running around your system and you can’t figure out what it is. If you’re feeling anxious and you’re feeling this confusion, you’ve got to write a song. You’ve got to get that out of your system. Put that to productive use.

MR: Jon, what is your creative process?

JT: My creative process for music, I usually sit down in front of the TV set and play until I come up with something that turns me on.

MR: Is it CNN?

JT: Never. It’s usually one of the movie channels. Occasionally, MSNBC with the sound off.

MR: What fun is that? My future wife, Rachel Maddow, with the sound off?

JT: I’m talking about during the day, not at night, no offense, Ms. M. I need a little moving wallpaper while I come up with my music.

KA: I’m the same way with music. When I’m writing music, it’s my spinal column driving it, not my brain. I’m just allowing my left hand to move and then I hear what I’ve done and I go, “wow, that was cool.” I need something else to so I can go Zen-like. I just let my left hand do what it does.

MR: Sally, what about you?

ST: Same thing. You’re basically channeling the music or whatever your art form is out there and your trying to invite it in, whatever your physical method is. In terms of lyrics, I like to listen to the other person. I really like writing with somebody else. They start their idea and I try to finish the line.

MR: Sally, what is your advice to new artists?

ST: My advice to new artists is have parents that can pay your rent for a few years. Give it a shot for a few years if you can afford to. It’s a great lifestyle if you can do it.

JT: Yes, but making money at it is very difficult in particular these days. It’s really difficult to be able to monetize anything that involves intellectual content because it’s so easily purloined by people on the web with nimble fingers. We have to do art for art’s sake as much as possible and hope that there will be some sort of sponsorship for us to do it. You can’t necessarily think there will be a record label that’s going to be able to do it. I mean, I’ve had a lot of help from the Jack Daniels people. They’ve hired me to be their musical director and MC for their birthday party at the distillery, so I’ve been subsidized by them. I’ve been able to employ people like Steve Cropper, David Hood, Spooner Oldham and Reggie Young to be in my band. We ended up backing Patti Smith, Warpaint, Plan B, Carl Barat, Juliette Lewis and a lot of artists who, otherwise, I wouldn’t be interacting with. It started out as a lark and now it’s been a very integral part of my music career. It’s not something that I sought out; it just fell into my lap thanks to Frank Black who performed the first year I did it. They film these things every year and show them on British television. I’ve done 5 different years, and they basically put the singers together and leave it to me to back them up.

MR: Kent, what is your advice for new artists?

KA: You know, it’s all changed so much since I was a new artist. Partly, now, there’s a beauty to it… there’s so much more that you can do by yourself, with the internet and home recording studios. A co-writer of mine and I, just a couple of months ago, finished writing a song in the morning, recorded in his house that afternoon, and I shot a video of him playing the song. We uploaded it to the computer that night. The new model to me for the young artist that I know is that it’s not about record labels anymore. The guys that I know who are doing it and touring who have the ability to tour like that are out in a van or a bus, they’re creating a fan base of ten-thousand people who they can talk into buying 20 dollars worth of merchandise a year — that’s $200,000 straight to them without a label. The beauty with that is that you can do so much yourself, but I think we’ve lost something, that cultural experience of music coming at you like it did when we were younger. It’s not like there is this niche like, “Oh, you’ve got to hear this new band Department of Eagles, they’re incredible,” and they are by the way. But you know, it used to come at you. It was a huge cultural experience that only a large record label could do. It’s sad that’s gone.

JT: You don’t have the repetitive play anymore because there’s so much and there’s so little of it that is really directed. Okay, like if the next Beatles came along, would we know?

KA: They may be there right now.

MR: Yeah, I think they were called U2.

JT: I would really encourage young artists to seek out people who are really better than you to write with.

KA: Absolutely.

JT: That was the thing that helped me the most. Working with Don Covay, Keith Reid, and Jim Carroll really made me get my act together. When you’re writing with someone that serious about what they do — and that gifted — and know so much more, you get a lot by osmosis and you do get a lot of knowledge even when they’re not teaching you because you’re around someone who’s learned how to do it. There are a lot of lessons that you will never learn anywhere except from people who are at that level.

MR: Jon, here’s the most important question that I have to ask you in this interview. The Yankees reunion album. When is that coming?

JT: The Yo MaMa record, for all intents and purposes, is the closest we’ll get to a Yankees reunion album. The Yankees were essentially me and Sally and whoever else we could finagle into the studio at the time. Our main drummer, Mickey Curry, went on to play with Bryan Adams and Hall & Oates. He’s available to me now, but he’s in Connecticut, I’m in Nashville, and still a pal.

KA: On the other hand, you have Chester Thomson available to you, too. Use him as much as possible.

JT: You know I do. I had someone named Paul Ossola on bass then, and strangely enough, he recently moved to Nashville, so it’s possible that Paul and I would do something together again. But for all intents and purposes, I have left The Yankees behind.

MR: Yes, leaving us to move on to The Artful Dodgers.

JT: As long as I don’t have to be in a rock band called The Mets.

MR: Let’s have some words of wisdom from everyone. Jon Tiven?

JT: My words of wisdom is that it’s all out there. All you have to do is seek what you are looking for and you will find it.

MR: Sally Tiven?

ST: My advice is go to yoga class.

MR: Kent Agee? Your words of wisdom please, sir?

KA: Stay joyful. That’s my big advice. You can find joy in everything.

MR: My words of wisdom are to listen to Kent Agee, Jon Tiven, and Sally Tiven’s works to find the secret of life.

JT: Thank you very much.

ST: Thanks.

KA: Thanks, Mike!

Transcribed by Joe Stahl