A Conversation with Nils Lofgren – HuffPost 4.18.14

Mike Ragogna: Nils, you have this awesome ten-disc collection Face The Music. How did this monster collection come about?

Nils Lofgren: Well quietly, or not so quietly for forty-five years, I’ve recorded and never quite had that hit record, so a lot of the music went out of print, which is not a unique story for artists without big hit records. But I’ve been at it pretty steady for forty-five years–my band Grin, my solo bands, and twenty years ago when I got off my last record deal, I took advantage of technology. I have a great website www.nilslofgren.com, run by some good friends in Maryland and I continue to make CDs and release them and go sing and play and even though it’s all off the grid, it’s amounted to quite a bit of recordings that I’m proud of. Fantasy/Concord Records approached me about sixteen months ago to discuss a box set and they seemed serious about. Long story short, it led to us agreeing that although it would be very complex because there’s a lot of old companies and ancient music loss, if we could get every single track we needed to make it completely comprehensive and only in that case, would it make sense to do a really classy forty-five year retrospective. God bless them, it was messy, but they found every track that I wanted. They let me hand pick a hundred and sixty-nine of the hundred and eighty-nine tracks and as the artist, they gave me complete control to re-evaluate keys, feels, put them in a running order, marry different records and decades together and so on and so forth and put together a very classy package. I’m very excited about it.

MR: There is a massive amount of music here, and I think it’s bigger than any box set that doesn’t just collect albums that I’ve ever seen. It’s a really original approach.

NL: Yeah, I think it’s pretty unique and classy. I saw the writing on the wall in the nineties and got my freedom, which I was grateful for–it was a year and a half of hell, but I did it. Nobody gets a second or third album deal unless they have hit records, so for me to have a colorful forty-five year recording history kind of speaks to the initial record business where if you were good and you worked well with their record producers that you’d jointly picked they’ve throw you a rope and as long as you went out and played good shows and represented the company well they’d work with you and try to develop you and I benefited from that. Of course, I make music to share and it’s very disappointing that over the years it’s gone out of print. So hats off to Fantasy Concord for going back and getting rights to these things and letting me put it all together. Dave Marsh, who’s my buddy and was going to write the forward was convinced that it would be a much better story if I wrote it in my own hand and he would edit it. So I had a whole other job of writing a short book, which I didn’t plan on, but again thanks to Dave pushing me to do it. Now that I look at it… All these old photographers came and helped us out to make it all happen and we’ve got a hundred and thirty five or so page book with some great stories and my personal takes on the songs and memories. Some song might be a couple lines, another song may open up a three-page story that’s kind of hilarious and intimate, from my perspective that no one’s heard before. So all in all, my wife Amy and Omar our assistant turned our home upside down for the last sixteen months basically, it was kind of a workstation on this project. It was very complex and fun between the music, the pictures, the stories, the rights issues, finding all the rights to songs and basement tapes that no one had ever heard, even going back to 1967 we found one of my first cohesive songs, we found some classic outtakes. I was looking for an old cassette that I’d hoped we could bake to get a mix of Neil Young playing piano and singing “Please Don’t Go” with my band Grin between deals in the early seventies with David Briggs, Neil’s producer and mine. We couldn’t find the cassette, but me and Bob Dawson, the engineer on that session, who still has the same studio in Virginia stumbled on a master sixteen-track, so we were able to bake it, save it, and remix that thing just like David Briggs and Bob and I would have done. You don’t often see Neil Young doing piano work as a session player. That classic voice of his singing with us in the studio, it was just a very charming thing and a great project because we grew up in the late sixties where there was no video, there was no choreography, so to speak, and if you worked with a producer well, a record company would give you some rope to develop, if they thought you were improving, which I felt Grin was for four albums. There was tour support, so if you wanted to play, which was my bread and butter and what I still love the most about my job, I love to perform, so we went everywhere and with the help of a bunch of companies got into a lot of places where we couldn’t even break even, and yeah they charged royalties against me, but we didn’t care, we were just grateful to have some support and go play for anyone and everyone and it paid off.

MR: That Neil Young connection was pretty strong. One of the earlier credits you have is for playing guitar and piano on After The Gold Rush and then years later, you’re doing the song “The Loner.” And I think this box set really emphasizes that you’ve been consistent as an artist over the years. Have you been conscious of that or is it natural kind of thing?

NL: It’s kind of a natural thing. A couple of things happened. I fell in love with performing and making records and writing is something I like to do and every time I finish a tour I think, “Okay, what’s my next batch of songs? What’s my next direction?” and I’m excited about it. Simultaneously, I was eighteen, a very young age, when I did the After The Gold Rush record and I realized that if I loved the people and the music it’s quite exciting to not be the boss for a minute and be in a great band. For instance, I love to play my own shows for people, but of course I play all the solos basically and I sing all the leads. When I play in bands with Neil Young, Ringo Starr, Bruce Springsteen or a couple great bands with Patti Scialfa, I’m a harmony singer, I love singing harmony with great singers and it’s something I don’t do a lot professionally. I love playing rhythm on peddle steel, bottleneck, dobro, lap steel, all of these instruments I challenged myself to learn in 1999 when Stevie Van Zandt came back in the band, and now I have all these different instruments to write on for my own music, so I found it goes hand in hand. For instance, now we’ll wrap up a six-week run in the states, I’ll go back home and be excited about my next chapter of my own music and see where that leads me, but I won’t be musically rusty because I’ve been really engaged as a musician in the E-Street Band so I have that sharpness to bring to my next project. It’s just part of the same job and I find it really exciting and thrilling to be in a great band and kind of freeing not to be the leader every day, because there’s a whole lot of non-musical issues that come with that that I’m familiar with and quite happy to do when I do my own tours, but I love stepping back and letting somebody else be the heavy but still being completely engaged, getting to play all these different parts and getting to look at music differently as a support musician instead of being the lead guy all the time.

MR: It seems like there’s been continuous growth in your creative output, especially while you’ve been with Springsteen.

NL: Yeah, it’s almost like magic. I started challenging myself with the bottle neck dobro on The Rising tour and a few years later, I wrote my first bottle neck dobro composition, a song called “In Your Hands,” which was a Christmas gift for my Jersey Girl/wife, Amy. Then I recorded it on the Sacred Weapon album and Mark Rothbaum, Willie Nelson’s manager who’s a buddy and supportive of my grassroots efforts said, “Hey, pick a song from a record you’re working on, I’m going to try to get Willie to do a duet.” So I had this great ballad right up Willie’s alley and he sang a beautiful duet with me and I got my Lofgren Brotehrs on it as backup singers. Things like that just don’t happen in the mainstream music industry. One of the upsides of having my freedom and going that way for twenty years without record companies is just to be able to pursue any creative ideas without any bureaucracy or need of approval for executives. It’s been a good journey for me, but I will admit I really was disheartened for all of these decades, I’d call and offer to pay five bucks a CD just to get my old music out because I owed them money and they’d always say, “No.” It was very disheartening, so to have Concord Fantasy champion this effort to make a complete forty five year retrospective and make it available and have it be mastered by my friend Billy Wolf who’s a genius and it all runs smoothly together and share this life’s work which has been almost impossible–you can’t get it in this form–it’s very exciting for me. A lot of the basement tracks, too. I always wanted to see the light of day and now I have an official platform to do that and share them.

MR: Were there any moments along the way when you heard a song and said, “I can’t believe I did that,” good or bad or nostalgicly? I imagine you had some moments like that during the assembly.

NL: Exactly. I tend to be very forward thinking, and when you throw in the mix the great gift of being in the E-Street Band I’m very engaged and busy, so my time for reminiscence is very limited, and I usually don’t go back and listen to my old stuff much. So to actually analyze forty-five years of it, that happened quite a bit. Things, for instance, on the Night Fades Away album, I got to do sessions with Nicky Hopkins, one of my great piano player friends who we sadly lost, but I was a fan of his with The Stones and The Jeff Beck Group. I was a sixteen year-old groupie following around the East Coast to hear their shows, so to have Nicky come in and play piano all over that record, tracks that weren’t meant to be singles but album cuts like “Sailor Boy” or “Ancient History”; to hear Nicky playing live in the studio and just reliving those adventures with great session players and Jeffrey Baxter producing in LA, there were a lot of moments like that where I said, “Wow, this is good, I think we should share it.” It was exciting for me because I tend to look forward and not back as much. I never would’ve looked this closely at my body of work, either, had it not been for the box set.

MR: What do you think about advice for new artists? Or, you know, something that they can take away as advice?

NL: I was very blessed early on, I hit the road when I was seventeen and shortly after that I met Neil Young and by eighteen I was living in David Briggs’ house, Grin was finding their way with David as a producer but I started working Neil on After The Gold Rush, Tonight’s The Night, the first Crazy Horse album without Neil, Danny Whitten and Jack Nitzsche joined the band to produce Danny Whitten who was the heart and soul of crazy horse. Basically, the message from Briggs and Neil was be authentic, always be honest and stay down in it and the business and what comes from it financially or otherwise has to be secondary. If you hang onto that honesty and you’re authentic about what you’re creating and stay engaged by it, the rest will work out. You’ll have highs, you’ll have lows, there might be some rough stuff but if you’re true to yourself and you weather the other stuff and you don’t get desperate and try to just change who you are or what you are to get a record deal or to please and executive then you might have a shot at the kind of career I wound up having, which is music I’m proud of, a lot of it, and to put it together and share it has really been exciting.

MR: Nice. Nils, what’s it like to be part of the E-Street Band?

NL: It’s extraordinary. We just played last night a well-over three hour improv crazy show and I just feel so blessed because I played ten years of classical accordion–God bless my parents for paying for those lessons, it was a great musical backdrop to picking up the blues guitar. My brother Tom was my first teacher and it was just a hobby for a couple of years and then one night I saw The Who and Jimmy Hendrix live the same night in two different venues in DC and I was possessed with the idea to be professional, but the gift of music itself is certainly not my creation. I got it from my parents and the higher power, whatever you want to believe–I don’t believe in organized religion at all, but I believe in some kind of higher power, God’s fine with me. But I got this gift and I just worked at it, so even today I look around and go, “Man, how lucky am I to be in a band like this?” It’s almost like you win the musical lottery, but then you recognize that if I just keep preparing like I do and do my homework and stay down in it, emotionally, it always works out because of this gift I was given. I didn’t create that gift, I’m just trying to nurture it and work at it. Yeah, there are people who work at it harder than I, but I do chip away at it, I like to go the shows a couple hours before Bruce and the band because I’ve got my own list of things to address, I’ve got a lot of freedom to play with foot pedals, sounds, guitar strings, size of strings, gauges, pickups, I’ve got a great tech and it’s like a kid in a candy store, man, because I love bands and now more than ever I’ve got this beautiful home with Amy and my four dogs. And I miss home. When I pull out the suitcase the dogs give me a dirty look. It’s hard to leave home now, but Amy calls it a champagne problem, because you’ve got this great home to go back to, and admittedly it is.

But I realize now at sixty-two with forty-five years on the road, I’ve got a show tomorrow night, I’m traveling to another city today and I’m already thinking about tomorrow night. You go to the gym, you nurse your injuries, you watch what you eat and you try to get your head in the game because I’m homesick and I know that tomorrow night’s why I’m here and when I walk out there I just want to be more prepared than ever to just really embrace the three, three and a half hours and look my band mates in the eyes and realize just how blessed I am to be in the E-Street band for thirty years as the new guy and take advantage of every moment because a lot of great musicians don’t get those opportunities. I’m a big jock. I played football and basketball growing up and I still love sports and play when I can, but it feels like I’m playing the super bowl when I play with Bruce and the E-Street Band every night, and you’ve got a home town crowd and you’re guaranteed to win, you’re just working on the point spread. That’s what it feels like. I don’t just want to win twenty-one to fifteen, I want to slaughter the team. All that means is that you want to kill the audience with kindness, inspiration and music and send them home with some hope and inspiration musically that may linger in their lives. It’s really a win-win thing and I go early and prepare for it because I want to make the most of it.

MR: And you’ve got this ginormous box set now. I’m not sure many others will ever have their careers treated with as much respect.

NL: I think right now I’ve got this great company–it’s words I’m not used to hearing, but every step of the sixteen months, we’d all put our ideas on the table and I’d be looking at them going, “Well they’ve got some good ideas, too” and then they’d say, “Nils, you’ve got to make the final choice,” and I’d say, “Really?” and they’d say, “Yep. It’s your box set. You’ve got to make every final decision” and it was shocking and beautiful to hear that from a record company. I’m going to promote this and go on the road myself this summer, play some shows, do a lot of promotion and try to share this music, but look: I’m sixty two, I never had any big hit records, no companies are breaking down the door to do my next solo album, so I imagine I’ll get back the independent artist I’ve been with my website and get excited about the next record I make this summer or the rest of the year, at least start the process and keep the door open with the freedom I’ve always enjoyed for any great projects with some of the wonderful people I’ve gotten to play with and others. It’s funny, after the Working On A Dream tour, a buddy of mine, Steve Bing called and he said, “Hey, I want you to play lap steel for a Jerry Lee Lewis country record.” I’m still a beginner at these oddball instruments, so my first thought was, “Well, Steve, let me tell you the top ten guys in LA,” but I bit my tongue, told myself, “Shut up, just say yes,” I went to play peddle steel with Jim Keltner, another old buddy of mine producing the Jerry Lee Lewis record. I remember playing there going, “Man, this is so cool, I seem to be cutting it,” and then Jerry Lee–we were doing a live session where he’s playing guitar for the first time in the studio, Jerry Lee Lewis, singing and playing guitar, I’m just so deep in the pocket and really focusing on Jim Keltner who I worked with in the Ringo bands and is a dear friend and stellar drummer and all of a sudden I hear Jerry Lee go, “All right, play that steel, killer,” and I’m looking around the room to see who’s going to solo because I’m so used to being with great players and I went, “Oh, damn, that’s me!” So off I go into a lap steel solo going, “Man, how lucky am I!”

MR: Life is good for Nils Lofgren.

NL: Life’s good, man. I’m excited to rush home Easter Sunday for a night, hang out with my beautiful Jersey girl wife of eighteen years Amy, see my dogs, say goodbye, get the dirty looks, get back out to another great E-Street Show. I grew up to be someone who loves performing. Look, even if you’re Elvis Presley or Bruce, you can’t play a hundred nights in one town. You might get away with a few in Jersey, but still, you’ve got to leave. Again, the music and the show we do make each night a new home for me when I’m out there with the instrument in my hands and my band mates interacting with me. It’s a beautiful thing and I don’t take it for granted, I’ve been blessed to have these opportunities.

MR: And now you have a lot of music to listen to on the tour bus.

NL: [laughs] Yeah, man. I’ve got to admit, it was a lot more work than I thought and I was very blessed and grateful to plow through forty five years. Psychologically, to know that the company wanted me to make the decisions–we had some good debates about some songs that were left on and off and they had a lot of great ideas and I took some of them, but it was very healthy, positive things that reminded me of the early days working with David Briggs and Grin where it was a team but by the end of the day the creativity went out and they deferred to the actual musicians that created this stuff. It’s been a blessing and a great journey for me.

Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne