The Tim “Napalm” Stegall Substack Interview: Jesse Dayton, Part Four
Wherein our heroes spend this entire ‘Stack fanboying out over Roger Miller, instead of promoting Jesse’s upcoming album. Because why the hell not?
Roger Miller, 1965: He was funnier than you are, and he sure as fuck wrote better songs than your favorite band.
Never let it be said Your Humble Narrator, if he can find a backasswards way to do something, won’t go running towards it with open arms. Such as sit around working on finishing The Book when Mojo’s Final Mayhem was going on, which I ONLY spent damn near the entire last ‘Stack promoting!! Or when my lil’ punk rock combo The Hormones finally released a debut album, it was a greatest hits record!
So why not, the week after our boy Jesse Dayton announces his upcoming Shooter Jennings-produced album The Hard Way Blues, spend almost the entirety of this installment of our ongoing conversation obsessing over Roger Miller, instead?
To be fair, Jesse did spend a chunk of the last installment talking about this forthcoming record. We’re covered. So, let us talk about Roger Miller if we want, dammit!
TIM: You recorded or worked with a lot of the greats in country music when you were a younger man. I mean, obviously Johnny Cash, Willie and Waylon and all these guys. Did you ever work with somebody I've been thinking about lately, Roger Miller?
JESSE: I never worked with Roger Miller and I never got to meet Roger Miller, but Roger Miller helped get Kristofferson and Willie their first songwriting publishing deals in Nashville. Ray Price told me on the back of his bus, ”At one point, I had Roger Miller on guitar, Willie Nelson on bass, and Johnny Bush on drums, and Willie was the only one who didn't smoke weed!”
But Roger Miller, he's up there with Chuck Berry in terms of wit. Oh my God! I mean, you've got Roger Miller, you've got Chuck Berry, you've got Cole Porter, and I'd go ahead and throw Tom Waits in there too. Just charm and wit.
TIM: The stories about that man's outrageous sense of humor. I heard that when he was introduced to Kris Kristofferson, he turned around and said, “Who pissed you off?” [laughs]
JESSE: “John Prine? We're gonna have to break his hands.” [laughs] Roger was great, man.He would get pulled over by the cops for a DWI and they’d say, “Can I see your license?” He'd go, “I don't know, can I see your gun?” [laughs] I mean, just crazy, you know?
And there's this great story about Roger Miller going to LA and meeting Lew Wasserman, who at that time was the head of, might've been MCA. But he was huge, probably the biggest executive in Hollywood. And he loved “King of the Road," and heard it before it really broke. And he told Roger Miller, “If you'll start thinking Yiddish and dressing British, I might be able to get you on The Tonight Show.” That was how “King of the Road" became a huge crossover hit, which is what everyone's been trying to do since the inception of country music. I mean, Louis Armstrong did it out of jazz, and Patsy Cline did it out of country. Did she want to be playing hillbilly stuff with no string arrangements on it? Probably. Did Louis want to be playing gut bucket jazz? Probably. I think all of us would. Like Willie said, there's nothing wrong with any of us writing hit songs.
TIM: I mean, Have you ever seen that clip of Roger performing in The Big TNT Show? At one point, he stops in the middle and says, “Now I'd like to introduce the band.” And each one of the musicians turns around, faces the other, and shakes hands. [laughs]
Fast forward to the six minute mark to see the bit in question. Then go back and watch all 8:47 of this clip. It’s that good.
JESSE: That's good.
TIM: That's classic Roger Miller.
JESSE: It totally is. But it's also this kind of old, kind of carny slash, what's the place up in New York, upstate New York, where all the comedians started out?
TIM: The Catskills.
JESSE: Yeah, yeah, it's also that too. And I love that. And that's why I love actors and I love just people in the entertainment business, because it's just so outrageously silly. But Roger Miller is unique amongst all of that. I mean, “Husbands and Wives?” Some of those songs are just unreal.
TIM: “Thank you for something I can't use/Received your invitation to the blues….” Goddamn, I would have killed to have written that!
JESSE: I mean, that's up there with Hank. It's like, holy crap. Yeah, some crazy stuff. Roger Miller was a genius.
TIM: Absolutely. Yeah, for some reason I wanted to ask you about that. I've been looking for an excuse to write about Roger Miller. Might as well use a Jesse Dayton interview. [laughs]
JESSE: Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's amazing what kind of effect he had on country music, if you think about him getting Willie and Kris their first deals.
This guy did an interview with me on a radio show this morning, and he was like, “Man I'm just really getting into country music, I'm younger, I didn't grow up on it. What's the best Waylon record?” And I was like, “Well, there's this record that was the first country music record to sell a million copies, called Outlaws,” He had a real effect on what would happen. “England Swings” and “Dang Me” and all that stuff is just so crazy. I mean, the lyrics! I've actually written down lyrics by Roger Miller, the same way Hunter S. Thompson wrote entire books by Ernest Hemingway, just to see what it feels like.
TIM: Oh yeah, I've done the same thing, man. “In the summertime, when all the leaves in the trees are green/And the redbird sings, I'll be blue because you don't want my love.” [laughs]
JESSE: That's crazy. I mean, that's just so poetic and so Shakespearean, in a way. The guy was born in Fort Worth, Texas. People forget that. He was a Texan. I don't know. There's that whole thing that he had with George Jones that's amazing. Executives at Starday, recording with Jones in Houston, Texas doing “Tall Tall Trees.” It's kind of amazing. Every time I come back around to Roger Miller, I'm just astonished. He wrote so many hits, man. It's just crazy. I could talk for hours. You've opened up a can of worms! “Half A Mind” by Ernest Tubb. There's a Faron Young song, I forgot, it might have been “Billy Bayou” [actually Jim Reeves] or "That's The Way I Feel.” Just an overwhelming amount of music.
TIM: Yeah, “Invitation to the Blues” was written for his boss Ray Price.
JESSE: Yeah, when he was a Cherokee Cowboy. I mean, that's one thing about that band, man. He wasn't low on songs.
Yep, that’s Roger doggin’ the boss on harmony, on the song he wrote.
TIM: No, at one point or another he had several of the country's greatest songwriters just playing in his band. I love the idea that Willie jumped on bass guitar without knowing how to play it. [laughs]
JESSE: I'm sure it sounded interesting.
TIM: You know, obviously he had Donnie Young in there before he changed his name to Johnny Paycheck.
JESSE: I mean, my God, that's insane. I was glad I had dinner with [unintelligible]. And I was like, man, I'm so glad you did the chicken or the egg thing. Was it Paycheck or Jones? He goes, it was Jones. I go, I know it was Jones. But there are things that he followed Jones on with harmonies that were things that are beyond the scope of the human voice. That's Beaumont, Texas and Houston, Texas, man. It's like cutting those records for Starday. I mean, that was kind of crazy, you know? It's right in my backyard. Such fertile musical ground there.
TIM: And you were definitely a byproduct of that, my friend.
JESSE: Yeah. Well, say a prayer for me and maybe we'll get to the next rung on the ladder. I'm so excited about this Samantha thing.
TIM: This is cool. We get to catch you pretty much at a transition phase here. You had such cool things to say when we were talking about the whole Jason Aldean thing.
JESSE: You know, they very carefully chose the lyrics to that song, obviously. And it's done its job. It's offended a whole lot of people, but protests after somebody gets attacked by the police or whatever? They want to feel safe, they want to feel secure and that song is speaking to them. Anywhere else outside of America, I'd be right of center with my views. But in America, I'm considered like a radical liberal, which I'm not. I'm a centrist. I'm an independent. So I mean, I always try to keep my compassion high for people that are not on the same page as me politically. Even though they make it really fucking hard. But, you know, I mean, I just think that that song is a bad song. And these two guys who wrote it are just a couple of little baseball hat-wearing redneck Republican writer guys, Neil Thrasher and Kelley Lovelace. It's just a terrible song. “Small Town" by John Mellencamp, I get it. “My Hometown” by Springsteen, I get it. There's a lot of small town songs that are great.
TIM: Oh, yeah. ”Okie From Muskogee,” for that matter.
JESSE: Oh, absolutely. It's not like I don't get it, you know. But, man, that whole Nashville country thing for me has become, like…if you're even talking about it, that's childish. It's for children, this music. The thing I think people got to remember is when Nirvana came in and busted up the heavy metal scene that was happening in Los Angeles, they only sold like about three million records. So that shows you what happened in country music. And, you know, if you were hip-hop or grunge or whatever you want to call it, you would probably come in second if Garth had records out. Because he was gonna sell more records than you, he was gonna sell more records than Pearl Jam, than any of the bands. And that heavy metal stuff was getting so ridiculous and silly too. It needed to be taken out behind the barn and shot in the head. But I think people forget that. Now the music on country radio makes Garth Brooks sound like Hank Senior. “Friends In Low Places” and “I'm Much Too Young to Feel This Damn Old,", while they're great songs, compared to what's out now, it sounds like old country music. It’s like “I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry” compared to what's coming out now.
End Part Four. Tune in next installment, where Jesse and I discuss why Cap’n Crunch tears up the roof of your mouth, rather than his new record!
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