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| First impression. |
The Hit
With Steve Forbert’s 1979 hit, “Romeo’s Tune,” we hit…yet another song I’d never heard. No memories or associations with childhood, nothing about the old man playing it and telling me about “real music” (his tastes go back 20 years prior, for the record), which leaves just the song itself.
To speak in the royal mode, Forbert comes off as an acquired taste the first time you hear him. Musically, it’s a fine song, great even, for people who are into sparkling piano phrases tangling with extended keening altos on the guitar and, a personal favorite, that warm, grounding glow an electric organ lends a song…and then Forbert starts singing. His voice sounds pinched to where you wait for him to clear his throat and, if not flat, possessed of a similar quality. Unless he’s not rasping out something like a shout, his vocals seem to fade into the music of the chorus, and so on.
And then, as one does when listening for what else someone did in his career, you keep listening. You find Forbert’s voice growing on you, and in a way you can’t put words to until someone does it for you - in this case, a Rolling Stone article from 1980, where they noted what sold Danny Fields, one of the original interpreters of New York punk to the mainstream, on Forbert as a performer:
“He attacked his acoustic guitar fiercely, took raw, careening harmonica solos, and sang in a manner nobody had heard before — hoarse, almost whispering at times, but with a sure command of texture and nuance and a sense of high drama.”
And, sure, I guess that makes his voice an acquired taste. To wrap up “Romeo’s Tune” - and it is a great song, worthy of a No. 11 hit - Forbert wrote it about a girl he either knew or heard about in his hometown of Meridian, Mississippi, but he had it dedicated to Florence Ballard of The Supremes out of sympathy for the way the music business screwed her over. As I discovered bouncing around the internet, that seems pretty on-brand for Forbert.
The Rest of the Story
“I wanted to do my own material, I didn’t have any money to hire a band, and I didn’t want to be a member of a band. I just asked myself, well, what’s the most noise I can make on my own? And where can I make it? So I played the acoustic guitar and harmonica and stomped my foot, and I think I was right in assuming that Greenwich Village would be the best place to perform my own material and possibly get some attention, move on to making records and all.”
First things first, if you want a good sense of who Steve Forbert was at the peak of his, if one slightly obstructed by the narrator, you can skip the rest of this, read that Rolling Stone piece and listen to the sampler (see below). A couple oddball anecdotes aside - e.g., if you remember Cyndi Lauper’s boyfriend from the “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” video, that’s him - his life doesn’t sound so different from any other working musician’s. He has worked long and steadily in music, and has both the large catalog and high regard among his peers to prove it, but he really does count as a one-hit wonder. “Romeo’s Tune” was it, but I didn’t see or read anything to tell me he’s given that a second thought.
Born at the tail-end of 1954, Steve Forbert grew up in Meridian, as much a child of the suburbs as of the South (his dad was career, ranked military, if memory serves). He developed what can only be called a fixation with music from an early age, declaring himself a “music junkie” and starting to write songs of his own by age 17. While he could always find a band to play in - he even played with the grandson of a brother-in-law to Meridian’s most famous musical son, Jimmie Rodgers - all those bands played covers and didn’t have interest in playing original material. When Forbert caught wind of New York City’s punk scene, he packed up, moved and, as quoted above, set to busking the corners of Greenwich Village. He graduated to CBGB’s, a guy in his mid-20s alone on stage with a guitar and a harmonica in one of punk's most famous venues - which is where/how Fields found him - before moving onto NYC folk venues like Kenny’s Castaways and Folk City.
With Steve Forbert’s 1979 hit, “Romeo’s Tune,” we hit…yet another song I’d never heard. No memories or associations with childhood, nothing about the old man playing it and telling me about “real music” (his tastes go back 20 years prior, for the record), which leaves just the song itself.
To speak in the royal mode, Forbert comes off as an acquired taste the first time you hear him. Musically, it’s a fine song, great even, for people who are into sparkling piano phrases tangling with extended keening altos on the guitar and, a personal favorite, that warm, grounding glow an electric organ lends a song…and then Forbert starts singing. His voice sounds pinched to where you wait for him to clear his throat and, if not flat, possessed of a similar quality. Unless he’s not rasping out something like a shout, his vocals seem to fade into the music of the chorus, and so on.
And then, as one does when listening for what else someone did in his career, you keep listening. You find Forbert’s voice growing on you, and in a way you can’t put words to until someone does it for you - in this case, a Rolling Stone article from 1980, where they noted what sold Danny Fields, one of the original interpreters of New York punk to the mainstream, on Forbert as a performer:
“He attacked his acoustic guitar fiercely, took raw, careening harmonica solos, and sang in a manner nobody had heard before — hoarse, almost whispering at times, but with a sure command of texture and nuance and a sense of high drama.”
And, sure, I guess that makes his voice an acquired taste. To wrap up “Romeo’s Tune” - and it is a great song, worthy of a No. 11 hit - Forbert wrote it about a girl he either knew or heard about in his hometown of Meridian, Mississippi, but he had it dedicated to Florence Ballard of The Supremes out of sympathy for the way the music business screwed her over. As I discovered bouncing around the internet, that seems pretty on-brand for Forbert.
The Rest of the Story
“I wanted to do my own material, I didn’t have any money to hire a band, and I didn’t want to be a member of a band. I just asked myself, well, what’s the most noise I can make on my own? And where can I make it? So I played the acoustic guitar and harmonica and stomped my foot, and I think I was right in assuming that Greenwich Village would be the best place to perform my own material and possibly get some attention, move on to making records and all.”
First things first, if you want a good sense of who Steve Forbert was at the peak of his, if one slightly obstructed by the narrator, you can skip the rest of this, read that Rolling Stone piece and listen to the sampler (see below). A couple oddball anecdotes aside - e.g., if you remember Cyndi Lauper’s boyfriend from the “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” video, that’s him - his life doesn’t sound so different from any other working musician’s. He has worked long and steadily in music, and has both the large catalog and high regard among his peers to prove it, but he really does count as a one-hit wonder. “Romeo’s Tune” was it, but I didn’t see or read anything to tell me he’s given that a second thought.
Born at the tail-end of 1954, Steve Forbert grew up in Meridian, as much a child of the suburbs as of the South (his dad was career, ranked military, if memory serves). He developed what can only be called a fixation with music from an early age, declaring himself a “music junkie” and starting to write songs of his own by age 17. While he could always find a band to play in - he even played with the grandson of a brother-in-law to Meridian’s most famous musical son, Jimmie Rodgers - all those bands played covers and didn’t have interest in playing original material. When Forbert caught wind of New York City’s punk scene, he packed up, moved and, as quoted above, set to busking the corners of Greenwich Village. He graduated to CBGB’s, a guy in his mid-20s alone on stage with a guitar and a harmonica in one of punk's most famous venues - which is where/how Fields found him - before moving onto NYC folk venues like Kenny’s Castaways and Folk City.
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| What I found. |
Forbert signed with Nemperor in 1978 and put out a debut album, Alive on Arrival. He mostly stuck with Plan A on that one - i.e., a guy, a guitar and a harmonica (fans of Mojo Nixon will hear a precursor on something like “What Kinda Guy?”) - if with some backing elements on other tracks like “Big City Cat.” That album made enough noise for critics to hear, who liked what they heard for the most part. The whole package, very much including his vocals, drew comparisons to Dylan. Forbert dismissed those with more or less patience; a quote from Wikipedia falls under the former
“You can't pay any attention to that. It was just a cliché back then, and it's nothing I take seriously. I'm off the hook – I don't have to be smarter than everybody else and know all the answers like Bob Dylan.”
However the decision came, he decided to swing bigger on the follow-up album, 1979’s Jackrabbit Slim. Forbert relocated to Nashville’s Quadrophonic Studio for that and, with some tips from Bill Jones, one of the session players, he assembled a studio/touring band that gave Jackrabbit Slim a bigger, richer sound (and most of them twice Forbert's age). With “Romeo’s Tune” to announce it to the world, it went gold and hit No. 20 on Billboard’s Hot 200. This is where that Rolling Stone piece finds Forbert: headlining the same venues where he used to open for acts that fit what he did better and worse. He’s giddy in some settings, subdued in some, a polished pro in others: through it all, though, the piece’s author delivers the impression of a musician who’s thinking “this, but also not this,” a man eager to keep writing and playing, but on his terms instead of having someone from a label telling him where to go musically or professionally.
Forbert continued with Nemperor for a few, recording Little Stevie Orbit (1980) and Steve Forbert (1982), until a “disagreement”/falling out split artist from label after 1983’s Down in Flames. He made a (critically-) triumphant return in 1988 with Geffen Records and Streets of This Town, an album I’m assured “received significant airplay” even though none of the songs ring a bell. (Then again, it’s a good bet I changed the channel when those came on; most kids lack patience and I barely had some.) And…that’s it. Forbert put out 16 studio albums since then; not even the 2017 cancer diagnosis that took one of his kidney’s slowed him down (as demonstrated by 2018’s The Magic Tree and 2020’s Early Morning Rain). With the exception of his 2002 tribute album to Jimmie Rodgers (Any Old Time), he still writes mostly original material and, as he told American Highways in a 2020 interview, he knows he wrote a good one when “people have to cover the song.” As artists like Rosanne Cash, Keith Urban, Marty Stuart and Webb Wilder have.
The pace is slower now, of course, now that he’s nearly 40 years away from the spotlight, but, as he told Classicbands.com, Forbert does still have a process and metric for songwriting:
“But when I'm not busy with things like that I can focus and I'm naturally focused on writings songs. My mind will just gravitate that way. In conclusion, I'm not under the pressure I was in the late '70s, early '80s, to put out a record at least every year. So, that's good. If they come along more slowly and I have to take more time on the songs in order to make myself say this is done, it's good, I'm willing to sing this for people. I'm willing to record it. Then so be it. So, it kind of works. I'm 66 now. I don't know. I'm a legacy artist or whatever.”
To second everyone who played on An American Troubadour: The Songs of Steve Forbert, it’s one hell of a legacy.
About the Sampler
With all the available material, I made the early, self-preserving decision to focus on three of Forbert’s first five albums - Alive on Arrival, Little Stevie Orbit and, the flat-out great, Jackrabbit Slim - if with a stray from the same era I found on a Best of collection, but haven’t yet placed: “Samson and Delilah’s Beauty Shop.” The other outliers come from the Jimmie Rodgers tribute, Any Old Time - e.g., the bluesy rambler, “Gambling Barroom Blues,” and the distinctly olde tyme piano ballads, “My Blue Eyed Jane” and the title track, and a tonally-exquisite cover of “Miss the Mississippi and You” - plus a pair from his late catalog, 2016’s Flying at Night, “Belle of Baltimore” and “Never Trust a Man Who Doesn’t Drink” (“unless he simply can’t/unless he’s been to hell and back”).
As for the rest, I picked at Alive on Arrival, selecting small-town ballads like “Goin’ Down to Laurel” and “Steve Forbert’s Midsummer Night’s Toast” (as well as “Big City Cat,” already linked to above; his voice is...quite a bit better live, very present); not all the recollections are fond, for what it’s worth. After that, I went, for lack of a better word, nuts on Little Stevie Orbit and especially Jackrabbit Slim. I can wholeheartedly recommend both. While some elements sound like the times - i.e., I got more than one whiff of Bruce Springsteen - it’s…really quite remarkable that an album like Jackrabbit Slim did as well as it did in the late ‘70s market (seriously; see the Top 100). Anyway, here's the list:
Jackrabbit Slim: “Romeo’s Tune,” “That Sweet Love You Give (Sure Goes a Long Way)” (which flirts with being a stripped-down, “Soul Man”), the still and gentle, “I’m in Love with You,” “Say Goodbye to Little Jo” (see note on Springsteen), the genuinely moving (especially for a second album) “Wait” and the jaunty sax vignette, “Make It All So Real.”
Little Stevie Orbit: “Song for Katrina” (a Joplin-meets-Dylan tale), the pining “One More Glass of Beer,” the blase “Get Well Soon,” the loose zydeco-inspired “Planet Earth Song” (a bonus track, fwiw), and the comparatively/appropriately high-tempo “I’m an Automobile.”
When I started this project, I expected to find three to four kinds of stories: 1) tales of excess and burnout (Free is a good example); 2) tales of hubris (The Knack does nicely here), 3) tales of record label exploitation and general skullduggery (e.g., The Lemon Pipers); and 4) talented people who stumbled into a hit by doing his/her own thing. I’ve found other varieties along the way (and some careers continue in truly fascinating ways) but Steve Forbert comes in as a No. 4 with bells on. This was a good one…and so is the next one, if for totally different reasons. Till then.
“You can't pay any attention to that. It was just a cliché back then, and it's nothing I take seriously. I'm off the hook – I don't have to be smarter than everybody else and know all the answers like Bob Dylan.”
However the decision came, he decided to swing bigger on the follow-up album, 1979’s Jackrabbit Slim. Forbert relocated to Nashville’s Quadrophonic Studio for that and, with some tips from Bill Jones, one of the session players, he assembled a studio/touring band that gave Jackrabbit Slim a bigger, richer sound (and most of them twice Forbert's age). With “Romeo’s Tune” to announce it to the world, it went gold and hit No. 20 on Billboard’s Hot 200. This is where that Rolling Stone piece finds Forbert: headlining the same venues where he used to open for acts that fit what he did better and worse. He’s giddy in some settings, subdued in some, a polished pro in others: through it all, though, the piece’s author delivers the impression of a musician who’s thinking “this, but also not this,” a man eager to keep writing and playing, but on his terms instead of having someone from a label telling him where to go musically or professionally.
Forbert continued with Nemperor for a few, recording Little Stevie Orbit (1980) and Steve Forbert (1982), until a “disagreement”/falling out split artist from label after 1983’s Down in Flames. He made a (critically-) triumphant return in 1988 with Geffen Records and Streets of This Town, an album I’m assured “received significant airplay” even though none of the songs ring a bell. (Then again, it’s a good bet I changed the channel when those came on; most kids lack patience and I barely had some.) And…that’s it. Forbert put out 16 studio albums since then; not even the 2017 cancer diagnosis that took one of his kidney’s slowed him down (as demonstrated by 2018’s The Magic Tree and 2020’s Early Morning Rain). With the exception of his 2002 tribute album to Jimmie Rodgers (Any Old Time), he still writes mostly original material and, as he told American Highways in a 2020 interview, he knows he wrote a good one when “people have to cover the song.” As artists like Rosanne Cash, Keith Urban, Marty Stuart and Webb Wilder have.
The pace is slower now, of course, now that he’s nearly 40 years away from the spotlight, but, as he told Classicbands.com, Forbert does still have a process and metric for songwriting:
“But when I'm not busy with things like that I can focus and I'm naturally focused on writings songs. My mind will just gravitate that way. In conclusion, I'm not under the pressure I was in the late '70s, early '80s, to put out a record at least every year. So, that's good. If they come along more slowly and I have to take more time on the songs in order to make myself say this is done, it's good, I'm willing to sing this for people. I'm willing to record it. Then so be it. So, it kind of works. I'm 66 now. I don't know. I'm a legacy artist or whatever.”
To second everyone who played on An American Troubadour: The Songs of Steve Forbert, it’s one hell of a legacy.
About the Sampler
With all the available material, I made the early, self-preserving decision to focus on three of Forbert’s first five albums - Alive on Arrival, Little Stevie Orbit and, the flat-out great, Jackrabbit Slim - if with a stray from the same era I found on a Best of collection, but haven’t yet placed: “Samson and Delilah’s Beauty Shop.” The other outliers come from the Jimmie Rodgers tribute, Any Old Time - e.g., the bluesy rambler, “Gambling Barroom Blues,” and the distinctly olde tyme piano ballads, “My Blue Eyed Jane” and the title track, and a tonally-exquisite cover of “Miss the Mississippi and You” - plus a pair from his late catalog, 2016’s Flying at Night, “Belle of Baltimore” and “Never Trust a Man Who Doesn’t Drink” (“unless he simply can’t/unless he’s been to hell and back”).
As for the rest, I picked at Alive on Arrival, selecting small-town ballads like “Goin’ Down to Laurel” and “Steve Forbert’s Midsummer Night’s Toast” (as well as “Big City Cat,” already linked to above; his voice is...quite a bit better live, very present); not all the recollections are fond, for what it’s worth. After that, I went, for lack of a better word, nuts on Little Stevie Orbit and especially Jackrabbit Slim. I can wholeheartedly recommend both. While some elements sound like the times - i.e., I got more than one whiff of Bruce Springsteen - it’s…really quite remarkable that an album like Jackrabbit Slim did as well as it did in the late ‘70s market (seriously; see the Top 100). Anyway, here's the list:
Jackrabbit Slim: “Romeo’s Tune,” “That Sweet Love You Give (Sure Goes a Long Way)” (which flirts with being a stripped-down, “Soul Man”), the still and gentle, “I’m in Love with You,” “Say Goodbye to Little Jo” (see note on Springsteen), the genuinely moving (especially for a second album) “Wait” and the jaunty sax vignette, “Make It All So Real.”
Little Stevie Orbit: “Song for Katrina” (a Joplin-meets-Dylan tale), the pining “One More Glass of Beer,” the blase “Get Well Soon,” the loose zydeco-inspired “Planet Earth Song” (a bonus track, fwiw), and the comparatively/appropriately high-tempo “I’m an Automobile.”
When I started this project, I expected to find three to four kinds of stories: 1) tales of excess and burnout (Free is a good example); 2) tales of hubris (The Knack does nicely here), 3) tales of record label exploitation and general skullduggery (e.g., The Lemon Pipers); and 4) talented people who stumbled into a hit by doing his/her own thing. I’ve found other varieties along the way (and some careers continue in truly fascinating ways) but Steve Forbert comes in as a No. 4 with bells on. This was a good one…and so is the next one, if for totally different reasons. Till then.
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