Al Ward is a 65-year-old musician who is hiding out from the wreck of his life in an abandoned mine in the high Nevada desert. Ward spends his days drinking and writing songs until he encounters a half-blind horse, and is forced to reckon with his life. Portland author Willy Vlautin joined host Geoff Norcross at the Pickathon Experiential Music Festival held early this month to talk about the compulsion to create art, the power of music, and the possibility of redemption.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Geoff Norcross: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Geoff Norcross. Willy Vlautin’s novels are like his songs, writ large. They’re sparse and real. They have promise and pain, heartbreak and redemption, alcohol, late nights, long roads and a lot of open spaces. His new novel is called “The Horse.” It’s about a promising songwriter and guitarist named Al Ward who struggles to make it. His salvation, oddly enough, comes in the form of a beaten down horse who is not unlike himself.
This is Willy Vlautin’s seventh novel. He’s also a founding member of the bands Richmond Fontaine and the Delines. I spoke with him recently at the Pickathon Music Festival in Happy Valley, Oregon.
[Applause]
Willy Vlautin: Thank you.
Norcross: So, Willie, you told Oregon Arts watch that Al is close enough to you – kind of.
Vlautin: I never think of things like that until the book comes out. A couple of weeks before it came out, people were saying, man, that guy sounds a lot like you. Man, I’m not that bright. I knew, but I didn’t admit it, I guess, how similar he and I are.
Norcross: How so?
Vlautin: Both kind of brooding. Both have had battles boozin’, chronic songwriters [laughter]. I guess those would be the main things.
Norcross: He’s older than you though.
Vlautin: He’s older than me. But not by much though.
Norcross: Did you have somebody in mind when you were writing him?
Vlautin: I guess I was really interested in the idea of why people continue to do art,
why all the guys I grew up playing with even in high school, most of those guys are still playing in some form of another and most of them haven’t had success at all. But they don’t quit. And I’ve always started getting really interested in why I keep writing songs or why I keep writing books, why buddies of mine continue being in bands. So it was some of that, too.
Norcross: And I was drawn to that part of Al’s personality and that he just can’t stop. He just has to keep writing. He has to keep performing. He tries. He bought a diner, ran it for a few years and it worked out pretty well for him, at least financially. But he just had to go back. What’s that about?
Vlautin: I think part of it’s a crutch. I mean, for me, it’s just a crutch. I didn’t like growing up and I just disappeared into songs. I loved the music so much. As a kid, you can’t eat your records and you can’t sleep next to them. The only thing you can do is join up. So I just decided, with no talent at all – naturally, no talent musically at all – I just joined a band. I wanted to plant my flag with the musicians and weirdos because I loved it so much.
Norcross: Who were your influences growing up?
Vlautin: Tom Waits was a huge one, and Springsteen. I like the musicians that could make you disappear somewhere, like where you could put a record on and suddenly you were in a different land. The Pogues [laughter] – I could put a Pogues record on at 13 and suddenly I was in some kind of makeshift Ireland. Tom Waits – I could be a merchant marine drinking a Singapore Sling with a guy playing cards that had naked ladies on the back of ‘em. Just by putting a record on, I’m somewhere a million miles away from myself. Kate Bush, as a kid, was the same way. She could make you disappear to a different world. And that’s what I gravitated towards.
Norcross: I hear a through line for all of those and they’re great storytellers, as well as great songwriters in that they can put you in a place.
Vlautin: Yeah, that was my main … that’s all I ever wanted to do was be in a different place. And so I always gravitated towards that and then I had things I was in love with. I was really in love with Eastern Oregon, Reno and Northern Nevada. And when I was a kid, I was like, well, that’ll be the place I write about because I love it. And then I wanted people to be able to disappear into those places. But that was just out of pure love for the other people that gave me the escape that I needed, like Springsteen, those early records in New Jersey with a depressed guy but a romantic guy. And then all of a sudden you’re not you anymore. It’s just brilliant, man. I just never got over the power of that.
Norcross: We’ll talk a little bit more about Reno and the high Nevada desert, which is obviously very important to you. But I wanted to give you a chance to read a passage from your book because we were talking about influences. And there’s a part in “The Horse” where Al sees a seriously important influence to him musically. You want to read that passage for us right now?
Vlautin: Yeah, this is just the idea of the power of music when you’ve never heard it. If you’ve got the sickness, it gets ya.
[Reading excerpt from “The Horse”] “At 14, Al was six feet three inches tall. His hair is jet black and his eyes light blue. His face was dotted with acne and he weighed 113 pounds. His body was his constant embarrassment, just undressing in PE revealed to all the rivers of blue veins under his skin and the bones of his skeletal frame.
“Fourteen was also the year he experienced his first prolonged mental anguish over the death of his Uncle Vern. Within a week of hearing the news, he became paralyzed in a sort of panic fit that wouldn’t abate. He couldn’t sleep and had no appetite or energy. Vern had not been only his uncle, but his best friend and only confidant. His mother had refused to talk about her brother, so Al never told her or anyone how broken he was by the loss or admitted the panic and sadness that followed his uncle’s death.
“Fourteen was also the year his mother’s part-time boyfriend, Herb, stopped in front of the duplex in a white Pontiac Grand Prix. From the kitchen window, Al and his mother saw him pull up, and Al grabbed his coat and left. Inside the car was warm, and had white leather interior and plastic floor mats covered in white carpet.
“Herb, a bulky, bald man with a wax mustache, owned three auto parts stores and smoked two cigarettes on the drive to John Ascuaga’s Nugget to see Buck Owens and the Buckaroos. This was years before Buck was Hee Haw Owens. But even so, the casino’s smaller main floor lounge was full and the band came on to stage in sparkly blue nudie suits. Buck grinned his big toothy smile and said witty things between songs and the buckaroos played with a sort of controlled abandon. And Buck acted like he was the happiest man who’d ever lived on earth.
“Maybe it was because Al’s mother and Vern had always had the country station on, or maybe it was because he’d never been to a live music show before, but seeing Buck Owens that night became a marker for everything after. It wasn’t the suits or the adulation that came from being on stage that attracted him nor the idea of money or fame. It was that when he played or when they played, he disappeared. When they played, suddenly Al wasn’t Al anymore. He was transported inside the noise, and rhythm, and melody, and story. It was as though, suddenly, he understood that just by a song playing, he was able to vanish from himself.”
[Applause]
Norcross: That’s really beautiful. And the fact that Buck Owens is at the center of this reminds me … when people ask me from other parts of the world, what is country music, I say it’s a lot of different musics. Buck Owens and that Bakersfield sound, that desert country sound, obviously, that’s an influence on you. Can you talk about where you came from, Nevada, and the music that was surrounding you at the time?
Vlautin: Growing up, I didn’t like country at all because when you’re a kid, you equate the music with the people that listen to the music. And I was always kind of, the guys that listen to Merle Haggard and guys like Buck Owens were the guys that would try to beat me up. So I didn’t like that kind of stuff at all until my brother moved to Los Angeles when I was 13, and started sending me the cow punk bands like Los Lobos, and Rank and File, and The Long Ryders, and X, and The Blasters – all these kinds of young guys that were kind of punk rock influenced, making folk music, country music and traditional music their own. When I heard those records, I understood the beauty of it.
Also, I had one guy throughout my life, which was Willie Nelson. He was the long-haired hippie that made it into my house. My mom was not a fan of arty people or long-haired hippies, but she had a huge crush on Willie. And I always said, “Willie was the hippie that made it into our house.” I’ve loved him ever since and he’s always been my guy.
But really, it was the punk rock guys that brought me into it – bands like The Pogues that take that weirdo, angry kind of kid energy and take traditional music over it. It ruined my life maybe, yeah.
Norcross: [Laughter] It ruined your life.
Vlautin: Yeah, man. Probably did.
Norcross: In a righteous way, right? Wow.
So you write beautifully in the book about the Reno casino circuit and the musicians who play in it. Can you describe that environment for us a little bit?
Vlautin: In the early days, the casinos were owned by one person. Bill Harrah owned Harrah’s and he was obsessed with music. He was married to Bobbie Gentry at one point. He had a 50-piece orchestra on salary and he lost a lot of money bringing in big bands because he just loved it.
There were tons of gigs in Reno from, say, the thirties to the late seventies, and then corporations started buying out the casinos and realizing what a loss music cost them. But when I was in high school, the guys I grew up with playing with, a couple of their dads played in casinos and it’s an awful gig. It’s like five hours a night. No one likes what you do. If you get too crazy, there’s a red phone that lights up and it means calm down. And so it’s pretty awful. But at 14, they had showgirl girlfriends and they worked three hours, four hours a day. And you’re like, that’s heaven. They would always take you aside and say, you don’t want to play Van Morrison songs behind a plastic barrier your whole life, so play your own stuff.
I was kind of love/hate with the lounge music. But you listen to that stuff so much as a kid that it gets in your veins, you know.
Norcross: And you write beautifully, also, about the high central Nevada desert where Al is at the end of the book. When you talk about Nevada, when you talk about your home state, I get some melancholy, nostalgia maybe. And everybody here in Northwestern Oregon is glad that you’re here. You live in the coast range, you’re part of the Portland music scene, clearly. But why are you here and not there?
Vlautin: Oh, you know, I was too weird for Reno at the time [laughter]. It was the mid-nineties, there were a bunch of Portland bands that would come through Reno. One being Crackerbash and a guy named Sean Croghan. I saw them one night in a bar in Reno and he was really cool. He says, “You should move up to Portland. There’s great bands.” And Portland, I love Portland. I was just too weird for Reno and it’s hard to be a failed musician in a town where your mom hates musicians. [Laughter]
I worked at a trucking company and they transferred me to Portland and I love Portland to death. But some of that melancholy is just in my blood, some of it is wishing I could be back in a different situation, and some things you just can’t escape. But that being said, I did grow up with one of my mom’s boyfriends who was obsessed with Nevada and Eastern Oregon and we just used to drive around at a very young age, and you just get indoctrinated into how beautiful Eastern Oregon and Nevada are. And that got tattooed into me.
Norcross: The spaces – they really get inside of you.
Vlautin: Yeah. Escapism, man.
Norcross: So Al, in the book, is so prolific a songwriter he just churns them out. And that’s why he’s in demand because many people come to him and say, “Will you write songs for me?” Are there actually people like that who can make a living just writing songs?
VIautin: I mean, there is. I don’t know very many of them, but there’s guys … well, like Scott McCaughey of The Minus 5 who’s been writing brilliant songs for 40 years, or another Portland transplant, Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers. He’s probably been writing good songs since he was 12, like consistently for, how many years? I don’t know how old he is, but a lot of years he’s been writing good songs, just one after another after another. It’s just mind blowing. And there’s guys like that in every city, every town in America.
Norcross: And like I said, there are so many songs. Most of them are just titles.
Vlautin: Yes that’s true.
Norcross: But there are some lyrics that will show up now and again. I’m wondering, if you would, please – is there a song that you kind of wrote into the book that maybe you can realize for us here as an actual performance?
Vlautin: Yeah. So I think there’s 230 song titles.
Norcross: I didn’t count.[Laughter]
Vlautin: I know.
Norcross: But I don’t doubt it.
Vlautin: And I was thinking about all the songs throughout his whole life that he’s written, in hopes that the titles would let you know where his head’s at, what he’s interested in, who he’s writing for. But I wrote one where he just woke up one mornin’ and wrote a song called “Mr. Lucky and Miss Doom.” So I’ve written maybe eight songs off this list so far and this is one that I’ll do right now.
Norcross: Please.
[Applause]
Vlautin: And the band I’m in, the Delines, we just recorded this and this will be on our new record. The singer, Amy, always says that if I could just not kill everybody in every song, she’d be really happy. And she said, why can’t they just be in love for once? And so this is my attempt at that.
[”Mr. Lucky and Miss Doom” by Willy Vlautin playing]
[Applause] Thank you for clapping.
Norcross: That’s beautiful Willy. You mentioned that this is going to be a song on the new Delines’ album. And you mentioned Amy Boone, your lead singer, and it makes me wonder about writing songs for other people. How would Amy perform that song differently?
Vlautin: She’s just a better singer, number one. She’s just the coolest. I guess I’ll first say that I never understood the idea of being in front of people. I love music – like I said earlier – to disappear and do it, and you want to be in a band because then you feel like you’re closer to it. But I forgot the whole idea of being in front of people, entertaining people. I couldn’t do any of that stuff, but I just wanted to be in a band. I kind of drank my way through Richmond Fontaine so I could be in front.
Then as you get older, you realize, well, if you wanna do something different, you better do it. And women singers have always been my favorite, and I always wanted to be in a sad, kind of loungey band that told really dark stories with a woman singer I believed in. Luckily, Amy took me up on it. So that’s how we do it. She kind of tells me what she wants and what she won’t sing, and then I try to listen to her. I just write what I want and then she tells me yes or no.
Norcross: These books of yours sometimes live on in film form. You’ve been through the process of having your books made in the movies twice before. There’s another one happening right now. “The Night Always Comes” is going to be a movie. It’s shot in Portland not that long ago.
Vlautin: Yeah.
Norcross: What’s that like? What’s that like for you to see your creation go through that process?
Vlautin: You just can’t take it seriously. There’s only two ways to look at it – you either keep the rights to yourself and then you do it, or you sell it to the best person that’s interested and do it, and you hope they do a good job.
Norcross: Do you think they did a good job?
Vlautin: I’ve always thought they’ve tried really hard. Yeah. Sure. And look man, I’ve had nothing but good experiences with all of them. But it’s not my thing. And so you just kind of have to turn your head artistically cause they’re trying to do the best they can. But yeah, it freaks you out. But it’s a great gift for me and my family. It’s been a great gift, the other movies have.
Norcross: So back to “The Horse.” Al eventually finds himself on this old mining claim near the end of his life. He doesn’t die in the movie, I just want to make sure that that’s clear – no spoiler! But there’s this horse that just shows up in his life and it’s this old, poor, injured, starving creature that he can’t bring himself to put down, right? What does that horse represent to Al?
Vlautin: Well, I mean, it’s a pretty basic idea. Like if you’re drowning, one of the best ways to get yourself from drowning is to help somebody else that’s drowning. Sometimes helping somebody else out that’s in a worse spot than you are, pulls you out and that person out, or that horse.
I was out researching a book of mine called “Don’t Skip Out On Me.” I was with a buddy of mine and we were like 40 miles out outside of the nearest town on a dirt road and on a big desert ply, we came across a blind horse, wild mustang, that was probably 20-years old with just scars all over its body. The life it’s lived was like a map, all those scars. And here, it ended its life with it being blind in the middle of the desert. And I think that it broke my heart in a way that certain things do and you can’t shake it.
I’d thought about that horse for years and years in a lot of different ways. And I think that, yeah, I felt a lot like that at times in my life. So that image kind of stuck with me, too. So I ended up writing about it years after I saw it.
Norcross: So when an idea comes to you, I don’t know, a scene, or a character, or an animal, do you kind of know how it’s going to live in the world? Do you know if it’s going to be a song? Is it going to be a short story? Is it going to be a novel?
Vlautin: Except for one of my books, they all started as songs. I might write a song. I wrote a song with Richard Fontaine in 2014, maybe, called “The Blind Horse.” The cover of our last record had a painting of the picture I took of that horse because it just really shook me. And so it started with that. All my books started as songs.
I think sometimes you write a song and whatever you’re thinking about with that song disappears, and then sometimes it just opens up another door. For instance, I wrote a song called “North Line.” And I finished that song and that song is all about weakness. It just kind of opened up this whole set of ideas that I thought could be a novel. So some ideas stop at a song and then some, you write a song and it opens up a whole world of ideas.
Norcross: Well, how about you take us out with something? Something you got ready?
Vlautin: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I’ll play you this song, another one that I wrote, that I started. I wrote a song called “Don’t Skip Out On Me” two years before I started the book, but I just knew the world of that guy and it was the hardest book I ever wrote. And the easiest song I ever wrote.
Norcross: Excellent. Thank you.
[”Don’t Skip Out On Me” by Willy Vlautin playing]
[Applause]
Vlautin: Thank you.
Norcross: That’s songwriter, author and bandleader Willy Vlautin. His new novel is called “The Horse.” We spoke earlier this month at the Pickathon Music Festival.
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