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Rocker Lowe satisfied with career arc

Rob Thomas  —  10/07/2008 10:55 am

Nick Lowe is doing the math. When he first started playing rock music in 1968, he was 18 years old, and rock 'n' roll as a genre had been in existence for about 16 years. How much longer, he thought at the time, could it possibly last?

"Back then, I thought I'd missed the boat," Lowe said in a phone interview from his home in London. "I thought it was all over. But when you think about it, it's double that from punk rock to now. It's just amazing how it's still all going."

Lowe is one of the few rock 'n' rollers who has aged gracefully in his career. Once known as a purveyor of cheeky pub rock in the 1970s with his band Rockpile and on his own with solo albums like "Jesus of Cool," Lowe was also a producer best known for working on early albums by the likes of Elvis Costello and The Pretenders.

At 59, his hair snow white and his laugh a soft, grandfatherly chuckle, Lowe has become more of a father figure in popular music. His last two albums "The Convincer" and "At My Age" show him mining strains of American blues, country and R&B, and writing songs that rely less on bruising riffs and more on wry turns of phrase.

He recognizes that many of his older fans, wishing he would still crank out rock songs like "Cruel to be Kind," have abandoned him. He doesn't seem to miss them that much.

"There are certain people who just want you to stay the same, so they can relive their youth through you," he said. "From my point of view, there's something rather disgusting about doing that, pretending you're still 23 when you clearly aren't. I suppose I did on purpose figure out a way that I could use the fact that I was getting older as an asset, as an advantage, rather than something that you're alarmed by."

The irony that Lowe appreciates is that by embracing his 59 years, he has discovered a new audience for his music. And it's a much younger audience.

"I see a lot of younger people -- well, certainly most people are younger than me these days -- but younger people, people in their 20s and certainly 30s, at my shows," Lowe said. "They're a lot more attractive audience than the one that used to sponsor me, so I'm very pleased about that. It's much nicer to look out."

Lowe's trip stateside was arranged primarily so he could do a benefit concert last Thursday in San Francisco with Elvis Costello, Ry Cooder and Jim Keltner. He decided to add a few dates around the country. At the Barrymore on Sunday night, Lowe will be performing solo.

He has fond memories of playing in Madison decades ago.

"Back in the day of Rockpile, we used to be a bit of a fixture there, actually," he said. "We were very good friends with Cheap Trick. I haven't seen those guys for a while, but back in the '70s when we first came over, we became very friendly with them."

Lowe said he keeps his set list pretty rigid from night to night, mixing old classics from the days when he was nicknamed "The Basher" for his ability to quickly write and record tunes. Being "The Basher" was a younger man's game; today, Lowe said he writes totally differently, focusing on a more mature, storytelling approach.

On "At My Age," that sensibility manifests itself in songs that look at love gone right and love gone wrong (mostly wrong), both from a wry and world-weary perspective. It's not hard to imagine that the cad who boasts of wronging a lover on "I Trained Her To Love Me" is the same one who gets wronged in "Both Sides of The Coin."

"I didn't want to come up with a riff and hammer away in the studio, and go away and come up with a few words to put on top of it," Lowe said. "I've done that in the past and gotten quite lucky, but it's a very depressing way of making records.

"It's much more satisfying to actually think of a really good song, just two-and-a-half or three minutes that you know works. You play it on the acoustic guitar and get it really, really happening, and get some good guys and go in and record it. Then you can mess around with it and put bells and whistles on it, but you know you've got something really solid up front."

Lowe recently had to reconnect with his earlier, rocking self when he contributed to this year's deluxe 30th-anniversary edition reissue of his first solo album "Jesus of Cool" (When it was initially released in the United States, it was called "Pure Pop For Now People").

"I found it pretty tough to listen to," he said. "It brought back the time. I was trying to make a name for myself. I was very ambitious. I hoped that by making a record like that, that was cheeky and irreverent, I'd hoped that it would get me noticed. And then I could do something good a little bit later on."

Rob Thomas  —  10/07/2008 10:55 am