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| Featured Artist Link REALLYMUSICRADIO presentsGREG TROOPER
In the fall of 2004, Greg Trooper tried to settle in to a moment not easily settled into - his first full-on recording session in the basement studio of soul producer and songwriter Dan Penn. Author of I'm Your Puppet, Do Right Woman and Dark End of the Street; producer of Solomon Burke, Irma Thomas and the Box Tops; colleague of Jerry Wexler and Chips Moman, Penn made a huge impact on soul music, but he's mighty low-key about it. He's a humble guy. But that didn't necessarily make it easier for Troop.
Musicians regard their heroes in infinitely varied ways, but they all have them. It's almost a job requirement. Trooper has described his own holy trinity as Otis Redding, Hank Williams and Bob Dylan. Below that is that cascade of demi-gods that any lover of old records can conjure in his own mind's eye. Near the top, for Trooper, would be Penn. And there he was on the other side of the double wall glass, as Trooper spread his feet, swung his guitar under his arm and addressed the vocal mike. How Mr. Trooper, veteran folk rocker, came to work with Mr. Penn, quiet soul legend, speaks to Trooper's musical journey and to the devotion he's earned inside the Americana and roots music community. As he approached his eighth album and that freighted fiftieth birthday, Trooper felt pulled toward sparer settings for his songs, a sort of cotton and corn-meal simplicity perhaps best defined by a warbling organ and an assured Southern back-beat. Trooper called colleague Dave Alvin in California to ask about production help. Alvin, hearing Trooper's aims and directions, suggested Penn. Then Buddy Miller, long-time Trooper supporter and former producer, introduced him to Penn, completing a sequence of referrals up a chain of gurus and guides to the frontier terrain between country and soul. It's a landscape easily negotiated by a lover of Otis, Hank and Dylan. More than most, Trooper has a gift for blending fervent feeling and bluesy honesty with elegantly simple language that nevertheless provokes double-takes and wry smiles. The chemistry did indeed produce a "rootsy little record" as Trooper put it, but one grander than that in its artistry and its many lovely invitations to hear the unadorned essence of rhythm and truth. Penn captured the live sessions on 16-track analog tape through a well-worn, elegantly utilitarian mixing board, offering a sound as different to Trooper from the digital environment he'd grown used to as a Jacuzzi is from a sponge-bath. And the producer applied a lighter touch to the players' parts or approach than he did with Trooper's singing posture. "'Go out and play what comes out of you.'" says Trooper, again channeling the beatific, sixtyish Penn. "'You don't want me telling you what to play. I'm not a drummer; you are. I'm not a keyboard player; you are. I can tell you if I like something or not, but you've got to go out there and start playing what it's saying to you.' I think the musicians on this record responded to that wonderfully." Does Penn's production make Make It Through This World a soul record? Sort of, and yet too many other colors swirl around on the palette to make it that simple. Besides, Trooper's soul and Otis Redding's soul come from different places in the throat, if not the heart. You won't find Troop wailing away improvisational funk like Otis at the end of Try A Little Tenderness. He was sitting down after all, and his intent was focus and clarity, not histrionics. "I hope to god I didn't overdo anything," Troop says with a smile. "Dan will agree with you. There's nothing worse than a white guy over-singing rhythm and blues. Just nothing worse." |
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