shaking talks to novelist Thomas Cobb about Crazy Heart

As a writer, my hope is that people will read Thomas Cobb’s gritty country and western saloon singer novel Crazy Heart long after the Academy Awards are meted out on the night of March 2, 2010. There may be nominations for best actor (Jeff Bridges), best actress (Maggie Gyllenhaal), perhaps even best director (Scott Cooper) best picture (watch shaking now for Providence Monthly film critic and Culture Vulture/PopKrazy blogger Scott Duhamel’s upcoming review), best song (“ The Weary Kind”), and best soundtrack, supervised, as if preordained, by the great T. Bone Burnett.  There may even be a writing nomination for best screenplay adaptation for first time director Cooper because Thomas Cobb, the writer, does not write screenplays; he writes novels and short fiction influenced by the American southwest. That seems a shame, about the Oscar, I mean. There ought to be a separate category for people who write great books that are turned into great movies by other people.

Crazy Heart , initially published by Harper & Row in 1987, is a wonderful read that languished in obscurity for twenty years until Jeff Bridges got a hold of it and the movie, which faced obstacles at every turn, got made and released. Thankfully Harper Collins plans to re-release Crazy Heart in paperback sometime before the end of January.

That’s very good news because Cobb’s protagonist, Otis Arthur “Bad” Blake is an unforgettable character. Even when he is befriending and falling in love with single mother/journalist Jean Craddock and bonding with her son Buddy, Blake is incapable of entirely putting his demons away. He’s haunted by drinking himself out of country music paradise, five marriages and a relationship with his only child, Steven, the product of his second marriage to Marjorie Reynolds, the love of his life. It’s never really clear why Bad drinks so much or why he treats his 57 year old body like a crankcase. In fact, that’s one of many exquisite tensions Cobb weaves through his story. Does Bad Blake drink, smoke and screw without respite to numb the painful memories of all that he’s lost, or has he lost it all because he has an addictive personality and hasn’t discovered a workable formula for breaking the cycle of addiction and oblivion?

Contrasting Blake’s bad personal habits, there is his consummate professionalism as a performer and bandleader. Even though he’s been reduced to playing bowling alleys and roadhouses, he puts the local boys who back him through the paces of rehearsals and argues with sound technicians to get his act together for the stage. When he gets a gig opening for his former protégé Tommy Sweet, several things happen. One, Blake gets to share with Jean Craddock, who has been assigned by a Santa Fe paper to do a story on him, some wisdom regarding the relationship between front men like himself and their one-time guitar players (and in the process, recite some of Cobb’s best lines), and two, Sweet, who is hungry for new material, gives Blake a shot at a comeback.

Implicit in Blake’s relationship history, whether it’s personal or professional, is his desire for harmony, for the duet that’s going to stick over the long haul. What makes him less than heroic and less than romantic (in Cobb’s novel, at least), is his flair for sabotaging the good things that come his way, in the grand tradition of the honky tonk hero.

Recently, shaking had a chance to sit down and to discuss Crazy Heart, country music and many things literary with Thomas Cobb in his office at Rhode Island College, where he teaches Creative Writing and directs the Performing and Fine Arts Program.

shaking: Since we are in the 80’s in the novel, I was thinking of the outlaw gang of Willie, Waylon and Tompall Glaser when I was reading Crazy Heart. Who did you have in mind when you were writing Bad Blake?

Cobb: This was written twenty-two years ago, remember, so I was thinking of somebody who was big in the 50’s and 60’s and had faded.  I was just starting to cover music for a magazine in Tucson, and I had to do a Conway Twitty show, which was a big production. It just bothered me because Conway Twitty was never one of my favorites and at the same time, there’d be someone like Hank Thompson, this major talent, playing in bars with pickup bands.

shaking: Not even union guys?

Cobb: No they weren’t. They’d just find guys who played in bars in Tucson and that idea sort of stayed with me for a long time.

shaking: The references in the novel to other country singers, Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, even Bob Wills and Spade Cooley, are they about showing Blake as a student of the genre or are they used in some way to demonstrate that as a musician, Bad Blake identifies with the best?

Cobb: He does identify with the best. He’s been with the best and knows the best. It’s again sort of a matter of integrity. You know, I write westerns, but one of my favorite writers right now is Alice Munro and my favorite writer of all time is Nabokov, so my taste is still way up there. I think Bad’s like that too. There’s that one point when he’s in the bar and the drummer’s too slow, he’s lagging and so Bad is having to bend the notes like Lefty Frizzell because he knows how to do that. He understands that’s the way out of this problem.

shaking: Another thing he seems to understand is the business. He knows he’s going to lose the guitar player in his Houston house band and he’s going to lose him for good. It’s like if you want a handbook on the way the business works, you can read it through Bad Blake’s eyes

Cobb: Yeah, I’ve had a lot of musicians contact me and say that this is the best book they’ve ever read about the business, and I honestly don’t think I ever knew that much about the business. I was never in it other than to talk to musicians for articles, but I spent some time on the buses traveling with them and somehow I seem to have picked up intuitively what went on with them and business.

shaking: Are we supposed to like Bad’s manager, Jack?

Cobb: No. Although he’s doing all the right things, he’s sort of Bad’s conscience. But you know, you don’t like that angel on the shoulder saying those stupid, un-fun things.

shaking: For all that, he doesn’t seem to be pushing Bad hard enough to clean up his act. It seems as long as he’s on the road and working, and Jack’s taking his commissions, he doesn’t seem to care if Bad detoxes…

Cobb: No, no, he doesn’t. And I think that’s because he’s been his manager for years and years and knows whatever’s going to happen, it will be a disaster.

shaking: What would be Bad Blake’s take on today’s country and western scene? I mean, he’s fairly disenchanted with his old protégé Tommy Sweet, with Tommy’s show band, horns and the glitz.

Cobb: I think he would be appalled. I mean I’m appalled.  I listen to alt-country sometimes now. I find it on Sirius XM. The IPOD is great because you can listen to the music you’ve loved for years and years but there’s never a source of new music coming in. Sirius XM has to be the greatest invention because that’s the way I now find about new music. There’s an alt-country show and there’s this one song I really love, I can’t remember who does it, but it’s called “They Call it Country, I Call it Bad Rock n Roll.” And that’s exactly what I think whenever I happen to hit one of the country stations. With the exception of a few people like Brad Paisley, whose work I don’t really stomach but he can really play that thing, there’s just not much to listen to. But over on the alt-country you’ve got Lucinda Williams, and Rodney Crowell’s still around and Guy Clark, Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett, and Joe Ely—Joe Ely is my personal savoir. So I think that if Bad were still around he might be listening to alt-country but he might also be listening to the jazz station by now.

shaking: Or blues, since that seems to be an influence, but one of the familiar country motifs that seems to be in the book is the theme of duets. There’s Bad and Tommy Sweet, who recorded a record together, which not unimportantly, was the last record Bad got to make, or Bad and the journalist with whom he falls in love, or Bad trying to get together with the son he lost touch with when he was at his alcoholic worst. This idea of trying to find some harmony, were you conscious of trying to weave that into the story?

Cobb: Not so much, I mean,  certainly it’s there and duets had been kind of central to the music, but at that point it was probably on my mind because it had gone to the ridiculous extreme of Willie Nelson and Julio Inglesias, and “All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.” But so much good country music is about that male/female dynamic. It’s loving songs, it’s hurting songs, it’s cheating songs. It’s really about how men and women make themselves fit together, and in country and western music they fit together but it’s always uneasy.

shaking: I don’t want to give away too much but after several starts toward the light, the endgame of Blake’s bad habits seems to veer toward darkness. What were some of the factors that moved you toward that ending?

Cobb: I always thought of it in somewhat religious terms, and I was always bothered by that notion that at the last second of your life you can say, “I repent,” and you’re good now. That just seemed way too easy and it doesn’t really work that way. I think that’s the thing that’s going on with Bad; there’s too much water that’s gone under that bridge, or too much Jack Daniels. And he made a choice at some point and he gave himself over to the drinking. That’s how I saw what was happening to Bad.

shaking:  Does the connection between music and your literary work end with Crazy Heart or does it continue through the short stories in Acts of Contrition and your most recent novel, Shavetail?

Cobb:  As a subject it ends, but I think it’s always there. There’s a lot of music in Shavetail, which is about 19^th century army life, since the men entertain themselves with music. I went back and listened to music that was popular in the day, and there were always people around who played guitar and fiddle, maybe accordion. There’s not so much in the short stories, except there is a story I actually wrote before Crazy Heart called “I’ll Never Get Out of this World Alive,” which comes from Hank Williams—‘No matter how much I struggle and strive, I’ll never get out of this world alive.”  There’s a lot of Hank Williams in that. In fact, the story conflates Hank Williams and John Keats in the lead character, who’s an English teacher who loves Hank and teaches John Keats. Now that I think of it, that’s a really fun story.

Postscript: Earlier this week Thomas Cobb’s Crazy Heart was reissued in paperback (pictured above) by Harper Collins.