John Mann

HEY, MANN:

JOHN MANN AND THE SONGS OF OUR LIVES

By Tim Roberts

WHO IS JOHN MANN?

Our footsteps on the hardwood floor echo around the living room: high-ceilinged and empty except for a small sofa, a coffee table, a television and a stack of stereo equipment on a wooden stand. A six-string acoustic guitar lies across the coffee table. In front of where the television rests is a wide-mouth blue bucket filled with a liquid the color of watery milk. A wet washrag hangs from the bucket's rim. Boxes are clustered together about the room, some empty, some full. A small bedroom is full of empty ones. From the doorway it looks like a giant honeycomb made by bees with no sense of geometry. A large gray-black tabby with white on her chin and chest skulks about. There's a clean smell that pierces the air throughout the entire apartment. Anyone who has moved into a new home would recognize it: oil soap and water, the smell that means the residue of the previous inhabitants has been flensed away. They may take their memories, but they always leave behind their dirt.

We're in the apartment of John Mann and his future wife Lissy on a street off of Frankfort Avenue in the city's Clifton neighborhood, an eclectic area of small homes, cafes, boutiques and upscale restaurants that buffers the opulence of Crescent Hill to the north and the ruggedness of Butchertown to the south. The last block on many of the cross streets in this neighborhood is a nearly perpendicular drop down to Brownsboro Road, which borders Clifton on the east. If you glance back, you'll see how the neighborhood got its name.

Their wedding is less than a month away. Both are preparing to graduate from the Master of Arts in Teaching program at Bellarmine University. They are setting up housekeeping. Mann is finishing a semester of student teaching at an elementary school.

And he's released his first CD.

Hands In the Pavement

So despite the pressures of impending life changes that are to take place in mere days and with boxes of his CDs somewhere among the others scattered about the apartment and a schedule of performances that are supposed to go right up to the hours before he says "I do," he sits in jeans and a white casual shirt at his kitchen table, sipping a soft drink from a heavy glass decorated with the color-saturated logo of a microbrewery in Boston, as relaxed and cool as a rock in the rain. Any other guy might be feeling as if his nerves were being fed through a woodchopper.

Instead, he talks about recording Hands in the Pavement, his debut released late last year, one he was excited to get out into the stores and into people's hands just as soon as he slit the packing tape on the first boxful of them.

He recalled the sessions at David Barrick's studio in Glasgow, Kentucky, a small city roughly 100 miles south of Louisville, where Pavement was recorded, mixed and mastered in less than a week. "I just wanted to look for ways to make things sound different," he said. "It would've been really easy for me to play guitar solos on everything, but I had access to the guys playing horns. And where we recorded, he has an old Hammond organ. That sound is what I love more than anything."

At 26 years old, tall with thick dark hair, narrow eyes that crinkle into small slits when he smiles, the square build of a guy who has worked with nothing but his hands his entire life and a burred singing voice of a man more than twice his age, John Mann is as honest and authentic as the songs he sings and of the stories he tells in them. In his songs he's the tired businessman heading home from his downtown to see the big brown eyes of the woman he loves (and he's stopping off at the corner liquor store to pick up a bottle of wine for the two of them). He's the soldier weary of battle and being called by his last name, looking forward to a life where the mundane task of buying an axe is bliss. He's the brokenhearted guy who returns to his hometown years later and finds that the preacher's daughter he loved dearly is long gone.

If the over-celebrated author Ayn Rand had journeyed into the Midwest and South and learned from people who actually worked the land and used common sense to solve problems, instead of living in high-rise luxury and hobnobbing with people so far up into their own heads that their eyebrows vanished into their hairlines (and shtupping one of her young disciples, the horny old tart), her Atlas Shrugged would have been a completely different book. Instead of being about a self-interested prig being assaulted from all sides by collectivist and bureaucratic enemies, it would be about a man who lives and loves, hurts and laughs, fears and perseveres. In this alternate version, Atlas would never shrug off his burden of bearing the world on his back. He'd stand tall with it, after first doing a fast clean-and-jerk. He'd bear his responsibility and all the sadness and joy that went with it. He'd endure.

And Rand's first line would not have been "Who is John Gault?"

It would have been "Who is John Mann?"

WHAT A PIECE OF WORK IS MANN

Born and raised in Madisonville, Kentucky, in the western portion of the state, a pinpoint nearly halfway between the borders of Indiana and Tennessee, John Mann did what any male wants to do when as he waxes pubescent: he picked up a guitar and started to learn how to play it. "I really started to get into it my freshman year of high school," he said. "And that was the point where you'll hear guitar players say they sort of hit a wall. When I was a freshman, that's when I got over the wall and I was able to play solos. It was simple stuff, but it's like some people don't have the time to do that. And I was so obsessed with it. If you played a Jimi Hendrix song on the stereo, I could've more easily played along with it as a freshman than I could now. It has shifted so much.

John Mann

So for a number of years in high school, Mann was content to be merely a guitarist in whatever band he played, not a co-star with the front man like Keith Richards is to Mick Jagger but more like Horatio to Hamlet: be present, provide support and be the last one on the stage when the lead vocalist had been dragged off (or had fallen off). Yet while he was content to be the guy standing to the side, he knew he could do better than what he was hearing.

"I would always think to myself, `I could do that better.' Or they would be the songwriters and I would just play along and think, `Man, these songs aren't really that good.'"

Mann changed his attitude about being a front man while he attended the University of Kentucky, where he and three friends formed the band Pleasureville, an edgy alternative country combo that Mann described as "really loud and kind of sloppy." "Most of us lived in the same house," he recalled. "So we practiced, drank beer, smoked cigarettes and it was fun. We played at Lynaugh's once a month. And there were a couple of summers in a row when we got to go to New York. Those were always just total busts financially. It would be like going on vacation and playing music along the way there."

Mann doesn't deny the experiences playing for what amounted to motel and gas money weren't fun or didn't contribute to his development as a performer. While in New York, Pleasureville did get to perform in Greenwich Village at the same club where Bruce Springsteen had played when he was in the same sing-for-your-beer-and-cab-fare-home mode as they were.

After graduating from UK with a Bachelors degree in History, Mann spent half a year with his sister and brother-in-law in San Diego, then came back to Louisville. And back to Pleasureville.

"We were still doing the four-piece thing," he said, referring to the band, "and then I think somewhere along the way I just decided that I just didn't want to do it anymore in that format I really wanted to get away from twanging it up all the time.

"It's not what I wanted to do anymore."

MANN FOR ALL SEASONS

The following is from an unproduced movie script:

EXT: A LARGE COTTON FIELD -DAY

The scene is bathed in a light sepia. A high bright, white sun shines down on a wide field of tall cotton plants. The sky is cloudless. A light breeze sways the tops of the plants. Offscreen a faint voice is reciting scripture. The camera pans across the field and frames an older man in a black robe holding a book. In front of the man stands a young couple: the young man is dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and dark tie. A large carnation flares against his lapel. A wide smile splits his face. The young woman is slender, in a white skirt and suit jacket. The white veil from a hat is across her eyes. She stands close to the young man, both hands clutching a thick bouquet of flowers. Behind them stand an older couple, the older man's hands on the woman's shoulders.

The man in the robe stops reading aloud and closes his book. MUSIC FADES UP from underneath, just gentle guitar and harmonica. Camera PANS LEFT to an elderly black man in a wilted fedora, shirtsleeves and overalls playing his guitar. The elderly man sings: "Two-dollar wedding in ten-foot cotton / Let me know if I've forgotten to / Put enough gas in the Model-T." The voice sounds rustic, wise. Camera follows as he moves toward the young couple. . . .

John Mann's "Two Dollar Wedding," which closes out Hands in the Pavement, indeed sounds as if the vocalist has led a full life of dreaming and feeling the of pain of watching dreams slowly evaporate. But earlier in the recording, he sings of the joy of finishing up a day of hard work and heading off to be with the woman he loves, in a place where every moment is a holiday. Again, his vocals sound like it is something he's done thousands of times over a number of years. It's a voice that's comfortable, timeless, experienced.

And it comes from a man in his mid-twenties.

"I don't know where it comes from," Mann said when asked about his singing style. "Even when I was in high school, when grunge music was really big, I liked those bands, but really briefly. I'd still listen to Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Van Morrison. Ray Charles is my dad's all-time favorite performer and his voice is my all-time favorite voice. That's just the music I've always liked."

He began to listen to more Bluegrass while in college and more of the early alternative country bands like Uncle Tupelo and Wilco. "And I loved them," he said, "but I still didn't have the same attachment to that music as I did to the old Atlantic Records Ray Charles stuff."

So Hands in the Pavement might be considered Mann's tribute to the performers who, figuratively, gave him his voice. He sings with the passion of Ray Charles, the bluesy robustness of Van Morrison, the tender earthiness of Johnny Cash. And the music that enwraps his vocals on Pavement doesn't mimic the sounds of those performers. You won't hear him do something that sounds like "I Walk the Line" right before a blatant rip-off of "Domino" or "You Don't Know Me." The music is his own, from the top-down, summertime street cruise anthem "Lost the Reel" to the folky lullaby "Keep Me Honest."

With a singing style influenced by a handful of giants from the last half decade of music and songs that couldn't be more of an exact fit than if they had come from a Saville Row tailor, Mann needed a space to help him develop the acoustic warmth that his work required. He found it at David Barrick's studio in Glasgow, Kentucky.

If psychic energy can be transduced into audio that can be sucked into the walls and floors of a place, Barrick's studio was, spiritually ideal for Mann's Pavement project, since it had been used by the Kentucky Headhunters and Louisville's Tim Krekel, both of whom are known for their honest, faded-blue roots rock sounds. Adding to the cosmic mix, Barrick owns a variety of vintage instruments and equipment, a Hammond organ and recording machine that was used to record Please to Meet Me by The Replacements, a band Mann says Pleasureville sounded like (or at least tried to).

So the sacred space was chosen and readied. Then Barrick and Mann had to make a few decisions.

"He had a big hand in more than just the engineering," Mann said. "We sat down at the beginning and talked about what we wanted it to sound like. Usually, he loves electric guitars and he does great with that. But after I told him I wanted to go in a different direction, he was totally cool with it."

Another decision Mann made was to build a band containing several of his former Pleasureville bandmates and those from other roots rock bands in Louisville: bassist Dave Nofsinger, trombonist Ian Thomas, drummer Marc Jones, saxophonist Christopher Fuller, trumpeter A.J. Holley and keyboardist Randy Arnold, all representing such bands as Satchel's Pawn Shop, Hell's ½ Acre and 10 Months Later. And, of course, Pleasureville.

Having a variety of performers and instruments added to the overall quality of Pavement. Mann and Barrick had more choices in how something would sound. They weren't just limited to guitars, guitars and more guitars.

"If there would be a part of a song," he said, "where we'd think it really needed something, where most people would put in an electric guitar, we'd ask `how about a tambourine?'"

And having a variety of choices proportionally increases the variety of music the band can play. "We can go from a big, cool rockin' horn song to a little country-sounding thing. Which is perfect for me."

Warm songs played with warm instrumentation can, overall, produce a warm recording. But with all the digital recording technologies used, that warmth is sometimes exchanged for digitized expediency and efficiency. But Barrick had a way to bring the warmth back.

"Because tape is so expensive," Mann explained, "we recorded into the computer and we mixed it through analog tape, but that was tape that [Barrick] could record over later. And that has a lot to do with the sound. There's a big difference between the way our record sounds and the way it would have sounded if we hadn't mixed through analog. We had one copy with it and one copy without and you can tell the difference. It makes the bass and the drums a lot warmer."

Five days later, John Mann and band walked out of Barrick's studio with a product that had been completed in less time that it takes some mail to get from one coast to the other.

"We left there very happy."

MANN OF THE PEOPLE

When he returns from his honeymoon, John Mann will have a wife, an advanced degree and more options for his future. But will one of those options involve music?

"I am definitely not content to be a teacher and just play music," he said. "After awhile, the romance of being in a band and playing to nobody ... there are people who want to do that and it's great. But the guys I play with, they pretty much all have kids. Or if they don't have kids they have really serious jobs where they can't just pick up and do that. And if I teach, I can do that. I can do that in the summer and still get paid and not have to worry that much about people not being there.

"I want to do it for sure, but I wonder sometimes. People are just so full of shit in the record industry. It's so crazy the stuff that people tell me."

To avoid the crazy stuff from the people in the industry, Mann wants to go the entrepreneurial route: get copies of his CD to radio stations. "The radio thing is so vital," he said. "You have to get airplay. This summer I'm gonna have time to send out 200 or 300 copies to radio stations. And I'm going to have press coverage to give to people."

Before we began the interview, John Mann handed me a framed photograph washed out by six decades of history. In it seven men in coveralls and hats pose in front of an old Esso station. One of them is Mann's grandfather. The building is made of white tile so bright that you almost have to squint your eyes as you look at the picture. A tow truck is parked next to the building. The name of the station hangs over a garage bay. There are no trees around them, just asphalt. At any moment, you would expect a car to come up the highway from out of the picture frame. It would slow down, slowly glide up to a pump and the men would disband and head over to it, asking what the driver needs, offering to check the oil and tire pressure, hanging up the pump handle when the car is full of gas, accepting the driver's money and thanking the driver with a short tip of the cap.

No doubt there is a song about his grandfather somewhere in John Mann's head. It would be consistent with his other work so far. And we might be able to empathize with it. That doesn't mean we all have grandfathers who worked in service stations, or even had grandfathers we were happy to know.

But we have our own stores and people we know have them, too. We tell them to each other. Sometimes as narrative. Sometimes as song.

Just like John Mann does.

Find out more: www.johnmann.net.