A singer and songwriter in his own right, as well as a guitarist, bassist and record producer with Lucinda Williams, the late Warren Zevon, Tom Russell, Mary Gauthier and Slaid Cleaves among his employers and clients, Morlix might have been excused had he claimed to be too busy to notice.
The truth was, he was on tour and wasn’t paying attention to events back home – and anyway, having been nominated in various awards before and never won, he’d banished this one from his mind.
“I don’t put much stock in awards, to be honest,” says the laid-back Morlix down the line from another stop on another tour. “For me, there is no best in music – but when I got back and started checking my e-mails and found hundreds of messages of congratulations, I realised that this really meant something to these people. People like to see the people that matter to them being recognised, and I felt honoured.”
Tangible recognition for his talents has been a long time coming. Having taken up the guitar as a teenager after seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan TV show in 1964, Morlix became set on being a musician. He was playing in bands not long after getting his first guitar, often arriving at school just a few hours after finishing the final set at one of the local biker bars in Buffalo, New York State. After leaving school he went in search of work on the next rung up the ladder – and preferably in warmer climes.
After fetching up in Florida and then Texas, where he made his recording debut playing bass guitar on singer-songwriter Eric Taylor’s Shameless Love album, he moved to Los Angeles in 1981. There he worked with Dwight Yoakam, recorded with Jerry Lee Lewis on the Great Balls of Fire soundtrack and began an 11-year association with Lucinda Williams, playing guitar, leading her touring band and producing her breakthrough self-titled album.
“There was really nothing I ever wanted to do except play music,” he says. “I used to pretend to be sick so that I could stay off school, and when my mum left me to go shopping, I’d sneak into my sister’s room and turn the dial on her radio till I heard something I liked.”
Later – when he had his own rocketship-shaped radio – he would listen through an earphone while pretending to be asleep: a story he also recounts on the song Drums From New Orleans from his recent album Last Exit to Happyland.
The defining moment was hearing the Everly Brothers’ Cathy’s Clown: the sound of Don and Phil’s voices convinced the youngster that this was what he wanted to do. The Beatles’ arrival shattered his parents’ resistance to his pleas for guitar lessons.
Touring with Lucinda Williams and Warren Zevon became a belated substitute for further education. “You learn from everyone, but with Warren, who was a class act as a musician and a human being, I learned to respect the audience. He showed that every night. He also showed me you can write a song about anything, and that was a really valuable lesson.”
The most valuable lesson Morlix was learning, however, was that, compared to the writers he was working with, his own songs weren’t quite good enough.
“I’d been writing for a long time, since my teens, and I’d come up with something I thought sounded good until I listened to what Warren or Lucinda or any of the great songwriters – John Prine, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan at his best – were writing,” he says. “I had to figure out how to make that leap to where you make what you’re writing compelling enough so that other people will want to listen to it. That’s not easy, but working with great writers showed me that you can do it if you learn the craft. Sometimes you’ll get a complete song tumbling out in 15 minutes. But those occurrences are rare and I came to enjoy the act of rewriting and polishing and getting songs to say exactly what you want them to say.”
HAVING moved back to Texas in 1991 and built a studio in his house, Morlix became the go-to guy for whole platoons of the prodigious Austin music scene. Morlix says he benefited from being around talents such as Ray Wylie Hubbard and Buddy and Julie Miller, and those same people were encouraging him to record his own songs.
His first album, Toad of Titicata – released in 2000 when he was nearly 50 years old – came, he says, before he was ready. But in the nine years since then he’s really hit his stride, creating songs such as Madalyn’s Bones, about the mysterious disappearance of American Atheists founder Madalyn Murray O’Hair. These put him in the long tradition of ballad writers reporting events, and give his concerts a great depth of character – as does his entertaining way of imparting background information.
“Madalyn’s Bones was a song that was crying out to be written by someone – and I’m glad it was me,” he says. “It’s funny, because people say you shouldn’t write about death and murder, but Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley’s repertoires have way bigger body counts than a rapper like 50 Cent’s. Rap’s supposed to be like a newspaper set to music and that’s the aspect of songwriting I like. I want people to feel something when they hear my songs, maybe cry a little, laugh a little. I’m sure I’m telling them things they already know – but if I can do it in a way they haven’t heard before, then I’ll be doing my job.”
Gurf Morlix plays The Old Library, Kilbarchan, on Tuesday, December 8; Laurie’s Bar, Glasgow, on Wednesday 9; and the Tolbooth, Stirling, on Thursday 10.
