A new album sends Tom Rush back to the garden
I happen to call Tom Rush at his Kittery, Maine, home just a few days after his 83rd birthday.
Last time we talked, I remind him, he was about to celebrate his 79th birthday with a “First Annual Farewell Tour” show in his hometown of Portsmouth, N.H.
This year was a low-key birthday, says Rush. “I’m actually trying to book Symphony Hall for my 100th birthday. It’s on a Saturday in 2041. They’re not returning my calls.”
First things first: On Friday, he’ll play City Winery in a benefit concert for the Pine Street Inn. The solo show also marks the release of his first album in half a decade, “Gardens Old, Flowers New.”
That phrase appears in two songs on the album, produced by Rush’s accompanist since 2014, talented multi-instrumentalist and Berklee alum Matt Nakoa.
“It’s Matt’s pick for the title. He said, ‘You’re no spring chicken, but you’re coming up with great new songs.’ So I’m the old garden and the songs are the new flowers — at least in Matt’s view,” says Rush.
Q. You said Nakoa “prodded” you into making this album. Did he have to prod hard?
A. No, he’s right. It’s time. In the old days, record companies wanted an album a year or you were in big trouble. That’s not the case anymore.
Q. For “The Harbor,” you wrote in the liner notes that you visited “the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, hospital in which I was born — it had been turned into an old-ages home.”
A. [Laughs] Yeah. That got me thinking. It’s about somebody [who] can’t quite remember who’s what, where he is. And just wants to go back to the harbor where it’s safe.
Q. You started “To See My Baby Smile” in 1992 and finished it in 2019.
A. When my wife and I parted company.
Q. What was it like writing that?
A. Well, I’m writing about a painful experience. I guess it was cathartic. I had two verses [from] when everything was great. I somehow just couldn’t come up with a third verse. It didn’t feel done, but I didn’t know what the third verse should be. When the breakup happened, it became obvious.
Q. You said on a Facebook video that you don’t know if you wrote “Give Me Some of It.”
A. I finally found out. I thought it was an old jugband tune. But Jim Kweskin and Geoff Muldaur said they’d never heard of it. I did it on a radio show and said “If anybody knows where this came from [let me know].” I wrote the verses, but the chorus went way back. Someone wrote in [and said] it’s an old blues tune, “Custard Pie.” That’s where the chorus comes from.
Q. When you arrived at Harvard in 1959, you weren’t into folk.
A. Actually, I’ll go off on a rant here. Being a bit of an academic, I’m annoyed that “folk” has come to mean virtually nothing except an acoustic guitar. To me, folk music is traditional tunes — songs that nobody wrote that exist in a thousand variants. If you wrote the song, it’s not a folk song — even if your name is Woody Guthrie. I bridle at the term “folk” singer. I’m a singer/songwriter.
Q. What would you call Woody Guthrie?
A. A genre of his own. I mean, everybody calls him a folk singer so I’m not gonna argue too hard.
Q. When you started in Cambridge, you didn’t see yourself as a musician — I won’t say “folk.”
A. I arrived in Cambridge for my freshman year very enthusiastic about Josh White. And I was told, “No, no, no, Josh White is commercial. We like people who build their own instruments and live in a cabin in the woods.”
But I’m still a Josh White fan. I saw him play in Boston three nights in a row. The first night, he breaks a string. The bass player keeps playing, Josh changes the string while singing, finishes the song with a new string — the audience went nuts. The second night, the same string broke. The third night I saw him do it. I think it was something that probably happened one night and the crowd loved it so much that he decided to keep in the act. He was a showman.
Q. Part of going to a Tom Rush show are the stories. Has that always been part of your repertoire?
A. I get requests for the stories now. Back in the Club 47 days, Robert L. Jones was a wonderful storyteller. He did mainly Woody Guthrie songs. He shows up late one night and says “Sorry, I’m late, I was at a National Guard meeting …” And he strums a couple of chords. Then he says, “But the interesting thing was what happened at the tollbooth …” He did 40 minutes without doing a song. The crowd loved it. It was eye-opening for me. If you can engage the audience, they’re more likely to like the song. That’s why I started telling stories. Now I enjoy them as much as the songs.
Q. One of your stories: You rode The Festival Express.
A. An asylum of its own. It was a train-load of musicians doing stadium shows from Toronto to Winnipeg: Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Delaney & Bonnie, The Band, Eric Andersen — a bunch of others. We drank the train dry four hours out of Toronto.
I feel bad for the staff; they were in jackets and bow ties. All of a sudden they’ve got a train-load of lunatics smoking God-knows-what and playing music until 5 a.m. We made them stop in the middle of nowhere to go to a liquor store. We bought everything — every bottle on the shelf — and continued partying.
In Calgary, the promoters rented a swimming pool. We wanted to go skinny-dipping, which absolutely horrified the administration, but they couldn’t stop us. They had one rule: Anyone with long hair had to wear a bathing cap. I’m scarred for life by the sight of Leslie West of Mountain — huge guy — wearing nothing but a bathing cap on his head and a second bathing cap upside-down over his beard. You cannot unsee that.
Q. [Laughs] Amazing. Do you have a certain feeling you get when you’re up onstage?
A. I can’t wait to get onstage so I can relax. I love playing for people — which is why I started [the online series] Rockport Sundays, now coming up on three years, when venues shut down. But I realized when you tell a joke to a video camera, it doesn’t laugh.