Features

The Champion: David Rawlings Steps Out Front (Relix Revisited)

The long-awaited new record from Gillian Welch is due out on June 28. Back in our Feb/March 2010 issue we spoke with Welch and her musical partner David Rawlings, following the release of his debut album Friend of a Friend.

David Rawlings wants to meet at Musso & Frank’s Grill on Sunset Boulevard. Long the haunt of writers and film stars, it’s swanky in that Old Hollywood way—run-down and highbrow at the same time. The venue seems fitting somehow. Rawlings and his longtime musical partner Gillian Welch have cultivated a timeless aesthetic. Their music, made under Welch’s moniker since the mid-‘90s, is old-timey country folk, but its feel is oceanic and transcendent. Onstage, Welch wears long dresses that you might have seen on the prairie in the 1890s and Rawlings wears a vintage suit. He plays an iconic guitar, a dark-finished 1935 Epiphone Olympic. It’s an archtop, with f-holes. It sounds like the 1930s.

The restaurant has a big neon sign, red-jacketed waiters, white tablecloths. The booths are Hollywood reliquaries—timeworn red leather semicircles bound in dark wooden cubbies. In one of them, facing the front door, is Rawlings. He’s wearing jeans and a denim shirt and black cowboy boots. He’s gaunt and has a stubbly, graying beard. He looks incongruous and out of place with the sharply-dressed Angelenos around him.

He looks just like he does on the cover of the new Dave Rawlings Machine record, Friend of a Friend. Going on 15 years, Rawlings has been the relatively unsung guitarist in the duo that is Gillian Welch. The Machine is his turn to step out front. Welch is still right there on every track—writing, singing, playing, in the studio and on tour. It’s not exactly a solo project. It’s more of a change-up, a swapping of roles.

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Rawlings orders clams. They remind him of back home in Rhode Island, where he spent his childhood summer nights hunting crayfish and days fishing for bass out of a canoe. It was, he says—except for the video games —“surprisingly Huck Finn.” He’d sit out on the lake with the lyrics to Kenny Rogers and Charlie Rich story-songs running through his head. But he hadn’t taken up guitar yet.

“I played a little saxophone when I was a kid,” he says. “And I didn’t like it that much. I never liked, as it turns out, instruments that made only one note at a time. I’m kind of a harmony guy—I’m interested in notes against notes. I’m not interested in just notes.”

It was much later that he realized he liked to sing harmony. He’d just moved to Nashville and he was sanding the floor of his apartment with a palm sander that was too small. He sang all day in the same key before he realized he’d been harmonizing with the exhaust fan.

A friend asked him to get a guitar, so they could play Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” in a talent show when was 15 or 16. As soon as he sat down with his guitar and his Mel Bay book, he had a light bulb realization. He could actually be good at this.

He consumed classic folk rock records—CSNY, Buffalo Springfield—and at the same time was into alternative and punk, and played in bands inspired by The Pixies. His father had turned him on to Dylan, calling him in one day to play him “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

“I knew I thought that song was kind of cool,” Rawlings says, “but I didn’t know I was going to hear the other stuff on that tape and think it was the greatest stuff I’d ever heard. The other side of this is, I heard Nashville Skyline. I became aware that I liked country music, and then… I realized that I really didn’t want to work jobs anymore.”