Last night I attended the Rod Picott gig at The Running Horse Nottingham which was enjoyable but also raised more questions than it answered.
Rod Picott has been plying his wares around these Isles and most every place in America for over 20 years and he embodies the indefatigable spirit of the lone americana troubadour that really began on these shores in the early 1960s with Dylan’s legendary appearance at the Pindar of Wakefield.
Pre Covid the trials and tribulations of touring in the U.K. were pretty hard but individuals could expect to tour and come away with at least some money for their troubles. Many years ago I ran a open mic in Oxford called the Spotlight Club with a friend and we were offered David Olney for £300 which we could not raise but that about the going rate in the good old days for a serious act who you could bet on attracting a decent 50 plus crowd.
Sadly those days are gone. Vanished into thin air. Without giving away state secrets a hire car for a month these days is totalling £2,500 for a month or £85 a day. Hire companies have folded and there are less hire cars to hire hence the hike in rates. Then you have a full tank of petrol at £100. Add to that current hotel rates which here in Nottingham are £100 a night plus and you can see that to play a night in a pub that not charging for playing and come away with anything you would need to clear £200 a night maybe £300 to cover food and drop outs or accidents. The gig I attended had 28 paying guests..some of whom paid but did not attend a new trend which also worrying promoters. This could be covid or petrol and train strikes but it all adding to the general malaise.
What the lucky few got ( and there was another Americana related gig at the Rescue Rooms of The Felice Brothers which accounted for some of the crowd being down) was a brilliant display of storytelling in word and song by a songsmith who along with Slaid Cleaves pretty much defined post Springsteen blue-collar American male songwriting over the past 20 years. Picott has had highs and lows along the way and lately has spent as much time writing poetry and documenting his father’s illness and care in prose of a very high order as writing songs.
Which leads me to wonder if he can afford to continue driving around these isles to entertain us in future. Not that he alone by any means. Many other artists are singing the same ‘Hire Car Hotel Blues’ these days.
For Picott the new songs were a step back to the golden days of Broke Down and was good to hear him back on form and committing as much energy to his writing and performance as he has to his renovation and plastering work in days of old. At 57 the body is not as strong as it was but the mind is fine and firing on all cylinders to cop a car metaphor he loves so much.
Here a great song off new cd called Sonny Liston about the doomed boxer.
This can be found on his new CD Paper Hearts and Broken Arrows which in his top three cds going by the songs presented last night. The spirit of Carver and Ford and the Dirty Realism genre of the 1980s and 1990s seems to inform this thoroughly working-class take on social and personal observations of living stateside these days both good and bad.
How much longer any Dirty Realists can afford to ply their trade is a worry. We could be seeing the end of the troubadour touring model. I think i will have more chance of seeing Rod being presented online in future or giving purely literary readings. Meanwhile the model of open mics and purely local music-making is gaining traction over professional foreign touring and that in the longer term is bad news.
We will soon be back to the 1950s.
Insular and unaware of the bigger picture apart from through a screen. Now that is a fight that can’t be thrown. Right now the touring musicians are taking some hard punches to the face let’s hope they aren’t knocked out in the next round…
check out his website here: