And then, last year, the song again resurfaced on, of all things, the sound track to the Whitney Houston egofest The Bodyguard. Though it's all but undetectable in the film itself, it appears on the record, performed by Curtis Stigers, a second-rate American soul singer. Whatever comedy or menace could be found in the first two versions is replaced by an inappropriate slickness, and it's almost as if Stigers thinks it's a love song--a man hoping his woman will help guide him through "this wicked world." At least there is no irony to be lost in the small fact that because the sound track went platinum many times over, Lowe racked in more than a million dollars in royalties, and there ain't nothing funny 'bout that.
Lowe, ever the modest man, has long maintained his albums aren't very good--not necessarily bad, but not enduring for the long haul. He began to feel that way especially during the early '80s, as his marriage to Carlene Carter began to crumble and his songwriting began to suffer. Though Lowe and Carter's partnership seemed a fruitful one artistically--he produced her best albums, they co-wrote the ironically titled "Time Heals All Wounds" for his The Abominable Showman--it imploded less than two years into it.
As Lowe recalls that period, he was "extremely unhappy because I couldn't express myself musically." As a result, where he once fused emotion with wit, honesty with irony, he completely tossed out what was real in the songs and supplanted it with puns and ill-gotten humor, and the material seemed sloppy and half-thought-out.
Lowe wandered through the mid-'80s, releasing hit-and-miss albums that bore some wonderful moments (most notably the Tex-Mex rave-up "Half a Boy & Half a Man" on Nick Lowe and His Cowboy Outfit and the biting cover of John Hiatt's "She Don't Love Nobody" on The Rose of England) and some lousy ones (the tepid remake of "I Knew the Bride" with Huey Lewis and the News), and he seemed a man confused and without direction. He was torn between creating more "disposable pop trash" (as he once described his material) and becoming a "genre artist of roots eclectic" (as Village Voice critic Robert Christgau described him in 1984), and the struggle seemed to both energize and destroy him.
Elvis Costello noticed his pal's problem and suggested he hit the road as a solo act, replacing the band with an acoustic guitar. Lowe, reticent at first, finally hit the road as Costello's opening act and, in 1987, came through Texas on a two-city national tour supporting Costello's King of America and Blood and Chocolate albums. And even now, Lowe's performance in Austin, opening for Costello and the Confederates at the Opera House, remains a striking memory--not simply because it was a great performance, but because Lowe seemed so damned uncomfortable on that stage even after all those years.
Sitting on a stool, holding his guitar, Lowe appeared terribly nervous and alone. He was comfortable enough in front of the audience--he had spent considerable time in Austin producing the Fabulous Thunderbirds' T-Bird Rhythm in 1982--but as he ran through some of his best-known material, from "Marie Provost" to "Time Wounds All Heels," he was surpried by how the material unfolded before him, almost without him. Removed from their thick shells--from the power-pop production, from the protection provided by a handful of the musicians--the songs revealed their vulnerable hearts, and Lowe seemed almost embarrassed by the revelation. And, in the end, it would forever change his approach to songwriting.
"Now, what I'm trying to do is explain how it feels--how it feels," Lowe says. "And that it is sort of an anonymous thing. It has to be something I conjure up that isn't me. If I started telling what my story was, people would find it tedious instead of empathizing with it. I don't really like the records I make--I mean, the songs I write. I can write songs, the bloke talking on the phone to you right now, but the best ones I do are when this sort of mysterious other person comes around to call. I don't know their phone number, I don't their name, I don't know anything about them. I don't even know when they're going to come around.
"But this person comes around and helps me do the best stuff. And, if you're following my drift, it's a sort of a muse. And when the muse comes around, I drop everything. Some people have disciplined themselves, like John Hiatt. I've talked to him about it, about how to bring the muse on, where he can actually go to work each day and bring the muse on. But I can't with mine. Sometimes, it stays away for months and months and months. Other times, I can't bloody get rid of it. It's in the house all the time.
