Ruthann Friedman’s Hurried Life
“I wrote a hit song, it was not what I planned,” sings Ruthann Friedman (best known for writing the Association’s hit “Windy”) on “That’s What I Remember,” the autobiographical opening song on her latest release, Chinatown. The album mixes personal stories with political commentary, delivered with honesty and wry humor. Musically, the spotlight shines on Friedman’s voice and guitar, augmented by some of her musical pals, including Van Dyke Parks. I spoke with Friedman recently about her new album, the allure of the ’60s, and what it’s like to be an “astral folk goddess.”
REBEAT: I’ve really been enjoying the new songs on Chinatown. How do you think your songwriting has changed and developed over the years?
RUTHANN FRIEDMAN: Well, I didn’t write songs except for nursery school things for my kids for a lot of years. I think one major influence — I’ve always been a big reader, but I went back to school and got my degree. I was studying a lot of literature and poetry, and it made me much more critical of my work. I have a better understanding of the mechanics of it and a better understanding of what I’m doing. I don’t write them as fast as I used to, but I think they’re better. Some people don’t. Some people like the old stuff. But I like the new stuff better.
How long was the new CD in the making?
It took about three years from beginning to end. What happened was, I had friends in a band, who used to camp out in my living room when they were playing in Los Angeles. One day I played them one of the songs on there, “The End,” and one of them leaped up and said, “We’ve gotta record that!” So I went up to San Jose and we recorded the album — just me and my guitar. And we brought back what we did to Los Angeles, and played it for friends, who all said, “I wanna play on it!” So we hightailed it back up to San Jose, and it grew. It was put together piecemeal, but I think it came out okay.
And you were working again with Van Dyke Parks, who was the one who encouraged you to become a professional musician, and introduced you to the Association.
Yes, he’s been very important in my life. I mean, we’re not social intimates or anything, but he was a very good friend when we were younger, and throughout my life, he’s helped me get to the next place. We had a lot fun back then in the old days.
It sounds like it was a lot of fun. I’ve read that you were living in David Crosby’s house when you wrote “Windy,” and that at one point, Jefferson Airplane wanted you to be their lead singer.
Yeah, it was after Signe Anderson left. And one night, Jorma [Kaukonen] and Jack [Casady] took me out to hear Grace Slick and her band, and that was the end of that. I mean, she was amazing and gorgeous and already well-known, so it was a no-brainer. And you know, I don’t think I would have done well as a rock diva. That’s not my thing, really.
And the story of David Crosby’s house: he had a two-story house in Beverly Glen, and the bottom was a little apartment, and he invited me to stay there, which was very kind of him.
I know you said you didn’t want to be a rock diva, but when you started out, were you writing with the goal of recording and performing your own music, or getting other people — like the Association, for example — to record your songs?
Oh, I wanted to do my own songs. But I wanted it to be reflective of me, not somebody else’s interpretations. The songs I write are pretty personal, as you may have noticed, so I really wanted to record them, and I wanted them to be out there. That’s why my first album ended up so sparse. Because at Warner Brothers, the producer wanted it to be reflective of me, and that was the only way he knew how to do it. So to answer your question, yes. [laughs]
There’s one cover song on Chinatown, your beautiful version of the Peggy Seeger song “Springhill Mining Disaster.” Why did you choose to record that song?
There were a lot of cave-ins that year around the world, and I was pondering the idea of being miles down in the earth in total darkness, in a cave-in, and the horror of that is beyond imagining. I remembered from many years ago there was a song about that, and I looked it up, and there it was. And I thought, “This is such a powerful song, and it relates today, and it should be out there.” And I loved singing it.
I know you came from a family that was very liberal, and involved in unions and other social issues, and I think that shows up in that song, and throughout the album on songs like “Our War” and “The Tides.”
I was raised in a very liberal household. Lefty, you might say. My father belonged to a union, and actually my aunt, his sister, married the President of the International League of Garment Workers Union, which was a big deal in New York. It was one of the first major unions formed. There was a terrible fire in a shirtwaist factory, and women were jumping out of windows — the conditions were horrendous, and that sort of spurred on this union. So anyway, I was raised on the idea of unions, sharing the wealth, taking care of people, and that sort of thing. It’s probably a little nuts. My father was very nuts. He was very liberal and very nuts. [laughs]
Your bio mentions that the Friedman family always sang in the car together. Was the rest of your family musical?
Well, we were musical in the sense that there was always music playing. There was classical music and folk music and there were show tunes. There was always music playing on our Victrola. We’d stack up eight 78 RPM records, one on top of another, and let them plop down on each other, and it was wonderful. So that’s how I was raised. There was always music in the air, and I loved it.
My sister brought home her “bohemian” friends from college, and they played folk music — and that’s what I wanted to do. I think I was about five years old. Picture me sitting on the lap of one of her boyfriends, with a guitar in front of us.
It’s interesting that you mention listening to music all the time growing up, and then there’s your song “iPod” on Chinatown that suggests that maybe it’s not the best idea to drown out the world with music.
Well, my songs used to be about what was in my head, and now a lot of them are about my views on what’s going on in the world around me. I love it when I can do it with humor, but that doesn’t come often, because it’s mostly pretty serious stuff. Things like “Our War,” about what a mess we’re in — and I don’t think anybody would deny that at this point in history.
How involved were you in the recent reissues of your earlier work?
Well, some of them I think are great songs; I love ‘em. And some of them make me cringe. But I was convinced by Steve Stanley that they needed to be out there as a record. The one that I really do like is Hurried Life, by Pat Thomas. That was the first time going back into the archives to find songs that might be reissued. I think those were representative of me. The other songs, I was really trying — well, I was trying to make money, so I wouldn’t be living so badly. Some of them stand out, and some of them I think should have been left behind. But like I said, I was talked into them.
Besides your work as a musician, you’re also the inventor of something called the Easy Writer Portable Stationary Kit. Can you tell me a little about that?
Ah, yes. Well, I had gone through a bad spell, and coming out of that bad spell, I had a good friend who suggested that instead of living off of the money from the one song I wrote that was a hit, I should maybe invent something, or start a business. And I had been messing around with making containers, taking big sheets of posterboard and folding it into different shapes and seeing what I could create, sort of like origami. And I came up with this thing that was a giant cigarette rolling paper box, but it also had a place in the back for envelopes. So the paper came out the slot folded in three already, and the envelopes were in the back, and there was a nice flat surface you could write on. And we found some paper that was just like cigarette paper, with the same sort of herring-bone effect on it. So my friend and I started our company, which was the Easy Writer Stationary Moving Company. But we used the graphics of Easy Wider rolling papers, so it was an obvious rip-off. We were in business for a couple of years and doing pretty well, in head shops and college campuses, and advertising in High Times, and then they injunctioned us, the Easy Wider people. I still have a couple of them. They’re kind of getting moldy, but it was a fun experience. Something different.
Before we go, I have to ask how you feel about being called an “astral folk goddess.”
Oh, please! [laughs] That was funny. [Plastic Crimewave] had this amazing magazine that he did by hand, the pictures and the words as well, about people from long ago. So he chose me as one of the astral folk goddesses, and I was in great company. It’s great in print, you know? “Come see Ruthann Friedman! She wrote ‘Windy’ and she’s an astral folk goddess!” It makes me sound very… light. Like I could levitate, or do astral projection.
There’s been a resurgence in popularity over the last ten years or so in that kind of music—artists like you and Vashti Bunyan and the other “astral folk goddesses.” Why do you think that is?
I think we all tend to idealize what was, and the ‘60s were such an incredible time of change in this country that people go back and want to relive it in a way. And I think that anything that reflects it is interesting to a whole lot of people. I get asked about the ‘60s all the time, and I think about it a lot, because I get asked about it so much. And lately I’ve come to the conclusion that people are people, and society is society. And in the ‘60s, people were people just like they are now. Social issues were different, and there was the Vietnam War going on, and we felt like we could make a difference. And I think that that’s the problem now. People don’t feel like that so much anymore. They feel disenfranchised.
But it wasn’t an ideal time. It was an interesting time. That’s a Chinese curse, I think, isn’t it? [laughs] It was an interesting time, and there was a lot going on. Of course, I was a lot younger, so I was a lot more in the middle of everything. But people weren’t ideal, and situations weren’t ideal.
There was a lot of good music, though. Things weren’t so corporatized, which is a problem these days. The big fish are eating the little fish, so there are no more little fish. Just a couple of gigantic fish.
