Bobby Bare Returns

08/23/05
. (conqueroo) Grammy Award winning country star Bobby Bare, best known for hits like "Detroit City" and "How I Got to Memphis", is preparing to release his first new album in more than 22 years. The Moon Was Blue was produced by Bare's son, Bobby Bare Jr. along with Lambchop's Mark Nevers. It was Bobby Jr.'s goal to coax a great voice and legendary song hound back onto disc. The album will hit the streets November 1 on Dualtone Records.

"Bobby Jr. was really pumped over doing this," Bare explains. "He was the driving force behind it." Bare Jr., known within the indie rock world for his band Bobby Bare Jr.'s Young Criminals Starvation League, is a musical iconoclast who has more in common with his father than their surface sounds would suggest.

The Moon Was Blue was the product of an artist-producer relationship unlike any in Nashville history. While its superstructure is forged of old classic songs by old Bare compadres like Wayne Walker and Allen Reynolds, its decorative exterior displays Bare Jr. and Nevers playing with textures and juxtaposing styles the way they did on Bare Jr.'s recent Young Criminals' Starvation League album. Bobby Jr. calls it embracing Nashville with one arm and molesting it with the other.

"For me it's like show and tell," says Bobby Jr. "Because most everybody who's bought my records have no idea what my dad does or who he is. So I'm going to let the old man coat-tail on me!"

Bobby Sr. has been out of the recording arena since the mid 1980s, save for the 1998 album Old Dogs, which featured Bare sculpting Shel Silverstein songs with Waylon Jennings, Jerry Reed and Mel Tillis. It was a reunion but not a unique statement by a single artist. The Moon Was Blue meets the standard both Bares have set for themselves in anything they release.

An Ohio native who spent his teens in California, Bare Sr.'s friendship with Harlan Howard brought him to Nashville, where Chet Atkins signed him to RCA. He became the first major label artist in Nashville to produce his own albums. When Nashville went pop in the late '70s/early '80s and labels began pressuring Bare to repeat himself, he turned away from the mic and toward his fishing poles.

Until today. In some important always, The Moon Was Blue lets Bare work in the same soundscapes he did when he stepped away from the business.

"He knew if he did just another Music Row album, it would mean nothing," says Bobby Jr. 'And once we got our way of putting our strange harmonies and our weird space noises on it, he just sat and listened and laughed - and just thought it was fantastic. He really gets it now. It's just a really cool thing to share with my dad. We got him in front of a mic. I was the one who got the record deal for him. It's nice to give back."

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