The Amy Rigby Interview
What was your childhood like growing up in Pittsburgh? When did you first begin to resonate with music, more specifically the guitar/songwriting, and was this something that was relevant around your home, or in your family during your more formative years? Who were some of your earliest influences, and when did you realize you wanted to pursue a life and career in music?
I grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, it was a classic white, bread leafy, very hilly world just south of the gritty, segregated steel town that southwestern Pennsylvania city was back in the sixties and into the seventies. Sports— Pirates baseball, Steelers football and Penguin hockey– were everything. I have four brothers. My mom is Italian American, my dad is Irish. My brothers and I all went to Catholic school until I broke free and convinced my parents to let me go to a public high school. My parents had a lot of pop records and Pittsburgh was the birthplace of AM radio - I fell in love with music through the radio and all the incredible 60s musicals (“The Sound of Music”, “The King and I” etc.) learned to play piano and that probably led to my love for Elton John. My older brother brought home the Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull albums, Mott the Hoople - I loved all that stuff too. I felt devoted to songs from an early age, remembering all the lyrics to every song I ever heard ! It wasn’t til I moved to NYC to go to art school (Parsons School of Design) in 1976 that I got to see bands up close, at CBGB, and I was too shy to imagine playing music, but it became my life. I wrote about all this stuff in a memoir, “Girl To City”, that came out in 2019. I think I captured it all pretty well there!
Eventually relocating to NYC during the incredible boom and movement in music/ I culture history in 1976, tell me about establishing the outfits Last Roundup and The Shams around that time. How did you initially meet Sue Garner and Amanda Uprichard?
My first band was actually called Stare Kits - I played drums in this short-lived no wave outfit with one of my brothers, Michael McMahon, who’d followed me to NY to also go to Parsons. The singer was Angela Jaeger who was in the original Last Roundup lineup along with Sue and Amanda - we’d met Amanda when she was my brother’s suite-mate at Parsons, and Sue was part of her contingent of Southern pals who moved up to NYC in the early 1980s. Angela left to join Pigbag, Amanda left to start her fashion business and a singer named Angel Dean joined the band. Sue left Last Roundup to play in Fish and Roses with her husband Rick Brown (who’d been the boyfriend of one of my Parsons roommates - what can I say, it was a very small downtown music world back in those days!)
What was the chemistry like between everyone, and what would you say was one of the main sorts of ingredients that tied everyone together in the beginning?
Some of us were very into punk and went to CBGB’s and Max’s and wherever else they were putting on bands back in the late 70s. Angela, Michael and I were involved in starting a club that became Tier 3, a seminal Lower Manhattan nightspot that was booked by Angela’s sister, Hilary Jaeger. Amanda was more a Studio 54 girl, but we all started discovering old country music in the early 80s and that’s what tied us all together - harmonies, girl group sound, and for me, it was country songwriting that really blew my mind and opened up the path to what I should do with my life. A huge ingredient that tied us all together was food and the culture of the south in general - we all loved bbq and Southern cooking, thrift shopping and flea markets and Southern writers like Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor; the folk art of Howard Finster. Maybe it was all a kind of cozy comfort in New York City at its hardest and meanest, the early 1980s.
Tell me about the overall process and approach to writing and recording Last Roundup’s album, “Twister!”, as well as The Sham’s Matador debut in 1991, entitled “Quit”. What do you recall, or reflect on the most during those early years of your career, and what are you most proud of with those albums?
It took years for Last Roundup to release an album - we first made a demo with Will Rigby of the dBs in their rehearsal room in the Music Building and that’s around when Will and I got together. My brother wrote songs and I wrote songs - his sounded like lost country classics and mine had contemporary themes and lyrics, about working and scraping by in a cold, hard city. We attracted the Praxis label, who were having some success with Jason and the Scorchers, and they brought us to Nashville in 1984 to record at Cowboy Jack Clement’s studio with Jim Rooney producing, and we had good songs, a real vibe and a great singer in Angel, but we were out of our depth. That effort got shelved, we played loads more gigs, mostly in New York City with occasional forays to Boston, or New Jersey, and finally signed with Rounder in 1987. We went out to Springfield, Missouri to work with Lou Whitney - at that point, my brother and I had a four-track Portastudio, and had done a lot more work recording ourselves. Lou’s job was to keep us on time (we played as a four piece without a drummer, Garth Powell played upright bass) and on a schedule, and feature the songs. We ended up remixing it at Philip Glass’s studio in Manhattan with engineer Dan Dryden who’d been the first person to record us back in the very early days (a recording that never came out, but should!)
The Shams grew up around me, Sue and Amanda’s harmonies and mostly my songs that I’d been putting down on the Portastudio. We’d done Christmas carols for fun and that got our sound going, and our first release, “Only A Dream” b/w “3 AM”, was recorded on four tracks and came out on Bob Mold and Nicholas Hill’s Singles Only label. I had a baby around then and Amanda’s friend Fay Hart’s song “3 AM” (written with Fay’s husband Steve Nieve from Elvis Costello’s band) was an inspiration for me - it was like a country song in how it talked about being a mother and I loved how that felt so real, instead of songs about youthful lust and abandon it inspired me to lean more on the real life aspect that had drawn me to country songs in the first place. Amanda was going out with Richard Hell at the time and I think he introduced Lenny Kaye to the Shams. Lenny became almost an honorary member of the group, he loved us so much and when we got signed to Matador he produced our album “Quilt”, working at Coyote Studios in this cheap dumpy Brooklyn neighborhood called Williamsburg that Will and I and our baby daughter Hazel had recently moved to. We recorded off and on over a couple of months, all of us working our day jobs (Sue did decorative painting, Amanda had her clothing business; I was a mom and worked temp jobs with word processing and answering phones in Manhattan) all singing around a mic and then adding a few overdubs. Will Rigby played drums on a few tracks, Lenny and I played guitar and Sue played bass. Robert Quine came in to add guitar to a few tracks, all of us sitting around him in the control room in amazement. I think I’m proudest of those records for the songs and the timeless, genuine quality of the performances - the playing and the singing. Not having drums in either of those bands is probably a key to that - we weren’t held hostage by drum mic’ing and mixing techniques of the 80s and our homemade ethos meant there was no remaking the music to make it more commercial. It simply represented who we were and what we did.
I’d like to jump ahead to talk about your wonderful solo career that started in the mid/late 90s with titles like “Diary Of A Mod Housewife”, “Middlescence” and countless others leading up to your most recent effort entitled “Hang In There With Me”? How did you want to approach this material, which differed from past releases? What was most important to you to achieve and express with this work?
I feel like I’ve entered into the last couple of solo album’s recording process going “I want it stripped down and stark, simple - focused on the song”. Almost as if I’m going to make an acoustic album, as I often play solo shows, just accompanying myself on my acoustic and maybe Danelectro 12 string. But it’s sort of like writing —songs, stories, essays, even a book— you just have to start doing it, and it unfolds and takes you where it’s going to take you. There are elements which will dictate what ends up on the record, like whether there are other players involved; what’s the time frame - or wait. I remember this cool guitar thing I did on a rough recording but forgot about playing live. The main idea for this album was gathering songs and getting them recorded. And certain songs attract songs that fit. I had to dump a couple of absolute favorites as the whole process took a couple of years with very hard life stuff intruding and what started quite dark ended up being life-affirming. It can be excruciating the way things take time. But it also makes it possible to say “could we do this better?” Some of the songs I’d played live - solo or with a trio, myself on guitar, Wreckless Eric on bass and Doug Wygal on drums. You try to capture what worked live, but sometimes the energy of life has to be stripped away to get back to creating the world of the song, like “Too Old To Be So Crazy”, or “Dylan In Dubuque”. Eric is super-exacting about things like that, saying “It’s not right” and I trust him, knowing I’ll often be afraid to try again for fear there was rough magic we can’t recreate. It’s really hard to push through to reach an elegant rendering beyond the lively sketch - I think back all the way to Last Roundup’s discarded album from 1984, how for years I was sure we’d shelved a lost classic full of quirk and charm and energy - when I finally listened to it just wasn’t all the way there yet. I love recording and slapping demos together by instinct, but a long-playing album should be built to last.
“I want it stripped down and stark, simple - focused on the song”
Is there anything else you would like to share further with the readers?
I’ve really enjoyed answering these questions. Maybe because I’ve written a memoir, with a second one in the revision phase, I tend to think I’ve told all this stuff already and don’t want to repeat myself. But like playing songs, the perspective changes over time, different things come out, and we keep learning and that makes the past look different too. And now I’m going to go out and play a set of the songs from the new album and I wonder how they’ll feel now that I’ve memorialized them? I think as artists we’re always most excited by what’s happening right now and that can mean our emotional focus has moved on by the time a record comes out, but the idea that people are hearing these songs recorded and sequenced as a work gives them a weight I’m scared and eager to try and build on live. Yes - I felt huge relief to get this album done and out, and now I’m scared. How often does that happen when it comes to our work? Time to embrace that feeling. I hope people will listen to the album and come out to the gigs!
