Well there's a young man in a T-shirt
Listenin' to a rock 'n' roll station
He's got a greasy hair, greasy smile
He says, "Lord, this must be my destination
"’Cause they told me, when I was younger
"Sayin' ‘Boy, you're gonna be president’"
- John Cougar Mellencamp, "Pink Houses"
Roger Clinton once answered the door of the guesthouse at the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion wearing only a bath towel. He had decamped there for the night after playing a show in Arkansas and was mildly surprised to discover that friends of the Natural State’s then-first lady would also be using the residence for the evening.
He didn’t let it get him down, though, any more than he did the year he spent in prison in the ’80s or the speeding ticket he got in 1993 almost immediately after buying a brand-new Dodge Stealth or the fact that his plan to star alongside Dan Ackroyd in a Blues Brothers sequel never panned out. Since childhood Roger has been living life in the fast lane. He once bragged to a reporter about routinely driving 120 mph. It’s been sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll since age 10 when he founded his first rock band, the Hundred Millimeter Banana. By age 16, he was playing gigs in topless bars. A few years after that he had what has been described as a "cocaine habit of near-lethal dosage." Even in the ’90s when he had, comparatively speaking, cleaned up his act, he was enjoying Pepsi and milk—separately—for breakfast and consuming six White Russians before club performances in Los Angeles. His stints performing at campaign stops for his brother and doing work in film and television—his screen credits include everything from Pumpkinhead II, in which he played a local pol named Mayor Bubba in addition to performing the theme song, to The Nanny to Letterman—culminated in the recording of his first and so far only studio album, 1994’s Nothing Good Comes Easy.
Other than a few exceptions such as his 1993 appearance at Farm Aid, Roger’s work is not on YouTube or Spotify. To hear him, you have to track down a physical release on CD or cassette. Two weeks ago when I received my mint condition—still in the original plastic, in fact—tape of Nothing Good Comes Easy, the first thing I did was read the liner notes. On the album cover we see Roger in a white suit standing next to a house that looks like a cross between a colonial mansion and a doublewide. A glance at a zoomed-out version of the same photo contained in the booklet reveals that the building is situated atop a mesa. Another image shows us Roger wearing all black in front of—I think—the Aurora Borealis. I didn’t recognize the name of the producer, Scott Maclellan, but a glance at the AllMusicGuide showed me that he worked with Bertie Higgins on "Casablanca" and "Key Largo" and manned the boards for comeback albums by The Band and Joe Walsh.
Probably the most striking thing in the liner notes is the very lengthy list of acknowledgments that spans everyone from God ("for the ability and the opportunity to make music") to the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section to someone called "Bear" ("for taking it to his bed"). The album is dedicated "with undying and unconditional love and devotion" to "my mother Virginia, my brother Bill, my wife Molly, and my son Tyler. I wish you peace and music." Clearly this is not a man short on gratitude. There is also an invitation to join the Roger Clinton Fan Club. The address is 3310 Central Avenue, Suite M2-237, Hot Springs, Arkansas, 71913, in case you are interested.
The first few times I heard Nothing Good Comes Easy, it made almost no impression on me. It sounded clean and bright coming out of my Technics M-205 but nothing really leapt out. Yet as I lay there on the couch three nights in a row, leafing idly through the third volume of Lady Gwendolen Ceil’s Life of the Marquess of Salisbury, I knew something wasn’t right. I also knew that it probably wasn’t the record’s fault: If I hadn’t been trying to get work done and had instead been listening to, say, Hank Williams Jr.’s Greatest Hits for the 5,000th time, the effect would have been the same. A change of venue was in order.
A couple days later, in an attempt to make further sense of Roger Clinton’s myriad contributions to American cultural life, I assembled a crack team of specialists to smoke cigarettes and drink Miller Lite at an undisclosed outdoor location and listen to the album on a portable cassette recorder. After a few snafus—a senior team member licked at least four batteries before it was determined that we had forgotten to hit the power button on our listening apparatus—we were in business. We cranked the Sony Pressman as high as it could go, cracked our cans open, and lit up. Almost indelibly I could feel myself being drawn in by the gated reverb, the lazy squealing sax, the fat, silky bass: a bit of George Michael, a lot of Michael McDonald, a smattering of Huey Lewis and the News, with hints of up-tempo Chicago and early-’70s Isley Brothers. "Like a redneck Phil Collins," as one member of the team put it.
The keyboards here are pretty slick. Then I realized that the man responsible, Steve Nathan, played the Wurly for Cyndi Lauper and synth on Steve Earle’s classic Guitar Man and piano for pretty much every major country artist of the ’90s. Bob Wray, who’s on bass, is a Kenny Rogers veteran, while Owen Hale played drums for George Strait and John Willis electric guitar on one of the only non-awful Johnny Cash albums from the ’80s. The only real mystery is who that sax man is: I can’t find anything about John Monroe. Could it be Bill under a nom de guerre?
"It’s my life / To live / Gonna give it / What it is," Roger sings over shimmering keyboards and wah-wah on the title track. Only this and "Mystery to Me" are Clinton originals. The rest are either well-chosen covers—check out Willis’s hot licks on "Born Under a Bad Sign"—or tunes from songwriters that no one else seems to have done anything with yet. Somehow, though, it all seems of a piece. These are tales of doomed love ("Ain’t No Cure for You") and desperation ("Brother Brother") and pleas for second chances ("Different Man"). There are dream visions ("Fantasy of Love"), and laments for the simplicity of bygone days ("We Throw Our Love Away"). It is approximately 100 percent dorky and, I think, heartfelt in roughly equal measure. If it’s not exactly great stuff, it’s also at least as good as half the tunes that hit number one in, say, 1984.
I would be lying if I said it is not entirely clear to me why Roger’s career seems to have stalled with Nothing Good Comes Easy, why what was supposed to have been a six-record deal worth around $4 million was cut short after one album. For one thing, there isn’t an obvious hit single: The album is more like one big fat groove that you have to let yourself fall into and swim in, preferably with a head full of cheap beer.
The larger issue is stylistic. Production-wise, to say nothing of the lyrics, the album was definitely behind the times. By 1994, American popular music had undergone the alternative revolution and was preparing for a succession of further upheavals—boy bands, nü metal, the hip-hop-influenced travesty of songwriting and arrangement inaugurated by the Spice Girls’ "Wannabe" that continues to dominate the pop charts as I write this—that would only take the listening public further away from Roger’s strengths, such as they are. For highbrow audiences, the situation was even bleaker, at least from his perspective: something so vitalistic, so unpretentious, so shot through with love and freedom and redolent of good old-fashioned heartland American optimism as this man and his music simply had no chance post-Slanted and Enchanted. There’s a metaphor here somewhere.