Johnny Dowd Is a Hillbilly-Goth/Country-Death-Metal Genius

He speaks in a very slow, lugubrious, Appalachian tenor?a voice that sounds like something you heard on the television once, some actor's cruel parody of a yokel. The words don't seem to be spoken so much as they just kind of slip out every once in a while and slide toward the floor.

Having heard most all of his records, I guess it shouldn't have been a surprise. It's hard to know what to make of Johnny Dowd's music at first. To look at him, you might think you'd know what to expect, but you'd be wrong. And the music press, desperate to label him away, has attached a lot of incongruous adjectives to it?"hillbilly goth," "country death metal," comparisons to everyone from Johnny Cash to Stan Ridgway to the Residents to a bunch of bands I've never heard of.

What Johnny Dowd does is all his own, these brooding, grim tales of a corrupt Jesus and of love that becomes murderous, both figuratively and literally. I guess you could say he's what Nick Cave always wanted to be.

"You try and hide in the house of love," he sings on his third album, Temporary Shelter (Koch). "But evil will find you there." On his last album, Pictures from Life's Other Side, he mused, "If love's a disease, you're the one that made me sick." Behind his sometimes deadpan, at others plaintive and hopeless voice, guitars howl like Black Sabbath, or moan, or pound along slowly as a dying heart. On the title track of Pictures, he transforms the mechanical waltz of the Hank Williams standard into a dark metal anthem. Hell, on the new record, he even turns a simple surfing ballad, "Big Wave," into something creepy and menacing.

You might say?and you'd be right?that you won't find much to dance to on a Johnny Dowd record.

"For me, my songs are kinda funny, in sort of a 'man slips on a banana' kind of way," Dowd told me recently over the telephone. "If I had a faith, it'd be a 'You gotta laugh to keep from cryin'' kind of a thing. I think sometimes people kinda miss that. Or maybe I don't get it across, I dunno. It's hard to say... I think the people who like my music kinda see that there's an element of a crazy kind of humor in it. The people who don't just see it as 'You're bringin' me down, I don't want to hear about it.'"

Even beyond the dour idiosyncrasies of his music, Dowd himself is an odd man out in the world of contemporary rock 'n' roll (and our youth-worshipping culture in general). He was born in Fort Worth on Easter Sunday, 1948?something to which he gives no special significance whatsoever. The family moved to Memphis, then Oklahoma, where most of his growing up took place, and most of the material for his songs came from. For the past quarter century he's lived in Ithaca, where he and a friend run a furniture moving business. I asked him how, after spending all that time in the South, he found himself in upstate New York.

He thought about it for a good long time, before he finally wondered aloud, "How did I end up here?" Then he thought a while longer. "My mother was livin' here, couple of my sisters," he finally said. "After I got out of the Army, I lived in California for a while, in Los Angeles, then at some point me and a friend of mine were drivin' around, went to West Virginia to visit his grandparents, and drove up here to visit, ran out of money. Started workin'?that's when we started our trucking business?actually were haulin' garbage then, in a pickup. One thing led to another, got in debt, haven't been able to leave since. Not a very romantic reason."

Despite his efforts to avoid such things, Dowd has become a much-romanticized character since the release of his first album, 1997's Wrong Side of Memphis?a collection of murder ballads. The romanticizing has come mostly, I'd guess, from the fact that Dowd released his first album at age 49, when most other rock musicians have long since retired. That alone, in the eyes of 20-year-olds, gives his music an air of authenticity.

"People were really wanting or hoping, y'know, that I was escaped from a mental institution, or was a serial killer or somethin'," he says of the response to his first album. "I can see if you were a young person, how these people get caught into tryin' to live up to, y'know, a certain image that's in rock 'n' roll, and they end up goin' crazy, or dyin' on vomit or somethin'. I can see the pressure that would be, if I was having the same experience when I was 20 or somethin'?but at my age, it's hard not to just be myself, much less be an image. It's hard?you can't be an image when you're fiftysomethin' years old."

All his songs, he insists, are fictitious. Not that there's no truth in them, but they're all made up. With the possible exception of "Hideaway," on the new album, which Dowd says is about him and his mother: "Just around the corner is the cruelest of winters," the song goes, "While in the metal forest sits the King of Emptiness."

Dowd says he was writing little poems since he was very young. Then, in his 20s, he first learned to play music. About 10 years after that, he and his friend in the trucking business decided to form a band.

"We were probably the world's oldest garage band," he said, chuckling. "I did that for quite a while, just playin' locally, to smaller and smaller audiences... When I put out the record?I didn't put the record out, I just recorded it, just for my own... I was out of the band, I wasn't playing live... Then I played it for some friends...people who had heard me do stuff for a long time, and they really liked it. Then I just thought, hell, I'll send it out to a couple of magazines or somethin', got a bunch of reviews. Then a record company called."

That caught him by surprise. "I'd pretty much given up on the whole idea, then did this little thing, and it had a life of its own, so then I had to get back into it."

Since then, he put another band together, recorded a few more albums, opened for the Mekons and Sonic Youth, toured Europe a bunch of times. Most interesting of all, I find, is the fact that through it all, in these few short years, the music he's making keeps evolving, growing weirder and louder and more dissonant along the way. If at first he was reminiscent of Hank Williams (who is referenced in a number of his songs), now he's like Hank Williams had Hank Williams fronted a death metal band?which is strange for a guy who grew up listening to r&b and 50s rock 'n' roll.

"I was just doing what I can do, y'know," he says of his own music. "I'm not the person that could?well, I could be singing jazz or I could be doin' this... Pretty much, when I make music, it comes out like this. I don't have a lot of choices, given the amount of ability that I have, so. I hear it all sort of as my take on blues. I'm sure it doesn't sound like that to a lot of people, but it's always sort of my attempt to write a blues or a country-blues type tune. It gets turned around in terms of the band, and what they do with it an' stuff. That's kind of the way I hear it."

And for the life of him, he can't quite figure out why it is that the youngsters have latched onto his songs about dread, fear and anguish the way they have.

"If I get a negative review," he told me, "I can always see what they're sayin'?y'know, 'He can't sing,' or 'He's depressing.' I can see the negative. But then when I read the real positive stuff, I always wonder, 'What is this?' We did this gig in, I don't know where it was, somewhere in Europe?and this nice girl came up, 23 or 24, and said, 'I really love your music and I had the weekend off and spent the whole weekend just listenin' to your music.' And I thought, that's great, y'know, but I'm thinkin', 'I wish I could just get inside your head for five minutes, to see what it is,' y'know? But I try not to even think about it, y'know. Praise makes me self-conscious."

Now almost 53, with his sharp features, dark eyes and a shock of white hair, Dowd is getting ready to hit the road again. While he's away, he says, his partner runs the moving business. "I can still draw some money from it," he told me. "Otherwise I'd never be able to do this."

Johnny Dowd plays March 31 at Brownies, 169 Ave. A (betw. 10th & 11th Sts.), 420-8392; [www.johnnydowd.com](http://www.johnnydowd.com).