Jeff Daniels’ debut CD called “Jeff Daniels Live and Unplugged” starts off with a really great tune called “If William Shatner Can, I Can Too.” When Jeff jokes about clearing the William Shatner bar he’s not talking about their respective acting chops but their merits as musicians. Because when it comes to the many actors who have crossed over into the music world good ol’ Captain Kirk is generally regarded as the worst. If you’ve ever logged on to youtube and watched his version of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” or “Rocket Man” you’ll understand why. On a personal note I favor the late great Telly Savalas and his unforgettable version of “If,” the sappy chestnut from Bread. That one is so bad it makes Shatner look like Sinatra, but I digress.
Getting back to Jeff Daniels, this guy is actually quite good. Sure he’s been an acclaimed actor for some time now but he’s also a terrific singer, songwriter, guitarist, and storyteller. He has a sound that blends roots, blues, and folk into his own unique original material. He can be screaming funny one minute, poignant and sad the next. He’s also been very prolific with four new releases over the past five years. Besides the aforementioned “Jeff Daniels Live and Unplugged,” there is also” “Together Again,” with Jonathan Hogan, “Grandfather’s Hat” and “Live at the Purple Rose Theater.” On these last two discs there are songs about road rage, his daughter getting her license, turning 50 and having it announced to the world on Entertainment Tonight, a sleazy motel, the loss of a cherished pet, a cross on a highway, his beloved Detroit Tigers, and his beloved state of Michigan in general. It’s all good.
It’s amazing how Jeff Daniels has flown under the radar all these years when you stop and think about all that he has accomplished. He burst on the scene in the early 80’s when he played the hapless son-in-law in the Oscar winning film “Terms of Endearment.” Other films of his from that era include the outrageous “Something Wild” which co-starred Melanie Griffith and a pair of Woody Allen movies “Radio Days,” and “The Purple Rose of Cairo.” It was from this film that Jeff named his theater in his hometown of Chelsea, Michigan and, as mentioned, recorded his latest CD.
The 90’s saw him star in films such as “Arachnophobia,” “Fly Away Home,” and the critically acclaimed “Pleasantville.” There was also the incredibly successful “Speed” and the even more successful “Dumb and Dumber.”
Over the past decade he’s been in an equally diverse selection of movies such as “Blood Work” with Clint Eastwood and “The Hours” with Nicole Kidman. There was a small masterpiece called “The Squid and the Whale,” along with George Clooney’s “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “State of Play,” with Russell Crowe and “The Answer Man.” His newest film is called “Howl” and it’s about the Beat Generation starring James Franco as Allen Ginsberg.
As if that wasn’t enough, Jeff starred on Broadway recently in a Tony award winning drama called “God of Carnage” with Hope Davis, Marcia Gay Harden, and James Gandolfini. He is also an accomplished playwright with over a dozen plays to his credit. His most recent play is called “Best of Friends” and it opens at the Purple Rose Theater on October 14th.
Jeff will be on tour throughout the fall with stops at Infinity Hall in Norfolk on October 20th and Stage One in Fairfield on October 25th. This phone interview took place on the afternoon of Wednesday August 4th.
BH – From one baseball fan to another I was wondering what we would do if on the night of your Connecticut shows the Red Sox and the Tigers had playoff games. But unfortunately that’s not happening.
JD - “I don’t think we have to worry about that. Actually I have a song called ‘The Lifelong Tiger Fan Blues’ that I wrote in 2002 when we just were horrid. We lost 119 games that year and if we lost one more game we would beat those 1962 Mets so that prompted writing the song. And because four of our guys just went down like they’d been shot in the same week I just pulled it out and I re-wrote it I think for the fifth time.”
BH – I really enjoyed the “Live at the Purple Rose Theater” disc. There are so many songs that are so easy to relate to.
JD - “That’s a good thing. That’s what you want because if I’m up there just singing about here’s another song that’s important to me and me only, you’re not going to last very long, at least I think. I’ve always kind of just played about fifty feet away for whoever is sitting there. I want to make sure that its something they can relate to, that’s familiar to them. It’s kind of how I run the theater company and approach playwriting is that I really want to hold a mirror up to the people that we’re doing the play for and if it’s familiar to them, especially out here in Michigan then chances are they’re going to come. And if they like it they’ll go tell their friends to come. And I look at songwriting the same way. Sometimes you can write ‘Dirty Harry Blues,’ a song about what it’s like to get shot by Clint Eastwood with a little behind the scenes stuff. And that’s ok because I think part of it is that people buy a ticket to get to hear some of those stories and I’m happy to tell them. Or they’re buying a ticket because they saw me in ‘Dumb and Dumber’ and they want to just see me. So that lasts about ten minutes but then you have to deliver the storytelling end of what I do. By using the guitar I’ve found a way to do that. It’s taken a few years to figure out how to come out there and sit there and hold them for ninety to a hundred minutes. But there’s an art to it and I’ve watched guys as far back as Bill Cosby when I was growing up to the George Carlins of the world to certainly nowadays with Lewis Black and the comedians. But the musicians, the guys like Steve Goodman that can walk out with just a guitar and hold the audience and Utah Phillips is another guy. He passed away recently but we had the same agent Jim Fleming. Jim said ‘you really ought to see Utah because he is a master at what it is you do.’ And I went when he played Ann Arbor at the Arc. And his opening song, the great railroad song, lasted twenty minutes. He kept stopping it and he kept improvising, he kept doing all these spontaneous little asides around it and he’d start the song up again. He broke every single rule of how to open a show and it was thrilling. I said to Jim afterwards ‘my god he’s just up there winging it!’ And he goes ‘no no no, every word is planned. Every word is scripted.’ He figured out the timing and everything. And it does become that. It does end up being like a play. I leave some room to move it around and go with the audience and go back and forth. I enjoy that. But there is a script in the back of my head just like with Utah. It was a great lesson to watch a guy like that.”
BH – Tell me about “Together Again” the disc you made with Jonathan Hogan
JD - “That was kind of a valentine to me and Hogan. I really don’t care whether anybody gets it or not. It was something that Jon and I would do since the late seventies as actors who play guitar. He was far more accomplished at the time than I was. We would just go to each other’s living rooms and just hang out and kind of stay sane by playing each other’s songs. Creatively it was a wonderful oasis for two actors trying to make it. Years later to be able to look him up and in a way just go back in time and play some of those old songs while sitting in an apartment living room was wonderful. For me it was capturing what we had done all those years ago and still occasionally get to do. So it was mostly for us and the fact that we were able to record it in the apartment and throw it up on the website was a bonus.”
BH – For what it’s worth Jeff, I really enjoyed it.
JD - “He’s a wonderful songwriter, his imagery. We both come from the school of Lanford Wilson. Lanford is a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright that we both were fortunate to work with at Circle Rep in New York City, the theater company. And when you’re around playwrights, particularly guys like Lanford whose whole livelihood is on imagery and the use of words and putting them together in a way that only Lanford could, you can’t help but learn from that. For me personally down the road to meet and study guys like John Hyatt, John Prine, Lyle Lovett, Joe Ely, and Guy Clark all those guys and then the humorists, the people who can tell the truth with humor like Christine Lavin and again Stevie Goodman. You see how they use words to say something that only they could say it that way. And that became kind of a pursuit for me way back when and continues to this day and the guitar is just kind of a vehicle for that.”
BH – Let’s talk about “Grandfather’s Hat.” There’s great story telling from the comedy of “Have a Good Day and Die” to the tragedy of “Mile 416” it really hits on a lot of emotions.
JD - “I don’t do theme oriented CD’s. I just go with the best songs I have as of today and put them out. But it also reflects the acting career and the playwriting career. I really love the challenge of going from A to Z and having a range of ‘Gettysburg’ to ‘Dumb and Dumber.’ From ‘Have a Good Life and Die’ this outrageous road rage song to the tragedy of ‘Mile 416’ and seeing a cross on the side of the road on Route 2 somewhere in eastern Montana and realizing somebody died there and I’ll never know who it is. A tip of the cap as you go by wondering who it was. I drove for five straight days from Vancouver back to Michigan and as I say in the intro you forget a lot of stuff as soon as you go by it and then there’s other stuff that you’ll remember forever and that was one of those things. I literally pulled a legal pad out while I was driving and just wrote most of the lyrics. But I love being able to believably go from one extreme to the other in acting, in playwriting, and in songwriting. There’s a wonderful, creative challenge to that.”
BH – I’ve interviewed Kevin Bacon before and he’s talked about the skepticism people have with an actor being in a band. Can you relate to that?
JD - “Absolutely although I think over time it dissipates. With me I’ve taken an approach where I just go out there by myself with no band. I’ve taken the coffeehouse approach and storytelling approach and less about trying to be a rock star. If we’re known for one thing, certainly successfully being an actor, having success as an actor they’re not going to let you have success as a rock star too. But, if I can come out there and whether they want to let me or not I have been playing for thirty years and I have been writing for thirty years and I’m just going to play for you tonight. You fifty people, you three hundred people, whatever it is and we’ll just make it about tonight. The ambition is not to try to equal the success that I’ve had as an actor. It’s just here tonight and you can like it or not but I have been doing something else during the day. So I take it that way. A lot of people have tried to cash in over the years on their success and there’s certainly an element to that. I’m aware and Kevin is too that they’re paying to see the actor, some of them. But I think over time, if you’re able as a musician or as a songwriter in my case to have this other creative side to you and you work hard at it so that in my case you sit down with Stefan Grossman to have lessons or Keb’ Mo’ to have a lesson, you can bring something to it other than three chords. I’ve worked hard to be able to do that. While I’ll never achieve what they have musically, I can get in the room and that’s the pursuit for me. So in a way for the guitar players out there, the acoustic players out there, I’m able to do stuff on the guitar that satisfies them. And I think that is all that they are going to allow me and that’s enough. And others will go ‘my god he can really play.’ I take it seriously and I’ve been doing it for a lot of years. I’ve been playing out almost ten years now and that defeats the whole William Shatner thing.”
BH – Tell me how the Purple Rose Theater came about.
JD - “We moved back to Michigan, my wife Kathleen and I did, in 1986 after ten years in New York City. We wanted to raise our family here because we understood Michigan. We’re both from here and we didn’t know how to raise our kids in L.A. and we didn’t have the money, we thought, to do it in New York so we moved home. And the movie career continued and frankly I thought it wouldn’t last and that I’d just end up home. While I was here, after about two or three years, creatively I was going to sleep. So I thought I’d just buy a building in this little town and create a home for professional actors and kind of create a Circle Rep, an off-Broadway theater company that did new plays. In my case there was an emphasis on comedy to help sell tickets. You make them laugh and they’ll tell their friends to come. Comedy is the dirty little secret the American theater doesn’t want to admit to but it’s a wonderful vessel that can keep your theater in the black. If you’re able to do comedy and write comedy and do it well it can really service what it is you want to do overall. Anyway, we did that and that became the Purple Rose Theater Company not only for people my age that didn’t get the breaks I did in New York or chose to stay in Michigan and raise a family who were talented, they now had a professional creative home. Also the twenty-one year old kid I used to be now has a place where he and she can go to learn what they need to learn before they go to New York. I didn’t have that.”
BH – Recently I was watching a show about Christopher Reeve on the Biography Channel. He was talking about a play he did way back when called “My Life.” Would you like to reminisce a little bit about that?
JD - “Yeah that was an early play when we were at Circle Rep. I forget the year, 1977 maybe or 78. And we had a dressing room with Chris Reeve, Bill (William) Hurt and me. I think at the time Bill Hurt was trying to decide if he was going to do ‘Love Story 2’ because Ryan O’Neal was not going to do it. And Chris was looking to, near the end of our little six week run off Broadway, he was looking to fly over to London to screen test for ‘Superman.’ And I was just hoping that I would get another off Broadway acting job for one hundred and twenty-five bucks a week. It was an interesting dressing room. There were three careers that ended up being something.”
BH – Now all these years later you’re back on Broadway in “God of Carnage” and it’s a great cast and a tremendous success.
JD - “It was a once in a lifetime experience I think. I certainly would love to go back to Broadway again and will. But what happened to us and the way it was received, and all the Tony nominations and the Tony wins for Marcia (Gay Harden) and the play, but in particularly the standing room only every single night and the parade of great people who came to see it seemingly night after night from Meryl to Jack Nicholson to Spielberg to on and on everybody came, we were the thing to see. And we would look out there at standing room only audiences eight shows a week and that just doesn’t happen for a play on Broadway, not any more. And yet it happened for us. Jim (Gandolfini) was a big part of that and it was a pleasure to work with him. He’s become a great friend. But it was a special time and we knew it. We came back in the fall and ran it until November. It was everything Broadway was supposed to be. It was the ideal, a fantasy come true.”
BH – Let’s talk about your next movie called “Howl.” How would Jeff Daniels define the Beat Generation?
JD - “They were the revolutionaries, the guys who questioned, like the Ginsbergs and the Dylans and all those guys that said ‘whoa, whoa wait a minute.’ It was peaceful descent or decent using words. The pen mightier than the sword. All those guys, Kerowac, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, all those guys that just kind of said ‘stop, wait a minute.’ It was a wonderful time I thought for descent. As far as the movie goes I was asked to come in and do a scene or two. Basically it’s a cameo. It’s like ‘Good Night, and Good Luck,’ the Clooney thing about Edward R Murrow, you felt that you wanted to help chronicle that thing. And the fact that it was a movie I said sure I’m happy to help and happy to be a part of it.”
BH – When we see you in Connecticut will it be a solo acoustic show?
JD - “I have an opening act but yeah it’s solo acoustic. They will laugh harder than they have in a long time. They’ll cry. I’ll make them think about something. Good night, drive safely. It will be a full evening. It’s not going out there and staring at the naval for ninety minutes.”
BH – You’ll be playing at Infinity Hall in Norfolk, CT. Have you ever been to that part of New England or the Great Barrington area?
JD - “I think I played in Pittsfield once. I’m in my bus. My wife will be with me with the two dogs and we’re playing somewhere different every night. We’re really looking forward to this. I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time.”
BH – Finally Jeff do you have any special plans for November 8th? It’s Mary Hart’s 60th birthday!
JD - “Whoa! I’ll be on the road and I’ll definitely be playing the song that night. I said wait a minute why are they… how old is she? The song was written in like a day. Wait a minute how old is she. Oh my God well let’s announce that shall we?”
BH – She’ll always be older than you.
JD - “Everybody, tune into Entertainment Tonight on November 8th and see if they say how old she is. They won’t! They won’t say it!”
With all of his talent and accomplishments Jeff is most proud of the fact that he’s been married to his high school sweetheart Kathleen for thirty years or so. They have two older sons and a younger daughter. And let’s not forget those two dogs! For more information on Jeff along some of his other tour stops simply log on to www.jeffdaniels.com. Or better yet be in Norfolk on the 20th or Fairfield on the 25th.