IT’S NEVER ENOUGH FOR ELI “PAPERBOY” REED, AND THAT’S THE GOSPEL TRUTH
- Bernard Zuel
- 5 days ago
- 7 min read
IT’S NOT JUST HIS TIME that Eli “Paperboy” Reed is giving up to talk today ahead of an Australian tour that is ostensibly a celebration of his 20 years-so-far career; his kids have sacrificed bedtime with him, and they are not even getting the ego stroke of an interview.
This is no small thing the reading time: the soul shouter/gospel teacher/multi-instrumentalist/producer and his wife have a child allocated each for story time at night and it’s serious. Though not so serious that he can’t get a audience-pandering plug in, as Reed explains that he doesn’t have a go-to story, leaving it to his son to choose but “we have a lot of Bluey-related stuff here, so on this tour I am mostly going to be talking about Bluey”. Nice. Smooth.
Sometimes in lieu of or in addition to a story, Reed will sing to his son “if he is interested, which is not always the case”. Ouch. And people think reviewers are tough critics! But the kids do remind me that in my first interview with Reed nearly 20 years ago I asked him to justify calling himself The Satisfier, as he did in one track on his album of barnstorming, sweaty soul, Roll With You.
At the time he offered up his girlfriend as a character witness, but that girlfriend is his wife now and they have the kids, he has a career that has kept him off the streets for decades and kept many of us happy, and this Bostonian has been calling himself a New Yorker for almost as long. Is he therefore The Satisfied?
“Am I?,” he asks after a long laugh. “You know, no. I don’t think so. I love my life and my kids but I think that the answer is the next 20 years remain to be seen. I want to make more music and I want to continue to be relevant, and I think that’s important. But I don’t think anybody ought to ever be satisfied in terms of making art.”
Can he be satisfied in his non-art life?
“I am very satisfied in my non-art life. I have a beautiful family, I love my community where I live, and my neighbourhood and my friends.”
So we should be spared him getting up on stage and, Kieran Culkin-style, publicly asking his wife for more kids?
“We have a two-bedroom apartment so we are pretty much maxed out,” he chuckles.
While Roll With You was his introduction to most people outside his circle in Boston, it was in fact the second long player he released. Its predecessor, Eli “Paperboy” Reed Sings Walkin’ And Talkin’ And Other Smash Hits, was quickly and roughly recorded and not much heard. But that’s about to be remedied as a reissue – vinyl and CD versions, with extra tracks – is imminent.
Hearing one track from it in the single Stop Talking In Your Sleep is for fans like getting a raw look behind the curtain. What does he hear when he hears those recordings now? Who was that kid?
“You know, I sent this to my dad and he asked the same question: ‘who is that kid?’. It’s funny, I look at the pictures and I feel the same way,” Reed says. “In some ways I feel like I knew exactly what I wanted to do, but in other ways I feel like I was posturing completely. And I think both things are true.
“I felt extremely confident at the time, which I think was probably to my benefit. I think the recordings are great for what they are, a complete and total snapshot of one day in my life in 2004.”
Yes, one day: that’s how long it took Reed, who was in his first (and as it turned out last) year of college studying sociology, and a scratch band of friends he pulled together at the last moment when he was offered studio time, to put down all the songs he knew how to play. There was, he recalls, “no malice aforethought”, just unthinking energy and optimism to help them replicate what, for example, The Beatles did 40 years earlier.
“People talk about The Beatles and Hamburg as their 10,000 hours moment [the idea that to really become good at something you need to put in something like 10,000 hours of preparation/rehearsal/repetition] that meant they could get to the point where they can spend a day in the studio and record something. The previous year I had spent in Clarksdale Mississippi was my 10,000 hours,” explains Reed.
“I was playing music all day every day, all the time. At that time I was playing in church in Chicago too, so I knew what I wanted to do.”
How did this little white kid from the north-east get the okay to sit in with the locals weren’t unfamiliar with, and not always much impressed by, the musician tourists – often from the UK actually – who made pilgrimages to that fabled town? Maybe that confidence he talked about was justified.
“Part of what set me apart – honestly, maybe all of what set me apart – was the people in the juke joints and places where you’d hear music, 99.9 per cent of whom were people from the Mississippi Delta, were interested in hearing southern soul music. They didn’t want some guy coming in and playing Robert Johnson or something like that,” he recalls. “There was some of those guys who definitely could play, but none who could sing, so I was getting up there and I was playing and singing Bobby Bland and Otis Clay and Latimore and Bobby Rush and that was what these people who were basically in their 40s and 50s were interested in hearing.”
To be fair, Reed isn’t pretending there weren’t other factors involved. “I was sort of like a sideshow in my way because I was really good and could really do that but I was also an 18 year old white kid and people thought that was funny. And it was. So they came to see me because of that, to some degree.” And when the novelty wore off they kept coming back and he kept singing those songs.
This may explain something about Reed. When old school soul-style singers, blues shouters and pre-rock groovers arrived in bulk 20 years ago – not just in the US but in Britain, Australia and Europe – it seemed a proper revival. But quite a few of those artists eventually moved on to heavier or funkier styles, or more decidedly modern sounds and techniques. Sometimes very quickly after fame hit. But Reed has retained a direct line to the sounds that moved him in the first place.
“I made my record for Warner Bros, which is my one major label pop record – was that a mistake? I don’t think so. I liked it and I thought that I was being honest. But it was not successful for a lot of reasons, not all of them having to do with the way that it sounded. But was I being true to myself? Not exactly. So did I want to go back and try and make records that I would want to listen to? That was what it really came down to.”
Among the records he would want to listen to it turned out was Merle Haggard songs done as pure soul, called Down Every Road and released by Reed in the middle of the pandemic. Now there’s a good reason why soul versions of Merle Haggard should work and that is that soul and country, particularly in their southern varieties, are so entwined as to be basically the same. A truth rubbed in properly when Reed was invited to perform at the Grand Ol Opry.
(It may not be quite as easy to see the line between soul and British hard rock but Reed’s version of Motorhead’s Ace Of Spades, which he released as a stand-alone single, puts up a very good argument.)
There is an even thinner line between soul and gospel, so Reed’s interest in it is in one sense fundamental. But he has taken it further, becoming a teacher of gospel quartet singing in New York – almost a case of coals to Newcastle except the generational divide almost killed that connection last century – and among his students was the group which will be touring with him in Australia, the high, godly but earthy Harlem Gospel Travelers.
How does he teach it? It’s simple Reed reckons: he teaches them to listen. Ok, sure. Easy. And as a producer – including for the Travelers but also an album of recordings made by his father 50 years ago of blues guitar hero, Fred Davis – does he work on the same principle?
“To be perfectly honest, the way that I produce records is not very common anymore, because most people who produce records are also the engineer, the one at the computer or whatever. I don’t produce records like that; I work with an engineer and I’m the one who is on the talkback microphone trying to get the performance,” says Reed. “I’m in the vein of Jerry Wexler [whose list of credits is huge, including Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan], who I admire greatly.
“Not to make it sound crass, but that’s what your job is: to take the pieces that you understand and say okay I can put a name to this, and I understand that when somebody hears that they are going to respond physically, emotionally, to this choice we are making. Understanding what you love and why you love, that is so clutch.
“Honestly, when it comes to my kids and the way I want them to experience music, I don’t care if they make music, I just want them to be able to think about art of any sort and have strong opinions about it. And stand behind them. That’s all I care about.”
If this were to happen in studio or classroom or living room, in this instance, and maybe only this instance, Reed and I could both be called The Satisfied.
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Eli “Paperboy” Reed plays:
May 8 - Corner Hotel, Melbourne
May 9 – Theatre Royal, Castlemaine
May 10 – The Baso, Belconnen
May 11 – Metro, Sydney
May 13 – Centro CBD, Wollongong (duo show with Simon Burke of The Meltdown)
May 15-18 – Blues On Broadbeach
May 19 – Byron Theatre, Byron Bay (duo show with Simon Burke of The Meltdown)
May 22 – The Memo, Healesville
May 23 – The Gov, Adelaide
May 24 – Queenscliff Town Hall
May 25 – Meeniyan Town Hall
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