Willy Vlautin is now as well known for his novels as his music, but his band Richmond Fontaine are a reminder he has other ways of telling the same tales
IT FIGURES. Richmond Fontaine, the band based in and around Portland, Oregon, is named after a dustbowl hippie that once gave bass player Dave Harding a helping hand with a broken-down car in the Baja Mexico desert.
From the band’s early days, it seems the sensibilities of people like their mascot hippie pervaded pretty much all that the band wanted to portray. This was a nominal alt.country act that focused on off-the-grid personnel and romantics, both optimistic and ill at ease. Evoking the rather less than touristy imagery of Reno, Nevada, Mexico and their home state, the band – notably songwriter/lyricist Willy Vlautin – chose to highlight the downtrodden and the down at heel.
What raised the suffering somewhat was the musicianship of the band, yet, despite the music, time and again you were brought back to Vlautin's often vinegary tales of dreams that weren't so much broken as not dared thought about for fear that even the thinking of a better life would be snuffed out before it got a chance to flicker. It's no wonder that Vlautin's lyrics have been compared to the writings of Raymond Carver. It's also no surprise that Vlautin's writing career – his first novel The Motel Lifewas published in 2006; his most recent is 2010's Lean On Pete– has been lauded by various literary critics. All he's doing, he avers, is writing about what he knows and understands.
“Since I was a kid I’ve always been into working class stories,” says Vlautin from his home city of Scappoose, which is about 30 miles from Portland. “My Mom worked in the same job for 30 years, raised me and my brother, and she kinda knew how easy it was for kids to end up on the street. She would say it only takes a couple of bad decisions to fall through the cracks, and I took that to heart.
"But then, as I got older, I forgot what she said, and started sneaking into bars full of 65-year old men, drinking, smoking, coughing. It was romantic until I woke up to the fact that I wasn't the youngest guy in the bar anymore." Music was Vlautin's initial saviour; it continues to be, but over the past 10 years or so, he has embarked on a cross-reference exercise whereby characters from Richmond Fontaine's albums appear in his literary realist books, and vice versa. This approach carries on in the band's latest work, The High Country– except this album takes it even further by being part-spoken word. It is, admits, Vlautin, his most ambitious work to date.
“We’re not the biggest band in the world, so we occasionally get isolated and just do our own thing. You do things that you hope people will like, and buy, because I want the guys in the band to do all right. There’s nothing worse than being in a van with a bunch of guys playing bad gigs because you wrote bad songs. So the biggest fear is letting the guys down.”
How did his bandmates feel when they heard that The High Country– in effect, a Gothic tale of romance, violence and humour – was to be an extension of/a tangent to his novels? Vlautin barks out a laugh. "They all thought I was nuts. 'Really? That's really what you want to do?' They keep thinking I'll write a bunch of songs that could at least buy them a used car, but this time around, they looked at me as if all they were going to get was a used bike. But they know at the end of the day I am who I am, and that what I write is what I think is important."
Now aged 43, Vlautin has been writing novels since the age of 20. Aside from making music with Richmond Fontaine, he says that to be stocked in a bookstore is all he’s ever wanted for the creative side of his life. “I’m fairly sure my books sit beside those by Kurt Vonnegurt. That’s an achievement, right?” Music guided and protected him, he freely admits, through his childhood and teens, with records his best and most firm friends. And novels? Vlautin says he believes in the healing power of writing, and so novels, also, anchored his life.
“I grew up in a redneck, conservative home,” he comments, “and art wasn’t really viewed as something that I – or anybody – should do. So the novel writing started as pure escapism. When I wanted a father I would write about one. It started like that – I wrote a bunch of really bad novels, a romance novel because I couldn’t find a girlfriend. Ha. When I got older I started writing about stuff that refused to go away – concrete on the back, so to speak, certain things that scar permanently.”
And so the years slipped by, until 2003 or thereabouts, when during an interview with a novelist/journalist, Vlautin admitted that he, also, had written some novels, all of which were unpublished. "He recommended me to a book agent. I'd had The Motel Lifesitting in a box at home, mixed up with the others, but I handed that one over."
It was, accepts Vlautin, one hell of a lucky break. But what about the other novels in that box? “Oh, my. You can be sure that the other novels will never see the light of day. The romance novel? I burned that one.”
Richmond Fontaine's The High Countryis on release through Décor Records. They perform tonight at the Workman's Club, Dublin, and then tour. See richmondfontaine.com for details
