It was like talking to my record collection.” Bill Janovitz is chatting about writing his book on American songwriter and musician Leon Russell, a legendary Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Famer you won’t hear on your average classic hits radio station.
“It was the pandemic. Everybody was home. Everybody wanted to talk about Leon… Springsteen and Willie Nelson, Elton, Clapton and Rita Coolidge. Anybody I wanted to talk to pretty much, except for Brian Wilson… and even Brian Wilson was pretty close.”
Leon Russell The Master of Space and Time’s Journey Through Rock & Roll History wasn’t Janovitz’s first literary effort: he has been published twice on the Rolling Stones, firstly as part of the 33 1/3 series on iconic albums with his thoughts on Exile on Main St and then Rocks Off: 50 Tracks That Tell the Story of the Rolling Stones which was released to mark the band’s half-century.
“Back in the earlier two books, I was a little bit nervous about doing interviews. But with the Leon book, I had a little butterfly thing with Elton John and Springsteen… but once you get them talking about music and they understand that you’re somebody somewhat informed, then you’re just having a conversation with another guy about music.
‘Somebody somewhat informed’ is a bit of an understatement. Janovitz is lead singer, guitarist and songwriter with Buffalo Tom, who released their 10th album Jump Rope earlier this year. The Boston trio of Janovitz, Chris Colbourna and Tom Maginnis have been going for almost 40 years and by the time they released Let me Come Over and Big Red Letter Day in the early 90s, wore a much wider circle of influences than their ‘grungier’ contemporaries.
Janovitz’s ‘dream book’ would be a definitive biography of Stevie Wonder, but he is not holding his breath.
“My agent gives me very good feedback, he’s just very frank. He’s like ‘a white guy doing a biography in America this year about Stevie Wonder’… it’s just not sellable.”
The band will forever be a footnote over here when it comes to the story a very different music legend, Kurt Cobain. They were playing Dublin the night news of the singer’s death emerged, a month after a well-publicised near-miss.
“We went down to a radio station, RTE and that’s where we heard the news. And there was such a sombre, really heavy atmosphere. We don’t usually start with Taillights Fade but we rejigged the setlist and I said ‘let’s do this’.
“When we introduced it, I said something about Cobain and you know, a few weeks before, he had had a close call. They (Nirvana) meant something to us without a doubt but I knew how much they meant to our generation and to the people that were listening to us. And so I knew it was an important thing. But when I dedicated (Taillights Fade) to him, a couple of people laughed… it was really audible, almost jeering. I think they thought I was being sarcastic about him almost dying… they didn’t know.
Bill Janovitz (centre), with Chris Colbourn and Tom Maginnis
“I feel fortunate to have to have come up in that whole scene and to have been the beneficiary of whatever success we had in their wake, even though we came up with them around the same time.”
When we speak, Janovitz had just handed in his final edits on his latest book, a biography of The Cars. It ‘took a while’ to get up and running but is due for release early next year. As The Cars song goes it takes a fast car to lead a double life, but ‘double life’ barely scratches the surface when applied to Janovitz. Not only has he been referred to as a ‘rock historian’, but also has a ‘proper’ job as a real estate agent.
“Yeah, what else do you do with a CV that says ‘graduated in 89, 10 years in a rock band’. I didn’t have people lining up to hire me!
“But real estate was something that I had some interest in. It’s not so much the sales aspect I was interested in, it’s the consultations and I took to it, pretty well. It really gave me the flexibility to keep doing music. It’s like I wanted to keep being a musician, even if it was just not a way to make a living.”
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Janovitz is blunt about Buffalo Tom’s status. When asked about maybe writing a book about his own band’s experience he responds they never made it big enough to warrant one so it wouldn’t be commercially viable. He also jokes about them being ‘big in the smallest countries in the world.’
The band went on hiatus after the release of Smitten in 1998 but since their return with Three Easy Pieces in 2007 they have been content to work at their own pace.
“Why do we want to keep coming back to Buffalo Tom? Well, it is that comfortable shoe, it is that collaboration, that weird chemistry that, and I talk about this with The Cars… I think a lot of people see older bands going back and they think it’s like a cash grab when I think for the most part, they’re trying to find that chemistry…”
“I think if we had broken up (properly), maybe there’d be more commercial potential in a reunion. I mean, yeah, it’s great to see bands like our friends in Pavement.. oh, my God, they’re gigantic now across the world. When they broke through on TikTok (and got namechecked in the Barbie movie), my kids in their 20s got into them.”
Plenty of Buffalo Tom’s contemporaries crop up in conversation… the Pixies, Dinosaur Jr, Wilco, Radiohead, the Flaming Lips and the WeddingPresent. It was supporting the latter, whose breakthrough album was called George Best, in 1991 that Buffalo Tom made their first appearance in Belfast, and one he recalls for the political lesson he picked up on Northern Ireland.
“It was still very heavy back and we turned the corner and there’d be some s**t there. I had such a rudimentary, American viewpoint and knowledge, very shallow about the whole thing. I’ve since read a little bit more about it and watched films etcetera, but I remember sitting down with David Gedge (Wedding Present singer), and him taking out a Guardian issue and recommending that I read this whole thing and it was it was really… educational.”
His education didn’t stop there. Janovitz kept a diary of his days on tour at the time, including an entry on that trip to Belfast and a couple of nights at the Europa Hotel. It was there he suddenly heard the TV barking about a bomb threat when he was in the shower.
“I quickly pulled my clothes on over my still-wet body and opened the door,” he wrote. “No one else was so much as opening a door, never mind running out into the hall. I went downstairs. No one taking notice of anything in the lobby. With my hair dripping, I asked the desk clerks what was going on. Was there or was there not a bomb threat?
“Oh, you didn’t see the notice about the drill?”
Jump Rope is out now and Buffalo Tom play Whelan’s in Dublin next Friday, September 27