Bush, Greg, 1998, 'Rich in Rock, Steeped in Country', Australian Country Music Roundup, Issue 5, March 1998.
Rich in Rock, Steeped in Country
With single-minded determination, Sherry Rich's trip from Melbourne to Nashville has added another link in the chain between Rock and Country.

Country music doesn't always run through the bloodlines. But in the case of Melbourne-based singer Sherry Rich, an added helping of Lefty Frizzell, Charley Pride and Loretta Lynn during her formative years sure helped entrench itself in her consciousness.
    Already influenced by the music of her mother Noeline Rich, an Australian '60s country artist who once toured the outback with Reg Lindsay, it wasn't unusual for the music of the aforementioned artists to be heard around the Rich household.
    However, a listen to the younger Rich's debut album for Rubber Records (through BMG) immediately confirms that a lot more than traditional country has reached her ears. Titled Sherry Rich and Courtesy Move, the album boasts the musicianship of the members of alternative US country band Wilco. And even compared to today's contemporary country music, it steers pretty close to the edge.
    Rich's metamorphosis to a country rocker with attitude can probably be traced back to her school days. Already becoming hooked on the '60s crossover acts such as Poco, the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Eagles' early music, Rich joined a school band with (which) also boasted her brother Rusty, and a blonde haired guitarist by the name of Keith Urban.
    That was in the south-east Queensland town of Caboolture. While her brother embarked on a career as one-half of the comedy duo Scared Weird Little Guys, and Urban eventually became one of Australia's biggest country music exports, Rich headed to Melbourne. With the southern capital not a noted centre for country, she joined an-all girl rock band with the aggressive title of Girl Monstar.
    But, as Rich points out, with the passing of time the desire to return to her first love won over.
"I decided that I just wanted to get back and sing the music that I love singing, and follow a bit in my Mum's foot steps I swung back to doing roots-based country.
    With her band the Grievous Angels, they released two EPs, and Rich was set to record her debut album with leading Australian country producer Garth Porter in 1996.
"We started working together before we were going to do the album, but it was taking too to long to get things organised with Garth - he was very busy."
"My publisher knew that I was more interested in the alternative country acts coming out of the US, and he said maybe we could try and get those guys (Wilco) to play with me on the record."
    Rich sent across the demo tapes to the band, and they liked what they heard. She took the plunge and head to Nashville, although she admits that Porter was "pretty cheesed off when he found I was going to do it in America".
    Wilco, minus their lead singer, performed under the name of Courtesy Move on the album and, when Rich arrived in town to record the album, suggested they record at Nashville's Quadraphonic studios.
"It's where Neil Young recorded Harvest, and Bob Dylan recorded Blood on the Tracks. It was a fantastic '70s studio with a great vibe in it."
    The '60s and '70s country rock influence on Sherry Rich and Courtesy Move is more than evident on first listen. The borrowed riff from 'Mr Tambourine Man' on 'Lonely Boy' and the overtones of Neil Young's band Crazy Horse on 'When I See you Tonight' are two that stand out. But the main element throughout was Rich letting the band have their head druing the recording sessions.
"I thought, I can either treat them like session musicians, and get them to play exactly the way I want, or I can hand the songs over to them like little babies and get them. So that's what I did."
"They came out a bit more rock, and some a bit more laid back."
On Rich's return to Australia in 1997, she knew that the nature of the album meant the possibility of aiming her music at two completely separate genres. And that, in her mind, created a marketing dilemma.
"Stations like Triple J won't play it if they think it's country," Rich said. "And I don't want to cut myself off, because I think that a lot of people who read Australian Country Music Roundup would probably really love the record."
    While the debate over the musical pigeonhole of Sherry Rich and Courtesy Move continues, there should be no such drama over the country credentials of a possible future project.
"I may do some recording with my Mum - with my brother Rusty as well - and call it the Rich Family. My mother's never been on CD before, so I think she needs to be immortalised."

Dawson, Dave, 1996, 'Sherry Rich - Punter's Club', Inpress Magazine.
The Dwight Yoakam invasion has opened the door for the young country boom to bloom.
Sherry Rich, daughter of sixties singer Noeline, launched her second EP at the Punters Club and the response was Yoakamesque.
    Ms Rich's brand of power country owes little to her mum's touring pals Slim Dusty and Reg Lindsay but plenty to Patty Loveless, Trisha Yearwood, Kelly Willis and Kim Richey.
    Sherry's bar band sizzled as she belted out Oh Lonesome You and Say You Will from the Trisha trove and Mary Chapin Carpenter hits I Feel Lucky and The Bug (penned by Mark Knopfler).
     But it was Sherry's strident originals Get Your Kicks and Wild Dogs that ignited a sweat soaked sea of urban cowpersons.
    The singer mixed her self penned tunes and covers with panache and punch; the rock reared rhythm section followed guitarist Nick Grant - a perfect foil for bassist Doug Lee Robertson and Steve Morrison.
     Pianist Matt Heydon's impact was more pronounced on Rich's reflective tunes Trying to Write a Love Song and Sitting here Alone.
    They contrasted starkly with Rich's raunchy rendition of the Harlan Howard-Kostas cheating song Blame it on your Heart and Libby Dwyer's Up All Night Crying.
    The only flat spot was bassist's Robertson's low vocal volume of the Dan Penn-Chips Moman soul standard Dark End of the Street.
    Far more riveting was the band's narrative Beautiful, Talented and Dead - a Kurt Cobain eulogy with a savage sting in the tail.
    This was riveting, relevant nineties country - a potent cocktail destined to blow away the hokey imagery of chook raffle country and covers clones.

Dawson, Dave, 1996, 'Sherry Rich - Trying to Write a Love Song', Inpress Magazine.
When Sherry Rich crossed from pop to country music in Melbourne she didn't emulate her mum Noelene, who toured outback in the sixties with Slim Dusty and Reg Lindsay. "She told me lots of good stories wading through flooded creeks with her guitar held over her head to it wouldn't get wet," Sherry told InPress.
"She used to work the doors at the concerts and collect the money from people as they came in. People always knew she was from the show in town because she had green or blue nail polish that matched her nail polish."
    Sherry made peers as green as her mother's nail polish with a swag of rave reviews for her debut CD. But she won't walk across the Yarra with her guitar raised on Saturday to launch her new Rubber Records EP Trying to Write a Love Song.
    Instead Ms Rich, whose career began with comedian brother Rusty, will boot scoot down from her Fitzroy digs.
    And, unlike her mum who replaced Judy Stone on the Reg Lindsay show for two years, she fronts her show with supports Working Class Ringos and The Waifs.
    Sherry, born on Bribie Island on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, joined her mother on stage at the age of five and played ukulele while singing.
"I lost the vibe as a teenager because you don't want to do what your mum has done," added Sherry, now 30 and holding.
"I was in a country band Cactus Fever in Brisbane with my brother Rusty. It was more of a jokey cabaret act and lasted about 12 months before we moved to Melbourne and I played with Girl Monstar for four years."
    Although Ms Rich honed her live act with Girl Monstar she got her songwriting fuel from skating on jagged edges of her broken heart - especially Trying to Write a Love Song and Sitting here Alone (A Country Star's Lament).
"He came back a couple of times and then he left for good," Sherry said of the spurned suitor in the title track.
"I wrote that about a year ago - you never know whether the flame is burning."
 The band's mixer Tim Miliken took over production from the late Steve Connolly who died suddenly last year aged 36.
"It was Tim's first production and he did a fine job,"  Sherry says of the successor to Steve who earns an eulogy on the CD sleeve. Sherry and the Grievous Angels recently returned from Tamworth where they showcased their original material.
"The people from ABC Records came and didn't get it," says Sherry.
"They thought I had a bad attitude, which I have. We got a really good response from all the places we played. Broderick Smith was there with his band and he was probably the best thing I saw at Tamworth. He makes you feel the songs - a lot of acts  do their thing but it doesn't really hit you in the chest and Broderick does. I  thought Rosemary Rae was really good - she came to a couple of our shows and she likes that kind of gal pal thing, supporting other women artists. She's very traditional but she has a really nice voice. She has that very sophisticated look on stage which not many girls in Tamworth have got."
    Sherry's brother Rusty of those Scared Weird Little Guys fame played on her first EP and is likely to play on her debut album being produced by Garth Porter in Sydney in April-May.
"I've sussed him out over the last year and I think he knows where I'm coming from" says Sherry, "We have similar ideas on the whole recording technique and I think it will be fine. I've written about 16 new songs and I haven't got any of them in the live set at the moment."
    Ms Rich is heading for a Texas sojourn in March at  the South by South West Conference in Austin. Although Sherry is promoting her new EP which includes covers of That's what I like about You and Dark End of the Street, she has fond memories of her debut EP - especially Get Your Kicks.
"That was written from the heart and the groin, I think," revealed Sherry whose propensity for bumping off lovers, leavers and listeners in her tunes is far more explicit than coy peers who walk and talk the Shamworth line.
    Sherry's cheating song Wild Dogs has graphic imagery  in which the villain is warned that after death at gunpoint he'll be thrown to the dogs who will "chew up your leg bones and eat out your heart".
    It rivals the vitriolic fuelled You can have that Man for venom and summary justice.
"It's my tribute to the murder ballad that has been a tradition in country music since the year dot," Sherry explains. "It's a fairly tongue-in-cheek song and very pro-firearms which I'm definitely not. I took a challenge to write a song in that vein and I'm very happy the way  the lyrics came out."
    But the song to cause most comment is Beautiful, Talented and Dead which examines the media and record company feeding frenzy following the premature deaths of  music stars - in this case Kurt Cobain.
"It could also equally apply to Hank Williams, Keith Whitley and Gram Parsons who died a very tragic death at 26," Sherry added. "The media, to this day, are still getting a lot of mileage out of Gram and the way he died and how his body was stolen and burned out in the desert. That was all very good  for his record sales."

Eastman, Judy, 1997, 'Sherry Rich', Beat Magazine (Melb.).
Recorded and mixed during the depths of a northern winter, Sherry Rich's first full length recording Sherry Rich and Courtesy Move is a therapeutic paean to the trials and poisons of love. It is also a dream come true for Rich because her band for the album is not the Grievous Angels, but three quarters of those darlings of US alterna-country, Wilco - Jay Bennett on guitar, keyboards and backing vocals, John Stirratt on bass and backing vocals and Ken Coomer on drums, percussion and backing vocals.
    Growing up on Queensland's Bribie Island, later moving to Brisbane and Melbourne, Rich began singing with her country singer mother at the age of four. She went on to join her first band in high school, which featured her brother Rusty (of the Scared Weird Little Guys) and friend Keith Urban (now based in Nashville with his band The Ranch).
    For those who haven't seen Rich live or heard her on the radio, she's 'a little bit country and a little bit rock-n-roll'. Lyrics of love and lament firmly based in country but backed by some rockin' beats. Along with others of the Melbourne-based trinity of female country/rock performers, Lisa Miller and Tanya Lee, Rich likes the universal appeal of country. "It's music for everybody; folk music ever since the mediaeval times was meant to be for the common person to understand, to tell stories via music. Country's got that essence and it's more real than a lot of other music... the heart's involved in it a lot".
    With the exeption of 'Beautiful, Talented and Dead', which reflects on the suicide of Kurt Cobain, all of the songs on the album reflect Rich's personal experiences (with a bit of artistic licence here and there) over the last couple of years and are a powerful statement of her preference for sincere music. 'I think songs are much more powerful when they're sung by the person who wrote them. I think the essence always come through. I like singer/songwriter stuff like Tom Petty and Neil Young. I think it's stronger and more real when it's sung by the person who's written the song'.
    Like the proverbial chicken and the egg, you may wonder are the songs coincidences of events or are the events orchestrated so that a song results? Does Rich sing because of what's happening in her personal life, or does her personal life happen so that she can sing? If the latter, she must be on the lookout for potentially tragic/painful experiences in order to come up with new material.
'Yeah! Often I think I do put myself in situations for the sake of my songwriting, which I guess a lot of songwriter's do. Like you attract these dramas into your life so that you can write about it; be tormented. This album is a bit of a storybook. For the past two years I've had a series of - like a dozen - dramatic two week flings... that's been my love life over the past two years and there it is in that record'.
    While recording and singing is a kind of therapy for Rich, she has a mother's love for the songs and the experiences that gave birth to them. 'They're like my children, my songs. I still think about it [the experience] when I'm singing. I'm very conscious of the fact that you should sing your own songs like you mean them. I kind of enjoy feeling the pain too - I kind of proud of it'.
    According to the liner notes, Sherry Rich and Courtesy Move was 'a project conceived in bold day dreaming, chance event and months of long distance phone calls'. So just how does a girl make her dreams come true? Afterall, there were plenty of people who, on hearing Rich's statement she 'wouldn't mind working with Wilco', said "Yeah right, dream on, as if", and other 'don't go for it' kind of comments.
Here is her secret to success:
'I was going to do it [the CD] here with a country music producer called Garth Porter and I'd done some pre-production work with him. My publisher, Mitch Ruben, who's this young American guy, ... knew that I really liked the American alternative country stuff that was coming out and he was going on a business trip to the States. I said "let's try and get me work over there" and gave him the names of like my three favourite bands - The Jayhawks, Son Volt and Wilco - and their record labels and said "see what you can do". He happened to be in Nashville at this showcase... and it just so happened that the Wilco guys were backing up this singer Jeff Black and he got introduced to them. He asked whether they might want to work with an Australian singer/songwriter and they said "yeah, if we like her stuff"'. They did, and managed to find two weeks in a busy touring schedule to record with Rich in Nashville at the studio where Neil Young recorded Harvest and Bob Dylan recorded Blood on the Tracks. 'It's an example of  you know, why not? Why can't I do that?... There musicians. They want money like everyone else and [I thought] they'd probably enjoy the experience of working with someone from overseas... It all happened very easily... it seemed to have a certain sort of spark to it that carried it through and ended up working really well'.
    Melbourne might be a much larger city than either Nashville or Austin, Texas, where Rich also spent a bit of time, with its own reputation for live music, but it can be difficult when you're playing music that doesn't quite fit into Australian anthemic pub rock or the so-called 'alternative' sound.
'That's the frustrating thing... like the sort of music I do, there's not much of a support system. There's not many people doing it really and it's not that popular, you know? Over there, there's so many people doing it and they're all really supportive of each other and crowds wanna hear it. You go to packed rooms where bands are playing roots/rock/country/whatever and the crowd's just loving it. Like I did a show in the House of Blues in Chicago with one of the guys from Wilco to like 3,000 people and it's just amazing. It's just a bit frustrating when you come back here - and people have this thing about anything to do with country music in Australia is like Slim Dusty or Gina Jeffries - really straight crap'.
    Having spent six weeks recording in Nashville and hanging out in the home of country music, Rich was in good position to compare that scene with our own. 'I did  notice in Nashville and Austin that there's a good core of singer/songwriters who are going for it and they do stick together. They really help each other out; go to each other's gigs, that sort of thing. I'm not saying that people aren't like that here because they pretty much are. There's just more people doing the singer/songwriter thing in those two cities'.
    What about Melbourne's very collective scene, where there's a good chance of seeing the members of your favourite bands shuffle themselves up and take the stage under another name? 'It's good like that in Melbourne... we've been doing quite a bit of that lately. I've been playing with Ashley (Naylor) from Even. I think it's good to get that collective attitude happening; it can only help everybody really in the end'.
'I think the main difference with Nashville and Austin is the style of music that's being played. There is a fairly healthy alternative rock scene in both of these towns as well, but the majority of the music being played is roots-based Americana. And they're very well- trained crowds. They go out any night of the week, clap lots, they're very appreciative'.
    Sherry is back with the Grievous Angels to promote the album in Australia but they're new angels: Nick on bass, who plays in The Rectifiers, and James McGuiness (sic) (James McIness) on guitar, who used to be in Shreen. 'They're pretty good, younger and shabbier. They play this record really well... They're basically young rock guys, which goes in keeping with the record. I didn't really want to get a guitarist who was a traditional country chicken-pickin' guitarist, because that's not the sort of guitar that's on the record. I wanted somebody who was like Keith Richards'.
    After the promotion for Sherry Rich and Courtesy Move, who knows how long Melbourne will remain this Rich gal's home? She has plans to go back to the States in February to play at an extravaganza in Nashville and the South by Southwest (so by so what) Festival in Austin in March and hopes to stay over there as long as she can. 'Like I said, doing the style of music that I'm doing, it's pretty hard to make a living out of it in Australia, much as I love Melbourne more than any other place I've ever been, but I'm pretty determined to be able to make it in the songwriting field; to be able to make a living out of it basically and I'm quite into songwriting for other people as well, and you can't really do that here' (unless your Paul Kelly).
    Rich may hook up with Jay Bennett to play guitar with her in Austin but will otherwise be performing solo, which she likes. 'I really enjoy doing the solo thing. I think that performers really have to be able to cut it themselves. I think if you can't cut it by yourself live, then you shouldn't be doing it really from a singer/songwriter point of view."

Eastman, Judy, 1997, "Sherry Rich, The Rectifiers and Deer @ The Continental Cafe", Beat Magazine.
...
The launch of the much talked about, long-awaited record that came out of Sherry Rich's collaboration with Wilco's guitarist, bass player and drummer in Nashville in late 1996, Sherry Rich and Courtesy Move. Things began with Sherry and Scared Weird Little Guys brother Rusty doing a touching duet of 'Love Hurts'. Rusty appeared throughout the night to add acoustic guitar, tambourine and vocals. The pair have played music together for years and this was obvious from the confidence and enjoyment with which they played tonight.
    If you take Rich's lyrics seriously, she is one angry and frustrated woman - but also a pretty honest one. For every 'Wild Dogs', with it's bitter focus on revenge, there is the vulnerability of 'When I See you Tonight' and the acceptance of responsibility for her fate of 'Three Time Loser'.
    Rich has a new set of Grievous Angels in tow for her local shows - Nick Volk from The Rectifiers on bass, Mat Hayden (who also plays in Lisa Miller's band) on keyboards and and James McGuiness (sic) (James McIness) on guitar. They're young and they rock, which is an important point to make about Rich's music. She may have country roots but she loves to rock. In getting her new band, she was careful to choose a guitarist who would help make that clear. Tonight I think they succeeded. The album is a nice piece of work that expands upon thew style and lyrical content of Rich's earlier EP material. It's more personal and intimate that say 'Wild Dogs', and just perfect for performing at the Continental. I couldn't really fault tonight's show except to say that the Grievous Angels' cohesion will improve the more they play together. This isn't to say they were out of step with each other, just that their backing will become more assured. As for Rich herself, well she has been playing music for a long time and is really confident, whether on her own or with a band. Take any opportunity you can to see her before she heads off back to the US early next year.

more interviews next page