Tom Rush's career of thirty-seven years has not only brought his own work to the forefront of folk music, but the careers of many other folk artists as well. Tom Rush was singing and recording the songs of Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, and many others, before most of us had ever heard of them.

Today, Tom Rush carries on the '60s folk tradition of the famous Cambridge, MA "Club 47" by leading tours with well-known and up-and-coming artists, bringing this traveling "Club 47" show across the US.

Sony has just released "The Very Best of Tom Rush: No Regrets" (Columbia/Legacy CK65860) which can be purchased through the Tom Rush website, or at your favorite CD store anywhere.

the TOM RUSH interview

Q: Tom, thanks for being with us today. The big news, of course, is Sony/Legacy's new release of "The Very Best of Tom Rush: No Regrets." Maybe you could tell us a little bit about the anthology, and how it came to be after all this time.

TOM: Well, Sony/Legacy approached me, saying they thought there should be a Tom Rush anthology, and I said that I couldn't agree more. So, we went to work on it. They went back, and they licensed stuff from my early labels, as well as using stuff from the Columbia years, which they of course already own. But, I had to go back and listen to everything I'd ever recorded, which was a very humbling experience, because, some of it I don't approve of, and some of it I do, and that's what's on the anthology. Once we'd come up with a list of selections, they went out and got licenses from the other labels, and digitally remastered everything. Dave Marsh wrote some notes for it, and I wrote some song by song notes, and I am very pleased with it. It's a nice package. It's got some archival photographs as well as some recent ones. We cut one new song, the "River Song," and I got John Leventhal to produce that. He's one of the hot producers of the day, and he's wonderful to work with. We got Shawn Colvin and Marc Cohn to sing on it, and I really like the way it sounds.

Q: It is great. I love the song.

TOM: Thanks.

Q: You mentioned that some you agree with, and some you don't. How involved were you with a final song selection?

TOM: I was very involved. They kept saying "It's your CD, Tom. You get to make the choices." The problem was, we had a lot too many songs to fit on there, and we had to leave off about twenty. But, we all agreed that we wanted a single disk, not a double disk or box set, to keep the cost reasonable. So, there's another, probably twenty songs that didn't make it on, that could have, or should have. But, it wasn't that difficult. We agreed on about a dozen of the seventeen songs. Probably more than that, more like fifteen. We had to argue over a couple of others.

Q: I couldn't help but notice the conspicuous absence of a couple of signature Tom Rush tunes, like "Who Do You Love," "Drop Down Mama". . .

TOM: "Circle Game". . . .

Q: Right, good one. . . .

TOM: They'll be on Volume II !

Q: Good. I was also looking for the title track from "Wrong End of the Rainbow." I hadn't heard that for years, and thought it might be nice to see that surface again.

TOM: Hmm . . . that's one, actually in listening to it, I didn't love the way I did it. In a lot of cases, I still like the songs, I just don't currently approve of the way I recorded them.

Q: That probably happens with any kind of retrospective work.

TOM: Well yeah, your taste and your sensibilities evolve over time. There's a couple of songs like "Jazzman," which isn't on the album, but, I still do that in shows occasionally. I've put it back into the repertoire after a long absence, but I don't like the way I recorded it. I love the song but, if I were to do it today, it would be much more gentle and acoustic, and softer. It might be an interesting project to do some day . . . go back and record things that I felt I didn't do justice to the first time around. But, I'd rather make an album with new stuff, which is what's in the works.

Q: Now that Sony has released this anthology, is there any better possibility that some of the older out of print Columbia albums might be released on CD?

TOM: They're talking about that, and to make sure that it happens, all of your readers should run out and buy this one! If it sells a bunch, they're much more likely to reissue the other stuff. Sony/Legacy is talking about reissuing all of the Columbia titles. They're very into enhanced reissues, they'll put a bonus cut on it, or find something from the archives, or some more pictures . . . so they're not just into a replication of the original release, it's got something extra to it, which is nice.

Q: Have you heard Curtis Stigers performing "No Regrets," on the new "Bleeker Street" compilation?

TOM: Yeah, yeah, I have. They sent me a copy of it, I like it.

Q: I was pleased that the song remains the same, it just has a different face on it. The song sounds great, it really holds up through the years.

TOM: I do like the way he did it. That song (No Regrets) has been done a lot of different ways over the years. There's a rap version of it, a heavy metal version, and Ann Margaret recorded a version of it once. I don't know what she did with it, I never heard it, but the grapevine has it that she had it on an album.

Q: I hadn't heard the "Ladies Love Outlaws" version of your song "No Regrets" for some time, so I was pretty happy to see it make its first appearance on CD on the new anthology. I think that song alone is worth the price of admission. It's a great version, with Carly Simon singing backup, and Jeff Baxter playing guitar.

TOM: Yeah, I like those people, I like what they did.

Q: Speaking of the 1975 "Ladies Love Outlaws" album, that record seemed like it was building an even stronger bridge between folk music, rock, and maybe even some kind of wild new country. It was really ahead of its time at that point, so I'm wondering . . . what happened to Tom Rush after that album?

TOM: Well, after that album, I actually got kind of burned out, and I quit show biz for a while. I left Columbia and retired to my farm in New Hampshire, and I drove my tractor around and ran my chain saw for about nine months. Then I got bored, and decided that I had to go back to performing, but on a much more limited scale. I'd been working way too hard. I've been on the road for five years straight pretty much, and I was kind of burned out.

Q: I can imagine. So when you quit performing, were you still writing music, and playing at all?

TOM: No, I actually didn't do anything musical during that period. I was quitting show biz. Then, once I got back in the saddle again, I started with a very limited performing schedule. If somebody called me up and wanted a show, I'd do it, but I wasn't looking for work. I wasn't really courting the industry in any way.

Gradually, I got interested in the question of, where the audience for folk music had gone. I was being told that there was no market, or audience, depending on who you spoke to about this kind of stuff, and that didn't make sense to me, because a few minutes ago, there'd been millions of people that liked it, and they couldn't all have died, it would have been in the papers! So I started getting involved with people at the Harvard Business School, and various consultants.

There was a fellow from the University of New Hampshire that came to a show, and he said he was doing his business thesis, and wanted to use me as the case that he was going to study. He did a survey of my audience to see who they were, and it was a very interesting thing . . . they were all baby boomers, and they were doctors, lawyers, and dentists. That realization lead to my booking Symphony Hall in Boston, to see if those people would rather go to Symphony Hall than go to a bar to hear me. I'd been playing a bar every Christmas time for years. Sure enough, Symphony Hall sold out, ten days in advance, much to everybody's astonishment, including my own. And, away we went. . . .

I then started a variety of projects to try to figure out how to reconnect the audience with the music. I started a record company, a publishing company, a media production company, a mail order company, and a record label. I recorded some of my own stuff for my little Nightlight label. I never did distribute those very widely, I mainly sold them through the mail, and nowadays through my web site www.tomrush.com. I also sell them at shows, but they're not distributed.

Q: I know for a while, you were pretty involved in the management and promotion of new artists. Are you still doing that?

TOM: No. I started this company called Maple Hill, that did all the activities that I mentioned above. It was very rewarding fiscally, and emotionally as well, because the picture that emerged was a "yes, there was an audience" and they were frustrated as well, because nobody was doing anything to cater to their particular tastes. I worked hard at that through most of the '80s, and in 1990 my house burned in New Hampshire, and my studios and my offices. I had to decide at what level to rebuild, and I decided that I was going to stop trying to be all things to all people, and just go back to playing the guitar. By that point, it was pretty well established that there was an audience. We went out on some limbs early on, that I think emboldened other people to try things. The ball was definitely rolling pretty well by the end of the '80s, and I decided that I'd rather be a guitar player then an executive. Actually, it wasn't really a decision . . . I knew that all along. I just had to go through the business stuff to get to the point where I could go back to being the artist. It was a necessary process.

So now, Maple Hill is just my company that takes care of my schedule and my products, and I've stopped trying to manage other artists. I am still involved in putting together package shows under the name "Club 47," which seem to be attracting more and more interest as time goes by. I'm doing six of them this fall. I try to combine some well-known artists with newcomers, in the spirit of the coffee house "Club 47", where I started out in Cambridge in the '60s. I just finished up a string with Richie Havens, Janis Ian, Vance Gilbert and myself, with Vance being the a new face on the bill. I'm about to do one in Nebraska, with Livingston Taylor, Janis Ian, Vance Gilbert and myself, then one in California with Nanci Griffith, Matthew Ryan, and Lynn Miles.

Q: Quite the variety shows!

Tom... They're fun shows, 'cause I coerce everybody into playing and singing with one another to the extent that it's possible, or to the extent that it's comfortable. We all do some songs together. It's fun.

Q: Tom, it looks like you're playing mostly the older US made Epiphone guitars?

TOM: I had an Epiphone that I played for years, and it was my main guitar. It had been fancied up with some inlay on the neck, a naked lady with a snake. . . a biblical theme of course. . . .

Q: Of course. . . .

TOM: And that burned up in the fire. A couple people appeared out of nowhere, and gave me guitars. They are the two that I use on stage now, the ones I use for open tunings, and the guitar that I use for probably two-thirds of the show in a standard tuning is a handmade guitar, by a fellow named Musser, who is still making guitars. This is one of the very first ones he made, and I really do like it.

Q: When you're using guitars specifically for open tunings, do you use any kind of compensated string gauge, or do you use a standard medium set?

TOM: I use standard medium, except for the guitar that I play "Panama Limited" on, I use a .015 for the high "E" string, instead of a .013, because I do the slide work on that string, and it holds up a little better, and it makes for a little bit clearer tone.

Q: Which open tunings do you use, mostly?

TOM: There's three, I use a "G" tuning, a "D" tuning, and a "C" tuning, as well as the regular drop "D" tunings, you know, just tune the "E" string down to "D" kind of thing.

Q: Do you play mostly in some kind of open tuning?

TOM: No, mostly I play in standard tunings, occasionally with a drop "D", but songs like "No Regrets," "Circle Game," "Joshua Gone Barbados," "Panama Limited," and "River Song," are all in various open tunings.

Q: Who are you listening to these days, for your own musical enjoyment?

TOM: There's a woman named Laura Love that I like a lot, she's from the Pacific Northwest.

Q: Are there any albums in your personal collection that we might be surprised that you listen to?

TOM: Hmm, I don't know how easily surprised you are!

Q: Good point! I guess, something far out of the genre that we know Tom Rush to be playing musically.

TOM: Well, I've got Keith Jarrett playing some classical works and a collection of classical guitar works, and what else is in there . . . the Swan Silvertones, the gospel group.

Q: That's pretty good, not too wild!

TOM: No?

Q: Your press photos credit Benjamin Rush as photographer. Is he one of your sons?

TOM: Yeah, he just graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design, in Georgia, majoring in photography. I decided to put him to work! He does good stuff.

Q: He sure does...Back to the new CD, I really like the title "The Very Best of Tom Rush: No Regrets". "No Regrets" kind of says it all, especially for an anthology. I was wondering if there had been any other working titles for the CD, before that one was chosen?

TOM: Well, at one point they wanted "The Best of Tom Rush: An Urge for Going." I didn't like that. And then, they were going to put the dates 1962-1999 after "No Regrets," and I said "No, it sounds like I died." Which actually is sometimes a good career move for a musician. . . .

Q: A tough one, though. . . .

TOM: Ha! Anyway, they agreed and scratched the dates off.

Q: It's a great title, and it's a great album.

TOM: Well, thank you!

For more information about Tom Rush, including a biography, discography, performances and other projects, and to purchase "The Very Best of Tom Rush: No Regrets" (Columbia/Legacy CK65860) check out the Tom Rush website