Filler: Live At Slim's, San Francisco, CA 3/27/94
Filler: Austin City Limits, Austin, TX
David Byrne: You were telling somebody here you were working on your car. John Hiatt: Yeah. My race car. David Byrne: What kind of racing. John Hiatt: Oval track racing. It's a little car called a "Legends Car" and they look like the cars that the clowns come out of in the circus. They are sort of small, but they're pretty fast. I started racing about four years ago. Being from Indianapolis, where the 500 is every year. David Byrne: Are they regular cars that have been worked on? John Hiatt: No. It's what they call a "purpose built" race car. It's a built chassis with a tubular steel role cage. It has a motorcycle engine and they take some parts from Toyotas for the wheels and drive tray and the axle. David Byrne: Did you ever roll over? John Hiatt: Haven't rolled over. I've taken some pretty nasty hits. David Byrne: An awful lot of your songs have been covered by other people. Some have been hits. John Hiatt: Iggy Pop. Great album. David Byrne: Do they have to ask permission? Can you deny permission? If you hear what they did and don't - John Hiatt: And you don't like it, can you stop it. David Byrne: Can you go, "No, no, no, not like that." Or can you say, "That's not the right chord right there. Really, I played something different." John Hiatt: Well, as you know and we'll tell the audience, once a song's been recorded anybody can record it. It's open season. If I wrote the song and it has not been recorded yet, then I have some say in the matter. If I don't want somebody to record I can say, "I'm sorry, you can't do that song." But once you record it, or it's recorded for the first time, then anybody can cover it. David Byrne: And real early on, I think before anybody had heard your stuff, you were writing in Nashville. For a company hired to write for other people. I'm curious how that works, how you do it? The whole Nashville music row-I've been there and walked around and gone in some of the little restaurants and- every table is talking about songs. And they're all publishers or writers. And it's just amazing. John Hiatt: It's kind of like - the Brill Building as I imagined it. Back when Carol King and Neil Diamond and people like that were cranking them out. David Byrne: But this is still going on. John Hiatt: Yeah. It's going on a lot and it's to the point where people make appointments to co-write songs. It's like going to see your dentist, but people do it. I was sort of the odd man out. I went down there when I was 18 and I walked into a publishing company that published this guy that I'd met down there who was named Bob Frank, a folk singer. I was very impressed with his work and I said, "Well,how are you surviving down here." He said, "Well, I write for this publishing company and they pay me money. Yeah, $25 a week. Like an advance." So I just thought, "Damn it, that's what I'm going to do." So I went into the same publishing company and played some songs. They said, "What do you want?" I said, "Twenty five dollars a week just like you give Bob Frank." And they accepted so, I was a professional. I was on my way. I was artistically successful because I was doing what I want to do, which is, write and sing. And somebody was paying me dough. David Byrne: You have a greatest hits record out now and - John Hiatt: "Best of," I think more fairly since none of them have ever been hits. David Byrne: And some have been re-recorded, or fleshed out. Does that mean you didn't like the original version? John Hiatt: No. Of the two we re-recorded, "Have A Little Faith In Me", originally was just a piano vocal performance for the "Bring the Family" album. And we tried it with the band and we didn't get it. It was a four day session. We were going to make the whole record in four days so you didn't really have a lot of time to work any one song too hard. And so I said, "Alright, screw it, I'll just lay down a piano vocal take, just to have it." So, it's just a song that I've always wanted to hear with a little more stuff on it. David Byrne: It's turned into a gospel number. John Hiatt: It kind of has, yeah. Well, Glen Ballard took it there on the modulation at the end. He heard some singing and I think it came out really cool.
