When Lucinda Williams’ breakout album “Automotive Wheels on a Gravel Road” was nearly ready for release in 1998, the pinnacle of her record label desired to hire filmmaker Paul Schrader to make a video for one in all the songs.
She was intrigued because his resume included the screenplay for “Taxi Driver” and other work with Martin Scorsese.
She agreed to satisfy him at a Nashville restaurant.
He had apparently been drinking heavily when Williams greeted him at his table.
“The very first thing he said to me,” Williams recalls, “was,” ‘If I wasn’t so f–ked up at once, I’d probably attempt to get inside your pants.’ ”
That was the tip of the project — and “Automotive Wheels” did just nice with no video, winning acclaim and a Grammy.
In her recent memoir, “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I told You” (Crown), Williams, 70, reveals this and many other secrets.
A singer and songwriter with deep Southern roots — born within the Louisiana city of Lake Charles — her songs tell tales of affection, lust and loss, God and the devil.
Essentially the most jarring stories within the book are about Williams’ mother, Lucille, who suffered from mental illness.
She writes of a time when she was 3 and her mother locked her in a closet, because, her father told her, ‘You were being a typical 3-year-old and crying and he or she couldn’t handle it.’
“Once I give it some thought now, it sounds so horrible. How could a mother do this? But there was all the time my dad there to say, ‘She will’t help it. It’s not her fault. She’s not well.”
Much later, her father, the poet and professor Miller Williams, told Lucinda that her mother had been sexually molested by her own father — a Methodist minister — and a number of of her brothers as a toddler. Williams relied on her father for care and support, and it was his literary life that had an enormous influence on her and her songwriting.
Williams says she’s still working through numerous that childhood trauma, writing songs about it, but not talking about it.
One in every of those songs, is the title track for “Automotive Wheels.”
When her mother would go to a mental hospital for a spell, Willams’ father might take her and her younger brother and sister to remain someplace else.
That turns up within the haunting lyrics: “Child within the back seat ’bout 4 or 5 years//Lookin’ out the window//Little little bit of dirt mixed with tears//Automotive wheels on a gravel road . . .”
When Williams was 11, her family spent a yr in Santiago, Chile, for a poetry scholarship her father was awarded.
Upon moving back to Baton Rouge, her father met her future stepmother, Jordan.
He was 35 and Jordan was his 18- or 19-year-old student at LSU. Lucinda was 12.
“Jordan got here into the home as an additional guardian or babysitter,” Williams writes, regardless that her parents hadn’t separated yet.
Williams doesn’t shrink back from revelations about quite a few broken relationships with men.
Some didn’t even involve sex.
“Flirting could be very underrated,” Williams writes of musical bad-boy Ryan Adams, 21 years younger than her.
The 2 met in Nashville, but a relationship was doomed from the beginning.
On the opening night of a recent four-show residency last month at City Winery in Manhattan, Williams said she used to call those motorcycle-poet men she was interested in “beautiful losers.”
But she felt that was too harsh.
“So now I say beautiful misfits,” Williams says.
Clyde Joseph Woodward III, the boyfriend that’s the main target of Williams’ touching song “Lake Charles,” mainly drank himself to death, succumbing to cirrhosis.
One other one, Matthew Greeson, caught her attention in Los Angeles in 2004.
Eventually, Williams suspected he was selling the artwork off her partitions, and even a Grammy, to pay for his drugs.
Things looked up a yr later when Williams met Tom Overby, the person who would change into her husband — and manager.
He had been a record buyer for Best Buy in Minneapolis and had just moved to LA for a job at a record label.
Soon, Williams invited him to listen to some recent songs and share a bottle of wine.
Their next date was a Bruce Springsteen concert.
And after meeting Springsteen backstage, The Boss invited them to dinner.
Just a few weeks in, she could tell that Tom was different than her usual “down-and-out poet-motorcycle-bad-boy guys who could barely hold it together.
The 2 got married on Sept. 18, 2009, after a show on the First Avenue club in Minneapolis.
Tom had suggested they’ve the ceremony onstage.
And when Williams’ father endorsed the thought, calling it “perfect” because Hank Williams (no relation) got married onstage, there was little doubt about it.
