Book review: ‘Cruel to Be Kind: The Life and Music of Nick Lowe’ by Kurt Gottschalk

It all could have been wrapped up for Nick Lowe by 1994. He’d had moderate success and had earned favorable reviews. He had a couple of songs – “Cruel to Be Kind” and “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love and Understanding?” – that seemed universally known, though they’d come out ages ago. He’d even married into American music royalty by wedding the daughter of June Carter and stepdaughter of Johnny Cash, and the wedding was seen on MTV in the clip for his “I Knew the Bridge (When She Used to Rock and Roll).”

But the marriage to singer Carlene Carter was over and he hadn’t had a hit in years. He’d been in two supergroups (Rockpile and Little Village) whose concerts were heralded, but the records fell flat. He’d been around the drug abuse bend (a predilection for LSD sometimes left him unable to perform in the early 1970s), and now drink was getting the better of him. Not long after passing the age-40 mile marker, however, Lowe did something few pop stars manage: he grew up.

“I didn’t want to sing songs about being on the road again, or ‘here I am in a bar,’” Lowe tells author (and fellow musician and record producer) Will Birch in the excellent new Cruel to Be Kind: The Life and Music of Nick Lowe (Da Capo Press). “I wanted to sing some grown-up shit, about being extremely pissed off, because I am. And I needed to put this across and really tell a story like a proper geezer, like all the people I admire. . . . Suddenly I thought, ‘I can do this.’”

What he went on to do was a series of a half-dozen remarkable records, coming only once every three or four years, that were candid, clever, and quite grown-up, songs about domestic life (and the concomitant strife) that come from the point of view of the other side of the hill. He also went on to become a remarkable showman, playing solo concerts with a generous humor and a worldly croon to small but adoring audiences around America and the UK.

“Candid and clever” also works well to describe the biography of one of pop’s greatest songwriters. Birch interviewed friends, bandmates and lovers from every phase of Lowe’s life, but most significantly quotes from extensive interviews with Lowe himself. And if Lowe is a humble subject (“I enjoyed being the big fish in a small pool” he says of his early days as one of the breakout stars of the British pub rock scene), his biographer can be a bit overly laudatory (it’s debatable whether “there is hardly a popular music genre that Nick Lowe hasn’t tackled”). The two achieve a balance and, with Lowe’s hands-off policy toward the narrative, craft a rich and readable story about how he went from Lothario to happy hubby and from near acid casualty to near alcoholic to a class act that wouldn’t turn down a glass of wine. The book also chronicles the evolution of the nascent New Wave movement and the fascinating rise and fall of the Svengali figure Jake Riviera, who managed Lowe and Elvis Costello and co-founded Stiff Records, where Lowe was in-house producer.

But first and foremost, it’s a portrait of the singer as a young and old man and a hard guy not to like. To some readers, it might be surprising that he comes off as being as kindly in interviews as he does on stage. To others, the surprise might be that he wasn’t always that way. But either way, the book will cement his position as a pop songster for the ages – if not for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame then at least for the lover of a smart turn of phrase and a memorable tune.

Kurt Gottschalk is a journalist and author based in New York City. His writings on music have been published in outlets throughout Europe and America and he has two volumes of short fiction to his name. He is also the producer and host of the Miniature Minotaurs radio program on WFMU.