Nov. 25, 1977 feature story: Nashville songwriter Even Stevens

 

Doing lunch with a man on his way to becoming one of Nashville’s most successful songwriters. 

Nov. 25, 1977 Gusto feature story

A New Tunesmith 

          The first thing you want to ask a guy named Even Stevens is what’s his real name. Stevens, sitting in front of a Bloody Mary in Sebastian’s Restaurant on Main Street, says he isn’t telling. He’s not telling his age either, but anywhere in the upper 20s is a good guess.

          Those matters out of the way, Stevens proves to be a most personable kind of fellow with a sunny, slightly wacky sensibility. Maybe that’s why he’s starting to do so well as a songwriting collaborator in Nashville.

          He’s in Buffalo to wrap up a promotional swing through Upstate New York, the first place outside New Orleans where his debut album, “Thorn on the Rose,” has gotten attention.

          His co-authorship on Eddie Rabbitt hits like “Drinkin’ My Baby off My Mind” introduced him to the country music stations. What made album-oriented FM programmers take notice, though, was his newest writing partner – former Playboy cartoonist Shel Silverstein, the lusty genius behind Dr. Hook’s hits “Sylvia’s Mother” and “Cover of Rolling Stone.”

          Stevens’ debut is studded with Silverstein, it turns out. He lent “The King of Country Music Meets the Queen of Rock & Roll,” on which Stevens duets convincingly with his girlfriend, singer Sherry Grooms. “She’s in the Toothpaste Commercial” adds a dab of sentimental irony. And then there’s the irresistible “Vanilla,” where all the pleasures of life are available in only one flavor.

          The Stevens-Silverstein collaborations go from wistfully battered (“Too Many Nights Alone”) to bizarre (“I’m from Outer Space”). The Stevens-Rabbitt tunes touch the more commonplace themes of nostalgia (“Delta Queen”) and religion (“A Piece of the Rock”). Joining Stevens for that one are his minister father and his sister, both gospel singers from around Cincinnati.

          He’d played guitar with his family as a teenager, then wound up in San Francisco, serving in the Coast Guard, playing folk clubs and deciding he wanted to be a writer. Back in Cincinnati in 1970, he was working as a deejay when he got a call from an uncle in Nashville.

          “He heard that I was playing in clubs and writing songs, so he sent word that if I wanted to come down and see if my songs were any good, he would put me up for a couple weeks,” Stevens says. “I wasn’t writing country music at all at the time.”

          As Stevens will tell you, it takes more than a couple weeks to get anywhere as a songwriter in Nashville. He’s been there seven years now. It was two years before he met Rabbitt, who wrote Elvis Presley’s hit, “Kentucky Rain,” at a party. They hung around together, moved into a big duplex and wrote a few hundred songs. He met Silverstein in similar fashion.

          “Almost a year ago,” Stevens relates. “I just sort of happened to pick him up while he was walking down the street in Nashville. He was on his way to the airport, but he decided to stay a couple more weeks. We wrote about 30 songs together. We’d write five or six a day sometimes. I write a lot of songs, but it comes out to one out of 30 that’s any good, that’s a special song.”

          Aside from Rabbitt’s hits, his special songs include George Jones’ “If I Could Put Them All Together (I’d Have You),” Stella Parton and Sammi Smith have recorded his tunes. They can work for him too. His 1975 single of “Let the Little Boy Dream” made the Top 40 on the country charts and put him on an eight-month tour with Sammi Smith.

          “I’ve been a barber, a Morse Code operator and a pottery maker,” Stevens says as the wings arrive, “but writing – it’s the best life in the world. There’s no hours, no boss and you just get paid for playing. This may sound trite, but I just want to be able to make more records. I don’t want to have to worry about success.”

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IN THE PHOTO: Even Stevens playing a guitar embossed with the titles of some of his hits.  

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FOOTNOTE: His real name is Bruce Stevens, or maybe it’s Eddie Stevens, but there’s no question about his collaborations on 11 No. 1 country hits – notably Eddie Rabbitt’s 1980 “I Love a Rainy Night.” By the time he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2015, he’d won 55 writing honors from BMI and a ton of other awards (including some for his  jingles for Miller Beer). He’s had songs picked up by everyone from Dolly Parton (“It’s Such a Heartache,” a track on her 1985 “Real Love” album) to Elvis Costello, who did that George Jones track, “If I Could Put Them All Together (I’d Have You”).

Stevens quickly decided he liked writing and producing better than performing and putting out his own albums. With another writing partner, David Malloy, he built an award-winning recording facility, Emerald Sound Studios, on Music Row. He summed it all up in 2015 in a memoir, “Someday I’m Gonna Rent This Town.”