Johnny Dowd released Wrong Side of Memphis at the age of 50. It was his debut album - a dark and scary piece of work from a very late starter. It was all about love, murder and retribution and it seemed like this furniture removal man from Oklahoma had plenty on his mind. This was lo-fi, murky stuff which quickly brought him to the attention of the alt-country crowd which eagerly awaited album No 2: Pictures From Life's Other Side (1999) - an equally disturbing journey into the dark heart of romance. The sound was harder, but the mood was something spookily similar.
The third album, Temporary Shelter, is just out. It's even scarier than the first two - and much less country. It's as if Norman Bates had lived to 60 and suddenly decided to make brand new music of his own. Some of the melodies come from heavy metal, the sounds come from Moogs and nightmares and the lyrics come from somewhere none of us have never been. All in all, it's a dark mystery indeed and, sonically, a very long way from Oklahoma in the 1950s.
"The only records that were available were sold in a store that sold washing machines. I don't know how they picked them but, at any given time, there'd have been maybe 30 albums. I think they were just random and they didn't even know what they were. But they did have Hank Williams's Luke The Drifter album - the one where he does the poems - and also James Brown Live at the Apollo. I spent many an hour in front of the mirror dancing around and I had that whole introduction down. That album is like the beginning and end of all good music. It's got great musicianship but its also as wild as Hell. It's got everything - the emotion and the technique."
Although born in Fortworth, Texas, Dowd grew up in rural Oklahoma "listening to the radio and driving around in Daddy's car". Perhaps surprisingly, country music didn't feature at all and Dowd considered himself a bit of a beatnik - spending a lot of time reading and even writing the odd poem. But it was music which would later become his "religion" - and it all happened in that washing machine store where he first felt the lure of another world waiting to be explored.
"I started exploring black music. You'd have to go looking for the more traditional blues, but I liked people like The Five Royales and Bobby Blue Bland. And that wasn't something you had to search out too much because there was a lot of it on the radio at the time. It was just the sound of it - it had the feel of an alien and more exciting form of life. And that was real appealing to me. I was just a typical white guy lost in blues and I was snobbish on that. I hated all the English groups and thought they were the Devil's spawn."
Dowd sums up his early days as follows: "Played sports, listened to music, fell in love, left home at 17, messed around, got drafted, couple of years in the army, got out, got married, got divorced two weeks after, messed around, many years wasted. Got a guitar at 30." And that last detail is the odd part of this particularly odd rock 'n' roll tale. When Johnny Dowd bought that guitar (at the age of 30) it certainly wasn't for the usual rock 'n' roll reasons.
"I'd done all the other stuff - the drugs, chased girls, driven around and I was beginning to see that wasn't going to be that much fun at the age of 60. But then I'd see blues guys at 60, 70 and 80 playing music and that was part of the motivation. I wanted to have something that they couldn't take away from me - something that time couldn't take away unless I broke both my arms. I just wanted to be able to do something when I was old - something that I would still enjoy. My first idea was to be a red hot guitar player by the time I was 40. Then when I was 40 and I was still playing the same three licks I was playing when I was 30, I realised there was no future for me as a guitar player. I couldn't get into a band and I wasn't really sharp enough musically to pick up other people's songs. So there you are - I started doing my own."
Quite what people made of his songs is one thing. What they made of Johnny Dowd is quite another. Dark songs of violence and death were nothing new, but there is always that desire on the part of the listener to believe that the singer just might be singing about himself. And Dowd is absolutely certain to be viewed by anybody who hears him as a very strange man indeed. The sound of his voice, the look in his eyes and the noise produced by his band can only add to it. We know well that Johnny Cash never "shot a man in Reno just to watch him die" - but even so.
"Even when people seem like they're singing a straight autobiographical song, they're still in character. You can pretend to be Robin Hood or you can pretend to be yourself and it doesn't seem that much different to me - once it's on paper it's fiction anyway. But yeah, people have been disappointed that I'm not a mass murderer or something. I'd be a more interesting person if I'd killed a few people. And I know a lot of rock stars got into living up to the image but I don't really feel that kind of pressure - to pretend to be anything. Maybe if was younger I would? But just pretending to be myself is a big enough burden."
There is a lot of darkness in one corner of American music these days. The altcountry bunch are outdoing each other with revived and brand new murder ballads, and the twisted melancholy of people such as Tom Waits is being been hauled by others into seriously lo-fi depths. It can be fun, it can be chilling - but it can also be a pretence which is downright daft. There's nothing worse than affected weirdness, nothing quite as silly than bogus misery. But somehow Johnny Dowd, singer and removal man, seems absolutely for real.
"Yeah, there's always a danger. I'm sure there's some people who think that there is posturing in what I do. And you are always in danger of being a parody of yourself. In fact, to me I think that's the biggest risk in the whole thing - to become a cartoon version of yourself and I think that can easily happen. But I'm the kind of person with that superstition that if you expect the worst, that way you'll keep it from happening. If I write enough songs about violence then nobody will beat me up. If I write enough songs about dying then maybe I won't die. I think there's a lot of that psychology in my head and I think that's where a lot of the darkness comes from."
Temporary Shelter is on Independent Records