Dana Cooper's DC3 released an indie single, pleadingly titled "Give Us the Money," in 1983, an eponymous self-produced cassette in 1985, and another called Perpetual Man in 1986, but Houston never quite bounced back from the oil bust, and never quite caught on to the more rock-oriented DC3. Come 1988, Cooper and Linda, his wife of 16 years, decided a move was in order, and the town they chose was the home of country music, Nashville, Tennessee.
"I'd never set foot in Nashville. I always bypassed it. Nashville to me, all through the '70s and '80s, there was nothing coming out of it that I gave a damn about."
But the folk singer's trade is much like the migrant worker's; you follow the work. In the same way that he'd been drawn to Houston a decade before, Cooper heeded the advice of old friends who had settled in Nashville.
"Geographically, it's a great place to work out of. It's almost exactly equidistant from Houston, New York, Chicago... it's a lot easier to travel out of than Texas for me. I had a lot of friends there, a lot of singer-songwriters that I've known over the years, and they kept writing me letters and saying 'Oh man, this is a great place, you should check it out.' So finally I went and visited and I was really taken with the people there, just a lot of real unusual non-country artists and musicians that have moved there from New York and L.A. because the quality of living is so scary in those places. And I was taken with the friendliness of all the people I met in the business. You could actually set up an appointment, go sit in somebody's office, go have lunch, play them a tape. It's hard to do that in L.A. or New York. So I'd go there every couple of months for a week or so and sleep on a friend's couch, go play the Bluebird and just check stuff out. Linda and I decided we'd go ahead and make the move. It was kinda scary, because I'd never lived anywhere for ten years in my life like I did in Houston."
The move hasn't made Cooper rich, but it has paid off in tangible ways. After years of trudging the song-publisher rounds, he's recently found peers such as Trout Fishing in America, Maura O'Connell and Rex Foster lined up to record his material. He's also taken on something of a guru-role in the city's alternative (read: not strictly country) songwriter community. "I get calls occasionally," Cooper says, "from writers that are coming through from other places, and they'll go to a publisher and ask who around here does this kind of thing, and I'm one of the people they'll refer them to. That's kinda neat. It doesn't pay the bills, but I have my place there."
Cooper's other place, the one that occupies most of his time lately, is the road, on which he tours almost continually, trying to make up for lost time in California and Texas, where steady gigs and recording obligations kept him tied to home.
"I just started doing the road thing a lot more, because as I've been doing it I've found that there are a hell of a lot of people out there that want an alternative to country radio and rock radio and pop radio -- it's all so limited on what they'll play on the radio anymore. These label folks are narrow-sighted, I think -- they're not seeing the immensity of the audience out there that's dissatisfied with what's being made available to them. I just happen to be in a place where I can play everything from folk clubs to rock clubs and bars and stuff, and it's interesting to me what's going on out there. We're selling stuff from off the stage and out of the back of the van, and it's paying for itself. It's obviously a very grassroots, long-term way to develop something, but you know, I'm seeing a little light at the end of the tunnel these days."
