Poltz still mining fertile musical inspiration

By: JIM TRAGESER - Staff Writer | Wednesday, January 23, 2008 2:42 PM PST ∞

It was a reluctant U-turn that led in large part to Steve Poltz's professional reputation and (relative) financial stability.

On vacation in Mexico with close friend Jewel Kilcher, the two then-unknown folk singer/songwriters were driving back to the States with a batch of new songs when a breeze blew through an open window of their car and sent the sheet of paper containing the lyrics to "You Were Meant for Me" out into the world.

"I was going to let it go ---- we had nine other songs, but she was like, 'No, you have to go back and get it,' " he remembered by phone on tour in Australia a few weeks ago. "Who knew it was the winning lottery ticket?"

Poltz admitted that co-writing the song with Jewel gave it a different flavor than it might have had if he'd written it all by himself.

"She said, 'We can't Poltzerize this one' ---- I wanted to have the girl come back and stab the guy in the face," he said, laughing.

"It's always fun writing with someone else because you always get a different twist."

That the song became a huge hit for Jewel has meant Poltz has had a bit of a nest egg to fall back on as he carves out his own music career. The leader of the popular local folk-rock band the Rugburns, Poltz hasn't achieved the kind of fame Jewel has, but he has found his own niche under the radar of the mass media, one with a fan base that's substantial enough to allow him to make his living from music.

Growing up in Pasadena and then Palm Springs, Poltz said he was apparently born with his love of music.

"Ever since I was a kid. I was glued to the radio," he said. "For some reason, it was always easy for me to learn the words from any song."

But he didn't jump straight into the popular stuff he was hearing on the radio, at least not as a performer.

"When I was 6, my uncle took me to see Julian Bream, the classical guitarist, at the Hollywood Bowl."

That concert hooked him on classical music, Poltz said, and he begged his parents for guitar lessons. Like many kids, though, once he got past the immediate glamor of owning a guitar and found out how much work was involved in becoming good at it, he wanted to quit.

"To my parents' credit they said, 'No, you wanted to do this, you're going to practice.'

"After a couple of weeks of tantrums over it, and realizing they weren't going to give in, I really got into it," he said. "It's hard to make a kid do something like that, but once I got into it, that was it."

He studied classical guitar for years, and says that's what his early musical dreams involved.

"It was pretty funny, because when I was 11 or 12, if people asked me what I wanted to do, I'd tell them I wanted to move to Spain and study with Segovia."

When his older sister began attending San Diego State University in the late 1970s, Poltz said he followed her.

He said at that time his musical taste was pretty mainstream, listing James Taylor, Boston, Steely Dan and Earth Wind & Fire as faves. But his sister was soon hosting her own show at SDSU's student-run radio station, KCR, and the LPs she loaned him to listen to started broadening his palette, with Elvis Costello one of the early new-sound artists to grab his ear.

At the time, he was studying classical guitar at Grossmont College but soon transferred to SDSU himself, before graduating from the University of San Diego with a political science degree.

While attending Grossmont, he began doing fill-in gigs on classical guitar at a Mexican restaurant in East County ---- he found himself getting paid for playing music for the first time in his life.

"They would give me like $20 and a tip jar, and I could eat a meal when I came in and again when I was done ---- and I was in hog heaven!" he said.

While at USD, he was in the choir, where he met Rob Driscoll.

"It turns out he was raised on classical guitar, too," he said of their early friendship. "Then we realized there wasn't much demand for that."

Soon they were gigging together playing folk-rock songs they'd written together, and eventually settled on the Rugburns as their name. Poltz said their first time playing as the Rugburns was fairly inauspicious, as they ended up paying the bar instead of getting paid. "We broke a yard glass, and they charged us like $35 for it."

Writing songs has never been a problem, he said. When he went into the studio for his new record on Pounder Records, "Traveling," Poltz said he took about 100 new songs with him. He recorded enough of them that a second CD, "Unraveling," also came out of the sessions and is being sold only at his live shows.

For Poltz, the secret to successful songwriting is to never throw away an idea, no matter how good or bad it seems at the time.

"Divine crazy inspiration will hit me," he said of his composing process. "It's weird ---- I don't even question it, but they've always come to me. You've just got to be ready for them when they arrive. I've never censored myself ----- it could be called 'Sugar Boogers' or 'Dahmer's Song,' and I don't care.

"They're like vomit songs ---- I can't even stop them from being written."

Steve Poltz with Tim Bluhm

When: 9 p.m. today

Where: Belly Up Tavern, 143 S. Cedros Ave, Solana Beach

Admission: $20

Info: (858)481-8140 or bellyup.com

Web: poltz.com

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