John Jennings has long maintained a solid international reputation as a producer and multi-instrumentalist. A longtime member of Mary Chapin Carpenter’s band, with whom he’s produced and recorded 11 Top Ten singles and 2 Grammy winning albums. His guitar playing and singing have graced numerous recordings by artists such as Kathy Mattea, George Jones and Indigo Girls. John was also nominated for a Grammy Award as producer for “Record of the Year” in 1993, and has won numerous Wammie (Washington Area Music Association) Awards over the last 20 years.

How’d you get started in music, the music business?

Well the two are different. I started in music when I was a little kid. My mom tells me that I could sing the national anthem when I was around two years old or so and then I took piano lessons for awhile. One day she sat my brother and me down and said, “What do you want to play?” I said drums so she got me a trumpet. I studied trumpet for three years and then I found out playing in rock and roll bands were more fun and put that down and started playing guitar when I was about fifteen. My brother told me some years back that he asked me when I was twelve what I wanted to do when I grew up and I said that I’d like to make a living playing music which I guess is pretty forward thinking for a twelve year old who doesn’t know his tail end from his elbow, but still. At least I said I wanted to make a living playing music not, I want to play music. And I didn’t say what kind of living I wanted to make.

So I started playing in bands and the first gig that I played, I was in sixth grade which was back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, well not that long ago, but it was a pretty long time ago. It was a school talent show and we played Sounds of Silence and Secret Agent Man and I played guitar and I didn’t play guitar again until I was fifteen ‘cause I had been playing bass in bands. But guitar players that I knew would be trying to figure things out and I’d pick up the guitar and say, “you can do it like that” and they’d say, “Oh okay great.” And I thought well I can play guitar, I should do this. I actually came to it kind of late for someone who has a little, tiny reputation; well I have a reputation as a guitar player for people past a certain age. So you know it’s pretty late for someone who becomes a professional, but it worked out that way.

I played in bands through high school, went to college for a couple of years as a studio art major and decided another bad artist was not what we needed. I got a gig, thanks to my brother, who was playing six nights a week in clubs in Northern Virginia and walked into a club one night and apparently there were looking for a new guitar player and I’m very shy and my brother walked up to the guy and said, “Look, have you got a new guitar player yet?” they said no. And he said, “Well if you don’t then you’ve got one now. Here’s the guy for your band.” So I sat in for a couple songs and they said, “Great, you’re in the band.”

I played with that band for a couple of years and then started playing in local Top 40 bands in the early 70s around D.C. I met some people who introduced me to a guy named Bill Holland, who up until very recently was the Washington Bureau Chief for Billboard Magazine, and was the first guy that I played in a serious band with – and the first guy that I went into a recording studio with, back in 1975 or so. And he was the first person that made me really think serious people do this, serious people make pop music, and played The Starvation Circuit in D.C. for the latter back end of the 70s. You know, go out play gigs for little to nothing and be late for the rent or sleep on somebody’s couch or whatever.

About 1979 or so, a guy from Bias Recording came into a club that I was playing at and heard the band that I was in and recommended me to a friend of his that did a lot of jingle production stuff. So the guy called me and I went in and sang a jingle. He put sheet music in front of me and I hadn’t read sheet music in well over a decade and fortunately it came back pretty quickly. I was never a fantastic reader, but I was a good enough reader that if you put something in front me I could play it. And then I started doing a lot of jingle work in the early 80s. I played in a band called Big Yankee Dollar around Washington, D.C. in ’79 and ’80. We did all original material, most of it was mine, and I think it was a good band and the guys in the band were great. The band lasted about a year & a half.

I did a lot of jingle work through about 1985 and then that sort of stopped. And then I met Mary Chapin [Carpenter] in ’82, we did some playing together, we dated for awhile and that didn’t work out. Fortunately, she got over it and so did I and we realized that there was something there that was probably larger than that. We dated from around early ’83 to ’85 and after we broke up (this is very much a matter of public record) and I know the story very well; it’s boring, but I’ll tell it anyway. So we broke up.

I broke up with her and I’m driving along in Northern Virginia one day and I see her little orange Toyota wagon and I go by and wave and she points me over and I pull off on the side road. I get out and walk to the side of her car and she rolls down the window and I said, “How are you doing?” And she said, “I’m terrible. How are you doing?” And I said, “I’m not doing too well myself. How can I make you feel better?” And she said, “Help me make a record.” So I had a studio at my house, a typical basement studio, but pretty cool. Sound Workshop Series 32 console, a Tascam 1” 16-track, a real reverb plate, the Yamaha GrandBias Recording and finished it up. Because basically, to be honest, I wasn’t good enough at that point as an engineer…I was a decent engineer but I wasn’t good enough to make that record as good as it could be. And whether that was my rationale at the time or not, in hindsight, it should’ve been. that I have here, an older drum kit that I don’t have anymore, you know, enough stuff to start making a record. And we were just going to make a record a sell it off the stage when we played. Well, halfway through the project we realized that maybe we should get a little more serious about it. So she got some money together and I sold all of my gear, I mean ALL of my gear and we went to

I didn’t know enough to make that record what it eventually became. So, at this point she had a manager who heard us working on the record at the studio and sat there and talked with her and they struck a chord and they got along great. So, she was pretty close to signing a deal with Rounder or Flying Fish, which at that point were the two major folk independent labels, when suddenly an A&R guy from Columbia enters the picture through, I think Gary Oelze at the Birchmere. He’d come up to take a look at a couple of other bands and said, “Well what else is going on?” And Gary Oelze evidently said Mary Chapin CarpenterColumbia Records” which is pretty [dang] funny; so here we are, twelve or thirteen million records later. You never know, you never know. is very cool. So he heard the mixes and called two or three days later and said, “I want to make you a deal. I want to sign you to

I think those days, for better or worse, are gone. Anyway, since about 1979 or so, which is about almost 30 years now, is all I’ve done is make music, make records, play, which makes me one of the luckiest people on the planet. It takes a lot of stuff. There’s a classical singer, baritone, who’s last name escapes me right now; his first name is Thomas [Quastoff]. He’s a great, great baritone, one of the great baritones and he was also a Thalidomide Baby. And I heard him doing an interview on MPR a couple or three weeks back, and this is a person who is a phenomenal, world class, classical musician which takes an insane amount of discipline and an insane amount of training. And someone called him, a young tenor singer, who called while he was doing the interview and said, “Well what advice do you have for young players?” and he said, “Well you know, just study and work and work and study and study and work and work and study. And he says, “Well what about career plans?” and he says, “You know career plans are great, but they usually don’t work out even remotely like you thought they would so it’s nice to have a plan, but what you end up with is going to be very different than your plan. So just keep that in mind if you find out things don’t go the way you thought they would.” I thought that was pretty sage advice for anyone at any age, frankly. Because – how often do things really, really, really go the way we thought they would go in any industry, in any endeavor, in any relationship, in anything? Seldom. Seldom.