He’s Writing--but Bearly

Singer-songwriter John Hiatt has written hits for Bonnie Raitt, Jeff Healy, Eric Clapton, Suzy Bogguss and B.B. King. Bob Dylan covered one of his tunes. “The Thing Called Love” wasn’t just a hit, it was also the title of a country music movie starring River Phoenix.

And he’s conjured memorable semi-autobiographical lyrics, often dealing with his past problems with alcohol.

“I was gonna get up off-a that bar stool, just as soon as I could figure it out,” Hiatt growls in a song about hitting the boozy bottom, “Paper Thin.”

So it’s a little disconcerting to hear his gravelly, bluesy baritone coming out of a bear’s mouth in a Disney children’s film, Disney’s “The Country Bears,” which opened Friday.

“Hey, stranger things have happened,” he says with a laugh. “I’ve always thought of myself as kind of bruin-like.”

“He may be from Indiana, but he sounds like he’s from the Ozarks,” Tennessee-based music critic Wayne Bledsoe says of Hiatt, who has made Nashville and environs his home for years. “He’s the perfect choice to play a singing bear.”

And at 50, maybe it’s time for the cult figure country-rocker to check in with a new audience.

“I’d hear from kids who dance around to ‘Riding With the King’ or ‘Perfectly Good Guitar’ at my live shows,” he says. “So I’ve always felt like the kids kinda dig me. Maybe kids like the simplicity of my music. Rock is about arrested development. It’s not about the maturing process.”

So he’s reaching out to the younger crowd. It happened because Country Bears director Peter Hastings is a fan. He approached Hiatt’s agent.

“A bunch of people working on the movie got on a plane, flew in to see me in Oregon, where I was playing at the time,” Hiatt says. “Next thing I know, there’s these nutters from Hollywood sitting around a table trying to explain to me this band of bears and how they were gonna get a movie out of them.”

Hiatt’s been to Disneyland. “So I know the bears, man.” But the filmmakers lost him. Then Hastings explained it in a way Hiatt could understand.

“As soon as Hastings told me it was ‘Spinal Tap With Paws,’ I knew I was in,” Hiatt says, laughing. He wrote a batch of songs: “Let It Ride,” “Where Nobody Knows My Name,” “The Kid in You,” “Straight to the Heart of Love,” and the filmmakers kept adding more and more of them to the movie. “Started out, they were using two. Ended up with something like seven.”

He wrote tunes sung by Raitt and Don Henley, by Jennifer Paige and E.G. Daily. And he sang some himself.

“It’s like building a ship in a bottle,” he says. “For this, I had to look at it from another point of view. You’ve got to be in this band of bears. And let me tell you, it’s not that hard to do. Ever been in a rock ‘n’ roll band? All rock musicians are bears.

“I wrote the tunes, and they built situations around them. It was a little tough, because all I had to go on was the script.”

Hiatt’s favorite themes of self-discovery, romance, redemption from the perils of the bottle and the like went by the wayside.

“When you’re writing for yourself, it’s your baby. When you’re writing for film, it’s the director’s baby. You’re just aiding and abetting. You have to meet the filmmaker halfway.”

More than one music critic has noted that Hiatt’s complex lyrics--clever phrases that in lesser hands would turn his tunes into “ditties”--require more than one hearing to be fully understood. In “Memphis in the Meantime,” he sings, “Get your Chevette together.” In “Thing Called Love,” the verse goes, “I ain’t no porcupine; take off your kid gloves.”

“I’m always trying to simplify what I write,” says Hiatt. But even though he was writing for kids, “I didn’t feel I had to write down to the audience for this.”

And like the late Roger Miller, the country music legend whose live show was forever changed the minute he did songs for a Disney film (“Robin Hood”), Hiatt is already prepping his band, the Goners, for a little flavor of the Mouse on their current tour. They’ve added “Let It Ride,” from the movie, to their playlist.

Plug that one in with the title cut from his last album, “The Tiki Bar Is Open,” about pre-Disney Florida, recovering from alcoholism and the death of NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt, and you’ve got an interesting set.

“That song came out of a week in Daytona Beach, the week before the 500 the year he got killed,” Hiatt says. “I was driving home and I got the news he had died. The song is all about Florida, tourist imagery. I saw the sign, ‘The Tiki Bar Is Open,’ hanging outside this little mom-and-pop hotel in Daytona Beach. It was a comfort to know those are still around, even if I don’t drink.

“I saw the shuttle being launched. And Dale was killed the week I was there. So it’s just a little sketch of life there, at least for the week I witnessed it.”

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Roger Moore is a reporter for the Orlando Sentinel, a Tribune company.