Jeff Daniels was just nominated for a second Emmy for his role as Will McAvoy on HBO's The Newsroom, and has entered the cultural lexicon via his acclaimed appearances in The Purple Rose of Cairo, Dumb and Dumber, Arachnophobia, The Squid and the Whale and Pleasantville But beyond acting, Daniels' affinity for music runs deep, from his early days as a frustrated piano player to a folk-loving teenager who performed in a bevy of stage musicals. He's gone from putting on annual performances to benefit his Purple Rose Theater in his hometown of Chelsea, Michigan, to hitting the road for live dates, sometimes alongside his son, Ben. He also put out an album last year, Days Like These, and is currently in the midst of a set of shows at the Purple Rose Theater, running through Sunday, August 2.
We caught up with Daniels to talk about his earliest musical memories, why he used to stress out significantly more before musical performances than before his acting roles, his desert island disc and why he felt it was time to move into more serious musical territory.
Q : As a kid, what music do you remember hearing around the house?
Jeff Daniels: My dad used to play piano, he could play some jazz, he knew two or three jazzy improvisations, or maybe just one, to be honest. He loved Nat King Cole. We had a piano and he’d bang around on the piano, suddenly you’d hear these jazz chords and stuff, but he didn’t play that much. He told me I should learn how to play piano, so I spent high school doing that. I fell in love with Elton John and then just started trying to play like Elton John, which sent my piano teacher up a wall. Then I kind of gave it up.
The first concert I ever saw was Arlo Guthrie at the Masonic Temple in Detroit in 1970, maybe. I didn’t have a driver’s license, so my dad and mom took me and a couple of friends to see Arlo. He had just had “Coming to Los Angeles,” and all of that was going on. There might have been a lot of pot going through the Masonic Temple audience if I remember right. But I loved it, I loved the acoustic guitar, I loved that Arlo was standing out there with a band, but right front and center was an acoustic, and I think that’s where I said, “What is that, he’s not doing Top Ten hits, he’s doing Arlo Guthrie songs,” and I liked that, and that got me to Steve Goodman, and by the time I got to New York I saw him at the Bottom Line, a friend turned me on to Doc Watson, and that guitar that I’d bought at Herb David’s guitar shop in Ann Arbor suddenly got pulled out, and I was learning how to fingerpick like Doc Watson, and that was in the late seventies.
Q : Michigan had a lot of different kinds of music going on.
Daniels: MC5, I remember, for nothing else, that lyric. But I remember MC5, I remember seeing J. Geils Band, and just the energy of that kind of stuff really turned me on, I really loved…I remember seeing Elton John at Jenison Field House, probably two-thirds full, and I loved the energy of what a concert could do, what music could do. And I was an actor, I was going through the theater programs in college and then off to New York, so that was a whole other thing, but there was that thing that happens when a band walks out onstage and everyone leans forward and here comes the music, I never lost interest in that.
Q : So you could appreciate the energy of the MC5 but you didn't feel compelled to make music like that.
Daniels: No, I was an actor, I was supposed to be an actor, that’s what I was supposed to do. So you can buy a guitar if you want and you can sit around in New York and write songs, but it’s a hobby, because you’re there to be an actor, you can only do one thing. That was what was in my head for 20 years, it was just something I really enjoyed doing, it was very relaxing, it kept me sane in a business that doesn’t breed sanity, and it was a wonderful creative place to go that I had complete control over, which is not what being an actor is like. Being an actor, you’re at the mercy of so many others. It was a wonderful creative outlet, and that’s all it was, and I worked at it, but it wasn’t until 2000 that I stepped on the stage at the Purple Rose to raise some money with it. But there were no gigs, no dreams of being a musician, it was just something I enjoyed doing.
Q : Were you always comfortable singing in front of people?
Daniels: I was in musicals, and that was fine, I had no problem from high school on, that was no problem at all. But when I did walk out with a guitar the first time at those Purple Rose shows, there was a nakedness to it that I didn’t see coming, and the flop sweat, literally, I had pit stains down to my belt, it was just so obvious, I had to hold up my arms and show the audience, because I looked like Albert Brooks in Broadcast News, it was horrible. I couldn’t understand why I could be on a Broadway stage or be in musicals, but this is so difficult. The songs were mine, they were personal, so maybe that’s the problem, and I would do these shows at Purple Rose, a little Christmas thing or New Year’s thing, those were the only shows I’d do. I’d do one on New Year’s Eve and then I wouldn’t do it again until the following Christmas, and I’d write and get ready for it, and it was still the same flop sweat.
By the third year I realized, “Oh, there’s no character, I don’t have a character to play, I’m not hiding behind a filter.” You’re using yourself in acting, but you’ve got almost this protective shield called the character in front of you, so I said, “Oh, that’s what it is,” so who’s the character? Oh, it’s Jeff in a good mood. That’s who you’re playing. Now suddenly the flop sweat was gone. That, plus the woodshedding. There’s the whole thing of it’s just you and a guitar and you realize that you aren’t good enough, so you spend months getting better with the guitar so you feel like you’ve earned the 90 minutes that they’re paying money to see, and there will always be people better. I remember seeing Kelly Joe Phelps at [Ann Arbor venue] the Ark and going, “Well, I could only dream of playing like that, so let’s enjoy the show.” But you can get better, you can really work at it, and that’s what I’ve done over the last 10, 12 years is just work on getting better so that’s not a cause for any kind of nerves or anything. “I can play, here it is.”
Q : What musicals did you do?
Daniels: The first one, when I was a senior in high school, I played Fagan in Oliver!, and that was the one where people said, “Look out, there’s something going on here, this kid’s really standing out.” Right away, she put me as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, 18, blond, Midwest, don’t have a clue what Jewish is, but I’d seen the movie six times, so it was a pretty dead-on impression of Topol, I must say. I remember going to New York and within six weeks I was sitting in an agent’s office and he goes, “What have you done, kid?” and I said, “Well, I recently played Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, and the guy almost laughed himself out of the chair. I was able to step onstage and do things like that, and that’s kind of all I did, Snoopy in Charlie Brown, El Gallo in The Fantasticks, Harold Hill in The Music Man, Cornelius Hackl in Hello, Dolly!, we had a regular little amateur musical theater company going on in Chelsea for about six years, every summer we’d do one or two musicals, it was a great experience, I learned a tremendous amount.
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