True to the Roots: Americana Music Revealed (Bison Original)

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the

True to

Roots

Americana Music Revealed monte dutton

university of nebraska press | lincoln & london

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© 2006 by Monte Dutton All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America ' Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dutton, Monte. True to the roots: Americana music revealed / Monte Dutton. p. cm. isbn-13: 978-0-8032-6661-2 (paperback: alkaline paper) isbn-10: 0-8032-6661-8 (paperback: alkaline paper) 1. Country music — History and criticism. I. Title. ml3524.d88 2006 781.642— dc22 2006006822 Designed and set in Janson by A. Shahan.

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To my father, Jimmy Dutton (1937– 93), who was responsible for instilling in me a love of country music

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contents

Introduction

ix

Waiting for Jack Ingram

1

Music City

11

Praise the Lord and Pass the Weed

17

Home on the Range

23

Charlie Dunn, He’s the Man to See

29

To Thine Own Self Be True

35

Not the Way They Do Things “Up North”

43

Forever Young

49

Getting Religious . . . about Country

57

If It’s Broken, Don’t Fix It

63

A Man of the People

73

Who Are “Those Guys”?

81

A Unique Take on Cowboys and Indians

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One-Chord Song

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The Soul of Marty Robbins

109

Son of a Gypsy Songman

115

Six Days on the Road

123

Contrary to, Uh, Anything

127

The Last Angry Cowboy

135

Ain’t No Place for No Poor Boy like Me

145

Hondo’s Legacy

163

Demented Genius

169

The Last True Texas Troubadour

179

The Novelist Begat the Songwriter

183

Two-Night Stand

191

The Ones That Got Away

199

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Introduction clinton, south carolina | february 2005

While corresponding with my agent, Jim Cypher, about this project, I received an e-mail in which Jim enclosed a set of dictionary definitions for the word invincible. The book’s original subtitle was “The Invincible Music of Americana,” and Jim wasn’t sure I understood what invincible meant. I was a bit mystified until I saw his note, scribbled below the definitions: “Are you sure this is what you mean?” Or something to that effect. Well, yes. I called him and said that I had chosen the adjective because of my view that Americana music is invincible because it survives, endures, and even flourishes despite all efforts by the high, mighty, and monied to kill it. It lives in the steadfast obstinacy of Steve Earle, who wrote a song in which he imagined what it would be like to be John Walker Lindh, “the American Taliban,” precisely at a time when the country was roaring with nationalistic fervor. Earle wasn’t being traitorous, as a thousand radio talk show demaix

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gogues rashly alleged. He wasn’t condoning what Lindh had done. He was trying to put himself inside Lindh’s psyche and figure out how an affluent kid from Marin County had wound up training with terrorists in faraway Afghanistan. Sympathizing with the misbegotten and the downtrodden is nothing new for Earle, who also once wrote a song in which he crept inside the head of a murderer. Americana artists such as Earle, Guy Clark, Lucinda Williams, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Emmylou Harris, Charlie and Bruce Robison, Iris DeMent, Cody Canada, Billy Joe Shaver, Willy Braun, Jack Ingram, Robert Earl Keen Jr., James McMurtry, Hayes Carll, Buddy Miller, Pat Green, and Django Walker share little in terms of style. They go their own way, picking up influences from one another and heading, to paraphrase Kris Kristofferson, “in every wrong direction on their lonely way back home.” Americana isn’t a musical form. It’s a state of mind. Some of its adherents refer to it simply as okom: Our Kind of Music. It’s not formulated from marketing surveys, nor is it nurtured in the common commercial environment in which record execs insist on making creative decisions. Fans don’t flock to Americana artists because Clear Channel radio tells them to. The music is passed along in smoky pubs and dance halls, by Internet downloads and individual web sites and even, yes, by word of mouth. Remember when hillbilly songwriters drove the dusty back roads, handing out sample copies of their 45-rpm singles to disc jockeys at am radio stations? Such scenes pepper the plots of movies like the 1980 biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter and, more recently, O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Nowadays it’s next to impossible for the fans even to find a radio station willing to take their requests. Playlists are computer generated, market researched, demographically focused, centrally devised, and virtually unchangeable. x

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Yet the spirit lives. Singers and songwriters still rush headlong down Earle’s “Nowhere Road” or Leon Payne’s “Lost Highway.” That road is seldom strewn with megabucks. Often the best a man can hope for is to make a modest living for himself and his family. Sometimes he breaks into the big-time, at which time there are short-lived opportunities for his peers, if only because of Nashville and Hollywood’s penchant for cloning. More often than not, though, the musical establishment welcomes him (or her) into its arms, only to chew him up eventually and spit him out. Kelly Willis knows that feeling, and she is merely, in my view, the best female country singer there is. More people ought to know this. Nashville mishandles more than it handles, though, and those who make it typically wind up forgetting where it all started. They do it for money, and contemporary logic holds that only a fool would do otherwise. The Americana artist wants the people to dig his stuff. He may dream of the big, long Cadillac and the sprawling country estate, but he should probably be wary of what comes with it. It’s that trouble looking at one’s image in the mirror that often brings the dance hall dreamer (Pat Green’s term) back to Austin, Texas. Are you sure Hank done it this way? Fresh terrain—the late John Hartford’s “Gentle on My Mind” referred to “the wheat fields and the clotheslines and the junkyards and the highways [that] come between us”— nourishes a musician; it’s the fertile ground. If only Nashville could appreciate it. Too much of mainstream country music lies off the beaten path. Away from the music industry’s interstate highways—bordered by their very own shopping malls, convenience stores, and fast-food franchises—there’s so much to experience. i ntroducti on xi

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Waiting for Jack Ingram fort worth, texas | december 2003

The interview is supposed to be sometime around 4:00 p.m. at the sound check. Onstage at Billy Bob’s Texas, the Fort Worth honky-tonk that includes, among other things, honest-to-gosh bull riding on the side. Jack Ingram packs them in at Billy Bob’s. That’s because Texas has a musical culture all its own. Ingram’s big in Texas but virtually unknown in the rest of the country. That’s really a shame because Jack Ingram rocks. There’s a delay while the swarthy guy manning the entrance checks to see if anyone back in the concert venue knows who the hell I am or whether the hell I’m supposed to be here. Apparently, someone thinks, yeah, maybe somebody wants to interview Jack. I think I heard something about that, man. Let the dude back. So, I’m there. But Jack isn’t. Supposedly, he missed a plane from El Paso. Or maybe there was a delay. Something went wrong. Turns out he’ll be here in time for the show. The road manager says we’ll work something out. For a while I watch 1

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Ingram’s Beat-Up Ford Band complete the sound check. They do Ingram songs—“Hey You,” “Mustang Burn”—with someone else filling in on lead vocals, but then they just start screwing around, checking the sound with songs by ac/dc and God knows who else. My grandmother raised me to be inherently cheap in a nitpicky sort of way, and I already paid to park outside Billy Bob’s, and there’s no way I’m going to leave and fork over five bucks for nothing again. So, I wind up wandering the Stockyards. For five hours. There’s a lot to amuse a person. A big horse show is going on at the “historic” rodeo arena. I grew up around horses, and even though I haven’t ridden a horse in a decade or two, I sit around on this review stand and watch all the cowboys and cowgirls loping around, making sure their quarter horses are in the right leads, which is horse show lingo for the inside foot falling first at every stride of a canter. I guess you have to be in that world to understand the crucial importance of such things. There are many women, dressed up in their cowgirl suits, pink hats, and sequined jackets and the like, and it strikes me that relatively few of them really know how to ride. Many of them are holding the reins too tightly. All the poor horse needs is the slightest flick of the wrist, but some of these girls seem intent on yanking the poor animal’s teeth out. Too many of them are would-be beauty queens—I guarantee the teenage ones enter or have entered pageants at the local armadillo festival (Armadillo Days!)—and trophy wives. Some of them know what they’re doing. I bet I can pick who wins based on the way they hold their reins, but I didn’t come here to watch a horse show, so after an hour or so, I move on. I look at the menus of a dozen restaurants, all posted behind glass outside the front door. I take a look at who’s play2

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ing at the various clubs. I even hang out in one for a while, watching the afternoon act play to a mostly empty house and eventually leaving a couple of dollars in the mayonnaise jar at the front of the bandstand. It’s a big mayonnaise jar, restaurant sized, but there’s not much in it. I browse in a bunch of shops and am mildly inclined to buy a piece of cowboy art to put up on the wall of my house. What dissuades me is the thought of trying to get it back to South Carolina. Too complicated. But I chuckle to think of the scene at the airline counter, in which I’m trying to explain myself. I guess they’d plaster a fragile sticker on the back, which wouldn’t prevent the harried employees of us Airways from “taking infield” with it out on the tarmac. For a while—a long while, actually—I sit outside in the evening air, listening to classic country tunes being played over the pa system. God, how long has it been since I heard Cal Smith’s “Country Bumpkin”? When did music reach the point where rhyming bumpkin with pumpkin became passé? I mean, once you accept the premise of writing a song about a bumpkin, what else could you do but contrive a rhyme with pumpkin? Guess that’s why there aren’t nearly enough bumpkin songs. I have a steak at the Cattleman, where, since I was too lazy to go back to the car and pick up a book to read, I basically consider all the overdeveloped bulls, steers, and heifers that won awards at the nearby cattle shows and thus had photographs taken with their dour owners, eventually to be hung on the Cattleman walls and pondered by lonely diners. I wonder if any part of Clara Belle II ever ended up being served in this very steakhouse. Probably not. One would hope award-winning beef would earn a better fate. I’m wearing tennis shoes, which sort of stigmatizes me, but I’m glad I’ve got them because after wandering around for hours, my feet are hurting. Eventually, I return to Billy wai t i ng f or j ack i ngram

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Bob’s, where I have a beer and watch the house acts over in front of the dance floor. One of the things that would surely be different if I lived in Texas is that I would eventually be able to two-step. It looks so simple, yet I can attest from experience that it’s not so easy. Then again, I reckon I’ve never tried it when I’m sober. It’s one dance that defies any gap between generations—it’s practiced by aging couples and freshfaced youngsters alike. The older two-steppers do it with a relaxed professionalism, smiling at each other in an oldtime, romantic way, while the young whippersnappers gyrate around and wonder about “gettin’ some.” It’s second nature to all of them. Eventually, I move down into the concert hall, and there, freshly arrived from somewhere like El Paso, is Jack Ingram. Sure enough, he doesn’t show up until there are only minutes to spare. The interview will have to wait until after the show, but, yeah, the road manager tells me, just hang around—Jack wants to talk to you. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone connect more intimately with an audience than Ingram, who is intense and charismatic. He works his ass off up there, but the guy with the really demanding job is the young man who must constantly restring and retune Ingram’s guitars, for he is truly a string-busting sonovagun. And Jack has his dreams. He’s a damn fine fish in a pond that’s too damn small. Not that Texas is small. Oh, no. Them’s fightin’ words. But Jack Ingram ought to be playing coliseums, not dance halls, and packing them in ought to mean twenty thousand, not three. This man is truly what Jimmy Buffett many years ago referred to as “a hot Roman candle from the Texas Panhandle,” even though Ingram isn’t from Lubbock or, a late plane flight notwithstanding, El Paso. Ingram is a onetime psychology major from smu; per4

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haps that’s why his songs have a thoughtful quality that runs through the background of the roots-rocking melody. Ever smiling, ever gentle on my mind, is this wry, ironic bent in his music. When he talks to his audience, he is also making love to the people in it. He is playing to the hearts and dreams of the audience as well as to himself. “Did you notice what’s really odd about this whole scene?” Ingram asks. No one seems to know. “It’s Saturday night, man.” Doesn’t ring a bell. “Usually, guys like me play on Friday night.” A little rustle. “Us Texas guys, man, we get the Friday night shows at Billy Bob’s. Then they bring in the Nashville guys—Tracy Byrd and Neal McCoy, all those guys—on Saturday. And, man, when I saw this booking, it didn’t really dawn on me until it got close to time, and all of a sudden I realized I was playing Billy Bob’s on Saturday. “Man, that’s pretty fuckin’ encouraging. Maybe we can set a trend, you know?” Now the audience gets it. A roar goes up. Damn straight. Somehow the music of this remarkably talented, deeply profound observer of the human condition doesn’t resonate with the U.S. mainstream. Maybe he’ll have to wait twenty-five years. Although he’s Texas blunt instead of California cool, his music is appealing in the same way that the music of the Eagles is. But the Eagles still get all kinds of airplay on what is termed “classic rock” radio stations. Classic is, of course, a politically correct way of saying old. Ingram’s music is great, but it’s not old. He’s too rock for country and too country for rock. But he’s “by-God big” in Texas (by God), and that’s saying wai t i ng f or j ack i ngram

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something. That’s saying a lot. It’s a way for a man to make a living. It’s not a way, however, for a man to make it really big. Jack’s trying. He’s playing all across the country, but what that means is half-full, smoky clubs in places like Charlotte and Little Rock and Dayton and Colorado Springs. In Texas it means sold-out, screaming audiences at Billy Bob’s. God knows it would be tempting for him to tell the rest of the country just to go to hell. Jack doesn’t do it, though. Jack still has his dreams, and those dreams are what keep him moving, trying to bust the fences that have been put up arbitrarily out there on the range. Jack Ingram’s never going to give up. He just isn’t. Afterward, well after midnight, I watch Ingram signing autographs, and there is no limit to the attention he lavishes on his fans. He poses, he chats, he hawks cds and caps, and there is absolutely no consideration given to the fact that the line runs all the way out the door and it isn’t getting any shorter. Whatever it takes, man. When it’s all over, a strange thing happens. It’s perhaps the strangest exchange in all the ones that go into the compiling of this work. When finally—nine, ten, hours after I thought—I finally get to speak to Jack Ingram, he remembers who I am. I’ve spoken to him for perhaps three minutes, and that bit of small talk occurred in Austin two years earlier. He looks vaguely confused when I introduce myself. “This isn’t actually our first meeting,” I say. “I met you in Austin a couple years ago.” “Yeah, man,” he says, “you’re the nascar guy. You write about nascar, right?” “Well, yeah.” I’m sure I look profoundly taken aback. Ingram knows the details of our previous meeting. He played first that night, before Charlie Robison. I shook hands with him at the back of the hall, while he was hawking souvenirs, with Robison’s music filling the air. He took one of his 6

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cds, ripped it open, and scratched down my e-mail address, and then he gave me the cd sans liner notes. I’m truly impressed. This is a first-class mind I’m encountering. It’s a relaxed, feel-good atmosphere when he and I arrive backstage. After exchanging greetings with all the faces he recognizes—and, of course, he recognizes all faces—we walk into another room, and he closes the door. “Shoot,” he says, inviting me to begin, and I broach the subject of his music and how it somehow falls between the cracks of commercially successful music and how virtually everything I like falls between the very same cracks. “I love country music,” he says, then rephrases it. “I love good country music. But . . . it’s for the same reason that I like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty and Steve Earle. Man, it’s country music. Not country in the sense of, aw shucks, I’m a country boy, but country in the sense that it’s straight-ahead shit that’s going to knock you down and make you think about what you’re hearing.” He takes the interview away from himself and to other great artists who toil in relative obscurity. He turns me on to Bobby Bare Jr., an acquaintance of his and the son of a Nashville singer who, relatively late in his career, turned away from the establishment and embraced the outlaw movement, in which Bare Sr. prospered during the 1970s. I tell him how much I dug Bobby Bare during my college years. “His father [Bare Jr.’s] was hanging out with Shel Silverstein and shit,” Ingram said. “You’d love him. It’s exactly the same thing. All that Bobby Bare and Jerry Reed shit. It’s looking at the world with a perspective that’s slightly skewed. Very slightly skewed perspective. It’s great stuff, man.” Then the conversation shifts to Buddy Miller, the extraordinary guitarist with a voice that’s so achingly traditional that it walls him off from the mainstream. wai t i ng f or j ack i ngram

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“That’s one of the great things about country music,” Ingram says. “It’s just the way the system is set up. You still get it, but it’s filtered. Some of those Buddy Miller songs become big hits. The world still gets hit by Buddy Miller [by other artists]. They just don’t know where it’s coming from.” I tell him that we’re both products of a liberal arts education, the kind that prepares us generally for almost everything but specifically for almost nothing. I apologize for being a snob but say that sometimes I think my musical tastes could best be described as “literate country.” “Whatever the arguments are,” Ingram interjects, “I’ve always had what you’re saying. People can say it’s sophistication or maturity or whatever. My songs have always been about trying to figure out what I’m going through. If I can figure that out, I’ve always trusted in the fact that it’s going to have an impact on other people. If you feel that way, you can trust that there’s a whole bunch of others who feel the way you do and relate to what you feel. “A lot of artists think of their lives as so normal that they don’t feel compelled to write about it or sing about it. That’s really insecure horseshit because the fact is that being normal is really fucking hard. Everybody’s got a lot of shit to deal with . . . and that is normal. They think, man, my life is just like everybody else’s and nobody cares, and the fact is that everybody’s having a real hard time getting through it all every day, and that’s what’s interesting.” Then I remark that so much of country music seems soulless today, and I suggest that the stars of past years succeeded in part because they lived the lives they sang about. I mention Brad Paisley—incredibly talented, incredibly nice, but, to me, incredibly boring—and Ingram concedes the point but comes to Paisley’s defense. “Why I really love Brad Paisley is that he’s a fantastic guitarist,” he says. “He has a great career. But I want to know 8

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one thing. I want to know what they care about. I know it ain’t fishing. If he doesn’t have anything that doesn’t keep him up at night, God bless him.” I propose that in the modern age virtually all families are dysfunctional, and I offer some personal history to back it up. I tell him we all privately think we come from the craziest family on earth, and the reason we all think this is that we hide it so well. Jack mainly laughs, nodding in agreement. Then I cite the example of a country music icon, Tom T. Hall, who wrote songs that stirred my soul. I’d wondered once why the quality of Hall’s work had declined, until I realized that Hall’s life had changed because of his very celebrity and that once he became well known, he could no longer just hang out over by the Coca-Cola cooler in a backwoods general store and observe actual people like he used to do. People knew him. They wanted his autograph. He lost the invaluable advantage of being an everyman. I told Ingram that what I had finally come to understand is that once the world changed, the best a Tom T. Hall could hope for was to maintain a degree of clarity, enough at least to be able to make wry observations about the ways his world had changed; as I saw it, by maintaining some perspective in the context of enormous fame, Hall proved that he had never really abandoned the Muse. “A lot of great people do [keep the faith], but you’re right, man, that’s tough,” Ingram opined. “A man has to keep his perspective when all about him things are changing. “The great fear of every songwriter is that [his] life will stop being real, so [he] can’t write about it. Because my career has taken such a low trajectory, I’ve been able to see that, as things get a little bit better, it’s still left me with things to write about. There hasn’t been this dramatic transformation in my life. “It’s the way life is. Misery and insecurity, and love and wai t i ng f or j ack i ngram

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hate, man, that’s it. The best you can do is see the humor in it. That’s the best way to get around it.” Since Ingram is such a thinking man, he actually understands the reasons behind his own plight. He understands why ubiquitous commercialism exists even as he decries it with every ounce of his being. “There’s a lot of money at stake promoting a race car driver, an artist. Not a songwriter. Just an artist,” he says. “I don’t think I’m really out there on the edge. There are a lot of guys out there who go a lot farther. There could be somebody out there willing to make a big million-dollar decision on whether to sign me and give me a million dollars and push my stuff or to sign somebody else who’s found another way to be compelling by not being passionate. Somehow not as compelling, not as passionate.” And, yes, Ingram concedes that a Brad Paisley, judged from a record executive’s perspective, is a far less risky investment. “Of course,” he says. “He doesn’t drink. He plays guitar like a bat out of hell. That’s just the way life is, man. I just figure . . . you can be stronger than all that.” He pauses for a moment, collecting his thoughts. “If I make it . . . when . . . I haven’t given up on that shit. When I make it up there, man, I’ve got a thousand gigs under my belt. When I play in front of 135,000 people, man, I’m going to know what the fuck to do. “Just like those nascar drivers you watch, man, when it comes time to win that fuckin’ race, they’ve got to know what the fuck to do.” Jack Ingram is worth the wait.

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Music City nashville, tennessee | april 2004

It’s kind of fitting when I walk into the Ernest Tubb Record Shop on lower Broadway. A Gram Parsons tune is playing. Naturally, I wind up buying a boxed set of Parsons’s considerable, and all too brief, body of work. I find plenty to like at the downtown store. A few minutes later Hank Snow’s “Hello Love” wafts through the shop. The bins feature more Johnny Duncan than Garth Brooks and more Louvin Brothers, by far, than Dixie Chicks. Later that day, while I’m waiting to interview Jesse Lee Jones, I sit on a stool at the bar of Robert’s Western World, next to one of those old-beyond-his-years natives who mingle with the tourists. He may or may not be a musician, but he loves the music. The place is practically empty late on a Monday afternoon. A singer, Dave Foley, and his bass player, Rich Holbrook, are basically just practicing since there really isn’t anybody here for whom to perform. Foley is singing “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died,” a Tom T. Hall signature. It’s kind of an unconventional version since Foley has 11

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a gravelly voice. Down low, he begins, “I remember the year that Clayton Delaney died,” and without much of a second thought I chip in my own high harmony from the bar. “They said for the last two weeks that he suffered and cried.” The guy sitting next to me said, “Hey, man, you a singer?” I say, no, I just like to sing. He pretty much bellows at Foley, bringing sort of a halt to the song. “Hey, man, let this guy sing!” Foley says, “Sure, c’mon up, man. I’m good with that.” I give my new friend a little shake of the head and a drop of the shoulders. “Nah, that’s ok. I’ll just embarrass myself.” “No such thing, man, not if you’re having fun.” So . . . I end up walking up to the front, going up the little steps to the stage, in front of the plate-glass windows where my back is facing the street. Because I just walked across the street from the record shop a few moments earlier, I have a guitar pick in my pocket. I remember it cost fifty cents because I picked it up after I had already charged some cds to my credit card. The guy behind the counter didn’t charge me any sales tax, which was damn nice of him since I’d just spent over a hundred and fifty bucks on music. Funny how I don’t remember exactly how much the music cost, but I remember the pick cost four bits. Since I have that pick in my pocket, I ask Foley if I can borrow his guitar. First, he’s letting some yokel sing, then he’s giving up his precious starburst guitar. “Sure, man, go ahead.” So, completely unexpectedly, I sing the old Charley Pride song “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone?” because it’s the first song I think of and because I know I can play it without screwing up. When I get through—Holbrook stays up there with me and plunks away at the standup bass—Foley actually says, 12

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“That’s a damn good song, man. I gotta learn that one.” It’s called just knowing enough to be dangerous, and it’s kind of odd that a guy who can barely strum along, sitting on a block where the best musicians you never heard of play night after night for only tips and a few cheap, homemade cd sales, can walk up on a stage and play a song as if it was the birthday party of his niece or something. Pretty good deal for Dave Foley, though. I wind up tipping him ten bucks and paying another ten for his cd Breaking Old Ground. Foley tells me the old barn on the cover is where he lives and that he’s hoping to get electricity in it eventually. Music is kind of a buyer’s market in Nashville, where a few get fabulously rich but most are just getting by. Oh, how I hate the Nashville that keeps cranking out the same crude vanilla shit and ignoring all disreputable types who really keep the dream alive. I reckon nothing has really changed. Where once there was some fat guy smoking a big cigar who took an old poor boy from Georgia’s song and made a million bucks off it, now that guy’s a Lipscomb or Belmont graduate who’s a born-again Christian, but if Jesus came back tomorrow, he’d toss that blow-dried, immaculately dressed, articulate marketing type right out of the temple and, preferably, right on his ass in the middle of Broadway. When I came to town, I got offered two seats at the Opry. I would have liked to have had a backstage pass, just so I could observe the mingling of the young hell-raisers with Little Jimmy Dickens and Jimmy C. Newman and Jim Ed Brown and all those other Jimmies. The tickets came in a packet to my hotel, but they were for “quality seating,” and sometime during the show, I’d been informed by letter, someone would come to take me on a guided tour backstage. That way, I guess, they could keep me under surveillance, lest I actually try to chitchat with someone like Randy Travis or Brad Paisley. musi c ci ty

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I didn’t go. After hanging out on lower Broadway, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Years ago, when I was younger and had less sense, a friend and I took what we called a Jerry Lee Lewis cruise around town. We rode around in the Olds 98 that my friend’s mother, in some brief episode of insanity, had loaned us for a road trip from South Carolina to Nashville. We drank an awful lot of beer—I’m sure it was the cheapest in the supermarket—and listened to one Jerry Lee song after another, cruising endlessly through rich neighborhoods with “Drinkin’ Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee” playing wide-ass open. Back then I couldn’t relate to some of the tunes, like “Middle Age Crazy” and “Thirty Nine and Holdin’ (Holdin’ Anything He Can).” Now I get the picture. So, the two of us rolled right off Briley Parkway, back to which we had somehow found our way, and attended the Grand Ole Opry. Back then it was in the middle of an amusement park, but, since there’s a God in heaven, they tore down the park in 1997. As fate would have it, Bill Anderson was walking on the stage soon after we took our seats in the balcony. “This part of the Opry is brought to you by Goo-Goo Candy Clusters. Please make welcome the host of this segment, Whisperin’ Bill Anderson!” My friend was not Whisperin’ Bill’s biggest fan, and it didn’t help that he began singing a song that was really insipid. As I recall, it began with something like “Happiness, happiness, everybody’s lookin’ for happiness!” To which my friend began jeering. “Boooooo! Boooooo! Get that stupid sumbitch off the goddamn stage!” It wasn’t a capacity crowd, but a lot of heads turned. I think maybe even Whisperin’ Bill himself shielded his eyes to the spotlights and peered up into the balcony. 14

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“Man, you just don’t boo at the Grand Ole Opry, man!” Somehow I got him quieted down, and, by a miracle even greater than the one that didn’t have us already in some jail cell, we managed to watch the rest of the show without being spirited out. In fact, I would have respected the Opry more if they had spirited us out and put us on public display in stocks out front of Roy Acuff’s cabin or something. Tom T. Hall had a song called “Come On Back to Nashville,” in which he noted the danger of basing the music on the tastes of businessmen, record company executives, and the so-called entertainment experts. Those people aren’t connected to the working men and women of the country, yet they insist upon dictating exactly what people in the heartland get to hear. The tail was wagging the dog even then, and now the dog doesn’t seem to matter anymore. It’s as true now as it was when he wrote it, only now the fix is instituted by lawyers and computer technology and marketing surveys and Belmont grads with the fear of God and the might of corporations on their side. It’s worse than payola ever was, and there’s no chance that anybody’s going to jail for it. The fixers and blackmailers are considered too respectable. Meanwhile, the record industry in Nashville is going broke, and they insist on blaming it on the kids who are downloading stuff off the Internet. The reason those kids are doing it is because they can’t get the stuff they want to hear on the radio. Goddamn it. But I don’t hate Nashville. Not all of it. I only hate the part that matters to the people who don’t have any innate creativity at anything other than making money. I love the part that really matters, that is, in the eyes of the God whose name I just used in vain. I love the kids who play rockabilly in front of a dozen peomusi c ci ty

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ple in a little converted warehouse that looks like it would make an excellent set for one of the weirder episodes of the 1990s tv show Twin Peaks. I love a cowboy singer named Mike Siler, who’s obviously cut some cattle in his time and very probably been bucked off a Brahma, or that would be my guess from the way he carries himself. I love Foley and Holbrook—both of whom are from Massachusetts, for chrissakes—playing for tips at Robert’s and living in a barn without any electricity. The day they were playing at Robert’s, by the way, there were snow flurries outside, so you know Foley was looking forward to getting offstage and back to the barn that doubles as his home. I love to listen to a rode-hard-and-put-up-wet guy with his white hair—a touch of gray in the temples—combed straight over and herded into a ponytail down his back. Jimmy Snyder spends too much time name-dropping for my taste, but what’s a guy supposed to do when he’s probably been in and out of this city for at least three decades and he’s still playing for tips at Tootsie’s? God love him. I wish it were me.

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Praise the Lord and Pass the Weed charlotte, north carolina | may 2003

Cody Canada is a twenty-something kid with shoulderlength hair and, at least offstage, a soft-spoken manner. He is obviously more interested in doing his own thing than in becoming a monster commercial success. “Are we getting any play on the radio here?” he asks from the stage of Amos’ Southend late one Saturday night. Not much emanates from the audience in the way of the affirmative. “When you sign that recording contract,” he says, “you think they’re going to play your stuff from here to Bangkok.” It’s not necessarily so. In fact, it’s necessarily not so. Where fm radio is concerned, the corporate conglomerates dictate what it is that audiences will allegedly like. There isn’t much love left out there. The actual consumers’ tastes don’t have a whole lot to do with it anymore. When’s the last time you heard a radio station solicit honest-to-gosh requests? What requests there are these days are strictly limited to songs al17

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ready on the computerized playlists. There are individual exceptions, but popular music in this country has become about as manipulated as, well, politics. Canada’s—that’s Cody, not the country—revolutionary band, Cross Canadian Ragweed, is stuck in the musical no-man’s-land between rock, pop, country, and folk. It’s where a lot of good stuff resides. While cloaked in the respectability of legal paperwork, today’s radio scene is worse than payola ever was. The payoffs are still there. They’ve just got lawyers’ fingerprints on them. In the cruelest of ironies the term for it is Americana. Some refer to “roots rock.” Some say “alternative country.” A lot of alternative country is related to what country used to be, which makes the use of the adjective alternative about as much an oxymoron as jumbo shrimp, a Civil War, or soothing aftershave. Perhaps you don’t believe me. Perhaps you think you like what your favorite station is playing. ok. Do me this favor. Listen to what isn’t being played on the radio. From the small sample of people to whom I’ve exposed the music of Cross Canadian Ragweed and dozens of other entertainers like them, you’ll like the stuff off the radio better than the stuff on it. Trouble is, unless you stumble across a Cross Canadian Ragweed or a Bleu Edmondson Band or a Stoney LaRue and the Organic Boogie Band or a Cooder Graw or a Jason Boland and the Stragglers, you’re never going to know what you’re missing. Never heard of these people, huh? Baby, that’s the plan. All you’re hearing is what New York and LA and Nashville want you to hear. The fix is in. Nothing’s coming out of Austin, Texas; Stillwater, Oklahoma; and, well, Merlefest up near Wilkesboro, North Carolina, for that matter, that you’re ever going to hear unless you’re passionate enough to look real 18

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hard. An occasional respite can be found on the left side of your fm dial, where public radio occasionally plays the music people ought to hear as opposed to what rich business executives want them to. You think Cody and his band of hard-rocking revolutionaries are worried about protecting their royalties? He stands on the stage, well into Sunday morning, to exhort people to download ccrw’s music for free. “Ain’t nobody but the people already rich worried about those royalties,” he proclaims. The underground downloading of music is the road to the Promised Land for Cross Canadian Ragweed. I’ve never seen a band that seemed happier onstage. They’re all in their twenties. They’re all busy having fun, with all the knowing smiles, backward ball caps, and jaunty dances that having fun onstage entails. There’s Canada, the lead vocalist, occasional harpist, and dazzling lead guitarist. There’s Grady Cross, listed as rhythm guitarist but capable on occasion of righteous lead riffs. There are Jeremy Plato on bass and Randy Ragsdale on drums. The names Cross, Canada, and Ragsdale, of course, bear responsibility for the band’s name. Then there’s the weed. I tell Canada that my first impression from listening to the band’s cds is that the band seems really passionate about two subjects: Jesus Christ and smoking marijuana. His reply? “Pretty much.” “As you get older, though, I think it’s fair to say that Jesus gets more and more important . . . in relation to the weed,” he concludes, wearing a thoughtful and serious expression. I have a bit of trouble keeping a straight face. The band has been “growing up musically” together since 1994. Canada is a charismatic stage presence. He may be on his way to becoming the Willie Nelson of his age, although, in p r a i s e t h e l o r d and p ass the we e d

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fairness to both him and Willie, his age is a bit different. On the cd Cross Canadian Ragweed—often called “Purple” by their fans because of the color of the artwork—they sing about being kids, prison, suicide, booze and drugs, and quite a bit about Jesus. Canada lists Steve Earle, Merle Haggard, Gram Parsons, the Grateful Dead, and Lynyrd Skynyrd as influences. Those guys all sang about the same things at one time or another. Theirs is a music that speaks directly to the alienated youth of the heartland. It aches with a timeless resonance that exists in every generation. The crowds that gather to hear what young Oklahomans refer to as “Red Dirt Music” carry with them a certain hopelessness that this music embraces and articulates. It’s a Beaten-Down Generation, not a Beat Generation. In the wee hours of Sunday morning I sit at a table with the members of the band and Canada’s wife, Shannon. In passing, I mention that I think Elvis is overrated (as if he could be underrated). I suppose it’s not every day that a grotesque icon of American pop culture is openly derided, so I find roles being reversed and me the center of conversation. “Hey, man, I love Elvis,” Canada says. “To each his own,” I reply. “I only speak for myself. I like him. I just don’t like him as much as others seem to.” Then I go into a comparison of Elvis and Roy Orbison, pointing out that Orbison could sing just as well, wrote great songs in marked contrast, and paled in comparison to The King only in the crucial area of sex appeal. I point out that Presley appeared in what, by almost any measure, would include half of the worst twenty movies ever made, whereas Orbison appeared in only one—though it, The Fastest Guitar Alive, is truly a stinker redeemed only by the fact that it is so obscure. I further contend that for much of his career Elvis really didn’t produce anything but commercialized crap. The 20

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early stuff was great, and he had kind of a creative burst in the early 1970s. In my mind I’ve made my case. In the minds of Cody and Shannon Canada, what it amounts to is more like an irrational rant. Finally, when my diatribe runs its course and winds down apologetically, there is a short period of silence while the Canadas digest the information. “That’s cool,” Canada says quietly.

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Home on the Range dallas, texas | december 2003

In a sense Ed Burleson came along after his time. His style of country music belongs in the 1960s, and he would have felt right at home on Broadway in Nashville, playing at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge after a set at the Grand Ole Opry, back when the Opry was held each Friday and Saturday night at Ryman Auditorium. The side door of the Ryman opened right across an alley from the back door of Tootsie’s. It being the twenty-first century, Burleson stands with his guitar on a modest stage at the back of Bill’s Records & Tapes, an establishment on the northeast edge of Dallas in a little shopping center at the intersection of Spring Valley and Coit. A crowd of perhaps fifty stands in the aisles, sipping beer from a keg and munching on pizza. The occasion is a weekly gathering called “Fridays at Bill’s” sponsored by radio station khyi-fm, nicknamed “The Range.” Bill’s features a healthy selection of music by Texas artists like Burleson, Max Stalling, and Bryan Burns, but the Ska/ Punk Rock section is just as large, and while country fans 23

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are listening to Burleson tunes like “A Honky Tonk Heart and a Hillbilly Soul,” they’re rolling their eyes at little cardboard signs directing patrons to cds by Hagfish, No Class, the Swinging Utters, Propagandhi, the Jesus Lizards, and the Meat Puppets. Burleson, his baby face darkened a bit by several days’ stubble, makes no apologies for his love of the old honkytonk sound of Hank Williams, Faron Young, and Buck Owens. One of his new songs, a tribute to Owens, is entitled “All Bucked Up,” which epitomizes the good-natured mischievousness of a onetime rodeo cowboy with a twang in his voice and a twinkle in his eye. At age thirty-five Burleson is growing up with only token and wistful resistance. He has a new wife and a new baby. “I don’t never drink beer no more,” he said. “Don’t have time to.” But he sips a little from the plastic cups that keep arriving mysteriously on a stool located next to him on the Bill’s stage, and he winks slyly at the audience when he belts out an unflattering depiction of marriage, “Bitch and Moan.” There is no nation more pretentious than the United States, no state more pretentious than Texas, and no city more pretentious than Dallas. Patriotism is evident everywhere in these times, but it has a double edge in Texas, where huge, garish Lone Star flags fly everywhere. What takes a little getting used to is the realization that the Texas state flags often fly alone and without accompaniment from Old Glory. The singer-songwriter’s young son is Bennett Edward Burleson V. The original Bennett Edward Burleson fought alongside Sam Houston in Texas’s war for independence, or so says the bio at www.edburleson.com. The name skipped a generation because Burleson’s grandmother lost a young son in infancy. Her second, Richard Edward Burleson, is Ed’s father. One of two singers who performs ahead of Burleson at Bill’s, Brett Watts, unveils a composition of his own entitled 24

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“Between the Red and the Rio,” and at the traditional talking point for so many country songs—the beginning of the final verse—Watts delivers a soliloquy that would have made George W. Bush, another patriotic Texan, proud. Watts concludes by growling, apparently in reference to all states other than Texas, “Don’t take me wrong, you fortynine others . . . aw, what the hell, Texas has it all.” Out in the audience Burleson is a bit more thoughtful but no less boastful. “There is no more soul than there is in Texas,” he says. “Texas doesn’t get any credit for what it has. It doesn’t matter what kind of music—it’s here, more than anywhere. I don’t care if you got the Mississippi Delta blues. There’s more blues here than there is there. There’s more country than anywhere, more rock than anywhere. Texas is the melting pot of all music, if you ask me.” Burleson may get a little carried away, but his love of Texas is heartfelt and genuine. So is his music. When he moans and yodels, there isn’t any of the posturing for effect that marks similar devices in the music of, say, Garth Brooks. Even though Burleson’s version of Hank Williams’s “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” is as true to the original as anything I’ve ever heard, it’s also natural. He doesn’t sing that way because he thinks it will sell records; he sings that way because it’s the way he loves to sing. As a practical matter, it’s the only way he can sing. “That’s what I grew up listening to,” Burleson says. “I guess part of it’s because I had a good daddy.” Richard Burleson, who is both the singer’s father and drummer, is the lone holdover from his son’s original band. That band got together at a place called the Three Teardrops Tavern in Dallas, site of Burleson’s first regular gig. Ed gravitated toward music partly because he suffered a knee injury in a Fort Worth rodeo. While recovering, he started hanging h ome on the range

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out at the Industrial Boulevard dive—what else could it be on a street named Industrial Boulevard?—where he literally gravitated, with his guitar, toward the stage. What began as a bashful solo stab at a Sunday afternoon “newcomers’ showcase” became a regular Thursday night performance with a hastily recruited band. “I was very serious about rodeo,” Ed says. “That’s all I thought about. I rodeoed in high school. I was into it all through high school and went to college on a rodeo scholarship. I rode pro for three years, and then I started playing music. “I rodeoed after [the injury], but when I was hurt was when I first really learned music. The knee injury laid me up. I’d been playing guitar and singing, but I hadn’t written very many songs, so, when I was laid up, I started writing. When I had my knee injury, I started writing, and over time I got out of rodeos and into songwriting.” “Eddie has that knack,” says his father. “You can’t really tell him anything about what songs he ought to sing or what songs he ought to write. He’s got to have a song in his head, whether it’s an old one somebody else did or an idea that he’s going to end up turning into a song himself.” “I don’t try to write a family or a drinking song or any particular kind of song,” says Ed Burleson. “I just try to write a song. I don’t to do anything extra-ordinary [Burleson’s pronunciation]; I just write what’s on my mind. Sometimes it’s a help, sometimes it’s a hindrance. I just roll with the flow.” Burleson’s career got a boost from a friendship with the late Doug Sahm, a musical wunderkind who once played onstage with Hank Williams at the age of eleven and also played with Webb Pierce, Faron Young, and Hank Thompson. Before his death at age fifty-eight, on November 18, 1999, Sahm would branch out in an almost endless array of musical genres. He fronted groups like the Pharaohs, the 26

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Dell-Kays, and the Markays, and his Sir Douglas Quintet produced a smash rock hit, “She’s about a Mover,” in 1965. Sahm lived in San Francisco for five years and spent most of two years in Europe before returning to Texas in 1988. In 1996 he teamed up with Flaco Jimenez, Freddy Fender, and Augie Meyers to form the Texas Tornados. In these circles the reverence reserved for Sahm is almost messianic. Sahm, in the final year of his life, produced Burleson’s album My Perfect World. It was a bow to his own musical roots. “He was crazy yet smart,” says Burleson of Sahm. “One of a kind. One reason we got along so well is that he and my dad are a lot alike on musical influences, and they’re a lot alike personally. I understood Doug real well. He used to scare a lot of people off. I just liked him. The first time we met, he asked me where I was from, and I said Lewisville, Texas. He was into pro wrestling, of all things, and he mentioned the Von Erichs [a wrestling family based in Lewisville]. That’s how we got to talking. I gave him my album, and then he realized I played pretty much traditional country music, and we just got to be friends from there. He started coming over, and we started writing together, contriving different little songs together, and got to be good friends.” Yet Burleson is as simple and straightforward as Sahm was complex and relentless. Simple musings run through his titles and lines. Another Texas songwriter, Chris Wall, once observed, “A bad songwriter can write a good song, but a good songwriter can’t write a bad one.” Ed Burleson has an agreeable stubbornness about him. He plays to an audience varied in age but not attitude. They’re as set in their ways as he is. Don’t ever change, Eddie. “I’m sure I never will,” he says. “It ain’t in me.” h ome on the range

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Charlie Dunn, He’s the Man to See gainesville, texas | december 2004

In north Texas I’ve never ventured beyond Denton, and the first stop on the latest little informal Texas tour doesn’t take me far beyond it. I drive up north from the Dallas–Fort Worth Airport to the most modest of locales. East of Gainesville, only a few yards past the Tabernacle Baptist Church and down a rutted dirt road, is Pawless Guitars. A red Ford Escape sits out front. There’s a 1964 Ford Fairlane, waiting for restoration, nestled on the left side of the simple, flattopped building. This is where Vince Pawless works his magic. This is where he builds guitars, some of which are crafted from the stands of cedar on the adjoining family farm. Pawless grew up attending the church that is within walking distance. I don’t realize it until I get inside, but he lives in this simple little shop. When I arrive, Pawless is working on four of Jack Ingram’s guitars. Jack’s about to hit the road again on the weekend. It’s Wednesday, and Jack just realized that he was out of working 29

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guitars. He’s hard on them, and Pawless is the soft-spoken, patient, unassuming man uniquely qualified to come to the rescue. So, I just stand around, admiring all the homemade guitars in various stages of construction, while Pawless methodically fiddles, adjusts, shines, grinds, restrings, tunes, and, quite often, just steps back a moment to consider. All the while we chat about guitars. There is little sense of urgency in Pawless, who obviously takes pride in the fact that he doesn’t work by a clock. The little shop, which includes within its walls his simple little residence, is perfect for a man used to setting his own hours. He may finish Ingram’s guitars now, or he may get the job done at two in the morning, depending on what mood strikes him and whether or not he wants to work on it right now or maybe take a little detour to the next stage of construction in his own custom-made design. Here is a man whose livelihood depends not on a fancy location or regular business hours. Pawless Guitars are treasured for their reputation but not because of any relentless wave of hype. Word of mouth is responsible for where Vince Pawless is today, and it’s exactly where he wants to be. He’s got all the business he needs—about twenty-five guitars a year make their lonely way from inside these walls to parts widely varied—and he’s doing it all his way. I, too, became aware of Pawless by his reputation. We’ve never met until now, and yet, knowing I was writing a book about a subject dear to his heart, he has invited me to the center of his modest life just to take a look. He doesn’t expect me to write about him. He just thinks I’d like to see some examples of what he does. He’s right. The intricacies of guitar construction elude me. Guitars in general elude me. I play them, but I don’t have a clear differentiation in my mind of what separates one style from another. I look at guitars and think, well, this one really looks cool 30

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or that one has a wonderful sound to it. Of my two guitars, one built by a young man named Rance White in Lenoir, North Carolina, and the other an Epiphone, bought from a secondhand store in Nashville, my general reflection is that I like each one more after I’ve been playing the other. I think the high notes sound purer in the Lazy River—White’s brand name—and the lower notes sound more resonant in the Epiphone. The Epiphone, to me, sounds a bit more metallic, but what I call “metallic” may evoke another adjective in the thought process of another. Dozens of guitars sit all around, all referred to lovingly by Pawless, whether he built them himself, traded for them from someone else, or is mulling over what to do with them. One in particular draws my attention, and when I ask about it, Pawless has a story to tell. He has a story to tell about all of them. This one has been designed for an expatriate Texan who now resides in Colorado. It’s designed with the blues in mind, and the erstwhile Texan, who pines for home and perhaps his college days at Texas A&M, has stipulated that it be constructed wholly of materials indigenous to Texas. Built mainly from mesquite, it is both gorgeous and unusual. Smallish, its borders resemble the lines of a beautiful woman. It’s the waviest guitar I personally have ever seen, but as noted, I’m hardly the expert. I’ve only been watching guitars closely for about a year. Playing one will do that to a man. Pawless shows me a miniature guitar, one seemingly fit for the nurturing of a five-year-old, that he discovered was originally constructed by a man in New York City who stopped building them in 1904. The look of a toy is deceiving, he notes, and then shows me how it has been kind of crudely, but ingeniously in its own way, revised during the century that has intervened. We leave to have dinner at the Chili’s out on i-35 in Gainesville, return, and retire to the residence half of Pawc h a r l i e d u n n , h e ’s the man to se e

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less’s shop. I play my guitar, and since my host is a kind man, he charitably offers the view that I’m not bad for a novice. He plays beautifully, taking turns on separate guitars, but I can’t get him to sing. He doesn’t sing, he says. He shows me a banjo he has “doctored,” noting that it’s a first. He shows me what he’s done to it, and that leads to a discussion of what’s wrong with the country music business. Pawless recalls a country music awards show, televised while the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? was selling more than twice as many albums as any other in the genre, in which an otherside-of-traditional artist named Keith Urban performed ostensibly using just a banjo. “I was looking, right there on tv, and all of a sudden I noticed that this banjo, what Urban is playing, has six strings,” Pawless says, laughing. “He’s just playing a guitar that’s been made to look like a banjo. “I mean, he could’ve had the thing for a long time, but what it looked like was, you know, this is their way, Nashville’s way, of responding to the O Brother, Where Art Thou? craze.” I note that they could’ve outfitted an entire band with these instruments and that lead, rhythm, and bass guitars could all have been refashioned in the guise of banjos. The two of us agree that the whole sham is emblematic—perhaps even microcosmic, if that’s a word—of Nashville’s whole administration of the country music industry. Pawless shows me “his baby,” a 1970 Mustang convertible hidden in a garage at one end of the building. Yes, he acquired it by trading a guitar. A story about a session with Jerry Jeff Walker leads to what becomes my lingering memory of the whole visit. Walker and Pawless, it seems, had agreed to a guitar trade, with one trading a Gibson for the other’s Martin. Pawless made the long trek to Austin only to discover that the reliably unpre32

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dictable Walker had changed his mind. Instead, Walker spent about four hours with Pawless, telling stories and reflecting on his career. “That was more valuable than the guitar,” recalls Pawless. “Now, I don’t know if Jerry Jeff would even recognize me if I walked up right now, but for whatever reason, he was just in a mood to talk, and I wouldn’t give anything for it. I don’t know whether, deep down, he felt bad for having me drive all the way down there, but it was quite an experience.” I think to myself about how much Vince Pawless reminds me of the subject of Walker’s song “Charlie Dunn,” which is about a boot maker, not a guitar maker, but Charlie Dunn, in his idealized Capital Saddlery, where he works “out in the back,” is not too far distant in my mind’s eye from Pawless, retreating from the rat race to a place he will always call home and plying a valuable trade with guitars crafted, like Dunn made boots, with his own two hands. If ever I desire another guitar—and that’s undoubtedly going to happen—then I conclude, to paraphrase Jerry Jeff, that Vince Pawless, he’s the man to see.

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To Thine Own Self Be True austin, texas | december 2003

Slaid Cleaves lives in a modest wood house not far from downtown Austin. His travels have forced him to become adept at basic automotive repair, and the old van out front matches the image conjured up by some of the stories from the road he has posted on his Web site, slaid.com. Slaid.com. Perfect. A simple web site name for a songwriter who specializes in simplicity. Cleaves tells stories about simple people with simple problems into which they descended simply. There’s sadness inherent in their plight but also a sense of hope. Cleaves’s tormented people still have hope. “That probably started with me being such a Springsteen fan,” he says. “I have an affinity for people who are struggling, and that’s kind of stayed with me all this time. “Oh, it’s definitely observations,” he adds. “Things someone in my family has gone through, or stories I’ve heard. I’m inspired by movies and other beautiful stories. Most of my 35

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songs are observational. Usually there are one or two songs that are confessional.” His latest compilation, Wishbones, includes a song inspired in part by Laura Hillenbrand’s book Seabiscuit. “Quick as Dreams” is written from the perspective of a young 1930sera jockey who, many years later, in the twilight of life, composes an ode to a fallen colleague. Cleaves, like predecessor Jerry Jeff Walker, is a transplanted Texan, although he hasn’t reinvented himself as a Texan the way Walker has. Walker is a Texan; Cleaves just lives there. But like Walker, he grew up in the Northeast—Walker in New York, Cleaves in Maine and Massachusetts—and like Walker, he found a musical home in Austin after kicking around and living somewhat the gypsy life. “I never thought of that before,” Cleaves says. “I just met [Walker] last week for the first time. He organized a caroling thing and brought a bunch of people over to his house. We all got on a bus and went to the hospice and the children’s hospital.” There is an appealing naïveté to Cleaves, so much so that there seems to be a disparity between his quiet personality and his song content rife with tempests and inner conflicts. This interview seems more notable for Cleaves playing off and complimenting my questions than, well, complementing them. He is almost painfully nice, and the answers are thoughtful. There just isn’t much to them. I ask about his views on religion, and he replies: “Churches are political organizations. That’s what it comes down to.” Continuing on this theme, I offer my own view that people who suffer from aids are kind of the lepers of this age, to which he replies: “Wow, that’s perfect, yeah. I agree.” Maybe he plays all his cards in the writing of songs. After all, he makes money off those choice nuggets. He doesn’t have to rhyme to stir the soul, though. Cleaves’s Web site in36

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cludes commentaries from the road that are masterful, most notably a tale titled “The Perfect Gig,” which almost reads like a short story. “My folks were really into music,” he says, finally elaborating a bit. “I lived in Virginia until I was five. My folks, from high school on, were real music buffs. My mom was into folk and jazz and some country. She was into Pete Seeger, Mahalia Jackson. My dad was more of a rockabilly guy: Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and others.” I offer my notion that Elvis was overrated. “Yeah, songwriting-wise,” he says, “but Elvis was such an icon. He was so beautiful.” Cleaves is almost itinerant in wandering across the country from club to club. Well, not always clubs. His schedule lists appearances at Unitarian churches in New England; the venues are as disparate as they are extensive. “I was on the road almost constantly for a couple of years, yeah, just because I had gathered up all the things I needed to tour, which I had always wanted to do,” he says. “I had a band together, I had a record that was getting some airplay, and I had a booking agent, a little bit of history and a little bit of momentum. When my last record [prior to Wishbones], Broke Down, came out in 2000, I felt everything was in place for me to tour and take advantage of what I had going. “That was the album I had been trying to make for ten years. Everything just came together perfectly, and I started playing two hundred shows a year. I loved it. It was fun to see all the new places and to find an audience developing out there.” What Broke Down gave Cleaves was a niche. It was an album that declared a sound all his own. It was popular in the folk community, although Cleaves doesn’t really see himself as a member. “I just had all this music playing as a kid, and you know t o t h i n e own se l f be true

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what? It was really Americana music, even though at that time there wasn’t such a thing,” he says. “Woody Guthrie. Buddy Holly. Buck Owens. Hank Williams. I had a good early start, good early influences. “Of course, I found myself getting into what everyone else was listening to at school. Through friends I came across Bruce Springsteen and the Clash. Those guys became my heroes: the Clash, Springsteen, Tom Petty, Tom Waits. From reading about them, I found out who their heroes were. I rediscovered Hank and Woody through those guys. I remembered hearing those guys: Hank and Woody, Buddy and Elvis. I came full circle, and I think that’s what led me to becoming my own person music-wise. ‘Lost Highway’ is a great song, and ‘Long Gone Lonesome Blues’ is one of my favorites.” Cleaves went to college in Boston, at Tufts University. One can imagine him sitting with a guitar, playing for tips at some coffeehouse. “Looking back, you would think—but that’s not the way it was with me,” he says. “Growing up in a little town in Maine, I wanted to go to the big city. Boston was only an hour from where I grew up. So I moved to Boston and at the time, in the early eighties, I was still into Springsteen and rem, and then into hard-core shows. I wasn’t really heavy into that, but that was kind of an exciting thing, kind of bubbling up at that time. I never really heard of a lot of music that I listen to now during my years in college. I was playing on the street corners, in Harvard Square, but I went to hardcore shows all around Cambridge and Boston. As soon as I turned twenty-one, I started going to rock venues and rockabilly shows. I really don’t have deep roots in the folk tradition, other than some of the music I was exposed to as a kid. It was really more of a pop and rock and country tradition. “Yeah, I kind of am a folk singer now, kind of by default. I 38

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had a band in Maine, kind of a folk-rock band, an Americana band [the Moxie Men]. An acoustic guitar, bass, and drums. We did some Hank Williams, but we did a lot of wacky covers. “I moved here alone and got hooked up with the Kerrville [as in the Kerrville, Texas, Folk Festival] folks. It was only after I moved to Texas that I discovered more of the coffeehouse scene. That was my career for a few years.” To Cleaves the irresistible allure of the road is enmeshed in drawing emotion from an audience, no matter the size. “I think one of the most wonderful things about being an entertainer is making a connection with people,” he says. “Other things are secondary—if you’re making money at a gig or not, if there are beautiful people at a gig or not—as long as you’re making a connection. If it’s a small crowd, or at a coffeehouse, or a club crowd, you can tell when you’re making that connection. It’s a beautiful thing. “Connecting with people is a two-way thing, and that’s what we’re all after. That’s what I’m after, anyway. “There’s a great Springsteen line about not being able to tell the difference between courage and desperation. People who hang on long enough are the people who do well. Stick with it and work harder than everybody else. It’s not necessarily the most talented people who succeed. It’s the ones who stick to it and persevere. The ones who don’t give in to defeat.” “Connecting” is inherently about honesty, although that trait may complicate the means by which it takes place. Write the songs, then go out on the road and find the people who appreciate them. The collection of songs, all written by Cleaves, on Wishbones is achingly honest. Coming up with a worthy successor to Broke Down wasn’t easy. The prospect tortured him. “That’s what I felt when I wrote this batch of songs for t o t h i n e own se l f be true

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the new record,” he says. “I’ve been worrying about how to write a new record. Broke Down was the record I’d been trying to make for ten years. As soon as I finished it, I knew the next one would be really tough. I’d kind of achieved this goal I’d been working on for a really long time. I just felt like the songs came together, and the record came together, and I had no idea what to do next. I knew I couldn’t do anything better. It took a couple years of me worrying about it before I started writing again. I had to take the time to write and realize, after writing a bunch of crappy songs, that I had to start writing songs for my own needs and my own enjoyment. “I wrote a song about one of the chapters in Seabiscuit, which is such a beautiful book, so, you know, I wrote a song about jockeys. I wrote a song about illegal aliens. A friend of mine has quite a story to tell. They’re totally uncommercial songs. I put little things away. I can’t think commercially when I write. I can only think about what amuses me and what I find interesting.” The most significant development in the whole interview is Cleaves’s definition of Americana, the musical genre that is maddeningly difficult to encompass, what with the membership of everyone from John Prine to Steve Earle to the Jayhawks. “There are four or five different categories of Americana,” he says. “There are people like me: singer-songwriters with a folk-country background. There are guys like Jack [Ingram], who are basically rock acts with a more storytelling, country style of songwriting. There is also the alternative, outsidethe-norm, the Bloodshot Records, with kind of a rock background. All those Chicago guys, Robbie Fulks, and people like that.” Cleaves pauses for a moment, perhaps considering whether to deliver the clincher. Then, finally, he says, “The only thing that I can come up 40

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with, the only common thing between all these Americana artists, is that we don’t sell a lot of records.” How’s that for being brutally honest? But, wait, there’s more. The vision isn’t quite as pessimistic as it seems. “I call it noncommercial country,” he says. “It’s kind of self-defeating, but I just think . . . well, the Dixie Chicks, if they weren’t so popular, they’d be Americana. They’re not because they’re too big to be Americana. “I never even thought I was material for [commercial success]. I never thought I was talented enough, or original enough, to be a big star. I have this trade, you know, and it’s enough to make a decent living and pay off my debts. It was really hard, the first ten years or so. I maxed out my credit cards, and it was hard on my wife and family. When Broke Down came out and had some air play, I was able to slowly start paying off my debts. With my next record I’ll be debtfree. “That’s all I ever wanted.”

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Not the Way They Do Things “Up North” key west, florida | november 2003 & 2004

Havana is closer to Key West than Miami. A fair amount of Canada is closer to my home in South Carolina. The cultural difference is even greater. Where else in the United States does one encounter a rooster walking around, looking right at home, on a downtown sidewalk? Or a Chinese man explaining to a T-shirt salesman that the term flirt is not appropriate to the romantic process in his native land? Ethnic diversity is the norm, and it’s an oversimplification to equate the context with the presence of Hispanics or the proximity to the Caribbean isles. For some reason there is a lot of French spoken in Key West. The waitress at a seafood restaurant explains, when I query her about her dialect, that she is from Poland, and one of the highlights of my two-day visit is watching an Irish fiddler, one Bobby O’Donovan, sit in with singer-guitarist David Goodman at the Hog’s Breath Saloon. I want to take a four-hour boat trip to the Dry Tortu43

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gas, the site of an old American fort from the 1800s, but a few complications—we journalists never really get rid of them—intervene. So, for two nights and most of two afternoons, I wander around from watering hole to watering hole, listening to live music. The Dry Tortugas will have to wait. What mainly happens down here is “bumping into.” For instance, I bump into Chris Clifton, a brilliant guitarist whose wife, Sherry, (a) owns Hickory Motor Speedway in North Carolina, and (b) is the sister of Teresa Earnhardt, the widow of nascar icon Dale Earnhardt. I bump into a very loud, tattooed, bald, and gregarious fellow from a seacoast town in the south of England. The bloke is positively entranced with Florida’s appeal, he and his mates having partied their way from one end of it to the other. I bump into a relatively older woman taking her Pekingese for a walk and wearing a “Women do Have All the Answers” T-shirt. A woman I’m guessing is her daughter tags along. Based on a few minutes’ observation, I can attest to the fact that the older woman positively rules the younger one. I also bump into the most incredible parade of powerboats, arriving in town for the annual races off shore. The sleek watercraft have more in common with the space shuttle than the standard conception of a powerboat. During the parade one boat, dubbed American Dream, features two cute young girls, perhaps ten years old, singing “The Star Spangled Banner” over and over as they wave little flags. Behind them, more mature beauties toss beaded necklaces into the crowd. I bump into an older man, painted silver, who is standing on the sidewalk impersonating a statue, holding a toy pistol from which he occasionally squirts water at passersby. Attached to his cowboy garb is a sign that reads, “Your coins are my livelihood.” I work for a newspaper. Perhaps I should get one of those signs. 44

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The best music isn’t always on the radio. It isn’t always in a huge open-air pavilion or indoor coliseum. Sometimes it’s in a seedy little bar on a backstreet, and sometimes the performer makes his living not from royalties and fees but from the contents of a tip jar. Marc-Alan Barnette has written songs for artists like Shelby Lynne and John Berry. He conducts “song and performance evaluations” in Nashville to help other aspiring songwriters. He and his wife, Jane, who is a nurse in a small Alabama town, periodically travel here to play the 5:00 to 9:00 p.m. shift at the Hog’s Breath Saloon for the week. David Goodman typically plays the Hog’s Breath on Mondays and Tuesdays then heads back up the road to his home in Jupiter, Florida. “I’ve been around now for about thirty years singing songs and selling beer,” he says. Rob Sweet is a small, slender man in his twenties from Lexington, South Carolina, who traded in a formal education for an informal one. There were times when he gave blood every few days just to help pay the bills. He wrote a song about it, aptly titled “Bleedin’ the Blues.” Sweet’s learned a lot about life, sitting on a stool at Captain Tony’s, mixing in the songs of John Prine, David Allan Coe, and Johnny Cash with a few of his own and selling a few cds to the friendly, sympathetic patrons who drift in and out. Sweet is young enough still to be taken with the vagabond’s life. He seems oblivious to any ambitions of widespread commercial success. He just does his thing, man. Keeping his head barely above water seems to be all he wants right now. Chatting with the beer-drinking tourists between songs, he has a disarming honesty. He recounts a story about how he was once inspired by the experience of attending a Grateful Dead concert on acid. Stockbrokers and housewives nod sympathetically, and for a moment it is the young guitarist, looking older than his years, who seems to be living the good life. n o t t h e way t h e y d o t hi ngs “ up north”

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At the Hog’s Breath, Goodman plays a blues version of the bluegrass classic “Rollin’ in My Sweet Baby’s Arms.” An hour or so later Barnette performs a blues version of “Rocky Top.” Barnette’s own songs reflect the Nashville struggle. They are built around hooks. The clever turn of a phrase comes first, then the song is built around it. I don’t consider that the best way to write a song, but it is the way that is most commercially accepted. Goodman talks about life’s commitments and recalls his youth, when he set off in a sailboat with a band of friends, wearing little more than the clothes on his back, only to find out his mates had quite an extended trip in mind. It was the first week of June, and they told him they planned on coming home at the end of August. He actually returned home on September 17. And, yes, a song came from that rite of passage, one called “Isle of Trinidad.” Sometimes, Goodman says, kiddingly, “I think maybe I could come back down to Key West and get a shopping cart [to live in],” and it seems right that to this free spirit that idea would be tempting. Key West is obviously alluring because the musical scene there is unique and irresistible. Perhaps that’s because it has evolved all by its lonesome down at the end of a string of islands. Perhaps it is unique precisely because it is remote. A lot of it isn’t my cup of tea. The tourist culture brings with it hundreds of respectable types who don’t particularly care to empathize with acid trips. More than once I saunter into a bar only to be launched out the door by a tidal wave of Neil Diamond. Then there’s the one joint where the guy onstage delights in screaming profane putdowns at the audience. I guess that’s why the audience is there, but I’ve had a few beers and am feeling weary. I don’t even have a chance to order another lager when the guitar-strapped Don Rickles starts heckling me. 46

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I turn around, blurt something akin to “Hand me a microphone, asshole, and I’ll give you a run for your money,” turn again, toward the door, and walk out. Life’s too short. I know I’ll never get that kind of treatment from Rob Sweet or David Goodman. The quality of the bands at the raucous Sloppy Joe’s is impressive, but it’s all straight out of classic rock stations. Also, there’s something just a tad depressing about watching all the forty-somethings flicking their lighters at the umpteenth Doobie Brothers cover. Of course, they’d probably make the same observation about me. To each his own . . . we’re all growing older. It’s pretty hard to spend much time here without at least once hearing someone say, “We don’t care how you do it up north.” That wouldn’t play too well if not for masses of the orthodox willing to renounce the company line for a few irresistible days and nights. A year later, in November 2004, I return, and practically nothing has changed. I bump into Rob Sweet again at Captain Tony’s. He remembers who I am, and we compare positive reviews on the new Steve Earle album, The Revolution Starts Now. Rob promptly picks up his guitar—he’s supposed to be taking a break—and performs parts of a couple of Earle’s new songs. David Goodman still plays in the off-hours at the Hog’s Breath, and one night I catch him setting up Chris Clifton’s equipment and adjusting the sound. He seems authoritative and quite the perfectionist in this role. The chrome man is still around, only this time he’s down at Mallory Square, where there is a constant hubbub from tourists getting onto and off of cruise ships. Or maybe it’s a different chrome man. This one isn’t dressed up as a cowboy, but he still performs robot-like movements for the people n o t t h e way t h e y d o t hi ngs “ up north”

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who happen by and occasionally drop tips in his jar. Musicians even more ragtag than the ones playing for tips in bars stand out in the open here, playing mystical-sounding songs that seem to wed East with West. Hemispheres, that is. Or maybe it’s North with South. The last evening I’m there, I finally get up the nerve to pull out my guitar. I park the rental car nearby, take the case out of the trunk, and walk over to a bench in Mallory Square and proceed to start playing simple country songs. I could use a couple beers to remove the inhibitions, but after a few minutes of unease I find my voice and start to relax. Over the next hour, despite the fact that I don’t solicit anything, people walk over and drop bills into my open guitar case, which actually hadn’t been placed on the concrete bench as a tip jar. At one point, while strumming away between verses, I even smile at a woman dropping money into my guitar case and say, “Now, ma’am, I’ve got cash money, and I’m working steady.” But the small bills continue to trickle in anyway. That’s just the way it works out, and I feel kind of sheepish knowing that I may be taking a few bucks away from buskers who are homeless. As it turns out, there are no other musicians around as the day passes into night. I make seventeen dollars, and they become my favorite seventeen dollars of the year. The experience is gratifying, particularly when a man and his wife roll their toddler by in a little carriage, and the little girl stares at me in wonderment. She is positively transfixed with the silly man making music. A few minutes later she comes by again, and this time her parents let her stop and listen to a song. I ask the child’s name, and her parents tell me it’s Missy. So, I sing a song to Missy, who smiles back. Her father leaves me five dollars.

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Forever Young newberry, south carolina | november 2004

When I arrive at the Newberry Opera House, a charming concert hall in an equally charming town, I believe Robert Earl Keen Jr. is expecting me. I knock on the back door. No reaction inside. I reach for the doorknob; it’s open. I walk in. No one in sight. I look around, still finding no one. I walk up a set of stairs. Still, no warm bodies. Finally, I arrive at a dressing room door. Once again, I knock. Someone opens the door. Keen is walking toward me holding a plate of tossed salad. I introduce myself. He starts to offer a handshake, only both hands are occupied. I explain that I’m the guy who’s writing a book and is supposed to be interviewing him tonight. I tell him I’m early and can talk to him any time before or after his concert, still well over an hour away. Please don’t let me bother you, I say. By all means, sit down and enjoy your supper. While this little awkward exchange is going on, I notice a man heading our way from the opposite end of the room. He 49

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intercedes and asks my business. I tell him I’m here to interview Robert Earl Keen, but I’m in no hurry and will be glad to wait until it’s convenient. He tells me he’s the road manager, and he doesn’t know anything about any interview. Somehow, in the course of this, I’ve been ushered back outside. I give him the name of the woman in management with whom I’ve exchanged e-mails. He seems to recognize the name and hurriedly punches some numbers into his cell phone. While I stand there, he has a brief conversation, apparently with the woman I’ve just named. When he gets through, he tells me there’s been some breakdown in conversation, everything has to go through him, and, oh, by the way, how the hell did I get in here? I tell him I got in here because there was no one on the way to this room to tell me where I should go and that basically I arrived here because it’s the first place where I found a warm body. He gets fairly agitated about this and starts walking. I follow him while he looks for someone representing the concert hall. He still seems to hold it against me that I “walked right up” to Keen. As we walk downstairs, I try to explain, as calmly as I can make myself be, that I made every effort to be as unobtrusive as possible and that I only spoke to Keen because he literally walked up to me. I’m trying to be forceful—after all, I don’t want this interview to fall through—without being discourteous. Finally, he settles down a bit, and his anger toward me seems to subside. He says, yet again, that no one told him anything about this, and he asks me for my cell phone number so that he can call me if he can work this out. I tell him I’m well prepared and have the interview mapped out and that I won’t waste the artist’s time. I ask him for his cell number, and that’s when I find out his name is Carlos. I apologize again for “barging right in” and leave Carlos to continue his search for representatives of the Newberry Opera House. Back outside in the cold night air, I walk around the 50

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building, observing its layout and architecture, then return to my truck to grab a copy of a story on Keen I found online, another notebook, and a backup tape recorder. When I walk back past the rear entrance, I find Keen sitting alone in a folding chair, smoking a cigarette. This time the last thing I’m going to do is walk up to chat. We exchange glances, but that’s all, and I keep on walking. My cell phone rings. There’s a message. Apparently, there’s been a service glitch. The call was from Carlos. I call him back, and he tells me Robert Earl wants to meet me at the dock out back. I thank him. Keen had been sitting there waiting for me and may now be wondering why I not only didn’t walk up for the interview but also seemed to be avoiding eye contact. So, I go back, briefly explain that I only just found out I was supposed to be conducting my interview now, and everything is now cool, which matches the weather outside the Newberry Opera House. It’s cool, not cold, and clear. A jean jacket is enough to keep from shivering, and the starry night is enough to make up for any physical discomfort. Keen is a bit of a storyteller, and I stand there, leaning against a rail, thinking how this quaint little town is surely an evocative site for the kinds of songs Keen writes. “Ideas and stuff come from novels, and more than anything, I’ll read a book and it’ll give me a certain feeling,” Keen says. “Graham Greene’s Heart of the Matter, there’s this great, great book, but I don’t recommend it to anybody because there’s this great despair going on there. But as far as a song, once you read something like that, you’re so overwhelmed by the feeling. It comes out in my own filter, or whatever you want to call it. I usually don’t try to follow so much a story line as the vibe—yeah, insight into the human condition.” f ore v e r young

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I remark that perhaps visibility and stardom make it difficult to make the kinds of observations necessary for the songwriter who likes to tell stories based on watching people live their day-to-day lives. Keen pauses to digest this point—it’s tough standing nonchalantly over by the drink box in some general store if the people in there all want your autograph. “It’s a mirror in a mirror in a mirror sort of thing,” he says. “I’m always amazed, not only in music but in television and stuff, at how everything closes in on itself. Somebody’s there, and the real producer’s not there, there’s a fake producer, and in a way, it’s so complex that it’s enjoyable. I’m still trying to be part of life and pick up pieces of life. A lot of that comes from the fact that I live in this really sleepy town west of San Antonio, and I live a relatively normal life there. I do get to observe, and I try to. Although I write a lot of road songs, I try not to write too many ‘lonely motel songs.’” To Keen songwriting and performing are separate joys. “I feel like the fun is in the creativity. When you just do the same set night after night or you do the same songs over and over or you decide you’ve got this bunch of songs that work for you, that’s when it all stops for me. Everything just grinds to a halt. I feel like creativity is the gasoline that drives the engine. Words jump out. What I said is what I said. That’s what makes me go.” I mention that I’ve noticed how he sometimes performs his songs in concert at a faster pace than the version recorded in studio. A 2003 concert I’d seen in San Francisco had the pace of a horse race, yet I enjoyed it. It had seemed almost as if Keen and his band cranked out all the standards—“The Road Goes On Forever,” “Think It Over One Time,” “I’m Coming Home,” “Traveling Light,” “Gringo Honeymoon”—at warp speed so that they could make more time for new songs. Keen says this wasn’t consciously the case. “For my money that’s kind of a failing of mine,” he says. 52

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“I have a tendency to sort of run things fast. What I want to do is get this connection and this flow with the audience, and sometimes when it’s not really taking place, you tend to push and somehow make it happen, and sometimes that’s a little difficult. “As far as songs on records and songs in concert, I think of them as two different things. A show is a show, and a record is a record. If you like the record, maybe you’ll like the show, but maybe you won’t. There are times when even the band tells me, ‘You know, this song is a lot faster than when we recorded it,’ and I’ll go, ‘ok, let’s try to back it down,’ but sometimes you feed on the adrenaline of the show.” Keen has carved a niche for himself because of his originality. His voice is distinctive, which also means that his detractors don’t like it. Others have described it as weather-beaten, rough-hewn, bleary, and gruff, but if there’s one adjective that describes the voice in my mind’s eye, it’s boyish. Keen sings with youthful enthusiasm, even though he is now well into his forties. He’s like a kid with his phrasings and intonations, and I find his enthusiasm appealing. “I don’t feel like my place is copying everybody else and trying to figure out what the world wants,” Keen says. “I feel like I’m equipped with everything I need to have to make up songs. I think that’s the enjoyment, and I think that’s why we have so many fans. I try to work with lyrics that are understood and story lines that are understood because there are only so many basic stories. I like to pick the things that are special to me.” His life is a dichotomy consisting of almost equal parts small-town existence and the hustle and bustle of the road. Life “away from it all” fuels lines in his songs like the one describing a character who is “like an old desperado . . . who paints the town beige.” “I just like to walk around in life and just enjoy it,” he says. f ore v e r young

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“I like [the road], too, but I feel like I’ve got a good balance.” Keen has a following that sells out his concerts almost everywhere he goes, yet he gets little mass-market airplay and doesn’t seem to yearn for it. It’s not a matter of being defiant. He’s just one of those people who has learned over time, through trial and error, that he is incapable of being true to anyone or anything except himself. “I don’t really put myself in that whole thing,” he says. “I lived in Nashville for a couple years. I wrote. I never had a songwriting job; I just had regular jobs. My name was on every temporary list in town. I did dock stuff. I moved furniture. I did all kinds of stuff. I tried to do that, and I tried to be part of the Nashville thing. You had to be this certain kind of person, and, really, what I’m doing is what I’m happy with. If I were sitting around trying to figure out what was a hit all the time, I feel like I’d be just completely selling my soul. “I don’t even really know how to do it. I guess I’ve made a couple of attempts at thinking that maybe this was more broad and commercial, but it never really works for me. It never really rings true. The songs I’ve written in that manner are always really embarrassing. Sometimes I say, ‘I’d like to do a song I haven’t done in a long time,’ and then I think, ‘Oh, no, not that song.’ I don’t even want to go to that place because some of those songs are really terrible. I do what I do. I go along. If whoever accepts it, at this point in my life and my career, I’m just glad I’ve got a career.” Keen’s “Merry Christmas from the Family” is a raucous celebration of dysfunctional family life. I tell him that the first time I played it for my mother, she was convinced I had written it about our family and persuaded someone to record it as a joke. It’s become a guilty pleasure for thousands of families. “The funniest thing I ever heard about that song is a guy came up to me one time and said, ‘You know that Christmas song that you do?’ and I said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘You know that family in 54

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there?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Is that your family?’ I said, ‘Yeah, you know, bits and pieces, that’s what it is.’ He says, ‘You guys are a bunch of sissies compared to my family. That ain’t nothing.’ And I said, ‘I’d hate to be over in your family.’” It’s not Keen’s only take on the subject. His album Walking Distance includes a sequel called “Happy Holidays Y’all.” Maybe it’s the ambience. Maybe being in the little town that surrounds the Opera House has left Keen a bit introspective, but the concert that night is anything but hurried. Between songs Keen’s dialogue is rife with his ironic humor. “Man, in this town you got everything,” he says. “You got a place to play, you got a motel, you got a Laundromat, you got Morris’s Barber Shop . . . what else do you need? “Nobody back home’s going to believe I was in the Opera House, man. They’ll think I was trying to play ‘Figaro’ or something. Robert Earl Pavarotti.” This is a pretty special night. Keen takes advantage of that great innovation in live music, the remote amp, to walk completely offstage in the midst of one song to perform an acoustic solo in the audience. And the wry observations flow. Just this very day, he says, he stopped off at a convenience store and tried “the new St. Joseph’s Children’s Aspirin-flavored Gatorade.” When the laughter subsides, there’s that little boy’s voice again. “It’s really awesome,” he says. “Really. It is.” At that moment Keen is the kid with his hand in the cookie jar, dissolving his mother’s stare with a mischievous grin. He’s explaining to his teacher that the dog ate his homework. Or maybe he’s just explaining to a record executive how so much of the material on the new cd just sort of snuck in there at the last minute. f ore v e r young

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Getting Religious . . . about Country new york, new york | june 2004

There really is a little bit of everything in the Big Apple. Some of it will inspire you. Some of it will gross you out. The city will teach you things you didn’t know. It’s easy to stereotype New Yorkers. For instance, one would think the last place to find good country music would be in the place that is the antithesis of the very word country. But, although New Yorkers aren’t country folk, some of them used to be. At a Tower Records on the east side of Greenwich Village, I find more quality country music than I could find in many music stores in the South. I discover there is practically no interest, apparently, in the music played on most commercial radio stations. Most New Yorkers think it’s garbage. That’s because it is. There may not be many New Yorkers who like country music, but the ones who do like good country music, which is why I decide to augment my considerable collection with cds by performers including the late Gram Par57

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sons, Loretta Lynn, and Billy Joe Shaver. None of the cds sets me back more than $12.99. I have Louisiana Cajun for lunch and Tex-Mex for dinner. I watch a traditional honker-tonker named Thad Cockrell perform at the Rodeo Bar in the Gramercy section of Manhattan on Saturday night. Another memorable aspect of the afternoon is the performance of a street band that sets up its equipment and plays in front of a subway entrance near Astor Place. The Lost Wandering Blues and Jazz Band consists of four musicians, all representing different styles. One guitarist looks like Bob Dylan at age twenty but sounds more like Harry Connick Jr. and was born in Stockholm. This I discover when he sings “Walking My Baby Back Home” in Swedish. The second guy, about thirty-five, toots the French horn and looks like he doesn’t wash his long hair very often. Another guitarist is probably in his fifties, wears jeans, a crumpled hat and western shirt, and looks like a man who hasn’t turned down many drinks in his life. The fourth fellow basically plucks on a string and beats on an upside-down wash bucket. He looks a lot like the late comedian Redd Foxx. In fact, he sings a lot like Redd Foxx. They’re cool. I tip them. Most everyone else—and quite a crowd gathers—does too. I had heard of a place called the Continental where, supposedly, country and rockabilly were played. What I find out, actually, is that the music performed there most of the time is punk. On Sundays the featured fare is country. Had I arrived a day later, I would have seen the Fandanglers, Tweed Schade, and the Lonesome Prairie Dogs. On this day, however, my options are Failsafe Nation, Pretty Alien, Pornshine, Nadsat Fashion, Dead Blonde Girlfriend, Naked Underneath, and the Modeles. I pass. The people are also quite interesting. I see one woman 58

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whose fashion sense catches my eye. She is wearing black cowboy boots, powder-blue tights, and a bright blue, frilly skirt. What really draws my attention is her hair, which is pale blonde except at the tips. The bangs in front are electric blue, one side is hot pink, and the other side is fluorescent orange. I also watch a young man—I’m speculating that he is monstrously stoned—conk himself over the head with something that looks like a snowboard. I don’t really understand why someone would be playing around, on a warm summer afternoon, with what is essentially a skateboard without the wheels, but that’s what he’s doing. He tries to stomp on one side, apparently so that when it flies up in the air, he can catch it. Instead, it hits him rather hard on the noggin. I stifle my laugh because I don’t particularly want to draw his attention. Thad Cockrell’s story is a compelling one. There’s a lot more to him than what appears at first glance. He has a lovely, soaring tenor voice that belies the rugged frame of a onetime college wrestler. He is a graduate of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, and from there he went on to Southeast Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. Today religion is a vibrant part of his life but not his life’s work. He seems to rebel against authority, or at least conformity, in both his religion and his music. This would-be preacher—a graduate of “Jerry Falwell’s college,” Liberty—loves the stage even more than the pulpit. The honky-tonk, as it turns out, is his sanctuary. “You answer to God,” Cockrell tells me shortly after polishing off a plate of ribs at the Rodeo Bar. “If you read the Bible, Jesus was accused of hanging out at tax collectors’ houses. Back then, that’s why they didn’t have bars and stuff. It was more community based, you know, in people’s houses. g e t t i n g r e l i g i o u s . . . about country

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If Jesus were around today, the Southern Baptists would be really upset because Jesus wouldn’t hang out with them as much as they think He would. “It just never made sense to me, growing up in the church, that most of the people who go to church don’t hang out with anybody except the believers. That doesn’t make any sense to me. Jesus didn’t come for the healthy; He came for the sick. I guess I just find no consistency in that. Besides, it’s a hell of a good time. “We ought to be inclusive in our religion, not exclusive. Yeah. That’s the way I feel.” Cockrell’s motto, according to his official bio, is “Puttin’ the hurt back in country.” “There’s no ‘alt’ in my country,” he says. He is the son of a Baptist preacher, born in Tampa, Florida, raised mostly in Oklahoma, and now living in North Carolina. Most of the music is secular, but he wrote a gorgeous gospel tune entitled “He Set Me Free” that is often mistaken for one of the old standards of the Louvin Brothers. “I was in dc the other night, opening up for the Tarbox Ramblers,” Cockrell says, “and I sang that song. This lady bought the cd, and she said, ‘I said to my friend, what a genius that guy is to take that old gospel song and redo it like that.’ She apparently had no idea that I’d written it. That’s a compliment, but I got up in the middle of class in seminary and ran to my house, wrote it in fifteen minutes, and ran back for the rest of my class.” One love song, “Pretending,” was evoked by family, not romantic, love. It works perfectly well in either context. “I write about loss. That’s about me,” Cockrell says. “I grew up in Oklahoma, and my dad had a car lot full of old El Caminos. I went back two summers ago and wrote that song. I wanted to sing it to him. It’s about loss, but it’s not about 60

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a girlfriend. It’s about going back and spending time with someone you wish you could see more often.” Cockrell’s distaste for what passes as country these days is considerable. He doesn’t particularly care to mold his music to what the establishment demands. “I’m just trying to balance out the stuff that’s on the radio,” he says. “The thing is, why can’t Willie Nelson get on the radio anymore? Tell me you can’t sell him. “’Is my tractor sexy?’ Why in the world would a grown man have anything to do with music like what’s on the radio right now? It’s such a dumb song. It’s soulless music. It all sounds like a business proposal to me. What Nashville doesn’t realize is this. Johnny Cash was a bad-ass. He was a rebel. He was a renegade. So was Waylon Jennings. So is Merle Haggard. So was Charlie Rich. The people who have made country music what it is today had unbelievable renegade personalities. The music today is too comfortable, at least the part of it that gets widespread airplay.” Then he echoes what Robbie Fulks called “the integrity scare” of the late 1980s. “I think what happened is that Nashville made a really bad choice. They had some people who were making amazing, viable country music: Dwight Yoakam, Steve Earle, some really great people who were just making their mark, and then you had, like, McBride and the Ride, people like that. Brooks and Dunn. They decided to go with the wrong group. “You know what? We spend billions of dollars every year for things we can get for free when we turn on the box, you know. People aren’t necessarily as dumb as Nashville considers them. The average Joe who buys the country records now isn’t any less literate than the ones who bought the country records twenty-five years ago or thirty-five years ago. Is the music of Hank Williams simple? Yes. But it’s honest. Beautifully honest. The shows back then were so much better and g e t t i n g r e l i g i o u s . . . about country

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meant so much more, but the people weren’t any different. They were just getting stuff they could feel empathy for.” Just because Cockrell doesn’t care much for the establishment doesn’t mean he isn’t ambitious, though. Perhaps his evangelical fervor comes from the religion. “Between you and me, you know who’s going to bring this back around? This asshole named Thad Cockrell. You should check him out.”

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If It’s Broken, Don’t Fix It austin, texas | december 2004

Shortly after I show up, James White shows me why the Broken Spoke is the best honky-tonk in Texas or anywhere else. It’s not just the leaky roof; it’s what he did to fix it. For years the roof leaked in the room White has filled chock full of memorabilia from all the greats who have played the Spoke since he opened it in 1964. He solved the problem by building a little tin gutter—one that carries the dripping water right out onto the earth out front. White erected himself a little second roof, one not so different from what a rancher might use to fix his barn. And it works. Country music isn’t supposed to be slick. It’s not supposed to be conjured up from the results of marketing surveys. It’s not supposed to be played by musicians who slap six strings on a banjo to make people think they can play one, and it’s not supposed to be played by cowboys who hang guitars around their necks and use them as little more than props. It’s supposed to be about life’s imperfections and the outrageous, ill-conceived ways that flawed human beings remedy 63

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the obstacles that the wind blows into their paths. As White says, “Don’t do it the easy way; do it the cowboy way.” White is a son of Austin. He grew up on West Mary Street, only a mile away from the simple honky-tonk that enabled him to realize his dreams. It’s all original, from the ramshackle roof to the bumper sticker that says, “I’d rather be a fencepost in Texas than the king of Tennessee.” “They’re all heroes,” White says, pointing to all the photos and memorabilia of forty years of honky-tonk nights. “They’re all on the top shelf and at the top of the ladder. I’ve loved country music all my life. I get to live my dream being right here at the Broken Spoke, and people let me do it. When I got out of the army back in 1964, I started thinking, you know, I’ve been in honky-tonks. I’ve always had a good time, so why not, when I get out, open up a place of my own. “I came out under the big old tree out front, right here on South Lamar, and I visualized a place like no other. When I got it built, I named the place the Broken Spoke. People ask me how I thought of that name. I was kind of thinking about something western, something original, something country, something Texas, and, anyway, I was thinking about wagon wheels in my brain, and all of a sudden I thought about this old movie, Broken Arrow, and it just kind of clicked in. Kind of like the lightbulb went on, and I thought, well, I’ll just call it the Broken Spoke. I’ll just buy me a couple of wagon wheels, and I’ll knock a spoke out and I’ll put them out front where people are walking in. I kind of figured that was all there was to going into business, but I found out over the years there was a lot more to it, but at least I got a good start. “I love the true country music, like Don Walser said, ‘When you cut out the roots of country music, you just cut out the soul, and you’re cutting out the country music al64

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together.’ I like the sound of a steel guitar. I love the fiddle. The guitar and everything just blends right in together. Country music tells a story, a lot of them soul-wrenching and about the hardships of life or about drinking beer in a honkytonk. When you get up and you sing those songs, it brings back memories. I’ve had so many good times, and there are a lot of upbeat old country songs too. It’s what I grew up on: Ernest Tubb, Bob Wills, Hank Williams, George Jones, country in its purest form. If Roy Acuff were still alive, he wouldn’t be allowing a lot of this stuff you see on tv nowadays. Nashville today, if he was still there, along with people like Ernest Tubb and Hank Snow, they’d frown on some of the stuff that’s popular now.” Go to the Spoke any night of the week except Monday, and there will be something compelling to see, whether it’s Debra Peters with her accordion or Jerry Jeff Walker celebrating his birthday. White even mounts the stage on most Tuesday nights, along with Alvin Crow, for the weekly “Hard-Core Country Music on Tuesday Nights.” “We do a lot of the old songs. Alvin does a lot of the old Jimmie Rogers songs, and I’ll jump in there with some songs that I like,” White says. “I’ve been here forty years, and I figure I can pretty much tell it like it is, and people seem to like to hear it. I don’t have to change nothing. I ain’t getting no hanging fern baskets on the ceiling. No Grey Poupon—we got the real mustard here. But we do have cold beer, good whiskey, and good-looking girls to dance with, so what else do you need?” It doesn’t take many questions to conduct an interview with James White. Just turn on the tape recorder and let the good times roll. “It was always good to see Ernest Tubb and the Texas Troubadours come here,” recalls White. “He’d flip that guitar over and say thanks.” i f i t ’ s b r o k e n, don’t f i x i t

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Tubb, you see, lettered Thanks upside down on the back of his guitar. “Ernest would sit up there on the bandstand, sign everybody’s autograph and everybody’s picture,” says White. “Through his whole break, he’d be up there mingling with the people. The guy was a true Texas troubadour. He traveled all across the country, and he must have done three hundred dates a year or close to it. He loved it, and he always promoted it.” The Broken Spoke is a country music mecca. Big-name acts, even the ones that fill football stadiums, still play there every now and then, but White has a soft spot for what country music used to be. He has his standards. They aren’t the same as the ones used by the record companies and the Clear Channel stations, but they’re just as restrictive. “They’ll repeat the same words over and over again,” he says. “It doesn’t have enough soul in it anymore, as far as I’m concerned. It’s just, with the bands that play here, I don’t really have any what I call ‘copy bands’ anymore at the Broken Spoke. A lot of them play original music, and even if they do some famous man’s songs, they’ll do their versions. You don’t hear no top forty on the radio, and I think it’s a shame that the radio stations have got to the point where people can’t hear the music they say they like. Now it’s: ‘This is your playlist. This is what you’ll play.’ I loved it back in the Loretta Lynn days, when she’d go to a radio station and pitch ’em a song, give them a 45-rpm record, and do a little guest appearance. Those days were just so good. “Now the big boys are going to force it down your throat, whether you like it or not. When they pulled Ralph Emery off the air (on the old Nashville Network), it was a crying shame when they did that because there were so many purecountry people who loved ‘Nashville Now.’ They yanked him off because he wasn’t young enough looking. He wasn’t 66

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playing enough of the young artists. Now the whole darn thing is sold out.” White helped raise money to relieve Willie Nelson’s income tax woes. He’s seen all manner of behavior and lifestyles that don’t necessarily jibe with his own. He never expected the heroes to be perfect, though. Heroes are the performers who rise above their flaws. “Jerry Jeff Walker is one of my biggest draws,” White says. “He plays the Friday night here when his birthday party kicks off [it’s called the bdb, for ‘Birthday Bash’]. “I’ve had ‘Jerry duty’ a few times back in the old days. Jerry duty is when you get to take Jerry Jeff Walker home when he’s had too much to drink. We get along just wonderful, him and his wife, Susan, and his kid, Django Walker, his son, who’s doing real good writing songs now. We had a good time.” The Spoke has been ranked the best honky-tonk in Texas by at least one publication, and another rated its chicken-fried steak the best in town. The front room is a restaurant that’s open for lunch, even though the steel guitars don’t crank up generally until after the sun goes down. “I love the music, and I hate to see it changing like it is, getting too slick, too imitation, too plastic,” White says. “It’s just not there, but every now and then, some of the stations will throw us a bone and play some good country music. I wrote a song called ‘Putting the C Back in Country.’ I haven’t got it on cd yet, but I mention the doghouse bass and the steel guitar. You know where you are when you hear that steel guitar, you know. There’s nothing any better than a steel guitar and a fiddle sound when it’s played correctly.” But no one could say the world has passed the Spoke by, at least no one present to see Asleep at the Wheel play on a Saturday night. Country radio gears itself to a young demographic—not only young but with limited sensibilities, it i f i t ’ s b r o k e n, don’t f i x i t

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seems—but the Spoke reflects the larger population. Every age group is represented on the dance floor, from the gentle shuffles of an elderly couple staring warmly into each other’s eyes to the advanced, showy version of the same dance as practiced by college kids. A lot has changed, White concedes. “Sometimes you kind of reflect back to when you were in high school, and that’s what I do sometimes, only I reflect way back to the opening day of the Broken Spoke,” he says. “I was still working sixteen hours a day out front, beer was two bits a bottle as fast as we could pop it, and there were some good, hard-core drinkers back in those days. “I mean, well, there would be a fight. There’d be a knockdown, drag-out. I remember, they’d get to fighting and knocking one another down, and people stood up and went to the side of the wall, and they’d just let ’em fight it out. After a while, the bouncers would drag ’em on out, the best they could. We’ve weeded out a lot of troublemakers over the years. I think they respect the Broken Spoke so much anymore when they come here that they behave theirselves. “It’s more of a dance hall. When you get the rough places, I call them roadhouses. A roadhouse, maybe that might be a little rougher. We used to have a band years ago, and when they’d play here, they’d get the kids in here, and I think the young, they’d get to fighting with or over their girlfriends. If you let them over the pool table . . . we don’t let ’em gamble, but I figure it’s mainly over women. You know how that goes. That’s true of the honky-tonk. They might get in a fight with their friend, and the next minute they’re over there buying each other a beer. If it’s a fair fight, ok. But if it gets too rough, the way it is nowadays, you don’t want to let anything get started because it’s harder to stop. All in all, we’re real fortunate not to have any problems out here. “Back when beer was two bits a bottle, it was a lot hard68

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er. I didn’t have any air conditioning, and they worked hard all day, they got hot, and they wanted to drink that beer as fast as they could. You figure four beers for a dollar, hell, you couldn’t afford not to get drunk.” White’s greatest memories are reserved for the heroes of another time—Bob Wills, Tubb, Tex Ritter, Roy Acuff—all now deceased but all featured prominently on his walls. “When I grew up, Bob Wills was a living legend,” he says. “I booked Bob Wills in 1966 and ’67 and ’68. I was bartender at the time. I used to work . . . seven days a week just so I could get this place paid for. I did the cleanup—whatever it took, I did it. I told the old drunks at the bar, ‘I’m going to have Bob Wills here,’ and they all said: ‘Aw, hell, he won’t show up. He’ll be drunk. He’s well known for not showing up.’ “He opened up the front door; he was by himself, had his fiddle on his arm and his cigar. He had his cowboy hat on. Boy, they were whispering, ‘There’s Bob Wills, there he is,’ and that’s one of my most memorable moments. Get out and meet Bob Wills, and he was the first big star who walked on the stage of the Broken Spoke. I’ll always remember it. Later on, back in ’68, I’d book just him and ‘Tag’ Lambert. About that time Tommy Duncan was on his own. I’d book him also and get a band to back him up. Bob Wills couldn’t have been nicer to me and more polite. I was in awe. I was twenty-six years old at the time, and it was a big thrill just to have him here. “Ernest [Tubb], he’d come up and tell me, ‘Keep it country, James,’ or ‘Keep it country, boy.’ I’d book him about three times a year out here, and then another one I got to book one time was my childhood hero, Tex Ritter, and I remember when I was a kid I went down to the Capitol Theater on Sixth Street, which is no longer there, and we got to see Tex Ritter ride out on his horse and rear up and shoot i f i t ’ s b r o k e n, don’t f i x i t

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the gun, you know. I got a picture of Tex up there singing on our bandstand. He’d sing that ‘Rye Whiskey,’ you know, and he’d fall out of the chair, he’d get so drunk. ‘If the ocean was whiskey and I was a duck,’ he’d hiccup, and then he’d fall out of the chair. ‘Rye Whiskey,’ he said, at first it was called ‘Jack of Diamonds.’ They changed it to ‘Rye Whiskey.’ They kicked it around a lot before they called it ‘Hillbilly Heaven,’ ’cause they didn’t want to use the word hillbilly. “I got to book Roy Acuff, and his last tour had a stop right here at the Broken Spoke. He went from Nashville to Disneyland to the Broken Spoke then back to Nashville. Then he kind of stayed up there in Nashville for the rest of his life. He was a nice guy. He came up and said, ‘Well, when’s the opening band going to start?’ and I said, ‘Well, you’re the only one I’ve got booked.’ He said, ‘Well, we ain’t much of a dance band,’ and I said, ‘Well, you just play, and everybody’ll love you,’ and they did. Those people kind of had tears in their eyes. At first he wasn’t going to sing ‘The Great Speckled Bird’ [a gospel song] because of this being a honky-tonk, but he said, ‘Well, I’ll go ahead. My daddy was a hard-shell Baptist, but I’ll go ahead and sing it as long as the people don’t applaud when I get through with it.’ That’s what he did, and the people abided his wishes and just had tears in their eyes when he got through with it. When I was a kid, my parents would take me to see Roy Acuff when he toured through Austin. For some of them it was just like a tent revival meeting. One time it was raining, and water was just coming through the tent.” When the cowboys roll into the Broken Spoke these days, they don’t tie their quarter horses to the hitching post out front. They’re more likely, in twenty-first-century Austin, to have stopped by the split-level home at the end of the culde-sac to ditch the tie and don the boots. But the spirit still 70

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lives, and it transcends, at least within the Spoke’s walls, the artificialities that have undermined it. “I’m just a true South Austin boy. I’ve been on both sides of the tracks right here in Austin, Texas,” White says. “I’ve heard that train all my life, and that’s the way I want to keep it. “We get them from all over the world when they come here, and when we got voted the best honky-tonk in Texas, there wasn’t anything that could have meant more to me. To me that means the world. It never ceases to amaze me. It’s just a rustic old building with a dirt parking lot.”

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A Man of the People gruene, texas | december 2004

Pat Green’s comments are peppered with offbeat observations and allusions. “I’ve been on the river way too many times to see if there are any rules and regulations. “My votes count double, and I’m the only one counting. “When we visit my in-laws, they always have enchilada breakfasts on Christmas Day. Enchiladas and cinnamon buns. That makes for a great, gassy afternoon. We all sit around the fire. “Instead of writing a book, I wound up buying a guitar. “Recording at Willie Nelson’s studio is great because I can act like I’m mad at the band and storm out to the golf course. “I wouldn’t say I was drunk because I don’t remember. “Pootie’s Bar is the kind of place where people tinkle on the floor. . . . It’s family is what it is. “I didn’t have any money because I spent it on beer. Well, not all of it. I spent the rest on paper towels to clean up the back seat of the car. 73

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“Waco is really where I’m from, and Waco is such a lame place. You remember that David Koresh thing? What was it? Branch Davidians? That’s, like, forty miles from Waco. Waco is so starved for attention that they claimed it. That’s like something happening in Hillsboro and people from Dallas saying, ‘Yeah, that was here.’” The “venue,” as they say, is a live radio show hosted by legendary songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard at the Lone Star Music store. Lone Star Music is revered not just for the store, situated in the quaint and cozy little dance hall village of Gruene, but for the mail-order business (lonestarmusic. com) that ships Texas music far and wide. That’s one of the reasons why Green is here. That and because Hubbard asked him. The live audience consists of only about thirty people, all present by special invitation. Green has been known to sell out the Houston Astrodome. Most any form of advance publicity would produce a mob, not that these aren’t true believers in the folding chairs placed around the little music store. Pat Green’s affability isn’t an act. Some artists, like Reckless Kelly’s Willy Braun, seem to be energized by a surge of electrical power when they mount a stage and hear the roar of a crowd. Green probably dances around alone in his hotel room, and there is probably no difference between the reminiscences shared by Hubbard and Green in this radio show and the ones that might occur if the two were sitting in a living room or over supper. With the exception of a few commercial breaks and the odd sponsor reference—and perhaps the omission of an occasional word that might not be suitable for “radio land”—this is unrehearsed, spontaneous, and candid. And the sparse audience eats it up. At one point Hubbard refers to the show as a “hootenanny,” to which Green replies, “I gotta get some salve and ointment to put on my hootenanny.” 74

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“You know, Pat, this is live radio,” says Hubbard. “What? All I said was hootenanny.” Green, equipped only with the gorgeous Gibson guitar that he wound up purchasing instead of writing a book—it’s a long story—spends considerable time ridiculing his own playing. Acknowledging some assistance from another musician, a holdover from the show’s previous segment, Green tells the audience, “I love a qualified musician.” Then he signs autographs, poses for photographs, chats with the guests, packs up his guitar, and invites me out back, where we drive around the area for most of an hour and talk. The only stop is a convenience store where Green buys a couple of Diet Cokes. “Got one lemon and one lime,” he says. “You get to pick.” “Lime,” I say, and off we go. “We all go through these points in our lives,” he says, “where we wake up one morning and say, ‘Tomorrow I’m not going to be young anymore. Right now, though, I’m still young for one more day.’” This isn’t a response to a question. This is kind of a random observation. Green bears some similarity to the Funny Car drag racer John Force, whom I’ve also interviewed, in that extensive questions aren’t required. The interviewer can just place his recorder in the proper location and let Green rip, and it isn’t because he is trying, in some way, to manipulate the interview. At any time Green might volunteer insights derived from the way his mind just flits about. The recorder operates properly; it’s Green who skips. He compares what I do to what he does. Writing columns, he says, “is a little bit more of a flip the bird means of communicating, you know,” and that leads to a segment in which Green interviews me instead of vice versa. He’s a strapping lad, husky and larger than he appears onstage, probably a handful when he was younger and had a a man of the p e op l e

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few beers in him. But any intimidating aspect of his persona is more than offset by his irreverent good humor. Yet the self-proclaimed “Dancehall Dreamer”—it’s the title of an early song and album—has managed to avoid falling through the Nashville cracks. Green somehow succeeds because he is an original, not in spite of it. The radio show just completed marks the fifth time Green and I have crossed paths, but this is our first conversation. I’ve seen him in a variety of settings: a street festival in Charlotte, North Carolina; a club in downtown Columbia, South Carolina; an outdoor concert in Glen Rose, Texas; a lavish concert hall in Las Vegas; and now an informal radio show. A Green concert is typically an unruly celebration. College kids flock to his shows. “To me it just feels so good,” Green says. “It just feels so normal and right. I’ll hang out with you. I’ll talk to you. There are certain people out there who get drunk and take it too far, and they don’t know how to behave, but there’s a difference between not knowing how to behave and wanting to shake somebody’s hand. I think it’s a thrill for people to want to feel like they know me. In what I do for a living, it’s great to be able to say hi.” But Green, absentmindedly rambling in roughly concentric circles around a tiny village on a starry Texas night, is a little concerned with the view in some quarters here that he is somehow abandoning the music that made him so popular in his native state. “Here’s what I think,” he says. “If you’re only writing for the radio, then you’re going to get precisely that. If you’re only writing for the fans—the super fans, the ones who will come see you no matter what—then you’re going to get stuff that your diehard fans are going to love, then you’re going to have a hard time connecting with the mainstream. And if 76

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you’re only going to write for yourself, then you’re going to get to sing a lot of songs all by yourself. “My goal in life has always, always, always been I want to have my music hit the ears of as many people as possible, and, like it or not, I just want you to have a choice. I’ve never been a person who said I only want a certain group of people to understand me, I only want Texas to understand me or I only want Southern people to understand me. I’ve never said any of that. I don’t believe that. Music is so universal. It’s such a common thing but such a complex thing that, if you can really make a connection, if you can really make a strong bond, then it doesn’t matter if you’re on a record label or if you’re famous or anything like that—people are going to get their hands on it, and I’m living proof of that. I mean, we didn’t have anything, and we could draw ten thousand people, fifteen thousand people. That says a whole lot. That says that these guys, whether you like it or not, whether they’re ‘real music’ in whatever circle you ride in, this band was pulling it off.” If Green ever had a never say never moment, it was in a line from an old song that is now thrown in his face: “I gave up on Nashville a long time ago.” “That’s what people always get on me about,” he says. “I was eighteen years old. It was the first song I’d ever written. I was just writing stuff down because I’d never written a song before, right? I’d never been to Nashville. I’d never gone to try to pitch songs to people or get a record deal. I just thought I was writing about this entity that I kind of vilified in my mind because, at the time, all I got to hear on the radio, when I first started writing music, was Garth Brooks, and I couldn’t stand it. I thought, oh, my God, everything sounds just alike, there’s no spirit, there’s no soul and there’s nothing tangible there. It all sounds the same. a man of the p e op l e

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Feels the same, looks the same, tastes the same. “I love Robert Earl Keen. I love Jerry Jeff Walker. I love all these really great writers, and they can write this really catchy stuff that I can sing along to and tap my toes to, and they could write this stuff that was ten miles deep off the side of the ocean. . . . All I wanted to do was the same thing and take it as big as it could go. That’s all we wanted to do: take this music, that has a tangible, earthy feel to it, and at the same time write about emotion. At times I can just get off and go preach and have that side of myself exposed. All of it has to come out and find exposure. Sooner or later, you either get a hit record or you go broke, one of the two. I don’t give a crap which happens first.” Nowadays, Green and Nashville get along pretty well. His reputation has stretched beyond the boundaries of Texas and earned him frequent play on mainstream radio. His commercial success offers hope to other musicians but also carries with it a certain perception that he has somehow sold out. It’s a charge that only mildly rankles him. He insists his outlook hasn’t changed. “This record [Lucky Ones] is, in my mind’s eye, the most serious record I’ve ever done,” he says, “but, at the same time, my brain will not let me think of it as anything but the best writing I’ve ever done.” The conversation drifts to other Texans who might be able to surf on Green’s waves, so to speak. After all, his first gold record was titled Wave on Wave, though not for that reason. “Jack Ingram is as bad as anybody,” he says. “He’s one of my best friends in the world, and Jack just is so revealing about himself and about the truth and the way he writes the truth. That’s the way it works, too. If you’re fibbing in your writing or if you’re making up some bullshit and if you’re trying to get it across in your songs and your performances, then people will know, or at least the smart people will know. 78

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“I don’t know. Then there are the songs you write hoping people will take them with a grain of salt, and those are inevitably the songs that people take quite seriously. But Jack is a master, man—Jack is the best showman in Texas music. There’s no doubt in my mind, as far as four-piece bands are concerned, nobody can top him. If you’ve got a four-piece band out there, then don’t follow Jack Ingram because it’s going to be tough.” Texas can be comforting, but, as big as it is, it’s not America. Green is taking Texas to America. I make passing reference to Gary P. Nunn’s “What I Like about Texas” and note that not everyone knows what the Llano Estacado is. “Yeah,” Green replies, “but they want to hear about it. When it comes to me and guys like Jerry Jeff, Willie Nelson, a few of the other guys, they already know we’re from Texas. They come to get that, and the ones that don’t, they just want to hear what the stink’s all about. To me, at home in Texas, it’s more fun to sing about Texas because the crowd is 99 percent there and ready to hear it. Out there [beyond the borders] it’s more like 60, 65 percent, and I’m just trying not to force anything down anybody’s throat. There’s nothing fun about going to watch somebody preach. I don’t want to hear anybody preach politics at the concert I paid twentyfive bucks to go to.” Pat Green has become a force of nature, and forces of nature are a way of life in Texas. He’s seldom deep in an intellectual sense, but then neither were Merle Haggard and George Jones. His is music for the people, and somehow he’s been able to get it to them. He’s still a dreamer. It’s just that his dreaming has moved from a dance hall to the national stage.

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Who Are “Those Guys”? st. augustine, florida | february 2004

Those Guys—the band Those Guys—and I go back a long way, and, yes, I have fallen victim to the double entendre of asking, “Who are those guys?” It was at a place called the Sunset Grill in St. Augustine Beach, where a friend and I showed up to see the band and the ones playing on the stage obviously weren’t, well, Those Guys. Turns out there had been a mix-up, and the owner of the joint had scheduled two bands for the night. Those Guys had reached a settlement that involved a partial payment in exchange for letting the other band play on that particular night, and since they knew I was coming down, they were waiting for me outside but had somehow missed us when we walked in another entrance—or something like that. “Oh, yeah, you mean the band Those Guys,” the waitress had said. Some years ago we met by happenstance. I showed up on a Wednesday night to have dinner at a little restaurant situated just south of Flagler Beach, right on the water. I’ve nev81

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er quite gotten it straight whether the name of that place is High Tide or Snack Jack’s because both names are on the sign out front. I think maybe High Tide is a little motel and Snack Jack’s is the seafood shack, but I’m not quite sure. On this particular Wednesday night Dave Besley and Walt Kulwicki were performing. Practically no one was there, so I started requesting songs and singing along, and the next thing you know we were friends. I liked their music, and when we started talking, I discovered that they liked mine. I do know this. Every little town in the United States of America ought to have a band like Those Guys. They play pretty regularly in several bars and restaurants in the area, and this little regional series of gigs has been going on for so long that kids who once started listening to them while they were in college regularly return years later with kids in tow to reminisce about how much they enjoyed the band during the good ol’ days. Playing to what is perhaps the most modest possible incarnation of a cult following, Besley and Kulwicki, joined by a frequently changing assortment of other musicians who drift in and out, mix in their own songs with crowd-pleasing covers of everyone from the Beatles to Simon & Garfunkel to Hank Williams to David Allan Coe. Kulwicki inspired me to learn how to play guitar because watching him made me realize that a guitar can be part of a man’s body. He hits notes on that black guitar in the same fashion that most people hit notes with their voices. I couldn’t reach that level of instinctive mastery if I played every day for ten years, but watching him has led me to dream, and this dream has inspired me to try to play guitar every day for five years. “That’s what’s cool about playing guitar, especially for kids, because of their attention spans,” Kulwicki says. “Teach them things. Major and minor chords. Major chords are happy; minor chords are sad. You can teach them things that will 82

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stick with them until they’re old enough to go back and appreciate it and learn from it, even though they didn’t know what you were talking about when you first told them stuff.” In my forties that’s the stage I’m at now; now I know what he’s talking about. Occasionally, I’ll have moments of revelation, but mainly I strum away at the basic chords, blissfully unaware of the difference between happy and sad. I usually see the band while I’m in the area writing about races at Daytona International Speedway. We keep in touch via e-mail on and off, and when I walk into the Sunset or Creekside or the Oasis, it’s not unusual for Dave to yell out at me in the middle of a song, which then makes it necessary for him to introduce me to the crowd. A lot of people get introduced to the crowd at Those Guys shows. That’s because there are lots of familiar faces. When I watch bands, at the least the ones that I know have written their own songs, drawn into performing an endless series of covers because members of these hard-drinking crowds keep requesting them, I can’t help but wonder if it annoys them. I ask Besley, a talented songwriter, what he thinks. “It doesn’t kill me,” he answers, “because I think, for me, the main goal is to perform music that people enjoy. I hope we get so famous someday that we get tired of performing our own music.” “It doesn’t tick me off,” Kulwicki chimes in. “What makes me feel good is to look out there in the audience and see somebody mouthing the words. That makes the whole deal.” Fortunately for Those Guys, many of their fans can mouth the words to their songs. The regulars are familiar with songs like “Goose Creek,” “Smile for the Camera,” “Southern Sky,” and dozens of others. “What really feels great is to see somebody out there and they want us to play one of our songs in particular, one that w h o a re “ those guy s” ?

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you know meant something to them, that touched them and became one of their favorites,” says Kulwicki. “We’ve got tons of fans whom we’ve gotten to know over the years. People who follow us around, and when they walk in the bar, they wave and greet us like friends because that’s what we are, old friends. “The crowd definitely drives me. I’d rather play for twenty people who care than twenty thousand who don’t.” The band records at Besley’s home, which he calls Single Wide Studios. “I have no regrets yet,” he says, “and I don’t think I ever will. If we get successful and rich as hell, I don’t think a lot of things would change for me. Different people have different values. I might be driving a big fancy car, I guess, but, no, I think I’d still be driving a piece of junk. “I haven’t had that many jobs, but I can’t think of many that I wasn’t having fun. I wasn’t ready to go to work every day and punch a clock. Even on a bad night it’s still better than that.” “Making a living is part of it,” adds Kulwicki. “Every job has its ups and downs, whether you’re pumping gas, making music, as long as you’re having fun.” “I look forward to coming to play,” adds bassist Danny Roberts. “That’s what I think about every day when I’ve got a gig.” While most of those gigs are in the area around St. Augustine—from Daytona Beach to the south to Jacksonville to the north—the band does make occasional trips to other areas. The life of a traveling band can be a bit treacherous. There are lessons to be learned from being on the road. “Two or three times a week we have major problems that either turn out great or turn out horrible,” says Kulwicki. “We did a Winn-Dixie grand opening in the world’s hottest parking lot in Kingsland, Georgia, one day. It was the 84

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most god-awful experience. We played as a three-piece, me and Dave and Artie (Artemus Pyle, once of Lynyrd Skynyrd). I was sick as a dog, and from that day on I’ve never been able to work in the heat of the day. Blacktop parking lot.” “In Kingsland, Georgia, there’s a Ramada Inn, with twenty-one beautiful, flat-screen tvs and ten pool tables,” said Besley. “First time we went in there, we talked on the phone with the guy who booked us. Got there, the manager said I have no idea what you’re talking about. So, we got together with this guy, got everything worked out. Went ok. Next time we show up, and there’s another manager: ‘Oh, the guy you met that night’s not the manager anymore. I’m the new manager. I’m going to book you through the summer.’ Nine gigs, thousands of dollars, motel rooms, and we showed up the next time, yet another manager, and, ‘Yeah, we’re not sure about it,’ and the next week after that they said, ‘You guys are off the table.’” “It was a terrible gig,” says Besley. “They had a dj, terrible crowd. We get the crowd up and dancing, and the dj comes up and says: ‘ok, I got it. I’ll take over now.’ Big military community. That was pretty awful.” Now it’s a general discussion of the nightmarish experiences that invariably tumble unannounced into the career path of a regional band. “Last time we were in Atlanta—” Kulwicki offers, the memory eliciting a groan in Besley. “The first time there we knew the manager,” recalls Besley. “He was buying us shots, and every time we’d play ‘Tequila,’ he’d buy the whole house a round. We ate one meal a day and just drank what we wanted. We stayed at a friend’s house, so we didn’t require a room. The next time we asked for a room, so they got us a room. We came and ate our meals, drank our asses off, just like we did before, and at the end of the night a waitress comes up and says, ‘I’ve got your w h o a re “ those guy s” ?

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tab.’ I said, ‘No, we don’t have a tab. Give that to someone else.’ And then the owner came the next day, we had dinner, he bought us a round of shots, and said, ‘I gotta take off,’ and left. Second night, waitress comes up again. We’ve got to load our stuff, and they’ve got a big old guy, Jay, and he’s sitting at the desk. I ask him, ‘How much we talking about here?’ because, man, we’re just wanting to get out of there now. He says, ‘A thousand or so.’ I say, ‘Wait a minute. We got a tab.’ He says, ‘Yeah, but things changed since the last time you were here.’ I say, ‘call the owner.’ He says the [allowable] tab was $350. We’d gone up there cheap, anyway. I say, ‘Why don’t we not pay it?’ and I’m thinking this could be bad. It was a biker bar. ‘Let Harry know. We’ll work it out the next time we come up there.’ He finally let us go. That was pretty, uh, testy, though.” “We went up to play a friend’s wedding,” says Kulwicki. “Oh, God,” says Besley, laughing. “Savannah. They take you to all the great places. Take you down to River Street. He [the friend] says go out and bring me all your receipts. We’ll go out and take care of it. I’ll never do that again. That was a $525 night. Dinner for all of us. Next night Danny and all of them [the wedding party] went out and spent another $400. Then we never heard from them. “He [the friend] started whittling it down,” notes Kulwicki. “He still owes us money, though.” “But normally,” says Besley, “we’re pretty lucky.” “After those two weekends,” says Kulwicki, “we had friends coming up and giving us contracts they’d drawn up for us. ‘Here. What do you think of this?’ And we’re, like, great, if you can get somebody to sign it.” “From now on, friend or no friend, it’s a deposit,” concludes Besley. “Just like this [upcoming] Virginia gig. ‘ok, 86

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we’re going to need a deposit.’ By the way, Danny, we did get that. We got the deposit check. He’s supposed to be giving us $150 toward expenses. That’s supposed to be coming in another week. And we got rooms. Up near the Potomac before you get to Chesapeake Bay.” Time heals wounds. If they hadn’t hit the bumps in the road, they wouldn’t have the stories to tell. “I started out in Virginia,” says Besley. “I’d just been in a bunch of groups. Things were pretty much drying up around there, though I never had any trouble finding work. Northern Virginia is a hotbed for acoustic music: the Seldom Scene, Country Gentlemen—Emmylou Harris was discovered there.” “My dad used to listen to Tex Ritter,” adds Kulwicki. “My mom was listening to Frank [Sinatra]. My sisters were listening to the Beach Boys. I guess I took a little bit from all of it.” “I really like the Civil War,” notes Besley. “A friend, a guy named Mike Howard, and I were talking about writing a whole album of Civil War tunes. We got one out of it. We wrote a song called ‘Free-Soil Man’ that one day we’ll try to record. We were trying to come up with a name, and I was reading a book, and a free-soil man wasn’t a slave owner. He was just a farmer. That’s what they called the guys who fought and didn’t have a reason. “Lonesome Dove, I think, was the best tv movie I ever saw. I must’ve watched it twenty-five times. You know, you kind of get things from books and movies and try to use those lingering scenes to give you creativity for your songwriting. Like, you know, just an example of something that stuck with me, when they were looking for Jake Spoon, they said, ‘He hates sodbusters, and he’s feeling bloody today.’ I don’t know, man, but if you’re a songwriter, you hear a line like that, and you think, man, a song’s got to come out of that somewhere. “You know, I can’t speak for everybody. All I know is what w h o a re “ those guy s” ?

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works for me, but when you look at the music business, so much of everything that happens is so calculated. A lot of people’s careers are totally calculated out.” The issue invariably leads to talk of the infamous Super Bowl halftime show during which singer Janet Jackson bared her breast on national television. “I was sitting there saying, like, what in the fuck are they doing? It’s a fucking football game, for crying out loud!” says Roberts. “And in the reaction they were trying to amp it up even more.” “I was watching American Idol, and it’s interesting how one style of vocals is so much in vogue,” says Besley. “Every kid on that show was emulating and trying to sing the same exact way as all the guys before who’d won on that same show. The judges keep trying to tell everybody you’re better off if you just try to be yourself, but nobody can figure that out. If anything else, if we get to the end of this road, whatever the end is, I hope we can say that we pretty much did it the way we thought. We aren’t trying to do it the way anybody else is. I mean, I respect the musicians we play with, and I respect the people I listened to growing up—Cat Stevens and John Prine and stuff.” The influence is noticeable. Besley’s voice evokes that of Stevens, who left the music business decades ago, converted to the Islamic faith, and changed his name. “Yeah, the influence is there, but I’m not trying to emulate him in my music,” says Besley. There is, of course, no known evidence that Stevens ever performed a version of anything even close to David Allan Coe’s “Long-Haired Redneck.” “I think it all depends on your original intentions,” says Roberts. “I think if you got into this thing to become a big star, that’s what you direct yourself to doing.” When I suggest that, in reality, kids learn to play guitars 88

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and sing mainly to make themselves more appealing to the opposite sex, the remark draws knowing nods and laughter. “When I first started out being a musician, I played the trombone all the way up to the fucking day the Beatles played that song,” says Roberts. “Girls went nuts, and I just said, hey, give me a bass. Give me a guitar.” “When I was in school, the guys who were in music, we used to go laugh at them,” Besley adds. “They’d be doing, like, Chicago, and they’d be killing it. We’d know three chords, and we’d say, ‘Those guys don’t know anything. This is how it’s supposed to be.’ We’d just blast out threechord stuff stoned or something, and they were doing Chicago. The only reason I got into it was I liked writing. I still know a song I wrote when I was fourteen. I’d learned a couple chords, and I fashioned a song out of it, and everybody was saying, ‘No, no, no, we gotta play the Stones.’ It was just something where, every time I learned to play something, I’d write something too. I still like to play other people’s songs, but I’m always trying to think of something. It’s fun, man. It’s fun.” “I was born in Baltimore,” says Kulwicki. “My first band was in New Jersey. I was about seven, and some people were drinking beer across the street. My parents didn’t like me going over there and hanging out. I got my first guitar and was taking lessons, and they invited me over to play ‘Gloria’ with them. “My dad traveled around a little with his job. We moved to Illinois for four years. I went to junior high school and played basketball and stuff like that. We moved back to New Jersey, and the first week I was there, there was this kid on the block who played piano, and he had a big Hammond organ, and that was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. He had two brothers and they both played, and they had a band. I said that’s pretty neat, so I go over, and I play with them. He w h o a re “ those guy s” ?

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introduced me to people at school, and I was playing in an original band at fifteen and playing in bars when I shouldn’t have been, but my parents were cool with that: ‘As long as we know where you’re at.’ We’d stop for breakfast on the way home, and I’d be home late in the morning, seven or eight in the morning. I’d sleep till noon, but I always liked playing guitar. “I guess the first thing I liked on my own, without my sisters’ influence, was Freddie and the Dreamers and Herman’s Hermits. Then, when the Monkees came out on tv, I thought that was cool, and I saw that Mike Nesmith was really playing. “When I moved to North Carolina, Chet [Atkins’s] sister lived in Elizabeth City. Right on Highway 17. I’d hang out at a music store, and I met her. She sat and listened to me play. My brother always said a guitar player picks up a guitar and plays a song, but a guitarist picks up a guitar and plays any song. He can play different styles of a guitar.” In their formative years all three of the musicians I was speaking with had bounced around from band to band, taking a random career path until experience made their choices more discerning. “I played this place next to a titty bar in Myrtle Beach [South Carolina]—the Afterdeck, I think,” says Roberts. “The place next to it was called Thee Doll House.” “The Dolphin Lounge in Philadelphia,” Kulwicki offers. “We played Earth, Wind & Fire, the Commodores, just with two guitars, bass, and drums. That was our job.” “Up in Gainesville [Florida]. Three-piece band and six dancers—it was fucking crazy,” says Roberts. “One time I sat in with [country band] Tompall and the Glaser Brothers,” says Besley. “[Tompall] wasn’t real nice to me. But, I mean, I still like him.” Now here they are, playing what they want. Doing what 90

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they do. Living life as they please. A trite country saying occurs to me: “No matter where it is in this world that you go, there you are.” “Things are going good,” says Besley. “Danny [Roberts] has been with us almost a year. That was a godsend. Woody [Pernell’s] hanging. If he lives through his birthday, we might have him a while longer. You’ve got your ups and downs. They can happen four and five times a night.” “I still detail cars every now and then,” says Kulwicki. “Only when I have to. It’s like therapy for me too. I love two things: cars and music. I’ve always made a living doing one or the other. If somebody has something fun, you know. Somebody had a Shelby Durango, you know, with a supercharged Hemi motor, and I had fun cleaning that up, detailing it a little bit.” Never did a band have a more apt name. Those Guys. They’re not getting rich, but they’re making ends meet and having a hell of a time along the way.

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A Unique Take on Cowboys and Indians austin, texas | december 2004

Perhaps you know that Bob Livingston has played bass guitar for decades behind Jerry Jeff Walker. Perhaps the name strikes a chord from his work with the Lost Gonzo Band and Gary P. Nunn and John Inmon. The most compelling aspect of this confirmed Texan’s career, however, is its international flavor. Livingston’s album Mahatma Gandhi & Sitting Bull grew out of his fascination with the music and mysteries of other cultures. For many years Livingston and his son, Tucker, have been touring India, Pakistan, Nepal, parts of Africa, and the Middle East for the State Department, exposing other cultures to cowboy music and, as it turns out, exposing Livingston to those cultures. It’s been a remarkable journey, one that started in what would seem to be the most unlikely of places. “You know, I grew up in Lubbock, and that’s not exactly the most pacifist place to be,” says Livingston. “You know, I had really good parents who had a lot of heart. They weren’t 93

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really conservative. I was born in San Antonio, and when I moved to Lubbock, I was just a kid, and a lot of my friends—I had no idea what conservatism was, except that I knew that George H. W. Bush, George the First, was running for Congress. This was my first political thing. I remember a couple of things. Wagner Carr, who was the attorney general of Texas under [Governor] John Connally, lived in Lubbock. His son was a real good friend of mine. We went on a couple of campaign swings with John Connally and Wagner Carr and hung out with them in west Texas somewhere. Being a kid, nobody was saying anything. “No one was saying anything about the concept of race. At the bus station across the street, it had a colored water fountain. All that stuff that I saw, I couldn’t figure it out. When I first saw it, it seemed so strange. If I drink at the colored water fountain, am I going to get sick? I remember going over these things. If it’s only for colored, does that mean that if I drink from it, is something going to happen to me? Is it against the law? I was going through all these things.” Livingston’s social consciousness grew while he was a college student. “When I got to Texas Tech, the Vietnam War was in full swing. It was 1969,” he recalls. “I was playing guitar and singing and writing songs—and listening to Bob Dylan. Listening to that stuff, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’,’ ‘Masters of War,’ you know, you can’t help but be influenced, whether you’re from Lubbock, or whatever, and I remember going to my first political rally, and it was against the war. This was at Texas Tech, and it was at the student union, back behind the commons. I had to tell myself that I was only there to be an observer, but I was there, so I guess I was participating, but I was scared. This was a highly charged, redneck atmosphere during this thing. Here was this preacher on the stage, and 94

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this guy I knew, this youth minister at the Methodist church, and he was coming out against the war, and I thought, this is really brave of this guy, and all of a sudden, in the distance, I hear this noise.” Livingston mimics a low rumble, slowly becoming distinguishable as the tune of Sgt. Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets.” “It’s getting louder and louder, and around the corner is this group of extremely short-haired, American flag–waving guys. They were just kickers, they were cowboys, they were for America, and they didn’t like what was going on, and I remember someone giving me an article when I was in high school about Lyndon Johnson being a Communist and him pacifying the Communists, this horrible stuff, and this was a Goldwater guy. These were the ‘Impeach Earl Warren’ days. I was saying, you know, this can’t be true, and here were these guys coming around to disrupt the thing, singing ‘The Ballad of the Green Berets.’ “So, it was sort of dangerous, but I had friends, and I was sort of growing my hippiedom, you know, at that point, and by the time I got out of there, which was pretty quick—1969, early 1970s—I split, and I went to Colorado. I was writing songs, and I was listening to all these people, and I met Michael Martin Murphey. He was Mike Murphey when I got to know him. So, one thing led to another, and by the time I had a chance—one of my first experiences—but, now that I think about it, I remember one of my first moments of social, and spiritual, consciousness as well was hearing the sitar on ‘Norwegian Wood.’ One thing led to another, and I wound up finding the only Ravi Shankar album in Lubbock, Texas, and listening to that stuff and burning incense. By the time I had a chance, I went to India. I was gone, you know. I took the first opportunity and have been going back ever since. “The first time I went was 1975, but my wife had gone a u n i q u e t ak e o n c ow boy s and i ndi ans

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there in 1972–73. I took my son, Tucker. Tucker went when he was barely old enough to walk.” The State Department sponsors a cultural exchange program in which Livingston has participated for many years. Livingston is working on a documentary based on video footage of his experiences in the Middle East countries of Yemen, Syria, Kuwait, Jordan, Oman, Qatar, and Bahrain as well as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Morocco. Yemen is and was a hotbed of anti-American sentiment. “When we played in Yemen, what I remember most is that it was incredibly beautiful, and I never felt a moment of uncertainty,” Livingston says. “We went to all these countries, and we never felt threatened. Walking in the middle of a bazaar in the old city . . . I’ve got some incredible video. We taught them how to yodel. We yodel along. One of the songs I always do is [Buddy Holly’s] ‘Not Fade Away.’ “Here are these people. I’ve got video of these kids in the Middle East coming up, and we’re singing that ‘love is real, not fade away.’ Interspersed in the several places we played, and I’m playing with Arabic musicians, and we’re singing ‘love is real,’ and people are singing it back. I’m singing ‘love is real’ [he imitates the call and response], ‘love is real,’ ‘doesn’t fade away.’” As Livingston—long nicknamed “Cosmic Bob” by his contemporaries—tells these stories, they take on an almost evangelical fervor. He is the most gentle of men who at times sounds as if he’s part of a tent revival. He even put together a band, called Cowboys & Indians, made up of musicians from Texas and India. Grants from the Texas Commission on the Arts and Austin Arts Commission have enabled him to take his band into the state’s public schools for more than a decade. “I remember being in Yemen, and we were playing at this 96

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arts college,” he recalls. “These women . . . there were boys and girls in the class, and many of the women’s faces were covered completely. Some of them you couldn’t see their face. “There was this one woman. I said, ‘Here’s a song about a young boy, a young guy from Lubbock, Texas, where I’m from. His name was Buddy Holly. He wrote a song about how big and how beautiful and how wonderful his love for this young girl was.’ This woman, all in black, started crying out, ‘Yes! Yes!’ It could appeal to her, this notion that love is the cultural bridge, really. They were all walking up and asking about it. Of course, if we had gotten into politics, it would’ve been different. This was before 9/11 and, actually, it was a month before the uss Cole was blown up in Aden Harbor, and we had been there. There’s a lot of stuff going on over there, and it’s anti-Americanism, but the people that I ran into, it was ‘anti the government.’ Now . . . I don’t know. Now we might be captured and beheaded. Who knows? They might not ask any questions. That’s what’s so weird, but at that time they were willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, for sure. And the State Department. Who knows what they thought? We were guarded, for sure, but it’s a whole different world out there now.” Livingston runs Texas Music International out of an office near the State Capitol. The topic of conversation turns to the vibrant musical scene in Austin and what distinguishes it from Nashville. “I went to Nashville, and Guy Clark introduced me to a bunch of people, and I played songs for them, and I asked him how he did it,” he says, “and what Guy said was, ‘I just write for myself, and if someone else likes it, great, but I just write for myself.’ I think there’s a lot of people who do that, like John Hiatt, for instance. Everybody covers his songs, but he writes for himself. a u n i q u e t ak e o n c ow boy s and i ndi ans

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“But I think maybe guys like Guy and Bruce Robison, Hiatt, Keith Sykes, maybe they’re the exceptions. There’s what I call a factory system in Nashville. You have that factory where you walk in, and they have a big blackboard, and they say on one line who’s in town this week and who’s cutting what kind of song they’re looking for. A slow song, a ballad, or whatever. There are creative ways to do it. . . . They get together, but they have to churn it out. The main thing they’re driven by is needing another hit. Even the really good ones [established or known musicians] are driven to do that. I always had a hard time with it, but I think part of the appeal of Austin music was that people wrote for themselves. People play music for themselves. It’s not a factory town. “Austin—you know, now that they’ve got South by Southwest [a wildly successful music festival]—is getting more business oriented, but there still aren’t any major record labels here. I don’t think it’s a factory town at all. I think it’s a feudal system. “You have all these really creative characters who have their own empires. People like Jerry Jeff [Walker] and Marcia Ball and Ray Benson. Willie Nelson and all these people have their own offices and their own way of doing things. Jerry Jeff has really been a pioneer in selling from my house to your house. He’s making a lot more money now than he ever did when he had gold records because he’s getting all the money. People just want to take a piece of that home with them, and he saw that.” What separates Livingston from, say, Steve Earle is that his outlook is devoid of bitterness. His travels around the world have left him deeply moved, but he remains comfortable both at home and abroad. He prefers to accentuate the positive. His love of Texas led him to experiment by reaching out to other cultures and blending musical styles that seem antithetical to one another. 98

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“When I call people ‘rednecks,’” Livingston says, “I do it affectionately. ‘Redneck mother’ [the Ray Wylie Hubbard song that has been a Jerry Jeff Walker standard for thirty years], you know. I don’t think Lubbock’s full of rednecks, but certainly those really, really, truly conservative people who didn’t want any change were there in force when I was.” Other cultures have the same kinds of folk. What Livingston has discovered is that love, in the form of music, can shape a common ground.

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One-Chord Song dallas, texas | december 2004

I’ve arrived in the Deep Ellum section of Dallas trying to come to grips in some metaphysical sense with the term red dirt. It’s a movement that grew out of the bars around Stillwater, Oklahoma. I’ve listened to the music. I’ve interviewed members of the band Cross Canadian Ragweed. Here, though, is a unique opportunity to see it up close and personal. What I expect, when I walk through the doors of the Gypsy Tea Room, is an appearance by Stoney LaRue and his Organic Boogie Band. What I get is quite a bit more. LaRue has completed an album, and in the general party that follows, he brings along four other musicians. The gig at the Gypsy Tea Room ends up being one with no headliner at all. Five stools are placed onstage, and LaRue, Mike McClure, Kevin Webb, Scott Evans, and Jeremy Watkins take turns performing songs. The first four play acoustic guitars. Watkins wields a fiddle. “If we get drunk,” LaRue tells the audience, “we need people who will take care of us.” 101

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A pause for both effect and applause. “Anybody got any weed?” Although the affair is a bit, uh, drunken, it evolves into a unique opportunity to see one of red dirt music’s defining characteristics. It’s cohesive, if not coherent. It’s one big party. The principals get along. They’re in this thing together. Maybe when they’re all older and either more successful or out of the business, they’ll look back at nights like these as the good old days. Perhaps it’s inevitable that times like these will be fleeting, but none of them believes it. “You can’t go up to some person, and I’m not picking apart anyone from Texas or any kind of country music genre, but I’ve never seen any other genre where you can go up and hug the guy that’s singing a song next to you,” says LaRue. The music ranges from the humorous—Webb sings a song in which he spells out the letters in Schaefer Beer (“E is for every girl you love . . . F is for girls you take home”)—to the defiant (“If I’m going down, I’m going down in flames”). “To me it’s just a group of people who I grew up with,” says McClure. “Well, not really grew up with. When I went to college, when I went to [Oklahoma State University in Stillwater], it was kind of a bohemian atmosphere. I came from a small town in Oklahoma called Tecumseh. When I moved there [Stillwater], it was like going to New York City in a way. I heard Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, stuff that I’d never heard. My dad had Willie [Nelson] Sings [Kris] Kristofferson, and I’d already gotten into those lyrics. I remember writing all those lyrics down on a legal pad when I could just barely write.” In the red dirt scene what has evolved is equal parts populist and cosmic. It’s not too unlike what developed around Austin in the 1970s, when hippies mingled with cowboys at the Armadillo World Headquarters. The influences once again range from Bob Wills to Bob Dylan, but it’s not the 102

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same because these guys have sifted through and scooped up what’s happened in the interim. They don’t seem at all obsessed with commercial success, and while they’re grateful for fans in Texas who have embraced them, they don’t much care to have their music swept into any categorization that includes the Lone Star State. Hence the term red dirt music. They thrive on performing live music and, quite obviously, party like the ship could sink at any moment. Many Texans hedge their bets when talking about the record companies and mainstream radio. They may not care much for what’s going on, but they’d like to be embraced by Nashville. In the red dirt scene Nashville might as well be Baghdad. About popular music McClure dismisses it as “all advertising time.” “They’ve got this little formula that keeps people listening, and it keeps radio stations selling ads. That’s why I’m so excited about xm [Satellite] Radio. There’s very little talk, and if there is talk, it’s talk pertaining to the album. Now, with most radio stations they may give the artist’s name, but used to be, they’d tell you what album it’s on, playing album cuts and whatnot. “You can either get mad about it, or you can find an alternative. I got really pissed off about it for a long time, and then I just decided being pissed off isn’t going to change anything.” During a break the room backstage is cloudy and raucous. A cell phone rings, and McClure picks up a banana and conducts a conversation with it. Webb lurches over, yanks the banana out of McClure’s hand, and spikes it, smashing it on the wood floor. “If you can’t enjoy the music, man, that means you’re giving up on humanity,” McClure observes, surveying the banana mush. Here’s a surprise. McClure cites Jack Kerouac as an influence. “I started traveling because of the Kerouac influence, one - chord song

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you know,” he says. “It’s still going to every town and exposing people to your music. You go to another town—they don’t know you, or they might have an album. It’s kind of cool. “I’ve been real fortunate in the experiences, in the views I’ve had of all these bands. Ragweed and [Jason Boland and the Stragglers], I saw them start. My own bands that were successful. It’s just grassroots. You build it yourself. If they play you on the radio, great. If they don’t, who gives a shit? You don’t have to worry about image. There are always the free spirits of every day, every time. That’s what Kerouac was to his time.” I return to the stage, in search of LaRue. Just as I come around the corner, he roars down the steps, and we collide. He cushions the impact with a bear hug and yells, “Hey, motherfucker, you want to get high?” A friend of mine, Jim McLaurin, has a saying he got from his father: “There ain’t but two things I can’t abide, and that’s a drunk when I’m sober and being sober when they’re drunk.” This is the predicament I find myself in. Later LaRue, who almost always wears a bandana, tells the Texas audience, “Y’all know, it took us coming to Texas to at least get it [my music] some popularity, but this is some shit you won’t ever hear anywhere else, man.” About making the new cd, he says, “We’ve been smoking a lot of reefer, but . . . nah . . . really more cigarettes than anything else.” I think they would’ve played all night had the patient management of the Tea Room not gently nudged the group to, well, head in the general direction of adjournment. LaRue stares into the spotlights and asks, “Hey, can we do, like, two more songs? Two more? ok, man, two more.” The two songs take about ten minutes each, and they include forays into four or five other songs, with all five onstage taking part. It’s after two in the morning when the 104

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group shuffles back to the dressing room and the crowd wanders unhurriedly onto the street. None of my interviews is anything approaching formal, but my conversation with LaRue is particularly unorthodox; he plays guitar nearly throughout. He answers my questions in the form of songs; some he makes up on the spot, and others he lifts from his cosmic psyche. “Red dirt music as a movement, huh? If you’re going to put it like that . . . one thing I can say about that, whatever you’re surrounded by, whatever musicians we’re surrounded by, and I say this coming from Stillwater, where I felt like . . . Let’s put it in music,” he says. I’m from Stillwater and the Red Dirt Rangers, Bob Childers, Tom Skinner . . . And Medicine Show, for sure. They got a lot of honesty in Red Dirt Rangers, one of the first songs I heard . . . Not only did they have the hook but Woody Guthrie kind of started it a long time ago in the Depression. Jimmy Lafave is part of it, I mean, everybody from Oklahoma, really, has at least heard about it. My dad was a honky-tonker, and he showed me all the chords one day at my grandpa’s house down in southeast Oklahoma. Was a rainbow rocker from way back when— Well, I never found it hard to find a friend. If you want to take a spin, you can count him in. Was a rainbow rocker from way back when. He came from California. No, that guy they wrote the song about . . . Andy Rainwater? He had a motorcycle accident. The Red Dirt Rangers wrote about it. one - chord song

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He was the rainbow rocker from California back in the sixties. Kind of pre-hippie, or maybe right there in the middle of it. LaRue abandons the chords for a while and tries to convey the camaraderie he feels with the whole movement and everyone in it. “Oh, this is a great example,” he says. “We just got done doing my album, and this song I wrote with Childers . . . I was with him in his trailer right before the van came and picked me up, and I thought, man, well, I’m doing this new album, and he’s like, what Childers song do you want to do, and it was, like, my ode to him. I want people to know what this whole thing is about. The last album ended up being an ode to every red dirt musician. There’s co-writes there pretty much from everybody in the scene. “The getting-along part is not the hard part. The hard part is watching other people play music who don’t really accept the lifestyle, and they just dwell on, you know, I’m going to be the next big thing. Our whole thing is, if we play a song, with Scott Evans or Mike McClure, it’s, hell, yeah, brother, that’s the song. Whenever I look at myself in the mirror, what I see is kind of the tail on the donkey of all the people who came out of Stillwater. This guy [Evans] is the saddle. Mike’s the fucking head. Childers, you know—” “That is genuine respect,” says Evans. “Genuine respect.” I remark that the level of humility among the five musicians seems remarkable, given their talent, and this observation leads Evans off on a tangent, a parable, of his own. “Here’s a story related to me by a guy from Leadville, Colorado, when Medicine Show [my band] was setting up one night,” Evans recalls. “We were getting ready to play, breaking all the gear out, this guy came up, and it was obvious he was jangled on some kind of hallucinogen, right? He was 106

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mostly on the pay phone, which was right beside the stage. As soon as he got finished, he came over and said, ‘I got it!’ and we all said, ‘What?’ “He said, ‘The music is the water, the dancers are the flowers, and the band is the hose.’ Upon reflection he was exactly right. That’s where humility comes in. On those good nights, when I plug in, it comes through me, and I can share it with people. It’s a channel, and my blessing is to be the guy that it’s coming out of, but I feel like it comes from somewhere else. The difference and the similarity to that is the honest approach. I mean, you guys can’t see that right now but—” LaRue politely interrupts. “I was talking with Childers when I was writing this song, and I said, what’s better than a two-chord song? And he said, a one-chord song. That’s what we named it.” And LaRue, joined by Evans and McClure, starts singing again. It’s called “One Chord Song,” and it’s about simplicity: in life, in love, and in music. Now it’s after three o’clock. I’m beginning to wonder if I will be seeing the sun rise over the Dallas skyline when McClure brings the interview to a suitably cryptic close. “If he can’t share it, I mean, you’re all just pissing water, anyway,” he says, and we all walk out into the street and go home.

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The Soul of Marty Robbins nashville, tennessee | april 2004

Jesse Lee Jones completes the old country standard “Talk Back Trembling Lips” and basks in the warmth of applause from a near-capacity crowd at the lower Broadway honkytonk called Robert’s Western World. He raises his arms triumphantly and declares to the audience, “This is real country music, not the crap that passes for it nowadays.” There’s more to this scene than just a singer, a band, and a honky-tonk. Jones’s story is rather unique. He came to this country in 1984 and is Brazilian by birth. He is part owner of the club where he performs each Friday night, usually from 10:30 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. Jones’s band, Brazilbilly, is a diverse, modern incarnation of Ernest Tubb’s Texas Troubadours. The fiddler, “Pappy” Eugene Merritts, is an old Nashville hand who, over the years, has played with Patsy Cline, Dottie West, Bill Monroe, and others. On the standup bass is Elio Giordano, native-born but of Italian descent. Jimmy Clark—who plays 109

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steel, accompanies “Pappy” when twin fiddles are required, and also plays lead, pedal steel, lap steel, and, from time to time, the trumpet and accordion—grew up playing with his father’s Iowa band, the Ellsworth Clark Orchestra. The drummer, John McTigue III, is a graduate of Berklee College of Music in Boston. The name dates back to the mid-1990s, when members of the band br549, then playing at Robert’s, dubbed Jones “the Brazil hillbilly.” Jones, a Mormon, came to the United States alone from São Paulo in 1984 with five hundred dollars in his pocket. “I had an old guitar and a dream to play in Nashville, Tennessee,” he says. On a bus from Miami to Salt Lake City, while he was sleeping, someone robbed him of everything he had. He wound up being taken in by a church family in Peoria, Illinois. The most striking aspect of Jesse Lee Jones’s music is his obvious love of and unerring similarity to the great Marty Robbins, who had been dead two years when Jones arrived in the United States. Jones didn’t discover Robbins’s music until he listened to an old Robbins cassette while driving between Peoria and Nashville, yet they share almost identical voices and have many of the same mannerisms. It is, as many people have told him, eerie, almost as if the legendary singer’s vagrant soul had found a refuge in Jones. “I didn’t get to know Marty until I came to America,” says Jones, sounding as if Robbins occasionally happens by. “Unfortunately, he’s not popular in Brazil. Of course, anyone who comes here now [from Brazil] hears me now as Brazilbilly. I turn them on to Marty Robbins, and they go back and have to take with them the boxed sets and all that. They leave here loving him. “I was at a garage sale—a yard sale, of sorts—and they had this Marty Robbins Christmas cassette. I got it for a dollar, 110

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whatever. I just loved his voice. I said to myself, ‘My God, I can sing his stuff. That sounds like me.’ It’s weird.” It’s easy to see how a farmer’s kid from Kentucky, or a rancher’s kid from Oklahoma, can become obsessed with honky-tonk shuffles and the simple hopes, dreams, and failures of the American working class. Growing up with bluegrass or trail songs or western swing can certainly cultivate a love of the particular genre and a desire to see it preserved. But Jesse Lee Jones has it bad, and it’s difficult to come up with a logical explanation. Running a rundown honkytonk—and playing for tips in it each weekend—is certainly no way to get rich. He didn’t mold himself into the reincarnation of Marty Robbins—and, by the way, yes, he performs songs of many other artists, and with extraordinary skill—for commercial reasons. The market for Marty Robbins impersonators hardly rivals that of Elvis Presley, though perhaps it ought to. Jones owns a jacket worn by Robbins on one of his album covers. Fans, fellow musicians, and local businesspeople have brought him mementos: photographs, prints, concert posters, ticket stubs. One result is that Jones actually owns a funeral plot next to where Robbins and wife, Marizona, are buried. He’s had plenty of help feeding the obsession. But he is much more than an impersonator. Jones has immersed himself in Robbins’s legacy but also in that of many other artists, from Hank Williams to Buddy Holly to Ray Price to Johnny Cash. His simple office above the little bar is crowded with cds and cassettes of dozens of artists, many of whom enjoy as little national acclaim as he. In fact, the music lying around is the only aspect of the office that seems disorderly. Jones seems to be a highly organized man in all respects other than the music, where the burning obsession still takes root. t h e s o u l o f marty robbi ns

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It’s just that the voice is so similar to Robbins and the passion for the music so achingly sincere. “I used to drive to Peoria, Illinois, because I still played music up there on weekends,” Jones says, “and, while this may sound difficult to believe, I would play Marty’s music, and it would make me cry from the time I left my house all the way to Peoria. Eight hours. The passion in his voice, the passion in his music . . . I’d just feel it in my heart. “I just love it. There is nothing like it. I get emotional just talking about it.” Jones takes great pride in the acceptance he has earned within the ranks of those like him, the ones who sacrificed almost everything to carve a little niche for themselves in Music City. “Jimmy Clark, who plays for me, is a genius,” says Jones. “He plays the steel, the lap steel, the flute, the trumpet, the fiddle, everything else. He grew up with this music. When he was three years old, he was already playing fiddle with his family. He asks the same questions. ‘Pappy’ played with Patsy Cline and toured for many years. Elio, of course, is of Italian descent, but he has been around this music all his life. “When I first came to Nashville, these very guys right here didn’t like me. This foreign guy coming here. ‘Who are you? You don’t know this stuff. You’re just exploiting it.’ But after they got to know me, after they hung out with me, they realized I was sincere. After nine years of being together, Jimmy [Clark] says, ‘If you’re not going to be here, I’m not going to be here either. I’m not playing behind anybody else. That’s it.’ See, I don’t understand that, because I know there was a time when he thought, you know, that this whole thing with me was bogus.” When Jones arrived in the United States, he says he barely spoke a word of English. His early lessons came from watching Sesame Street on tv in Peoria. 112

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Robert’s Western World has been, at various times, a guitar shop and a western store. Cowboy boots are still on sale as sort of a testimony to how the place has evolved. Its former owner, Robert Moore, greatly encouraged Jesse Lee Jones’s career by putting together a band to back him. What is now known as Brazilbilly began as the Tennessee Travelers. “I came here and asked Robert what would I have to do to audition and get a chance to play here,” says Jones. “You know, he’s just a good old boy, and he looked at me and said, ‘Well, son, can you sing country music?’ [Jones makes a fairly awful attempt at mimicking a Southern accent.] I said, ‘Well, yes, sir, I can.’ He said, ‘Well, can you sing four hours of it straight? If you take breaks, I ain’t interested.’ And I said, ‘Yes, sir, I love to do it.’ “He got me up there with a band, and the next thing I knew, he had walked up and down the street and brought all these other club owners down to see me. We became friends. Never once do I remember Robert making any comments about my accent or my being from Brazil, and he’s gung ho about country music and what he believes in. He just took me in.” Jesse Lee Jones seems uncomfortable at the art of self-promotion, perhaps because of his work ethic and the fact that he has been able to survive, at least make a living, in this country by simply being true to himself and his love for the music. One would think, at the very least, there would be a natural appeal for this self-made man on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. His voice gets even softer than it has been during the course of the entire interview. “I can’t really understand or comprehend their point of view,” he says. “I don’t know what that is. I think the Opry would be a great honor, though. I don’t even know if I could make it. I’d probably pass out.” t h e s o u l o f marty robbi ns

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Oh, Jesse Lee Jones could make it. It’s a long way from lower Broadway to the Opry stage, which used to be just a few yards from Robert’s Western World’s back door. It’s not as far, though, as it is from poverty and a broken home in São Paulo to relative stability in Nashville, doing exactly what he wants to do with his life. This is a quintessential American success story, and perhaps the best explanation is a simple one. “I can’t imagine a man having a heart and not loving country music,” Jones says with simple conviction.

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Son of a Gypsy Songman austin, texas | december 2003

The first impression of Django Walker is that he is a good kid, the kind who would instill pride in any father. The fact that his father happens to be Jerry Jeff Walker, a legendary figure in Texas music, only intensifies that sentiment. The interview is scheduled to take place at an Austin bar where, unfortunately, the presence of a Longhorn basketball game on television has created a rather raucous atmosphere. “Gosh, I didn’t even think about that,” says Django, so we abruptly change plans and depart in his suv for a local Schlotzky’s fast-food joint, where the lanky singer-songwriter proceeds to order up a hefty portion of the menu. It takes a lot of food to fuel Django’s level of energy. His father was, by his own description, “a gypsy songman” who migrated from his native upstate New York to the Florida Keys to New Orleans and to Los Angeles before finally settling in Austin. Nowadays Jerry Jeff Walker, in his sixties, is about as Texan as anyone not born there can be. Jerry Jeff often sings, to borrow from a phrase penned by singer115

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songwriter Steven Fromholz, about “trying to recover from a misspent youth.” Django bears the fruit of that attitude without having to experience firsthand the dangerous rites of passage his father went through. Jerry Jeff rolled out of New York with a guitar on his back and a thumb in the air. The son’s apprenticeship has been a bit more formal. Jerry Jeff sent Django to the Liverpool, England, music school founded by Paul McCartney. Django apparently learned both sets of lessons well. His song “Texas on My Mind” has become a rallying cry, although the most familiar version is from a singer who covered it, Pat Green. When Django and his band perform the song, it draws thunderous acclaim, but he always has to point out, politely, that he, not Green, actually wrote it. Of Green, the bright, shining star who could propel others on to the national stage, Django says, “I think he’s great. His business sense is unreal. That’s one area where I’ve really learned a lot from him. He understands the business, and he’s done it, and I hope he does pave the way for all of us. I couldn’t think of a better guy doing it for us. He and [Cross Canadian] Ragweed are really clearing a path for us. There are no two better groups. “There’s no better guy than Pat, and there’s no better group of guys than Ragweed.” Before a New Year’s Eve performance in the heart of Austin’s music district, Django slugs down Red Bull energy drinks, revealing a rather telling point. Django Walker doesn’t even drink, let alone do the drugs that once fueled his father’s headlong spree of musical mayhem. You wouldn’t know it from a song, “College Life,” he penned with friend Greg Combs. It’s a crowd-pleaser, one that apparently reflects more the lives of the kids who populate Django’s concerts than that of the singer. Or perhaps he’s just growing up much more quickly than his father. 116

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Asked about it, he says simply, “Nah, I just don’t do that stuff anymore,” and we leave it at that. He’s hardly judgmental about it. His friends include dozens of unrepentant bohemians. Django and his band have blended seamlessly with a regular touring troupe of bands that cater to the college life: Stoney LaRue and the Organic Boogie Band, Wade Bowen and West 84, Cross Canadian Ragweed, Honeybrowne, Jason Boland and the Stragglers, Mike McClure Band, and others. It’s not unusual to find at least two of them falling in together on the vast Texas country-rock frontier. There’s plenty to observe if not to partake in. “All the good writers have written about reality in their own way, you know,” he says. “That’s what makes an original song. That’s what makes you the quality of artist that you are.” Perhaps the best example of all is his father, who has exerted guiding influence without actually taking the wheel. “He and my mother both are always around, and when I do something, they’re kind of there, and I have to tell them, you know, that sometimes you have to learn by your mistakes,” Django says. “That’s how life goes, and you don’t get anywhere unless you dip your foot in the water. They’re always sitting around saying ‘You might not want to do that’ or ‘That’s not the way your father made it to where he is.’ My dad took a very unique path. “We’ve had our scuffles. My dad and I still butt heads to this day. He has his way of doing something, but it’s a different time, and I have my way of doing something. He has a way that he wants music to sound, and I have a way that I want music to sound. We’re influenced by completely different people. We sort of butt heads, but we have to be lenient of each other. You have to listen to him because he didn’t get to where he was because he’s dumb. He’s very smart. He did it his way, and he butted heads, but he made it, and he was sort s o n o f a gy p sy songman

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of the leader of people with this attitude, with this grassroots mentality.” Jerry Jeff Walker famously rejected the musical establishment, with the considerable assistance of his business-savvy wife, Susan. They founded Tried & True Music, which successfully markets the music to an intensely loyal core of fans, many of whom have been listening almost religiously to Jerry Jeff for decades. Most of them grew up with him. When he was wild and young, they were too. Now he’s older and wiser, and they are too. As a result, the fans relate to the music as much as they ever did. “He can say [to Nashville or New York or LA], ‘I don’t have to do things your way,’” says Django. “’I have this fan base. I play around the whole country, just like everybody else. I have a great life, and I did it all independently. I did it all by networking and building fans.’ A lot of artists today use him as an example. Nobody goes out shopping for major-label deals anymore.” The Django Walker shows are long and raucous. The singer’s level of energy is almost maniacal. He sometimes comes across onstage as a big old goofy kid, hopping up and down as he hammers his electric guitar and assumes the defiant pose of the young and unencumbered. He’s impossible not to like. The road agrees with him, and his heart is in the right place. “You build friendships with fans in this business,” he says. “One time—well, maybe not just one time, but this particular one time—we got in a bind. We didn’t have our live cd that we recorded at the Firehouse, this bar in Houston, and we didn’t have it. We lost it. We called this fan of ours and said, ‘Hey, man, you got any copies of it?’ He said yeah, and he overnighted it to us. It’s just a friendship that you build through music. They come to all these shows, they’re there, 118

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and they’re supporting you 100 percent, no matter what. You always try to give something back to them because I think the fans are the real reason you’re out there and that you stay out there playing music. We love music, and we love to play music. “Every band that we play with, there’s at least one or two guys in every band that I stay in touch with when we get off the road. . . . I’ve grown up around musicians. A handshake and a minute of conversation are priceless. There’s something about meeting somebody. When you meet somebody, you begin to pick up their personality. Meeting somebody carries a lot more weight than autographs, in my eyes. When you meet somebody that you really like and they’re a great person, you will remember that for the rest of your life. You’ll lose an autograph, maybe, but you’ll remember that meeting for the rest of your life. I met Paul McCartney, and he was the nicest guy I’ve ever met. For someone to be that level and be that humble, I will never forget that.” Django’s life hasn’t notably changed yet. His fame is modest and easily monitored. But because of who he is, he knows the drill. He understands what’s ahead, and while, like most musicians, he yearns for fame and adulation, he is suitably wary of its implications. “You have to adapt to the way that fame has remade you, and it sucks,” he says. “Look at Michael Jackson. He has to close a mall in London to go shopping. You get bigger, and, you know, I think your friends start to dwindle away. When you get so big, you start hanging out with a different crew, and I think that crew’s fake. It’s fake. It’s very fake. “They’re only there for the thick, and when the thin parts come, that’s when you find who your true friends are.” Jerry Jeff Walker wrote songs about spending the night in a New Orleans jail with a song-and-dance man [“Mr. Bojangles”], hitchhiking with a likable rogue [“Stoney”], hanging s o n o f a gy p sy songman

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out with cowboy philosopher Hondo Crouch in Luckenbach, and simple little friendships with a maker of cowboy boots [“Charlie Dunn”] and cowboy hats [“Manny’s Hat Song”]. The great man’s son is already building his own catalog of stories from the road. It’s a different age, but there is a definite resonance between the generations. “We had to drive one night from El Paso to Houston to get to a Pat Green show [at the Woodlands], where we were the opening act,” recalls Django. “We drove overnight. We got in at about six o’clock in the morning. We walk in the hotel to take showers and stuff, and there were these people who’d just gotten married, and they were going to the show the next day, and there were a bunch of their friends, and they were playing guitars there in the hotel. And I just said, ‘Well, I’m just going to stay up,’ so I stayed up and played guitar with these people. Like two years later, they came up and said, ‘Hey, man, you remember me,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, man,’ we stayed up all night playing guitar. It was such a weird moment. We walk in after staying up all night, and then I wind up staying up and playing music with people who are going to come see us play. “You just remember things like that.” He admires fellow Texans like Green, Jack Ingram, and Cody Canada [of Cross Canadian Ragweed] and learns something from them all. “Jack [Ingram] lays it all on the stage,” he says. “I saw him open up for Charlie Robison. Robison had, like, a sevenpiece band. Jack just walked out there with four guys, and Jack put on so much better a show. He just left it all out there.” Of Canada he says: “He’s just a rocker. He’s the guy who has the cool shirts and the cool belt buckles and the hair and the rocking out. He has the stage presence and the view. “Everyone else in the band is great. Grady [Cross] is a 120

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great guy. Once you sit down in a quiet place with him, he’s really cool. Jeremy [Plato], the bass player, is kind of the shy, soft-spoken guy. Randy [Ragsdale] is kind of the kid, they guy who plays the jokes, and everybody plays jokes on Randy. It’s really neat, and they’re a great group.” What Django Walker lacks is his own niche. He remains a bit lost amid the glorious battle of the bands in Austin and beyond. He toured Texas and Oklahoma in 2003 with Bowen and LaRue, in what was envisioned as a glorious triumvirate of emerging talent, and learned a few hard lessons. “It went terrible, as far as crowds coming out and actually watching,” Django says. “The shows were amazing as far as hanging out with Stoney and all the bands and Wade and everybody in that group. It was the most unreal thing, and the shows were absolutely unreal. We thought that people would be interested: three good bands playing in a city full of music. A city like Dallas, where Pat Green can come in and do twenty thousand or [Cross Canadian] Ragweed can come in and do six thousand, we’re sitting there saying, ‘Well, we’re three bands. Why can’t we come in and do four hundred?’ “We just had the wrong mentality. You don’t just jump in the fire. You don’t know.” Dad could have told him that. Dad would also have to grudgingly concede, though, that a man has to make his own mistakes.

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Six Days on the Road texas | march 2003

From the Broken Spoke on South Lamar Street in Austin to the Ridgelea Theatre in Fort Worth, another road trip provides the opportunity to immerse myself in the rich country music scene of the Lone Star State. Here’s why the music in Texas is superior, at least from one perspective, to what is available in Nashville, Tennessee. Texas music is all about performing; in Nashville it’s about recording. In Texas the auditoriums, dance halls, and honkytonks provide sustenance to hundreds of singers and bands. In Nashville session musicians labor skillfully but in seclusion for years until the lucky ones finally sign that elusive record contract. Then the record company sends a singer or a band out on the road, and no one knows what to do there. Austin is the capital of both the music and the state, but weekend nights in the Dallas–Forth Worth metroplex provide enough live-music options to confound even the most discerning consumer. I can’t say I regret it, though. On Saturday night, in Fort 123

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Worth, I opt for the Ridgelea, where the Derailers put their latest cd, Genuine, on public display. I can’t think of anyone truer to the roots of country music than the Derailers, with their “retro” tributes to the honky-tonk shuffles of the sixties and the much-loved Bakersfield sound of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. Everything about this album is great, but watching the Derailers in person is greater. The band defines the term tight. The new album features mostly the band’s own compositions but with significant input from the likes of Jim Lauderdale and, yes, Buck Owens. Django Walker, the excitable, hard-rocking son of the gonzo legend, Jerry Jeff Walker, had played Antone’s, on Fifth Street in Austin, on Thursday night. Django is a lanky, slightly awkward young man (I wish I could see him on a basketball court, manning the low post), but his music and enthusiasm are endearing. His daddy, a founding father of all this, must be proud. The crowd at Antone’s is liberally sprinkled with fans, my age and older, gathered in Austin for Jerry Jeff’s annual three-day Birthday Bash (“the bdb”), which begins—without me, alas—the following night. Sadly, there are race cars to occupy me 200 miles to the north. What better compliment to offer a father? He is true to his daddy’s legacy. Even harder rocking than Django Walker is the Bleu Edmondson Band, which plays Woodie’s Tavern in Fort Worth on Friday night. The country-influenced rock carries with it a certain punk sensibility, and Edmondson may have drifted out beyond the edge of—and perhaps extended—my range of appreciation. Still, it’s fun to watch the kids go wild in response to all the posturing and take-no-prisoners enthusiasm. Edmondson isn’t exactly old-school where Texas music is concerned. He wears his smu cap on backwards and lets 124

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the audience see both middle fingers a couple of times. The gestures, by the way, draw applause and laughter. Our little troupe also sees Marcia Ball and the South Austin Jug Band, meets Cory Morrow and Slaid Cleaves in the wings, and makes a memorable side trip to Luckenbach, where we mingle a bit with the spiritual compadres of “Waylon, Willie, and the boys.” There is even music at the track. Cooder Graw, the Amarillo band that was originally named Coup de Grace, plays a cold, windblown set behind turns 1 and 2 of the sprawling Texas Motor Speedway, north of Fort Worth. When the group discovered there was another band using the French name, its members unanimously decided to spell the name in the manner Texans pronounce it anyway. As usual, I buy a lot of music, mostly at the delightfully eclectic Austin outpost Waterloo Records. I spend perhaps an hour with a sportswriting chum cracking jokes about the outrageous names of groups we’d never heard of—Bongzilla, Frat Guys from Hell. Meanwhile, I collect some music from entertainers I’ve sampled but want to get to know better: Adam Carroll, Jason Boland and the Stragglers, Roger Creager, and Adam Carroll among them. My nascar-related travels to Texas have given me many fond memories, precious few of which have been related to stockcar racing. Once, on a similar trip, a friend and I saw Billy Joe Shaver and Charlie Robison in concert at a little restaurant on the shores of Lake Travis. All it cost me was a Mexican dinner, which was well worth the money. Over the past few years I’ve been to a lot of honky-tonks and dance halls, and along the way I’ve even made friends with a few Texas singer-songwriters, most notably Ed Burleson and Jack Ingram. One friend in particular is fond of saying that I won’t listen to music that anyone else does. My defense is that I seldom care for anything that is commercial s i x day s on the road

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and that my friend seldom pays attention to anything that isn’t. If you think mainstream country radio is as vacuous as I do, Texas is your place. If you really think the best music is what sells the best or what the radio plays, there’s probably no need even for you to look this stuff up. But if you’d like to hear something a little different, check it out. I think you’ll be glad you did. A lot of what I listen to is called “Americana,” or “alternative country.” My translation is that alternative country is what country used to be. The songs are about the lives of ordinary people. There’s not a lot of “boot-scooting boogie” there. It takes some relay driving with a friend to get back from Austin on a drive through the cold night air in the wee hours of a Friday morning, but missing out on Django Walker is not an option. When I arrive back home to South Carolina, I sleep for a solid day, but fatigue was never a factor in Texas. To paraphrase the words of Charley Pride on an old live album, the Texas music scene energizes me like a bucking horse roaring out of a stall. I probably look older after six days on the road in Texas . . . but I sure feel younger.

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Contrary to, Uh, Anything raleigh, north carolina | july 2004

At a time of personal anguish Kenny Roby’s music came along to soothe and comfort me. Roby recorded an album called Rather Not Know. Much of it he wrote in response to the death of his father, a Clemson University professor, in October 2001. Although it is an introspective album, it’s also somehow uplifting. In many cases the cheerful, even soaring melodies counterbalance the melancholy messages conveyed in the words. Listening to Rather Not Know cheers me up, even though I’m not exactly sure why. Psychological effects aside, this album blew me away the first time I heard it, and that was before my eighty-eightyear-old grandmother—probably the most influential person in shaping my life—slipped into a sudden, precipitous decline and died almost before I could come to grips with it. A friend sent a homemade cassette with Roby, whom I’d never heard of, on the back side and the Austin, Texas, band Reckless 127

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Kelly on the front. Only a few days passed before I bought both cds on my own. Fate then intervened. In the aftermath of my grandmother’s funeral I needed to get away. I took two of my nephews to a Greenville Braves baseball game. Late that night I hatched a plan and surfed the Internet charting other minor league games for a makeshift road trip. I wound up going to Durham, Asheville, and Charlotte, all in North Carolina, with a side trip to the site of the Battle of Kings Mountain—the town of Kings Mountain is in North Carolina, and the battlefield is in South Carolina—for good measure. While I was in Durham, guess who just happened to be playing at a place called the Manbites Dog Theater? Kenny Roby. The same Kenny Roby whose cd had helped me immeasurably in coping with a personal loss. Just a few days after the funeral, with me on the lam to escape the proximity of grief, I could go to a small club—one more accustomed, apparently, to the staging of plays—and see what this faceless songwriter, whose songs had arrived almost magically in my mailbox, looked like. I could meet him. I could try to figure him out. So much for that night’s game between the Durham Bulls and the Louisville Bats. Roby is cheerful in person. In a sense he reminds me of the forever boyish Robert Earl Keen. At times the singing style is reminiscent of Gordon Lightfoot, but he seldom seems as somber. The music is a sort of mechanism for survival. It’s a way of putting aside life’s uneasy baggage. Putting together Rather Not Know was evidently cleansing for Kenny Roby. Listening to it may not have been cleansing for me. Maybe I’d have to write a book about my grandmother—or at least 128

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a poem—to do that. It was comforting, though. And thought provoking. Two things I needed in my hours of need. But from the title song through a personal favorite, “In the Wilderness” (which was partly responsible for my abrupt detour to the Kings Mountain National Military Park—wrong war, but the best I could do at the time), and on through other gems like “Blues Too Blue to Mention,” “Glad It Ain’t Me,” and the gospel number “Tidal Wave,” Roby’s music gave me, well, maybe not serenity but at least a glimpse of it and a few moments of much needed clarity. A year passes. I decide to write a book about music. I want to include a chapter on Kenny Roby. I notice several of his songs have baseball references, so I decide that it might be useful to get in touch with Roby and use a minor league game as the setting for our interview. Alas, that strategy doesn’t work out. We go to a game, but we watch it. The bulk of the interview takes place in a Raleigh restaurant. Roby seems world-weary and, compared to what I’d anticipated, contrarian. I have a hard time getting him to step away from what seems like a dogged intent to play devil’s advocate to virtually everything I ask. He’s friendly enough but seems much more supportive of the musical establishment than I’d anticipated. The system works, he says. It just hasn’t worked for him yet. It’s kind of left him depressed, perhaps because at some level he’s blamed himself instead of the system. “I don’t think the guy who lives in a trailer park and works in the mill all day is going to listen to Ryan Adams,” Roby says. “I just don’t think he’s going to, and that’s the same guy who didn’t listen to Townes Van Zandt. That’s the same guy who was listening to all the bad country in the seventies. Or c o n t r a ry t o, uh, any thi ng

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the bad rock. In the seventies he was listening to that stuff. He wasn’t listening to songwriters.” Great music on the radio? Very rare, Roby tells me. When it happens, it’s an accident. “It’s been very rare . . . most of the stuff,” he says. “It’s like The Band. It was a mistake. It was a mistake they got as big as they did. They fell through the cracks. The Stones had no business breaking through when ‘How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?’ was going on. “Producers are businessmen now. In Nashville they’re businessmen. That started with people like Billy Sherrill and Chet Atkins, even though those guys made great music. I think they start out with some creative interest, but they reach a point where they know so well what the businessmen want that they [the music industry execs] don’t have to come in and look over the producer’s shoulder. The suits don’t have to come in. He’s become one of them. A businessman. The businessmen have not become producers. The producers have become businessmen.” And that’s a good thing? “It’s not just music,” Roby says. “I think it’s movies. I think it’s life in general. I don’t think we need to make an Oliver Stone movie out of it. It’s not a conspiracy. I don’t think anyone was trying to frame it this way. It was just something that happened. It’s the evolution of society. It’s getting more and more boring. More and more bored. They hand us everything. We don’t want anyone to make us think. We’ve become afraid of it.” But the music doesn’t cause the problem. The problem causes the music. “Those people wouldn’t be able to foist stuff across on people if it didn’t sell,” Roby says. “You can’t make people literate. You can’t do it. It doesn’t work.” 130

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I refer to several quality songwriters, or at least songwriters whose work I admire. Roby shoots them down. I’m flabbergasted. “I don’t think what they’re doing is a hit,” he says. “If I was [producer] Billy Sherrill, I’d say, ‘Dude, you need to go talk to some songwriters. You need to come and bring them in because I haven’t heard you do it. I’ve heard a lot of that stuff, and I don’t hear the hits. I’m sorry. I think Shania Twain—even though I don’t like the music—I see why it’s popular. I see why ‘The Way You Love Me’ by Faith Hill is a hit. I’ve been listening to Steve Miller lately. We’d be better off with him on radio. If they want to compete, they need to jump up and step up to the plate. I don’t think it’s just the record companies. “It might serve their purpose better to take up some other people’s songs. There’s a little more room out there that isn’t being filled, but mainly all these guys are just jealous. They wouldn’t have a problem with it if they hadn’t been turned down. I was in the middle of that stuff. I was in Nashville in the mid- to late 1990s. ‘In Search of Alt-Country.’ Well, if Nashville was so bad, why is everyone still living there? Why is Rodney Crowell still living outside Nashville? It’s where the industry is. It’s where the money is. “A lot of stuff was just bad. It was about, just anything, a small percentage of stuff was good. See, that’s another thing. None of these guys can hold a candle to George Jones. They can’t hold a candle to a lot of guys—as vocalists, and that’s the thing. Nashville’s never been a writer-friendly place. Tom T. Hall didn’t have as many hits as he wrote.” The only limit on Roby’s rant is that he won’t discuss individuals. He just sort of excoriates them in bulk. Finally, I give up. It’s obvious that Roby’s personal views, or at least the ones he espouses in the interview, are contrary to most of my own views and most of what I’ve encountered c o n t r a ry t o, uh, any thi ng

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in my conversations with the other musicians. But the reason I asked him was that I wanted to know how he felt. I take the interview in another direction and ask Roby about the practical matter of how he writes songs. “There’s probably, like, three different sides,” he says. “There’s the guy sitting on the back porch drinking coffee in the morning, smoking a cigarette and tapping into what he experienced the night before and writing it. Half of it’s still in the world; part of it is wondering what the kids are going to have for breakfast. I write a lot when I wake up. Then there’s just the fan. I’m a fan, too. This is where an interview gets dangerous because if you say what you think, it could be seen as sour grapes. It could actually be sour grapes. You look at me different if you know I’m an artist and I’m talking about another artist’s music. If I go, Man, I think that’s crap, well, that’s completely separate from the Kenny Roby that’s a singer-songwriter. That’s the Kenny Roby the fan who’s heard some good shit, and that ain’t nowhere close to it.” So, in fact, Roby has sort of wandered away from the question about songwriting and returned to the topic of everyone I think is good being bad. “It’s different,” he continues. “I can sit there. I can be a fan of music, and when I’m in a group of people, and they know I’m a writer or they like my music or whatever, and if I talk about the Old 97’s, which I fucking hate, but that’s the fan. That’s not jealousy. There are people who just sit around and talk shit about other musicians all the time. That’s not what I like about it. I like the music. If I don’t like it, I don’t have to read it or listen to it or talk about it. My job is not to slam other bands. “Just because I might sell two thousand copies and not fifty thousand, I still think I have kind of an obligation to show some respect for other people and other musicians and not slam them. I don’t want people slamming me. I don’t 132

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mind critics doing it, but for a musician to do it, it just looks bad. It’s one of those gentleman things. Maybe I’m deceiving myself to think that anybody cares about what I say. I think a lot of those guys on country radio can sing a lot better than these insurgent guys . . . At least they grew up with a mom and dad cooking grits, and they’re a little different from some of the people from Illinois. I’ve only heard one person not from the South who can pull it off, and that’s Gillian Welch. “In my eyes that’s the only one [Welch] who has pulled it off. I just don’t think . . . there are too many other influences. Too much information. Too much stress. Too many other things in life to keep making that simple old country music like they used to make. It’s hard to sing George Jones when you’ve got Hilfiger on your waist.” Roby’s latest album, The Mercy Filter, is a radical departure away from country. It’s melodically much more diverse than the two previous cds, Rather Not Know and Mercury’s Blues, which I adored. The Mercy Filter is a pop album with far less country music, which is not to suggest it isn’t a fine album but is, rather, to suggest that it isn’t as appealing to me as Roby’s previous work. The longer the interview goes, the more I’m struck by just what a walking, talking contradiction Kenny Roby is. Tom T. Hall once described a character who was “about as happy as a thinking man can be,” and this is the phrase that keeps coming back to me as we talk. The same man who has just finished cutting a pop album now starts talking about how country is reeling off in a direction that takes it even farther from its roots. “Now we look back on Garth Brooks, man, and we’d be lucky to get Garth Brooks back,” Roby says. “You go back now and listen to ‘I’ve Got Friends in Low Places’ right now, and it would sound like Hank Williams Sr. c o n t r a ry t o, uh, any thi ng

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“Good music’s good music. You can boil it down to that. Good music’s good music whether it’s Ralph and Carter Stanley or Little Stevie Wonder. You get into the genres, and it gets . . . it becomes a money issue and a labeling issue. It becomes like, what are you going to sell it as? What are you going to market it as? If we put it against this other kind of chart, it’s not going to look like it sells much, but if we make fifty thousand records gold for this kind of chart, the ‘techno-flipflop-jimmyjohn,’ it’s going to look better.” Techno-flipflop-jimmyjohn. After forty-five minutes talking music with Kenny Roby, I almost think I understand what the term means.

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The Last Angry Cowboy berkeley, california | june 2004

Tom Russell sings of the rugged individualists who once made this country great, but his is the pessimistic vision of a man who sees a United States awash in political correctness and commercialized boredom. “I love telling hard, well-carved stories from a believable scenario or a wounded heart,” Russell says. Our paths intersect while I’m covering a nascar race at Infineon Raceway, in Sonoma, and Russell is performing at a pair of East Bay locales, the Freight and Salvage Coffee House in Berkeley and Downhome Records in El Cerrito. Russell is accompanied by Andrew Hardin, a tall, angular guitarist with an intriguing picking style and a speaking dialect reminiscent of the actor Donald Sutherland. I’ve never seen anyone play exactly like him. Hardin attacks the strings in almost a neoclassical style. Hardin tells me he is a fan of Tom T. Hall’s. After I tell him what I do, he asks, “Are you married?” I reply by telling him that with this lifestyle—gone most 135

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of the time for ten months of the year—I probably never will be. “You’ve got a country song right there,” he says. The audience seems to be mostly middle-aged, but among the young people the women greatly outnumber the men. An alarming number of young women are accompanied by successful-looking older men. Some are undoubtedly girlfriends, some daughters, and some students of University of California professors. I can’t help but wonder what there is about this man’s brand of western cowboy songs that draws such a collection of urban professional elites. Maybe the scene is unique to Berkeley. Before the concert begins, I overhear conversations, sitting alone with my notepad. “I never wanted to meet Dylan, man, you know what I mean. I used to be with the Grateful Dead all the time. I’ve seen Dylan, but I never wanted to meet him.” The woman who introduces Russell calls him the finest singer-songwriter in the country, after which he and Hardin arrive onstage and lend considerable credence to her contention. “I love the West,” Russell tells the audience, “but want to tell it from my own standpoint, without politics and false romance. This country was founded by rugged individuals who came over here to escape oppression and starvation and ended up going insane in the wilder reaches of this country. “Most families lost their pioneer spirit. It was bred out of them in three centuries. They caved in. Why do we now live in a land of McDonald’s and Wal-Marts? Fear. Plain and simple. Fear. You can only find traces of that old lost America in Alaska. Check out country music in the last fifteen years. Wal-Mart emotions . . . Everything we came here to escape . . . has caught up with us.” Along with other artists like Ian Tyson and Don Edwards, 136

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Russell strives to keep alive not just the dying virtues of the West but also the adventurous soul of the human condition. Russell tells the Freight and Salvage audience that the aching remnants of lost love have triggered many of the new songs: “It Goes Away,” “Kansas City Violin,” “All the Fine Young Ladies,” “Ash Wednesday,” and “Stealing Electricity.” His latest studio album, Indians Cowboys Horses Dogs (Hightone), is made up of his own western ballads, however, as well as standards like Marty Robbins’s “El Paso” and Bob Dylan’s “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.” He has just returned from Europe, where he says he recovered from emotional anguish and “began to think more clearly.” “I’m tired of being ‘Mr. Entertainment’ onstage,” he says. “I’ll leave that to Siegfried and Roy. Eventually, the tiger’s going to grab you by the neck. “That gig is finished. I want to sing these new songs and record a double record about love and fear . . . I’ve been edging more and more toward the personal. Like Carl Perkins said, ‘If you run away long enough, you’ll run back into yourself.’” Russell pokes fun at the new direction of his music. He imagines himself as a member of the audience and asks: “What’s up with this? What happened to the funny guy? “He went into the Rhine with a lot of cowboy songs.” Russell’s passion matches Steve Earle’s as he rails against restrictions on free speech: “Colin Powell’s son is the head of the fcc [at the time]. You can’t say ‘piss’ anymore, let alone ‘fuck.’ Forget the rest. The problem with political correctness is it’s boring.” The humor is biting but insightful. At one point he says of the stories in his songs, “They’re all true, folks, right up to the point where they don’t rhyme.” Russell talks about drying out in Europe and notes that t h e l a st angry cowboy

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the coffeehouse doesn’t serve booze. He affects an Irish dialect and yells to the back of the room, “I’ll sing no more, Nicki, till I get an oatmeal raisin cookie.” Then he chats briefly with a woman in the first row, after which he says, “This [next song] is for Carmen. With a name like that, you’re bound for the big-time.” A smattering of the crowd is leaving as Russell returns to the stage for an encore. With a smile on his face he yells to those who are departing, “The rest of you bastards, get the hell out of here!” In the middle of the encore set, he abruptly yells: “You can’t request a song! You work here. Shut off the cash register, you capitalist!” I show up at Down Home Records, hoping to conduct the interview I wasn’t able to do at the coffeehouse. Russell and I chat amiably, but he asks me to send him a list of questions by e-mail. That way, he says, he can compose a thoughtful reply. I’ve read stories suggesting that he’s felt burned by journalists in the past. Any doubts I have about using such a mechanism for an interview are dispelled by the replies I get from Russell within days. The thoughtfulness reflected in his songs is prevalent, along with a healthy quotient of bluntness. I ask him about his love for the West and the songs he’s written about it. “No agendas,” he replies. “I love the old songs and melodies, but all of that has been covered long ago and very well by good people like Tex Ritter and Marty Robbins and Johnny Cash and Peter LaFarge. Current western music, with the exception of Ian Tyson, the singing of Don Edwards, and the poetry of Zarzyski, is beat. Dead. Square. Conservative. Serving up the old bullshit ‘Myth of the West.’ “Most cowboy singers wouldn’t say ‘horse shit’ if they had a mouth full of it (to quote my friend Katy Lee). I love telling hard, well-carved stories from a believable scenario or 138

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a wounded heart. I love the West but want to tell it from my own standpoint, without politics and false romance. Hell, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott was singing ‘The Range of the Buffalo’ on the streets of Paris in 1959. How do you follow that?” I note that the history of the West is a metaphor for the modern conflict between rugged individualism and the strictures of society and ask him how he draws the line in his own mind. “Check out country music in the last fifteen years. WalMart emotions. The dead fucking the dead . . . in a vacuum. To quote the bard [Charles] Bukowski, ‘Everything we came here to escape . . . has caught up with us.’” Noting that he has cowritten with Ian Tyson, Nanci Griffith, and Dave Alvin, among others, I ask him about how songwriters work together and wonder if egos get in the way. He answers yes. “Egos always get in the way. Ego is a big old ape sitting up on our backs. Cowriting really works in factory environments like Nashville or the old Tin Pan Alley. You compromise the heart out of the song. It’s like two people trying to paint a picture together. It’s inherently tough because you show up with your own creative baggage. That being said, I’ve learned a lot from these people because they come from diverse melodic backgrounds, so you bite the bullet a bit, and maybe you luck out on a few. “Remember, Lennon and McCartney did not actually sit down and write those songs together; they wrote alone. In the end it’s one soul talking to whatever muse or angel graces you with their spirit, but there have been exceptional moments of collaboration. On occasion. It’s tough going.” Specifically, I ask him about a line in one of his songs that offers the view that withholding affection from loved ones is “the oldest trick we know.” What is there, I wonder, about the human condition that t h e l a st angry cowboy

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makes us increasingly standoffish and secretive in dealing with one another? Is honest emotion in decline? “Yes,” Russell replies, “honest emotion is in decline. Or gone dead. I’m glad you picked up on that line about ‘withholding affection.’ “I just broke up with a lovely woman. The song you are quoting is about her, and we had agreed that if we ever broke up, we would be friends forever. Well, that didn’t happen, pard, and it seldom does. So, it hurt. Plenty. I had to work with this person in a very close situation a few months ago, and she kept her nose up in the air. She refused any closure. I thought it was a brutal move. Maybe I deserved it, and it certainly opened my eyes. Well, a month or so later, I’m in a [bed and breakfast] in Northern Ireland, and there’s a beautiful woman owner who is breaking up with her boyfriend, and we get to talking about life and love. “Well the Irish lass ladled a few truths on me: ‘Women have an on-off button on their emotions. When it’s turned off . . . it’s turned off. That’s it.’ “And here’s the capper: ‘For women, withholding our affection is really the only leverage we have!’ “Well, I was stunned when I heard that. Like, I have been walking around in a dream for fifty years! Fighting James Thurber’s ‘War between Men and Women,’ but with inferior weapons. Withholding affection, when you know it hurts someone who may need healing, is a very brutal move. Achtung! Be aware. There are land mines on the road to the soul. “The old campaigner still has a lot to learn about love, but this recent situation has triggered many new songs like ‘It Goes Away,’ ‘Kansas City Violin,’ ‘All the Fine Young Ladies,’ ‘Ash Wednesday,’ and ‘Stealing Electricity.’ “So, I’m blessed to be able to sober up from this heartache [three breakups in five years] and learn something that 140

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I may be able to share in my art. I hope so. Then there was this Zen nun who really clued me in to love, but that’s another story, as they say. ‘We go to the father of souls . . . but it is necessary to pass by the dragons.’ St. Augustine, I believe.” When I ask Russell about the “funny guy went into the Rhine” line, he replies: “I started out in strip clubs and topless bars, being the master of ceremonies, and I did it well, like Joel Grey in [the movie] Cabaret. That gig is finished. I want to sing these new songs and record a double record about love and fear, so I threw the dummy off the bridge. He was the wise-ass making rude remarks to chicks and saying ‘fuck’ onstage, and I was the one being blamed. But the parasites are hard to get rid of, and, yes, you gain much-needed perspective playing to foreign audiences. They listen on a deeper level, and they are not victim to the cloud of current American hype. They have sunk their own cross into the heart of the vampire.” Speaking of America, I ask Russell about the growing trend toward consolidation of the music and radio industries, comparing it to a system of legalized payola. “The American public has allowed itself to be fucked in the ass for at least twenty years,” Russell replies. “Country music is dead, offensive. Wal-Mart mentality has taken over. The whole country looks the same as you drive through it. The same repetition of chain outlets. Yeah, it’s depressing. It’s way beyond depressing. Things like wars in the Middle East are a distraction from the cancer here at home that has eaten this country alive. A spiritual cancer—a giving in to the inevitability of three or four corporations telling us where to eat and shit and what to listen to. “I want to write about it. It’s my only way out. That will be the fear portion of the next record. Available wherever independent darkness is sold. Not available in shops. “All my friends say they don’t eat at McDonald’s or shop at t h e l a st angry cowboy

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Wal-Marts or listen to modern country music, but someone is buying all this crap. Aliens. We have to be able to identify them and close down their golf courses because that’s where they breed, like mutant sociopathic lemmings. “They kicked the living legends off the radio fifteen years ago—Cash, Haggard, and Jones—and proceeded to turn the scene into the Night of the Living Dead. I did pick up a cd from a great writer, though, Gretchen Peters. Halcyon. It’s commercial, but it’s great. Maybe there’s a slight ray of hope. “I’m tired of trashing Nashville; it’s neither here nor there in my life. If you want to get an impression of what happened, go find the top ten Billboard country songs for the last forty years. You’ll find you might recognize all of them from 1955 to ’75. Then, after that, it goes rotten. Then nothing. Death. People down there walk around in dead people’s clothes. They smell of fear. It’s a spiritual golf course. Miniature golf. Austin is getting to be the same way. South by Southwest [an annual music festival held in Austin] was conjured up by motel owners. Young writers ought to stay home and get a job in a bar, learn twenty Hank Williams songs, and get their hearts broken raw a few dozen times. Bleed a little then write with the blood. Yeah, that sounds very colorful, but there’s truth there. Dylan knew two thousand old folk songs before he wrote his own and then rode into Greenwich Village on a donkey, exploding American music. There are good people camped out in Nashville: Nanci Griffith, Guy Clark, Gretchen Peters . . . but they have nothing to do with the industry, the Death Factory. Most current songwriters have nothing to say, but that doesn’t hold them back. They buy a rhyming dictionary and start lying.” I broach the subject of something Russell had said to the audience in Berkeley: “Keep away from Tom. You’ll wind up in a song.” 142

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“I’m tired of being a journalist or a novelist in song,” he replies. “There are Gnostic principles operative: ‘Everything you bring forth will save you; everything you do not bring forth will destroy you.’ That’s from the Gospel of St. Thomas, the one they tore out of the edited Bible and buried in a cave. Dig it.” I ask if it disappoints him that so much modern music, like everything else, is as concerned about political correctness as it seems to be. “Hell, yes,” Russell replies. “From both the Right and the Left and the middle. I had a writer from the Telegraph-Tribune in England at my house a few months ago. He said America is turning into a boring shithole because of political correctness. Of course, this guy smoked and drank and liked to fuck stray women. Or pretend he did. That stuff went out fifteen years ago. It’s more conservative now than it was when they hung Lenny Bruce. Catholics and Jews and all of us whining about morality, while people are destroying each other in the Middle East and the Catholic Church is spending millions of dollars to settle beefs with their pedophile priests . . . and the fcc is coming down hard on words like piss and shit. We’re all going to be living in caves, duct-taped to chairs, [and] forcefed Christian rock music. Go back and read George Orwell. The dead walk among us, and their taste in art is all fuckedup.” My last question for Russell is: “One man’s team player is another’s ass-kissing weasel—where do you draw the line?” “That’s one question too many,” he writes back. “You draw the line . . . I know where I stand. Adios and good luck with your book. Good questions. I applaud you and was glad to meet up.”

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Ain’t No Place for No Poor Boy like Me las vegas, nevada | december 2004

Under normal circumstances Vegas would be the last place I’d go to work on a book about country music or, for that matter, even just to see the place. This, however, isn’t a normal circumstance. For ten days each December the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association sanctions the National Finals Rodeo at Thomas & Mack Arena. The rodeo brings hundreds of cowboys and thousands of their fans to Sin City. They take over the city. The streets and casinos are full of people wearing cowboy boots and Stetsons. Where rodeo fans migrate, country music acts follow. I fly to Vegas to observe the whole scene, but the specific goal in mind is Brad Paisley, about whom I harbor profoundly mixed feelings. When country becomes cool, it also becomes insipid, at least to its discerning fans. The brief wave of popularity that followed the movie Urban Cowboy sent the music reeling in the early 1980s. The specter of John Travolta, of Saturday Night Fever fame, getting caught up in “hardhat days and honky145

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tonk nights” fueled a depressing trendiness that made mechanical bulls popular and Johnny Cash passé. Thankfully, what followed was a rise of the so-called New Traditional sound of singers like Ricky Skaggs and Randy Travis. Garth Brooks and the feeding frenzy that followed his fame sent the music down the drain again. Brooks won over millions of fans by crafting a sound that was more intricate than traditional country and a performance style that borrowed liberally from what had been associated with rock ‘n’ roll. It wasn’t that Brooks harmed the music so much. What robbed it of its message, not to mention its integrity and soulfulness, were the imitators who followed Brooks and the formula for success that the recording industry implemented in his name. Once again, country music is in need of emotional rescue. The common theme of most songs these days seems to be “Hey, baby, let’s party.” Take away Alan Jackson’s remakes of revered country classics and George Strait’s agreeable cowboy persona, and there’s not much country left. The music has become bereft of the populism embodied in Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, George Jones, and dozens of others. Which is why Paisley seems so important to me, and when I contacted his management, exchanged some e-mails, and received word that the artist could spare me fifteen minutes or so if I’d meet him in Vegas, where he and Pat Green were playing back-to-back, late-night shows at the Hilton, I booked a flight the next morning. All I needed to do, it seems, was schedule an appropriate time with Brent Long, Paisley’s road manager. My first telephone conversation was promising because Long and I had a mutual friend, he seemed to be familiar with my name and reputation, and my explanation of why I wanted to interview Paisley seemed to satisfy him. 146

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What I didn’t know when I left South Carolina was that the rodeo, not Paisley, would be the most insightful aspect of the trip. For four days I’m on call. I might as well be a general practitioner with emergency room duty. Long tells me to call him. When I do, he exhaustively confronts me with all the demands on the artist’s time, tells me he’s working hard to “work me in,” and gives me another time to call him. I tell him any time will do. The only discouraging aspect of our conversations—mainly they’re a few mild assertions by me and breathless recitations by Long—is the road manager’s concern that I’m going to get Paisley in trouble with radio stations. He tells me that Paisley had participated in a call-in show on a radio station—in Michigan, as I recall—in which a questioner complained about the lack of a mechanism to make call-in requests of favorite songs. Paisley had mildly expressed his view that listeners should be able to request tunes on country stations, and this had been enough to make a station manager, one who apparently considered himself to be some sort of visionary leader in the field of centrally devised playlists, to, in Long’s words, go berserk. I tell Long that my chief motivation in interviewing Paisley is to depict his career positively, but that little exchange marks the first time I get a sinking feeling. The fact that I’ve traveled almost all the way across the continental United States for this interview does not seem to impress him much, although I mention it in passing several times. Returning another message, Long tells me that he’s got me on the pass list for the Friday night show, but he doesn’t think I’m going to be able to talk to Paisley, what with all the “meet-and-greets” and the litany of short interviews scheduled with various radio stations. I remind him that I’m writing a book, not a five-paragraph profile for My Weekly Reader, but I try to be patient and ask him if Saturday night will a i n ’ t n o p l ac e fo r n o p oor boy l i k e me

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be better. He says he thinks he can get me fifteen minutes “tops” on Saturday, so I say great, how about leaving the pass for the Saturday night show. Super. So, I go off to the rodeo, which ends up impressing the hell out of me. Little had I realized that rodeo is the most adroitly presented professional sport, at least for the live audience in the arena. That’s because I hadn’t seen it anywhere except on tv, and then just in bits and snatches, since childhood. I attend the second of ten consecutive sessions, and it’s a more enlightening experience than any of the stock-car races I’ve written about over the previous twelve years. The reason I get in at all is that the rodeo writer of the Las Vegas ReviewJournal, Jeff Wolf, is also the motor sports writer, and when I’d seen him several weeks earlier, he’d told me, “You’ve got to see this,” and been so adamant about it that he took it upon himself personally to get me a press pass. All the National Finals Rodeo (nfr) sessions are sold out and have been for twenty years. I grew up on a farm where my family raised horses and cattle. As a kid, I attended my fair share of rodeos and even participated—not with any great degree of success—in a few wild-cow milking contests. They don’t have those at the national finals. As far as modern rodeos are concerned, my previous knowledge consisted of the fact that rodeos are usually described on tv by rustic cowboys named Shorty and that there seems to be an inordinately high number of young men named Cody who grow up to ride Brahma bulls and wrestle steers to the ground. Ah, the sights and sounds. The scent and feel reminds me of a very pungent dirt track, but in Vegas suffice it to say that this is not your father’s rodeo. When country singer Tracy Lawrence performs before the start, purple smoke wafts into 148

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the arena from the wings. Next is a green laser light show that would have caused Superman to writhe in agony. Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” blares into the arena, providing the unlikely spectacle of thousands of fans wearing cowboy hats doing their little boot-scootin’ boogies to the sounds of a gay English rock star. The rodeo starts at 5:45 p.m. and races along at a pace I can only describe as dizzying. It’s really difficult to keep up with recording all the times and scores as one competitor after another roars out of the chutes. Every little break in the action—bulls being rounded up, transitions from one event to the next—is punctuated immediately by all sorts of stunts and gimmicks. For instance, they unleash a distinguished and retired old bucking bronco into the arena for a victory lap of sorts. Old cowhands—and people who wish they were old cowhands—stand with tears welling up in their eyes to pay homage to a horse named Khadafy Skoal. The pa announcer blurts out, “Praise God for Khadafy!” Excuse me. If the bull is named Khadafy, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to say, “Praise Allah”? Sometimes my thoughts are kind of weird, I know. At another break they park a red Chrysler Sebring convertible right out in the sod, and I watch in disbelief as one cowboy riding two horses—that’s right, one boot on each back—appears from the wings to leap over the shiny car. Within thirty seconds it’s time for the team calf roping to begin. By the way, these guys are good. It’s pretty incredible to see Blaine Linaweaver of Leavenworth, Kansas, team up with Benton City, Washington’s B. J. Campbell to rope a calf—one around the neck and the other around the back legs—in four seconds flat. If you’re interested in bareback bronc riding, you need to a i n ’ t n o p l ac e fo r n o p oor boy l i k e me

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watch Brighton, Colorado’s Cimmaron Gerke perform. He’s an exuberant lad, this Cimmaron (pronounced sim-uh-ron) fellow. Reminds me of the kind of guy Chris Ledoux, himself an ex–rodeo star, might have sung about. And, oh, by the way, his name is Cimmaron, even though the version of that word used in an old tv western is spelled “Cimarron” (as in “Cimarron Strip”). You’ve heard the cliché “hit the ground running”? No one ever hit the ground running like a cowboy who just got bucked off a huge bull’s back. Those cowboy boots start spinning before the first grunt escapes. At the Las Vegas rodeo one cowboy gets a roar of applause because he has the presence of mind to reach up and keep his hat on his head while flying through mid-air. Broken bones will mend in time, but how does a man overcome the loss of a quality Resistol? Rodeo has its own collection of original names. They’re very different from basketball, where one might see a Baskerville Holmes at point guard or a Shaquille O’Neal in the paint. But these names are just as original. In the course of only a few hours I watch in fascination as Speed Williams, Turtle Powell, Monty Joe Petska, Steve E. Dollarhyde, many of the aforementioned Codys, Ira Slagowski, Royce Ford, Cleve Schmidt, Luke Branquinho, Rope Myers, Spud Duvall, Ivan Teigen, Stran Smith, Jerome Schneeberger, and, in the barrel racing, Jolee Lauteret perform. They come from places with names that include Roggen, Forepaugh, Bashaw, Belle Fourche, Bend, Checotah, Las Animas, Hereford, Sudan (Texas, not Africa), Llano, Paso Robles, Didsbury, Crowville, Utopia, Geyser, Kaycee, La Junta, Wikieup, Hockley, Navasota, Ponca City, Winnie, Hermiston, Alamagordo, Okotoks, Alice, Spur, and Tonasket. Few cowboys, it seems, hail from any of the five boroughs of New York, and I’m not sure whether Slagowski’s home150

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town, Plain City, Utah, is named because it’s on the plains or because it’s just, well, really plain. I can tell you that Slagowski rides saddle broncs. There’s nothing plain about that. The highlight for me is the opening procession, although that term is a misnomer. It should be called the opening “haul-ass.” Unlike the Olympics, where the teams of all the various countries parade into the stadium with one lucky athlete carrying the flag, at the nfr they roar into the arena at breakneck speed. A lucky cowboy carries the flag of his state, but the quarter horses behave as if they’re leaving the starting gates at Ruidoso Downs. The noise and excitement is nonstop, fueled in no small measure by the loud yet affable remarks of the public-address announcers. To great acclaim they introduce the various contingents of participating cowboys and, in the case of the barrel races, cowgirls. There may be five from Arkansas, three from Louisiana, a couple from Florida, one from Alabama, and then upward of a dozen from places like Montana, Wyoming, and Oklahoma. Then, in a flourish, the Lone Star Flag appears in the arena, followed by a horde of Texans that can only be compared to a cavalry charge. The sound that rises is akin to what would greet a basketball game–winning three-pointer by the home team. Soon even the announcers are drowned out by a deafening chorus of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and Asleep at the Wheel’s version of “Miles and Miles of Texas.” The following night I show up hours early at the Las Vegas Hilton, hoping that the long-awaited call from Brent Long will arrive and that there are no glitches in my cell phone service. It never rings. When I call him, I get the same embattled litany of how hard he’s trying to “get me in to see Brad, and maybe we can get it done after the show, so be sure to come backstage for the meet-and-greets” because he’s beneficently managed to get me on that list of chosen few. a i n ’ t n o p l ac e fo r n o p oor boy l i k e me

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All the while that sinking feeling is getting oppressive, and I’m thinking, what’s the world coming to when you can fly all the way across the country and still not get a fifteen-minute interview? The show is late because everything must revolve around the rodeo, and the timing has been designed to allow that horde to escape Thomas & Mack Arena and get to the Hilton in time to see first Green and then Paisley. It’s not just a rodeo crowd, though, and it’s not a Pat Green crowd. It’s a Brad Paisley crowd. The crowd is still drifting in when Green hits the stage. I encounter one woman who’s come all the way from Minnesota with her daughter, who is confined to a wheelchair, and they’ve come here because they love Paisley and because it’s difficult for her daughter to attend one of those concerts in Minnesota where “everybody rushes in.” Three young women from Washington—the District of Columbia, not the state—sit behind me, and they, too, idolize Brad. I briefly tell them of my frustrations, and one of them observes sagely of Paisley, “It’s not in his personality to make waves.” The number of cowboy hats grows. There’s a tiny little boy, hat bigger than he is, right smack in the middle of the front row. It strikes me that Fu Manchus are very popular with rodeo fans. Green asks how many bull riders there are in the audience. Some of the hats raise their hands. “Y’all some crazy sumbitches,” says Green. “I grew up on a ranch, and my daddy would’ve whipped my ass if I’d thought about getting on one of those things.” Then Green and his band roar into “All the Good Things Fade Away,” complete with the showy stage antics that one of my interview subjects later refers to as “fake fun.” The crowd gets a rise when Paisley joins Green for the duet, “College,” 152

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that is included on Green’s latest album, Lucky Ones. Finally, Paisley’s concert begins, and it’s as slick as Green’s is raucous. I think to myself that Paisley isn’t near the natural showman that Green is, but it’s fascinating to observe just how meticulously rehearsed and practiced Paisley’s act is. Every little wisecrack to the audience is carefully chosen, even though it’s so well delivered that there is a facade of originality. Paisley is a guitarist of righteous virtuosity. I’ve been told this before, but it’s something that must be seen in person to appreciate fully. I’m so impressed that later I go on the Internet to review Rolling Stone’s list of the hundred greatest guitarists ever and become more than a little pissed off when Paisley isn’t listed among them. All the while I think that, yes, this man, this Brad Paisley, could be the new savior. He’s considered a brilliant songwriter by the people who decide such things from Nashville’s perspective. The songs are all clever but hardly wise. He’s got his heart in the right place, and he genuinely pays homage to the music’s history and traditions. Everything about his act is so detached, though, and clichéd. I can’t help but think about when I bought Paisley’s most recent album, Mud on the Tires, earlier in the year and had the same reaction I’d had to the one by him that I’d bought before. The first song I like, then I listen to the second one, and it leaves another positive impression. But there’s this slow, gradual descent that culminates in disgust when I listen to “The Cigar Song,” which is derived from a familiar joke that’s been circulated by e-mails for years now. It’s about a man who tries to claim his Cuban cigars on his fire insurance because, well, they’ve burned up. I guess the same people who’ve forwarded this story to me five or six times might love the song, but I get so disgusted at what I consider to be the song’s utter and complete silliness that, when I return a i n ’ t n o p l ac e fo r n o p oor boy l i k e me

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home, I toss the cd into a box where I’m saving stuff I’m going to trade in at a secondhand store. I’m happy to report that Paisley doesn’t perform this song during his Vegas concert. For all these reservations of mine that might be considered nitpicky, the Paisley concert leaves me with a positive overall impression. I’ve been snared and perhaps hoodwinked by the videos that accompany virtually every song, and I feel only mildly annoyed when the image of Alison Krauss shows up on the gigantic screens to sing an electronic duet, “Whiskey Lullaby,” cowritten by Bill Anderson and Jon Randall, with Paisley. Live and Memorex, in one swell package. Accompanying the title song of his cd, Paisley says: “I love it because we’re those kinds of people. This if for all you rednecks who can’t keep your trucks clean.” I just can’t help but look at those carefully creased pants and hat and the starched collar without doubting the sincerity of his supposed ad-libs. Here is a man who stretches the bounds of his guitar without stretching the bounds of his music. But then the band leaves the stage. Paisley trades his electric guitar for an acoustic, sits on the edge of the stage, and performs a touching rendition of “How Great Thou Art,” and I’m captivated again. When the show is over, I feel confident about the anticipated interview. I’ve taken good notes, and I prepared my questions in advance. But then I find myself in a line with about a hundred other people, and the ones closest to me are jabbering on about how great it is to drink a shot of Jägermeister. They’re convivial drunks, all loaded down with cameras so that they can have their photos taken with Paisley. There are also eight-by-ten glossies, cds, and all other manner of autographable goodies in abundance. Ah, that sinking feeling again. I’m struck by how odd it 154

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must look to everyone else that I’m standing there in this interminable line with only a digital recorder and a notepad in my hands. A laughing man behind me—and there aren’t many people behind me—starts to look a little nervous and is undoubtedly wondering why I’m scribbling furiously in the notepad. Then I realize that many of these people represent radio stations. I realize this because I can’t help but overhear a conversation that I can’t begin to understand: “Lee is, like, ohmigod, have you been out with Mike?” “Dude, you just don’t get it!” “He, like, said, ‘Every time you see a skunk, you hit it!’” Everyone laughs but me. I’m sure my expressions betray me. Finally, I arrive at the front of the line, where there to greet me is genuine, heartfelt, wholesome Brad Paisley and, just to the right and behind, genuinely nervous Brent Long. I make a little joke about not having anything for him to sign and tell Paisley I’m in Vegas to do an interview, and then I briefly explain what my book is about and why I think it’s important to have him in it. Long intercedes and says something like, “Yeah, Brad, you remember, I was telling you about it.” Paisley looks me right in the eye and says, “Yeah, I think I’ve heard people talking about that book. We’ll certainly take care of it.” That’s it. I move along. I play my final card by noting to Long that Paisley is scheduled to appear at the next night’s session of the rodeo. Could we talk then? “Yeah, I think that might work,” says Long, and I think to myself that this is at least the third time he’s said this to me. “Come see me at the rodeo.” The next night Paisley and Long appear on press row after Paisley’s song opens the show. I walk a few steps toward them, raise my hand to draw Long’s attention, and he rea i n ’ t n o p l ac e fo r n o p oor boy l i k e me

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turns the favor by making that signal that generally denotes a-ok. I monitor Paisley’s presence, but that’s difficult because on press row at the rodeo there’s a need to make sure one doesn’t get conked in the head by a flying cow turd or something just as unpleasant. I do notice, however, when Paisley rises and walks along with a small entourage into the bowels of the arena. I try to walk, not run, after them, but it’s all done so swiftly. By the time I get out of the glare of the lights and into a short hallway where tv announcers interview rodeo cowboys, the star has been whisked away into the night. At that moment I make a decision that I will make no more calls to Brent Long. Paisley has told me, “We’ll take care of it,” and now I wonder about the sincerity of that remark. Is he despicably nice? Has he avoided me by having his road manager put up smokescreen after smokescreen? Has there been a marketing survey of journalists that has revealed that telling them no causes too much irritation and that a more prudent course is just to avoid them endlessly? Or is this all just a consequence of having a road manager with much too much to do? I wait a month before hearing again from Brent Long. In the interim I talk to Pat Green about Paisley. The two are friends. When I describe my frustrations, Green is vividly amused. When I offer the opinion that Green is as spontaneous as Paisley is calculating, Green pokes fun at himself by saying, “There’s a difference between spontaneity and cluelessness. “Brad and I met because we were up for a Grammy two years in a row. Different categories, but we both lost both years, so that’s kind of how we got to be friends. You can walk around in your life—I’ve seen a lot of guys walk around in their lives pointing the finger at people and saying stuff about them when they don’t know anything about them. “I was one of those guys. I used to throw my rocks at peo156

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ple that I didn’t know. I found out that ain’t a good way to do things. Hey, look, I didn’t know Brad from a hole in the wall, but he had one song that I didn’t think was that great, but then he had a couple of songs that I thought were number one, out of this world. I thought ‘the fishing song’ [‘I’m Gonna Miss Her’] was funny as hell. So, when I had an opportunity to meet him and talk to him, I took it, and it turns out not only is he a great guy; he’s a funny guy. He’s really funny. “I’m the self-professed, number-one drunk in town. You know, I can be a flat-out, roaring idiot, and he hasn’t ever had a drink. We’re complete opposites. He doesn’t cuss a lot; I cuss like a sailor. We’re two opposite people that came together, and, you know, when we got together to do a duet, we didn’t even record the better song. The better song was ‘Before December,’ but it’s not what the record needed. I tend not to think about myself personally when we’re putting out a record. I think of the record as its own entity. That song ‘College’ needed to be in there. Our record, I felt, was a little bit overwhelmingly serious. I needed just a little levity to break things up so that people would go, ‘Ah, ok, we still got that in there.’” Amazingly, I eventually get my interview with Brad Paisley. It occurs in that soulless modern way— an exchange of emails—but I get the chance to ask the questions I had prepared two months earlier by scribbling them on a notepad, and Paisley’s replies reflect a thoughtful, frank mind-set. He is, it seems, truly the nice guy I had hoped he was and not the good-natured marketing whiz whom in darker moments I had conjured up. Paisley’s studied approach to his career is apparent in his live shows and in the composition of his albums. My first a i n ’ t n o p l ac e fo r n o p oor boy l i k e me

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question is about how carefully he prepared himself to be exactly where is today. “My education about the music industry came in two different ways,” he replies. “The first was when I became a regular member of Jamboree usa in Wheeling [West Virginia, his home state]. The Jamboree is a long-running radio show much like the [Grand Ole] Opry, where different headliners pass through there on Saturday nights. Over the years I opened for almost all the greats. I got to perform before George Jones, Jimmy Dickens, Steve Wariner, Charley Pride, Lee Greenwood, The Judds, Charlie Daniels—you name them, they came through there. I learned by osmosis, by just being around that. “Secondly, by transferring to Belmont University as a junior, I got into the Nashville business by being around that as well. By interning for three very different organizations [ascap, Atlantic Records, and Fitzgerald/Hartley Management], I got an overview of the three parts of an artist’s business: songwriting and publishing, record labels, and management. “I didn’t anticipate that the music business would be constantly changing as much as it does now. There was a time when just having a hit or two meant a long career was probable. Not anymore. It takes reinvention and constant creativity to remain competitive in the modern country music world.” The trouble with such a clinical approach is that it can stifle creativity in the same manner as what is practiced by the recording and radio industry and decried throughout this book. The paradox embodied in Paisley’s career is that he must balance his own fondness for the music’s roots with the very trends that take it away from them. To his credit he is mindful of the dangerous waters into which he is wading. 158

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“The critics of new country are very quick to cite the differences between today’s music and the past,” Paisley writes. “On one hand, they have a point in that it is different, but, on the other, there is more validity here than [what] they are willing to recognize. Nostalgia is a wonderful thing, but just because something is old or antique doesn’t mean it’s better, necessarily. On the radio I just had a hit with a very dark account of a couple who let alcohol destroy there lives [‘Whiskey Lullaby’], at the same time that Sara Evans had a huge hit with a Cajun-flavored tune about soap bubbles and a clothesline, and Josh Turner had a huge hit about sin and temptation and trains, which also was on the chart simultaneously with pop-sounding stuff. It’s a very big umbrella, and fans are not really complaining much. I admit that there have been times, throughout our history, when there were very, very strong songs on the charts simultaneously. Look at the early sixties, or the outlaw seventies, or the early nineties. However, in every one of those eras there were also pieces of crap that did well too. The thing is, some of those turds are considered classics just because they are old songs now. That’s the beauty of hindsight. “At the time ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ came out, people were calling it a low point. In retrospect it was very catchy, and it sold a lot of records and really made people happy to hear it. In my mind that is a classic due to the effect it had, regardless of the intricacy of its song structure. I think, looking back at today, there will be plenty of high points to discuss. “The one thing I would like to see return are more songs about personal experience and less that seem merely an attempt to be clever. Ironically, the biggest hits are usually honest. As I listen to songs for my next album, I can’t tell you how many songs sound like recalculated equations. I wish more people were pitching stuff that was autobiographical.” By sheer coincidence, since Paisley and I are neither talka i n ’ t n o p l ac e fo r n o p oor boy l i k e me

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ing face to face nor by telephone, his last reply leads perfectly into the next question, which is about how one maintains a common touch while living a life that is progressively becoming more affluent and out of touch with the common problems of the people who make up the bulk of his audience. “I admit that fame is a real problem for a songwriter,” he writes. “It makes day-to-day life a completely different experience. I try to get out and have experiences as much as possible when I am writing, so that all my songs don’t cover the same topics. I try to read authors, like Garrison Keillor, who write such vivid accounts of simple life, and I try to spend time with my family. In the words of [writer] Harvey Pekar, ‘Real life is pretty complex stuff.’ “Staying in touch with that is essential.” Next I broach the subject of “the Wal-Mart world” and the theory that music is growing emptier because of the world that surrounds it. Paisley suggests that perhaps it’s not really empty but merely different. “The music and the world we live in are both different now,” he writes. “That is the way of things. You don’t hear songs about coal mining anymore or railroads per se or farming all that often. That is probably a good sign, though, because so much of people’s lives are spent doing other things now. If we were still singing about these old topics in our format all the time, we would be antiquated. You can find plenty to write about by watching people interact in Wal-Mart or Target. It’s a little less vibey, lighting being fluorescent and all white walls and floors, but it’s there for the studying. “On one hand, I hate to see America begin to look the same at every exit off the interstate. On the other, it makes it easier to write about it.” Paisley also defends the high-tech nature of his shows. Frequently he and his band are accompanied by videos play160

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ing on huge screens in the background, and he’s been criticized, for instance, for having Alison Krauss “perform” her part via the video screen during the live rendition of “Whiskey Lullaby,” which had rubbed me wrong too. Purists complain that live music is undermined when some of the music isn’t live. “I believe in giving people their money’s worth when they buy a ticket to a concert,” Paisley writes. “I really enjoy the aspects of our show that are enhanced by technology, such as when we perform ‘Whiskey Lullaby’ and Alison [Krauss] appears and sings her part via video screen. For me it is a highlight every night to get to sing with her that way. Of course, she can’t be there in person, and that song is not the same without her. I’m sure critics have a field day bashing that sort of presentation. I’ll never understand why, though. We have three options. First would be to sing it by myself, which is fine, but it’s a duet. Second is to hire a female singer to tour and tackle that part, but still they would be compared every night to Alison. The third option is to do it how we do it now. I have never met a single fan who was unhappy about getting to hear her part and see her on the screen. I still get to be spontaneous every night; the video stuff is just like lighting or sound. It follows the music. As we play bigger venues, it’s the best way to give people in the back row more bang for the buck. “Country music doesn’t mean backward music,” he concludes. “We are not Amish. We should be allowed to use technology just as well as any other format does.” As impressed as I am by his eventual cooperation, I still come away from my encounter with Brad Paisley with conflicting emotions. The issue seems similar to one that afflicts contemporary politicians. They pay too much heed to the polling data. Sometimes it’s not enough to give the people a i n ’ t n o p l ac e fo r n o p oor boy l i k e me

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what they want. Without some mechanism to give the people what they need, the system doesn’t work. Paisley’s intentions are the best, but only time will tell whether he is truly capable of molding the music, leaving a personal stamp on it, and nudging it in an original direction.

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Hondo’s Legacy luckenbach, texas | december 2004

It’s pretty rare to find a tourist attraction as unaffected by tourism as Luckenbach. Its appeal is defined by its quirkiness. Not that there aren’t commercial aspects to Luckenbach. It is, after all, the twenty-first century. The name became familiar thanks to the 1977 hit song “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love),” written by two men, Bobby Emmons and Chips Moman, who’d never been there. It became a monster hit for familiar Texas collaborators Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings and made the little crossroads mentioned in the title sort of emblematic of the laidback lifestyle glorified in the song. What’s extraordinary is that Luckenbach, hard by South Grape and Snail creeks, remains a relaxed, relatively unaffected place. It’s a tourist attraction, sure, but it’s not like some alligator farm in Florida or a Wild West knockoff where gunfights are staged and tired families pull their station wagons off the interstate to sip Diet Pepsi and watch cancan girls perform in the bogus saloon. 163

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My first visit was in October 2000, when I flew to San Antonio, found myself a motel room in Kerrville, attended a Jerry Jeff Walker concert at Luckenbach Dancehall, and watched the Texas Longhorns thump Baylor 48-14 in Austin, seventy-five miles away. I already knew that Walker was more significant to the lore of Luckenbach than either Nelson or Jennings and that one of Walker’s more significant albums, Viva Terlingua, had been recorded live there. It was an accident, though, that brought me back to Luckenbach on the day after the concert, a Sunday. At the time I was writing a feature column that ran every Tuesday in the Gaston (N.C.) Gazette. That morning I had decided to write about Luckenbach, but I needed more information. I drove back to the combination gift shop and beer joint (originally a post office) located adjacent to the dance hall. It was fortunate that the column wasn’t due for another day. I bought several cd’s, the most notable being Pat Green’s Dancehall Dreamer, which was my first exposure to a singer-songwriter whose popularity would mushroom over the next few years. More pertinent was the biography of the man most responsible for the Luckenbach legend immortalized in the Nelson-Jennings duet. John Russell “Hondo” Crouch (1915–76), along with partners Guich Koock and Kathy Morgan, had bought Luckenbach “lock, stock, and dance hall” in 1970. The story of how Luckenbach became Hondo Crouch’s “make-believe town” is commemorated in Hondo My Father by Becky Patterson Crouch (Austin: Historical Publications, 1979). Sundays are special in Luckenbach. When I got there, the grounds were rife with men playing guitars and singing. Most were from the surrounding Hill Country region, but a few had made sabbaticals from several hundred miles away. It 164

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was an informal, communal scene. I began by sipping a few Lone Star beers and listening. Then I started singing harmony. Eventually, I fell in with a guitarist from the area—I can only recall that his last name was Moon—who knew a number of old country songs by the likes of Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, and the Wilburn Brothers. At the time I could do nothing but sing, but by dusk, as I told friends later, I had become damn near a headliner. Shortly thereafter, I began purchasing harmonicas, which I taught myself to play passably by accompanying recorded music on long drives. Eventually, I bought a guitar at a pawn shop and learned to play the basic chords. An argument could be made that this book began on the mild, autumn afternoon in Luckenbach. Getting to Luckenbach isn’t easy. This visit, my third, takes me in a new direction, mainly because I’ve had to drive from Austin to New Braunfels to pick up something I’d left in a restaurant the day before. It’s fairly easy to get from New Braunfels to the general area of Luckenbach, but I spend most of an hour circumnavigating my way in. This time I’ve brought along a guitar, but I’m pretty uptight about it. About a dozen motorcycles, a like number of cars, several minivans, and five sport-utility vehicles are parked along the dirt roads servicing the little complex of wooden buildings. At any given time there are people arriving and departing. Several people are even wandering around the grounds on horses. I get out of my rental car and sneak around a bit. It’s been slightly over four years since I last visited on a Sunday, but the scene is almost identical. My chief regret is that the man with whom I sang in 2000, Moon, isn’t around this time. I don’t feel really worthy of playing my guitar with these people, all of whom are much better than me. That’s one charachondo’s l e gacy

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teristic of playing guitar badly. It’s similar to knowing enough to be dangerous. More to the point, it’s knowing enough to realize how bad one is. But I’ve come here to play my guitar, and that’s what I have to do. Quietly, trying not to be noticed, I go back to the car and retrieve it. In front of the gift shop, around on the opposite side from where all the pickers are and nearly out of earshot, I take the guitar out of its case and begin playing in relative solitude. A few people happen by. I do well enough to make a couple stop to listen. “Why don’t you go back yonder?” a man asks, his wife or significant other nodding. “I don’t reckon I’m good enough,” I say quietly, realizing that this is my copout. This is my fallback position. I can sit here out front, all by my lonesome, and be able to tell friends that I played my guitar in Luckenbach, Texas. Only I will know the sheepish truth. “Aw, go on back there,” the man says. “I done listened to them, and now I’ve listened to you, and you’re as good as they are.” What he says is untrue, but it’s comforting. Now I’ve got the kind of gut check that comes from having someone else contest one’s rationalization. I put my guitar back in the case, fasten it, thank the man and woman, and walk slowly around back. I’m all gulps and sighs when I walk up to the collection of stumps, chairs, and benches. Politely I wait my turn. All of these people are playing what seem like songs they wrote. I’ve written a couple of songs but have nowhere near the confidence to toss them out in this crowd. Dale Earnhardt, whom I used to write about when he was alive, never intimidated me the way these folks do. There’s an opening. One bearded, hat-wearing, cigarettesmoking picker has finished his tune, and another is engaged in a seemingly endless period of guitar tuning. 166

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Another gulp. Another sigh. I begin strumming a G chord and launch into the old Faron Young hit “Wine Me Up.” The others are too polite to poke fun at me, and the people there to watch don’t know enough to realize how bad I am. I’m nervous, and I screw up several times. I’m playing too fast, which is a common weakness of mine. It’s a good, colorful, familiar song, and, as usual, my singing is enough to cover up, at least somewhat, the weakness of my playing. I get a round of applause, which loosens me up. I think I’ll have a beer. In time I start to fit in. Everyone seems dutifully impressed to find I’m from South Carolina, so, of course, that conversation leads to what winds up being a big mistake. I allow as how I’m here because I’m writing a book. All save one seem dutifully unimpressed by this fact. He wears a bandanna around his head, and I’m just guessing he’s about my age. I ought to be forewarned that, among its many virtues, Texas has more than its fair share of bullshitters. That’s why I never should have mentioned one word about writing a book. The fellow begins by telling me who I should and shouldn’t write about. Most everyone I’ve talked to seems unfit for his tastes, and he makes suggestions of people of whom either I’ve never heard or don’t want to portray. He’s got a raised eyebrow or a disparaging aside for most everyone with the exception of himself. After a while he humbly describes how he made millions during the Internet boom, knew precisely when to get out, and was able to retire at age forty. Since retiring to the lap of luxury and quaint Sunday afternoons in Luckenbach, he’s managed to write fifteen chart records, all under what he calls “his songwriter name,” which he doesn’t volunteer. Then, when I make another mistake and tell him my regular job is writing about nascar, he tells me the stock-car racing scene would make a fine setting hondo’s l e gacy

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for a mystery novel and, oh, by the way, he’s written dozens of them, all of which have been wildly successful. I think to myself either he’s a bullshitter or James Bond, and, as James McMurtry later points out, if he were James Bond, he probably wouldn’t tell me all about himself. I also ponder the irony of the situation as I nod and try to keep a straight face. Does he want me to write about him? He doesn’t tell me his name, and I’m determined, having been twice stung, not to solicit it. Of course, I’m also thinking to myself that I am going to write about him. A fellow can’t let pass red flags like this. One must make the best of whatever one happens across, and the up side to wretched experience is the opportunity to write about it. It doesn’t put a permanent damper on the day, though. Eventually, Double-oh-seven wanders, with most of the other musicians, inside, leaving me with a biker-picker and his perfect match of an eccentric girlfriend. The light is fading, and the wind is starting to howl. That leaves me and the biker with an audience of stragglers outside. The competition has moved on to a better venue. Now I’m just playing for fun, belting out every song I know: “Wabash Cannonball,” “Lost Highway,” “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone.” I’m in heaven, and now I don’t even care whether there’s anyone listening or not. I might as well be in a motel room or the living room of my house. It’s better, though, because I’m in Luckenbach, where “everybody’s somebody.”

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Demented Genius lake villa, illinois | january 2005

When I drive up to Robbie Fulks’s home, carefully following his directions, I don’t know what to expect. I’ve never seen Fulks in concert, but others have described him as crazy, and these are people who describe themselves as fans. The scene in Lake Villa, Illinois—up near the Wisconsin border north of Chicago—is anything but crazy. There’s close to a foot of snow on the ground, and the wind is howling, but Fulks lives in a subdivision where the local high school football coach might reside. There’s a white van out front, which is the only thing that gives him away as a struggling musician. If it had been the football coach, it would’ve been a minivan, not a conversion van. My travels related to this project have led me to a lot of houses with Ford Econolines and Chevy Expresses. They’re handy for hauling equipment to gigs. Why have I taken the rather extreme measure of going all the way to northern Illinois in the dead of winter to interview a singer-songwriter I’ve never even seen before? 169

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Several years ago I read an article about a Fulks appearance on the Grand Ole Opry. As I recall, the article was in the us Airways in-flight magazine. I was intrigued by it, but my interest lay dormant until I stumbled upon a Fulks cd, Country Love Songs, in a Nashville store in the spring of 2004. When I got home, I removed the cd from its case and placed it in a wallet to take on the road. There it sat for months, probably because it had no identifying information, only a cartoon figure of a man wearing a hat and holding an axe, with a circular assortment of various cuts of meat. I’d stop at a stoplight somewhere, ponder what I was going to listen to next, and choose a cd that had some identification on it. I forgot about Robbie Fulks for several months until, at some point, I finally plucked it from the cd wallet and inserted it into my car stereo. I loved it right away. It became a favorite. Unfortunately, it took me quite a while to figure out who the musician was. I batted it around in my brain until finally, on about the third listen, I remembered buying the cd in Nashville. My innate absentmindedness is hard to overstate. Another cd I had bought in Nashville, by Bobby Bare Jr., sat unopened in my house until early 2005. Guess what? I loved it too. Country Love Songs led me to buy another Fulks album, The Very Best of Robbie Fulks, shortly thereafter. Surprisingly enough, The Very Best isn’t a greatest hits album, although it is composed of quality stuff that isn’t on any of Fulks’s other albums. What I found in Fulks was a phenomenon who reminds me of another. He is the only artist I’ve encountered who reminds me of the late Roger Miller. Miller was shortchanged by those who listened to his songs and only heard the garish comedy. Many people never recognized that the clown was weeping softly while he delivered the gags. Miller’s best songs were awash in irony. 170

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That’s the kind of sense of humor Robbie Fulks has. In the mid-1960s it was possible, apparently, for a man to be so “out there,” so wickedly irreverent, that it became a gimmick that could propel him to stardom. It was the same era that produced Loretta Lynn and the outrageous honesty that allowed her to sing so bluntly about a wayward husband and threaten, in song, to kick the asses of the floozies who tempted him. Indulge me for a moment here. When I was a small boy, my father would occasionally take me with him to a beer joint out in the country, miles farther from town than our South Carolina farm. There he would drink Falstaff beer while furnishing me with a Dr. Pepper full of salted peanuts. It’s where he taught me to shoot pool, but the most vivid memory is of the old Loretta Lynn songs that seemed to be forever roaring out of the jukebox—“Your Squaw Is on the Warpath Tonight,” “You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man,” “Fist City.” My eyes must have grown as big as saucers. I was shocked. I was amazed. I remember thinking what manner of woman would sing such things, but she was so honest, and her work was such a contrast to all the wholesome sitcoms I was being exposed to on network tv. The only other time in my boyhood I remember being so shocked was when a band of gorillas cut loose the G-string from Charlton Heston, and there on the silver screen at the Broadway Theatre I briefly witnessed Moses’s bare ass. That was in Planet of the Apes. Miller used humor to get the same points across, but he was so far beyond the staid country humor of the era—Minnie Pearl, Archie Campbell, and others who undoubtedly inspired Hee Haw—that he was hip. Country performers had a lot of great virtues in those days, but very few of them were hip. Fulks takes irreverence beyond even Miller’s bounds. His song about the death of a Marilyn Monroe–like movie star is called “She Took a Lot of Pills (and Died).” His ode to an de me nte d ge ni us

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unsuccessful stint as one of Nashville’s factory songwriters is “Fuck This Town.” Not surprisingly, Fulks, sitting at his kitchen table in idealized suburbia, tells me he is quite the admirer of Roger Miller. “Roger had that talent, but he was also kind of a demented genius who knew exactly what he wanted to do once he got that shot at the big time,” he says. “He worked it so brilliantly. I just think he’s the most multifaceted and satisfying country musician since Hank Williams, and maybe even including Hank Williams.” Far too many modern fans equate Miller’s work only with humor. On the other hand, my favorite song of his is “Invitation to the Blues,” which carries a tone of droll sorrow. There are other Miller songs, though, that will break your heart: “One Dyin’ and a Buryin’” and “Husbands and Wives” come to mind immediately. Fulks, too, has that subtle touch of melancholy. “Tears Only Run One Way” is a song Miller would have appreciated. Fulks is one of the few modern country songwriters whose knowledge of the music’s past is comprehensive. One of his albums, Thirteen Hillbilly Giants, is made up of carefully selected, somewhat obscure songs written by, well, hillbilly giants like Jean Shepard, Bill Anderson, Wynn Stewart, Bill Carlisle, and others. A notable recent work is his production of a tribute to the late Johnny Paycheck, Touch My Heart. This guy, chewed up and spat out by Nashville, is as true to the roots of this music as anyone. “It’s amazing, yeah, just to walk into Tootsie’s or any of the other places on that strip [Nashville’s lower Broadway]. Any day of the week you can see stuff that anywhere else in the country this would be the best band in town that everybody’s talking about, but in Nashville it’s on a Tuesday night and they’re just scraping by on tips and working four-hour 172

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sets,” Fulks says. “It’s an amazing town for musical talent. To me it’s continually frustrating that the Nashville aesthetic, in terms of major-label music, is just so mall oriented, whatever that is. It’s just so suburban mood music–oriented. There’s just this one little strip. All that music just gets boiled down to this one little, narrow distillate that is so unnourishing. “It’s just gotten to be such a big business, since Garth [Brooks], especially. That’s great for people who are living down there and making tons of money. I certainly have a lot of friends who are down there and making a great living. There are a lot of old people who remember when a hit record was ten thousand copies and how bad the salad days really were, even though they seem glorious now in retrospect. The down side of the big business is when you have a huge event, like Garth, the whole industry orients itself to the idea of ten and twelve million sales being the bar that everyone has to reach. All of a sudden selling four million records, or a million, isn’t considered successful anymore. Everything has been reoriented to this new model where ten million is the thing to aspire to now. The two effects of that are that it mitigates against any form of risk taking, musical or otherwise, and now everything sounds like Garth Brooks imitation music for the fiveyear cycle, or however long it perpetuates itself.” Of Brooks himself Fulks says: “He’s got a great producer. He’s got a lot of vocal talent, but a hundred other people have that too. His ego is what got him there. I’m sure a lot of people were waiting for him to trip up for a lot of years, and [with the singer’s rock alter ego, Chris Gaines, which proved a commercial disaster] he finally did.” The great paradox of Fulks’s music is that it actually seems to appeal to an audience that isn’t nearly as attuned to country music’s history as its author. “I play for urban audiences that might know more about the new Wire record than the newest Alan Jackson record,” de me nte d ge ni us

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he says. “The lesson I take from my own experience and how I got into it, and from looking at other people and how they got into it, [is that] you can’t describe any window into music as illegitimate. There are just so many ways to get to the real thing, and a lot of bands that I don’t see the point of, or who I don’t see any musical merit in, are pathways for other people to get to Hank Williams or the same destination. The point is that you develop the perspective to say this band is a pathway band, a treasure map kind of singer, who isn’t the real deal. This is the real deal, right here, and that’s how I got here. There were a lot of bands in the eighties, when I was forming my musical tastes, and there was a band, Dave Alvin and the Blasters, that sort of provided that pathway to me. “If you’d pay attention to the wellsprings of their music, they would lead you to the real thing, and I don’t think it’s a slam on Dave or that group to say that it was a beautiful group, but it was also a pathway group. You could go from there to [blues legends] Big Joe Turner or Robert Johnson or whoever it was. That was the thing.” The whole interview begs the question: Why is this guy in the Chicago area? Is there some burgeoning underground current of traditional country music simmering in the Windy City? As it turns out, no. It was fate, the kind that country used to catalog, that brought Fulks to the area. “I had a girlfriend who came up here,” he says, unflinchingly honest. “I got her pregnant, and I just followed her here to raise the kid. This was back in ’83. It was a move from the loins. “It’s not a place I would have picked. A lot of times in the last twenty years, I’ve wanted to move down to Nashville or just some place closer to country music because it seemed like that was where my talent was and where I needed to be, but at this point I’ve got so many roots dug in here in the city that I’m resigned to staying here in spite of the weather and 174

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the things that I don’t particularly care for. But the city itself I really, really love. As far as country music is concerned, I’d say there are ten people who are top-notch players and singers. It’s a really, really small scene. I think, though, there are more good clubs with good [public-address systems], fair promoters, nice sight lines, and all the rest of it than probably anywhere except two or three clubs in the rest of the country. It’s great for that.” Family life has been good for Fulks, who, by his own admission, has mellowed in recent years. Or maybe he’s just studied the industry and gained a more complete understanding of it. He seems more relaxed than his music. “As far as the corporatization of music in Nashville is concerned, I was really upset about it when I was in the thick of it, which was ten years ago, and since then I can’t say I give much of a rat’s ass about it,” he says. “I’m way up here, and I do what I do, and I have this tiny niche of a career, and they’re of no concern to me, and I’m of not that much concern to them. It’s not something I really simmer about anymore.” I decry the fact that country music doesn’t seem to dwell on the hardships of life anymore and suggest that the average theme of the song featured on mainstream radio is “Hey, baby, let’s me and you party.” I complain that there’s no populism anymore. The common man and his worries became passé with Merle Haggard and George Jones. “I think you’re exactly right,” he says, “but the common man must bear some of the responsibility, too, for the direction that country has gone. I think the common man is listening to ac/dc and a lot of other stuff. A lot of common people are listening to Shania Twain, and when I say common man, I mean the guy who fixes my car down the street. “They just need a chance to hear it. It’s organic. It just happened because people heard it, and that’s what they had. It’s not what they selected. It’s what they had. de me nte d ge ni us

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“You can get reams of press, but when you read about a singer or a band, it can be presented in an exciting, romantic, and well-written way, but there’s nothing that’s going to sell people on it like hearing it.” The experience of producing the Paycheck tribute has given him new perspective into the way the industry works, which leads to a discussion of why and how music industry executives made mainstream radio so bereft of creativity. “One of my favorite things about being on the inside of music, as I’ve gotten in the last couple of years, is that there is a hierarchy of merit within the music business,” Fulks says. “Outside of it, it’s such the opposite. It’s like, when Randy Travis gets a record he’s really excited about, it would be, like, a Guy Clark record. He’ll get an Alan Jackson record to see what the competition’s up to.” Over time Fulks has evolved to the point where he doesn’t see himself anymore as “so all alone.” He now perceives a certain condescension and even arrogance in his earlier work. Although he remains a persistent critic of the establishment, he wouldn’t write “Fuck This Town” again. He is more cognizant of the source of his frustrations. “I just think there was a spirit of innocence and ignorance,” Fulks says. “When I made [Country Love Songs], I’d never put out a record, at least on an outside label, before, and I was so excited about the opportunity to do it. I was excited about the opportunity to be around other musicians. I was like a conduit between the world and Buck Owens, this great music that I was totally absorbed in at the time. I wasn’t smart enough to think, well, everybody smart about music knows all about Buck Owens and Roger Miller and all this stuff. Why do I consider myself a musical emissary for that? To me I was the first person in the world who had discovered this great music. “Also, I think, different kinds of music are answering those 176

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fundamental issues that country used to explore. I just listened to the new Eminem record, and I’m not the hugest fan of hip-hop or rap, or whatever, but that music, man, it’s manon-the-street, and they’re telling stories that aren’t censored by anybody, they’re saying what they want to say, and they’re talking about fucking sex and drugs and alcohol and everything that country used to talk about. “It’s amazing, too, that it goes backward in a way. On my second trip to Nashville, some woman at emi was listening to a song I’d written. It was nothing you would know or nothing I recorded, but she said, ‘This is nice that you’ve tried to write a song from the point of view of the man singing about the woman who’s cheating on him. And he’s saying I’ll be patient, just get through the cheating and then just come home to me. As long as you come home, it’s ok.’ She said, ‘It’s nice and daring that you wrote about that, but you can’t get away with that, with writing about women who cheat. And I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘The Pill’ is twenty-five years old, and Loretta Lynn could get away with singing about the birth control pill and have a hit in 1972. This is 1994. And she said, ‘Well, it doesn’t work that way.’ “Free speech doesn’t get wider and wider. At that point the business was more restrictive than it had ever been and probably more restrictive than it is now too.” Fulks finds just a hint of optimism in the latest trends. “Toby Keith has been a great influence and others too. As much as I despise certain aspects of this and his presentation of this so-called ‘art,’ I really like the fact that it’s opened up and there are certain things you can say because of what those guys are doing. There’s a little kick ass in it that’s good.” But Fulks objects with his old passion to the adoption of what another generation might have considered mainstream pop by country. It used to be the other way around. Country de me nte d ge ni us

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hits—oddly enough, Miller’s “King of the Road” is a classic example—found their way to pop stations by appealing to a broader audience. “Without being a little bit country, why should it even exist? If it’s going to be like crappy rock music, we already have a lot of crappy rock music,” says Fulks. “It’s like the Republicans saying, ‘If we run a Democrat against a Democrat, the Democrats will win every time.’ If country music’s just going to be secondhand rock music, it’s always going to lose out. “Country music has some things that it does perfectly well. It’s got a set of themes that only it does the way it does. It’s got a vocal tradition and an instrumental tradition that are unique to it and every bit as worthy and full of technical proficiency as jazz. I hope it gets back to it. On the other hand, if it does get back to it, you’ve got to wonder if there’s a point of view to get back to. Sort of that down-home country attitude, other than wistful, bullshit nostalgia. If there are really people around who can transmit that soulfully and honestly. I hope there are.” Fulks hosts a monthly radio show on xm Satellite Radio. The premise, he says, is that the old music isn’t gone and in fact isn’t even rare. “I think there’s more good country music out there than there was even in the fifties, at the apogee we were talking about,” he says. “There’s just so much of it out there. Someone’s going to come along who’s going to bring that country soulfulness again to a wide audience. It just can’t be that nostalgia. It’s got to be something new and something personable and something with the communicable power to put a new slant on it.” Robbie Fulks would be willing to be the guy.

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The Last True Texas Troubadour arlington, texas | december 2004

Brian Burns has made a career out of concentrating on Texas. Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, the focus of his music is firmly centered in the Lone Star State. Since 2003 he’s even been taking his message into the schools of the state via a program originally begun to accompany his album The Eagle & the Snake: Songs of the Texians. “I’m interested in all kinds of history,” he insists, “but here in Texas we have so much of it in our own backyard. I’ve always been drawn to, and found it fulfilling to write, songs with visual imagery, drama, and emotional impact. History, and especially Texas history, provides those elements for me.” Speaking of history, Nashville and the country music establishment have often confounded Texans. Even for many of those who have succeeded there, there’s a certain love-hate relationship. Burns is one of many who seem to have written off Nashville and the trade-offs that often accompany mainstream acceptance. There’s a good living to be made in Texas, where there’s a unique musical culture. 179

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“Nashville music is about selling pickup trucks and blue jeans,” Burns says. “The focus is on commercials, and the music is tailored to work as a background. In Texas there are djs and programmers gutsy enough to play songs that are actually as entertaining, or more so, than the commercials.” One example of his attitude is a colorful assault on Nashville in the song “Nothin’ to Say (Austin vs. Nashville)” from his 2004 cd Heavy Weather. Burns compares commercially successful male singers to Chippendale dancers and suggests their music is almost irrelevant. Writing or performing the song is less important in Nashville than the tight jeans and the rugged good lucks. The loss of a sense of populism in the music troubles Burns, but he doesn’t blame the targeting of youth by the country music establishment. To him the fundamental problem is commercialism. “The music industry has always been driven by youth, and I have no misgivings whatsoever about that,” he says. “I’m lucky in that my music has fans and supporters of all ages, and a good portion of my income is derived from performing for kids [in the school program]. People, young or old, are going to gravitate to music they can identify with. When I was young, it might have been Grand Funk Railroad one week and Willie Nelson the next. “But I never gravitated toward any music simply because it was considered cool by my peers. I judged it by whether or not I liked the music . . . the songs . . . which certainly positioned me well out of the mainstream, where I remain to this day. I remember a few years ago, when I first heard Robert Earl Keen. I became a huge fan. Man, what a phenomenal singer-songwriter. Next thing you know, there are singers coming out of the woodwork, imitating him to the letter, but who couldn’t write a song if their lives depended on it. “I think it would be cool if more people selected music for 180

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music’s sake, and based on personal taste, rather than what tastemakers are saying.” It’s not the youth that confounds Burns but, rather, the sameness of the music. I point out to him that there is precious little attention paid to the hardships regularly and inevitably visited upon families and individuals. “Feel-good music” should have its place, but the history of country music embraces the full range of human emotions. “I can’t explain it,” Burns says. “Maybe it’s just that the world has gotten so crazy that people don’t want to think about those things. Musical depth seems to be out of fashion right now, and most popular music concerns itself heavily with some sort of dumbing down. “Music has become antiseptic because most of it is made, as I mentioned earlier, with the express purpose of reinforcing commercials. It’s stayed that way because most people don’t realize there are musical artists out there, actually taking the time to learn to play real musical instruments and write substantive music. It’s just that few listeners get exposed to it.” To underscore this point, Burns answers one of my questions by citing a new song, “Border Radio,” that offers a certain wistful hope. It’s set in the future, where a lonely listener stumbles across a simple tune that takes him back to a time when men sang “honest rhymes.” So moved is he that he tries to find its source, calling “Mr. dj” in search of this plaintive, stripped-down blast of music he’d never heard “from the satellite.” He makes the call because he wants to awaken the world to this snippet he heard only briefly before it faded into static and oblivion. When Burns wrote that song, he must have been thinking about the new options that have only begun to provide alternatives to mainstream radio. “The Internet has made it easier to get the music out,” he t h e l a s t t r u e t e x as troubadour

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says, “but the digitization of the music—thereby making it free for the taking—has made it harder for artists to make a living. What makes Texas unique, in this respect, is its abundance of music venues. A recording artist can still earn a living in Texas with live performances. No other place in the country offers so many venues for live music.” As for satellite radio, Burns has hope but thinks the jury is still out. “I’m getting satellite airplay, particularly on xm’s ‘X Country,’” he says. “I just recently subscribed to xm, and while it does offer considerable variety, I’m still evaluating its merit on substance.” “Heavy Weather” is an apt description of Burns’s latest cd (at the time of my interview). It’s all about thunderstorms, shipwrecks, hurricanes . . . and the storms of life. He wrote twelve of the sixteen songs, which reflect a divergence of styles not previously seen in his work. His cover of Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is among the more poignant I’ve heard. It’s appropriate that Burns takes his message into the schoolrooms of Texas. By and large, his is a perspective that the kids seem to lack. Adults frequently decry the absence of historical knowledge in kids, whether by some failing of the educational system or by a lack of attention to it at home. Heavy Weather, about the storms of life, followed The Eagle & the Snake: Songs of the Texians, which was kind of a gallant ode to Texas history. Burns’s perspective grows ever more sophisticated in his descriptions of people and places, triumphs and failures, methods and motivations. I noted in an earlier chapter that music should nurture the people even as it reflects them. Burns is a nurturer.

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The Novelist Begat the Songwriter austin, texas | december 2004

James McMurtry arranges to meet me at a Mexican restaurant on South Congress Street, and it’s obviously a place he frequents. His is the simple gratitude of a man who pays attention to people who have taken an interest in his music. His father, novelist Larry McMurtry, writes about the people in small towns who have breakfast every morning at the local Dairy Queen, and this interview has that same kind of feel as we talk above the clattering of pots and pans. If Kinky Friedman is a songwriter turned novelist—and now politician, since he is running a quirky independent campaign for governor of Texas—then James McMurtry is a novelist turned songwriter. He doesn’t write fiction, or even prose, but his lyrics evoke the same kind of wry observations of small-town life used by his father in novels like the interconnected The Last Picture Show, Texasville, and Duane’s Depressed. In fact, one wonders why James never tried his hand at his father’s trade. 183

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“It’s a different muscle,” he says. “It’s a different kind of attention span. I can’t see the novel laid out in front of me the way he can. Larry says a lot of times he can’t either, but he says you can tell when you start writing a book whether it’s going to work or not. It’s either going to work or it’ll be work. Most of them are work. He said Duane’s Depressed was like that.” In much the same fashion as a novelist, James builds on observations. Many of his songs begin with personal experience and scenes from the road. All of the songs have stories behind them. They’re not the same stories told in the songs, but they began there in much the same fashion as the writer of fiction. “Sixty Acres,” for instance, is the story of a man who becomes a landowner upon the death of a relative. Of course, he doesn’t know what to do with the land. Getting the sixty acres catches him by surprise, but it doesn’t take him long to regard the inheritance as being more trouble than it’s worth. It’s suitable only for farming, and he isn’t suited to that. Why couldn’t “Grandma” have left him with the other plot, the one zoned “commercial,” instead of “the last of the old home place”? Then he becomes doubly embittered at the suggestion that he’s ungrateful. “It came to me in a roundabout way,” McMurtry says of a plot of land he really did acquire, though not in the manner described in the song. “My uncle was going to lose it. The bank was going to take it, and my father just happened to really hate that particular banker and the fact that he was going to take his brother’s shop, so he gave it to me. He thought property ownership would make me responsible, which it did not. My relatives kept telling me to make it all into storage units because Wichita Falls experienced a boom because their base didn’t close. Shepherd Air Force Base trained so many of the foreign troops in nato, so, rather than close the base, they kept it open while they were closing so many others. 184

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They consolidated a lot of the stuff from other bases there. So, I never did make the storage units because I’m reluctant to put money into anything in that neck of the woods. Something always takes it.” The song resonates with me because of my own dysfunctional family experience and because, at roughly the same time I first heard the song, my own grandmother passed away, leaving me the family farm. And, like the character in the song, I haven’t a clue about what to do with it other than what we’ve done with it since my father died, which is almost nothing. McMurtry can hardly be categorized as country at all in terms of the sound of his music, but, in the sense advanced by Jack Ingram of country being more a state of mind, he, like Ingram, belongs in the fold. He writes and sings about the wild eccentricities and oddities overlooked by mainstream radio’s sanitized vision of the common man. No one could accuse McMurtry of writing commercials. “Choctaw Bingo,” McMurtry says, is about the “north Texas/south Oklahoma crystal methamphetamine trade.” The occasion of the song is a family reunion up at “Uncle Slayton’s place.” Uncle Slayton is a figure who, in previous generations, would’ve been described as a bootlegger or a moonshiner. Times have changed. McMurtry weaves a raucous vision of the family gathering, focusing on the patriarch who makes moonshine and cooks crystal meth because “the shine don’t sell.” It’s a scathing satire on what the family has become and how we rationalize the reality that the world is spinning out of control. Its ring is a little too true for comfort. “That one,” McMurtry says, “was observation. It’s just from driving down Highway 69 across Oklahoma. We never play Oklahoma, but we have to go through it to get to Kansas City or St. Louis. There used to be a lot of weird stuff t h e n ov e l i s t b e g at the songwri te r

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along the road there. That was the case with ‘Choctaw Bingo.’ It may be calling itself that again. For a while there it changed to the Choctaw Gaming Center, which didn’t have nearly the alliteration. “There was that, and there was the Pop Knife and Gun Shop in Tushka. There was a lingerie store in Kansas that, the first time I saw it, it was in the middle of the night, and for some reason it was a us highway, and you know how they break off into alternate routes. For some reason, I took alt 69, same place by a different route, and I went through the middle of Baxter Springs, Kansas, at about midnight. There was nothing lit up in downtown except these pink neon [Rolling] Stones lips. I woke the drummer up to say, ‘Are we seeing this?’ We came back through in the daytime a couple years later, and, sure enough, it was a lingerie store next to the biker bar across from the bank. All that’s gone now. Nearly everything I wrote about in that song has disappeared since I wrote it. Club 69 [where Uncle Slayton ‘drinks Johnnie Walker’] burned to the ground.” McMurtry’s songs tell stories, not unlike the 1960s and ’70s work of Tom T. Hall. McMurtry’s vision is darker, but, then again, this may be a darker age. Like Hall, McMurtry bases his songs on wry observations of the life he encounters. “Life anywhere, really,” he says. “Before I was on the road, I wrote about other things. High school football or whatever. Now a lot of it comes from the road, but I’ve got a fourteenyear-old son, so that changes the perspective. I’m trying to observe his set, their language, soak up a little bit of it. “The experiences are pretty intense. There is a lot of hypocrisy, and the kids are hip to it, man. They’re much better at arguing through it than we were.” McMurtry migrated to Austin—which, by the way, is not one of his father’s favorite cities—because of a recording contract. 186

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“They had a record deal, and we had a band,” he said, “and at that time it was real cheap to live here. That’s not true anymore because it’s the place to go. “I don’t know that [Austin] is really any easier on artists than anywhere else. The reason it was an artists’ mecca was that it was cheap to live here. Not so much anymore. It was cheap and tolerant in a certain sense. It’s not tolerant anymore either. They have an . . . ordinance where you can’t play on the street unless you can be in a storefront and off the sidewalk. You can’t have drums, and you cannot have amplification.” McMurtry was born in Fort Worth but mostly raised in Leesburg, Virginia. He studied English and Spanish at the University of Arizona, where he began playing his own material in a downtown beer garden. He won an award in the New Folk category at the 1987 Kerrville (Texas) Folk Festival. More than anything else, McMurtry seems comfortable with his music, which enables him to make a living. He seems to accept commercial reality and even to understand that by refusing to succumb to “the Wal-Mart world,” he isn’t going to be able to exploit it. He doesn’t want to exploit a world that, in his words, “is turning all the small towns into theme parks.” “As far as it being determined by the market, well, it’s always been,” he says. “Most of the visual art that’s survived was done by pork painters [i.e., the Symbolists] or church painters, based on what the king wanted, if you wanted to survive as an artist, and hence your art survived. Here we don’t have aristocracy. We have corporations and capitalism. That’s why I never had a problem with corporate sponsorship. It’s what we’ve got. You’ve got to get the money from somewhere. I think part of that is having to fight with the market forces. It probably creates some complications in the course of it from having to work around whatever syst h e n ov e l i s t b e g at the songwri te r

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tem you’re in. In movies in the early twentieth century the sex was censored out of them, but they found a way to get around the requirements and get the point they wanted to convey in. I’ve watched enough movies, and part of their art was in getting around the obstacles.” But McMurtry does fret a bit about what he perceives as a hard right turn in the whole society. “We were basically pretty liberal until 9/11,” he says. “I never felt vulnerable. I never had my whole life.” Steve Earle influenced “We Can’t Make It Here,” which McMurtry calls “the only straight-out political song I ever wrote.” “Earle is one of the best songwriters around because he can do something that normally kills a good song, which is to make a point,” says McMurtry. “He can make his point with his characters without weighing a song down, which is something I’ve never been able to do—until now, with this song, and Earle had a lot to do with that. I didn’t think I could do it, but then I thought, well, Steve Earle can do it, so I might as well give it a shot. That’s better than sitting on the sideline. “I got some really nasty e-mails for that one, by the way. A lot of my fans were upset. There’s this sentiment, this idea, that you’re supposed to keep politics and music separate. A guy wrote me that. I wrote the guy back and said, well, I guess that means you can’t listen to Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan on the left or Merle Haggard and Toby Keith on the right. Be careful what you wish for.” I draw from my own career and note that a columnist is supposed to say what he thinks. “When you’re a songwriter, you are too.” McMurtry says. “My tactic is to post what I think on my web site, without giving out my own e-mail address. I post it and let everybody else reply.” 188

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Then the conversation turns to his father. I’ve been an avid reader of Larry McMurtry since I was a teenager, when I first saw the movie The Last Picture Show and then read the book. James played a bit part in the much-praised miniseries Lonesome Dove. “He’s [Larry’s] not real happy with his own work these days. He’s just been doing it so long that he doesn’t really know what he’s got left, if he has anything. He doesn’t really want to write fiction anymore. He wants to write nonfiction, if he writes at all. Of his recent work—Arthur Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Roads, and Paradise—they make a really good trilogy.” I mention the series of recent western novels subtitled “The Berrybender Narratives” and say I’ve enjoyed them. “Oh, yeah, I like those just fine,” says James, “but he kind of doesn’t.” With favorite writers I’ve often chosen a somewhat obscure, sometimes overlooked work that becomes a guilty pleasure of sorts. From Larry McMurtry’s body of work, that distinction belongs to All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers. “That was in that golden time when he first started publishing,” the son says. “Dylan talks about that time, or did in a recent interview. I just heard about it secondhand, but when he was asked if he could write stuff like that anymore, he said, no, those times are magic, but there are other things I can do now. “Some of it’s about energy, though, too. You’ve got a lot of energy in your twenties that you don’t have later on. You have other kinds of energy. You have other tools to use. But you don’t have that same kind of wild, rabid emotion. You learn how not to hook yourself, basically. Physically and other ways, too, in terms of your whole way of operating.” What’s next for James McMurtry? “Getting through the holidays,” he says. “Making another t h e n ov e l i s t b e g at the songwri te r

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record. I guess I’ll get it out before fall, but that’s all right. The last one came out in March. “I sort of envy novelists and writers. You write a book, and you don’t have to think about it again unless you want to. We’ve got to go out and do the damn songs and do them live. My dad comes back at me with what he envies about my profession. I can get the instant gratification from the audience being there when I perform a song. The writer doesn’t get that. By the time you turn in the final draft of a book, you’re sick of it. You don’t want to ever see it again, but you have to go out and read it. That’s why my dad doesn’t adapt his own screenplays because then he’d have to go back and reread the damn book, and he’s emotionally done with it.”

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Two-Night Stand charlotte, north carolina | march 2005

On a nascar off-weekend I travel to the Neighborhood Theatre, about an hour and a half away, for consecutive concerts. The theater is located in what’s known locally as the NoDa [North Davidson Street] Arts District. It’s a formerly rundown area now brimming with art galleries, coffeehouses, and other shops. Over the years I’ve attended dozens of concerts at the renovated movie house to see artists like Jerry Jeff Walker, Robert Earl Keen, Billy Joe Shaver, and some who don’t even have three names. Buddy Miller is a favorite of mine. He’s the most unassuming of artists, not to mention one of the more talented. For many years Miller has played lead guitar for his close friend Emmylou Harris, who is at least indirectly responsible for the title of his latest cd, Universal United House of Prayer. The cover is a black-and-white photograph of an actual house of worship, shown beneath a cloudy sky, located in a rundown neighborhood of Nashville next to an automobile repair shop. After completing work on the album, Miller 191

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sent a copy to Emmylou, accompanied by a Xerox copy of the cover photo. “The label [New West] liked the record, but they weren’t sold on the title or the cover photo,” Miller says. “I figured I’d just let it go. You know, I figured they were the experts, and it wasn’t something to quibble about.” In a conversation with Harris, however, he let slip in passing the news that the title was apparently about to be changed. This did not sit well with her, so she made a call to the label, after which the original title and evocative photograph were restored. “I went back to the church and found it boarded up,” says Miller. “I guess in Nashville, you don’t have the opportunity to go worship while your car is being fixed anymore.” Miller, often accompanied by his wife and songwriting collaborator, Julie, goes it alone this time, with a three-piece band backing him. He arrives onstage wearing a faded cap, his gray, shoulder-length hair cascading out of the back like a mountain waterfall. Almost every song is previewed by a low-key, rambling dialogue that is charming for its very lack of direction. He nonetheless apologizes repeatedly for his streams of consciousness. The band works well together despite the fact that the bassist, Denny Bixby, is on loan from Rodney Crowell. A recent birth in the family of Byron House created the gap that Bixby adroitly fills. The friendship between Miller and his jack-of-all-trades, Phil Madeira (on organ, accordion, lap steel, and guitar), and drummer Bryan Owings is obvious as they exchange private quips during the entire concert. “My voice is trashed,” says Miller, “so I’ll call it character.” Worn or not, Miller’s voice is nothing if not strong and distinctive. In terms of plaintiveness he’s kind of a male alternative to Lucinda Williams. I haven’t heard a voice as distinc192

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tive since the relatively brief prime of Vern Gosdin’s career. It’s a take-no-prisoners voice, and since Miller doesn’t sound like a thousand other singers, it’s probably an acquired taste for some listeners. There’s a lot of blues and soul there, but most of the songs are hard-core traditional country. Many of the songs are the creative work of Miller and his wife, but the concert also includes samplings of Mark Heard, the Louvin Brothers, Bob Dylan, Tom T. Hall, Jim Lauderdale, and, near the end, Hank Williams, who never sang “You Win Again” any better. Twice nominated for a Grammy Award, Miller seems blissfully unaware—and if not, then ambivalent—about his own considerable talents. Although he won a Grammy neither time, he takes pleasure in telling the audience that one of the losses was to Bob Dylan. The most memorable aspect of the Grammy ceremonies just completed, he says, was the fact that the food “was so beyond anything you can imagine.” “I’m one of those guys who can’t tune and talk at the same time,” he says during one of the between-songs monologues. “Actually, I can’t tune . . . and I can’t talk.” The lead-in act, by the way, is a pleasant surprise. Miller produced Bill Mallonee’s cd Audible Sigh, and Mallonee, who lives in Athens, Georgia, performs for about an hour, accompanying himself with guitar and harmonica, before Miller’s band joins him for a couple of songs at the end. When I walk out into the cold night air, I get sidetracked on the way to my truck by the sound of music being played nearby. I head in the direction of the sound and find a couple of young men set up in the grass, one with an electric guitar and the other on drums, in front of a small specialty shop. After listening to a couple of Hank Williams Jr. standards, I put a couple of bills in the guitar case. They outnumber the audience two to one at this point since several people leave as I arrive in the yard. For a few moments I pick up a spare two- ni ght stand

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guitar and strum it, although an electric guitar is alien to me, not to mention trying to play it with a stiff pick (plectrum, I believe, is the formal term). It’s hard to embarrass oneself in a group of three people, but I’m doing it, so I put the guitar up, chat for a while, and then they indulge me by letting me sing a few verses of Hall’s “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died.” I fumble the lyrics several times, so they let me acquit myself with another simple standard, Harlan Howard’s “Pick Me Up on Your Way Down.” That’s enough to send me on my late-night way with enough adrenaline flowing to make it home safely. I get my nephew to accompany me the following night after he discovers that Charlie Robison’s song “El Cerrito Place” is currently being featured on Country Music Television. Once we arrive in NoDa, we queue up until the doors open, at which time we walk into the arena to mark our seats, then, with a plastic band safely fastened around our right wrists, we walk back outside to window-shop at the various galleries and antique shops. The first sign that something is slightly amiss occurs when two women in line with us inform me that they have never heard of Robison, that they are “huge fans” of Paul Thorn (the opening act), and that they have come all the way from Virginia to see Thorn. My nephew, Ray Phillips, does not share my political views, and he smells liberals almost immediately when we start walking around. He seems as confused and mystified by the existence of affluent liberals as I am by working-class conservatives. I’ve heard of the Paul Thorn Band, but I’ve never heard a single one of his songs. All I know about him is that some members of an online message group are really big fans. Based on these recommendations, I await his concert with some enthusiasm. I’m not disappointed. Thorn is about as 194

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far from country as anyone in these pages, but he’s the kind of artist who springs, powerful and unrepentant, from charismatic religion. It comes as no surprise when Thorn tells the audience that he has a father who is a Church of God preacher and an uncle who is a pimp. He says his father taught him about God and his Uncle Merle taught him about women, and off we go on that tantalizing Jimmy Swaggart/Jerry Lee Lewis slippery slope. Some of Thorn’s songs could’ve been sung by Marvin Gaye or Al Green. Some are rock. Some are rhythm and blues. Some are just blues. Precious little could be categorized as country. The music is satisfying, though, and full of humor and occasionally even wide-eyed innocence. The between-song monologues are priceless. Thorn tells about how he and his honey used to sit around the trailer, eat bacon and Miracle Whip sandwiches, and procreate while watching Jerry Springer. He misses watching her prance around in her purple thong, he says, but the breakup was his fault. “I cheated on her,” Thorn says, “and she cheated on me, and pretty soon we was having us a cheat-a-thon.” One of his songs is about “Joanie the Jehovah’s Witness Stripper.” There’s a little something that’s demeaning about watching this throng of Thorn fans rollicking at one zany song after another. Thorn sings about his life—of that I have little doubt—but to those around me who have taken up most of the seats in the front rows, it’s almost like slumming. Most of these people arrived in bmws and Lexus suvs. It’s easy for them to look at Thorn as being some kind of musical version of The Beverly Hillbillies’ Jethro Bodine, and that’s selling him and his background fairly short. But I guess it’s a living. After a break, most of which is dominated by Thorn fans streaming to the exits, Charlie Robison arrives onstage to a crowd grown sparse and quiet. A couple of drunks seem to exist to block my view. One carries a sixteen-ounce can of two- ni ght stand

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Budweiser that he repeatedly hoists with one hand while signaling the stage with the two-fingered “Hook ’em Horns” gesture familiar to University of Texas fans. Bud Man does everything but climb up on the stage. Robison, who has experienced limited mainstream success with three stellar studio albums in a row, mentions with a somewhat sheepish tone that the video is number seven on the cmt charts and encourages fans to vote for it online. He’s uncomfortable with self-promotion, though, and he acquits himself a bit by saying, “Besides, I’m tired of watching Kenny Chesney frolicking on the beach all goddamned day.” The Robisons of Bandera, Texas, represent quite a contrast in styles. It’s hard to believe that Charlie and Bruce Robison are brothers. One similarity is that both married well. Charlie’s wife, Emily Robison, is one of the Dixie Chicks. Bruce’s wife, Kelly Willis, is a phenomenal vocal talent who is inexplicably underappreciated outside the borders of the Lone Star State. Charlie Robison calls brother Bruce “the greatest songwriter on earth,” and while there might be a bit of familial bias in that, Bruce concedes, “The main thing that I make money from is songwriting.” He wrote “Lonely Too” (Lee Ann Womack), “Travelin’ Soldier” (Dixie Chicks), and “Angry All the Time” (Tim McGraw). Bruce Robison’s most familiar tune, at least among those heard on radio, is “What Would Willie Do?” a whimsical ode to Willie Nelson. Another notable song is “Wrapped,” which was the title song of his own album and was covered by his wife on her critically acclaimed 1999 cd What I Deserve. Bruce is laid-back, with a vocal style that somehow reminds me of Don Williams. Charlie is out there on the rock edge of country. Charlie’s show is full of crowd-pleasers like “Barlight” (a nursery rhyme for grownups), “Sunset Boulevard,” “My Hometown,” “Desperate Times,” and “The 196

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Wedding Song.” The last was released on his Step Right Up cd as a duet with the Chicks’ Natalie Maines. In concert Charlie sometimes recruits audience members to sing the female part. Irony defines Charlie Robison. Why else would there be a song called “Life of the Party” on his 2001 album Step Right Up but no such song on his album called Life of the Party, which came out three years earlier? It’s a great show but a strange one. I’ve seen Robison play to raucous, beer-chugging Texas crowds, and it’s no inconvenience to me that this audience has only two obvious drunks in it, although I would prefer that those two were not blocking my view of the stage. One, by the way, eventually gets escorted out. Robison watches with good humor and notes that he’s played to rowdy audiences and he’s played to sedate ones, but rarely has he played to such a polarized one as this. The whole atmosphere is kind of weird. For one thing, the throng of Robison fans is situated mostly in a low balcony, or really more of a platform, to the left of the stage. That’s because the prime seats have now been vacated by departing Paul Thorn fans and, presumably, the Robison fans are either too comfortable or too drunk to move. The beer stand is in easy access to the fans watching from the platform. It could be that there are dozens of rowdy fans over there. I can’t see because of a barrier at the front. The only drunk I can see is Bud Man, sloshing beer around and dancing like a goose on Quaaludes. Despite all this, Robison and his really tight band carry on for an hour and a half, performing brilliantly on a night when they could be excused if they cut out early. Ray, my nephew, is convinced that everyone in Charlotte is a lunatic, but he’ll be in college soon and will learn that it’s really true of everyone, uh, everywhere. two- ni ght stand

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The Ones That Got Away march 2005

Jerry Jeff Walker is the artist most responsible for my love of this music. When I was young and wild, he was too, and now I’m older and wiser, and so is he. I relate to his music as much now as ever. I’ve watched him in concert dozens of times, dating back to the late 1970s, when I was in college. I’ve seen him alone, just sitting by himself onstage with his guitar, and with his band, the Gonzo Compadres being the current incarnation, in almost every possible setting. I’ve seen Walker outdoors and indoors, in rundown clubs and upscale opera houses, at music festivals and small-town honkytonks, and from Texas to Florida to Virginia. I read his book, bought a dvd of a live performance, and bought every record, cassette, eight-track, and cd I could get my hands on. I’ve seen Jerry Jeff ornery, thoughtful, rowdy, and sentimental. For all that, I’ve only spoken to him twice, once when he autographed a copy of his Cowboy Boots and Bathing Suits cd and, in October 2004, when I intercepted him as he trudged across the street, carrying his guitar case, from the 199

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Newberry [South Carolina] Opera House to the Hampton Inn, where he was staying. He had left everything on the stage that night and looked tired. It’s the only time I ever saw him when he looked his age, which is amazing in itself, since he has apparently outlived his well-documented demons and fought them to at least a draw. I didn’t have the heart that night to ask for an interview, but I told him I was writing a book, that I’d been a fan for decades, and that I wanted to set up an interview for later that year when I’d be coming to Austin. We chatted a little, and he told me to call Susan, his wife, to set something up. Later I did talk to Susan as well as others associated with Tried & True Music, the company the Walkers own. I tried and failed to make arrangements, sent questions via e-mail for review, and got promises of cooperation that ultimately failed to materialize. The whole project was fraught with spectacular failures and unlikely successes, and it didn’t really rankle me so much that things didn’t work out. For one thing, I know Jerry Jeff Walker in the sense that I know the words to his songs, which ones he wrote and which ones he covered. There were many other people I needed to get to know, Walker’s son Django being one notable example, and the experience of writing this book was more instructive for the new over the old and familiar. I don’t know if it was Walker who said it first, but I know he was the first I heard describe the process of aging in this manner: “I used to take acid. Now I take antacid.” What a life he’s lived. This quintessential Texan grew up in Oneonta, New York, wandered the country riding his thumb, sang on the streets of Key West, New Orleans, and dozens of other places, damn near killed himself on drugs and booze, and emerged to inspire a generation of Texas musicians and others, like the great Todd Snider, who migrated there. An old album depicts Walker standing outside a honky200

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tonk on the edge of a highway, lighting a cigarette with a guitar slung around his back. As I talked with him under the streetlights of Newberry, I thought of the man in front of me and the man from the album photo. Same guy more than thirty years later. Probably what I value most about Walker is the nature of his concerts. They are unusually extemporaneous, and no set list is immune from radical departures. He sings what he wants to sing, and since his band almost always includes survivors of all those road trips, they move along without a hitch. Every time I’ve ever seen Walker, he’s neglected to sing at least one song I expected and sang one that I’d never heard him perform before. It’s not unusual to see him dredge up a tune like “Dear John Letter Lounge” that’s from an album so old that I haven’t even heard it on a turntable in a decade. In his heart, from what I can tell, he still lives the troubadour’s life. Of course, audiences always have fans who are less experienced than I. They frequently scream requests, which almost always irritates Walker, who insists on doing his own thing. The only time I ever heard him relent was one night when he stopped, glared fiercely at the heckler, and said, “All right, goddammit, I’ll do ‘Railroad Fuckin’ Lady.’” That stopped the guy in his tracks. As for me, the only thing I’ve ever screamed at the stage was, “Play what you want to play, J.J.!” The man is best left to his own devices. Out of all the entertainers in the world, across all the forty-eight years of my life, what makes Jerry Jeff Walker my favorite? I think it is simply that listening to Walker always puts me in a good mood. At a May 2003 concert at the Neighborhood Theatre in Charlotte, Walker, now in his sixties, was a bit down in the back, and he spent most of his two-and-ahalf-hour show sitting in a chair while he played his rhythm t h e o n e s that got away

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guitar and sang. Maybe that made him a bit more thoughtful than usual. Many of my friends don’t know who Jerry Jeff Walker is, and many of those who do are only vaguely aware that he wrote “Mr. Bojangles,” one of the more widely recorded songs of the past five decades. They ask me who my favorite singer is, and when I say, “Jerry Jeff Walker,” invariably they ask, “Who?” I only speak for myself; to me he is simply the best. “Mr. Bojangles,” by the way, is sometimes derided because it allegedly fosters racial stereotypes in its sympathetic portrayal of a street singer Walker encountered in a New Orleans jail many years ago. The song has nothing at all to do with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the black tap dancer who appeared in a number of movies and stage presentations. One of the less-known facts about the song, in fact, is that the character described in Walker’s song was white. Another significant bit of trivia is how the best-selling version of “Mr. Bojangles,” by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, includes a line that is rather inexplicable, cast as it is in the midst of such a straightforward song. While one of the band’s future members packed his car for a move to southern California, a college acquaintance told him he ought to check out this new song, and just before the trunk was closed, he tossed Walker’s original 45-rpm single into the pile. The record remained in the trunk for months, and when it was finally retrieved, immersed in rusty water beneath the spare tire, it was a bit the worse for wear. That’s why the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, where the words to the song say, “and he spoke right out,” sang, instead, “as the smoke ran out.” In Charlotte Walker sang “Mr. Bojangles” and many other songs, some of which he wrote and some of which he did not. He introduced many of the compositions with stories 202

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from a lifetime on the road. From Harry Stonebeck, the itinerant “artiste” who once accompanied Walker on one of his cross-country rambles, to the great rodeo cowboy Larry Mahan and other kindred spirits, Walker provided running liner notes to a concert that would have been evocative without a word being spoken. He likened his son Django to the main character in Guy Clark’s tender song “The Cape.” In fact, one of Walker’s great assets has always been his ability to select great songs of other writers and weave them into his own collection. Among the highlights of the Charlotte concert were Clark’s “LA Freeway,” Ray Wiley Hubbard’s “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mothers,” Steve Fromholz’s “Man with the Big Hat” and “Singing the Dinosaur Blues,” and Gary P. Nunn’s “London Homesick Blues,” all of which have become Walker standards. Time may have settled Jerry Jeff down, but it hasn’t broken his spirit, and even though his back sometimes troubles him, it doesn’t prevent him from rising from his chair periodically to jam with the band. The only conversation I’ve had with Steve Earle mainly concerned baseball, of all things. After a November 2003 concert at Charlotte’s Visulite, I happened to be wearing a Boston Red Sox cap when I approached Earle outside the back door. “You know I’m a Yankees fan, right?” he asked. A few weeks earlier New York had advanced to the World Series by beating Boston in the seventh game of the American League championship series. “Let me get this straight,” I replied. “Steve Earle is a fan of the team that epitomizes wretched capitalist excess?” “I know, I know,” he said. “What can I say? I’ve been pulling for the Yankees all my life.” t h e o n e s that got away

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“Well, that’s a little different,” I conceded. “If you’ve been a fan all your life, I can respect that and even admire it because that’s the way I am with the Red Sox. There are some Yankee fans, though, who pull for them because they win all the time.” During the concert Earle had made the remark that his father once predicted that the older he got, the more he would love baseball. That’s one experience the two of us have in common. I think Earle is the most talented and intriguing performer on the American stage, and I respect him as much for his guts as his talent. My admiration is only amplified by his controversial song “John Walker Blues,” about the so-called American Taliban, John Walker Lindh. First of all, it’s a great song; in it Earle delved into what might make a kid from an upper-middle-class Bay Area background wind up being a radical Muslim fundamentalist. It’s similar to the way he got inside the mind of a murderer in his song “Billy Austin.” The notion that our troops are “defending freedom” is undermined by having controversial views suppressed on the home front. Freedom is antithetical to a society in which the political views of Steve Earle—or Toby Keith, for that matter—can be shouted down. As Earle frequently says at his concerts, his definition of patriotism apparently differs from that of his detractors. “Some people say I’m paranoid,” he’d said from the stage that night. “I can’t say for sure that y’all are being watched, but I know for damn sure that I am.” Earle is often quoted for his remark that he would go to Bob Dylan’s home, stand up on his coffee table, and tell Dylan that the late Townes Van Zandt was a greater songwriter. Given the opportunity, I might make the same claim on Earle’s behalf, which, by the way, isn’t meant to be disrespectful to Dylan. 204

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Steve Earle is a difficult man to categorize, which means that he falls between the musical cracks to land in the realm of Americana. His songs run the gamut from country, bluegrass, rock, and folk to the blues. I think he’s brilliant, but what do I know? As with most everyone else I like, mainstream radio remains uninterested. Earle is passionately opposed to the death penalty, but his concert was free of the political diatribes some of the people around me expected to hear. At one point, however, late in the concert, he said: “This is what I think is really cool about my fans. I know that a lot of you don’t agree with me, but I think you do believe that there ought to be a dialogue.” When I was eleven or twelve years old, my father took me to Columbia, South Carolina, to see the “Johnny Cash Show, the touring troupe that included Cash and the Tennessee Three, the Carter Family, Carl Perkins, the Statler Brothers, and Tommy Cash, the singer’s brother. It means a lot to me that I saw Cash in his performing prime (it was probably a bit past his songwriting prime), along about the time of the recorded prison concerts at Folsom Prison and San Quentin. I’ve seen Earle perhaps a half-dozen times over the years, but for the first time, as he stood on the stage in Charlotte, he reminded me of the Johnny Cash of my youth—not in sound, not in musical style, but in attitude. He had that lean, hungry, and energized look of Cash way back when. I told him this after the concert, and Earle said he had been out of the country when Cash died but that he was looking forward to the tribute concert, then just a few days away, in Nashville at Ryman Auditorium. What country music has lost is its populist streak. All the songs on mainstream radio now seem to echo the same tedious themes. No one takes any chances. Patriotism becomes big in the music when it becomes big in the country, and, of t h e o n e s that got away

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course, it just so happens that patriotic songs tend to be a reliable way to make money. I’m not saying that all of this music isn’t heartfelt; I’m just saying that the timing is awfully convenient. Yet no one sings about the day-to-day problems of average people. Johnny Cash sang about the life he lived, which was full of highs and lows, triumph and heartbreak. So did Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, the Louvin Brothers, the Carter Family, and dozens of others. Now the singers are cowboys because they happen to wear the boots and hats. I listen to the old concert albums from Folsom and San Quentin. Can you imagine Garth Brooks playing to an audience of convicts? Can you imagine him sympathizing with their plight? I’m disturbed about the direction of the country right now, mainly because all the creative decisions seem to be made by people who only have business in mind. It’s all so calculated, and that’s true, it seems to me, of just about everything. I can see a common thread that runs through everything that affects my life, from newspapers to sports to entertainment to politics to simple day-to-day events. I think it’s a vicious cycle. I think the Founding Fathers would be appalled. I don’t agree with everything Steve Earle has to say either, but I’m getting tired of the notion that he doesn’t have the right to say it. I’m getting tired of the notion that some important people don’t believe a controversial film account of Ronald Reagan’s presidency is fit for public view. I’m getting tired of people who speak into a microphone on talk radio and tv stations across the country, many of them owned by a few huge conglomerates, and refer to “the media” as if they were not a part of it. 206

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It seems to me that’s what the knob on the radio or television set—ok, the remote control—is there for. This isn’t about ideology. This is about freedom. “Reckless Kelly” was Ned Kelly, the ill-fated Australian bandit whom Mick Jagger once played in a mostly forgettable movie. Reckless Kelly is also the name of an Austin, Texas, band, although the Rolling Stones’s Jagger really had nothing to do with it. “We heard the name in school,” recalls Cody Braun. “Willy [my brother and band mate] thought of it one day. We had a gig coming up that weekend, and we needed a name for the band. We found out more about [the bandit] later.” School was in Bend, Oregon, the band’s home before moving to Austin and its vibrant musical scene about a decade ago. “I guess we’ve played with every band in town,” says Cody Braun. “It’s great to be able to play with them as friends and people. There’s so much music in Austin that has influenced and inspired us.” I’m particularly fond of the cd Under the Table and above the Sun. With bows to Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly, Reckless Kelly mines the fields of elusive love and unreachable beauty. “Everybody” strolls down the same street Orbison walked in “Pretty Woman.” A lost love is so haunting that it intrudes upon every memory, every scene, every casual encounter. A newer album has been released since these words were written, 2005’s Wicked Twisted Road. It’s splendid too. Willy Braun’s voice evokes the splendid style of Buddy Miller. Says Cody, who plays the fiddle and sings harmony: “We’ve been listening to [Miller] for the last three or four years. We even talked to him about producing a record. Our t h e o n e s that got away

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schedules haven’t worked out yet, but he’s somebody we’d like to work with. “It’s so hard to write songs these days with any new sort of substance. There are so many love songs out there. It’s difficult to write a love song. Willy [who either wrote or cowrote all twelve songs on the aforementioned cd] does a good job. I guess it’s not just a matter anymore of just flat out saying stuff. You have to think about it.” Of his own craft Cody adds: “I guess [playing the fiddle] hasn’t really changed much over the years. There are lots of different styles, but I think I’ve really stuck to the roots with my playing. I try to take the traditional stuff, the old-time styles, and throw it in there where I can. It’s nice, in our music, to throw that country stuff in there.” “That country stuff” is etched in the band’s background. Cody plays the fiddle, he says, because he got one for Christmas at age seven. Willy got the guitar, and the rest is history. Their father, a musician, enlisted the boys in the family band. They were playing “western music and honky-tonk stuff” from the time they were kids. What they’re playing now, though, has the edge of revolution in it. They’re moving the music not away from its roots but sort of parallel to them. It’s a sharpened edge on an old blade. Never was a man so talented and yet, at the same time, so humble. The great Billy Joe Shaver is now well into his sixties. One of his recent albums, Freedom’s Child, is so soulful, so moving, and so personal that, of course, it has no chance at all of being played on mainstream country radio. Plainly, Shaver is too hot for country radio to handle, and what a shame that is because he speaks with the raw human emotion that used to define the genre. That Shaver is 208

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a throwback to Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, the Allman Brothers, and even Elvis is underscored by the fact that each one of them recorded his songs at one time or another. Now, however, Shaver is mostly alone. In recent years he lost his mother and wife to cancer and his son Eddy, a guitarist of world-class skill, to a drug overdose. That Shaver has figured out a way to come to grips with so much tragedy comes across in the simple tranquility of some of his recent songs. A Shaver concert is characterized by variety. At regular intervals he allows his band to drift into the background as he sings either a quavering a cappella or accompanies himself only with his downsized acoustic guitar. That voice! Gruff, timeworn, and unapologetically twangy, it, like everything else about him, is too good for radio. Radio can’t understand him. Radio doesn’t get it. Here is a man whose religious convictions have been tempered by stern tests of enduring tragedy and the consequences of his own temptations and failings. One gets the impression that the battle between good and evil that lurks within every man has etched and shaped the very character of Shaver, yet with age he has found a certain fleeting serenity, the kind that envelops opposing armies as they wearily observe a lull between skirmishes. Some songwriters imagine. Shaver reflects on what life has taught him. His songs are about the lessons of life, some learned and some regretfully ignored. It’s not unusual in concerts to see Shaver perform one set composed mainly of songs from recent albums and another dominated by old standards. He wrote almost all the songs on Jennings’s finest album, Honky Tonk Heroes (1973). The title track is about the dive Shaver’s grandmother ran in Waco, Texas. Freedom’s Child includes a song dedicated to the late Johnny Cash, “That’s Why the Man in Black Sings the Blues.” t h e o n e s that got away

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Partway through a Charlotte concert several years ago, soon after the release of Freedom’s Child, when Shaver sang “Tramp on Your Street,” an obviously autobiographical tune, the audience spontaneously rose to give him a standing ovation. Shaver said such a thing had never happened to him before. He descended to his knees several times to acknowledge the simple adulation. Once he sang a song with one knee on the ground and the other supporting the little guitar. Like many of Shaver’s songs, “Wild Cow Gravy” mixes humor with wisdom as he ponders just how he managed to live so long through “all the reckless ramblin’ and the crazy stuff I’ve done.” In my regular job I travel around the country writing about automobile racing. My general unsettledness from living many days and nights on the road probably has a great deal to do with the somewhat random nature of this book. I’ve tried to include the singers and songwriters whom I consider true to the roots, but I’ve had to settle, in too many instances, for the interviews I could arrange and the concerts I could see. It’s surely not wise to cite all the artists I wish I could have interviewed—undoubtedly, I’ll manage to leave important figures out—but here goes anyway. I wish I’d had the chance to profile men like Kinky Friedman, John Prine, Guy Clark, Todd Snider, Rodney Crowell, Ian Tyson, and Ray Benson. I saw Benson perform with his band, Asleep at the Wheel, at Austin’s Broken Spoke, but there wasn’t time for an interview. It’s tricky to talk to performers before or after their shows. They’re concentrating on the upcoming show beforehand and exhausted and itching to get the bus—or van or motor home—on the road afterward. My deepest regret is the absence of female subjects upon these pages. I tried very hard to interview Kimmie Rhodes, 210

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the exceptional Austin vocalist. It was a distinct pleasure to see Lucinda Williams in concert a few years ago in Los Angeles, and I admire her work like I admire Steve Earle’s. Robbie Fulks wrote an essay devoted to Williams that is probably more eloquent than anything I could muster. Iris DeMent has a voice even more plaintive, if that’s possible, than Williams, and no one stirs my soul like Kelly Willis. Among others I wish I could’ve interviewed are Caitlin Cary, Tift Merritt, Allison Moorer, Cheryl Wheeler, Alison Krauss, and Shelby Lynne. It occurs to me that perhaps a sequel, composed entirely of woman singers, is in order.

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