Mavericks of Sound

by Ensminger, David

  What ever triggered the thought that you could meld the New York Dolls and the Ramones to Dylan and Williams?

  I think that if I could take any credit for anything in the music business, I can take credit for the fact that I had that unique and original idea, although now it doesn’t seem that original. There are a thousand bands doing that kind of thing. But boy, I tell you, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were maybe two or three [laughs]. I was one of them who had the idea to take roots music and kick the hell out of it. That’s why I came to Nashville, to do just that.

  That’s real insurgent country.

  I had that in my head when I moved to town, and while there I ran into Warren (guitarist) and Jeff (bassist), and whoa boy, I got more than I ever bargained for [laughs]!

  There were alcohol and drugs, and other dangers, but could you have those great albums like Lost and Found without that side?

  No, I don’t think so. When the band cleaned up, it was just as good, and in some ways it was better. I’m certain that if the band had their heads on straight we would have gotten bigger, and not necessarily done better music, ’cause it’s hard to argue with Fervor and Lost and Found, but we could have done better overall.

  Why were you initially opposed to a reunion back in the early 1990s, especially after a broken marriage and less-than-sterling solo record?

  It was kind of a trip down memory lane, and I had a lot of bad memories [laughs]. That lane, at that point, was polluted with a lot of bad memories. I didn’t feel like it was something I wanted to do. And obviously, I’m glad I changed my mind.

  Like Todd Snider and Billy Joe Shaver, there’s a lot of outspoken faith in God in your recent music. Do you think it rubs off on people, or do people listen in spite of it?

  I think it depends on how you present it. I’m real careful about that, because I grew up and came of age in the height of the “born again” movement, which is what they called it in those days. That stuff really turned me off when people were so pushy about the whole thing. I really try not to be pushy about it. What I believe is what I believe, and I sing about it. Folks get whatever they want out of it. It’s cool with me.

  If Hank Williams were alive today, would he make a Jason and the Scorchers record or a Jason Ringenberg record?

  I think that at times, if he came back today, it would be a Scorchers record, if he were in this world today. I’m able to do this record because I have done the other stuff before. If I came out right now with this record without the Scorchers’ stuff, I don’t think it would get nearly the attention it has. It’s juxtaposed against the wild Scorchers’ heritage.

  Like Springsteen said regarding the Tom Joad album, he couldn’t have made that record without making everything before it because he would not have had an audience for that acoustic record.

  I agree with him completely. It would be so hard to get people interested in something like this. There have been a few people who’ve made this kind of music and gotten it off the ground, but for the most part, it’s really difficult to sell this kind of music.

  Is the tune “Last of the Neon Cowboys” about a certain fondness you have of old Nashville singers like Ray Brand even though they weren’t probably supporting the Scorchers?

  No. What I was going for on that song was a very specific kind of country singer, real people. There are four or five of them that make up the composite character in that song. They were guys down in the Lower Broadway section of Nashville, which is now a big money place with NASCAR and Planet Hollywood and places like that, but twenty years ago it was full of seedy, rundown honky-tonk places that had been there since the 1940s. All these ancient old bars had all these ancient singers that had sung there every night for thirty years: “Curly” Putnam, Ray Brand, guys like that who I don’t even know if they are alive anymore.

  They would just sing these songs, maybe there was a single record out twenty years before, and they had these ancient guitars with their names engraved in the neck from some little record deal years before, hair greased back, long sideburns. They made a hell of an impression on a kid from Illinois coming to Nashville and seeing that, and I was seeing it all alone because there was nobody paying any attention. They played for tips to six or seven people. They weren’t tourists either. They were down on their luck. Then there were a few kids like me. It was quite inspirational to see those guys sing their lights out and giving their best.

  Was it a victory for you when the Scorchers, Nashville’s biggest rebels, were the first modern rock act signed from the city?

  Absolutely, there was no question at the time that it was a radical thing to be happening in Nashville, a rock ’n’ roll band breaking out of there. Nashville was such a little provincial town in those days, a cowtown that happened to have the music business. Country music was all Nashville had at the time. It wasn’t like it is now. We didn’t come through any of the channels that were set up here. We just made our own channels, we made our own records and put them out ourselves, and heck we had a review in Rolling Stone before we even had a record contract. It was pretty exciting times. Everybody in Nashville knew about the band and was talking about it. Either they loved it or didn’t like it, got it or didn’t get it, but everybody was interested in it.

  Was playing “White Lies” on the Conan O’Brien show the band’s swan song?

  It was the high point of that period of the band, there’s no question about it. The period of the live record, and Jeff left the band in 1996, so when we put the band back together, that song was the high point of what that band was.

  “Addie Rose” is a very tender, personal song for your daughter. Did you ever hesitate about putting it on the new record?

  I think that if I was a bigger artist, I might not have done it. I would start worrying about weirdos and creeps and stuff, but Addie is now like famous in her own way. She’s just that kind of girl. She makes a strong impression no matter what, and having a song out there about her makes her even more so. It’s really a lot of fun hearing her sing it, like she goes to shows. She doesn’t sing it on stage but sings it around the house with me. When I’m in my sixties, and she’s in her twenties, I’m sure she’ll play that for her friends and they’ll say, wow, what a cool thing.

  Are you content knowing that there are some disadvantages to small record companies, like the record may not get everywhere?

  It’s funny in the music business. You think those big things really help, but most of the time they really don’t. The only time the real big company with money can help an artist like myself is when everybody is 200 percent behind you, because otherwise it works against you. It’s harder to make the bigness work for you. I don’t think that putting it out myself on my own label has hurt me much. I still have people hired to work it, and they do a pretty good job.

  How did George Bradfute (former Webb Wilder player) and Fats Kaplin come to play on your record?

  The whole thing was pretty organic. I didn’t think in the spring of 1999 that “I am going to make a folk record.” I just started moving in that direction and having fun writing songs for the heck of writing. Some of those songs were just gifts, like “Addie Rose” was for my daughter, while “A Pocketful of Soul” was a birthday gift for my wife. When I started thinking that maybe I have a record here and maybe some people should hear the songs, then I started thinking “Who?” George is a real underground character. He’s a talented, musical genius that can play anything. I’ve known him for years and enjoy the way he plays and him as a person and the way he lives and the way he records.

  Bric-a-brac everywhere?

  But it’s not a planned thing, like “I’m going to make this cool place.” It’s just him, like, “Excuse me, I have to move this 1935 Martin so you can sit on the couch.”

  Twenty years after going to Nashville, are you still the oddball kid in the family?

  They are still very supportive of it, but they have been through it as well as I have because as a parent, and you don’
t realize this as a kid, but your dreams are their dreams too. As a parent, when your child wants something, you want them to have that. And they really wanted me to be a success in the music business after I committed to do it, and they really got into it. They were a huge help all those years, very supportive. The flip side of the coin is they felt all the disappointments as keenly as I did. They felt the triumphs as big, and the valleys as bitterly, as I did. So, now they are happy that I’m making music because they know how happy it makes me.

  Robert Earl Keen: This Ain’t No Picnic

  Originally published in Left of the Dial. Introduction culled from a text originally commissioned by Keen’s record label as a publicity bio by me.

  Delving into Texas songwriters and trying to put a new spin on such ingrained lore in a few soon-to-be-crumpled pages is like trying to tell the gist of the Old Testament while munching on popcorn and fingering the remote control. You are bound to miss some crucial folks, and Robert Earl Keen might find himself beneath the radar, despite nine seminal Americana albums and tens of thousands of fans flocking to his shows with the fervor of Deadheads. Fact: music moguls’ zealous fetish for newcomers far outweighs their commitment to honest, close-to-the-ground talent. That’s why both Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash recorded for indie labels during the past ten years, and Keen himself has surfed between labels despite numerous TV appearances (Conan O’Brien, Today Show), magazine articles (Playboy, Men’s Journal), and constantly having his songs covered by the likes of the Dixie Chicks and Shawn Colvin.

  Keen will forever be known as the guy who can cover the likes of Dave Alvin, Peter Case, Townes Van Zandt, and Johnny Cash, evoke the world of tough immigrant workers and dead politicians, and simultaneously appeal to baseball-cap-wearing college kids without losing his own poetic magnetism or sense of self. While others drift quickly toward anonymity, flash-in-the-pan cut-out bins at the local Kmart, or hopelessly make banal copycat Keen songs and try to serve them up as fresh pie, Keen delivers literate, rich worlds by letting go of squabbles and egos and embodying an earthy resilience that is more and more uncommon in the dot-com millennium. There are no hillbilly hoedowns, white trash mockery, or ad-lib mock blues on his record, but instead what Keen does best: lyrical and cinematic wordplay, raved-up rocking, and masterly country thumbing that makes the road feel like a bit of black tar heaven. Or as Keen offhandedly ruminates on one track, “The truth is all I’m looking for.” Undoubtedly, he has found part of it.

  Texas Music once said that you were the “Hillbilly Shakespeare” of the next century.

  That’s a nice compliment but . . . Shakespeare was a genius.

  But the hillbilly angle seems maybe a bit demeaning?

  Selling it short? Singular dimensional. Yeah, I’m not a hillbilly. That just sounded good to the writer as far as I am concerned. I am by no way the genius that Shakespeare was, and then I am not a noble savage. I’m educated. I try to use some of the stuff, or reinterpret things that I have read in my life and think and try to put them in a song. It is a very multifaceted process. It in no way compares to gigging a frog.

  Do you think you have more in common with your favorite writers like Larry Brown (who wrote the big article on you for No Depression) than with, say, Buck Owens and Dolly Parton?

  I can’t write those kinds of songs.

  But do you even tell those stories?

  Do I tell the Larry Brown–type stories? Yeah, I think I do. I like as much as you can cram into four minutes of a song. I like a lot of characterization. I really love characters. You can get the right word to it or the right spin, you can color that character, it can be very dark and shining. . . . The whole thing about characterization is really interesting to me, and that does not relate in any way to how much you tap your foot or remember a chorus.

  Jack Kerouac said you should only stop writing in order to see the picture better.

  You mean typing all those sheets of paper together?

  Do you overflow with the stories?

  I think that’s different. That’s writing prose, and I am writing songs, which is closer to poetry.

  Are you writing every day, spilling over with it?

  No, no. It’s like an attic for me and it stays dormant and dusty for a long time, then I go up and visit it every once in a while and I open up all these trunks and turn on all these toys and look at all this stuff and start thinking about them and then something happens. When I am strumming my guitar, this melody, it connects with this old wooden Indian doll that I picked up in the attic in my brain and I think, okay, this has a groove, or work with this image and you start riffing on this image, and when I do that. . . . Well, because I am not as extemporaneous as some people are, I get this outline in my brain and then I start nit-picking how it would fit better, how it would be cleaner, how it would sing better with the melody. Would it improve the song if it were more melodic or would it be better if it were more rhythm-driven?

  Do you feel that your characters reappear in the songs in different names or personas?

  That’s a great question. I do tend to, and I’ve said this before, I tend to focus on down-and-out type characters.

  Somebody called them a rogue’s gallery.

  Rogue, yeah. But I don’t think it’s the same character. I think I am looking for somebody different. The only thing I can connect to that is I noticed that in some movies, some writers and movie people really write the same plot over and over, and they just stick in a different character but it’s the same plot. And it really works, and you don’t think, ah, they just ripped off their own idea. Actually, it puts a whole different spin on it. It’s a little different and it works. I have a hard time doing that because I feel that I. . . . Well, I really try to change them up to some degree, although I do constantly focus on the down-and-out characters because they are more interesting.

  But not as surreal as Gravitational Forces?

  Well, yeah, there are a couple of them. They’re not exactly spoken word. They’re not exactly just a song either. It’s just kind of fun with lyrics, and you know the thing I’ve done since we started this process is like, if we get to a point anywhere in this process where it is not fun, we’re going to quit for the day. We’ve been having fun, because that’s what . . . well, I felt like all the records I really liked, the ones I can look back on and say, yeah, that was really fun, I had a great time doing that.

  Would you say that as much great art comes from fun as it does from duress?

  Yes, I think that can be true. Yeah, as much as duress, sure. You don’t have to be the brilliant, alienated artist with Phil Spector putting a gun to his head. I think so, and I think that some of the really good songs and music that work for a long time doesn’t come from a catastrophic experience. I think it comes from that “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” attitude as well. John Prine once said you can put anything into a song as long as you keep the attitude. You would know this, being a writer. You just feel what’s honest within your own character and when it comes to a point where it just sounds like bullshit, you just go, I can’t do that, that’s not me. That might be somebody else, but it’s not me. The attitude is pretty easy to keep as far as I am concerned [laughs].

  So, even if you visit different styles, say a ballad, and then a honky-tonkish song, or yee-haw fun song, all of it has that Keen attitude to it?

  Well, I definitely feel like I put my. . . . Well, when I write a song, I really try to steer clear of, like, any other song that I can think of. There are bits and pieces of every form of music in what we do, and like Fred Eaglesmith always says, we all borrow from each other, and that’s true too. As far as writing the songs, I just try to make something, make it some way unique. And the unique part is the thing I would say, as opposed to just somebody saying let’s just write a song for whatever artist, but let’s not throw anything in there that would scare anybody away. Scaring somebody away is not a problem; someone hearing a song and going sure, that’s fine, that’s a problem for me.

&nb
sp; You fear mediocrity?

  Sure. That’s what I do as a writer. I am not a great singer, I’m not a great musician, but I do feel that I have a true talent as a writer. I just didn’t stumble into it; it’s just there with me, so I try to make it as interesting as possible, and the filter that I go through is my own filter, so I make sure to stick with my choice of words and also make sure that it doesn’t sound like somebody else.

  Prine also said, “Always sing other people’s stuff, otherwise you end up getting really selfish. You get stuck in your own world and your perspective is all crooked.”

  I didn’t make this up. I didn’t make songwriting up. I didn’t make singing, playing the guitar, performing up. To me, it was always first. I learned songs and I played songs, and I started writing songs. So, I think that is part of growing as a writer, musician, and performer, always trying to learn other people’s songs. In fact, I try to remind myself every year you need to learn, even if you are not thinking about it. If you are not just falling into learning a song because you like it, you need to go out and find songs that you like, and then learn them. My friend Fred Cohen, who has written songs in Nashville for years, says there’s no output if there’s no input. I think Fred has written a bunch of songs for John Prine.