True to the Roots

by Monte Dutton

  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 cul-de-sac to ditch the tie and don the boots. But the spirit still 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 honkytonk 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."

  A Man of the People

  Gruene, Texas I 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 inlaws, 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.

  "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 mailorder 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."

  "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 few beers in him. But any intimidating aspect of his persona is more than offset by his irreverent good humor.

  Yet the selfproclaimed "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 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 n
ot, 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.

  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.

  "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 twenty-five 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.

  Who Are "Those Guys"?

  St. Augustine, Florida I 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 mixup, 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 never 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 crowdpleasing 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 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 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."