True to the Roots

by Monte Dutton

  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 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.

  "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.

  "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.

  One-Chord Song

  Dallas, Texas I 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 Still-water, 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 Mc-Clure, 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."

  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 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 adver-rising time." "They've got this little fo
rmula 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, 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 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.

  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 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 Mc-Clure 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.

  The Soul of Marty Robbins

  Nashville, Tennessee I 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 honky-tonk 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 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 Sao 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 Bra-zilbilly. 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.