by Monte Dutton
"I think it would be cool if more people selected music for 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 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.
The Novelist Begat the Songwriter
Austin, Texas I 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.
"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.
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 along the r
oad 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 fourteen-year-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.
"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 system 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."
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 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."
Two-Night Stand
Charlotte, North Carolina I 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, coffeeh
ouses, 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 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.