True to the Roots (2 page)

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 passe? 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
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 twostep. 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 fresh faced 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; perhaps 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 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 soldout, 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 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.

"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 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 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.