True to the Roots (20 page)

All of these people are playing what seem like songs they wrote. I've written a couple of songs but have nowhere near the confidence to toss them out in this crowd. Dale Earnhardt, whom I used to write about when he was alive, never intimidated me the way these folks do.

There's an opening. One bearded, hat-wearing, cigarette-smoking picker has finished his tune, and another is engaged in a seemingly endless period of guitar tuning.

Another gulp. Another sigh. I begin strumming a G chord and launch into the old Faron Young hit "Wine Me Up." The others are too polite to poke fun at me, and the people there to watch don't know enough to realize how bad I am. I'm nervous, and I screw up several times. I'm playing too fast, which is a common weakness of mine. It's a good, colorful, familiar song, and, as usual, my singing is enough to cover up, at least somewhat, the weakness of my playing. I get a round of applause, which loosens me up.

I think I'll have a beer.

In time I start to fit in. Everyone seems dutifully impressed to find I'm from South Carolina, so, of course, that conversation leads to what winds up being a big mistake. I allow as how I'm here because I'm writing a book. All save one seem dutifully unimpressed by this fact.

He wears a bandanna around his head, and I'm just guessing he's about my age. I ought to be forewarned that, among its many virtues, Texas has more than its fair share of bullshitters. That's why I never should have mentioned one word about writing a book.

The fellow begins by telling me who I should and shouldn't write about. Most everyone I've talked to seems unfit for his tastes, and he makes suggestions of people of whom either I've never heard or don't want to portray. He's got a raised eyebrow or a disparaging aside for most everyone with the exception of himself. After a while he humbly describes how he made millions during the Internet boom, knew precisely when to get out, and was able to retire at age forty. Since retiring to the lap of luxury and quaint Sunday afternoons in Luckenbach, he's managed to write fifteen chart records, all under what he calls "his songwriter name," which he doesn't volunteer. Then, when I make another mistake and tell him my regular job is writing about NASCAR, he tells me the stock-car racing scene would make a fine setting for a mystery novel and, oh, by the way, he's written dozens of them, all of which have been wildly successful.

I think to myself either he's a bullshitter or James Bond, and, as James McMurtry later points out, if he were James Bond, he probably wouldn't tell me all about himself. I also ponder the irony of the situation as I nod and try to keep a straight face. Does he want me to write about him? He doesn't tell me his name, and I'm determined, having been twice stung, not to solicit it. Of course, I'm also thinking to myself that I
am
going to write about him. A fellow can't let pass red flags like this. One must make the best of whatever one happens across, and the up side to wretched experience is the opportunity to write about it.

It doesn't put a permanent damper on the day, though. Eventually, Double-oh-seven wanders, with most of the other musicians, inside, leaving me with a biker-picker and his perfect match of an eccentric girlfriend. The light is fading, and the wind is starting to howl. That leaves me and the biker with an audience of stragglers outside. The competition has moved on to a better venue. Now I'm just playing for fun, belting out every song I know: "Wabash Cannonball," "Lost Highway," "Is Anybody Goin' to San Antone." I'm in heaven, and now I don't even care whether there's anyone listening or not. I might as well be in a motel room or the living room of my house.

It's better, though, because I'm in Luckenbach, where "everybody's somebody."

Demented Genius

Lake Villa, Illinois I January 2005

When I drive up to Robbie Fulks's home, carefully following his directions, I don't know what to expect. I've never seen Fulks in concert, but others have described him as crazy, and these are people who describe themselves as fans.

The scene in Lake Villa, Illinois—up near the Wisconsin border north of Chicago—is anything but crazy. There's close to a foot of snow on the ground, and the wind is howling, but Fulks lives in a subdivision where the local high school football coach might reside. There's a white van out front, which is the only thing that gives him away as a struggling musician. If it had been the football coach, it would've been a minivan, not a conversion van. My travels related to this project have led me to a lot of houses with Ford Econolines and Chevy Expresses. They're handy for hauling equipment to gigs.

Why have I taken the rather extreme measure of going all the way to northern Illinois in the dead of winter to interview a singer-songwriter I've never even seen before?

Several years ago I read an article about a Fulks appearance on the Grand Ole Opry. As I recall, the article was in the US Airways in-flight magazine. I was intrigued by it, but my interest lay dormant until I stumbled upon a Fulks CD,
Country Love Songs
, in a Nashville store in the spring of 2004. When I got home, I removed the CD from its case and placed it in a wallet to take on the road. There it sat for months, probably because it had no identifying information, only a cartoon figure of a man wearing a hat and holding an axe, with a circular assortment of various cuts of meat. I'd stop at a stoplight somewhere, ponder what I was going to listen to next, and choose a CD that had some identification on it. I forgot about Robbie Fulks for several months until, at some point, I finally plucked it from the CD wallet and inserted it into my car stereo.

I loved it right away. It became a favorite. Unfortunately, it took me quite a while to figure out who the musician was. I batted it around in my brain until finally, on about the third listen, I remembered buying the CD in Nashville. My innate absentmindedness is hard to overstate. Another CD I had bought in Nashville, by Bobby Bare Jr., sat unopened in my house until early 2005. Guess what? I loved it too.

Country Love Songs
led me to buy another Fulks album,
The Very Best of Robbie Fulks
, shortly thereafter. Surprisingly enough,
The Very Best
isn't a greatest hits album, although it is composed of quality stuff that isn't on any of Fulks's other albums.

What I found in Fulks was a phenomenon who reminds me of another. He is the only artist I've encountered who reminds me of the late Roger Miller. Miller was shortchanged by those who listened to his songs and only heard the garish comedy. Many people never recognized that the clown was weeping softly while he delivered the gags. Miller's best songs were awash in irony.

That's the kind of sense of humor Robbie Fulks has. In the mid-1960s it was possible, apparently, for a man to be so "out there," so wickedly irreverent, that it became a gimmick that could propel him to stardom. It was the same era that produced Loretta Lynn and the outrageous honesty that allowed her to sing so bluntly about a wayward husband and threaten, in song, to kick the asses of the floozies who tempted him.

Indulge me for a moment here. When I was a small boy, my father would occasionally take me with him to a beer joint out in the country, miles farther from town than our South Carolina farm. There he would drink Falstaff beer while furnishing me with a Dr. Pepper full of salted peanuts. It's where he taught me to shoot pool, but the most vivid memory is of the old Loretta Lynn songs that seemed to be forever roaring out of the jukebox—"Your Squaw Is on the Warpath Tonight," "You Ain't Woman Enough to Take My Man," "Fist City." My eyes must have grown as big as saucers. I was shocked. I was amazed. I remember thinking what manner of woman would sing such things, but she was so honest, and her work was such a contrast to all the wholesome sitcoms I was being exposed to on network TV. The only other time in my boyhood I remember being so shocked was when a band of gorillas cut loose the G-string from Charlton Heston, and there on the silver screen at the Broadway Theatre I briefly witnessed Moses's bare ass. That was in
Planet of the Apes
.

Miller used humor to get the same points across, but he was so far beyond the staid country humor of the era—Minnie Pearl, Archie Campbell, and others who undoubtedly inspired
Hee Haw
—that he was hip. Country performers had a lot of great virtues in those days, but very few of them were hip.

Fulks takes irreverence beyond even Miller's bounds. His song about the death of a Marilyn Monroe-like movie star is called "She Took a Lot of Pills (and Died)." His ode to an unsuccessful stint as one of Nashville's factory songwriters is "Fuck This Town."

Not surprisingly, Fulks, sitting at his kitchen table in idealized suburbia, tells me he is quite the admirer of Roger

Miller.

"Roger had that talent, but he was also kind of a demented genius who knew exactly what he wanted to do once he got that shot at the big time," he says. "He worked it so brilliantly. I just think he's the most multifaceted and satisfying country musician since Hank Williams, and maybe even including Hank Williams."

Far too many modern fans equate Miller's work only with humor. On the other hand, my favorite song of his is "Invitation to the Blues," which carries a tone of droll sorrow. There are other Miller songs, though, that will break your heart: "One Dyin' and a Buryin'" and "Husbands and Wives" come to mind immediately. Fulks, too, has that subtle touch of melancholy. "Tears Only Run One Way" is a song Miller would have appreciated.

Fulks is one of the few modern country songwriters whose knowledge of the music's past is comprehensive. One of his albums,
Thirteen Hillbilly Giants
, is made up of carefully selected, somewhat obscure songs written by, well, hillbilly giants like Jean Shepard, Bill Anderson, Wynn Stewart, Bill Carlisle, and others. A notable recent work is his production of a tribute to the late Johnny Paycheck,
Touch My Heart
.

This guy, chewed up and spat out by Nashville, is as true to the roots of this music as anyone.

"It's amazing, yeah, just to walk into Tootsie's or any of the other places on that strip [Nashville's lower Broadway]. Any day of the week you can see stuff that anywhere else in the country this would be the best band in town that everybody's talking about, but in Nashville it's on a Tuesday night and they're just scraping by on tips and working four-hour sets," Fulks says. "It's an amazing town for musical talent. To me it's continually frustrating that the Nashville aesthetic, in terms of major-label music, is just so mall oriented, whatever that is. It's just so suburban mood music-oriented. There's just this one little strip. All that music just gets boiled down to this one little, narrow distillate that is so unnourishing.

"It's just gotten to be such a big business, since Garth [Brooks], especially. That's great for people who are living down there and making tons of money. I certainly have a lot of friends who are down there and making a great living. There are a lot of old people who remember when a hit record was ten thousand copies and how bad the salad days really were, even though they seem glorious now in retrospect. The down side of the big business is when you have a huge event, like Garth, the whole industry orients itself to the idea of ten and twelve million sales being the bar that everyone has to reach. All of a sudden selling four million records, or a million, isn't considered successful anymore. Everything has been reoriented to this new model where ten million is the thing to aspire to now. The two effects of that are that it mitigates against any form of risk taking, musical or otherwise, and now everything sounds like Garth Brooks imitation music for the five-year cycle, or however long it perpetuates itself."

Of Brooks himself Fulks says: "He's got a great producer. He's got a lot of vocal talent, but a hundred other people have that too. His ego is what got him there. I'm sure a lot of people were waiting for him to trip up for a lot of years, and [with the singer's rock alter ego, Chris Gaines, which proved a commercial disaster] he finally did."

The great paradox of Fulks's music is that it actually seems to appeal to an audience that isn't nearly as attuned to country music's history as its author.

"I play for urban audiences that might know more about the new Wire record than the newest Alan Jackson record," he says. "The lesson I take from my own experience and how I got into it, and from looking at other people and how they got into it, [is that] you can't describe any window into music as illegitimate. There are just so many ways to get to the real thing, and a lot of bands that I don't see the point of, or who I don't see any musical merit in, are pathways for other people to get to Hank Williams or the same destination. The point is that you develop the perspective to say this band is a pathway band, a treasure map kind of singer, who isn't the real deal. This is the real deal, right here, and that's how I got here. There were a lot of bands in the eighties, when I was forming my musical tastes, and there was a band, Dave Alvin and the Blasters, that sort of provided that pathway to me.

"If you'd pay attention to the wellsprings of their music, they would lead you to the real thing, and I don't think it's a slam on Dave or that group to say that it was a beautiful group, but it was also a pathway group. You could go from there to [blues legends] Big Joe Turner or Robert Johnson or whoever it was. That was the thing."

The whole interview begs the question: Why is this guy in the Chicago area? Is there some burgeoning underground current of traditional country music simmering in the Windy City? As it turns out, no. It was fate, the kind that country used to catalog, that brought Fulks to the area.