True to the Roots (22 page)

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 road 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."