True to the Roots (11 page)

"It was a terrible gig," says Besley. "They had a dj, terrible crowd. We get the crowd up and dancing, and the dj comes up and says: 'ok, I got it. I'll take over now.' Big military community. That was pretty awful."

Now it's a general discussion of the nightmarish experiences that invariably tumble unannounced into the career path of a regional band.

"Last time we were in Atlanta—" Kulwicki offers, the memory eliciting a groan in Besley.

"The first time there we knew the manager," recalls Besley. "He was buying us shots, and every time we'd play 'Tequila,' he'd buy the whole house a round. We ate one meal a day and just drank what we wanted. We stayed at a friend's house, so we didn't require a room. The next time we asked for a room, so they got us a room. We came and ate our meals, drank our asses off, just like we did before, and at the end of the night a waitress comes up and says, 'I've got your tab.' I said, 'No, we don't have a tab. Give that to someone else.' And then the owner came the next day, we had dinner, he bought us a round of shots, and said, 'I gotta take off,' and left. Second night, waitress comes up again. We've got to load our stuff, and they've got a big old guy, Jay, and he's sitting at the desk. I ask him, 'How much we talking about here?' because, man, we're just wanting to get out of there now. He says, 'A thousand or so.' I say, 'Wait a minute. We got a tab.' He says, 'Yeah, but things changed since the last time you were here.' I say, 'call the owner.' He says the [allowable] tab was $350. We'd gone up there cheap, anyway. I say, 'Why don't we not pay it?' and I'm thinking this could be bad. It was a biker bar. 'Let Harry know. We'll work it out the next time we come up there.' He finally let us go. That was pretty, uh, testy, though."

"We went up to play a friend's wedding," says Kulwicki.

"Oh, God," says Besley, laughing.

"Savannah. They take you to all the great places. Take you down to River Street. He [the friend] says go out and bring me all your receipts. We'll go out and take care of it. I'll never do that again. That was a $525 night. Dinner for all of us. Next night Danny and all of them [the wedding party] went out and spent another $400. Then we never heard from them.

"He [the friend] started whittling it down," notes Kulwicki. "He still owes us money, though."

"But normally," says Besley, "we're pretty lucky."

"After those two weekends," says Kulwicki, "we had friends coming up and giving us contracts they'd drawn up for us. 'Here. What do you think of this?' And we're, like, great, if you can get somebody to sign it."

"From now on, friend or no friend, it's a deposit," concludes Besley. "Just like this [upcoming] Virginia gig. 'ok, we're going to need a deposit.' By the way, Danny, we did get that. We got the deposit check. He's supposed to be giving us $150 toward expenses. That's supposed to be coming in another week. And we got rooms. Up near the Potomac before you get to Chesapeake Bay."

Time heals wounds. If they hadn't hit the bumps in the road, they wouldn't have the stories to tell.

"I started out in Virginia," says Besley. "I'd just been in a bunch of groups. Things were pretty much drying up around there, though I never had any trouble finding work. Northern Virginia is a hotbed for acoustic music: the Seldom Scene, Country Gentlemen—Emmylou Harris was discovered there."

"My dad used to listen to Tex Ritter," adds Kulwicki. "My mom was listening to Frank [Sinatra]. My sisters were listening to the Beach Boys. I guess I took a little bit from all of

it."

"I really like the Civil War," notes Besley. "A friend, a guy named Mike Howard, and I were talking about writing a whole album of Civil War tunes. We got one out of it. We wrote a song called 'Free Soil Man' that one day we'll try to record. We were trying to come up with a name, and I was reading a book, and a free soil man wasn't a slave owner. He was just a farmer. That's what they called the guys who fought and didn't have a reason.

"
Lonesome Dove
, I think, was the best TV movie I ever saw. I must've watched it twenty-five times. You know, you kind of get things from books and movies and try to use those lingering scenes to give you creativity for your songwriting. Like, you know, just an example of something that stuck with me, when they were looking for Jake Spoon, they said, 'He hates sodbusters, and he's feeling bloody today.' I don't know, man, but if you're a songwriter, you hear a line like that, and you think, man, a song's got to come out of that somewhere.

"You know, I can't speak for everybody. All I know is what works for me, but when you look at the music business, so much of everything that happens is so calculated. A lot of people's careers are totally calculated out."

The issue invariably leads to talk of the infamous Super Bowl halftime show during which singer Janet Jackson bared her breast on national television.

"I was sitting there saying, like, what in the fuck are they doing? It's a fucking football game, for crying out loud!" says Roberts. "And in the reaction they were trying to amp it up even more."

"I was watching
American Idol
, and it's interesting how one style of vocals is so much in vogue," says Besley. "Every kid on that show was emulating and trying to sing the same exact way as all the guys before who'd won on that same show. The judges keep trying to tell everybody you're better off if you just try to be yourself, but nobody can figure that out. If anything else, if we get to the end of this road, whatever the end is, I hope we can say that we pretty much did it the way we thought. We aren't trying to do it the way anybody else is. I mean, I respect the musicians we play with, and I respect the people I listened to growing up—Cat Stevens and John Prine and stuff."

The influence is noticeable. Besley's voice evokes that of Stevens, who left the music business decades ago, converted to the Islamic faith, and changed his name.

"Yeah, the influence is there, but I'm not trying to emulate him in my music," says Besley.

There is, of course, no known evidence that Stevens ever performed a version of anything even close to David Allan Coe's "Long Haired Redneck."

"I think it all depends on your original intentions," says Roberts. "I think if you got into this thing to become a big star, that's what you direct yourself to doing."

When I suggest that, in reality, kids learn to play guitars and sing mainly to make themselves more appealing to the opposite sex, the remark draws knowing nods and laughter.

"When I first started out being a musician, I played the trombone all the way up to the fucking day the Beatles played that song," says Roberts. "Girls went nuts, and I just said, hey, give me a bass. Give me a guitar."

"When I was in school, the guys who were in music, we used to go laugh at them," Besley adds. "They'd be doing, like, Chicago, and they'd be killing it. We'd know three chords, and we'd say, 'Those guys don't know anything. This is how it's supposed to be.' We'd just blast out three chord stuff stoned or something, and they were doing Chicago. The only reason I got into it was I liked writing. I still know a song I wrote when I was fourteen. I'd learned a couple chords, and I fashioned a song out of it, and everybody was saying, 'No, no, no, we gotta play the Stones.' It was just something where, every time I learned to play something, I'd write something too. I still like to play other people's songs, but I'm always trying to think of something. It's fun, man. It's

fun."

"I was born in Baltimore," says Kulwicki. "My first band was in New Jersey. I was about seven, and some people were drinking beer across the street. My parents didn't like me going over there and hanging out. I got my first guitar and was taking lessons, and they invited me over to play 'Gloria' with them.

"My dad traveled around a little with his job. We moved to Illinois for four years. I went to junior high school and played basketball and stuff like that. We moved back to New Jersey, and the first week I was there, there was this kid on the block who played piano, and he had a big Hammond organ, and that was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. He had two brothers and they both played, and they had a band. I said that's pretty neat, so I go over, and I play with them. He introduced me to people at school, and I was playing in an original band at fifteen and playing in bars when I shouldn't have been, but my parents were cool with that: 'As long as we know where you're at.' We'd stop for breakfast on the way home, and I'd be home late in the morning, seven or eight in the morning. I'd sleep till noon, but I always liked playing guitar.

"I guess the first thing I liked on my own, without my sisters' influence, was Freddie and the Dreamers and Herman's Hermits. Then, when the Monkees came out on tv, I thought that was cool, and I saw that Mike Nesmith was really playing.

"When I moved to North Carolina, Chet [Atkins's] sister lived in Elizabeth City. Right on Highway 17. I'd hang out at a music store, and I met her. She sat and listened to me play. My brother always said a guitar player picks up a guitar and plays a song, but a guitarist picks up a guitar and plays any song. He can play different styles of a guitar."

In their formative years all three of the musicians I was speaking with had bounced around from band to band, taking a random career path until experience made their choices more discerning.

"I played this place next to a titty bar in Myrtle Beach [South Carolina]—the Afterdeck, I think," says Roberts. "The place next to it was called Thee Doll House."

"The Dolphin Lounge in Philadelphia," Kulwicki offers. "We played Earth, Wind & Fire, the Commodores, just with two guitars, bass, and drums. That was our job."

"Up in Gainesville [Florida]. Three piece band and six dancers—it was fucking crazy," says Roberts.

"One time I sat in with [country band] Tompall and the Glaser Brothers," says Besley. "[Tompall] wasn't real nice to me. But, I mean, I still like him."

Now here they are, playing what they want. Doing what they do. Living life as they please. A trite country saying occurs to me: "No matter where it is in this world that you go, there you are."

"Things are going good," says Besley. "Danny [Roberts] has been with us almost a year. That was a godsend. Woody [Pernell's] hanging. If he lives through his birthday, we might have him a while longer. You've got your ups and downs. They can happen four and five times a night."

"I still detail cars every now and then," says Kulwicki. "Only when I have to. It's like therapy for me too. I love two things: cars and music. I've always made a living doing one or the other. If somebody has something fun, you know. Somebody had a Shelby Durango, you know, with a supercharged Hemi motor, and I had fun cleaning that up, detailing it a little bit."

Never did a band have a more apt name. Those Guys. They're not getting rich, but they're making ends meet and having a hell of a time along the way.

A Unique Take on Cowboys and Indians

Austin, Texas | December 2004

Perhaps you know that Bob Livingston has played bass guitar for decades behind Jerry Jeff Walker. Perhaps the name strikes a chord from his work with the Lost Gonzo Band and Gary P. Nunn and John Inmon. The most compelling aspect of this confirmed Texan's career, however, is its international flavor.

Livingston's album Mahatma
Gandhi & Sitting Bull
grew out of his fascination with the music and mysteries of other cultures. For many years Livingston and his son, Tucker, have been touring India, Pakistan, Nepal, parts of Africa, and the Middle East for the State Department, exposing other cultures to cowboy music and, as it turns out, exposing Livingston to those cultures. It's been a remarkable journey, one that started in what would seem to be the most unlikely of places.

"You know, I grew up in Lubbock, and that's not exactly the most pacifist place to be," says Livingston. "You know, I had really good parents who had a lot of heart. They weren't really conservative. I was born in San Antonio, and when I moved to Lubbock, I was just a kid, and a lot of my friends—I had no idea what conservatism was, except that I knew that George H. W. Bush, George the First, was running for Congress. This was my first political thing. I remember a couple of things. Wagner Carr, who was the attorney general of Texas under [Governor] John Connally, lived in Lubbock. His son was a real good friend of mine. We went on a couple of campaign swings with John Connally and Wagner Carr and hung out with them in west Texas somewhere. Being a kid, nobody was saying anything.

"No one was saying anything about the concept of race. At the bus station across the street, it had a colored water fountain. All that stuff that I saw, I couldn't figure it out. When I first saw it, it seemed so strange. If I drink at the colored water fountain, am I going to get sick? I remember going over these things. If it's only for colored, does that mean that if I drink from it, is something going to happen to me? Is it against the law? I was going through all these things."

Livingston's social consciousness grew while he was a college student.

"When I got to Texas Tech, the Vietnam War was in full swing. It was 1969," he recalls. "I was playing guitar and singing and writing songs—and listening to Bob Dylan. Listening to that stuff, 'The Times They Are A-Changin',' 'Masters of War,' you know, you can't help but be influenced, whether you're from Lubbock, or whatever, and I remember going to my first political rally, and it was against the war. This was at Texas Tech, and it was at the student union, back behind the commons. I had to tell myself that I was only there to be an observer, but I was there, so I guess I was participating, but I was scared. This was a highly charged, redneck atmosphere during this thing. Here was this preacher on the stage, and this guy I knew, this youth minister at the Methodist church, and he was coming out against the war, and I thought, this is really brave of this guy, and all of a sudden, in the distance, I hear this noise."