True to the Roots (12 page)

Livingston mimics a low rumble, slowly becoming distinguishable as the tune of Sgt. Barry Sadler's "Ballad of the Green Berets."

"It's getting louder and louder, and around the corner is this group of extremely short-haired, American flag-waving guys. They were just kickers, they were cowboys, they were for America, and they didn't like what was going on, and I remember someone giving me an article when I was in high school about Lyndon Johnson being a Communist and him pacifying the Communists, this horrible stuff, and this was a Goldwater guy. These were the 'Impeach Earl Warren' days. I was saying, you know, this can't be true, and here were these guys coming around to disrupt the thing, singing

'The Ballad of the Green Berets.'

"So, it was sort of dangerous, but I had friends, and I was sort of growing my hippiedom, you know, at that point, and by the time I got out of there, which was pretty quick—1969, early 1970s—! split, and I went to Colorado. I was writing songs, and I was listening to all these people, and I met Michael Martin Murphey. He was Mike Murphey when I got to know him. So, one thing led to another, and by the time I had a chance—one of my first experiences—but, now that I think about it, I remember one of my first moments of social, and spiritual, consciousness as well was hearing the sitar on 'Norwegian Wood.' One thing led to another, and I wound up finding the only Ravi Shankar album in Lubbock, Texas, and listening to that stuff and burning incense. By the time I had a chance, I went to India. I was gone, you know. I took the first opportunity and have been going back ever since.

"The first time I went was 1975, but my wife had gone there in 1972-73. I took my son, Tucker. Tucker went when he was barely old enough to walk."

The State Department sponsors a cultural exchange program in which Livingston has participated for many years. Livingston is working on a documentary based on video footage of his experiences in the Middle East countries of Yemen, Syria, Kuwait, Jordan, Oman, Qatar, and Bahrain as well as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Morocco.

Yemen is and was a hotbed of anti-American sentiment.

"When we played in Yemen, what I remember most is that it was incredibly beautiful, and I never felt a moment of uncertainty," Livingston says. "We went to all these countries, and we never felt threatened. Walking in the middle of a bazaar in the old city . . . I've got some incredible video. We taught them how to yodel. We yodel along. One of the songs I always do is [Buddy Holly's] 'Not Fade Away.'

"Here are these people. I've got video of these kids in the Middle East coming up, and we're singing that 'love is real, not fade away.' Interspersed in the several places we played, and I'm playing with Arabic musicians, and we're singing 'love is real,' and people are singing it back. I'm singing 'love is real' [he imitates the call and response], 'love is real,' 'doesn't fade away.'"

As Livingston—long nicknamed "Cosmic Bob" by his contemporaries—tells these stories, they take on an almost evangelical fervor. He is the most gentle of men who at times sounds as if he's part of a tent revival. He even put together a band, called Cowboys & Indians, made up of musicians from Texas and India. Grants from the Texas Commission on the Arts and Austin Arts Commission have enabled him to take his band into the state's public schools for more than a decade.

"I remember being in Yemen, and we were playing at this arts college," he recalls. "These women . . . there were boys and girls in the class, and many of the women's faces were covered completely. Some of them you couldn't see their face.

"There was this one woman. I said, 'Here's a song about a young boy, a young guy from Lubbock, Texas, where I'm from. His name was Buddy Holly. He wrote a song about how big and how beautiful and how wonderful his love for this young girl was.' This woman, all in black, started crying out, 'Yes! Yes!' It could appeal to her, this notion that love is the cultural bridge, really. They were all walking up and asking about it. Of course, if we had gotten into politics, it would've been different. This was before 9/11 and, actually, it was a month before the
USS Cole
was blown up in Aden Harbor, and we had been there. There's a lot of stuff going on over there, and it's anti-Americanism, but the people that I ran into, it was 'anti the government.' Now . . . I don't know. Now we might be captured and beheaded. Who knows? They might not ask any questions. That's what's so weird, but at that time they were willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, for sure. And the State Department. Who knows what they thought? We were guarded, for sure, but it's a whole different world out there now."

Livingston runs Texas Music International out of an office near the State Capitol. The topic of conversation turns to the vibrant musical scene in Austin and what distinguishes it from Nashville.

"I went to Nashville, and Guy Clark introduced me to a bunch of people, and I played songs for them, and I asked him how he did it," he says, "and what Guy said was, 'I just write for myself, and if someone else likes it, great, but I just write for myself.' I think there's a lot of people who do that, like John Hiatt, for instance. Everybody covers his songs, but he writes for himself.

"But I think maybe guys like Guy and Bruce Robison, Hiatt, Keith Sykes, maybe they're the exceptions. There's what I call a factory system in Nashville. You have that factory where you walk in, and they have a big blackboard, and they say on one line who's in town this week and who's cutting what kind of song they're looking for. A slow song, a ballad, or whatever. There are creative ways to do it. . . . They get together, but they have to churn it out. The main thing they're driven by is needing another hit. Even the really good ones [established or known musicians] are driven to do that. I always had a hard time with it, but I think part of the appeal of Austin music was that people wrote for themselves. People play music for themselves. It's not a factory town.

"Austin—you know, now that they've got South by Southwest [a wildly successful music festival]—is getting more business oriented, but there still aren't any major record labels here. I don't think it's a factory town at all. I think it's a feudal system.

"You have all these really creative characters who have their own empires. People like Jerry Jeff [Walker] and Marcia Ball and Ray Benson. Willie Nelson and all these people have their own offices and their own way of doing things. Jerry Jeff has really been a pioneer in selling from my house to your house. He's making a lot more money now than he ever did when he had gold records because he's getting all the money. People just want to take a piece of that home with them, and he saw that."

What separates Livingston from, say, Steve Earle is that his outlook is devoid of bitterness. His travels around the world have left him deeply moved, but he remains comfortable both at home and abroad. He prefers to accentuate the positive. His love of Texas led him to experiment by reaching out to other cultures and blending musical styles that seem antithetical to one another.

"When I call people 'rednecks,'" Livingston says, "I do it affectionately. 'Redneck mother' [the Ray Wylie Hubbard song that has been a Jerry Jeff Walker standard for thirty years], you know. I don't think Lubbock's full of rednecks, but certainly those really, really, truly conservative people who didn't want any change were there in force when I was."

Other cultures have the same kinds of folk. What Livingston has discovered is that love, in the form of music, can shape a common ground.

One-Chord Song

Dallas, Texas I December 2004

I've arrived in the Deep Ellum section of Dallas trying to come to grips in some metaphysical sense with the term
red dirt
. It's a movement that grew out of the bars around Still-water, Oklahoma. I've listened to the music. I've interviewed members of the band Cross Canadian Ragweed. Here, though, is a unique opportunity to see it up close and personal.

What I expect, when I walk through the doors of the Gypsy Tea Room, is an appearance by Stoney LaRue and his Organic Boogie Band. What I get is quite a bit more.

LaRue has completed an album, and in the general party that follows, he brings along four other musicians. The gig at the Gypsy Tea Room ends up being one with no headliner at all. Five stools are placed onstage, and LaRue, Mike Mc-Clure, Kevin Webb, Scott Evans, and Jeremy Watkins take turns performing songs. The first four play acoustic guitars. Watkins wields a fiddle.

"If we get drunk," LaRue tells the audience, "we need people who will take care of us."

A pause for both effect and applause. "Anybody got any weed?"

Although the affair is a bit, uh, drunken, it evolves into a unique opportunity to see one of red dirt music's defining characteristics. It's cohesive, if not coherent. It's one big party. The principals get along. They're in this thing together. Maybe when they're all older and either more successful or out of the business, they'll look back at nights like these as the good old days. Perhaps it's inevitable that times like these will be fleeting, but none of them believes it.

"You can't go up to some person, and I'm not picking apart anyone from Texas or any kind of country music genre, but I've never seen any other genre where you can go up and hug the guy that's singing a song next to you," says LaRue.

The music ranges from the humorous—Webb sings a song in which he spells out the letters in Schaefer Beer ("E is for every girl you love . . . F is for girls you take home")—to the defiant ("If I'm going down, I'm going down in flames").

"To me it's just a group of people who I grew up with," says McClure. "Well, not really grew up with. When I went to college, when I went to [Oklahoma State University in Stillwater], it was kind of a bohemian atmosphere. I came from a small town in Oklahoma called Tecumseh. When I moved there [Stillwater], it was like going to New York City in a way. I heard Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, stuff that I'd never heard. My dad had
Willie [Nelson] Sings [Kris] Kristofferson
, and I'd already gotten into those lyrics. I remember writing all those lyrics down on a legal pad when I could just barely write."

In the red dirt scene what has evolved is equal parts populist and cosmic. It's not too unlike what developed around Austin in the 1970s, when hippies mingled with cowboys at the Armadillo World Headquarters. The influences once again range from Bob Wills to Bob Dylan, but it's not the same because these guys have sifted through and scooped up what's happened in the interim. They don't seem at all obsessed with commercial success, and while they're grateful for fans in Texas who have embraced them, they don't much care to have their music swept into any categorization that includes the Lone Star State. Hence the term
red dirt music
. They thrive on performing live music and, quite obviously, party like the ship could sink at any moment. Many Texans hedge their bets when talking about the record companies and mainstream radio. They may not care much for what's going on, but they'd like to be embraced by Nashville. In the red dirt scene Nashville might as well be Baghdad.

About popular music McClure dismisses it as "all adver-rising time." "They've got this little formula that keeps people listening, and it keeps radio stations selling ads. That's why I'm so excited about XM [Satellite] Radio. There's very little talk, and if there is talk, it's talk pertaining to the album. Now, with most radio stations they may give the artist's name, but used to be, they'd tell you what album it's on, playing album cuts and whatnot.

"You can either get mad about it, or you can find an alternative. I got really pissed off about it for a long time, and then I just decided being pissed off isn't going to change anything."

During a break the room backstage is cloudy and raucous. A cell phone rings, and McClure picks up a banana and conducts a conversation with it. Webb lurches over, yanks the banana out of McClure's hand, and spikes it, smashing it on the wood floor.

"If you can't enjoy the music, man, that means you're giving up on humanity," McClure observes, surveying the banana mush.

Here's a surprise. McClure cites Jack Kerouac as an influence. "I started traveling because of the Kerouac influence, you know," he says. "It's still going to every town and exposing people to your music. You go to another town—they don't know you, or they might have an album. It's kind of cool.

"I've been real fortunate in the experiences, in the views I've had of all these bands. Ragweed and [Jason Boland and the Stragglers], I saw them start. My own bands that were successful. It's just grassroots. You build it yourself. If they play you on the radio, great. If they don't, who gives a shit? You don't have to worry about image. There are always the free spirits of every day, every time. That's what Kerouac was to his time."

I return to the stage, in search of LaRue. Just as I come around the corner, he roars down the steps, and we collide. He cushions the impact with a bear hug and yells, "Hey, motherfucker, you want to get high?"

A friend of mine, Jim McLaurin, has a saying he got from his father: "There ain't but two things I can't abide, and that's a drunk when I'm sober and being sober when they're drunk." This is the predicament I find myself in.

Later LaRue, who almost always wears a bandana, tells the Texas audience, "Y'all know, it took us coming to Texas to at least get it [my music] some popularity, but this is some shit you won't ever hear anywhere else, man."