True to the Roots (15 page)

Django Walker, the excitable, hard-rocking son of the gonzo legend, Jerry Jeff Walker, had played Antone's, on Fifth Street in Austin, on Thursday night.

Django is a lanky, slightly awkward young man (I wish I could see him on a basketball court, manning the low post), but his music and enthusiasm are endearing. His daddy, a founding father of all this, must be proud. The crowd at An-tone's is liberally sprinkled with fans, my age and older, gathered in Austin for Jerry Jeff's annual three-day Birthday Bash ("the BDB"), which begins—without me, alas—the following night. Sadly, there are race cars to occupy me 200 miles to the north.

What better compliment to offer a father? He is true to his daddy's legacy.

Even harder rocking than Django Walker is the Bleu Ed-mondson Band, which plays Woodie's Tavern in Fort Worth on Friday night. The country-influenced rock carries with it a certain punk sensibility, and Edmondson may have drifted out beyond the edge of—and perhaps extended—my range of appreciation. Still, it's fun to watch the kids go wild in response to all the posturing and take-no-prisoners enthusiasm. Edmondson isn't exactly old-school where Texas music is concerned. He wears his SMU cap on backwards and lets the audience see both middle fingers a couple of times. The gestures, by the way, draw applause and laughter.

Our little troupe also sees Marcia Ball and the South Austin Jug Band, meets Cory Morrow and Slaid Cleaves in the wings, and makes a memorable side trip to Luckenbach, where we mingle a bit with the spiritual compadres of "Way-lon, Willie, and the boys."

There is even music at the track. Cooder Graw, the Ama-rillo band that was originally named Coup de Grace, plays a cold, windblown set behind turns i and 2 of the sprawling Texas Motor Speedway, north of Fort Worth. When the group discovered there was another band using the French name, its members unanimously decided to spell the name in the manner Texans pronounce it anyway.

As usual, I buy a lot of music, mostly at the delightfully eclectic Austin outpost Waterloo Records. I spend perhaps an hour with a sportswriting chum cracking jokes about the outrageous names of groups we'd never heard of—Bongzil-la, Frat Guys from Hell. Meanwhile, I collect some music from entertainers I've sampled but want to get to know better: Adam Carroll, Jason Boland and the Stragglers, Roger Creager, and Adam Carroll among them.

My NASCAR-related travels to Texas have given me many fond memories, precious few of which have been related to stockcar racing. Once, on a similar trip, a friend and I saw Billy Joe Shaver and Charlie Robison in concert at a little restaurant on the shores of Lake Travis. All it cost me was a Mexican dinner, which was well worth the money.

Over the past few years I've been to a lot of honky-tonks and dance halls, and along the way I've even made friends with a few Texas singer-songwriters, most notably Ed Bur-leson and Jack Ingram. One friend in particular is fond of saying that I won't listen to music that anyone else does. My defense is that I seldom care for anything that is commercial and that my friend seldom pays attention to anything that isn't.

If you think mainstream country radio is as vacuous as I do, Texas is your place. If you really think the best music is what sells the best or what the radio plays, there's probably no need even for you to look this stuff up. But if you'd like to hear something a little different, check it out. I think you'll be glad you did.

A lot of what I listen to is called "Americana," or "alternative country." My translation is that alternative country is what country used to be. The songs are about the lives of ordinary people. There's not a lot of "boot-scooting boogie" there.

It takes some relay driving with a friend to get back from Austin on a drive through the cold night air in the wee hours of a Friday morning, but missing out on Django Walker is
not
an option. When I arrive back home to South Carolina, I sleep for a solid day, but fatigue was never a factor in Texas. To paraphrase the words of Charley Pride on an old live album, the Texas music scene energizes me like a bucking horse roaring out of a stall.

I probably look older after six days on the road in Texas . . . but I sure feel younger.

Contrary to, Uh, Anything

Raleigh, North Carolina I July 2004

At a time of personal anguish Kenny Roby's music came along to soothe and comfort me.

Roby recorded an album called
Rather Not Know
. Much of it he wrote in response to the death of his father, a Clemson University professor, in October 2001.

Although it is an introspective album, it's also somehow uplifting. In many cases the cheerful, even soaring melodies counterbalance the melancholy messages conveyed in the words.

Listening to
Rather Not Know
cheers me up, even though I'm not exactly sure why.

Psychological effects aside, this album blew me away the first time I heard it, and that was before my eighty-eight-year-old grandmother—probably the most influential person in shaping my life—slipped into a sudden, precipitous decline and died almost before I could come to grips with it. A friend sent a homemade cassette with Roby, whom I'd never heard of, on the back side and the Austin, Texas, band Reckless Kelly on the front. Only a few days passed before I bought both CDs on my own. Fate then intervened.

In the aftermath of my grandmother's funeral I needed to get away. I took two of my nephews to a Greenville Braves baseball game. Late that night I hatched a plan and surfed the Internet charting other minor league games for a makeshift road trip. I wound up going to Durham, Asheville, and Charlotte, all in North Carolina, with a side trip to the site of the Battle of Kings Mountain—the town of Kings Mountain is in North Carolina, and the battlefield is in South Carolina—for good measure.

While I was in Durham, guess who just happened to be playing at a place called the Manbites Dog Theater? Kenny Roby. The same Kenny Roby whose CD had helped me immeasurably in coping with a personal loss. Just a few days after the funeral, with me on the lam to escape the proximity of grief, I could go to a small club—one more accustomed, apparently, to the staging of plays—and see what this faceless songwriter, whose songs had arrived almost magically in my mailbox, looked like. I could meet him. I could try to figure him out.

So much for that night's game between the Durham Bulls and the Louisville Bats.

Roby is cheerful in person. In a sense he reminds me of the forever boyish Robert Earl Keen. At times the singing style is reminiscent of Gordon Lightfoot, but he seldom seems as somber.

The music is a sort of mechanism for survival. It's a way of putting aside life's uneasy baggage. Putting together
Rather Not Know
was evidently cleansing for Kenny Roby.

Listening to it may not have been cleansing for me. Maybe I'd have to write a book about my grandmother—or at least a poem—to do that. It was comforting, though. And thought provoking. Two things I needed in my hours of need.

But from the title song through a personal favorite, "In the Wilderness" (which was partly responsible for my abrupt detour to the Kings Mountain National Military Park—wrong war, but the best I could do at the time), and on through other gems like "Blues Too Blue to Mention," "Glad It Ain't Me," and the gospel number "Tidal Wave," Roby's music gave me, well, maybe not serenity but at least a glimpse of it and a few moments of much needed clarity.

A year passes. I decide to write a book about music. I want to include a chapter on Kenny Roby. I notice several of his songs have baseball references, so I decide that it might be useful to get in touch with Roby and use a minor league game as the setting for our interview.

Alas, that strategy doesn't work out. We go to a game, but we watch it. The bulk of the interview takes place in a Raleigh restaurant.

Roby seems world-weary and, compared to what I'd anticipated, contrarian. I have a hard time getting him to step away from what seems like a dogged intent to play devil's advocate to virtually everything I ask. He's friendly enough but seems much more supportive of the musical establishment than I'd anticipated.

The system works, he says. It just hasn't worked for him yet. It's kind of left him depressed, perhaps because at some level he's blamed himself instead of the system.

"I don't think the guy who lives in a trailer park and works in the mill all day is going to listen to Ryan Adams," Roby says. "I just don't think he's going to, and that's the same guy who didn't listen to Townes Van Zandt. That's the same guy who was listening to all the bad country in the seventies. Or the bad rock. In the seventies he was listening to that stuff. He wasn't listening to songwriters."

Great music on the radio? Very rare, Roby tells me. When it happens, it's an accident.

"It's been very rare . . . most of the stuff," he says. "It's like The Band. It was a mistake. It was a mistake they got as big as they did. They fell through the cracks. The Stones had no business breaking through when 'How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?' was going on.

"Producers are businessmen now. In Nashville they're businessmen. That started with people like Billy Sherrill and Chet Atkins, even though those guys made great music. I think they start out with some creative interest, but they reach a point where they know so well what the businessmen want that they [the music industry execs] don't have to come in and look over the producer's shoulder. The suits don't have to come in. He's become one of them. A businessman. The businessmen have not become producers. The producers have become businessmen."

And that's a good thing?

"It's not just music," Roby says. "I think it's movies. I think it's life in general. I don't think we need to make an Oliver Stone movie out of it. It's not a conspiracy. I don't think anyone was trying to frame it this way. It was just something that happened. It's the evolution of society. It's getting more and more boring. More and more bored. They hand us everything. We don't want anyone to make us think. We've become afraid of it."

But the music doesn't cause the problem. The problem causes the music.

"Those people wouldn't be able to foist stuff across on people if it didn't sell," Roby says. "You can't make people literate. You can't do it. It doesn't work."

I refer to several quality songwriters, or at least songwriters whose work I admire. Roby shoots them down. I'm flabbergasted.

"I don't think what they're doing is a hit," he says. "If I was [producer] Billy Sherrill, I'd say, 'Dude, you need to go talk to some songwriters. You need to come and bring them in because I haven't heard you do it. I've heard a lot of that stuff, and I don't hear the hits. I'm sorry. I think Shania Twain—even though I don't like the music—I see why it's popular. I see why 'The Way You Love Me' by Faith Hill is a hit. I've been listening to Steve Miller lately. We'd be better off with him on radio. If they want to compete, they need to jump up and step up to the plate. I don't think it's just the record companies.

"It might serve their purpose better to take up some other people's songs. There's a little more room out there that isn't being filled, but mainly all these guys are just jealous. They wouldn't have a problem with it if they hadn't been turned down. I was in the middle of that stuff. I was in Nashville in the mid- to late 1990s. 'In Search of Alt Country.' Well, if Nashville was so bad, why is everyone still living there? Why is Rodney Crowell still living outside Nashville? It's where the industry is. It's where the money is.

"A lot of stuff was just bad. It was about, just anything, a small percentage of stuff was good. See, that's another thing. None of these guys can hold a candle to George Jones. They can't hold a candle to a lot of guys—as vocalists, and that's the thing. Nashville's never been a writer-friendly place. Tom T. Hall didn't have as many hits as he wrote."

The only limit on Roby's rant is that he won't discuss individuals. He just sort of excoriates them in bulk.

Finally, I give up. It's obvious that Roby's personal views, or at least the ones he espouses in the interview, are contrary to most of my own views and most of what I've encountered in my conversations with the other musicians. But the reason I asked him was that I wanted to know how he felt.

I take the interview in another direction and ask Roby about the practical matter of how he writes songs.

"There's probably, like, three different sides," he says. "There's the guy sitting on the back porch drinking coffee in the morning, smoking a cigarette and tapping into what he experienced the night before and writing it. Half of it's still in the world; part of it is wondering what the kids are going to have for breakfast. I write a lot when I wake up. Then there's just the fan. I'm a fan, too. This is where an interview gets dangerous because if you say what you think, it could be seen as sour grapes. It could actually be sour grapes. You look at me different if you know I'm an artist and I'm talking about another artist's music. If I go, Man, I think that's crap, well, that's completely separate from the Kenny Roby that's a singer-songwriter. That's the Kenny Roby the fan who's heard some good shit, and that ain't nowhere close to it."

So, in fact, Roby has sort of wandered away from the question about songwriting and returned to the topic of everyone I think is good being bad.

"It's different," he continues. "I can sit there. I can be a fan of music, and when I'm in a group of people, and they know I'm a writer or they like my music or whatever, and if I talk about the Old 97's, which I fucking hate, but that's the fan. That's not jealousy. There are people who just sit around and talk shit about other musicians all the time. That's not what I like about it. I like the music. If I don't like it, I don't have to read it or listen to it or talk about it. My job is not to slam other bands.