True to the Roots (16 page)

"Just because I might sell two thousand copies and not fifty thousand, I still think I have kind of an obligation to show some respect for other people and other musicians and not slam them. I don't want people slamming me. I don't mind critics doing it, but for a musician to do it, it just looks bad. It's one of those gentleman things. Maybe I'm deceiving myself to think that anybody cares about what I say. I think a lot of those guys on country radio can sing a lot better than these insurgent guys . . . At least they grew up with a mom and dad cooking grits, and they're a little different from some of the people from Illinois. I've only heard one person not from the South who can pull it off, and that's Gillian Welch.

"In my eyes that's the only one [Welch] who has pulled it off. I just don't think . . . there are too many other influences. Too much information. Too much stress. Too many other things in life to keep making that simple old country music like they used to make. It's hard to sing George Jones when you've got Hilfiger on your waist."

Roby's latest album, The
Mercy Filter
, is a radical departure away from country. It's melodically much more diverse than the two previous CDs,
Rather Not Know
and
Mercury's Blues
, which I adored.
The Mercy Filter
is a pop album with far less country music, which is not to suggest it isn't a fine album but is, rather, to suggest that it isn't as appealing to me as Roby's previous work.

The longer the interview goes, the more I'm struck by just what a walking, talking contradiction Kenny Roby is. Tom T. Hall once described a character who was "about as happy as a thinking man can be," and this is the phrase that keeps coming back to me as we talk. The same man who has just finished cutting a pop album now starts talking about how country is reeling off in a direction that takes it even farther from its roots.

"Now we look back on Garth Brooks, man, and we'd be lucky to get Garth Brooks back," Roby says. "You go back now and listen to 'I've Got Friends in Low Places' right now, and it would sound like Hank Williams Sr.

"Good music's good music. You can boil it down to that. Good music's good music whether it's Ralph and Carter Stanley or Little Stevie Wonder. You get into the genres, and it gets . . . it becomes a money issue and a labeling issue. It becomes like, what are you going to sell it as? What are you going to market it as? If we put it against this other kind of chart, it's not going to look like it sells much, but if we make fifty thousand records gold for this kind of chart, the 'tech-no-flipflop-jimmyjohn,' it's going to look better."

Techno-flipflop-jimmyjohn
. After forty-five minutes talking music with Kenny Roby, I almost think I understand what the term means.

The Last Angry Cowboy

Berkeley, California I june 2004

Tom Russell sings of the rugged individualists who once made this country great, but his is the pessimistic vision of a man who sees a United States awash in political correctness and commercialized boredom.

"I love telling hard, well-carved stories from a believable scenario or a wounded heart," Russell says.

Our paths intersect while I'm covering a nascar race at Infineon Raceway, in Sonoma, and Russell is performing at a pair of East Bay locales, the Freight and Salvage Coffee House in Berkeley and Downhome Records in El Cerrito.

Russell is accompanied by Andrew Hardin, a tall, angular guitarist with an intriguing picking style and a speaking dialect reminiscent of the actor Donald Sutherland. I've never seen anyone play exactly like him. Hardin attacks the strings in almost a neoclassical style.

Hardin tells me he is a fan of Tom T. Hall's. After I tell him what I do, he asks, "Are you married?"

I reply by telling him that with this lifestyle—gone most of the time for ten months of the year—I probably never will be.

"You've got a country song right there," he says.

The audience seems to be mostly middle-aged, but among the young people the women greatly outnumber the men. An alarming number of young women are accompanied by successful-looking older men. Some are undoubtedly girlfriends, some daughters, and some students of University of California professors. I can't help but wonder what there is about this man's brand of western cowboy songs that draws such a collection of urban professional elites. Maybe the scene is unique to Berkeley.

Before the concert begins, I overhear conversations, sitting alone with my notepad.

"I never wanted to meet Dylan, man, you know what I mean. I used to be with the Grateful Dead all the time. I've seen Dylan, but I never wanted to meet him."

The woman who introduces Russell calls him the finest singer-songwriter in the country, after which he and Hardin arrive onstage and lend considerable credence to her contention.

"I love the West," Russell tells the audience, "but want to tell it from my own standpoint, without politics and false romance. This country was founded by rugged individuals who came over here to escape oppression and starvation and ended up going insane in the wilder reaches of this country.

"Most families lost their pioneer spirit. It was bred out of them in three centuries. They caved in. Why do we now live in a land of McDonald's and Wal-Marts? Fear. Plain and simple. Fear. You can only find traces of that old lost America in Alaska. Check out country music in the last fifteen years. Wal-Mart emotions . . . Everything we came here to escape . . . has caught up with us."

Along with other artists like Ian Tyson and Don Edwards, Russell strives to keep alive not just the dying virtues of the West but also the adventurous soul of the human condition.

Russell tells the Freight and Salvage audience that the aching remnants of lost love have triggered many of the new songs: "It Goes Away," "Kansas City Violin," "All the Fine Young Ladies," "Ash Wednesday," and "Stealing Electricity." His latest studio album, Indians
Cowboys Horses Dogs
(Hight-one), is made up of his own western ballads, however, as well as standards like Marty Robbins's "El Paso" and Bob Dylan's "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts."

He has just returned from Europe, where he says he recovered from emotional anguish and "began to think more clearly."

"I'm tired of being 'Mr. Entertainment' onstage," he says. "I'll leave that to Siegfried and Roy. Eventually, the tiger's going to grab you by the neck.

"That gig is finished. I want to sing these new songs and record a double record about love and fear . . . I've been edging more and more toward the personal. Like Carl Perkins said, 'If you run away long enough, you'll run back into yourself.'"

Russell pokes fun at the new direction of his music. He imagines himself as a member of the audience and asks: "What's up with this? What happened to the funny guy?

"He went into the Rhine with a lot of cowboy songs."

Russell's passion matches Steve Earle's as he rails against restrictions on free speech: "Colin Powell's son is the head of the fcc [at the time]. You can't say 'piss' anymore, let alone 'fuck.' Forget the rest. The problem with political correctness is it's boring."

The humor is biting but insightful. At one point he says of the stories in his songs, "They're all true, folks, right up to the point where they don't rhyme."

Russell talks about drying out in Europe and notes that the coffeehouse doesn't serve booze. He affects an Irish dialect and yells to the back of the room, "I'll sing no more, Nicki, till I get an oatmeal raisin cookie."

Then he chats briefly with a woman in the first row, after which he says, "This [next song] is for Carmen. With a name like that, you're bound for the big-time."

A smattering of the crowd is leaving as Russell returns to the stage for an encore. With a smile on his face he yells to those who are departing, "The rest of you bastards, get the hell out of here!" In the middle of the encore set, he abruptly yells: "You can't request a song! You work here. Shut off the cash register, you capitalist!"

I show up at Down Home Records, hoping to conduct the interview I wasn't able to do at the coffeehouse. Russell and I chat amiably, but he asks me to send him a list of questions by e-mail. That way, he says, he can compose a thoughtful reply. I've read stories suggesting that he's felt burned by journalists in the past.

Any doubts I have about using such a mechanism for an interview are dispelled by the replies I get from Russell within days. The thoughtfulness reflected in his songs is prevalent, along with a healthy quotient of bluntness.

I ask him about his love for the West and the songs he's written about it.

"No agendas," he replies. "I love the old songs and melodies, but all of that has been covered long ago and very well by good people like Tex Ritter and Marty Robbins and Johnny Cash and Peter LaFarge. Current western music, with the exception of Ian Tyson, the singing of Don Edwards, and the poetry of Zarzyski, is beat. Dead. Square. Conservative. Serving up the old bullshit 'Myth of the West.'

"Most cowboy singers wouldn't say 'horse shit' if they had a mouth full of it (to quote my friend Katy Lee). I love telling hard, well-carved stories from a believable scenario or a wounded heart. I love the West but want to tell it from my own standpoint, without politics and false romance. Hell, Ramblin' Jack Elliott was singing 'The Range of the Buffalo' on the streets of Paris in 1959. How do you follow that?"

I note that the history of the West is a metaphor for the modern conflict between rugged individualism and the strictures of society and ask him how he draws the line in his own mind.

"Check out country music in the last fifteen years. Wal-Mart emotions. The dead fucking the dead . . . in a vacuum. To quote the bard [Charles] Bukowski, 'Everything we came here to escape . . . has caught up with us.'"

Noting that he has cowritten with Ian Tyson, Nanci Griffith, and Dave Alvin, among others, I ask him about how songwriters work together and wonder if egos get in the way.

He answers yes. "Egos always get in the way. Ego is a big old ape sitting up on our backs. Cowriting really works in factory environments like Nashville or the old Tin Pan Alley. You compromise the heart out of the song. It's like two people trying to paint a picture together. It's inherently tough because you show up with your own creative baggage. That being said, I've learned a lot from these people because they come from diverse melodic backgrounds, so you bite the bullet a bit, and maybe you luck out on a few.

"Remember, Lennon and McCartney did not actually sit down and write those songs together; they wrote alone. In the end it's one soul talking to whatever muse or angel graces you with their spirit, but there have been exceptional moments of collaboration. On occasion. It's tough going."

Specifically, I ask him about a line in one of his songs that offers the view that withholding affection from loved ones is "the oldest trick we know."

What is there, I wonder, about the human condition that makes us increasingly standoffish and secretive in dealing with one another? Is honest emotion in decline?

"Yes," Russell replies, "honest emotion is in decline. Or gone dead. I'm glad you picked up on that line about 'withholding affection.'

"I just broke up with a lovely woman. The song you are quoting is about her, and we had agreed that if we ever broke up, we would be friends forever. Well, that didn't happen, pard, and it seldom does. So, it hurt. Plenty. I had to work with this person in a very close situation a few months ago, and she kept her nose up in the air. She refused any closure. I thought it was a brutal move. Maybe I deserved it, and it certainly opened my eyes. Well, a month or so later, I'm in a [bed and breakfast] in Northern Ireland, and there's a beautiful woman owner who is breaking up with her boyfriend, and we get to talking about life and love.

"Well the Irish lass ladled a few truths on me: 'Women have an on-off button on their emotions. When it's turned off . . . it's turned off. That's it.'

"And here's the capper: 'For women, withholding our affection is really the only leverage we have!'

"Well, I was stunned when I heard that. Like, I have been walking around in a dream for fifty years! Fighting James Thurber's 'War between Men and Women,' but with inferior weapons. Withholding affection, when you know it hurts someone who may need healing, is a very brutal move. Ach-tung! Be aware. There are land mines on the road to the soul.

"The old campaigner still has a lot to learn about love, but this recent situation has triggered many new songs like 'It Goes Away,' 'Kansas City Violin,' 'All the Fine Young Ladies,' 'Ash Wednesday,' and 'Stealing Electricity.'

"So, I'm blessed to be able to sober up from this heartache [three breakups in five years] and
learn
something that I may be able to share in my art. I hope so. Then there was this Zen nun who
really
clued me in to love, but that's another story, as they say. 'We go to the father of souls . . . but it is necessary to pass by the dragons.' St. Augustine, I believe."

When I ask Russell about the "funny guy went into the Rhine" line, he replies: "I started out in strip clubs and topless bars, being the master of ceremonies, and I did it well, like Joel Grey in [the movie]
Cabaret
. That gig is finished. I want to sing these new songs and record a double record about love and fear, so I threw the dummy off the bridge. He was the wise-ass making rude remarks to chicks and saying 'fuck' onstage, and I was the one being blamed. But the parasites are hard to get rid of, and, yes, you gain much-needed perspective playing to foreign audiences. They listen on a deeper level, and they are not victim to the cloud of current American hype. They have sunk their own cross into the heart of the vampire."