True to the Roots (21 page)

"I had a girlfriend who came up here," he says, unflinchingly honest. "I got her pregnant, and I just followed her here to raise the kid. This was back in '83. It was a move from the loins."

"It's not a place I would have picked. A lot of times in the last twenty years, I've wanted to move down to Nashville or just some place closer to country music because it seemed like that was where my talent was and where I needed to be, but at this point I've got so many roots dug in here in the city that I'm resigned to staying here in spite of the weather and the things that I don't particularly care for. But the city itself I really, really love. As far as country music is concerned, I'd say there are ten people who are top-notch players and singers. It's a really, really small scene. I think, though, there are more good clubs with good [public-address systems], fair promoters, nice sight lines, and all the rest of it than probably anywhere except two or three clubs in the rest of the country. It's great for that."

Family life has been good for Fulks, who, by his own admission, has mellowed in recent years. Or maybe he's just studied the industry and gained a more complete understanding of it. He seems more relaxed than his music.

"As far as the corporatization of music in Nashville is concerned, I was really upset about it when I was in the thick of it, which was ten years ago, and since then I can't say I give much of a rat's ass about it," he says. "I'm way up here, and I do what I do, and I have this tiny niche of a career, and they're of no concern to me, and I'm of not that much concern to them. It's not something I really simmer about anymore."

I decry the fact that country music doesn't seem to dwell on the hardships of life anymore and suggest that the average theme of the song featured on mainstream radio is "Hey, baby, let's me and you party." I complain that there's no populism anymore. The common man and his worries became passe with Merle Haggard and George Jones.

"I think you're exactly right," he says, "but the common man must bear some of the responsibility, too, for the direction that country has gone. I think the common man is listening to AC/DC and a lot of other stuff. A lot of common people are listening to Shania Twain, and when I say common man, I mean the guy who fixes my car down the street.

"They just need a chance to hear it. It's organic. It just happened because people heard it, and that's what they had. It's not what they selected. It's what they had.

"You can get reams of press, but when you read about a singer or a band, it can be presented in an exciting, romantic, and well-written way, but there's nothing that's going to sell people on it like hearing it."

The experience of producing the Paycheck tribute has given him new perspective into the way the industry works, which leads to a discussion of why and how music industry executives made mainstream radio so bereft of creativity.

"One of my favorite things about being on the inside of music, as I've gotten in the last couple of years, is that there is a hierarchy of merit within the music business," Fulks says. "Outside of it, it's such the opposite. It's like, when Randy Travis gets a record he's really excited about, it would be, like, a Guy Clark record. He'll get an Alan Jackson record to see what the competition's up to."

Over time Fulks has evolved to the point where he doesn't see himself anymore as "so all alone." He now perceives a certain condescension and even arrogance in his earlier work. Although he remains a persistent critic of the establishment, he wouldn't write "Fuck This Town" again. He is more cognizant of the source of his frustrations.

"I just think there was a spirit of innocence and ignorance," Fulks says. "When I made [
Country Love Songs
], I'd never put out a record, at least on an outside label, before, and I was so excited about the opportunity to do it. I was excited about the opportunity to be around other musicians. I was like a conduit between the world and Buck Owens, this great music that I was totally absorbed in at the time. I wasn't smart enough to think, well, everybody smart about music knows all about Buck Owens and Roger Miller and all this stuff. Why do I consider myself a musical emissary for that? To me I was the first person in the world who had discovered this great music.

"Also, I think, different kinds of music are answering those fundamental issues that country used to explore. I just listened to the new Eminem record, and I'm not the hugest fan of hip-hop or rap, or whatever, but that music, man, it's man-on-the-street, and they're telling stories that aren't censored by anybody, they're saying what they want to say, and they're talking about fucking sex and drugs and alcohol and everything that country used to talk about.

"It's amazing, too, that it goes backward in a way. On my second trip to Nashville, some woman at EMI was listening to a song I'd written. It was nothing you would know or nothing I recorded, but she said, 'This is nice that you've tried to write a song from the point of view of the man singing about the woman who's cheating on him. And he's saying I'll be patient, just get through the cheating and then just come home to me. As long as you come home, it's ok.' She said, 'It's nice and daring that you wrote about that, but you can't get away with that, with writing about women who cheat. And I said, 'What are you talking about?' 'The Pill' is twenty-five years old, and Loretta Lynn could get away with singing about the birth control pill and have a hit in 1972. This is 1994. And she said, 'Well, it doesn't work that way.'

"Free speech doesn't get wider and wider. At that point the business was more restrictive than it had ever been and probably more restrictive than it is now too."

Fulks finds just a hint of optimism in the latest trends. "Toby Keith has been a great influence and others too. As much as I despise certain aspects of this and his presentation of this so-called 'art,' I really like the fact that it's opened up and there are certain things you can say because of what those guys are doing. There's a little kick ass in it that's good."

But Fulks objects with his old passion to the adoption of what another generation might have considered mainstream pop by country. It used to be the other way around. Country hits—oddly enough, Miller's "King of the Road" is a classic example—found their way to pop stations by appealing to a broader audience.

"Without being a little bit country, why should it even exist? If it's going to be like crappy rock music, we already have a lot of crappy rock music," says Fulks. "It's like the Republicans saying, 'If we run a Democrat against a Democrat, the Democrats will win every time.' If country music's just going to be secondhand rock music, it's always going to lose out.

"Country music has some things that it does perfectly well. It's got a set of themes that only it does the way it does. It's got a vocal tradition and an instrumental tradition that are unique to it and every bit as worthy and full of technical proficiency as jazz. I hope it gets back to it. On the other hand, if it does get back to it, you've got to wonder if there's a point of view to get back to. Sort of that down-home country attitude, other than wistful, bullshit nostalgia. If there are really people around who can transmit that soulfully and honestly. I hope there are."

Fulks hosts a monthly radio show on xm Satellite Radio. The premise, he says, is that the old music isn't gone and in fact isn't even rare.

"I think there's more good country music out there than there was even in the fifties, at the apogee we were talking about," he says. "There's just so much of it out there. Someone's going to come along who's going to bring that country soulfulness again to a wide audience. It just can't be that nostalgia. It's got to be something new and something personable and something with the communicable power to put a new slant on it."

Robbie Fulks would be willing to be the guy.

The Last True Texas Troubadour

Arlington, texas I December 2004

Brian Burns has made a career out of concentrating on Texas. Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, the focus of his music is firmly centered in the Lone Star State. Since 2003 he's even been taking his message into the schools of the state via a program originally begun to accompany his album
The Eagle & the Snake: Songs of the Texians
.

"I'm interested in all kinds of history," he insists, "but here in Texas we have so much of it in our own backyard. I've always been drawn to, and found it fulfilling to write, songs with visual imagery, drama, and emotional impact. History, and especially Texas history, provides those elements for me."

Speaking of history, Nashville and the country music establishment have often confounded Texans. Even for many of those who have succeeded there, there's a certain love-hate relationship. Burns is one of many who seem to have written off Nashville and the trade-offs that often accompany mainstream acceptance. There's a good living to be made in Texas, where there's a unique musical culture.

"Nashville music is about selling pickup trucks and blue jeans," Burns says. "The focus is on commercials, and the music is tailored to work as a background. In Texas there are djs and programmers gutsy enough to play songs that are actually as entertaining, or more so, than the commercials."

One example of his attitude is a colorful assault on Nashville in the song "Nothin' to Say (Austin vs. Nashville)" from his 2004 CD
Heavy Weather
. Burns compares commercially successful male singers to Chippendale dancers and suggests their music is almost irrelevant. Writing or performing the song is less important in Nashville than the tight jeans and the rugged good lucks.

The loss of a sense of populism in the music troubles Burns, but he doesn't blame the targeting of youth by the country music establishment. To him the fundamental problem is commercialism.

"The music industry has always been driven by youth, and I have no misgivings whatsoever about that," he says. "I'm lucky in that my music has fans and supporters of all ages, and a good portion of my income is derived from performing for kids [in the school program]. People, young or old, are going to gravitate to music they can identify with. When I was young, it might have been Grand Funk Railroad one week and Willie Nelson the next.

"But I never gravitated toward any music simply because it was considered cool by my peers. I judged it by whether or not I liked the music . . . the songs . . . which certainly positioned me well out of the mainstream, where I remain to this day. I remember a few years ago, when I first heard Robert Earl Keen. I became a huge fan. Man, what a phenomenal singer-songwriter. Next thing you know, there are singers coming out of the woodwork, imitating him to the letter, but who couldn't write a song if their lives depended on it.

"I think it would be cool if more people selected music for music's sake, and based on personal taste, rather than what tastemakers are saying."

It's not the youth that confounds Burns but, rather, the sameness of the music. I point out to him that there is precious little attention paid to the hardships regularly and inevitably visited upon families and individuals. "Feel-good music" should have its place, but the history of country music embraces the full range of human emotions.

"I can't explain it," Burns says. "Maybe it's just that the world has gotten so crazy that people don't want to think about those things. Musical depth seems to be out of fashion right now, and most popular music concerns itself heavily with some sort of dumbing down.

"Music has become antiseptic because most of it is made, as I mentioned earlier, with the express purpose of reinforcing commercials. It's stayed that way because most people don't realize there are musical artists out there, actually taking the time to learn to play real musical instruments and write substantive music. It's just that few listeners get exposed to it."

To underscore this point, Burns answers one of my questions by citing a new song, "Border Radio," that offers a certain wistful hope. It's set in the future, where a lonely listener stumbles across a simple tune that takes him back to a time when men sang "honest rhymes." So moved is he that he tries to find its source, calling "Mr. DJ" in search of this plaintive, stripped-down blast of music he'd never heard "from the satellite." He makes the call because he wants to awaken the world to this snippet he heard only briefly before it faded into static and oblivion.

When Burns wrote that song, he must have been thinking about the new options that have only begun to provide alternatives to mainstream radio.

"The Internet has made it
easier
to get the music out," he says, "but the digitization of the music—thereby making it free for the taking—has made it harder for artists to make a living. What makes Texas unique, in this respect, is its abundance of music venues. A recording artist can still earn a living in Texas with live performances. No other place in the country offers so many venues for live music."

As for satellite radio, Burns has hope but thinks the jury is still out.

"I'm getting satellite airplay, particularly on XM's 'X Country,'" he says. "I just recently subscribed to XM, and while it does offer considerable variety, I'm still evaluating its merit on substance."

"Heavy Weather" is an apt description of Burns's latest CD (at the time of my interview). It's all about thunderstorms, shipwrecks, hurricanes . . . and the storms of life. He wrote twelve of the sixteen songs, which reflect a divergence of styles not previously seen in his work. His cover of Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" is among the more poignant I've heard.