Robert Earl Keen – Goode-Crowley Theater (Marfa, Texas)
Rowdy can be fun. There’s a place for rowdy, and sometimes that place is a Robert Earl Keen show at a beer hall favored by roofers and frat boys. The hook for the January 19 show in Marfa, Texas, however, was its Marfa-ness. The little 250-seat theater in this one-stoplight town meant this was a sit-down show. Marfa, population 2,500, is hours from anywhere and on the way to nowhere. The audience really had to want to be there, and Keen himself must have been keen to perform in such an intimate setting.
This was the first of two sold-out nights, and the venue was standing-room-only with local folks and ardent fans who’d come from all over. Opening the show was Ross Cashiola, a Chicago guy now living in Marfa who crooned a handful of brave and revealing originals. Cashiola’s song “Skydiving”, with its concision, delicacy and punch, stilled the otherwise restless room.
This had been billed as a solo acoustic event. It wasn’t, but no matter. Keen took the mike and without a word his crackerjack band swung into “Feeling Good Again” and then “Gringo Honeymoon”. “Wild Wind” and “Mariano” followed. Many in the crowd sang along, softly. The wooden floors jounced with all the booted toes unconsciously keeping time. Keen seemed slightly subdued, as if gauging the gig before genuinely letting loose.
He told a joke and headed into “Sonora’s Death Row” and “Wolf And Bear”. He then set his guitar aside, eyed the audience, and took the mike off the stand.
“This is a song about love and Hank Williams and baseball — a triple shot of hit material,” he said, and pedal steel guitarist Marty Muse slid into the boozy wail of “The Great Hank Williams”. Although he’s a fine, sensitive balladeer, Keen is arguably best in the droll landscape of the perverse. Things suddenly clicked. His performance went from being another day at the office to a guy and his band knocking out a genuinely odd song that completely worked.
After the loony “Merry Christmas From The Family”, Keen stood solo for “This Old Porch”. Midway through, he ruminated on how to define his music. It came to him, he said, while staring out the window of a motel in Bakersfield, California. His was “Best Western” music.
When the band returned, the energy level dialed up four ticks. The Robert Earl Keen Band is seamless and pro, but guitarist Rich Brotherton rises above even that standard. A rocketing “Amarillo Highway” had Keen proclaiming he’d done the song so long that it was no longer Terry Allen’s. “It’s my fucking song now,” he declared.
The crowd yipped and yowled. No longer content to sit still, cowboys gave up the constraint of theater seats to congregate along the wall, waving their hats and draining beer after beer. “Corpus Christi Bay” and “Dreadful Selfish Crime” came before the finale, a great, raucous, locomotive version of Keen’s much-loved anthem “The Road Goes On Forever”.
Stomping brought them back for “Rollin’ By” and “Apt. 9” before the concert’s clear, sweet finish: The band lined up with acoustic guitars and Keen on mandolin, and, unaided by microphones and in harmony, they sang Billy Joe Shaver’s “Live Forever”, strolling offstage for good as they reached the song’s final chords.