The song was “Patty McBride”, about a woman whose “magical songs just poured out from inside.” The recorded version ended up on the first Bare Jr. album: “We all want to love you/And we all want to be near you/As if we too could shine,” he sang. Maybe there was a little in there about his father, a little something from the point of view of the kid who watched others clamor to be near the dad.
Sometimes people have trouble connecting Bobby Bare Jr., the singer of bent and tortured rock songs, to Bobby Bare Jr., the child of wealth and privilege. “I thought he was kind of a goofy star kid when I first met him,” says Mark Nevers, who moved beyond that impression quickly enough, and has, with Bare, co-produced all of the Young Criminals work. In truth, Bobby is a goofy star kid (and proud of it, too), but that designation does not prevent conflict or sadness.
Bobby’s dad was around quite often. A man who’s on the road playing music 200 days a year is home for 165 days, and when he’s home he has no office-dictated agenda to follow. Thus, “Let’s go fishing for a week” was not an uncommon father-to-son suggestion in the Bare household.
“I don’t remember missing him, even though he was gone a ton,” Bare Jr. says. “He was a great dad. But when he was gone, he left me at home with his wife, who was my mother. That was the toughest part. She was real angry that he was gone. That’s what I remember. All the girl issues come from that: just being way too close to mom. She needed someone to endorse whatever tragedy there was of the day, and to empathize.
“Dad would leave, and mom would drag me through all of her drama. She needed someone to feel that drama, and I was there. My sister died when I was 9 and she was 15. She woke up Thanksgiving eve, having a baby. Nobody in the house knew she was pregnant. You’ve got a 15-year-old having a baby, and within two or three weeks she dies. That was 1976. That’s a bunch of darkness to take on. And there I was, left alone with the mommy. I was the man of the house.”
Time, and mother Jeannie Bare’s willful decision to live in the present (and to assist her family in doing the same), helped take the family out of crisis. Bobby calls her “the hero in the story,” and “the greatest person in any of our lives,” but the loss of a sibling is nothing that can be overcome through positive thoughts or rock ‘n’ roll or anything much else. It is something to be weathered, not to be healed.
“It was easy growing up for me in Nashville,” Bobby sings on his new album’s song “Visit Me In Music City”. The line is supposed to be kind of funny, and not supposed to be true.
Soon after working up the nerve to show his songs to friends, Bare began gathering musicians to help him play them front of audiences. One of those songs was “You Blew Me Off”, which he says “was an early, simple, ridiculous one. It’s just ‘Tobacco Road’ with Gary Glitter, but it works.”
Once he started fronting a band, Bare had a publishing deal after five gigs, and a record deal after ten. Several pals from Belmont University had become bigwigs in the music industry, and those contacts proved invaluable, giving him people to whom he could play “You Blew Me Off”. The song did the rest, as both the publishing deal and the contract with Immortal Records were spurred by executives’ belief that the “You Blew Me Off” had what it takes to get college kids to chug, cheer and buy. The singer-songwriter quit his bike shop gig, paid his bills with a combined $180,000 in publishing and record deal advance money, and began a rock ‘n’ roll ride.
“I got to buy a condo and not work,” he said. “It’s mostly, ‘What can you do to not have to go back to your day job?’ Everything else is just cake. I just wanted to play. Them giving you money for it is just stupid, just ridiculous. I only got that because someone had bought millions of Korn records, and Immortal had money from that. Shit, I wasn’t complaining. They gave us a tour bus. We were losing $1,200, every single gig. They were still like, ‘Go on out there.'”
Though Bobby wrote and sang the songs, the act was known by the band name Bare Jr. The group featured a rhythm section of drummer Keith Brogdon and bassist Dean Tomasek. Tracy Hackney, a friend Bare met at the bike shop, plugged in his dulcimer and found a way to make that mountain instrument sound like Armageddon when run through an amp; it was both a highly musical addition and a highly valuable gimmick. Grimes played lead guitar.
At this point, Bare was a screamer and a leaper, hollering self-disapproving pronouncements (“I’m a failure as a faker!” or “I hate myself and it’s all your fault”) above a soundscape that was packed with guitar-stacked southern punch. “You Blew Me Off” was the single, but it was a twang-less aberration on the 1998 debut Boo-Tay album, and even as it neared the Top 10 on some rock charts it didn’t spur album sales.
“They spent like, almost $600,000 just on radio…on payola, basically, to promote that record,” Bare said. “They didn’t do a video. I don’t know, it was kind of weird. As soon as it starts dipping, everybody backs off. Mostly what was weird about it is the single’s doing real well but nobody’s buying the record. That track was totally different than everything else on the record. People who did buy it got it and went, ‘This is kind of a country album, and I thought I was buying something a lot closer to Korn.'”
Bare Jr. toured constantly, through the rise and fall of “You Blew Me Off”. The road was grueling and electrifying, more the former after it became obvious the single wasn’t going to crack the Top 5 or spur significant album sales (Boo-Tay sold about 25,000 copies in total).
“The worst was towards the end,” Grimes says. “I remember Tracy saying, ‘Oh, this is great: We’re going to be home in only five more weeks.’ The fact that it was five weeks, that was supposed to be good.”
