“I was a year older than him and was really involved in athletics,” said Charlie, picking up the thread. “We had a little bitty room together with two beds side by side, and when he brought that bass in, I remember it like it was yesterday. He opened it up for the first time, and man, the smell of that case…
“I might have waited another three or four years or something. Music was something I always wanted to do, but when would I do it? That was the catalyst.”
Bandera, a small town some 50 miles northwest of San Antonio founded in 1856, grandly styles itself “The Cowboy Capital of the World” (owing in large part to the proliferation of dude ranches in the area). The precincts around Bandera might boast many more sheep and mohair goats than cattle, but it did have a plenitude of one cowtown essential: beer joints and honky-tonks. Venerable dancehalls and saloons such as the Cabaret, the 11th Street Cowboy Bar and Arkey Blue’s Silver Dollar still line the main drag, and the Saturday night dance is as firmly entrenched a local institution as the Friday night football game.
“He’s got the perspective of someone who grew up in a small town but was surrounded by great music all the time,” Kelly observes of Bruce’s formative years. “But it was still a small town.”
Country music, with its storytelling legacy and its small-scale views of human frailties and triumphs, wound through Bandera just as indelibly as the nearby Medina River wound through the Texas hill country.
At the same time, San Antonio’s urban sprawl and “ranchette” subdivisions were spreading their tentacles westward. The big city was easily accessible, and that hard-charging metropolitan sensibility — San Antonio is, among other things, the head-banging heavy-metal capital of Texas — found its way into the Robison boys’ sensibilities as well.
“We have all kinds of influences,” Bruce acknowledges. “Charlie always makes fun of me if I mention Don Williams. He’ll say, ‘You never tell anybody that we listened to Judas Priest!’ Well, I’m not hiding it! It just comes out in his music more than mine. I grew up in San Antonio, you know? Go down there and listen to the radio and see what you think a 13-year-old boy would have been listening to.”
“We’ve taken turns in our lifetimes being the catalyst for the other person,” says Charlie. “When we first got to Austin, Bruce was saying, ‘I can’t be in a band in Austin.’ And I went out and got into a band. And right after that, he said, ‘Hell, I guess you can do that.’ And when he started going at songwriting, I went, ‘Well, you can’t do that…’ But I really liked what he was doing, so I set out to do that as well.
“We’ve been lucky to have each other to kind of push each other through little spots. It’s wasn’t like giving each other a pep talk, it’s more like, ‘If he can do it…'”
(One might, at some risk, even extend the sibling give-and-take to their spouses. Bruce married country chanteuse Kelly Willis in 1996; Charlie wed Emily Erwin, the banjo-playing sister in the Dixie Chicks, in 1998.)
The Robison brothers hit Austin in the late 1980s, and both found themselves briefly in the same band: Chaparral, a local-favorite honky-tonk ensemble helmed by Jeff Hughes. Another collaboration between Bruce and Charlie, the Weepers, boasted the sort of organic blood harmonies that only family can produce, but that group fell by the wayside in short order as well.
“They’re two of my best friends, but they’re as different as two brothers can be,” said cowboy singer Chris Wall in an interview several years back. “Charlie sings Bruce’s songs great [but] they fight a little bit, like brothers do, and they can’t stay in a band together.”
Soon enough, each of the brothers’ essential temperaments asserted itself. Bruce retreated to concentrate on songwriting, and Charlie made a beeline for center stage in the aptly named good-time honky-tonk band the Millionaire Playboys.
Bruce released his eponymously titled first album in 1995 on the Austin-based micro-indie label Vireo Records. The cover art boasted, if that’s the word, “Bruce Robison” written by hand, and a scribbled stick figure on a plain white background.
The presentation may have been beyond primitive, but the album was a gold mine waiting to happen. It contained two future #1 country smash hits: “Angry All The Time”, which became a massive hit duet for Tim McGraw & Faith Hill in 2001, and “Travelin’ Soldier,” co-written with Farrah Braniff, which the Dixie Chicks took to the top of the charts in 2003. Kelly Willis cut her own duet with Bruce on “Angry All The Time” (a song whose genesis lay in the breakup of Bruce and Charlie’s parents), and she would also record “Take It All Out On You” and “Not Forgotten You”. Meanwhile, Charlie would cherry-pick the wiseass barroom rocker “Red Letter Day” for one of his own projects.
A second indie album, Wrapped, came out in 1997; a Nashville-tweaked version of it was re-released by Sony’s Lucky Dog imprint the following year. A second disc for Lucky Dog, Long Way Home From Anywhere, came out in ’99.
Country Sunshine followed in 2001; released on Bruce’s own Boar’s Nest label, it was a homegrown reaction to the Nashville releases (which Robison felt were over-amped and under-promoted). The album contained a droll paean to a fellow Austin tunesmith called “What Would Willie Do”, along with a Dixieland-flavored track and several lower-key meditations on love gone right, wrong and sideways.
