“I hope so,” he chuckles.
“It’s all harmonies to me,” he continues. “And when I heard ‘Tennessee Jed’, it was exactly the same, from that point of view, as the Webb Pierce song.
“We all have all kinds of influences. The great thing about growing up in Bandera was that you heard the old stuff all the time on KKYX and KBUC. And you had the Cabaret and the weekly dances.” And don’t forget Judas Priest…
Dance-floor shuffles aside, it’s the poignant, quiet moments of songs such as “I Never Fly” and “Don’t Call It Love” and “Days Go By” that linger after the lights go out.
Eleven Stories was recorded at Premium Recording Service, a new studio grafted onto the back of a bungalow in a funky blue-collar neighborhood in North Austin. The bungalow proper is the office for Bruce’s own label, Premium Records (the label’s first release will be an album by the Damnations, produced by Bruce).
It is the kind of neighborhood that might have been lifted from a Bruce Robison lyric. Rumbling freights roll down railroad tracks by the front door, past what used to be a 24-hour pool hall and beer joint situated across the street from a grade school. A cafe called Six Napkins sits across the way. Funky.
Inside, however, the studio is all polished wood and cavernous space and lots of primo outboard gear. The Dixie Chicks, George Strait, Lee Ann Womack, Tim ‘n’ Faith and the other chart-topping luminaries who have cut Bruce’s songs paid for the set-up.
“It’s funny, but when we had some success, all we did was hunker down and try to be real smart about everything,” Robison recalls. “I wound up getting a pair of boots made, I think.
“But I decided I wanted a place to put [the money] into, and I bought this place and ended up going crazy on it. It ended up being this huge indulgence. But it’s cool that Kelly likes it too.”
The studio is all about old-timey natural reverb and analog equipment, the better to make records that sound like 40-year-old classic country tracks. As with Bruce’s stated songwriting ideal of simplicity, Premium Recording Service is a testament to the virtues of an earlier era.
And speaking of an earlier era…the lighted sign outside the Broken Spoke in South Austin reads “Dine and Dance Texas Style.” Inside, the beer sign neons seem to go on forever and couples dance in counterclockwise circles. A pouch of Beech-Nut chewing tobacco lays unattended on a table next to a glass of scotch. If an order for a cosmopolitan has ever been placed inside the Spoke, owner James White, a fifth-generation Texan in a perennial cowboy hat and pearl-snap shirt, doesn’t want to hear about it.
It’s a Saturday night in January, and Bruce and his five-piece band are onstage, playing a set that hopscotches between Robison originals such as “Bed Of Ashes”, “Travelin’ Soldier”, “Tonight” and “Long Way Home From Anywhere” and covers of Merle Haggard’s “Big City”, Harlan Howard’s “Above And Beyond”, Johnny Rodriguez’ “Ridin’ My Thumb To Mexico” and Ray Price’s seminal Texas shuffle, “Crazy Arms”.
The dance floor is dead-solid packed. Coltish junior high girls dance with each other because the acne-pocked junior high boys are too shy to approach them; a 5-year-old with starched jeans and a big straw cowboy hat dances with his 4-year-old sister; older couples glide by serenely, as though on skates.
Toward the end of the first set, the band lights up a loping version of “You Ain’t Going Nowhere”. Their twangy take on the Dylan classic fits like a tongue-in-groove joint between the Ray Price shuffles and Bruce’s own honky-tonk epistles:
Ooh-whee, ride me high
Tomorrow’s the day my bride’s gonna come
Oh Lord, are we gonna fly
Down in the easy chair…
The performance marks probably the first time anyone had ever sung about Genghis Khan’s sheet onstage at the Broken Spoke. But who cared? The dance floor was full, the music was swinging, and Bruce was standing onstage with his shirttail out, doing something even a gridiron hero like Vince Young could never aspire to. Every once in a while in life, you run across a perfect moment.
ND contributing editor John T. Davis is a journalist and author living with The Beautiful Lawyer in Austin, Texas.
