Goodtime Charlie has an ornery streak in him. The same reckless defiance that got Charlie Robison booted from Warner Bros. Nashville while in the midst of recording his mid-’90s label debut turned even more dangerous with 1998’s Life Of The Party, a corpse-littered song cycle that ended with a fantasy of Nashville in flames.
Now the question is whether that very same Nashville is ready to embrace that very same Charlie as the latest savior of mainstream country — the real deal, the guy who’ll shatter the mold, return some artistic credibility to the airwaves, and, oh yeah, move a few million units in the process.
Is Charlie, as the swaggering kickoff track to his new Step Right Up album puts it, the “Right Man For The Job”?
Clearly, the commercial stakes are higher than they were for Robison’s previous release. Last time out, Sony Nashville’s Lucky Dog imprint threw him a bone, giving him a small recording budget for Life Of The Party, complete creative freedom, and the sort of below-the-radar promotional nudge accorded music that stands little chance with country radio.
A few years later, times have changed. A mounting chorus in Nashville and beyond has anointed Robison the poster boy for a resurgence of progressive country, the make-or-break artist who can borrow the chip from Steve Earle’s shoulder and somehow turn it multiplatinum. And who just happens to be married to a Dixie Chick.
“As an industry, everyone’s grasping for an answer to the deterioration of country music’s success, and what kills me is the answer is sitting right there,” says Mike Kraski, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Sony Nashville. “It’s the same answer that there was to the slickness of ‘the Nashville sound’ and to the Urban Cowboy phenomenon — a return to artistry that’s honest and true, something that cannot be contrived. Charlie’s the right man at the right time.”
So the label’s committed to turning Charlie into a star?
“We’d better,” responds Kraski, with a nervous laugh, “or you won’t be talking to me the next time out.”
In mainstream country, a longer creative leash typically accompanies a tighter commercial collar, as the industry experiments to see what might possibly work before reverting to a reliance on formula. Almost invariably, when market share diminishes and sales plummet, major labels begin investing in artistry that would previously have been considered defiantly anticommercial, from Willie and Waylon in the ’70s, through Dwight Yoakam, Lyle Lovett and Steve Earle in the ’80s. At Nashville’s annual Country Radio Seminar, while the industry waits for the next Garth to arrive and the cloning to ensue, Cinderella Charlie was the belle of this year’s ball.
“When I walked through CRS this time, all these program directors were telling me they were huge fans and couldn’t wait to play the record, whereas, for the last two years, those people didn’t look in my direction,” Robison said.
“Every year there’s somebody who’s going to save country music, and now they’ve put that flag in my hand. I don’t expect that it’ll be a long ride, but I might get a couple of songs on the radio that are cooler than the rest, before Nashville finds a way to completely screw things up again. Somebody’s going to come along, sell a lot of records and make country radio totally awful the next 10 years. Thank God it wasn’t Brad Paisley, that little moron.”
But tell us what you really think, Charlie.
“After spending last week there, I’ve been out at the ranch in Bandera, building fence and just getting away from it all,” he continues. “It’s like the long shower you take after you’ve been raped.”
Talk to Robison long enough, and you start to feel that according him the substantial investment a commercial career demands is like handing over the keys to a brand new Cadillac — and then watching him peel away with a beer and cigarette in one hand, his other arm around some babe, careening around the corner at 70 mph, steering with his knees. Then again, if Nashville neuters those dangerous tendencies — the qualities that made Life Of The Party such a lethal delight — Charlie might as well be Travis Tritt, who showed how easily one of those standard-bearing saviors can morph into Kenny Rogers.
With his crooked grin and cocksure bravado, Robison isn’t looking to Nashville to make him into a star. In his mirror, he’s always been one — the tailback sensation of his high school football team in a football-crazy state, a highly-rated pitcher who went to college on a two-sport scholarship, then headed to Austin, where he promptly joined two of the hottest bands on the city’s retro-alternative country circuit.
Ask most male musicians, and they’ll tell you they picked up the guitar to pick up girls. Charlie never had that problem. And though his mid-’99 marriage to the former Emily Seidel raised his profile in the celebrity press, no one who knows Charlie thinks of him as Mr. Dixie Chick, basking in the reflected limelight of his banjo-playing wife’s band. He’s always been the spotlight kid.
“Charlie was a rock star from the time he was eight,” says his songwriting brother Bruce, younger by 21 months. Though towering over his older brother at 6’7″, Bruce long struggled to escape Charlie’s shadow. “He was the football star and really popular with the girls, and he’s been like that forever, a very charismatic individual. We were really close, but not lovey-dovey, more like the long tradition of rock ‘n’ roll brothers. I felt very competitive toward him, but he was always able to kick my ass at everything. I’m sure that being around him always being such a big deal colored who I ended up being.”
With the more flamboyant Charlie a magnet for attention, Bruce developed a subtler, more introspective brand of songwriting, better appreciated in listening rooms such as Austin’s Cactus Cafe than in the boisterous, beer-chugging environs of the Hill Country’s Gruene Hall (though he’s played both). Married to Kelly Willis, Bruce doesn’t mind ceding the spotlight to his wife and brother, both of whom regularly record his songs.
“I’m really happy to let Charlie and Kelly do my dirty work for me,” he says with a laugh. “I like performing, and I’m sure my recording career will find its own level, but I’m focused on the songwriting. And Charlie wants to have a really serious recording career, with all the bells and whistles attached to that.”
For the Robison boys, sports and music were all there was in Bandera, a Hill Country hamlet of less than 1,000, surrounded by ranches, 100 miles or so southwest of Austin. Charlie remembers playing in bands with his brother, when they’d barely bother to shower after a Friday night game to make some gig. The music that spoke deepest to him — Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits and Jackson Browne in particular — showed him the worlds of possibility beyond his Texas town.
“Jackson Browne was the main guy who made me want to get out of Bandera,” says Charlie. “First time I heard Jackson and Springsteen, it was like, okay, you come from a small town, but there’s like-minded people out there.”
When he graduated from high school, he couldn’t wait to leave home, with an athletic scholarship to Southwest Texas State in San Marcos providing the ticket. “I thought it was going to be like The Paper Chase, with symphony music playing in the quad and really knowledgeable teachers and a wide curriculum to study from — music and journalism and literature and all these things I wanted to learn about,” he remembers. “I’d meet a lot of cool people, and we’d sit around and smoke pot and talk about philosophy and Kerouac and Flannery O’Connor. And then I got there, and it was like spring break all year. People would come for the first day of class, take the midterm and come for the last day. The rest of the time was just a beer bash.”
Though Charlie’s never been averse to having a beer or three, he felt his college experience was narrowing rather than broadening his horizons, reducing him to a slab of beef for the football field. Brother Bruce experienced similar disillusionment after a knee injury on the basketball court sent him to the sidelines. The two of them bailed on college, pondering their next move.
“We were both washing out of everything at the same time, and we had nothing going on,” Bruce explains. “Austin had always been this beacon. Our grandparents had lived there, and we had an uncle there. If you were going to go where the cool people and the pretty girls were, Austin was obviously the place.”
Initially, the Austin of the mid-late 1980s seemed as close to heaven for Charlie as college had been hell, with the city’s economic bust proving a boon to musicians. Three-bedroom houses in the South Austin hills of Travis Heights, an easy stumble from the Continental Club, rented for less than three hundred bucks a month, which left little need to scramble for day jobs. Every evening, Charlie would roll out of bed around the break of dusk, hit the music bars, and then pass the guitar at the after-hours parties that might last from closing time past dawn. He fell in with a good crowd.
“The people at the Hole in the Wall [a storied UT campus-area dive] were the most well-read people in the world, and they’d all dropped out of college, too,” Charlie remembers. “There was just total freedom in Austin at that time. We called it ‘the second summer of love.’ Within this retro-country scene, I became friends with Jeff Hughes [Chaparral], Monte Warden [Wagoneers] and Rick Broussard [Two Hoots And A Holler] and all those guys, and it was really fun to be a part of at the time.”
Characteristically, while brother Bruce was laying back, surveying the situation, Charlie rushed headlong into joining two bands with the most popular residencies at the Black Cat Lounge on Sixth Street, playing with Two Hoots and a Holler on Mondays and Chaparral on Wednesdays. It was a good apprenticeship and great experience, but sideman was never Charlie’s suit. He soon formed the Millionaire Playboys and set his sights beyond Austin, earning a following in Dallas and Houston as well. Ultimately, he burned himself out on retro-country.
“Things started evolving,” he explains. “We all had the pompadours and the vintage clothes and the bolo ties, and it all seemed more about fashion than music. And I realized that the guys I really loved, they made their own sound. I started to go see a lot more Joe Ely shows and getting more back into the people who had gotten me into music in the first place. I wanted to write songs about the way my life is and be a troubadour rather than a Hee-Haw player.”
He continues, “Austin had so much to do with me becoming who I was, who I am right now, but it also had a lot to do with it taking a lot longer than it should have. There’s so may descriptions of Austin — the velvet coffin and things like that — and it got me real lazy, with a bad attitude of having that chip on my shoulder all the time. You know, fuck Nashville, fuck L.A., we’re Austin.”
Bandera, Charlie’s 1995 solo debut, was a departure from his Millionaire Playboy days, a folkishly transitional effort between retro flashbacks and the higher-octane honky-tonk he plays now. “Barlight” (an alcohol-fueled nursery rhyme) and “I Don’t Feel That Way” remain signature tunes to this day, with Bruce’s “Red Letter Day” occupying the album-opening slot. If John Prine had spend his formative years in Bandera, this could have been his music.
Barely distributed beyond Austin, the indie CD (on Vireo Records) served as a glorified demo, catching the ear of Warner Bros. Nashville, which heard plenty of commercial potential in the material with the right tweak and polish. For Charlie, signing with Warner Bros. was a little like going to college — it didn’t necessarily feel right, but he couldn’t let the opportunity pass.
“Warner Bros. really psyched my ass out,” he says. “When I asked if I’d be able to do the sort of music I’m doing now, they said, ‘Oh yes, definitely.’ They loved ‘Barlight’ and ‘I Don’t Feel That Way’, so I re-recorded the songs that they considered most commercial. Then I tried to put ‘Sunset Boulevard’ and some of the more off-kilter stuff on there, and they said they’d already given the first five sides I’d cut to the marketing department, and that they weren’t nearly commercial enough.”
Through the ensuing stalemate, the stubborn Charlie became more insistent on his creative freedom, while the frustrated label kept sending him boxes of what he terms “these inane, bullshit Nashville songs. I told them, ‘Hey, I’m a songwriter, and so are a lot of my friends. If I can’t write it, my brother can.’
“Finally, they said they had no recourse but to let me out of my contract. My A&R person, this woman who’d been my best friend for over a year, left a message saying she was going out of town on vacation and, literally, ‘Do not call me back or anybody else at Warner Bros.’ Wow, was that a slap in the face.”
Actually, it was more like business as usual. The experience reinforced all the negative impressions about the major-label racket that Charlie had brought with him from Austin to Nashville. He was on the verge of signing with Sugar Hill when Sony Nashville’s Blake Chancey (now the division’s A&R honcho and co-producer of the multiplatinum Dixie Chicks) came to the Robison brothers with a brainstorm — an imprint label inspired by his love for their music, one that functioned more like an indie than a Nashville major, with lower recording budgets and less commercial pressure. They could make the albums they wanted, sell them by touring tirelessly, and, if anything caught fire, they’d have the massive Sony system to promote a hit to its full potential.
“You get in a van and work 150 dates, every honky-tonk and college gig,” says Chancey. “And then you go back a second time and get bigger crowds and sell more records. With Charlie, all the guys wanted to buy him a beer and all the girls wanted to sleep with him. A lot of listeners who are already country fans dig what he does, but he also brings in plenty of people who aren’t mainstream country.”
Recorded in Austin with an assortment of local luminaries — from producer Lloyd Maines to keyboardist Riley Osbourn to guitarists David Grissom, Charlie Sexton and Rich Brotherton — Life Of The Party took more than a year to build any national momentum. Around Texas, however, the crowds kept growing, with Charlie’s troubadour storytelling, rock ‘n’ roll attitude and natural charisma suggesting a popular potential well beyond the alt-country circuit. Eventually, the video for “My Hometown” got the ball rolling, and his marriage to Emily Siedel provided a publicity hook. Watching his wife’s band progress from touring by bus to skyrocketing atop the charts helped give him perspective on his own career.
“I tell her all the time that success like that scares me to death,” says Charlie, who lives with his wife near Bandera (“in a double-wide, believe it or not”) outside the even smaller town of Comfort. “When they were coming out with their new record, I could not imagine it hanging over my head that if I only sold two million records, people would say he’s kinda lost it. Watching their growing pains helped me, seeing where they said no to the label and when they said yes. Choosing their battles.
“My independence is very important to me, and at first I was a grumpy dude all the time, with Sony saying this magazine has agreed to write about you if they can use this as an angle,” he continues. “Or magazines saying we’ll mention your album if you’ll give us a recipe that you and your Dixie Chick wife make at home. I don’t consider that publicity. I consider that bullshit.”
This time through, nobody is expecting that Charlie will need to hitch a ride on his wife’s coattails. With a bigger recording budget and a priority promotional campaign, Step Right Up likely won’t require the 18 months it took Life Of The Party to chart. Though Robison insists his writing has become even less commercial, co-producer Chancey admits they made sure to include “three or four more radio-friendly songs.” To their credit, they first turned not to the Nashville mill but the underexplored NRBQ catalogue, with “I Want You Bad” the kickoff single (and “Comes To Me Naturally” another album highlight).
“I’m an NRBQ fanatic, and their songs are so right for somebody like me to take to country radio,” says Charlie. “I’ve always thought that NRBQ and the Rolling Stones are the greatest country bands.”
Among the other standout tracks, “Desperate Times” (another harder-rocking remake from the Bandera album) sounds like a close cousin to Robert Earl Keen’s “The Road Goes On Forever”; the hilarious string of shaggy-dog excuses on the accordion-powered “One In A Million” recalls the Texas Tornados; and the enigmatic parable of religious hypocrisy on the anthemic “The Preacher” likely will raise eyebrows in god-fearing country circles.
Perhaps the pivotal cut is “The Wedding Song”, a duet with the Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines, featuring the sort of romantic resignation you’re not likely to hear from Faith Hill and Tim McGraw (coincidentally, McGraw recorded brother Bruce’s “Angry All The Time”, for his new Set This Circus Down album). Is country radio ready for sentiments such as “I guess I still love you, if I ever did…And we will get by, for the rest of our lives”?
“I was almost that guy a hundred times, if the sperm hadn’t just missed,” says Charlie, who doesn’t expect listeners to jump to conclusions about his own marriage from such sardonic material. “Just because you’re living what people might think of as a fairytale life, you can still look back if you have any imagination. Springsteen was still writing about things he struggled with growing up when he was five albums in.”
If Robison’s album strikes commercial paydirt, you can expect a run on other Texas new-breed troubadours, similar to the rash of tinhorn outlaws that followed Waylon and Willie into the breach. In the wake of Jerry Jeff Walker and Robert Earl Keen, it sometimes seems as if any songwriter who can string “pickup truck,” “Shiner Bock” and “Hill Country” into the same verse will find favor among the frat rats who love to shout along.
“I am running, screaming away from that stuff as fast as I can,” says Charlie of the emerging bards of yahoo Lone Star jingoism. “This whole ‘Texas Music’ thing has gotten to be like the boy bands, and it’s getting pretty scary, the level of crap that’s out there. I think the guilty parties know who they are, but the whole state needs to realize that just because it’s from Texas and puts down Nashville doesn’t mean that it’s good. There’s just as many shitty Americana bands as shitty Nashville bands. I hate it when people say, ‘We love you and so-and-so and so-and-so,’ because I bristle really hard if they mention the wrong names.”
So, who are the right names?
“Oh, come on, you know,” he replies. “Roger Miller, Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle, Willie. If there’s somebody I’d love to be mentioned in the same sentence with, it’s Doug Sahm. We got to be good friends, and his passing was tough on me, because we had some pretty big plans of putting a band together in San Antone. He was the king of melding every kind of music, and that’s pretty much my goal.”
And who’s the ideal audience?
“When you get 2,000 people out there screaming the words to every song, it becomes more of a rally than a concert,” he says. “I draw a pretty good cross-section, and I can’t complain, but I would love it if everybody in the audience was a college-educated, beautiful, 25-year-old girl that listened to my songs and got every one of them.”
The longer that ND contributing editor Don McLeese lives in Des Moines, the better Bandera looks.
