Over the decades, Houston’s subdivisions and shopping malls have crept up close to Klein; the family’s acres of pasturage are now a green oasis in the suburban sprawl. Lovett’s youngest uncle, whose name is actually Calvin Klein, raises beef on the farm now. He has worked with cattle all his life, but you never know when a bull might turn on you, and last year one unexpectedly knocked Calvin down. Lovett jumped in to help and got his fibula smashed into 16 pieces of bone. The nephew even had to give up his favorite hobby, riding motorbikes, for a year. But it was a fluke accident, and it didn’t change Lovett’s mind about working around the farm.
“My dad was retired when he passed away,” he says, “and he ran everything at home. After he passed, I came back and got involved in the things he had been doing. Doing his chores gave me a renewed interest in actually working on the place, being involved with the cows, getting up in the morning and going out to the barns. Life wouldn’t be any better if I could go through the world and do the things that were important to my dad. That to me, because of his example, is what life is about, and when it is over, if you’ve done that, it will have been a good life.”
Lovett began playing guitar in second grade and joined the Future Farmers of America Band at his high school. But he was never a record collector or a lead singer until he went off to Texas A&M in College Station, a couple hours Northwest of Houston. During his second year there, he found a block near campus where you could usually find a parking place. On one of the porches lining the block, a tall, gangly kid was often sitting in a second-hand chair, playing an acoustic guitar. Lovett finally worked up the nerve to go introduce himself, allowing that he too played guitar. The kid said his name was Robert Earl Keen, and invited Lovett to come over and pick sometime.
That house was memorialized in a song, co-written by the two friends, that appeared as “The Front Porch Song” on Keen’s first album in 1984 and as “This Old Porch” on Lovett’s 1986 debut. The initial verses comparing the porch to a Hereford bull, a plate of enchiladas and a 70-year-old cowboy are mostly Keen’s, as is the comic monologue on his version. But Lovett wrote the final verse, the one that characteristically put the sting in the joke: “This old porch is just a long time/Of…remembering the falling down/And the laughter of the curse of luck/From all of those passersby/Who said we’d never get back up.”
“It was just a great place,” Lovett told New Country magazine in 1996. “It was just close enough to campus that people would congregate there. You’d go over to Robert’s house between classes. Anybody that played would pick up an instrument and sit out there and play. People got to where they left their instruments over there. It was a real nice center of activity, a real community of acoustic players….You could always sit down and play with somebody.”
That sense of community is the key element in the whole Texas singer-songwriter ethos. Whether it’s Van Zandt, Jerry Jeff Walker and Mickey Newbury in Houston in 1968; Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, Butch Hancock and Terry Allen in Lubbock in 1972; Clark, Earle, Crowell and Richard Dobson in Nashville in 1975; Lovett, Keen, Nanci Griffith and Eric Taylor in Houston in 1977; or Ray Wylie Hubbard, Patty Griffin, Jimmy LaFave, Gurf Morlix and Troy Campbell in Austin in 1999; that habit of sitting around someone’s house or a nightclub after it’s closed and sharing new songs produces a different kind of songwriting.
In those situations, away from paying audiences and check-writing executives, when empty bottles cover every flat surface and an acoustic guitar rests on every right thigh, the motivation for singing a new song is not to win applause or a contract but to impress your peers. Craftsmanship becomes the highest goal, and you try to come back each month or each week with a new song that might finally win that elusive nod of approval from Guy Clark or Townes Van Zandt or whoever the unspoken arbiter of the gathering happens to be.
The years spent in such an environment instill a deeply ingrained belief in the well-turned phrase, the seductive guitar figure and the concise narrative. Later on, when you’re battling with the industry’s pressures, you have a bedrock of standards that cannot be pushed aside.
“I want to be successful enough to keep my job,” Lovett admits, “but somehow making the records the way I want to, without outside influence, with freedom of thought, is still the most important thing. And that attitude comes from those nights at the Anderson Fair Retail Restaurant in Houston, where, after the gig was over, Robert and I would sit around with Nanci Griffith, Eric Taylor, Vince Bell, Blaze Foley and Shake Russell. We would play songs till four in the morning and tell stories about Guy and Townes. It was like a graduate school in songwriting.
“You know, I didn’t know a lot about music when I first came to College Station. But I knew what I liked and I tried to soak up as much as possible. I’d be standing at the Budget Tapes & Records and the guy working there would say, ‘Have you heard this Guy Clark record? You should check it out.’ I would take it home and listen to it and immediately start learning how to play the songs on guitar. I was certainly drawn to the fact that Guy and Townes and Willis Alan were Texans; they spoke in a language that I could understand. In those years between ’76 and ’84, they became people I would go and listen to.
“I would take those songs and play them at my gigs in restaurants and bars. These weren’t listening rooms full of music patrons; we were playing anywhere we could, just to play. I loved playing ‘Pancho & Lefty’ for people who had just come off the golf course and were waiting to eat their steak; I was proud that I could play them something they hadn’t heard on the radio that day. I was proud that I could play them a song that good.”
The Texas singer-songwriter culture encourages you to come up with your own songs, and Lovett was soon mixing his originals in with his Van Zandt and Clark covers. He was booking the Basement Coffeehouse on the Texas A&M campus; he was covering music (and the City Council) for The Battalion, the student newspaper; he was picking up gigs in Houston and Austin. The shy kid from a rural Lutheran school had plunged head first into the Texas bohemia of the late ’70s.
But he hadn’t forgotten his family roots, and after graduating with a B.A. in journalism in 1978, he pursued an M.A. in German. That took him to Europe, and he brought along his guitar. He was invited to perform at a fair in Luxembourg in 1983, but upon arriving at the event, he discovered he had signed up for the gig from hell. Between sets by a pop top-40 band from Miami and a country top-40 band from Phoenix, Lovett was expected to stand on the floor in front of the stage and sing while stagehands shuffled equipment behind him.
