The Phoenix band, S. David Sloan & the Rogues, finally took pity on him and offered to learn a few of his songs and to back him up during their sets. Though they were a country cover act, the Rogues were offstage fans of the same kind of music Lovett’s parents had listened to — Big Joe Turner, Buck Owens, Ray Price. When Lovett sang his Houston coffeehouse songs with the Rogues behind him, the two sides of his musical personality came together. Suddenly he could sing his quirky stories with some real swing and harmony behind him.
“They were the house country band at a club called Mr. Lucky’s in Phoenix,” Lovett recalls, “and the fact that they had jazz and swing influences even as they played contemporary country hits was really interesting to me. That fit right in with my view that music was music. When I met those guys, I thought to myself, ‘Wow, this is really what I’d like to do.’
“One of the things that first made me want to make up blues-flavored swing songs like ‘She’s No Lady’ was hearing Uncle Walt’s Band [the 1970s Austin trio of Walter Hyatt, Champ Hood and David Ball] because they proved you could swing without a big orchestra. I would write similar songs, and I would think, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if I could actually perform them like that?’ When I was playing solo to 50 people in Austin or College Station, that didn’t seem realistic. Meeting the Rogues, however, took it out of the realm of imagination and made it seem real.”
The Rogues included guitarist Billy Williams, who went on to co-produce most of Lovett’s albums; guitarist Ray Herndon, who later became a member of McBride & the Ride; keyboardist Matt Rollings, who later emerged as Nashville’s top keyboard session player of the ’90s; and bassist Matt McKenzie, who went on to play sessions for Mickey Newbury and Don Williams as well as Lovett.
Lovett was so enamored of the Rogues that he traveled repeatedly to Arizona in 1984 to demo eighteen of his own songs with them. He would then take four-song cassettes to Nashville and hand them out to anyone who might be able to help.
One of those cassettes fell into the hands of Guy Clark, who was so impressed that he set up a meeting with Tony Brown, a former sideman for Elvis and Emmylou Harris who had become the head of MCA Nashville. Brown eventually signed Lovett, and when his self-titled debut album emerged in 1986, it consisted of ten of the Scottsdale demos with some Nashville overdubbing. Clark wrote the liner notes, saying, “The first time I met Lyle, I thought he was a French blues player. You can’t tell he’s Texas ’til you hear the songs. Then he’s so Texas he doesn’t have to say it.”
“For someone to feel that confident in his own opinion and act on it is unusual anywhere,” Lovett says with a trace of lingering bewilderment, “but that’s what Guy did. That kind of support gave me credibility in Nashville that made a huge difference. The first time I met Townes was backstage at the Kerrville Folk Festival in 1985. I was walking offstage and he introduced himself, saying, ‘Some people I respect say you’re alright.’ Guy had mentioned me to him, and I just thought, ‘Whoa, I can’t imagine higher praise.’
“Being around Guy is an opportunity to learn how to be in the world, how to value what’s important. That’s what it’s like being around Robert Altman. The only reason I tried acting in movies was Robert Altman. He came to a show of ours in 1990 at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles and then called me up and asked me if I wanted to be in The Player. I did it because I thought it would be a good experience to learn from him. For me, to work on these Altman films [Lovett has acted in four — The Player, Short Cuts, Pret A Porter and Cookie’s Fortune — and scored a fifth, Dr. T & The Women] was like going to school.
“I had always liked his point of view, his sense of humor; it’s fun to see the world through his eyes. He strips away the pretense of almost any situation and gets to the heart of the matter. And he’s like that all the time, even in conversation.”
Lovett was a member of “The Class of 1986” — four promising country singers who all made their major-label debuts that year. Dwight Yoakam and Randy Travis went on to become major neo-traditionalist stars, but Lovett and Steve Earle had a more ambiguous reception. The latter two, both signed and produced by Tony Brown (as was Nanci Griffith a year later), penetrated the country top-10 singles chart, but by 1988, it was unclear if there was room on country radio for Earle’s rabble-rousing or Lovett’s quirky swing. By 1989, it was clear there wasn’t.
“Tony Brown saw early on that the people buying my records weren’t the mainstream country audience,” Lovett acknowledges. “He thought there was an audience that would support my music, but it wasn’t that audience. He was perceptive enough and generous enough to get the L.A. office involved in my career.”
Thus, the Los Angeles arm of MCA was willing to gamble some tour-support and recording-budget money on Lovett’s “Large Band” concept. It paid off. From the 300 people who packed the Birchmere that first night in 1988 to the thousands who packed the outdoor theaters for Lovett’s tour this past summer, there has been a large, sometimes huge, audience for his blend of singer-songwriter quirkiness and full-bodied swing.
It’s similar to the audience Earle eventually found by a very different route. Earle has observed that his following is not the blue-collar workers he often sings about, nor is Lovett’s the ranchers and farmers he grew up with. Rather, it’s educated, urban liberals; the National Public Radio audience; the readers of this magazine.
“I feel really lucky that Tony helped me find my audience while allowing me to be myself,” Lovett says. “It seems weird that it’s a hard thing to walk through the world and just be yourself, but it is, especially when you’re just starting out in this business. The key is making money for the people you work for. If you do that, they’ll let you do what you want.
“If all these Texas songwriters are united by anything, it’s that — just being yourself. All these songs — whether they come from Guy or Townes or Lefty Frizzell or Lightnin’ Hopkins — embody an independence. When you grow up in Texas, you believe in that as a birthright. When Ray Benson came to Texas from Philadelphia or Jerry Jeff from New York, that’s what they latched onto.
“You can’t overestimate how important Willie Nelson coming back to Texas was. When he threw off the mantle of the Nashville songwriter, moved back to Texas and basically became himself, that led to his greatest success. That encouraged everyone else to do the same thing.
“Willie and Ray Charles — no one sings better and no one is braver in following their tastes and inclinations. They show the rest of us that music is music, and just how much fun it can be.”
ND contributing editor Geoffrey Himes has written for such now-defunct music magazines as Musician, Crawdaddy, Country Music, New Country, Fi, Request and Replay. And don’t even ask him about the now-vanished websites he’s written for.
