“The last time, I felt like, ‘Well, I’m signed with Arista, I have this worldwide connection here, and maybe some things that limit me are just particular regional references,'” explained Keen, who recorded Picnic in Athens, Georgia, with producer John Keane and an aim of concocting an edgier, guitar-driven sound that would be more alternative, less country. The album sold a respectable 65,000, but that was a disappointment for Keen in comparison with the 100,000 or so sold by his previous year’s live album for Sugar Hill, No. 2 Live Dinner.
“I thought in some ways, I made the perfect compromise — I didn’t make anybody happy,” he said with a laugh. “The reviews were nice enough — hey, this guy’s trying something new, and some of it works and some of it doesn’t work so well — but that record was jagged. I like some of the songs on Picnic a lot, but when I listen to it from front to back, it doesn’t fly. It doesn’t feel like it’s one thing.”
This time through, the album felt naturally cohesive with every step. Keen wrote all of his material in a couple of weeks at home during the late spring, and sequenced the album in pretty much the same order it was written. He recorded in Austin with his regular band and co-producer Gurf Morlix (late of Lucinda Williams’ band, and a player on Keen’s two previous albums). He was determined to avoid a repeat of his previous recording experience.
“It was like night and day,” he said. “When I went to Athens, I was really afraid, because I didn’t know anybody, and I didn’t know John. So we go there, and it was just so friggin’ intense, and you were scared you were going to make a mistake. John is a good guy, but he is a humorless guy, and I don’t think I ever saw him laugh the whole time. At one point, my mouth broke out with some kind of ulcers and I had to go to the hospital, I was just so stressed out.
“Now, when we get to Austin, it’s Gurf — Mr. ‘Hey Dude, Whatever.’ But a real professional, real pro — he kept things rolling and you never felt like you were working. And I love the way he plays; he has that really big, fat electric guitar sound. He plays like he talks, very little. When he talks, you listen to him, and when he plays, you listen to him.”
If Walking Distance makes Keen sound comfortably settled in Bandera, enjoying the life he shares with his wife Kathleen (with whom he manages his career) and four-year-old daughter Clara Rose, the path he took to get there was as strange and circuitous as any you’ll find in a Robert Earl Keen song. After graduating from Texas A&M in 1980 with a degree in English, he initially got a job with the state’s Railroad Commission when he moved to Austin, and pursued music only as a sidelight. “I kind of secretly wanted to play music, but I never did come out and tell my parents; I didn’t have that kind of confidence,” he explained. “And then I kind of grew into it. I wasn’t making any money, but I was opening for a lot of my heroes, like Townes and Guy and Loudon Wainwright.”
Later that year, Keen had developed enough confidence to move to Nashville and try to hawk his songs. At a time when country music was floundering commercially, the city was uncharacteristically receptive to all sorts of creative renegades, with fellow Texans such as Lovett, Griffith, Darden Smith, Joe Ely and Steve Earle all making inroads. It was Earle, in fact, who counseled Keen to leave Austin, because, as Keen remembers it (in the same words Earle has been known to utter), “Austin had such a manana attitude. There were too many pretty girls and too much cheap dope in Austin.”
Expecting the doors to open as easily for him in Nashville as they had for his buddies, Keen was surprised to find them slammed shut. Whatever it was that he was selling, Nashville wasn’t buying.
“If you’re going to present some music to them, it had better be something that either they really understand, or something they recognize as great, like Lyle, but don’t understand,” he said. “What I was doing they recognized as kind of quaint. My favorite euphemism they use in Nashville is ‘intelligent lyrics.’ The first time I ever saw that was in a review of No Kinda Dancer (his self-financed 1984 debut) in Billboard, and I thought it was kind of cool. And then over the years I realized it was like a secret code in Nashville: ‘You don’t want to mess with this guy. This is going nowhere. These songs are not meant for radio.’
“I was on the same bill as Darden at a downtown thing, and I sat next to his A&R person, and she was writing notes on everybody. She got up, and I looked over, and it said, ‘Robert Something Keen — this guy’s Jerry Jeff, Billy Joe Shaver, same old shit.”
Keen eventually got the message and decided to return to Texas, where wife Kathleen had been paying the bills by working in Bandera at a nursing home her parents owned there. Keen harbored no ambitions about launching a musical career from such an isolated outpost. As a city kid from Houston who had failed in Nashville, he looked at Bandera as more like a last resort.
“I thought my career was over, and I didn’t know what I was going to do in Bandera, Texas,” he said. “At first it was like it’s the moon out there, because there’s no grass. I’d work construction and make a few bucks here and there, but all the time I was thinking I had to find a career. I got really whipped and remember just sitting for a month, doing nothing. And then I started writing songs again and that kind of brought me around. I realized that I’d been writing these fake songs and trying to pass them off in Nashville, because I thought maybe that was the kind of song they wanted to hear.”
