With 1989’s West Textures, Keen’s writing came into its own. “The Road Goes On Forever” gave him a signature tune; “Mariano” and “Love’s A Word I Never Throw Around” showed his ability to hit deeper with more serious fare. In “Leavin’ Tennessee”, he gave a belated kiss-off to the Nashville experience that had almost soured him on music forever.
After playing clubs as a solo act and opening concerts for Van Zandt and Clark, he started developing a reputation in the ’90s as a live-wire performer, a guy with a reckless edge of unpredictability. Once 1993’s A Bigger Piece Of Sky began to receive some Texas airplay, he formed a band to play over the noise of the bigger joints necessary to accommodate his audience. From his base in Bandera, he and Kathleen started running a fan club and producing a newsletter that now has a mailing of 8,000. Along the way, he decided to stop billing himself as Robert Earl Keen Jr., figuring that even folks who had learned to accept three names from Texans might be having some trouble with four.
Then came Joe Ely’s recordings of “The Road Goes On Forever” and “Whenever Kindness Fails” on his 1992 album Love And Danger, giving a critical boost to Keen’s roadhouse credibility. Even bigger, in terms of mainstream exposure, was the inclusion of “The Road Goes On Forever” as the title track of the 1995 album by the Highwaymen, the supergroup featuring Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson. Against all expectations, what hadn’t worked in Nashville turned into a thriving cottage industry in Bandera, with the Keens employing almost a dozen folks (including the band) to keep the Robert Earl Show on the road.
“I guess I’m ambitious without focus,” said Keen. “I’ve always wanted to get to a larger audience, because I want to keep this thing going. I mean, I don’t want another job. I wish I could go back and learn more about music, be more musical than I am, but the whole thing’s kind of caught up in this big tidal wave right now. I want my shot at playing as big a things as I can play, and so far I’ve been too cocky to say I’ve hit my limit.
“Of course, I haven’t played the rodeo in Houston, Texas, but my booking agent knows I’d take that without even calling me. And you know that would be a miserable situation: You can’t hear worth a shit and nobody can hear half the songs, but the idea of playing to 60,000 people is that good.”
With a band that features Keen’s boyhood buddy Bryan Duckworth on fiddle and Austin virtuoso Rich Brotherton on guitar, his performance has all the musical firepower it needs. With recent material such as “My New Life In Old Mexico” and “That Buckin’ Song” likely to join mainstays such as “The Road Goes On Forever” and “Copenhagen” as rabble-rousing highlights, his audience is likely to grow wherever cold beer warms a Saturday night.
If there’s a limit to Keen’s popular potential, it likely lies in his singing, since his flat, nasal range will never be timbre for Caruso’s. On Picnic, his delivery sounded all the more wooden in comparison with the Cowboy Junkies’ Margo Timmins, who shared vocals on five of the album’s cuts.
“I worry about that all the time,” he said of his singing, which is more supple on Walking Distance. “I think I sing better when I’m surrounded by acoustic instruments and not so much heavy-hitting stuff. Now John Keane was a good coach, and he really hears things very well, but it got to the point where I was really nervous and self-conscious about it, and felt like I was losing some of my weirdness or sloppiness or whatever it is I do. Where Gurf would just say, ‘It sounds good.'”
Knowing his limits, Keen tends to record material by others who have similar vocal ranges — Terry Allen, James McMurtry, Dave Alvin. “I just pick songs that I really like from other people, and generally they’re kind of singers like I am,” explained Keen, who covers “Travelin’ Light” by Peter Case and Bob Neuwirth and “Billy Gray” by Norman Blake on Walking Distance. “I like those peoples’ voices, and it’s just kind of a nod to the art or the craft. This is a song I’d write if I could.”
Maybe part of the key to Keen’s appeal — whether he’s revving his way down Allen’s “Amarillo Highway” or leading the holiday serenade of “Merry Christmas From Fhe Family” — is that the more you drink, the better he sounds. And the younger you are, the less you care.
“I have never, ever stood in front of a 60-year-old rancher in a white shirt and khakis and a straw cowboy hat and gone anything but, ‘I bet this old man thinks I sing like shit,'” he said with a self-deprecating laugh. “It drives me crazy, but I’m just glad that all his kids don’t seem to mind.”
Don McLeese always rides home from the Robert Earl Show with a designated driver.
