Music is the hardest thing for me to write about. I don’t know why that is or maybe I do know why that is. I can do liner notes, but I have to struggle and struggle over them for four or five nights, maybe more, and I’m only talking about a few hundred words. A few hundred words is nothing compared to a novel. The thing is, on liner notes for an artist whose work you deeply respect or even love, they have to be the right words. They have to mean something. The words have to at least try to do justice to the music that’s recorded on the tracks. They need to try and pay a little homage if homage is rated.
I don’t think my words can adequately describe what good music actually sounds like and be accurate. There’s probably some musically educated dude in New York who reviews an orchestra performance for the paper and can do it eloquently. To me it’s easier to put it into a feeling I get when I hear a particular song. What it does to me. How it makes me feel. Or what it makes me think about. Music can push you around a curve and put you into a whole new mood, sometimes one that’s got some sweet regret, or good and satisfying memory, or an aching for a place in time you once had and wish you could have again, and it’s such a solid complement to the rituals of mating, driving, relaxing, and drinking. I don’t like to write without it and I wouldn’t cruise down to the store for crickets and cigarettes without it.
I lowride in the country in the evenings and listen to music. I do that just about every day of the year. Robert Earl Keen and his band’s music takes me to a place where I have been over and over and will be again, and it’s a place where you go inside a song with the people who are singing it and playing, and although different things are passing beside you, whether they be does and fawns standing in tall grass as the sun burns finally down, or a freshly planted cotton field with the tire tracks still showing in the dirt, the words and the melody are like familiar old friends you can hear from any time you want to. And I never get tired of that with them. Others CDs come and go. Theirs stay close to me, either in my truck or in the room where I work.
I bought my first little cheapie guitar on credit over twenty years ago, and I’m still just a three-chord player, but the firsthand realization of the difficulty encountered in trying to learn how to progress in musical skills only makes me even more in awe of somebody who can get up on the stage any night he wants to and make his guitar sing anything he wants it to. How much practice did it take him and the guys in the band to learn how to get that good? How many thousands of nights have they played? Rich, Bryan, Tom, Bill, they’re all so good, they’re all so professional. They each have tremendous individual talent, but together they hum like some kind of well-oiled machine that lives on an environmentally harmonious substance like honey and produces pleasurable sounds that lift your heart like the honking of wild geese flowing high and south overhead.
They couldn’t have always been this good, this polished. You wonder at what point they cross the line. For writers it comes when you publish a book and get paid for it, and it doesn’t count the years you spent dicking around with sappy short stories in your basement, because you might have quit, because lots do, musicians and songwriters and fiction writers alike, because so many of them have to give up their dreams for a lot of different reasons, and find something to do that pays regular, and I see it over and over, and maybe it’s kind of like all the coffee shops and beer joints and crappy clubs that struggling musicians play in before somebody starts paying them enough money to live on. Not just any homeboy can get up there with a microphone and a really good guitar and do a song that’ll break somebody’s heart. Some guys get it early, like George Jones, walking around town playing music when he was a kid, or hear it early, like Billy Joe Shaver, walking ten miles of train track outside Corsicana to see the Light Crust Doughboys and a new guy named Hank Williams sing. And I figure even the naturally talented have to work at it.
But I think God smiles on some unborn souls and gives them a gift. Some get born to sing and play for the rest of us. It’s all they want to do and at an early age they start working on it. They can even pass the gene down, witness Hank Jr. and Hank III, Lorrie Morgan, Pam Tillis, Jakob Dylan and Rosanne Cash, to name a few. But it doesn’t mean they get born knowing how to write songs and make the poetry that goes to music. They have to learn that.
Robert was born with that golden voice and the natural ability to sing. But he had to learn how to tell a story, how to write a song that would kick somebody’s ass. And that only comes with practice, work, revision. The person who puts down words of any kind has to write stuff and throw it away or fix it when it’s not good enough, and it’s always never good enough because that’s not the way it works. The poet who sings has to hone his craft like you hone a hunting knife on a stone until you know damn well it’s sharp enough to skin a deer. The words have to get better and better, the layers of meaning deeper and richer.
The band adds the heartbreakingly pretty music, and sings backing vocals.
Later it’s absolutely packed in the Austin Music Hall and I’m running late after the magnificent play and some hanging out, and I’ve absolutely missed the Continental Drifters, and I fear that ex-Bangle/Drifter guitarist/Psycho Sister Vicki Peterson is pissed at me, but luckily, months later, in Mississippi, she will tell me that it was only “kind of annoying.” Cars are in the parking lot by the herds and there’s a long line of people out front either paying their way in, waiting to be let in on their badges or wristbands, or getting checked for handguns. I scoot around the line and to the back doors, where I encounter zero resistance from heavily-built and superbly dressed young men with my little AA tag. It’s nowhere near time for Robert’s show but Patty Griffin is on, and the girl is wailing. This afternoon, she was quiet and drawing no attention to herself and now she’s standing under the lights in a long tight skirt and a spotlight is on her so that she glows amber and she’s got her guitar in her hands and her band is swinging with her in one seamless stream of electrifying performance.
It’s way too good to leave. And isn’t this why I came? I stand there and watch her whole show, and then she does a couple of encores because people are screaming and shouting their enthusiasm. Then there’s a break while they’re waiting for Lucinda to go on. I wander out to Robert’s bus and they’re just hanging out, shooting the shit, waiting to go on. It’ll be a while yet, but the bus is a good place to wait. It’s comfy like my hotel room, deep couches, very decent stereo, they have cold drinks. It idles effortlessly beneath you with a soft but deep-throated rumbling and gives the illusion of imminent departure until you get used to it. I talk to Charles Ray, Robert’s sound guy, for a while. We sit out there and chuckle up a few anecdotes with the rest of the band. People come in to visit. It’s kind of like a community thing. People visit from bus to bus. Somebody needs a beer, somebody else has one. They talk and wait and laugh and tell stories.
Backstage you can get beer and soft drinks, have a snack or snacks. I sit back there with some snacks when Lucinda starts her show and then I go out front where the listening is better. There are so many people on the floor that it’s hard to walk around. They’re drinking the shit out of some beer. The Texas girls have tans already, and they’re dancing, oh yeah.
