True to the Roots

by Monte Dutton

  I loved it right away. It became a favorite. Unfortunately, it took me quite a while to figure out who the musician was. I batted it around in my brain until finally, on about the third listen, I remembered buying the CD in Nashville. My innate absentmindedness is hard to overstate. Another CD I had bought in Nashville, by Bobby Bare Jr., sat unopened in my house until early 2005. Guess what? I loved it too.

  Country Love Songs led me to buy another Fulks album, The Very Best of Robbie Fulks, shortly thereafter. Surprisingly enough, The Very Best isn't a greatest hits album, although it is composed of quality stuff that isn't on any of Fulks's other albums.

  What I found in Fulks was a phenomenon who reminds me of another. He is the only artist I've encountered who reminds me of the late Roger Miller. Miller was shortchanged by those who listened to his songs and only heard the garish comedy. Many people never recognized that the clown was weeping softly while he delivered the gags. Miller's best songs were awash in irony.

  That's the kind of sense of humor Robbie Fulks has. In the mid-1960s it was possible, apparently, for a man to be so "out there," so wickedly irreverent, that it became a gimmick that could propel him to stardom. It was the same era that produced Loretta Lynn and the outrageous honesty that allowed her to sing so bluntly about a wayward husband and threaten, in song, to kick the asses of the floozies who tempted him.

  Indulge me for a moment here. When I was a small boy, my father would occasionally take me with him to a beer joint out in the country, miles farther from town than our South Carolina farm. There he would drink Falstaff beer while furnishing me with a Dr. Pepper full of salted peanuts. It's where he taught me to shoot pool, but the most vivid memory is of the old Loretta Lynn songs that seemed to be forever roaring out of the jukebox—"Your Squaw Is on the Warpath Tonight," "You Ain't Woman Enough to Take My Man," "Fist City." My eyes must have grown as big as saucers. I was shocked. I was amazed. I remember thinking what manner of woman would sing such things, but she was so honest, and her work was such a contrast to all the wholesome sitcoms I was being exposed to on network TV. The only other time in my boyhood I remember being so shocked was when a band of gorillas cut loose the G-string from Charlton Heston, and there on the silver screen at the Broadway Theatre I briefly witnessed Moses's bare ass. That was in Planet of the Apes.

  Miller used humor to get the same points across, but he was so far beyond the staid country humor of the era—Minnie Pearl, Archie Campbell, and others who undoubtedly inspired Hee Haw—that he was hip. Country performers had a lot of great virtues in those days, but very few of them were hip.

  Fulks takes irreverence beyond even Miller's bounds. His song about the death of a Marilyn Monroe-like movie star is called "She Took a Lot of Pills (and Died)." His ode to an unsuccessful stint as one of Nashville's factory songwriters is "Fuck This Town."

  Not surprisingly, Fulks, sitting at his kitchen table in idealized suburbia, tells me he is quite the admirer of Roger

  Miller.

  "Roger had that talent, but he was also kind of a demented genius who knew exactly what he wanted to do once he got that shot at the big time," he says. "He worked it so brilliantly. I just think he's the most multifaceted and satisfying country musician since Hank Williams, and maybe even including Hank Williams."

  Far too many modern fans equate Miller's work only with humor. On the other hand, my favorite song of his is "Invitation to the Blues," which carries a tone of droll sorrow. There are other Miller songs, though, that will break your heart: "One Dyin' and a Buryin'" and "Husbands and Wives" come to mind immediately. Fulks, too, has that subtle touch of melancholy. "Tears Only Run One Way" is a song Miller would have appreciated.

  Fulks is one of the few modern country songwriters whose knowledge of the music's past is comprehensive. One of his albums, Thirteen Hillbilly Giants, is made up of carefully selected, somewhat obscure songs written by, well, hillbilly giants like Jean Shepard, Bill Anderson, Wynn Stewart, Bill Carlisle, and others. A notable recent work is his production of a tribute to the late Johnny Paycheck, Touch My Heart.

  This guy, chewed up and spat out by Nashville, is as true to the roots of this music as anyone.

  "It's amazing, yeah, just to walk into Tootsie's or any of the other places on that strip [Nashville's lower Broadway]. Any day of the week you can see stuff that anywhere else in the country this would be the best band in town that everybody's talking about, but in Nashville it's on a Tuesday night and they're just scraping by on tips and working four-hour sets," Fulks says. "It's an amazing town for musical talent. To me it's continually frustrating that the Nashville aesthetic, in terms of major-label music, is just so mall oriented, whatever that is. It's just so suburban mood music-oriented. There's just this one little strip. All that music just gets boiled down to this one little, narrow distillate that is so unnourishing.

  "It's just gotten to be such a big business, since Garth [Brooks], especially. That's great for people who are living down there and making tons of money. I certainly have a lot of friends who are down there and making a great living. There are a lot of old people who remember when a hit record was ten thousand copies and how bad the salad days really were, even though they seem glorious now in retrospect. The down side of the big business is when you have a huge event, like Garth, the whole industry orients itself to the idea of ten and twelve million sales being the bar that everyone has to reach. All of a sudden selling four million records, or a million, isn't considered successful anymore. Everything has been reoriented to this new model where ten million is the thing to aspire to now. The two effects of that are that it mitigates against any form of risk taking, musical or otherwise, and now everything sounds like Garth Brooks imitation music for the five-year cycle, or however long it perpetuates itself."

  Of Brooks himself Fulks says: "He's got a great producer. He's got a lot of vocal talent, but a hundred other people have that too. His ego is what got him there. I'm sure a lot of people were waiting for him to trip up for a lot of years, and [with the singer's rock alter ego, Chris Gaines, which proved a commercial disaster] he finally did."

  The great paradox of Fulks's music is that it actually seems to appeal to an audience that isn't nearly as attuned to country music's history as its author.

  "I play for urban audiences that might know more about the new Wire record than the newest Alan Jackson record," he says. "The lesson I take from my own experience and how I got into it, and from looking at other people and how they got into it, [is that] you can't describe any window into music as illegitimate. There are just so many ways to get to the real thing, and a lot of bands that I don't see the point of, or who I don't see any musical merit in, are pathways for other people to get to Hank Williams or the same destination. The point is that you develop the perspective to say this band is a pathway band, a treasure map kind of singer, who isn't the real deal. This is the real deal, right here, and that's how I got here. There were a lot of bands in the eighties, when I was forming my musical tastes, and there was a band, Dave Alvin and the Blasters, that sort of provided that pathway to me.

  "If you'd pay attention to the wellsprings of their music, they would lead you to the real thing, and I don't think it's a slam on Dave or that group to say that it was a beautiful group, but it was also a pathway group. You could go from there to [blues legends] Big Joe Turner or Robert Johnson or whoever it was. That was the thing."

  The whole interview begs the question: Why is this guy in the Chicago area? Is there some burgeoning underground current of traditional country music simmering in the Windy City? As it turns out, no. It was fate, the kind that country used to catalog, that brought Fulks to the area.

  "I had a girlfriend who came up here," he says, unflinchingly honest. "I got her pregnant, and I just followed her here to raise the kid. This was back in '83. It was a move from the loins."

  "It's not a place I would have picked. A lot of times in the last twenty years, I've wanted to move down to Nashville or just some
place closer to country music because it seemed like that was where my talent was and where I needed to be, but at this point I've got so many roots dug in here in the city that I'm resigned to staying here in spite of the weather and the things that I don't particularly care for. But the city itself I really, really love. As far as country music is concerned, I'd say there are ten people who are top-notch players and singers. It's a really, really small scene. I think, though, there are more good clubs with good [public-address systems], fair promoters, nice sight lines, and all the rest of it than probably anywhere except two or three clubs in the rest of the country. It's great for that."

  Family life has been good for Fulks, who, by his own admission, has mellowed in recent years. Or maybe he's just studied the industry and gained a more complete understanding of it. He seems more relaxed than his music.

  "As far as the corporatization of music in Nashville is concerned, I was really upset about it when I was in the thick of it, which was ten years ago, and since then I can't say I give much of a rat's ass about it," he says. "I'm way up here, and I do what I do, and I have this tiny niche of a career, and they're of no concern to me, and I'm of not that much concern to them. It's not something I really simmer about anymore."

  I decry the fact that country music doesn't seem to dwell on the hardships of life anymore and suggest that the average theme of the song featured on mainstream radio is "Hey, baby, let's me and you party." I complain that there's no populism anymore. The common man and his worries became passe with Merle Haggard and George Jones.

  "I think you're exactly right," he says, "but the common man must bear some of the responsibility, too, for the direction that country has gone. I think the common man is listening to AC/DC and a lot of other stuff. A lot of common people are listening to Shania Twain, and when I say common man, I mean the guy who fixes my car down the street.

  "They just need a chance to hear it. It's organic. It just happened because people heard it, and that's what they had. It's not what they selected. It's what they had.

  "You can get reams of press, but when you read about a singer or a band, it can be presented in an exciting, romantic, and well-written way, but there's nothing that's going to sell people on it like hearing it."

  The experience of producing the Paycheck tribute has given him new perspective into the way the industry works, which leads to a discussion of why and how music industry executives made mainstream radio so bereft of creativity.

  "One of my favorite things about being on the inside of music, as I've gotten in the last couple of years, is that there is a hierarchy of merit within the music business," Fulks says. "Outside of it, it's such the opposite. It's like, when Randy Travis gets a record he's really excited about, it would be, like, a Guy Clark record. He'll get an Alan Jackson record to see what the competition's up to."

  Over time Fulks has evolved to the point where he doesn't see himself anymore as "so all alone." He now perceives a certain condescension and even arrogance in his earlier work. Although he remains a persistent critic of the establishment, he wouldn't write "Fuck This Town" again. He is more cognizant of the source of his frustrations.

  "I just think there was a spirit of innocence and ignorance," Fulks says. "When I made [Country Love Songs], I'd never put out a record, at least on an outside label, before, and I was so excited about the opportunity to do it. I was excited about the opportunity to be around other musicians. I was like a conduit between the world and Buck Owens, this great music that I was totally absorbed in at the time. I wasn't smart enough to think, well, everybody smart about music knows all about Buck Owens and Roger Miller and all this stuff. Why do I consider myself a musical emissary for that? To me I was the first person in the world who had discovered this great music.

  "Also, I think, different kinds of music are answering those fundamental issues that country used to explore. I just listened to the new Eminem record, and I'm not the hugest fan of hip-hop or rap, or whatever, but that music, man, it's man-on-the-street, and they're telling stories that aren't censored by anybody, they're saying what they want to say, and they're talking about fucking sex and drugs and alcohol and everything that country used to talk about.

  "It's amazing, too, that it goes backward in a way. On my second trip to Nashville, some woman at EMI was listening to a song I'd written. It was nothing you would know or nothing I recorded, but she said, 'This is nice that you've tried to write a song from the point of view of the man singing about the woman who's cheating on him. And he's saying I'll be patient, just get through the cheating and then just come home to me. As long as you come home, it's ok.' She said, 'It's nice and daring that you wrote about that, but you can't get away with that, with writing about women who cheat. And I said, 'What are you talking about?' 'The Pill' is twenty-five years old, and Loretta Lynn could get away with singing about the birth control pill and have a hit in 1972. This is 1994. And she said, 'Well, it doesn't work that way.'

  "Free speech doesn't get wider and wider. At that point the business was more restrictive than it had ever been and probably more restrictive than it is now too."

  Fulks finds just a hint of optimism in the latest trends. "Toby Keith has been a great influence and others too. As much as I despise certain aspects of this and his presentation of this so-called 'art,' I really like the fact that it's opened up and there are certain things you can say because of what those guys are doing. There's a little kick ass in it that's good."

  But Fulks objects with his old passion to the adoption of what another generation might have considered mainstream pop by country. It used to be the other way around. Country hits—oddly enough, Miller's "King of the Road" is a classic example—found their way to pop stations by appealing to a broader audience.

  "Without being a little bit country, why should it even exist? If it's going to be like crappy rock music, we already have a lot of crappy rock music," says Fulks. "It's like the Republicans saying, 'If we run a Democrat against a Democrat, the Democrats will win every time.' If country music's just going to be secondhand rock music, it's always going to lose out.

  "Country music has some things that it does perfectly well. It's got a set of themes that only it does the way it does. It's got a vocal tradition and an instrumental tradition that are unique to it and every bit as worthy and full of technical proficiency as jazz. I hope it gets back to it. On the other hand, if it does get back to it, you've got to wonder if there's a point of view to get back to. Sort of that down-home country attitude, other than wistful, bullshit nostalgia. If there are really people around who can transmit that soulfully and honestly. I hope there are."

  Fulks hosts a monthly radio show on xm Satellite Radio. The premise, he says, is that the old music isn't gone and in fact isn't even rare.

  "I think there's more good country music out there than there was even in the fifties, at the apogee we were talking about," he says. "There's just so much of it out there. Someone's going to come along who's going to bring that country soulfulness again to a wide audience. It just can't be that nostalgia. It's got to be something new and something personable and something with the communicable power to put a new slant on it."

  Robbie Fulks would be willing to be the guy.

  The Last True Texas Troubadour

  Arlington, texas I December 2004

  Brian Burns has made a career out of concentrating on Texas. Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, the focus of his music is firmly centered in the Lone Star State. Since 2003 he's even been taking his message into the schools of the state via a program originally begun to accompany his album The Eagle & the Snake: Songs of the Texians.

  "I'm interested in all kinds of history," he insists, "but here in Texas we have so much of it in our own backyard. I've always been drawn to, and found it fulfilling to write, songs with visual imagery, drama, and emotional impact. History, and especially Texas history, provides those elements for me."

  Speaking of history, Nashville and the count
ry music establishment have often confounded Texans. Even for many of those who have succeeded there, there's a certain love-hate relationship. Burns is one of many who seem to have written off Nashville and the trade-offs that often accompany mainstream acceptance. There's a good living to be made in Texas, where there's a unique musical culture.

  "Nashville music is about selling pickup trucks and blue jeans," Burns says. "The focus is on commercials, and the music is tailored to work as a background. In Texas there are djs and programmers gutsy enough to play songs that are actually as entertaining, or more so, than the commercials."

  One example of his attitude is a colorful assault on Nashville in the song "Nothin' to Say (Austin vs. Nashville)" from his 2004 CD Heavy Weather. Burns compares commercially successful male singers to Chippendale dancers and suggests their music is almost irrelevant. Writing or performing the song is less important in Nashville than the tight jeans and the rugged good lucks.

  The loss of a sense of populism in the music troubles Burns, but he doesn't blame the targeting of youth by the country music establishment. To him the fundamental problem is commercialism.

  "The music industry has always been driven by youth, and I have no misgivings whatsoever about that," he says. "I'm lucky in that my music has fans and supporters of all ages, and a good portion of my income is derived from performing for kids [in the school program]. People, young or old, are going to gravitate to music they can identify with. When I was young, it might have been Grand Funk Railroad one week and Willie Nelson the next.

  "But I never gravitated toward any music simply because it was considered cool by my peers. I judged it by whether or not I liked the music . . . the songs . . . which certainly positioned me well out of the mainstream, where I remain to this day. I remember a few years ago, when I first heard Robert Earl Keen. I became a huge fan. Man, what a phenomenal singer-songwriter. Next thing you know, there are singers coming out of the woodwork, imitating him to the letter, but who couldn't write a song if their lives depended on it.