True to the Roots (19 page)

Paisley's studied approach to his career is apparent in his live shows and in the composition of his albums. My first question is about how carefully he prepared himself to be exactly where is today.

"My education about the music industry came in two different ways," he replies. "The first was when I became a regular member of Jamboree usa in Wheeling [West Virginia, his home state]. The Jamboree is a long-running radio show much like the [Grand Ole] Opry, where different headliners pass through there on Saturday nights. Over the years I opened for almost all the greats. I got to perform before George Jones, Jimmy Dickens, Steve Wariner, Charley Pride, Lee Greenwood, The Judds, Charlie Daniels—you name them, they came through there. I learned by osmosis, by just being around that.

"Secondly, by transferring to Belmont University as a junior, I got into the Nashville business by being around that as well. By interning for three very different organizations [ASCAP, Atlantic Records, and Fitzgerald/Hartley Management], I got an overview of the three parts of an artist's business: songwriting and publishing, record labels, and management.

"I didn't anticipate that the music business would be constantly changing as much as it does now. There was a time when just having a hit or two meant a long career was probable. Not anymore. It takes reinvention and constant creativity to remain competitive in the modern country music world."

The trouble with such a clinical approach is that it can stifle creativity in the same manner as what is practiced by the recording and radio industry and decried throughout this book. The paradox embodied in Paisley's career is that he must balance his own fondness for the music's roots with the very trends that take it away from them. To his credit he is mindful of the dangerous waters into which he is wading.

"The critics of new country are very quick to cite the diff-ferences between today's music and the past," Paisley writes. "On one hand, they have a point in that it is different, but, on the other, there is more validity here than [what] they are willing to recognize. Nostalgia is a wonderful thing, but just because something is old or antique doesn't mean it's better, necessarily. On the radio I just had a hit with a very dark account of a couple who let alcohol destroy there lives ['Whiskey Lullaby'], at the same time that Sara Evans had a huge hit with a Cajun-flavored tune about soap bubbles and a clothesline, and Josh Turner had a huge hit about sin and temptation and trains, which also was on the chart simultaneously with pop-sounding stuff. It's a very big umbrella, and fans are not really complaining much. I admit that there have been times, throughout our history, when there were very, very strong songs on the charts simultaneously. Look at the early sixties, or the outlaw seventies, or the early nineties. However, in every one of those eras there were also pieces of crap that did well too. The thing is, some of those turds are considered classics just because they are old songs now. That's the beauty of hindsight.

"At the time 'Achy Breaky Heart' came out, people were calling it a low point. In retrospect it was very catchy, and it sold a lot of records and really made people happy to hear it. In my mind that is a classic due to the effect it had, regardless of the intricacy of its song structure. I think, looking back at today, there will be plenty of high points to discuss.

"The one thing I would like to see return are more songs about personal experience and less that seem merely an attempt to be clever. Ironically, the biggest hits are usually honest. As I listen to songs for my next album, I can't tell you how many songs sound like recalculated equations. I wish more people were pitching stuff that was autobiographical."

By sheer coincidence, since Paisley and I are neither talk ing face to face nor by telephone, his last reply leads perfectly into the next question, which is about how one maintains a common touch while living a life that is progressively becoming more affluent and out of touch with the common problems of the people who make up the bulk of his audience.

"I admit that fame is a real problem for a songwriter," he writes. "It makes day-to-day life a completely different experience. I try to get out and have experiences as much as possible when I am writing, so that all my songs don't cover the same topics. I try to read authors, like Garrison Keillor, who write such vivid accounts of simple life, and I try to spend time with my family. In the words of [writer] Harvey Pekar, 'Real life is pretty complex stuff.'

"Staying in touch with that is essential."

Next I broach the subject of "the Wal-Mart world" and the theory that music is growing emptier because of the world that surrounds it. Paisley suggests that perhaps it's not really empty but merely different.

"The music and the world we live in are both different now," he writes. "That is the way of things. You don't hear songs about coal mining anymore or railroads per se or farming all that often. That is probably a good sign, though, because so much of people's lives are spent doing other things now. If we were still singing about these old topics in our format all the time, we would be antiquated. You can find plenty to write about by watching people interact in Wal-Mart or Target. It's a little less vibey, lighting being fluorescent and all white walls and floors, but it's there for the studying.

"On one hand, I hate to see America begin to look the same at every exit off the interstate. On the other, it makes it easier to write about it."

Paisley also defends the high-tech nature of his shows. Frequently he and his band are accompanied by videos playing on huge screens in the background, and he's been criticized, for instance, for having Alison Krauss "perform" her part via the video screen during the live rendition of "Whiskey Lullaby," which had rubbed me wrong too. Purists complain that live music is undermined when some of the music isn't live.

"I believe in giving people their money's worth when they buy a ticket to a concert," Paisley writes. "I really enjoy the aspects of our show that are enhanced by technology, such as when we perform 'Whiskey Lullaby' and Alison [Krauss] appears and sings her part via video screen. For me it is a highlight every night to get to sing with her that way. Of course, she can't be there in person, and that song is not the same without her. I'm sure critics have a field day bashing that sort of presentation. I'll never understand why, though. We have three options. First would be to sing it by myself, which is fine, but it's a duet. Second is to hire a female singer to tour and tackle that part, but still they would be compared every night to Alison. The third option is to do it how we do it now. I have never met a single fan who was unhappy about getting to hear her part and see her on the screen. I still get to be spontaneous every night; the video stuff is just like lighting or sound. It follows the music. As we play bigger venues, it's the best way to give people in the back row more bang for the buck.

"Country music doesn't mean backward music," he concludes. "We are not Amish. We should be allowed to use technology just as well as any other format does."

As impressed as I am by his eventual cooperation, I still come away from my encounter with Brad Paisley with conflicting emotions. The issue seems similar to one that afflicts contemporary politicians. They pay too much heed to the polling data. Sometimes it's not enough to give the people what they want. Without some mechanism to give the people what they need, the system doesn't work.

Paisley's intentions are the best, but only time will tell whether he is truly capable of molding the music, leaving a personal stamp on it, and nudging it in an original direction.

Hondo's Legacy

Luckenbach, Texas I December 2004

It's pretty rare to find a tourist attraction as unaffected by tourism as Luckenbach. Its appeal is defined by its quirki-ness. Not that there aren't commercial aspects to Lucken-bach. It is, after all, the twenty-first century.

The name became familiar thanks to the 1977 hit song "Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)," written by two men, Bobby Emmons and Chips Moman, who'd never been there. It became a monster hit for familiar Texas collaborators Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings and made the little crossroads mentioned in the title sort of emblematic of the laidback lifestyle glorified in the song.

What's extraordinary is that Luckenbach, hard by South Grape and Snail creeks, remains a relaxed, relatively unaffected place. It's a tourist attraction, sure, but it's not like some alligator farm in Florida or a Wild West knockoff where gunfights are staged and tired families pull their station wagons off the interstate to sip Diet Pepsi and watch cancan girls perform in the bogus saloon.

My first visit was in October 2000, when I flew to San Antonio, found myself a motel room in Kerrville, attended a Jerry Jeff Walker concert at Luckenbach Dancehall, and watched the Texas Longhorns thump Baylor 48-14 in Austin, seventy-five miles away.

I already knew that Walker was more significant to the lore of Luckenbach than either Nelson or Jennings and that one of Walker's more significant albums,
Viva Terlingua
, had been recorded live there. It was an accident, though, that brought me back to Luckenbach on the day after the concert, a Sunday. At the time I was writing a feature column that ran every Tuesday in the
Gaston (N.C.) Gazette
. That morning I had decided to write about Luckenbach, but I needed more information. I drove back to the combination gift shop and beer joint (originally a post office) located adjacent to the dance hall.

It was fortunate that the column wasn't due for another day. I bought several CD's, the most notable being Pat Green's
Dancehall Dreamer
, which was my first exposure to a singer-songwriter whose popularity would mushroom over the next few years. More pertinent was the biography of the man most responsible for the Luckenbach legend immortalized in the Nelson-Jennings duet. John Russell "Hondo" Crouch (1915-76), along with partners Guich Koock and Kathy Morgan, had bought Luckenbach "lock, stock, and dance hall" in 1970. The story of how Luckenbach became Hondo Crouch's "make-believe town" is commemorated in
Hondo My Father
by Becky Patterson Crouch (Austin: Historical Publications, 1979).

Sundays are special in Luckenbach. When I got there, the grounds were rife with men playing guitars and singing. Most were from the surrounding Hill Country region, but a few had made sabbaticals from several hundred miles away. It was an informal, communal scene. I began by sipping a few Lone Star beers and listening. Then I started singing harmony. Eventually, I fell in with a guitarist from the area—I can only recall that his last name was Moon—who knew a number of old country songs by the likes of Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, and the Wilburn Brothers. At the time I could do nothing but sing, but by dusk, as I told friends later, I had become damn near a headliner. Shortly thereafter, I began purchasing harmonicas, which I taught myself to play passably by accompanying recorded music on long drives. Eventually, I bought a guitar at a pawn shop and learned to play the basic chords. An argument could be made that this book began on the mild, autumn afternoon in Luckenbach.

Getting to Luckenbach isn't easy. This visit, my third, takes me in a new direction, mainly because I've had to drive from Austin to New Braunfels to pick up something I'd left in a restaurant the day before. It's fairly easy to get from New Braunfels to the general area of Luckenbach, but I spend most of an hour circumnavigating my way in.

This time I've brought along a guitar, but I'm pretty uptight about it. About a dozen motorcycles, a like number of cars, several minivans, and five sport-utility vehicles are parked along the dirt roads servicing the little complex of wooden buildings. At any given time there are people arriving and departing. Several people are even wandering around the grounds on horses.

I get out of my rental car and sneak around a bit. It's been slightly over four years since I last visited on a Sunday, but the scene is almost identical. My chief regret is that the man with whom I sang in 2000, Moon, isn't around this time. I don't feel really worthy of playing my guitar with these people, all of whom are much better than me. That's one characteristic of playing guitar badly. It's similar to knowing enough to be dangerous. More to the point, it's knowing enough to realize how bad one is.

But I've come here to play my guitar, and that's what I have to do. Quietly, trying not to be noticed, I go back to the car and retrieve it. In front of the gift shop, around on the opposite side from where all the pickers are and nearly out of earshot, I take the guitar out of its case and begin playing in relative solitude. A few people happen by. I do well enough to make a couple stop to listen.

"Why don't you go back yonder?" a man asks, his wife or significant other nodding.

"I don't reckon I'm good enough," I say quietly, realizing that this is my copout. This is my fallback position. I can sit here out front, all by my lonesome, and be able to tell friends that I played my guitar in Luckenbach, Texas. Only I will know the sheepish truth.

"Aw, go on back there," the man says. "I done listened to them, and now I've listened to you, and you're as good as they are."

What he says is untrue, but it's comforting. Now I've got the kind of gut check that comes from having someone else contest one's rationalization. I put my guitar back in the case, fasten it, thank the man and woman, and walk slowly around back. I'm all gulps and sighs when I walk up to the collection of stumps, chairs, and benches. Politely I wait my turn.