Bruce Robison came bustling through the door...and brother, when a guy who's six-foot-seven bustles, he really bustles.
Robison was in mid-hue-and-cry as he entered the front room of his Premium Recording Service studio, lauding the performance of University of Texas quarterback Vince Young in UT's jaw-dropping national title victory over USC the previous night in the Rose Bowl.
"I heard Johnny Cash on the way over here," he was saying, "An icon. And now Vince Young is that same sort of icon. Man, he's painted his masterpiece. I wouldn't mind at all if he went away."
In point of fact, Young would announce plans a few days later to forgo his senior year at Texas, the better to rake in millions in the NFL. But that wasn't really the point.
As a kid who had been steeped in the lore and bathed in the blood of the Church of High School Football, with services every Friday night across the Lone Star State, Robison was still surfing on the adrenaline that had nearly all of Austin coasting on a pigskin high. His wife, singer Kelly Willis, was expecting their fourth child within the week and, as Bruce joked onstage a few nights later, the baby boy was going to be christened "Vince Young Robison." (He relented, almost certainly to Kelly's relief; the youngster, born January 10, was christened Joseph Willis Robison.)
Nor was the baby boy his only impending offspring. Robison was meeting a reporter after dropping his other kids off at school to talk about Eleven Stories, his forthcoming album. His first record in four years, it marks a return to form for a songwriter who has already crafted big ol' hits for Tim McGraw & Faith Hill, Lee Ann Womack, George Strait, and the Dixie Chicks.
Robison himself had played football, albeit with a notable lack of enthusiasm and (to hear him tell it) natural ability when he was growing up in the Texas hill country town of Bandera. The way he tells it, it was less a matter of inclination than of Manifest Destiny.
"There was so much pressure from the town because I was so big," he recalled. "You had to play football in Bandera. You just had to. It was weird. If you didn't, it was like you weren't straight, or something. It's high school ball. Sports is crazy."
It didn't help that Robison's father was a coach, or that his slightly older brother Charlie was a charismatic star who played with effortless grace.
"I think Charlie could have been Roger Clemens if he hadn't gotten hurt playing football," said Bruce of his sibling. "He blew his knee out in the last game, and he still got a full ride, got a full baseball scholarship to Texas State. He was a prototype for what you see now, which is a big strong kid that can throw hard and still have a couple of good pitches."
At least -- and mercifully, from Bruce's point of view -- their father wasn't the boys' coach. "Our parents divorced and he took a job in a middle school in San Antonio that paid more than coaching in high school in Bandera," he recalled.
"And, from a very early age, he never pushed me into sports," he adds, "because he knew I wasn't any good." (Robison's modesty is almost a reflex; it's worth noting that he went to college on a basketball scholarship.)
Robison seems to view almost everything but his music through a humorously self-deprecating lens. Regarding his habitually rumpled appearance, he says, "I'm not much into the bling. I look more and more like the Professor on Gilligan's Island every day."
It's a fact that Robison looks like he takes his sartorial cues from unmade beds. But his rumpled, unstructured good looks tend to put guys at ease and probably bring out a certain maternal aspect in women.
His good-natured po'-mouth routine loses a lot of traction when one considers he's married to one of the most beautiful women in a town largely overrun with what sportswriter Dan Jenkins is fond of calling "shapely adorables."
(Their courtship, according to Willis, was a lot closer in spirit to Homer and Marge than Romeo and Juliet. "We were friends with a lot of the same people," she recalls. "But he acted like he hated me. He was rude to me all the time, and..." she had to admit, "...it piqued my curiosity.
"Then one night we were all hanging out together and we all wound up getting drunk, of course, and he grabbed me and kissed me. He said he thought everybody around me was kissing my butt and he didn't want to come across as just another one of those guys. It's been true love ever since.")
Robison's amiable litany of his shortcomings evaporates, however, when the subject turns to his songwriting. Although he is about as far from a preening egotist as it is possible for an artist to be, he takes a fierce, unvarnished pride in what he has achieved in the field of songcraft.
"I always had very high goals and a very high opinion of myself as a songwriter," he says, adding, "and I don't say that in a conceited way. I just think everybody should feel good about what they do.
"And I really loved calling myself a songwriter, from the time I first started doing it through the first ten years, when I never made a dime. And I have to assume that I would have loved calling myself a songwriter if I had never made a dime at it, because I always felt good at it from the first moment I started. And it really was ten years, and looking back on it -- because nothing happened -- I go, God, why did I keep doing that?
"I wasn't good at sports. And I wasn't good at academia. So until I started writing songs, I didn't know what it felt like to be good at something.
"And it's funny about people...I get asked all the time, 'How did you start writing songs?' And if you say, well, I was bad at everything else I tried to do before then, they all turn into your grandmother: 'Oh, no you weren't! You were good!' But I don't want your sympathy. I'm talking about something great! All I would love for my kids is for them to find something that they feel great at."
At this juncture, Bruce Robison is speaking as a proven commercial commodity, a guy with a track record of hit covers and the royalty checks to prove it. He's on the other side of the looking glass, recalling the tall, uncertain gangly guy who used to pick up gigs the Broken Spoke and the Continental Club, and then drive his beat-to-shit car to Nashville over and over, to pitch songs until the Music Row carousel spun him off and sent back down the road to Texas.
But he still looks back at that struggling acolyte with affection. The eventual vindication helps, too. "Success wipes away all past damages, man," he says. "All of a sudden, the doors opened up. And it was ten years of struggle, but that's what an open door is. And so those were good times; they still are."
Robison experienced both the perks and the pitfalls of stardom by proxy. Kelly Willis was a critics' darling who never quite crossed over to massive mainstream success even though MCA Records and label president Tony Brown threw clout and money behind her by the truckload. Willis had all the tools, but the house never quite got built.
Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, on the other hand, could not make a foolish move. Robison got word that McGraw and Hill had cut his song "Angry All The Time" the same week his and Kelly's first child was born in 2001. It was an interlude of unalloyed rapture that Robison knows in his heart will never be repeated.
But then he had a ringside seat as the Dixie Chicks were turned into political pinatas after a remark Chicks vocalist Natalie Maines made to an English audience in March 2003: "We're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas." Overnight, the trio -- which includes Bruce's sister-in-law Emily Robison (who's married to Charlie) -- were transformed from America's Sweethearts to unpatriotic pariahs, largely at the hands of conservative country radio conglomerates.
Their #1 single at the time just happened to be a Bruce Robison composition called "Travelin' Soldier", and it could not have dropped off the chart faster if it had been a share of Enron stock. Robison jokes that it was the fastest-falling single in the history of the Billboard chart.
No one could have blamed Bruce for feeling a little chagrined as all those royalty dollars took wing. But he wasn't having any of it. "We never felt sorry for ourselves," he said of himself and Kelly. "The song still did very well, and the album [the Chicks' Home] sold, God, 6 million or whatever."
Still, the whole protracted episode made him just a little bit hot. As far as he was concerned, it was his family that was being vilified. "They were punching bags for so long, and I feel like everybody missed the point," Robison says in retrospect. "I wanted to defend them but they, probably wisely, decided to stay quiet and take the high road. But it was relentless and, I thought, unfair too."
The "Robison family" extends far beyond blood. There is Charlie, of course, and younger sister Robyn Ludwick, who recently released her first album (her husband has played with both Kelly and Bruce). There's Kelly and the kids, naturally. The Chicks are family, too, by virtue of both marriage and music. Natalie Maines' father, acclaimed steel guitarist and producer Lloyd Maines, produced Bruce's second album, Wrapped.
And, at another remove, there are friends and family relations, including Robert Earl Keen (who wasn't born in Bandera, but he got there as fast as he could), Jack Ingram, Guy Clark, Rodney Crowell, Radney Foster, Jerry Jeff Walker, and other members of the far-flung Texas songwriters' fraternity.
Family is as family does: For brother Charlie, the Rosetta Stone that unlocked the world of music and revealed a level of coolness that even trumped small-town sports stardom was a Fender Precision bass. Bruce's bass, to be exact.
"My dad, in his wisdom, bought me a bass guitar in seventh grade," Bruce recalls. "And it was one of those things where I look back on it and...we had no money at all. So to spend $250 on a Fender Precision bass, so I could join a band..." He shakes his head in wonderment at the memory.
"I was a year older than him and was really involved in athletics," said Charlie, picking up the thread. "We had a little bitty room together with two beds side by side, and when he brought that bass in, I remember it like it was yesterday. He opened it up for the first time, and man, the smell of that case...
"I might have waited another three or four years or something. Music was something I always wanted to do, but when would I do it? That was the catalyst."
Bandera, a small town some 50 miles northwest of San Antonio founded in 1856, grandly styles itself "The Cowboy Capital of the World" (owing in large part to the proliferation of dude ranches in the area). The precincts around Bandera might boast many more sheep and mohair goats than cattle, but it did have a plenitude of one cowtown essential: beer joints and honky-tonks. Venerable dancehalls and saloons such as the Cabaret, the 11th Street Cowboy Bar and Arkey Blue's Silver Dollar still line the main drag, and the Saturday night dance is as firmly entrenched a local institution as the Friday night football game.
"He's got the perspective of someone who grew up in a small town but was surrounded by great music all the time," Kelly observes of Bruce's formative years. "But it was still a small town."
Country music, with its storytelling legacy and its small-scale views of human frailties and triumphs, wound through Bandera just as indelibly as the nearby Medina River wound through the Texas hill country.
At the same time, San Antonio's urban sprawl and "ranchette" subdivisions were spreading their tentacles westward. The big city was easily accessible, and that hard-charging metropolitan sensibility -- San Antonio is, among other things, the head-banging heavy-metal capital of Texas -- found its way into the Robison boys' sensibilities as well.
"We have all kinds of influences," Bruce acknowledges. "Charlie always makes fun of me if I mention Don Williams. He'll say, 'You never tell anybody that we listened to Judas Priest!' Well, I'm not hiding it! It just comes out in his music more than mine. I grew up in San Antonio, you know? Go down there and listen to the radio and see what you think a 13-year-old boy would have been listening to."
"We've taken turns in our lifetimes being the catalyst for the other person," says Charlie. "When we first got to Austin, Bruce was saying, 'I can't be in a band in Austin.' And I went out and got into a band. And right after that, he said, 'Hell, I guess you can do that.' And when he started going at songwriting, I went, 'Well, you can't do that...' But I really liked what he was doing, so I set out to do that as well.
"We've been lucky to have each other to kind of push each other through little spots. It's wasn't like giving each other a pep talk, it's more like, 'If he can do it...'"
(One might, at some risk, even extend the sibling give-and-take to their spouses. Bruce married country chanteuse Kelly Willis in 1996; Charlie wed Emily Erwin, the banjo-playing sister in the Dixie Chicks, in 1998.)
The Robison brothers hit Austin in the late 1980s, and both found themselves briefly in the same band: Chaparral, a local-favorite honky-tonk ensemble helmed by Jeff Hughes. Another collaboration between Bruce and Charlie, the Weepers, boasted the sort of organic blood harmonies that only family can produce, but that group fell by the wayside in short order as well.
"They're two of my best friends, but they're as different as two brothers can be," said cowboy singer Chris Wall in an interview several years back. "Charlie sings Bruce's songs great [but] they fight a little bit, like brothers do, and they can't stay in a band together."
Soon enough, each of the brothers' essential temperaments asserted itself. Bruce retreated to concentrate on songwriting, and Charlie made a beeline for center stage in the aptly named good-time honky-tonk band the Millionaire Playboys.
Bruce released his eponymously titled first album in 1995 on the Austin-based micro-indie label Vireo Records. The cover art boasted, if that's the word, "Bruce Robison" written by hand, and a scribbled stick figure on a plain white background.
The presentation may have been beyond primitive, but the album was a gold mine waiting to happen. It contained two future #1 country smash hits: "Angry All The Time", which became a massive hit duet for Tim McGraw & Faith Hill in 2001, and "Travelin' Soldier," co-written with Farrah Braniff, which the Dixie Chicks took to the top of the charts in 2003. Kelly Willis cut her own duet with Bruce on "Angry All The Time" (a song whose genesis lay in the breakup of Bruce and Charlie's parents), and she would also record "Take It All Out On You" and "Not Forgotten You". Meanwhile, Charlie would cherry-pick the wiseass barroom rocker "Red Letter Day" for one of his own projects.
A second indie album, Wrapped, came out in 1997; a Nashville-tweaked version of it was re-released by Sony's Lucky Dog imprint the following year. A second disc for Lucky Dog, Long Way Home From Anywhere, came out in '99.
Country Sunshine followed in 2001; released on Bruce's own Boar's Nest label, it was a homegrown reaction to the Nashville releases (which Robison felt were over-amped and under-promoted). The album contained a droll paean to a fellow Austin tunesmith called "What Would Willie Do", along with a Dixieland-flavored track and several lower-key meditations on love gone right, wrong and sideways.
"Bruce wrote really memorable sad songs long before I ever met him, so it's not my fault," Willis points out. "Years after we sang 'Angry All The Time', people are asking me if I'm still angry and I say, only at being asked that question."
Now, after a long layoff to get his and Kelly's three (now four) kids settled into a family routine, Eleven Stories is set for release on March 14 via the new independent label Sustain Records (with distribution through Universal). Its understated title reflects the quiet, tensile strength of the best of Bruce's songs.
Robison, very deliberately, sets his scene, poses his characters and puts the machinery in motion. Then he stands back and gives them room to breathe. It's an approach that is a luxury in this day of blunt-object sentimentality and sledgehammer nuance that passes for most commercial country music.
"I like setting these little scenes and letting people make up their own minds about it," he says with a shrug.
Charlie Robison, who has labored in the Nashville vineyards for years and has cut a number of his brother's songs in the process, is in a unique position to appreciate the distinction.
"I think he's one of the few guys that's gotten away with a certain way of putting things," Charlie suggests. "Take 'Angry All The Time', where the subject matter might be extremely sad and deals with things that country radio doesn't want to deal with. But he has a way of sliding a subject past them [and] they don't really know it's going by.
"Some people will think this person [one of Bruce's musical protagonists] is the coolest person in the world, and someone else will think the same person is a scumbag. And they're both right. In 'Days Go By', for instance, I would dare anyone in the world who thinks homeless people are lazy or no-account to listen to that song....This guy is not a hero, but Bruce humanizes something in a way that is very hard to do without being maudlin."
"Days Go By", with its air of stoic resignation ("Some days you find love if you try/Ooh, but the days go by") and its homeless, mentally ill protagonist, is as simple as a shoelace. But there's an entire life lived between the lines.
As one of the songs on Eleven Stories, "Days Go By" shares in common with tunes such as "Every Once In Awhile" and "I Never Fly" a certain pensive quality that sneaks up on the listener. It's an elusive quality that seems to mirror Bruce's more inward-looking persona.
The most popular of Charlie Robison's songs brim with a certain honky-tonk shot-and-a-beer bonhomie. The most powerful of Bruce's songs are morning-after creations, where you find yourself sitting in the empty kitchen, staring at the dead flowers and the bottle of whiskey on the table, and wondering just where, exactly, life came irrevocably off the rails.
"Simplification is the goal," he says. "The songs that I put on the top spot -- like 'I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry', 'Maybe Baby' or 'No Woman, No Cry' -- they're, like, ten words."
At the same time, he adds, "I'd felt a lot of my records were guitar/vocal-y things that I had shoehorned some music onto. With this project, I really did want the music, and the feel of it, to be the thing. It's poetry, not music. You need to be able to clap your hands for it to deserve to be called music."
Exhibit A in that regard is "It's All Over But The Cryin'", a song so melodic and hook-laden that a dead man could have a hit with it. That song is yet another in the Robison canon about love's day-after denouement. With its quietly anguished lines -- "The battle is over and the other side won/It don't help to know that it ain't a matter of tryin'...It hurts like hell when you're livin' in a love that's dyin'/And you know that it's all over but the cryin'" -- the tune's essential melancholy sneaks up on you under the radar.
(A case in point: My fiancee, The Beautiful Lawyer, was staring into her laptop screen with fiendish concentration, intent on unraveling some hideous legal Gordian tangle, when "It's All Over But The Cryin'" wafted out of the speakers. Midway through the song, she abruptly sat bolt-upright, eyes widened, and exclaimed, "That song is so me! That's exactly why my first husband and I broke up!")
There are also some unadulterated jaunty uptempo moments on Eleven Stories, to be sure: the dance-floor reel of "You Really Let Yourself Go", a remake of the venerable "Bandera Waltz" (a hit for Ernest Tubb and Slim Whitman, among others), the Taj Mahal/J.J. Cale-flavored groove of "Kitchen Blues".
And, in a juxtaposition that perhaps unintentionally reveals Robison's myriad influences, a cover of the Grateful Dead's "Tennessee Jed" leads straight into a reverent remake of Webb Pierce's 1950s hit "More And More".
Should anyone be surprised at a Grateful Dead song resting cheek-by-jowl with a vintage beer-joint weeper on a Bruce Robison album?
"I hope so," he chuckles.
"It's all harmonies to me," he continues. "And when I heard 'Tennessee Jed', it was exactly the same, from that point of view, as the Webb Pierce song.
"We all have all kinds of influences. The great thing about growing up in Bandera was that you heard the old stuff all the time on KKYX and KBUC. And you had the Cabaret and the weekly dances." And don't forget Judas Priest...
Dance-floor shuffles aside, it's the poignant, quiet moments of songs such as "I Never Fly" and "Don't Call It Love" and "Days Go By" that linger after the lights go out.
Eleven Stories was recorded at Premium Recording Service, a new studio grafted onto the back of a bungalow in a funky blue-collar neighborhood in North Austin. The bungalow proper is the office for Bruce's own label, Premium Records (the label's first release will be an album by the Damnations, produced by Bruce).
It is the kind of neighborhood that might have been lifted from a Bruce Robison lyric. Rumbling freights roll down railroad tracks by the front door, past what used to be a 24-hour pool hall and beer joint situated across the street from a grade school. A cafe called Six Napkins sits across the way. Funky.
Inside, however, the studio is all polished wood and cavernous space and lots of primo outboard gear. The Dixie Chicks, George Strait, Lee Ann Womack, Tim 'n' Faith and the other chart-topping luminaries who have cut Bruce's songs paid for the set-up.
"It's funny, but when we had some success, all we did was hunker down and try to be real smart about everything," Robison recalls. "I wound up getting a pair of boots made, I think.
"But I decided I wanted a place to put [the money] into, and I bought this place and ended up going crazy on it. It ended up being this huge indulgence. But it's cool that Kelly likes it too."
The studio is all about old-timey natural reverb and analog equipment, the better to make records that sound like 40-year-old classic country tracks. As with Bruce's stated songwriting ideal of simplicity, Premium Recording Service is a testament to the virtues of an earlier era.
And speaking of an earlier era...the lighted sign outside the Broken Spoke in South Austin reads "Dine and Dance Texas Style." Inside, the beer sign neons seem to go on forever and couples dance in counterclockwise circles. A pouch of Beech-Nut chewing tobacco lays unattended on a table next to a glass of scotch. If an order for a cosmopolitan has ever been placed inside the Spoke, owner James White, a fifth-generation Texan in a perennial cowboy hat and pearl-snap shirt, doesn't want to hear about it.
It's a Saturday night in January, and Bruce and his five-piece band are onstage, playing a set that hopscotches between Robison originals such as "Bed Of Ashes", "Travelin' Soldier", "Tonight" and "Long Way Home From Anywhere" and covers of Merle Haggard's "Big City", Harlan Howard's "Above And Beyond", Johnny Rodriguez' "Ridin' My Thumb To Mexico" and Ray Price's seminal Texas shuffle, "Crazy Arms".
The dance floor is dead-solid packed. Coltish junior high girls dance with each other because the acne-pocked junior high boys are too shy to approach them; a 5-year-old with starched jeans and a big straw cowboy hat dances with his 4-year-old sister; older couples glide by serenely, as though on skates.
Toward the end of the first set, the band lights up a loping version of "You Ain't Going Nowhere". Their twangy take on the Dylan classic fits like a tongue-in-groove joint between the Ray Price shuffles and Bruce's own honky-tonk epistles:
Ooh-whee, ride me high
Tomorrow's the day my bride's gonna come
Oh Lord, are we gonna fly
Down in the easy chair...
The performance marks probably the first time anyone had ever sung about Genghis Khan's sheet onstage at the Broken Spoke. But who cared? The dance floor was full, the music was swinging, and Bruce was standing onstage with his shirttail out, doing something even a gridiron hero like Vince Young could never aspire to. Every once in a while in life, you run across a perfect moment.
ND contributing editor John T. Davis is a journalist and author living with The Beautiful Lawyer in Austin, Texas.
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