(Editor's note: With this issue we begin a semi-regular feature profiling the supporting musicians who help make much of the music we spend our days listening to.)
Rich Brotherton is best known outside of Austin, Texas, as Robert Earl Keen's guitar player. But in his adopted hometown he's much, much more. There he's also a celebrated folk and Celtic musician, and a producer who has helmed records for Keen, Caroline Herring, Rodney Hayden, Beaver Nelson, Ana Egge and others.
Raised in Augusta, Georgia, Brotherton began his musical explorations at age 8; by 11, he was playing professionally with a folk group, and at 14, he started playing solo gigs in a local restaurant. He attended Colorado College in Colorado Springs, graduating with a degree in music theory and composition.
After finishing school in 1981, Brotherton traveled to the town of Doolin in the County of Clare, Ireland, to study music. He lived in a tent in a field behind McGann's Pub & Restaurant for the summer, working in the restaurant during the day and playing music in the pub at night. After returning to the States, he ended up in Boise, Idaho, where his family had settled.
In 1985 he made a list of places he wanted to go, and eventually crossed them off until Austin was the only one left. Once there, he quickly made a name for himself. He played guitar with Kris McKay (who had a deal on Arista) and renowned songwriter David Halley. He and bassist J.D. Foster teamed up with Danny Barnes to play in the Barnburners, a short-lived group that was a precursor to the Bad Livers. He played with Ronnie Lane, and toured Japan with Lane and Ian McLagan. He originated the Continental Club's legendary "Hippie Hour" early shows with singer Toni Price. He played Irish music with Ed Miller.
Brotherton had no problem keeping busy. Then he happened to run into Robert Earl Keen.
NO DEPRESSION: How did your family end up moving to Boise, Idaho?
RICH BROTHERTON: My dad and my uncle bought a beer distributorship at one point. Did you know there are more Mormons per capita in Southern Idaho than there are in Salt Lake City? They decided that they were going to try to sell Schlitz beer to a mostly Mormon community. It was a bad idea. They moved out there right when I went off to college. After college I came back and spent a couple of years in Boise playing.
ND: How did you get your start in music?
RB: My dad had a Harmony Tenor guitar he tuned like a baritone uke. I figured out how to pick a little pattern on the open strings and I showed it to him. He had me do that and he chorded the neck while I played that pattern. I said, "Wait a minute! What did you do there?" He showed me 1-4-5 in G and in C. Then he showed me how a capo worked. From those lessons, anything I was able to hear, I was able to figure out. My first guitar was that Harmony Tenor. When I was 12, my dad gave me a Yamaha FG-180 that I still have.
ND: You list Tony Rice and Leo Kottke as influences, and you've got a solid acoustic reputation, playing mandolin, playing Irish music. But you are also a monster on the electric.
RB: I didn't get an electric guitar until I was in college. I stumbled upon Richard Thompson and went, "Wait a minute." And then Albert Lee; I listened to "Two More Bottles Of Wine" [on Emmylou Harris' 1978 Quarter Moon In A Ten Cent Town] and went "whoooa." Then there was Clarence White..."Chestnut Mare" and "Tulsa County" are mindblowers. There was a really badass version, that I only heard one time, a buddy of mine had a cassette in college of Clarence and [his brother] Roland doing an electric version of [Mickey Newbury's] "Why You Been Gone So Long" that was just awesome.
ND: Do you have any trouble with the transition between acoustic and electric? Most acoustic players prefer a much heavier gauge of strings than electric players do.
RB: I tried a lot of stuff for years and I finally got to where I am playing 12s on the acoustic and 11s on the electric, so that I don't just squeeze it out of tune every time I pick it up.
ND: You started playing with Robert Earl Keen about thirteen years ago after meeting him at a record release party for A Bigger Piece Of Sky.
RB: I was playing at Gruene Hall with Champ Hood. Robert and [Bryan] Duckworth were coming in to set up to do a record release that night. Champ was friends of theirs; we were doing our afternoon set. They sat in with us for a tune or two. That was the first time I met him. It turned out a buddy of mine was playing bass with him. Robert decided that he was going to be looking for a guitar player and my buddy threw my name his way. Maybe he remembered me from that gig with Champ, but he called me up.
ND: What's the difference between your approaches to playing live and in the studio?
RB: The road is a lot more forgiving, unless someone is taping the show; then I just start cringing. The studio requires a lot more; everything's got to be right because it's all under the microscope. I end up doing a lot more whittling down when I am in the studio. I'll play something and listening too it on playback and think "I need to take out this, this, and this." A lot more of that takes place in the studio, trying to play the right notes instead of the most notes. I aim for that live, but sometimes you end up just blazing away to try and build space. Sometimes you want to. It's really just a matter of listening all the time.
ND: How did you make the transition from folkie, Celtic musician to what you are doing now with Robert?
RB: The astounding thing to me at this point is that I have hammered out a career for myself playing essentially the same thing I have been playing all my life. Robert pulled out "Billy Grey" to record [on Walking Distance]. I'm like, "You know 'Billy Grey'?" "Yeah man, it's a great song, let's sing it." I've known 'Billy Grey' since I was in high school; it's a really great Norman Blake song off of his badass Old & New record. He pulled out "My Home Ain't In The Hall Of Fame", that Jonathan Edwards did.
So it's like we know all the same stuff, we listened to all the same records, with some exceptions. He had a more hardcore country upbringing and I had a more folk into rock, but if you draw it out with a diagram of circles, there was a huge intersect where his music world overlapped my music world, and that's kind of where I am still making my living today. It's very encouraging and a great relief.
ND: How did you get into producing?
RB: With Ed Miller. I moved to Austin and I met some guys who were math professors and bachelors, and Celtic music freaks. They had professor money and really nothing to do with it, so they would buy stuff. At one point, they bought some recording gear. And they said, "We need to make a record." Ed was living around Austin singing great stuff and had never made a record. He was painting houses.
So we tried to do some recording with him one time and it didn't really work out. Those guys moved on to something else, but then Ed later on thought that making a record would be a good thing and he called me up. I had done a little bit of recording since then; I could figure it out. So I just arrogantly, blindly said, "Yes, I can produce your record." So I made a record with him I just kind of fell into it sort of by accident.
ND: You have your own studio now?
RB: It is called Ace Recording. It's not a big place; it's a room I added on to the back of my house. It's a good space. It's a nice big all-in-one sort of room. There's a smaller isolation room where you can go off and sing vocals. I have a Pro Tools Mix Plus system. I've been collecting mikes off of eBay like everyone else. I've got a Neumann U87, and a couple of KM184s, and a bunch of alphabet soup.
ND: Who all have you had in your studio so far?
RB: We did Caroline Herring's record here. I just finished a[nother] record with Ed Miller. I did a record by an Irish band called the Tea Merchants who just won the Best World Music Band at the Austin Music Awards. Recently I've been working with a guy named Stephen Clair from New York City. He's an incredible singer-songwriter who I met when he opened some shows for Robert.
ND: When you are producing, how do you approach the way you work with a Caroline Herring versus the way you work with Robert? What do you bring different to each project?
ND: To a large degree it was just a level of experience. Caroline had made one record up to that point. Robert, when I started producing his records, had made ten. So he already had a really good idea of what the process was and how it worked and what he wanted to do. My job was to kind of facilitate things and keep the ball rolling and to just sort of be the kind of arbiter.
With Caroline...it was a lot more of directing the whole of the thing, showing her to some degree how to do this, how we could do that. But now, with this newest record, Caroline has her sea legs underneath her and has much more of an idea of what she wants and how she wants it to sound. So the new one was much more of a collaborative process.
ND: What about wearing the producer's hat versus wearing the musician's hat? How does Rich the producer tell Rich the guitar player when it's enough?
RB: It depends on where we are with stuff. If I'm in the studio with Robert, for instance, a lot of times, I spend much more time nitpicking my stuff when I'm producing it than when somebody else is producing me. When I go in to play for someone else, I put something down and they say, "That sounds great," and my reaction is, "If you like it, there it is." But if it were me, I'd spend another hour working on this thing....I've just built my own studio and so I can sort of allow myself the luxury of spending the time I want, and then charging for the time it should have taken to get the part down.
ND: Let's talk about your guitar collection.
RB: My main touring instruments are, right now, a 1970 D-28 that my wife got me for our 10th anniversary to play on the road. It's a good road guitar and it's opening up real good now.
I still have a 1971 D-35 that was given to me by a friend when I graduated high school. I put a new top on that in 1994. I used it on the road and got scared finally and decided I was just going to leave it at home. I gig with it around town but it doesn't ride the bus anymore.
I have a Paul Reed Smith. It's a Custom 24 model; I would have liked a McCarty, but that's only available with a wide/fat neck, so instead I got them to put McCarty electronics and pickups in a Custom 24.
And then there are the Epis. Many years ago, Epiphone gave me a couple of guitars. They gave me a Riviera, which is like a Gibson 335, and they gave me a reissue Texan which is like a Gibson J-45. I travel with those guitars. They are like Korean guitars and they're dipped in plastic and if they were to die on the road, it would just be a matter of buying another one, but they are great for that. They sound good, and they play good.
At home I've got a Collings, I've got a National Polychrome Tri-Cone, I've got an old Telecaster Custom, like the Keith Richards kind, with a humbucker in the neck position. I've got a real Epiphone Texan, a '63 or '64; it's a beautiful thing. I've got an Epiphone Frontier that's kind of their version of a Hummingbird or a Dove or something like that, whichever one of them is maple.
There's a sack of other oddball things. I've got a cittern that was made by this guy named Charlie Fotheringham in Scotland that is a cool thing. It's like a ten-stringed giant mandolin. I use it all the time in the studio. It doesn't have a pickup in it. I used it all over Robert's last record. Just about everything I do I end up using it on, because it's just a really cool texture, a really cool sound.
ND: Do you have any endorsement deals?
RB: No, not as such. Not as an individual. A couple of folks gave me some guitars over the years; a couple of folks have given me breaks on guitars.
ND: Who are you playing with these days?
ND: Playing with Robert, Ed Miller. Caroline Herring when I can. Occasionally I get to play with Warren Hood, Champ's son.
Comments ()