ISSUE #23: Always go to the show

RIP Charlie Robison.

****THIS THURSDAY***** JOSHUA RAY WALKER will be joining the Don’t Rock The Inbox Live official Zoom room on September 14th at 7 p.m. CT — become a paying subscriber today so you don’t miss it! Here’s one of my favorites of his, simple and brilliant.

Another reminder: We are officially launching the Don’t Rock The Inbox Book Club!! Our first book will be Why Tammy Wynette Matters by Steacy Easton — read it before we get Steacy on Zoom to discuss it on Monday, September 18th with our paying subscribers. If you don’t have it yet, we have our first discount code (!! I’m so excited about this!) for Don’t Rock The Inbox readers only (!): enter UTXTAMMY for 25% off + free shipping if you purchase the book directly from UT Press.

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Robison at Banita Creek Hall in Nacogdoches, Texas

By Natalie

I didn’t know anything about Charlie Robison before I fell in love with a Texan — and honestly, maybe that’s exactly as it should be. Some things — most things, even — are better understood within the place they’re made. Charlie Robison is an artist whose work runs miles deep in Texas soil, an artist whose sound, I assume, never echoed better than it did in barrooms and honky-tonks in Nacogdoches and Abilene and, of course, Fort Worth.

He grew up on a ranch in Bandera, the self-proclaimed “Cowboy Capital of the World,” played football at Texas State and was the inspiration for the Chicks’ “Cowboy Take Me Away.” The man had a Billy Bob’s tattoo on his forearm, for Christ’s sake. You don’t get much more Texas country than that.

I’m wearing a Billy Bob’s t-shirt as I write this, but I’m still compelled to guess how and where Robison sounded best because I never saw him live. It wasn’t for lack of opportunity. Robison stopped in Dallas and Fort Worth not long after he resumed performing last year; a botched tonsillectomy had forced him into early retirement in 2018, but he’d made it back to the stage and was actually slated to play Billy Bob’s again (for the 39th time) in October, a few days after my fiancé Jonny and I will get back from our honeymoon.

I’d mentioned it to him, suggesting that we buck up and do the hour drive even though we’ll probably be exhausted (and I’m already forcing us to go to another Fort Worth show that week…). But the concert was cancelled a couple weeks ago; now, it’s clear why. Robison is gone at 59 years old, too young by just about any measure. Another beloved Texas singer-songwriter-laureate now confined to the state’s robust musical lore, fodder for tall tales and fond reminiscences.

Jonny never saw him play either, but introduced me to his music probably the first time we were on an extended car ride together. Robison has the place in his musical memory that bands like Nirvana and Death Cab have in mine — inescapable hometown hero whose ubiquity you take for granted. He grew up going to Billy Bob’s with his high school friends as a matter of course, listening to red dirt without thinking anything of it because that’s what everyone did. I had already heard “New Year’s Day” probably five to ten times on his playlists before we played it on January 1, 2021 as I drove across the Texas border with all of my records and clothes in tow. “I think I’ll stay,” indeed.

It’s a great song, one that I think it’s fair to say was different than anything I’d ever really heard before meeting Jonny and immersing myself full-throatedly in the music of his home state. The cowboy-poet thing is so much realer and weirder and more earnest here than it might feel from the coasts, and “New Year’s Day” is the perfect exemplar of it — familiar-sounding but unexpected, catchy and more than a little haunting. “My Hometown,” another one of his best-known anthems, exists at the much more square end of the Texas country spectrum — a straight-forward ode to small-town West Texas, with fiddle and audience participation opportunities to spare.

The contrast between them — two out of dozens of rich, compelling songs — shows some of Robison’s range, as well as that of the song-first musical community where he lived and played. Without him, there’s one less person pushing against the grain towards something honest and original and specific; something for Texas by a Texan that some other people might like too but who cares, really?

Robison tried Nashville in the early aughts. “It's up to you to decide whether that's selling out or not,” he told the Austin Chronicle of his sole top 40 country hit, a 2001 cover of NRBQ’s “I Want You Bad.” “But I did it not to get in Nashville's good graces. I did it to get my other songs heard." Soon after, he signed to the more artist-friendly Dualtone and gave up completely on radio; the resulting album, Good Times (2004), had “New Year’s Day” among a slew of memorable songs.

He never played along the way you’re supposed to on Music Row — a hindrance to his radio career, and a boon to his reputation in a state that cherishes its “outsiders” over everything.

“You wouldn't believe how insular this town is,” he said in the same Austin Chronicle piece of Nashville. “I've gone to country radio stations where I've heard them talk about Tracy Lawrence, the country star convicted of beating up his wife [I did not know this!]. Some of these guys say, 'Know what bothers me about that? Nobody ever asked his side of the story.' These are fucking hillbillies we're dealing with. We're a bunch of dolphins in a world of stupid sharks. I'll always feel like a fish out of water here."

So he came back home to a state where prickly singer-songwriters can always find a place to play (and hopefully always will) — a state where he could prove over and over just how ambitious and surprising those three chords and the truth could be. “I'm not saying I hate country or even Nashville,” said Robison, again in the same interview. “It's just that I'd love for everybody to sit together and say, 'We can make better music here.' We should try and raise the bar a bit, myself included.”

I just wish I could have seen him trying to raise that bar in person. Always go to the show; I know I’ll be at the next one as soon as I can, raising a glass (or a Shiner) to Robison.

“So I'll see you in Nashville if I ever get out that way/
I'll see you in Austin but I won't have long to stay/
If you're ever out west, son, and you’re feeling like slowing down/
I'll see you around, around my hometown.”

— Charlie Robison, “My Hometown”