30th anniversary of Keen's masterpiece

Robert Earl: "I've become the hero of the dysfunctional Aggie"

As the country music critic for the Dallas Morning News from ‘92- ‘94, I watched the Robert Earl Keen phenomenon unfold on my beat. One day he was playing for a couple hundred at the Sons of Hermann Hall, and a few months later he sold 2,000 tickets at the Majestic Theater. Keen was a ten-year overnight sensation, from his ‘83 New Folk arrival at Kerrville, to the release of A Bigger Piece of Sky, which took him to the next level and then the one above that. The track that did it was the one we dubbed “The Song Goes On Forever (And the Lyrics Never End).” First appearing on Keen’s third album West Textures (1989), “The Road Goes On Forever” found new life when a handful of diehard Keenoids devised a pantomime around the lyrics of a waitress and an honorable lowlife, who set off on an adventure that ends with one of them dying to protect the other. It snowballed from there until Keencerts became almost like “red dirt” Rocky Horror Picture Shows. The curved brim heads couldn’t get enough of REK! His words ruled their lives.

Keen’s 1993 LP Bigger Piece added other future classics- “Corpus Christi Bay,” “Whenever Kindness Fails” and a kickass cover of Terry Allen’s “Amarillo Highway.” It’s a nearly perfect album.

To trumpet its Feb. ‘93 release, Team Keen (wife Kathleen was manager) invited me over for a barbecue/sleepover at their house in Bandera for a big feature story. I had just gotten married so I brought my bride, a cute, personable Dallas blonde I’d known for less than a month. While we were sitting at the kitchen counter before dinner, smoking a joint, the wife passed out cold, falling off the stool and hitting her head on the terra cotta floor. Thwack! was the sound. We were mortified, but she popped back up, more embarrassed than injured. Hadn’t eaten all day, she said, and that was really strong pot.

Kathleen wanted to take her to the hospital, but she said she was fine. All through dinner the Keens were looking at her for any signs of brain trauma. “Who’s the President?” is not exactly stimulating dinner conversation. Perfectly-grilled steaks were on the menu in this concussion protocol. Afterwards, I sat with Robert Earl in the living room and talked about A Bigger Piece, while Mrs. Corcoran retired to the bed room (Kathleen checking on her). When I went to bed and turned on my whirring cpap- a relatively new device at the time- the Keens laid in bed and wondered if they’d wake up to two dead bodies in the next room. REK has told that story to mutual friends.

At least I got a good piece with great access for the DMN. But a few days before mine was scheduled to run, Shirley Jinkins of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram published the same “at home with the Keens” story ! My competition had also stayed over in Bandera. So I had to rewrite mine into the story that follows.

I’m on great terms with my son’s mother, my ex-wife, who I’ll call next month on our 30th anniversary. But after the effects of CTE became made public via the NFL it helped me better understand parts of the marriage that confused me.

Bryan Duckworth and Robert Earl Keen 1977. Photo Lyle Lovett

1993 BANDERA. Sometimes Robert Earl Keen resembles actor Tim Robbins. But when he chews tobacco, he looks more like Jack Nicholson, with the brown corners of his mouth looking like the start of the Joker's makeup.

He's got that sheen of suave, slick-backed determination so prominent in hip new actors: the rake next door. It's his old college pal Lyle Lovett, however, who gets the hip movie roles.

Robert Earl Keen is the only Texas songwriter who could've written “Lawyers, Guns and Money” instead of Warren Zevon or “Mama Told Me Not To Come” instead of Randy Newman, yet it's Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt who are called the deans of Texas songwriting.

And while writers like Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore often sing the glories of riding tractors and hitchhiking through West Texas, Keen gets extra authenticity points by being the only Tex-bred songsmith (until Ryan Bingham) who's ridden bucking bulls in the rodeo. ("It's like driving down the highway at 70 miles an hour and then just chucking the steering wheel out the window,' he says).

Robert Earl Keen is the great undiscovered singer-songwriter from the Lone Star State. And he just may be the best of the bunch. His fourth and latest LP, A Bigger Piece of Sky (Sugar Hill), finds him lushing up his spare, folky arrangements without losing any of his lyrical bite. And the unanimous rave reviews and heightened airplay on such stations as KERA-FM have made this his best-selling LP just a month out of the chute.

A Bigger Piece of Sky just sounds better than Mr. Keen's previous No Kinda Dancer, The Live Album and West Textures albums. He's dropped the Jr. from his name and seemingly moved into the grown-up section of the studio.

Dallas has long been Keen's biggest market, thanks to a series of raucous shows at the Sons of Hermann Hall (one of which became The Live Album), and Saturday night's concert at the 2,400-capacity Majestic Theatre is an important show for the Bandera resident. This ain't beer gardens and coffeehouses. Thanks to the new LP -- as well as Joe Ely's covering “The Road Goes On Forever” and “Whenever Kindness Fails” on his Love And Danger album -- Keen's career is on a roll.

"I wouldn't say that I'm confident, but I am driven enough to hope that the venues keep getting bigger and better,' he says. "At my level, that's the best measure of success.'

Besides being larger, the Majestic should be a great place to actually hear the songs. Mr. Keen's shows have become increasingly rowdier, with beer sales records being broken in some venues. "I've become the hero of the dysfunctional Aggie,' says Robert Earl, who graduated from Texas A&M with a degree in literature. "I'm not going to tell people not to have a good time, but, yeah, every once in a while I feel like Lynyrd Skynyrd.”

It's been 15 years since Robert Keen and Lyle Lovett sat on that now-famous front porch in College Station, making up songs and talking about where they were going to move when their parents got their grades. It's been a slow but steady climb since then, but now Keen has a nice little business and a nice little life that he runs with wife Kathleen out of their house on a golf course in Bandera, northwest of San Antonio.

"When I started doing this, right after college, I didn't know anything about the business,” he says. "I didn't even know there was a business. It was the biggest thing to get up in front of a few people and play songs that you had written and have them like 'em. In seventh or eighth grade, my plan was to find something that I had some talent in and do it the rest of my life. That way you know you'd at least be good. Eventually.'

Initially, Keen played guitar in bluegrass bands, but he decided to take songwriting more seriously when one group replaced him after a few months. "I was busted down to bass,” he says. "That was pretty humiliating.'

Keen did speckle his creative endeavors with some requisite hard living when he took a few years off from college to work the oil fields and party with real alkies. The new LP contains a great song called “Corpus Christi Bay” that could not have been written by someone who hasn't passed out on a green shag carpet. "If I could live my life all over/It wouldn't matter anyway/Cause I never could stay sober/On the Corpus Christi Bay' goes the chorus. It's a song about how a certain time, place and group of friends can conspire to make a complete mess of you. Beer and drugs are almost incidental. Though they do the damage you can see, it's that other stuff that sets the thirst in motion.

"I lived in Corpus with my brother around 1975-76, which is the inspiration for that song,' Keen says. "That time was spent in an almost complete alcoholic haze. I made so many deals with myself, like, "If I should live through the night, I will never, ever do this again.' Then I'd meet up with my brother the next day, and we'd kill a case.” (Note: Keen was freshly sober when we did the interview).

Keen has always been a witty and insightful writer, something like John Prine with smaller hooks and a longer line, but the new LP shows remarkable growth, even for the writer of such wonderfully quirky tunes as “The Front Porch Song,” “I Would Change My Life,” “Swerv-in' In My Lane,” and “Mariano.” It's been almost four years since the release of the previous LP, West Textures, and Robert Earl had a stockpile of formidable new tunes.

"I wouldn't say I'm prolific, but I spend a lot of time writing songs. It's worth the extra effort to finish songs, Keen says. "It's been my experience that if you write a bunch of crap, it makes you feel real bad.”