Austin's Studio MVP Lloyd Maines

Lubbock native also co-produced, with wife Tina, 1998's hottest new singer in country music

Austin City Limits Music Festival photo by Mikala Compton AAS.

When Natalie Maines was in the second grade in Lubbock, her teacher telephoned her parents -- Tina and Lloyd Maines -- because there was a slight problem.

”During math class one day, Natalie said she didn't need to learn all this,'' recalled Lloyd, who then, as now, plays steel guitar in Joe Ely's band. “Our daughter stood up and said learning math was a waste of time because she was going to be a star.''

Natalie's prophecy came true in 1998, when her Dixie Chicks trio released its major label debut Wide Open Spaces and hit No. 1 on the Billboard country singles and CMT video charts with the infectious “There's Your Trouble.'' Charter Chicks Emily Erwin and Martie (Erwin) Seidel give the group a lot of credibility, with their instrumental flair and confident, paid-their-dues stance. But it's singer Natalie, projecting herself as the country Madonna, with her sassy body language and gorgeously elastic voice, who has made Dixie Chicks a Texas version of the Spice Girls. Call this more talent-soaked model the Marinade Sisters.

Cover of the 1998 breakout LP Wide Open Spaces.

Natalie Maines didn't even join the Chicks, a nine-year mainstay on the Dallas scene, until after they'd signed to Sony, about three years ago. The group's singer then was Laura Lynch, who had a teen-age daughter and was reluctant to commit to the sort of year-round touring regimen required to break new artists into the country market. When Emily and Martie needed a singer on short notice for one of their high-society bread-and-butter gigs, they called Lloyd Maines, who had played pedal steel guitar on the Chicks' indie LPs Little Ol' Cowgirl ('95) and Shouldn't a Told You That ('93).

”They had met Natalie when they went through Lubbock and they wanted to give her a shot, so they asked me if I had a tape,'' Lloyd said. “The only thing I had was a two-song demo we used to get Natalie a scholarship to the Berklee School of Music.'' That was good enough for the Erwin sisters. Natalie flew into Dallas from Lubbock (homesick, she left Boston's Berklee after one semester) and clicked so well with the Chicks that her audition quickly turned into a rehearsal.

“I knew Natalie was fearless,'' said Lloyd, who moved to Austin with his wife in early ‘98. “But the Dixie Chicks is her first band.'' He'd seen earlier incarnations of the Chicks pay the rent by dressing as cowgirls and playing old-timey music at private parties, then weather the “novelty act” tag. Does the parental antennae pick up any signals that this overwhelming success could be all happening too fast?

Pre-Natalie Dixie Chicks at Kerrville circa 1994. Photo John Carrico.

”These girls have got a great attitude,'' said Lloyd. The thing that set his mind at ease, Lloyd said, is that he's also worked with Erwin and Seidel and found them to be “level-headed by experience, yet young enough to be giddy about how their career is taking off.''

Papa Maines said another plus of this association is that Martie (fiddle, mandolin) and Emily (banjo, dobro) are such great players that his daughter has been working on her acoustic guitar playing. “She only played guitar onstage for about six months, but you know what makes me laugh?'' he asked. “Natalie's already got an endorsement deal with Gibson guitars. She gets all the equipment she wants for free; meanwhile I've been playing for 30 years, and I can't even get free strings.''

FOUR YEARS LATER

Lloyd Maines and dog Jake. Photo by Tina Maines.

Feb. 2002. It's Saturday night, and Lloyd Maines could be playing live from New York in front of millions. His daughter Natalie's Dixie Chicks are making their debut on "Saturday Night Live" and they wanted Lloyd to play guitar. But he had a gig with Terri Hendrix, at the 200-capacity Cactus Cafe, so he had to turn them down.

"The Cactus show had been booked for months," said the 51-year-old teddy bear with pictures of his two grandchildren -- Declan and Jackson Slade -- taped to his guitar. "Doing Saturday Night Live just wasn't an option."

Another guitarist might've found a replacement for the Cactus show, but that's not the way Maines, the embodiment of down-home and low-key, likes to operate. Besides, he'll have his time in the New York spotlight this Sunday when he backs the Chicks on "Landslide," the Stevie Nicks cover, at the Grammys. He might even make it up to the podium for an acceptance speech, as Home, the record he co-produced with Natalie and bandmates Martie Maguire and Emily Robison, is up for the prestigious Album of the Year award. (Note: It won Best Country Album.)

The fact that Lloyd Maines, the last Austin musician to leave Lubbock, is competing against the likes of Dr. Dre (Eminem's producer) and Arif Mardin (Norah Jones') is a little incongruous, even to him. "It's like a whole new arena," he says, sipping 7-Eleven coffee. The guy who graduated from a rural high school so small that it shared its lone building with the elementary and middle schools is slowly learning the mass marketplace from watching his daughter's swift ascent. He prefers to play awards shows than to merely attend them because he feels more at home with a guitar around his neck than a bow tie.

It can all be a little intimidating, the pop carnival, but one place that has long been Maines' domain is the recording studio, where he's produced everyone from somber songster Richard Buckner to Pat "Yee-Haw!" Green (up for two Grammys on Sunday.)

"What's always impressed me about Lloyd is the absence of ego," says Bruce Robison, whose Wrapped was produced by Maines in 1995. "He's very respectful of your ideas."

He's also ever-conscious of keeping costs down. Maines shakes his head at some of the exorbitant recording budgets thrown around these days. "I'd say that the catering budget for most major label projects is more than the $3,500 it cost to make the last Adam Carroll record," he says.

"The more money you have, the more money you have to waste, and that's money you've got to pay back," he concludes, noting that recording advances are always recouped by the label from record sales.

Recorded while the Chicks were estranged from their Sony label, Home was paid for by the trio, at a relatively low cost of $100,000. (The group's previous CD, Fly, was made for almost triple that.) "The girls had the idea to do an all-acoustic album, with no drums. They were just going to put it out themselves if they couldn't get things worked out with Sony."

Accusing the label of bilking them of more than $4 million through "creative accounting," the Chicks declared themselves free agents and started talking to other labels. Sony sued them for breach of contract. But on Aug. 27, a year to the day after the Chicks countersued, Home hit the shelves under the Sony imprimatur. According to the Los Angeles Times's description of the settlement, the group received a $20 million advance, plus their own Open Wide label, to be distributed by Sony.

"Just having my father as the producer made the whole project such a labor of love," Natalie told the American-Statesman in August. "That's why there's such a family feel to it." The vibe was so good at Cedar Creek that Sheryl Crow, who befriended the Chicks on the 1999 Lilith Fair tour, hung out in the studio for two weeks. "The girls spent a lot of time in the lobby reading fashion magazines and talking about babies," says Lloyd. "But when it's time to work, those girls are pros. I mean, Emily and Martie are just exceptional musicians. And they had so many good ideas. It really was a true collaboration."

So Lloyd gets only 25 percent of the producer's fee, not his usual 100 percent. But he's not complaining. Considering that Home has already sold 5 million copies and is the current best seller on the Billboard charts, Lloyd says, "That album's put me in a whole new tax bracket."

The coolest band on the planet

Like a lottery winner who keeps a school-teaching job, Maines is unmoved to change by the windfall. He still listens to demos by unknowns who want him to produce them. Still gigs frequently with Terri Hendrix. The life of a working musician is just in his blood.

He started playing guitar at age 8, forming a country cover band with his four brothers, none older than 14 at the time, called the Little Maines Brothers Band. They dropped the "Little" when their father's family band, the Maines Brothers Band, retired.

Lloyd stepped into a studio for the first time in 1972, as a 21-year-old Texas Tech student, and was hooked. "It was just a plumbing commercial I played steel guitar on, but I was totally mesmerized that my playing was being preserved." Maines took every studio gig he could get, and at one session, for a gospel record, he recruited a local harmonica player named Joe Ely.

"Joe wanted to get out of Lubbock real bad, so he put together this little band to play the Main Street Saloon and raise some money," says Maines, the group's pedal steel player. "Well, the first night we had a blast, but we only made about $50 apiece -- not enough money for Joe to get to Austin. The next week, we showed up and I guess the word of mouth was pretty good because there was a line around the block. Joe said, 'Fellas, we might be onto something here.' "

And that was the birth of the Joe Ely Band, which would soon add the great Jesse Taylor on guitar and earn a reputation as the best dang country rock 'n' roll band in the world. Signed to MCA, the group toured the States and Europe with the Clash. (A nine-year-old Natalie tagged along.) "It was weird. In England, the punk rock fans gave us a chance. There was a lot of interest in the kind of country, rockabilly roots music we were playing. But in the U.S. they were trying so hard to be punk that they'd throw stuff at us and boo after the first few notes," Maines says. "One night at the Palladium in L.A., Joe Strummer came out during our set and scolded the crowd. Said that if they didn't like us, they didn't know anything about music."

C.B. Stubblefield introduces the Joe Ely Band circa 1980. Photo by Cindy Light.

In 1981, when Ely's Musta Notta Gotta Lotta album had critics hailing him and his band as saviors of rock, Maines told Ely he didn't want to tour anymore. "I had a wife and a couple of young daughters back in Lubbock and I just didn't want to jeopardize my family life," he says. Maines went back to the band with his brothers, who signed with Mercury Nashville, and played with Ely whenever he came through Lubbock or the surrounding area. "It just tore me up to miss all those Ely gigs on the road. I've never seen him give less than 110 percent. I felt like I was in the coolest band on the planet, but it was really for the best in the long run that I stayed in Lubbock." Maines has been married to his high school sweetheart, Tina, for 33 years.

After producing Terry Allen's stellar Lubbock On Everything in 1977, Maines became an in-demand helmsman who rarely said no. "I produced conjunto groups, heavy metal bands, gospel acts, just about everything," he says. "I just loved the work."

He was sitting in on a Robert Earl Keen gig in Lubbock in 1994 when, during a break, a Texas Tech student commandeered the stage with an acoustic guitar and played a couple songs before Keen's roadies got him offstage. When the kid, Pat Green, asked Maines to produce his first record a few weeks later, Lloyd thought to himself, "Well, at least this guy's got guts." After they hung out for a couple hours, guitars in hand (which is how the production process always begins with Maines), the veteran decided to take on the upstart's album. "He just had this great energy and he could really sing. Plus, I thought his songs had something there."

The first Green album, Dancehall Dreamer, became a surprise hit on the Texas/Oklahoma college circuit. The Maines-produced follow-up, George's Bar, sold even better. Seemingly every upcoming Texas singer-songwriter was after the Maines touch (not to mention his light touch on their wallets). He was soon spending more time in Austin studios than in Lubbock. As much as it pained him and Tina to sell the house they'd lived in for 23 years, the move was inevitable. Their oldest daughter, Kim, was working as a news producer for Austin's KXAN and Natalie was in Nashville with the Dixie Chicks, so the Maineses fled the empty nest in 1998. Natalie moved to Austin with husband Adrian Pasdar and their newborn baby Jackson Slade the next year.

Maines thought the move to Austin would signal a "take it easy" period of his life. Instead, things got really hectic. Besides all the production work, Maines started playing guitar for Terri Hendrix, a young singer-songwriter from San Marcos. "I heard a demo tape of hers and was totally blown away," he says. The Maines-produced Wilory Farm was a splendid calling card, and soon Hendrix and Maines, sometimes playing as a duo, sometimes with a band, were getting booked all over the country. The road life that Maines had rejected as a 30-year-old suited him just fine as an empty-nester. Tina often came along to sell merch.

Lloyd and Terri in Fort Worth. Photo by Dave Hensley.

Maines is not just a sideman in Hendrix's band, he's a co-star. The self-effacing duo have an unmistakable chemistry onstage and Maines is as apt to tell a funny story as she is. "Sometimes we have to kill time while we're changing guitars," Maines says of the Smothers Brothers-like banter. "Otherwise, I'm happy to not say a word."

Reluctant a yarn-spinner as he may be, Maines was on a roll at the Cactus Cafe and clearly enjoying his time in the spotlight. "When I moved to Austin about five years ago, my goal was to find a young, talented artist and take advantage of her financially," he tells the crowd, while Hendrix plays along with an exaggerated jawdrop. "I'd give her lessons in Music Biz 101. Like one of the main ones that Terri here didn't know until I came along is that if you write a song and someone else is in the room, they get half the songwriting credit. So we've been collaborating a lot lately."

Hendrix gets him back a couple songs later with a road story about how notoriously tight with expenses Maines is. "If it's in the contract that the promoter has to feed us before the show, Lloyd won't pull over to eat, no matter what," she says. "I'll be in the car going 'I'm sooo hungry' and Lloyd would say, 'But we can eat for free at the gig.' " Hendrix recalls one recent bout with starvation on the way to a gig. "So we finally get to the venue and they bring us our food and we each got a tiny bowl of this really yucky looking vegetarian chili."

"Don't forget the crackers," Maines chimes in. "They gave us crackers, too." The smiles linger into the next song.


LLOYD MAINES' ADVICE TO NEW ACTS

1. Don't spend beyond your means. Going into debt is not good for the creative mind.

2. Hire a booking agent before you hire a manager.

3. Radio promoters are a waste of money.

4. Develop a good work ethic. This isn't a party, it's a job.

5. Don't buy a tour bus. You can't imagine the stress and expense involved.

Lloyd Maines has just released his first-ever solo album at age 71. Read about Eagle Number 65 in this Texas Highways article by Joe Nick Patoski.