'Bobmania' was born of symbiosis

Schneider's LPs flew off the Waterloo shelves after heavy rotation on KGSR

Much of the talk at SXSW in the early 2000s was about shrinking album sales and corporate consolidation of radio, but Waterloo Records and KGSR (FM 107.1) offered a striking alternative to the doom and gloom that otherwise characterized the music business post 9/11. Both were profitable because of a symbiotic relationship that found Waterloo staffers poring over the KGSR playlist every week for display influence, while the radio station's programmers kept a close eye on Waterloo's sales chart.

"Waterloo is our best focus group," said Jody Denberg of KGSR. "If we notice that a track we're playing moderately is flying out of the store, we'll play it more."

The 2002 success of Norah Jones owed much to this radio/retail synergy, but it was never stronger than with Austin musician Bob Schneider, beginning with 1999’s Lonelyland, still the best-selling album ever at Waterloo. KGSR played the hell out of “Metal and Steel” and “Big Blue Sea,” and buying a Schneider album at Waterloo became an Austin cliché, like swimming at Barton Springs or two-stepping at the Broken Spoke. To put his E.Q. (envy quotient) over the top, Bob dated Sandra Bullock during the height of the Lonelyland mania.

But Bob had been doing the frontman thing for a long time before Bullock moved to Austin after making Hope Floats in Smithville in 1997. While Sandy was doing chemistry auditions with Keanu Reeves in the early ‘90s, Schneider was ruling Sixth Street with punk funk band Joe Rockhead. He was the wild man of Horneo.

Once a hotel-trashing, groupie-devouring rockstar, Schneider has been sober almost three decades, and he now drives home after shows within a four-hour drive to Austin. He’s gotta see his kids in the morning even if he’s been up all night.

There was a time when Schneider read every review, and he would let the negative ones eat at him all day. But it was a waste of time and energy, he decided, so he tries to stay away from the opinions of others. If you believe the raves, you’ve also gotta think the pans have some truth.

“I’ve been up against the backlash for a long time,” he said. “I think there’s a misconception that I’ve got it made.” His fanbase- mostly white, upper- middle class folks aged 35- 55- includes celebrity chef Rachael Ray, who talks him up in the press and booked him at every one of her SXSW blowouts. “If you’re a hipster and you’re seen at one of my shows, they revoke your street cred,” he said. He lobbies to play ACL Fest, but is bypassed yearly.

Sometimes someone will come up to Schneider after a show and tell him his or her friends dragged them there and they didn’t want to go, but now they’re a fan. That’s his favorite reaction. Schneider said he wants to take on every negative perception of him. “I want to try and change their mind,” he said. ”Every one of them.”

The popular perception was that he owed his career to Sandy B.’s star power, but in reality it might’ve hurt. Schneider was selling hundreds of CDs a week at Waterloo and packing 700 fans every Tuesday into Antone’s with the Scabs before he met Miss Confidentiality. The relationship ended after two years and the pair haven’t spoken since. (Ironically, the Saxon Pub, Schneider’s favorite place of business, was next door for years to the Austin Speed Shop, owned by Bullock’s cheating ex-husband Jesse James. Not her favorite block on South Lamar.)

When an alcoholic becomes sober the days are 10 hours longer, and Schneider filled all that new time with work. Also a talented visual artist, Schneider was always drawing, always writing, playing music, making videos. “It was actually a pretty pathetic way to live,” he said in 2009. One addiction had been replaced by another.

“I had been capable of living a 24-hour, self-centered, self-absorbed existence,” he said. And then his son was born in 2006 and priorities changed bigtime. But not until the residual effect of his workaholicism shook up his home life. Schneider and his first wife, a nurse, divorced when Luc was just a few months old. The musician was so disappointed in himself he took a vow of celibacy that lasted 13 months.

Schneider tapes “ACL” in 2010. Photo Scott Newton

In his son, Schneider saw the chance to make up for his own sad, lonely upringing. “My parents never listened to me, never seemed to care what I thought,” he said. “I listen to every word Luc says. And he’s always cracking me up.” Schneider has written songs using Luc’s words as lyrics. Nothing in life has ever turned him on like being a father. Remarried, he’s got a young daughter, too.

His own father was a musician who had dreams of being a world class opera singer.  Bob Schneider Sr. dragged his family to Germany for four years when Bob was a toddler, then to El Paso for five years and then back to Germany, all to learn from noted vocal instructors.

Kevin Connor, Bullock, Schneider at the Austin Music Awards circa 2000.

“My parents had this big plan, but my dad just didn’t have the voice, I guess,” said Schneider. Mother Katie supported the family on a teacher’s salary, with Bob Sr. contributing here and there.

“We were dirt poor and lived in the worst part of town,” said Schneider, who was bullied daily from the third to eighth grades in El Paso. He remembers going with his mother and sister across the border to Juarez to buy powdered milk, 5-cent cans of pinto beans and tortillas, the family’s dinner most nights.

Growing up without money is a form of abuse that can leave scars. “To this day, I can’t treat myself. Instead of buying a $3,000 guitar that will last forever, a buy a $400 guitar every year,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense.” While his sometime tour mate, Mississippi songwriter Charlie Mars has been known to splurge on $1,000-a-night hotel suites on special occasions, Schneider spends hours on Expedia before a tour looking for $89 motel rooms. “I mean, Charlie’s got, like $8,000 to his name,” Schneider said, shaking his head. (Told what Schneider said, Mars laughed and remarked, ‘they don’t have luggage racks on the top of hearses.”)

From his father’s example, Schneider also learned how to be an authoritative band leader. Bob Sr., who fronted a frat band called Bob and the Collegians while attending the University of Michigan, fibbed to get a gig playing a club on a military base near El Paso. He said he had a band, then bought a cheap set of drums and taught 10-year-old Bob Jr. to keep a beat. “My father knew thousands of songs,” said Schneider, “and he’d play 45 minutes without even a pause, just going from one song into another.” Schneider said his arms were so tired he started crying one night and his dad shot him a look like don’t even think about it.

“Always keep playing no matter what,” Schneider said of what his father taught him. It’s what he tells his bands. “I broke my arm once with Joe Rockhead and still finished the show.”

During his times with Rockhead, the flamboyant frontman was usually so drunk he couldn’t feel any pain. Schneider started drinking as a 14-year-old in Germany, where there was no age limit. “My parents didn’t care if I drank,” he said. “They were both heavy drinkers.”

Schneider said that the first time he was drunk he’d found a coping mechanism that made him feel more complete. “I’ve always been terrified and alcohol took away that fear.” He found the power of playing rock n’ roll around the same time. Schneider put together a band called Bitter Lemon to play the talent show at his American high school in Germany. What happened when he sang amazed him.

“All these chicks got out of their seats and ran towards the stage screaming my name,” remembered Schneider. “I couldn’t believe it. No girls would talk to me and now they’re going crazy. After that, I was the hero of the school.”

Schneider was also suspended for a couple days for his use of obscene lyrics. The seed was planted.

The kid finally knew what he wanted to do with his life. And with booze he had the courage to get up there in front of everybody.

I met Schneider in 1988, soon after he’d moved to Austin from El Paso at the suggestion of guest lecturer Terry Allen. When I held a “Make a Valentine for Corky” contest during my pitiful last chapter at the Austin Chronicle, Schneider won.

I’d run into him at clubs and he was kind of a pest- unrelenting in his social awkwardness. I called him the Preppy Killer because he looked like the recently-convicted Robert Chambers. He was outside the Pogues show at Liberty Lunch in June ’88 without money to get in, so I made him my plus one. I was on the wagon at the time, until Bob poured whiskey in my root beer, which doesn’t taste bad after you’ve had a few.

I left town for San Francisco a couple weeks later. Then came Chicago and then Dallas. But during the seven years I lived elsewhere I was always coming back to Austin every couple of months, and always for SXSW. I took any freelance job that sent me to Texas- the Pixies in Houston, Bon Jovi in Dallas, the Bangles in Houston- and I’d expense a rental car and drive to Austin. On one of those trips back to the garden, I kept hearing about Joe Rockhead, and went to see them at Steamboat. The club was packed and going crazy. Flailing around onstage was the Preppy Killer! I couldn’t believe it. I gave him a ride home to 45th Street after the show and he invited me inside to hear some of his new music. A tape with just him and an acoustic guitar, it was nothing like the punk-funk he’d been singing that night. It was good, real good.

We ran out of beer at about 3 a.m. and Bob made a phone call. Half an hour later, a very cute woman was at the door with a six-pack. Bob took the beer and thanked her with a kiss, then she was on her way.

Once Schneider started drinking, he couldn’t stop. “When I was at my worst, which was during the Ugly Americans (1993- 1995), I would get black-out drunk five nights a week,” he said.  One night a friend turned up at a show with a beautiful woman and Schneider introduced himself. “You don’t remember me?” the woman said. Turns out she and Schneider had recently spent a weekend together, but Bob was drunk from morning til pass-out. “She was drop dead gorgeous and I was thinking, ‘I wish I could remember some of that,’” he said.

Rock bottom came in L.A., where Schneider spent a few months recording an album with Ugly Americans for the recently-revived Capricorn Records. “Adam (guitarist Temple) and I were getting in so much trouble,” he said.  “In Austin, we had people who took care of us. I’d pass out in somebody’s car and somebody else would say, ‘Oh, that’s just Bob Schneider. Let’s take him to Steamboat and they’ll get him home.’ But in L.A. there were some serious consequences.”

One night at a party, Schneider flirted with the girlfriend of a reputed mobster and was quickly whisked out when the made man overheard Bob telling his girl that he wanted to spank her ass. Bob went into hiding for a few days.

Ugly Americans did some shows with Dave Matthews Band and the groups had become friends, but Schneider had a habit of breaking into the DMB’s dressing room when they were onstage and stealing their beer. One night he was caught urinating in their garbage can. Everybody laughed, but the next time DMB came through town they gave backstage passes to all the Ugly Americans except Schneider.

“That really hurt my feelings,” he said.  “I realized that to some people I was just an obnoxious drunk, not a musician.”

Schneider said the last few months of drinking was “so horrible that the only thing that gave me some comfort was that I could always kill myself. That’s pretty bad when suicide’s the light at the end of the tunnel.”

One day in L.A,, Schneider was called in for a band meeting that turned out to be an intervention. A car was waiting outside to take him to the airport. He was soon on his way to rehab in Colorado.

“I didn’t think it was going to work,” he said. “I was absolutely convinced that I would eventually drink again, but the label paid $6,000 to send me to rehab, so I was going to give it a shot. I owed them that.”

That was 1995. Schneider says he has never relapsed.

“When I got sober I suddenly woke up to the fact that I didn’t like the band I was in,” Schneider said of Ugly Americans. “Everyone was just so serious. I wanted something a little quirkier.”

The concept behind Schneider’s next band, the Scabs (who were inspired by Steve Poltz’s Rugburns, right down to the suits and ties), was that every idea was valid. There were bawdy show tunes and puerile blues in the beginning, but eventually the powerhouse funk took over when the Grooveline Horns were added.

Like Rockhead, the Scabs owned Tuesday night in Austin. Sometimes they would gross more than $10,000, with two sets at Antone’s. The pretty girls loved to dance and the guys loved the pretty girls.

In ‘98, Schneider wrote a haunting, hopeful song called “2002” that wouldn’t fit in a Scabs show. He wanted to test it and several other unfunky songs live so he started a singer-songwriterly outfit called Lonelyland. He had gotten the people moving and now he would have them listen. That Monday night residency would move from Stubb’s indoors to Steamboat and then finally to the Saxon Pub, where Schneider has packed Monday nights for over 25 years.

The ensuing Lonelyland album established Schneider as an up-and-coming talent, not just some sexy lunatic. The major label bidding war got a little crazy and, thanks to Bullock’s connections, Schneider performed on “The Tonight Show” as an unsigned artist. But after Universal reissued Lonelyland with three new songs in 2001, it didn’t break nationally.

The King of Austin would rule only regionally. But he would do it as he wished. He would play jazz and bluegrass and solo acoustic and funk and try to tap into his songwriting hero Tom Waits for lyrical inspiration. He would be as filthy as he wanted to be.

But when he goes into the studio to record a new album, he has only one goal in mind. “I set out to make Graceland, every time,” he said of the 1987 Paul Simon classic. “That’s such an insanely great album, so (that goal) sounds unreasonable. But that’s just the way I am. When I’m playing golf and I’m hitting off the tee on a par three, I’m always thinking I’m going to get a hole in one. It’s not, ‘get close to the flag,’ Its ‘this one is going in.’

Use your delusions until they are true.

That ace may never happen for Bob Schneider, but he’s going to keep swinging. That’s what he does, that’s the game. If you don’t think you can do it, don’t even try.