"Don't Move Here"... unless you're Reckless Kelly
Idaho brothers inspired by Shaver and Steve Earle come down from the mountain to Austin
Raised in a remote frame house without electricity or running water in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, Micky, Gary, Willy and Cody Braun had never heard of The Tonight Show until they appeared on it in 1989. Micky, the youngest, was 8 at the time. Oldest brother Cody was 12. The band’s lead singer was father Muzzie Braun, himself a member of an all-brother band when he was growing up in Idaho. Muzzie and the Little Braun Boys, all decked out in Stetson hats and matching Western shirts, so charmed the national audience with their old songs of the New West that Johnny Carson had them back a few months later.
“We were a lot more nervous the second time,” recalled fiddle player Cody. “The first time it was just surreal.”
That shot on the biggest national stage seemed even more removed from the real world a decade later when, based in Austin, Cody and Willy hit the highways hard with Reckless Kelly, while younger brothers Gary and Micky were off in the other direction, carving up a following for Micky and the Motorcars. Out on the road is where bands like these make their bones.
It’s fun, dragging your sound all over the country, but it’s also a lot of work and often frustrating. You’ve got to believe in your music or the road just doesn’t make sense, Willy said, as the band’s tour bus idled loudly, expensively, in the parking lot of a strip mall in Utah in 2006. The Reckless Kelly that hit Austin in 1996 was supposed to be big stars 10 years later. But although they’re critics’ faves and have had five Top 25 albums on the country chart, the breakaway hit has been elusive.
That night’s gig was in Park City at Suede, a former dance club gone jam-band haven. R. Kelly had never played there before, and it was a Tuesday night, so walking to the back entrance of the venue, the members mimicked the club owner excuses they’ve heard for years: “We need to get you back when the students are in town,” said guitarist David Abeyta. “Should have been here for penny beer night – the place was packed,” added Willy.
Mama said there would be nights like this. But when the band hit the stage, they locked in tight and the 50 or so in attendance perked up. Hey, these guys are good.
“My first love was a wicked, twisted road,” Willy sang early in the set. “I hit the million mile mark at 17 years old/ Never saw a rainbow, much less a pot of gold.” Later on they got everyone on their feet with a boisterous hayride version of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Reckless Kelly eats the miles and motels like cherry pie.
“I think one of the main things I passed onto my sons is that you’ve got to play sometimes when you don’t feel like it,” Muzzie Braun said from the Clayton, ID, bed-and-breakfast he and wife JoAnn built in 2000 with their sons, who each have a guest room named after them. The Braun brothers grew up in mountain seclusion, with no electricity or running water, for about seven months a year and toured from Montana to California the other five months.
Because they were home-schooled by their mother, Cody and Willy got their GEDs at age 16 and moved away from home in 1995. Inspired by Steve Earle, the first Son Volt record, and Unshaven by Billy Joe Shaver, they set out to pursue a more alternative country sound.
After about a year in Bend, OR, where they were recruited to join the Prairie Mutts, the Brauns left when the band’s backer tried to make them the next Diamond Rio. Muzzie Braun, who’s pretty much the Jerry Jeff Walker of Idaho, suggested a move to Austin. “A DJ up in Idaho had turned me onto Robert Earl Keen’s first album,” Muzzie said, “and I wanted to record his song ‘Willie.’” During a visit to Austin in 1985, Muzzie found Keen playing at the Waterloo Ice House and asked his permission to record the song. The two became friends and when Cody and Willy were looking to move to a place where they could take their music to a level unattainable in Idaho, Muzzie asked Keen if he could help them get settled in Austin. Soon, Keen’s wife Kathleen was managing the young country heartthrobs from the Northwest.
It didn’t take Reckless Kelly long to stir up the Austin music scene when they hit town in 1996. They had it all: the looks, the songs, the musicianship, the attitude.
Every Monday night, Reckless Kelly packed the original Lucy’s Retired Surfers Bar on Sixth Street with college guys who didn’t know they liked country music until they saw all those pretty girls dancing. When the club opened its stage window, the band also played to the street. It was quite a scene. After a Reckless gig, the action usually continued at a rented house on Milton Street in Travis Heights. When the neighborhood association threatened to sue the building owner for excessive noise, the band was evicted, but it quickly found another party house, which they dubbed “the Shed.”
The younger brothers kept hearing great things about Austin from their siblings, who in 1997 released the critically-acclaimed debut Millican, which sold an astonishing 30,000 copies from the merchandise table. Austin was a place you could play five, six nights a week. And you didn’t get carded if you were in the band.
Had to watch out for the ex-girlfriends, though. One jiltee sent an anonymous fax to the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission tipping them to the fact that Willy and Cody, 18 and 19 at the time, were serial swillers.
“The agents showed up before a show,” Cody recalled with a laugh. Luckily for the band, they had recently held a come-to-Jesus meeting about too much drinking before shows and they were all holding soft drinks. “If the TABC had showed up at 1 a.m., they’d have gotten us good.”
Club owners on Sixth and Red River streets let out a collective sigh the day Willy Braun turned 21. They would feel the same way about Micky Braun’s 21st birthday three years later.
‘Braunaroo!’
Although Willy and Micky tried to write together as much as possible (regional hit “Nobody’s Girl” was a collaboration), and the two sets of Braun brothers had a garage band side project for grins, they didn’t get to see each other much in Austin. In 2006, most of their hanging out together was been on the Roots Music Report chart, where the Motorcars’ Careless dethroned Reckless Kelly Was Here at No. 1. The little brothers got a big kick out of that.
Every August, however, the Brauns all return to the Sawtooth Mountains for the Braun Brothers Reunion festival, which Muzzie and his brothers Gary and Billy have organized since 1979. It takes place in a spectacular mountain setting that makes Zilker Park look like the infield of a motor speedway. Once Texas country’s best-kept secret, the word has gotten out about the BBR fest, which draws crowds upwards of 18,000 over three days to see such “red dirt” acts as Randy Rogers Band, Turnpike Troubadours, Cody Canada and the Departed, Jason Boland and the Stragglers and Django Walker. When I visited in 2006, it was still more of a local affair, with about 3,000 on hand. Kids played Red Rover on the driving range of the Challis Golf Course, and grandparents two-stepped when someone finally played a Bob Wills song. It felt like Texas and Idaho at the same time.
Nowhere was that connection more powerful than onstage, where the setting sun threw nostalgic light on the original Braun Brothers – Gary, Muzzie and Billy, who mixed Everly Brothers chestnuts with some Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard with old campfire tunes like “Streets of Laredo” and “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds.” Then the kids came up to back their father and uncles and the whole place went crazy.
With Willy masterfully holding down the Western swing beat on drums, while Gary blew the harmonica, Cody rosined up the bow and Micky thumped the bass that was once as big as him, the band ran through the old repertoire as if they’d been touring together all along. Texas country standards such as “San Antonio Rose” and “Faded Love” alternated with Muzzie originals such as “Proud To Be From Idaho” and “13 Miles Up the Yankee Fort,” while guest performers crowded the wings to watch the years come flying back.
It all started with Eustacious “Mustie” Braun, a musician from a German-speaking community in North Dakota (his neighbor was Lawrence Welk), who moved his family to Twin Falls, Idaho in the ’50s at the tail end of legalized gambling in the state. When the law changed, Mustie made his living playing the Nevada lounges that dotted the state line, 50 miles to the south, eventually parking his Hammond B-3 organ at Club 93 in Jackpot. Mustie played that lounge for 25 years, while wife Becky worked there as a waitress.
Sadly, Mustie, 63, and Becky, 59 were killed in a head-on collision en route to a gig there in 1981.
None of the Braun brothers were old enough to really know their grandparents, who built their sons a stage in the basement, but Mustie’s legacy was all around, like the instruments they would pick up off the floor and play for hours and hours. With no school, no neighbors and no TV, playing music was the favorite pastime up on the mountain.
“Growing up, we didn’t wish we’d had a more normal life,” said Cody. “We didn’t know any other way. We thought our life was normal.”
When Muzzie gigged with his brothers, JoAnn and the kids would get in the Champion Motor Coach and travel with him. A sure crowd-pleaser was when 7-year-old Cody would come out for a fiddle breakdown and six-year-old Willy would play a drum solo.
After JoAnn gave birth to a bass player and a guitarist/ harmonica player, the quartet was complete and Muzzie and the Little Braun Boys took to the road. “We were really the only friends we had,” Cody said of the four brothers.
The family band was discovered in 1989 by a Tonight Show talent scout at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nev. “The guy said he was with The Tonight Show and I asked him if he had a card, but he didn’t, so I was pretty skeptical,” Muzzie said. But the airplane tickets to Los Angeles arrived two weeks later. A limousine picked the Brauns up at the airport. When they arrived at the Tonight Show studio, their name and a star was on the dressing room door.
The two national TV appearances went so well that the Brauns were courted by national booking agents. They signed with one based in Nashville, but Muzzie says that turned out to be a mistake. The agency promised the moon, but just ended up pricing the Brauns out of the circuit of fairs, rodeos and dance halls Muzzie had carefully cultivated through the years.
Willy Braun said that experience helped shape Reckless Kelly’s caution towards the music business. Most young bands would jump at the chance to play arenas opening for Rascal Flatts, for instance, but Reckless turned down the slot because they didn’t think Rascal’s middle-of-the-road audience would go for their insurgent brand of country rock. “When we first met with (then-managers Fitzgerald Hartley Co.) we made it clear we wanted to do it our way, no matter what,” Willy said. “They told us, fine, but we should know that route’s going to take a whole lot longer. We’re totally cool with that.” The band has never had a Billboard country hit, but they’ve never set out to write one.
Reckless Kelly hit Austin as the new pups of country rock, and now 25 years later they’re the elders to a new generation that gives them credit the way the Braun brothers did to Steve Earle and Billy Joe Shaver in the ‘90s. The band is playing two consecutive nights at the legendary Red Rocks Amphitheater in May. They’re opening for Turnpike Troubadours, the Oklahoma act that used to open for them, but it’s still Red Rocks.
These Braun boys came down from Idaho, leaving that gorgeous mountain home because they had more ambitious musical peaks to climb. The Big Sky Country has been good to them, but, as the song goes, their first love is a wicked, twisted road.
FURTHER READING:
Booked one of their first Austin shows at Waterloo Brewing Company 26 years ago today. Our annual Texas Independence Day party under the big tent!