Pages 78-89

No Depression, July-August 2004

www.nodepression.net

"LOOK WHAT THE OLD MAN MADE ME DO"

Raised on the country ways of outlaws, Bobby Bare Jr. tries to makes sure the
good times aren't really over for good

words by Peter Cooper

photographs by Kristina Marie Krug

"God, this beer's good," says Bobby Bare Jr., shaking his tousle-topped head
after another sip of domestic, marveling at the cold glass in his hand and the
tiny, aftertaste-less, alcohol-fortified ice crystals melting instantly on his
tongue.

Bobby's dad, longtime country music singer, songwriter and celebrity Bobby
Bare, was best at wise. On now classic recordings such as "The Streets Of
Baltimore" and 'Detroit City", his voice conveyed a
been-there-and-lived-to-tell-the-story kind of astuteness. The son - even now
in his late 30s - is better at wonder, whether its wonder at beer or at
favorite bands like Ministry or the Silver Jews, or, most often in song, at
his own stupidity.

"I show my ass to everyone/As if that's never been done before/In case you
missed it the first time," he sang in "Naked Albino", from his 1998 Boo-Tay
debut album with the raucous rock band he called Bare Jr. These days, he's
recording as Bobby Bare Jr.'s Young Criminals' Starvation League, and though
the sonics have changed from wailing rock 'n' roll to something equally
wailing but more stripped down, the self-flagellation has remained constant.
From The End Of Your Leash (released June 22 on Bloodshot) finds him advising
"Don't Follow Me, (I'm Lost)" and bemoaning, "I don't want to be that
motherfucker/Who can make you so blue you become mean/When the devil needs
help, why does he always calI me?"

Mike Grimes, a former Bare Jr. member and a frequent participant in Young
Criminals shows and recordings, is among Bare's best pals, "The self-loathing
lyrics that are the fabric of a lot of his songs don't manifest themselves, at
least to me, to be in his real life," Grimes said. "Maybe he feels like that
inside, I don't know. Lyrically, they're a lot more desperate than the man
that I see and hang around with. I don't think he hates himself,"

This is not an article about whether Bobby Bare Jr. hates himself or not. Odds
are, he doesn't. Either way, he laces his Songs with enough humor to take a
little of the edge off the "peer into my soul" stuff, and to add some bite to
the otherwise innocuous stuff. Either way, he's an unusually powerful voice
in an unusually punchless Nashville time. Either way, he makes music worth
hearing. Either way, he rocks and he snarls and he wonders.

"Insult me ruthlessly, oh you're the best/You blew me off/It turned me on!" he
shouted in the song that helped him to almost-one-hit wonder status. People
chuckled at that song, a reaction Bare didn't mind a bit.

WHAT IF: Bobby Bare Jr., Nashville, May 2004. Wardrobe styling by Helen
Thornton.

"'You Blew Me Off was written from an intensely sad spot," he said, chasing
the beer with a soda, because he finds that to be the best method for avoiding
a hangover. "If I can take these horrifying feelings and get a roomful of
people to laugh along with me, it brings it into perspective a little."

Trouble is, Bare's current situation leaves little room for intensely sad
spots. Days after his No Depress ton interview, he married the former Megan
Stembridge, who was pregnant with his child.

"We dated off and on for five years," he said. "I bought her a ring, and was
waiting for the right moment. She was cooking bacon and said. 'Oh, I'm
pregnant. Here's my third positive pregnancy test.' Luckily. I had the ring in
my pocket, so I got on my knees and said, 'Darling, I want to be married to
you.' So, it worked out. She's by far the prettiest girl I've ever got to
kiss, and she wants to have my kids and be around me forever. I got lucky. I
can't wait. I'm so tired of chasing girls, man. It's a waste of time, and none
of them are prettier than her."

Marriage, offspring and luck can be wondrous developments, but they don't do
much for the ol' Hank Williams complex. If internal conflict is a muse, and
the muse helps pay the bills and justify the publishing deal, then happiness
can be a curse.

"Oh, but I've got enough backlog to last me a long time," Bare assures. 'Not
songs, but drama. I can pull up journals and stuff, and old letters and stuff
that are filled up enough with drama, and real feelings, that I can look at
and taste immediately."

Stardom was predicted early on for Bobby Bare Jr. Early, and on the record.
The record in question was 1973's Bobby Bare Sings Lullabys, Legends And Lies
double-album, one of a quartet of brilliantly loose, eminently literate,
like-minded works to emerge that year from a country music world that was
considerably more open-minded than today's Music Row. (The others being Willie
Nelson's Shotgun Willie, Waylon Jennings' Honky-Tonk Heroes and Tom T. Hall's
The Rhymer And Other Five And Dimers.) While Honky-Tonk Heroes focused on the
songs of Billy Joe Shaver, Papa Bare chose to record fourteen songs written by
off-kilter poet Shel Silverstein, because Shel was a top dog songsmith and
Bare was looking for a hit. Fourteen songs seemed a better bet than one or
two.

It turned out that Silverstein wrote Bare a couple of hits, the chart-topping
bizarre witch tale "Marie Laveau" and a sweet little duet with sweet little
5-year-old Bobby Bare Jr. called "Daddy What If'. The latter rose to #2 on the
country charts and was nominated for a Grammy for best country vocal
performance by a duo or group. The Bare men earned the rare pleasure of being
beaten out by the Pointer Sisters. (Yes, the Pointer Sisters. For a country
Grammy. Remember "Fairytale"? Uh-uh.)

Anyway, the elder Bare's voice began the song by announcing, "I'd like to
introduce you to the next superstar. Twenty years from now, he's gonna be so
ashamed of what he has done on this record, that he's probably gonna sue me.
And he and all of his friends are gonna be sittin' around stoned, and he'll
say, 'Look what the old man made me do,'"

It's impossible to imagine a circa 2004 mainstream country artist joking
onstage about his or her 5-year-old getting high, but that's another topic
altogether. The point is that a little Bare kid was nominated for a Grammy,
given the opportunity to perform with his father on the Grand Ole Opry, and
allowed to be around during the recording of a classic country album that
starred his own dad.

Though it doesn't differ substantially in sound from some works that were
already on the market, Lullabys, Legends And Lies is sometimes called the
first "Outlaw" record, because Bare's decision to produce the thing himself
inspired Waylon and Willie to do the same.

"The music these fellows recorded after the rebellion had a hell of a lot more
energy, imagination, musicality and emotional connection to listeners," says
Lloyd Green, the Nashville steel guitar legend. Green was a top session player
during the Chet Atkins /Owen Bradley-dominated "Nashville Bound" era, and he
quickly ascertained that what he was playing, hearing and seeing during the
Lullabys recording signaled a shift in both protocol and execution.

Silverstein's wild-eyed demeanor in the studio only added to the mayhem.

"The presence of Shel was palpable," Green said, "He influenced the way we cut
those tunes, and he had a lot of input with Bare. He was a force, and a
charismatic figure to be reckoned with."

After the Grammy hubbub died away, Jr.'s parents decided to halt the boy's
ascent into country stardom.

"He and I had that big hit, and were nominated for a Grammy," said Bare Sr.
"Then 'Hee Haw' tried to hire him and my other son to be on that show, 'cause
they were cute little boys. I wouldn't let 'em do it, though. We wanted them
away from the business when they were small, because we wanted them to be
regular kids. All that attention makes kids crazier than shit."

Even with his parents' conscious decision to take him away from the spotlight,
the young Bare's proximity to his father left him in some heavy company. Years
removed from all of that, he looks with - yes - wonder at the world of
personalities and artists to which he was privy. Aside from his star turn on
the album, he was there to witness Bare, Hall, Silverstein, Kristofferson,
Jerry Reed and others as they spewed bullshit and poetry and sought inside
straights.

THE WINNER: Bobby Bare Jr.

By osmosis, Bare learned lessons that would seem to ill-serve him today: It is
possible to live in Nashville, write stupendous songs, break rules, be
irreverent and hilarious and collegial and bull-headed and independent and
crazy as hell, and make money.
"I would do anything to somehow go back and be Kristofferson's buddy back
then," Jr. says. "I was around all that, but I was a kid and it was like
'Bobby, go get us a beer,' They had poker parties. and I got to go get the
beer and bring it back to the table. Everybody was larger than life. And
everybody was just insanely talented and charismatic and real and artistically
motivated."

Flash forward three decades from those poker party days, and the grown-up beer
bringer is often described as talented and charismatic and a;; the rest.

:He's exactly the way they were - the way we were - back then," says his
father. "If he could jump back right now with them, he'd fit right in with
Kris, Billy Joe, Tom T., Waylon and the whole bunch. You know, Bobby sees
things from a different viewpoint, just like Shel always did. With Shel, it
was like he was sitting up in a tree or something, looking from somewhere
else. Bobby views things from a different place, and he's not afraid to take
chances. I don't know whether that would further someone's career or not."

As a young adult, Bare Jr, worked at a bicycle shop, ran lights when he could
get the work, and fronted a cover band. He marveled at cowpunk originators
Jason & the Scorchers and other Nashville-based rock acts that drew from
hillbilly roots but managed to color completely outside the Music Row lines.
He schlepped around, fell in love a couple thousand times, and was fortunate
to find a musician roommate in Mike Grimes.

"We got to be roommates in, like, 1995," recalls Grimes, who went on to play
guitar in the Bare Jr. band and guitar and bass with the Starvation League.
Excepting a contentious but since-rectified falling-out in the late '90s,
Grimes has also been Bare's best pal.

"I don't know if he was writing songs when he first moved in," Grimes
continues. "He had a cover band, doing the grunge-rock hits of the day:
Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl dam and that stuff. He loved that music, and he had a
real presence onstage. Loved to play loud, jump around and get the crowd into
it, just like what he did when he started to do his own songs.

"A year after we'd been living together, one day he goes, 'Check this out.'
and he played this song. I said, 'Man that's great. You wrote that?"

The song was "Patty McBride", about a woman whose "magical songs just poured
out from inside." The recorded version ended up on the first Bare Jr. album:
"We all want to love you/And we want to be near you/As if we too could shine,"
he sang. Maybe there was a little in there about his father, a little
something from the point of view of the kid who watched others clamor to be
near the dad.

Sometimes people have trouble connecting Bobby Bare Jr., the singer of bent
and tortured rock songs, to Bobby Bare Jr., the child of wealth and privilege.
"I thought he was kind of a goofy star kid when I first met him," says Mark
Nevers, who moved beyond that impression quickly enough, and has, with Bare,
co-produced all of the Young Criminals work. In truth, Bobby is a goofy star
kid (and proud of it, too), but that designation does not prevent conflict or
sadness.

Bobby's dad was around quite often. A man who's on the road playing music 200
days a year is home for 165 days, and when he's home he has no office-dictated
agenda to follow. Thus, "Let's go fishing for a week" was not an uncommon
father-to-son suggestion in the Bare household.

"I don't remember missing him, even though he was gone a ton," Bare Jr. says.
"He was a great dad. But when he was gone, he left me at home with his wife,
who was my mother. That was the toughest part. She was real angry that he was
gone. That's what I remember. All the girl issues come from that: just being
way too close to mom. She needed someone to endorse whatever tragedy there was
of the day, and to empathize.

"Dad would leave, and mom would drag me through all of her drama. She needed
someone to feel that drama, and I was there. My sister died when I was 9 and
she was 15. She woke up Thanksgiving eve, having a baby. Nobody in the house
knew she was pregnant. You've got a 15-year-old having a baby, and within two
or three weeks she dies. That was 1976. That's a bunch of darkness to take on.
And there I was, left alone with the mommy. I was the man of the house."

Time, and mother Jeannie Bare's willful decision to live in the present (and
to assist her family in doing the same), helped take the family out of crisis.
Bobby calls her "the hero in the story," and "the greatest person in any of
our lives," but the loss of a sibling is nothing that can be overcome through
positive thoughts or rock 'n' roll or anything much else. It is something to
be weathered, not to be healed.

"It was easy growing up for me in Nashville," Bobby sings an his new album's
song "Visit Me In Music City". The line is supposed to be kind of funny, and
not supposed to be true.

Soon after working up the nerve to show his songs to friends, Bare began
gathering musicians to help him play them in front of audiences. One of those
songs was "You Blew Me Off", which he says "was an early, simple, ridiculous
one. It's just 'Tobacco Road' with Gary Glitter, but it works."

Once he started fronting a band, Bare had a publishing deal after five gigs,
and a record deal after ten. Several pals from Belmont University had become
bigwigs in the music industry, and those contacts proved invaluable, giving
him people to whom he could play "You Blew Me Off". The song did the rest, as
both the publishing deal and the contract with Immortal Records were spurred
by executives' belief that the "You Blew Me Off" had what it takes to get
college kids to chug, cheer and buy. The singer-songwriter quit his bike shop
gig, paid his bills with a combined $180,000 in publishing and record deal
advance money, and began a rock 'n' roll ride.

SHE'S MY EVER LOVIN' MACHINE: Bobby Bare Jr., the morning after his bachelor
party.

"I got to buy at condo and not work," he said. "It's mostly, 'What can you do
to not have to go back to your day job? Everything else is just cake. I just
wanted to play. Them giving you money for it is just stupid, just ridiculous.
I only got that because someone had bought millions of Korn records, and
Immortal had money from that. Shit, I wasn't complaining. They gave us a tour
bus. We were losing $1,200, every single gig. They were still like, 'Go on out
there.'"

Though Bobby wrote and sang the songs. the act was known by the band name Bare
Jr. The group featured a rhythm section of drummer Keith Brogdon and bassist
Dean Tomasek. Tracy Hackney, a friend Bare met at the bike shop, plugged in
his dulcimer and found a way to make that mountain instrument sound like
Armageddon when run through an amp; it was both a highly musical addition and
a highly valuable gimmick. Grimes played lead guitar.

At this point, Bare was a screamer and a leaper, hollering self-disapproving
pronouncements ("I'm a failure as a faker" or "I hate myself and it's all your
fault") above a soundscape that was packed with guitar stacked southern punch.
"You Blew Me Off" was the single, but it was a twang-less aberration on the
1998 debut Boo-Tay album, and even as it neared the Top 10 on some rock charts
it didn't spur album sales.

"They spent like, almost $600,000 just on radio ... on payola, basically, to
promote that record," Bare said. "They didn't do a video. I don't know, it was
kind of weird. As soon as it starts dipping, everybody backs off. Mostly what
was weird about it is the single's doing real well but nobody's buying the
record. That track was totally different than everything else on the record.
People who did buy it got it and went, 'This is kind of a country album, and I
thought I was buying something a lot closer to Korn.'"

Bare Jr. toured constantly, through the rise and fall of "You Blew Me off".
The road was grueling and electrifying, more the former after it became
obvious the single wasn't going to crack the Top 5 or spur significant album
sales (Boo-Tay sold about 25,000 copies in total).

"The worst was towards the end," Grimes says. "I remember Tracy saying, 'Oh,
this is great: We're going to be home in only five more weeks.' The fact that
it was five weeks, that was supposed to be good."

Fed up and feuding with Bare at the time, Grimes exited the band. Twang
-rocker Tim Carroll took over on guitar, bringing a style that was equal parts
Chuck Berry and Sex Pistols and co-writing an appealing slacker anthem with
Bare called "Why Do I Need A Job". Before the second album, Brainwasher,
Carroll was succeeded by multi-instrumentalist Kevin Teel. Things were going
OK, though Immortal had shifted parent companies from Sony to Virgin, and
corporate circumstances were a little weird.

Brainwasher moved into harder, grungier, more indie-rock territories. and
today Bare admits most of the songs didn't hold up to the material on Boo-Tay.
The live shows were fun, with Bare onstage and L.E.D. screens flashing
messages like "I have the Andrews Sisters in my milkshake," but more critical
and audience attention was paid to the over-the-top stuff at the expense of
nuanced songs like "Miss You The Most". Until his death in 1999, Silverstein
had personally critiqued aII of Bare Jr.'s songs (and co wrote "I Hate Myself"
from the first album), but some of the compositional work was now lost in the
bluster.

There was, though, hope for another shot at a single.

"The guy who signed Beck was our A&R guy at Virgin, and he loved 'Why Do I
Need A Job," Bare explains. "In my mind I could think, this is the guy who
heard 'Loser' and said 'That's it.' And he's telling me the same thing about
my song. But I know better. Honestly, nobody knows what's going to be it. It's
people throwing shit up on the wall as quickly as they can to see if it
sticks. Eventually, by sheer number of times you're tossing, something will
stick up there. We didn't stick. That second album sold 3,000 copies."

TRUE STORY: Bobby Bare Jr.

Tracy Hackney, the dulcimer player, was tired of road life and missed his
wife, and he quit in 2001. The rest of the guys kept going, living in a
strange universe where one night could be an all-night jam with Kid Rock and
Winona Ryder in a San Francisco bar (sober through the '90s, Bare said he
began drinking with the new millennium in what was "a really bad idea"), and
the next day could be sleeping on the floor of a minivan on the way to
Portland.

Then the label situation got weirder, with Bare getting a $10 000 advance
toward the next record just before Immortal was dumped by Virgin. Bare sought
and received permission, to cut some, as he says, "acoustic-y" tracks for the
alt-country independent label Bloodshot, as a side project. Somewhere in
there, the rhythm section left as well.

"For the Bloodshot album, Young Criminals, Starvation League, I didn't use the
other guys from Bare Jr.," he said. "And why should they dedicate their lives
to me when I'm going to go off and record with other people? It was a bummer
that they left, though' They were real, real good."

So, anyway, right then - in 2002 or so, right when the front money and the big
budgets went away and the headbanging ceased and the kids in the backwards
baseball caps completely disappeared from the crowd and Bobby Bare Jr. was
pretty much left alone to recreate himself and his music - that's when things
picked back up again.

Word on the street was that Bare had soured on rock 'n' roll and was working
on an "Americana" project. The Starvation League album (recorded with much of
Lambchop as the backing band), though, didn't end up sounding much like
anything else "Americana," and it certainly wasn't some logical next step from
the traditions of Hank Williams, Uncle Tupelo, Jason & the Scorchers or Bobby
Bare Sr.

"What I think is so tragic about a lot of the alt-country stuff is; that it
can be kind of theme party," Bare Jr. says. "And no matter what you do, you're
not going to be better than Hank Williams. There's already been a Hank
Williams. You might sound exactly like him, but you're still no better than
just as good as he was. And you had a blueprint to get it there: You're in a
cover band."

Starvation League was not a cover album, though it did include a version of
Silverstein's infinitely depressing "Painting Her Fingernails". With Nevers at
the production helm and containing songs that were as good as the ones from
Boo-Tay the album trafficked in different sounds than had been present within
Bare Jr. The themes - wonder and self-doubt - remained constant, but the
environmental shift from driving rock to what Nevers called "psychedelic
country" offered a new perspective.

"It was something I thought of as totally to the side," Bare said, "I had no
idea if it was good or bad. It was so stripped down, not hiding behind a bunch
of amplifiers, and it was pretty eccentric. We made it in seven days, and I
couldn't believe I could put so little effort into something and have it be
good work."

It was good work, though. Grimes, who began working again with his old friend
around the album's release (he also ran the now closed Slow Bar in East
Nashville, and still owns an eponymous record shop across town in Berry Hill),
called it "refreshing" and praised "a universal identification in those songs,
where you go, 'I feel exactly like that,'" The stripped down settings allowed
listeners to get the jokes on first listen, and the lack of screaming guitars
helped Bare project enough subtlety for people to realize the jokes weren't
just jokes. The sound wasn't inherently commercial, but the album outsold the
supposedly highly commercial Brainwasher.

"Brainwasher sold 3,000, and they spent $800,000 on it," Nevers said. The
first Bloodshot record, we spent $7,000 and sold 15,000."

The whole thing reconfirmed some lessons Bare first learned in watching his
dad make Lullabys, Legends And Lies: Calculation doesn't guarantee success,
and creative freedom can reap rewards beyond self satisfaction. That is, if
the artist is any good. As Bare began touring again, this time with a
different set of backing players and a looser feel, Papa Bare looked on with
pride.

"I told him early on, 'If you have a dream, don't let nobody mess with it,"
says Bare Sr. "Well, he's been punching it out there, going after it and doing
it his way. I try to talk him into kind of splitting the difference, but then
his eyes glaze over and I shut up."

This is the part of the story where the subject is supposed to declare
new-found stability and comment on how that stability led him to make his
current album.

"I wish I could say things have come together personally, but it's like I
think things are just about to get really out of hand," he laughs, back to
sipping his cold domestic beer at an East Nashville dive. "I know I'm headed
in the right direction, but, I mean, a year ago I was dating a different girl
in a different city, healing a broken finger and living out of a duffel bag. I
sold my condo and everything was in storage. I guess I have a house and a wife
now. It all seems really fast, and really wild."

He and Megan had been dating on and off for several years, and she had been
the subject of several songs, including Starvation League compositions "Mehan"
(his nickname for her) and "The Ending", a song in which he ruminated on a
busted relationship by proclaiming, "The only thing I'd change would be the
ending." Eventually, he did change the ending, becoming a husband and father
and tickling his parents no end.

But that hasn't made the new album a treatise on domestic bliss, or anything
like that. From The End Of Your Leash is as tortured as anything he's done.
Asked whether he worries about his son's penchant for desperate lyrics, Bare
Sr. responds, :He's just writing what he feels. But some of those things don't
last very long. Some days, I wake up myself and feel like shit. Then the next
day. I feel better."

Vocally, Bare Jr. somehow sounds both ravaged arid strengthened on From The
End Of Your Leash. Horns, strings and Paul Niehaus' steel guitar wrap around
his voice and melodies, and Andrew Bird's vibrato whistle makes like a freaky
musical saw on "Beguiled, Bashful, Burnt". Hackney is back for a dulcimer
turn, Jesus Lizard's Duane Denison plays some guitar, and Grimes is on bass.
"One of his strongest suits is finding people you'd never think would play
together and then having them create something," Grimes said.

As usual, there are a couple of nods to Silverstein, both on a cover of his
"Things I Didn't Say" and in "Visit Me In Music City", a song Bare Jr. wrote
with his father and Tony Crow. "Visit Me" presents a utopian Nashville, as
told from the point of view of a boosterish Music City native who assures his
listeners, "The hills are filled with naked 'Hee Haw' honeys," and observes,
"The world's greatest living guitar pickers/Can deliver you a pizza or sell
you weed." (That last part is, by the way, wholly correct).

"I think Shel would have been proud of 'The hills are filled with naked 'Hee
Haw' honeys,'" Bobby says. "You know, to hear Kristofferson talk about Shel,
he looks at him as an equal. Sometimes people don't understand that, because
he wrote so many songs that people thought of as 'novelty.' He had stuff that
could tear your heart into a thousand pieces, but it was the novelty stuff
that kept people from taking it too seriously. Sometimes that scares me about
my stuff. The thing is, it baffles me that I'll do songs that are really sad
to me, but people get them as kind of funny."

One of those Songs is the hidden track, the one about not wanting to be "that
motherfucker" who mistreats his lover.

"Yeah, that's a sad song," Bare said. "But all people are going to hear is the
word, 'Motherfucker.' Anyway, the advice my dad gave me was, if it gets you
success, don't even question it."

So many things are unclear about Bare Jr. His band personnel, his
relationships, his musical sound and his happiness are things people close to
him ask about a lot, because these things have changed so often in the past.
With all that has been altered in his life between albums - the baby and the
wife and the home - Bobby dedicates From The End of Your Leash "to Papa Bare
Sr." His father is, after all, the one whose presence assures guidance and
respect and wonder.

"As long as dad is here, I'm still a kid, big time," says the son. "The only
thing Freud was right about are fixations, stuck points. People get fixated at
a. certain stage, and I think I'm stuck right here at about 15 or 17.
Somewhere in there. I'm pretty much stuck here as his son, and he wants me to
be that, too. He wants me to be his little boy. He likes being the daddy,
wants me to stay right here, and I'm happy to.

"I know a bunch of kids who've raised kids. I guess most people don't grow up
until they have to. I think I can probably dance around this one, too."

Peter Cooper lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee, where he keeps two
copies of Lullabys, Legends And Lies (vinyl and digital).

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