“Steve Earle and Nancy Griffith and Lyle [Lovett] all blew up at the same time, and I couldn’t get through a door if it was made of paper,” Keen says. “A lot of people said, ‘Well, we think you ought to just go back to Texas. Your best move would be not [to] try to get into this,’ but I’m bullheaded, so I just kept charging ahead.”
Though this persistence would hardly reward him in the Athens of the South (at least at first), it kept Keen close to all the action. While in Nashville in the mid-1980s, Keen and his wife worked at a print shop called Hatch Show Print, which was directly across the street from the legendary Ryman Auditorium. At the time, the Ryman building was a cobwebbed time capsule of country music history, although Keen describes it more favorably as a “dusty museum.”
Dustiness and dormancy notwithstanding, no one was more aware of the Ryman’s formidable history than Keen himself, who would frequent the oft-proclaimed “Carnegie Hall of the South” for the $2 museum fee and spend his lunch breaks eating there and reflecting on the watershed events that happened between those same creaky walls.
Keen was so close to all the action and history, yet simultaneously so far away from it. He spent many a lunch break there as a struggling artist, but time made a drastic change as it is wont to do.
“When they [eventually] opened it up, I actually thought that I spent so much time there, I should be first in line [to play],” he says with a laugh.
And in a sense, he was.
The Keen of today is in two different states: Texas and well-earned retirement. The Keen of today doesn’t have to daydream about playing the same stage where the Grand Ole Opry happened, because he is headlining there on the Sunday following his conversation with the Observer.
If this opportunity were availed to the Keen of the 1980s, it would have been a life-changing experience. But to the Keen of today, it’s just another show. In fact, since the fateful day of Keen’s overdue Ryman debut in August 1999, he's performed at the venue often enough that he says the phrase “five or six Rymans ago” to quantify time. (Keen says he has played the Ryman roughly once every 18 months since, so one Ryman = 18 months.)
With that, the story of Robert Earl Keen is 27 Rymans in the making and counting.
This story reached somewhat of an open-ended conclusion on Sept. 4, 2022, when he began his retirement from touring after a bittersweet farewell show in Helotes, a small town outside of San Antonio.
But apropos to his signature hit “The Road Goes on Forever,” the party indeed never ends.
Rehearsal, Rehearsal, Rehearsal
Jack Benny allegedly quipped when asked how to get to Carnegie Hall: "Practice, practice, practice." Similarly, there is only one way to get to the Ryman.First, go to Nashville. Be prepared for Nashville to reject you like it did Dwight Yoakam. Or in the alternative, be prepared for post-success disenchantment a la Willie Nelson.
Second, move to another city, and make that city the next country music mecca. If you do this right, that city’s tourism bureau will be your publicist.
Once you do all of this, Nashville will take notice, sometimes even doing the inverse of the first step insofar as the city comes to you.
This is the story of Keen’s overarching career from the perspective of just one venue that has come to define and represent the country music industry (hence its nickname “The Carnegie Hall of the South”). But as Keen reflects on his pre-retirement career, it seems that the emphasis on “practice, practice, practice” came later.
During the touring days, Keen would rehearse only during soundcheck and write the setlist one hour before the show, he says. But now that he's retired from touring and playing one-off shows and regional legs, the focus and preparation for each show is more intense and particularized.
“I’ve had a lot of time to think about how to present a show [since retirement],” Keen says.
But at the same time, touring had its share of advantages.
“There’s a structure to touring that I don’t get anywhere else,” he says. “That structure gave me a little more sense of myself. That structure is really good for me, because I’m the most disorganized person on the planet.”
This, of course, is not the easiest thing to believe, seeing as one of Keen’s flagship events (his once-annual Christmas tour) famously upped the ante on production and showmanship.
“I missed the whole surrealness of the whole thing, because [‘Merry Christmas From the Family’ is] a very personal song for me, and obviously it resonates with a lot of people," Keen says. "But it was one of those things where I just think, ‘How did we get all of these people in here just to hear this one song?’
“I do miss the part where people really wanted to see the Christmas show, because that became a show that people booked way, way in advance. It’d sell out way, way in advance, and it also kept people from coming to other shows that we played during the year, but that was OK, because [for] these things, we’d get some bigger venues, and we’d really fill them up, and that was really satisfying.”
Northern Fire, Western Chill
Unfortunately, those Christmas shows at House of Blues in Dallas are only memories today, but Keen will make a grand return to North Texas on June 14 at the Texas Trust CU Theatre in Grand Prairie.This, of course, is a far cry from the multitudes of Dallas shows Keen has played over the years. Aside from the obvious fact that this is a post-retirement show that’s technically not in Dallas, there was a point post-Nashville when Keen’s early career ambitions finally paid dividends with interest, and Dallas was making those payments before just about everyone else.
“Dallas just caught on fire pretty easily once I got started playing up there,” Keen says. “Poor David’s Pub was kind of a landmark for me.”
It was at Poor David’s that Keen’s talent agent tried to finagle him into some shows, but venue owner and namesake David Card wasn’t exactly known for giving new artists a show on a silver platter with a side of fontina quiche, so Keen himself made some phone calls. From there, the artist-venue relationship happened as it normally does: The venue offered a low-stakes opening and/or weeknight slot, that turned into more opportunities and amid those opportunities, the venue decided, “Wow, there’s a lot of people here! Would you like some truffle salt on your quiche?”
One distinct memory Keen shares of Poor David’s involves a cab ride from the hotel to the venue, and a particular conversation with the cabbie.
“He kept saying, ‘Oh, music makes me so happy,’” Keen says. “And we pull up there, and there’s people out on the street trying to get a ticket. And he goes, ‘This is you?!’ And I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘You must be so happy!’ And I was!” Keen says with a laugh.
Keen's reflections on the Ryman came virtually in the same breath as his thoughts on Poor David’s, a venue that couldn’t be more disparate. Such contrast is a true encapsulation of Keen: He is country music royalty just as embedded into the lore of the Ryman as Waylon Jennings and Vince Gill, but also a club act who couldn’t outgrow the club environment without taking it with him.
This may sound like a cliched appeal to Keen’s country bona fides (as if such an appeal even needs to be made), but its truth bears repeating in the face of Keen’s inventiveness and ambition insofar as no club act has the resources to do what he does. Case in point: Keen released a post-retirement album in April 2023 called Western Chill, and it comes with a 92-page graphic novel. It also comes with a songbook with lyrics, chords and sheet music. Without giving away too much, the graphic novel involves a singer-songwriter named Zane, who leaves his College Station home with his dog Mac and hits the dusty trail to escape the pressures of music stardom. (Trigger warning to A&R reps: Zane hates you.)
It is perhaps Keen's most ambitious undertaking.
“The graphic novel came late, and it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in music,” he says, recounting the process of hiring illustrators, dialogue specialists and other personnel. “There were times when I was like, ‘Man, if we had just skipped this graphic novel, we’d have all this stuff out,’ and it did slow down the whole process. But we would have never — if it weren’t for COVID — we would have never done what we did with Western Chill.”
Robert Earl Keen plays the Texas Trust CU Theatre in Grand Prairie on Friday, June 14.
