The Party Never Ends

“Robert Earl Keen!....Robert Earl Keen!....Robert Earl Keen!” the packed crowd was chanting in unison while banging their beer bottles on the long wooden tables in the cavernous concert section of Billy Bob’s (Texas’ self-billed “The World’s Largest Honky Tonk”).  Keen just completed his forty-first and presumably last appearance at the historic venue and they wanted an encore.  It’s a ritual I’ve participated in hundreds of times over my concert-going career. I’ve been among the thousands of fans over the decades who bellowed “Robert Earl Keen!” knowing that this group incantation would magically produce Mr. Keen and his band from behind the curtain. Tonight was no different.  “Robert Earl Keen…Robert Earl Keen…Robert Earl Keen!” we continued to chant, and at a duration longer than needed but not so long as to wane the enthusiasm. Keen appeared back on stage carrying a vintage Gibson J-45 tobacco colored acoustic guitar as he made his way to the chair in the middle of the stage.

At sixty-six years old Keen had announced his retirement from touring after forty-one years of crisscrossing the country playing at innumerable bars, opera houses, festivals, theaters, and every other type of concert venue you can imagine.  I have been along for the ride for my entire adult life - almost thirty of those forty-one years - and as I watched this final Fort Worth show with a little bit of sadness, I saw a chapter closing. Despite our wishes to the contrary, the road doesn’t actually go on forever. 

Throughout the show Keen’s voice was as strong as ever and his guitar picking had even improved over the years, but decades on the road had started to show.  In this and recent shows Keen had taken to performing sitting down, and when he did stand he seemed to move just a little slower and with a slight haunch in his back.  His hair and beard were starting to look more white than not, like that of a silver fox, but this only made him look every bit more the elder statesmen of Texas Country and Americana music that he already was. 

As I looked around I noted that the crowd too had aged along with Keen. While we all were hooting and hollering and singing along, we drank a few less beers than we once did, and we probably checked our watches a couple of times when the show crossed the 11pm mark on a Thursday night. 

As Keen sat down in his chair to begin the encore, my mind went back to all of the Robert Earl Keen concerts I have attended over my life.  The first time I saw Keen in concert was in 1993 at the Wolf Pen Creek Amphitheater in College Station.  I was at the show to see Jerry Jeff Walker, my other musical hero, but was also excited to see Keen.  I had discovered his “Bigger Piece of Sky” CD while a senior in high school and knew all the songs on it, but I didn’t know much beyond that.   When he took the stage and started singing about an old porch on Church Street in College Station where he and his roommate, Lyle Lovett, used to pick songs; followed by a song about getting drunk with his brother on the Corpus Christi Bay; followed by another song about the joys of going after a five pound bass; followed by a song about crazy cowboy dreams; and on, and on…I was amazed at all the stories and characters that poured out of Keen’s songwriting pen.  The crowd cheered and hollered and I felt like I’d been invited into an exclusive club for those in the know.  Keen closed with his now widely known song, “The Road Goes On Forever”, about a couple of small-town lovers who are in over their heads and on the run, and that sealed the deal for me.  In that moment I knew I was a fan for life. 

Keen’s songs run the gambit from the absurd tragedy of a crazed man running down armadillos on the highway in order to make a little extra cash (“The Armadillo Jackal”), to sweet and tender love songs about how love is a word to not use lightly (“Love’s a Word I Never Throw Around’).  If you’ve ever questioned your life’s choices and been close to a nervous breakdown in public or if you just want to have a honeymoon adventure south of the border, Keen has a song for you (“Then Came Lo Mein” and “Gringo Honeymoon,” respectively).  Of course there is Keen’s ode to family dysfunction and love (“Merry Christmas From The Family”) and more songs about love and longing and the need to be close to those who mean the most to us (“I’m Comin’ Home,” “Feeling Good Again,” and “What I Really Mean”).  Keen’s songs are populated by outlaws and in-laws, friends and lovers, highways and dirt roads, dancehalls and lonely streets, ghosts and anthropomorphic animals (seriously!) and so much more.  Keen always had wry sensibility that is sincere and sarcastic at the same time.  It’s a magic trick that Keen has been pulling off for forty-one years and it never gets old.

After that first show I saw in 1993, I have seen Keen countless times across the state of Texas.  There was one memorable show after a rodeo in Odessa at a little bar called Dos Amigos where there were only about fifty people.  My friends and I sat right in front of the stage as we sang along to every song.  And like manna from Heaven a beer distributor was at the show handing out free beer to anyone who asked, and we asked many times.  We were young with the whole world in front of us and we had the time of our lives that night.  As one of Keen’s songs, “The Wild Ones,” says,

We were the wild ones

The young guns

Restless as the wind

 Several years later when Keen had gone from playing in front of fifty people in a little Odessa bar to selling out the opulent Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, I saw him close one of his first Bass Hall shows with a moment that still gives me chills.  The concert was full of Keen favorites, as always, and the setting of Bass Hall with its plush seats, sky painted ceiling, gold accented walls, multiple levels of balcony seating and incredible acoustics elevated the whole affair. 

At the concert’s encore, Keen sang a version of “The Road Goes on Forever” that was played at two- or three-times normal speed.  Rich Brotherton (Keen’s gifted lead guitarist for many years) played the lead guitar solo moving across his guitar’s fretboard at an inhuman pace.  Keen was on point with every lyric and note and the whole band was as tight as ever.  Everyone in the audience was on their feet clapping and cheering as the song, and presumably the show, came to an end.  After the song the band left the stage and the theater lights remained dim.  There was more clapping and more cheering and after a few more beats Keen and the band returned to the stage for a second encore.

Keen then moved to the very front and center of the stage and had his bandmates, each carrying acoustic instruments, gather in close around him.  Keen then asked everyone in Bass Hall to sit down, the band to unplug their instruments and the sound engineer to cut the sound.   Keen said he wanted to take advantage of the excellent acoustics offered by the Bass.

The crowd of approximately 2,000 concertgoers, who had been raucous and cheering five minutes ago, now sat silent and you could hear a pin drop.  Keen began to sing the haunting Billy Joe Shaver song, “Live Forever,” and the band joined in.  No one moved a muscle and I’m sure many held their breath, like me, because you did not want to break that magical moment.  Keen’s voice and the band’s instruments traveled softly throughout the hall unaided by any amplification and time seemed to stop.  That moment ranks as one of the best and most serene of any Keen show I have attended.

“Robert Earl Keen!...Robert Earl Keen!...Robert Earl Keen!” the crowd continued to shout at Billy Bob’s as I was pulled from my memories back to the show at hand.  Keen was in his chair and started talking. The crowd settled down.  He explained that the Gibson guitar he was holding used to belong to the late Jerry Jeff Walker.  Keen then launched into the Jerry Jeff classic, “Gypsy Songman,” and followed it with “L.A. Freeway,” a song written by Guy Clark and made famous by Jerry Jeff.  Twenty-nine years ago I saw a fresh-faced Robert Earl open a show for Jerry Jeff and now the grey whiskered Keen covered two of the late singer/songwriters’ songs.  It had all come full circle.

Keen closed out the show with “I’m Comin’ Home” and he was indeed on the road back home as this final tour was ending in a couple of weeks. 

My friends and I parted ways after the show and as I laid in bed still vibrating and wired from the concert, my mind swirled with all the good memories, good times and great songs. I tossed and I turned, and I did not want the party to end.  “Robert Earl Keen!…Robert Earl Keen!…Robert Earl Keen!”

Five Years Gone

In the liner notes (remember those?) of an old Jerry Jeff Walker album called Five Years Gone, Jerry Jeff writes about some advice he received from an old friend while on a late-night road trip from D.C. to Ohio.  Jerry Jeff’s friend turns to him in that tired and punchy, too many hours on the road weariness and says, “I have found it very healthy in my life to sit back about every five years and evaluate my present philosophic outlook by what it was, what it had become today, what my goals were then and what they are now and just how truly on course I have remained. “

In today’s always on, always reacting, jacked-in, Twitterfied, Tik-toked, post-modern liquified reality we all scroll through every day, these words are probably truer now than when they were written over fifty years ago.  It’s good to take a break every now and then to make sure you are standing on something solid and real and to make sure you are still walking in the right direction.  It’s healthy to pause, breath, reflect, and take stock of things.  I believe this is especially true now as we all begin to emerge from our pandemic-induced hibernation that strangely seemed to hinder thoughtful reflection.  No matter how much time we spent isolated from all that was familiar, how could we possibly find the brain space to reflect on our current circumstance when we were simply trying to keep our head above water?  The proverbial life raft seemed to be a socially distant six feet away or just a mirage in the virtual background of a Zoom call.

So I’m going to take slow and thoughtful breath and just be for a moment.

Today five years ago, I stood at the abyss, staring straight into the deepest darkest nothingness I could have ever imagined.  I was sitting next to a hospital bed in the intensive care unit holding my wife’s hand as she slipped quietly away from me and from all she had ever known. It was in that moment that all hope of her recovery from a heart transplant was extinguished, and this hope was replaced with a gloomy cloud of sorrow and grief.  The ground had given way, and I found myself falling into the darkness.

In the days and months that followed, I painstakingly worked through my grief in fits and starts. Sadness and sorrow filled every part of my mind and my body, and there were days that I do not even know how I got out of bed.  With a lot of help and determination I confronted my grief, and in time I began to establish the new normal. Ever so slowly my disorientation turned into a reorientation and the darkness became little brighter.  This work required me to make a choice every day, and that choice was fueled by hope. While I could no longer see hope, I had faith that it was still there.

In subsequent years, I met and fell in love again with an incredibly special person who loved me despite all my wounds and battle scars, something that I would have thought beyond impossible if you had asked me during my journey through the lonely tunnel of grief.  Hope had brought me out of the darkness and this hope had left space in my heart that joy was able to fill.  It was amazing to experience the return of laughter after it was so jarringly taken away years before.

Claire and I got married and a few months later found out we were going to have a baby boy.  Charlie was his name, and, in my mind, he was the answer to the question about why my first wife, Shannon, was taken from this world much too soon.  A new life was going to result from death and that thought helped give me comfort and somehow make sense of things.

However, making sense of things is not always easy.  Charlie died unexpectedly at birth and I was once again enveloped with grief and unanswered questions.  I not only had my own grief to deal with, but I also had to witness my wife grieve the loss of her first-born child.  It is one thing to go through grief yourself, but it is all together another thing to see someone you love to go through it too.  It is our instinct to protect the ones we love, and nothing is worse than when you are powerless to give the protection you so desperately want to provide.

But hope. Real hope; solid hope - hope you can stand on and feel in your bones and in your body; hope you can hold on to and that will be there when nothing else is; hope that does not rely on novel theories or make false promises of comfort and happiness; hope that is above you and below you and within you; behind you and in front of you; the kind of hope that comes from faith – that is what got us through such an unexplainable and unimaginable tragedy.  Sometimes hope is hard, and it leads you down a difficult and gut-wrenching path, but we must force ourselves to follow it. 

As a Christian this makes sense when you think about it. True hope sprang forth from a crucifixion, which is the most agonizing and hopeless way to end a life.  However, when everything appeared lost, the most unimaginable thing happened three days later when Jesus appeared alive before his disciples. This event ignited a revolution of hope.

The year 2020 will go down in history as one of the most tumultuous in our country’s history.  Not only did we endure the first pandemic of our lifetimes, the year was marked with fear, anger, resentment, political strife, economic uncertainty, and the unsettling of foundations that once felt solid.  Everything was heightened to an almost surreal level because all our routines and lives had been disrupted in unimaginable ways.  Families grieved over the deaths of loved ones from a new disease. We collectively became disoriented by the sheer volume of information and disruption we navigated every day.  But life moves forward, and hope finds a way.

In December, hope broke into the chaotic year with the birth of my daughter.  She was born two months early but arrived healthy and ready to take on the world.  After losing a wife and a son in the past five years, Claire and I were terrified through the pregnancy but each day we resolved to hold on to hope and follow the path where it led. 

As I stood in the surgical delivery room for the emergency C-section, I was once again surrounded by the beeps and whirrs of medical equipment.  The antiseptic smell and murmurings of nurses and doctors were sadly familiar, and my nervous system has become wired to respond to this environment with heightened stress and anxiety.  I have experienced when things go wrong too many times.  However, this time it was different.  This visit to the O.R. ended with the cry of a newborn baby taking her first breath.  A newborn’s cry is the very embodiment of hope and all the possibilities that lay before a new life.  Tears streamed down my face and relief washed over me when it became clear that mom and baby were going to be okay. 

It was in this moment I said a prayer of thanks to God.  Thanks for the strength to cross through the darkness when I was completely lost.  Thanks for the light of hope that the darkness could not extinguish, and thanks for the faith that this light was still there even when I could not see it.

Five years gone indeed. I know the path forward will continue to zig and zag and be full of life’s ups and downs.  On this path there will be more joy and happiness but also more tragedy, sorrow, pain, and grief.  I have learned over the years that the road of life only makes sense when it is supported by the solid foundation that faith, hope, and love provide.  These give us gratitude for the good times and the strength to endure the bad. As we travel our paths, we should all stop, take a breath, and look around every so often.  Hope is all around us in thousands of ways large and small.  Sometimes it can be difficult to see and at other times it is completely hidden from view. But it is always there before us, lighting the way.