Legends of the Old West - RODEOHOUSTON 3 | "The Music"

Episode Date: March 19, 2019

The final episode of our three-part series on the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. Former Chief Operating Officer Leroy Shafer tells a great story about the Jackson 5 (1:58) and then we hear from Robert Earl Keen (4:08) and Lyle Lovett (15:31). The two legendary Texas musicians talk about the Rodeo, music, songwriting, books, horses and much more. For more details, visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com and www.rodeohouston.com  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We lost Jermaine during the sound check. We were looking all over for him. Security was pulling their hair out because how in the world could we lose this kid? And then we hear this yelling, and it's Jermaine up in the skyboxes of the Astrodome yelling down. And his mother says, how do we get up there? How do we get up there? How do we get? I said, no, I know how to get him. We'll get up there. So I took his mother and we went up the elevator in the back dock area, got in there, got him. And then I heard his mother going, oh no. Welcome to the third and final episode of our special series about the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.

In Episodes 1 and 2, we heard about the history of the event and went behind the scenes of the rodeo. Episode 3 is all about the music. As you just heard, Leroy Schaefer, former Chief Operating Officer of the Rodeo, has another great story for you. He'll finish the tale of the Jackson 5's memorable sound check before their performance in 1974. Then we'll go backstage before the final concerts of the year at Rodeo Houston 2019 to hear from two legendary Texas songwriters,

Robert Earl Keene and Lyle Lovett. We spoke to them less than two hours before showtime. And as you can hear in the background during Lyle's interview, the crowd was ready to go. So let's get to it. Here's Leroy Schaefer to finish the story of the Jackson 5. As a podcast network, our first priority has always been audio and the stories we're able to share with you. But we also sell merch, and organizing that was made both possible and easy with Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell and grow at every stage of your business, from the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage.

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And they opened the show that year with this group called the Jackson 5. And it was my introduction. It was my introduction to the horror of presentation. I was put in charge of sound checks for that year in addition to promotion and advertising. And the Jackson Five to say that they were a mischievous bunch of young people would be an understatement. We lost Jermaine during the sound check. We were looking all over for him. Security was pulling their hair out because how in the world could we lose this kid and then we hear this yelling and it's germane up up in the sky

boxes of the astrodome yelling down and his mother says how do we get up there how do we get us no i don't know how to get him we'll get up there so i took his mother when we went up the elevator in the back dock area got in there got him and then i heard his mother going oh no and we looked down at that time the rodeo clown uh wilbur plogger had this cable that came down from the top of the of the astrodome and he usually had a dummy on it to look just like him and they would put that down and bulls would come and hit it but when we were doing sound check and other things we would raise that thing up so that it was about i think it was probably 12 feet off of the floor of the stadium somehow the brothers had got this thing swinging and it was swinging over the stage and michael grabbed a hold of it and

they were pushing him and he was probably going 50 or 60 yards either side of that stage and when he was at the at the one end of that swing he would probably be 70 or 80 feet off the ground. I thought Mrs. Jackson was going to absolutely die. We get down and we security has gotten a hold of Michael by the time we get down and everything is under control. Thanks to Leroy Schaefer for donating his time and many stories to this project. And now, here's Robert Earl Keene. First, thank you so much for being a part of the show. We appreciate you taking the time on the final day of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.

We know you're very heavily scheduled. You're only a couple hours away from showtime here. So thank you, sir. Appreciate it. Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks, Chris. And so we want to start, since we are here just a couple hours before showtime, I want to start with a question about the rodeo. So you're obviously a Houston native, but your career grew through Austin. How was the experience when you first came home to Houston to play at the rodeo in the early 2000s? I don't know. It was otherworldly. I really could. I think I was

kind of, it was such a heady experience that I really couldn't get a handle on, you know, how exciting it was. I had a lot of friends that came of course and of course it was one of those things that unfortunately my parents had passed away and you know we had gone to the rodeos from the time they were back in the Coliseum years and years ago and so that I guess it was bittersweet I got to play the rodeo, and it was really exciting. I could never imagine playing the rodeo when I was like a child. I met like Michael Landon from Bonanza, and I saw Roy Rogers all the way back in the Coliseum. And so there were things that were connected with those.

And so there were things that were connected with those. And then actually to be one of those guys was hard to really put in place. But once I got on stage and started playing, it's kind of like always when you get on stage. Once you get on stage, everything comes together. And it all came together, and it was overwhelming. I was lucky I didn't cry. Sure, sure. And we're going to talk to Lyle in a few minutes also. Obviously, you guys are close friends and longtime friends.

And kind of somewhat piggybacking off that, this is such a huge event. And you're about to go on stage in front of 80,000 people. And the energy, the craziness is going to be a part of that. I'm going to talk to him a little bit about that as well. But I want to slightly take a sidestep for you. When you guys play together in smaller venues, more intimate venues, the acoustic shows you've done, is there also a similar kind of energy that comes from those shows

where it's a little bit different, that they're close, the people are closer to you, it's a little more intimate, it's just two guys with guitars. Is there a similar kind of energy that can come from that as can come from a huge event like this they're very different actually the the the energy that you get from a large show is like i said before sort of overwhelming and heady but it's exciting and you just try to ride the wave and you and just try to remember everything that you're doing because that's the important part. It's like we'd be able to sort of absorb the excitement and enthusiasm of the crowd.

Whereas when you play a more intimate venue, you would like to really make the crowd be part of the show and bring them into you. It's kind of almost the opposite way. You're on top of the crowd here at 80,000 people, and you're hoping to just stay right on top of that wave and not fall off the back of it and just really just continue to increase their enthusiasm and hope that your songs really catch on. Whereas when you're in those smaller venues, you're bringing those people into you and trying to invite them into your headspace and how the songs relate to them and you at the same time and how you can actually have some kind of almost cosmic connection

with those people that are out there in the audience. And that happens quite a bit when you play some smaller clubs. And that's what we try to do, is try to really connect with the audience in almost like an ethereal way. Whereas, again, the large ones, you just try to ride the wave. I was going to say that was going to be the natural follow-up, but you kind of already asked it. Do you feel that connection?

When it's happening, is it pretty obvious to you in those smaller venues? Yes, it does. And I want to say there's almost nothing that feels better than that where you have taken whatever you've created and brought it out and handed it to the people, and they understand, and you have this great understanding all at the same time. And sometimes, you know, it's emotionally overwhelming because you can feel their emotion. It can be, you know, you can be laughing or enjoying that, or you can, you know, have something really heartfelt,

and you can, or maybe you're writing this song about, say, somebody that you really love that you hadn't seen in a long time, and they are thinking about not that person but someone else, and you connect in that way, and that emotion is all brought together in one big nucleus there. And it holds together for those few minutes. And that feeling right there, there's nothing that you can substitute that with. And I think you actually answered it much better than I asked it in my fumbling way.

But that's kind of where I was going. You obviously have this big, huge energy from the big events, but then you also have a different kind of energy, and it feels like it can be just as powerful as the big, awe-inspiring spectacle. Absolutely. It can be – both of them are incredibly satisfying and incredibly enjoyable and fun, but they are two different kinds of performing

and two different feelings that you are going to derive from that experience. Okay, great. And so I want to wrap up with this. Again, we know that you got to run to some other engagements, but I did want to ask this one question. It's always been on my mind. Since I do a lot of other kinds of writing

and it's very long writing, I've always been interested in a songwriter's, the great songwriter's ability to construct a complex, nuanced story in such a small package, like a three to five minute song with the layers and the complexities. Did you know that that was the form and the medium that your writing was going to take in the early stages? Did it just come naturally that you thought about telling stories in that form? I started writing songs. The first song I ever wrote was when I was eight years old. And from then on, then school, then elementary school and junior high I wrote narrative rhyming poetry and it was and it was always there I would never want to discourage

someone to say like you can't learn this skill but it certainly is a lot better if you have some of those you know like if I were a pitcher it'd be a lot better if I could you know really pretty much throw a ball pretty well, and then I'd learn how to throw it better. Well, I had that skill when I was really young, and I took that skill and I just continued to enhance it. And when I got to be 18 years old, I started playing the guitar. And I learned three chords, and all of a sudden i realized oh i can write a song but back to your point about how it you you take a a subject and put it in three minutes one of the the greatest things and this is the secret here is for me those those rhyme schemes those those um cadence cad the choice of words, all that stuff creates a boundary

that makes songwriting fun and easy for me. Whereas when you talk about something longer, like prose, like making a short story or writing a novel, which I've done both of those. Well, actually, I didn't finish the novel, but I'm still working on it. I work on it like one sentence at a time. But anyway, when it comes to prose, there are so many choices, and I can't, you know, I don't have that boundary.

You know, I don't have that rhyming boundary or that length of, or that rhythm boundary or any of those things that a song has. And, oh, my God, I just, you know, I wonder where those boundaries are when you're writing really good prose. You know, I don't really have a real good feel for that. And so for songs, you know, I stick with songs because it all makes sense to me. I look at it and I go, oh, this makes sense. When I open a big page and I start writing even something journaling, I sort of go off all over the place and I'm like, I don't know, this doesn't make much sense.

But however, there's another addendum to that particular idea about writing. I love great prose. I'm a total fiction guy i don't care about non-fiction i don't care about documentaries i don't care about any of that stuff i love love fiction and i have so much respect for great fiction writers that i feel like it's uh an insult for me to try to you know write like they do you know know, I just enjoy it, you know? Yeah. I completely understand what you're saying. Right. I completely understand. Is there a couple of fiction writers you want to throw out that you're reading

right now? I mean, I have the entire, all of Cormac stuff, Cormac McCarthy stuff. I have all first editions and all signed first editions of his stuff, except for the road. And then, you know, of course, McMurtry, I have McMurtry. Of course, of course. I love that dude, Hanson, that wrote the Jesse James thing.

Is that Ron Hanson? Is that his name? The Assassination of Jesse James by the Cowboys. He also wrote one called Desperados. It's really good. And there's a book I picked up a couple years ago called The Sisters Brothers by this dude out in Oregon. Just got made into a movie.

Yes, by John C. Reilly, and I haven't seen the movie. But I'm a fan of Western fiction, and Louis L'Amour and that kind of thing. But the fact is, all of those really great writers also almost always touch somehow on the western genre somehow somehow they always sneak into it like like if a director has been at being a director long enough they'll always end up trying to do something with the civil war that's usually where they make their mistake but the fact is it's like every great writer somehow almost always codes into that world of, you know, how we create this world of like hardly anything as far as like a landscape and put things into it, you know. Yes, of course. Well, we'll wrap up with that one.

Thank you very much again for your time. We really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Robert Earl Keene and Lyle Lovett are old friends from their days at Texas A&M, and they've shared the stage together many times. And in 2012, they were both inducted into the Texas Heritage Songwriters Hall of Fame, along with a couple other guys you might have heard of,

Danny King and Townes Van Zandt. So let's move from one Hall of Famer to another. Here's Lyle Lovett. Thank you very much for agreeing to be on the show. We really appreciate you taking the time. Well, thanks for having me on, Chris. Yeah, we know this is the final day of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. You just finished soundcheck. You're just a couple hours away from showtime for closing the event this year. Yes. Hour and 15 minutes. Hour and 15 minutes to be exact. So we'll get right into it.

So we know you've played here a couple times before in the early 2000s. Obviously, you're a native of the greater Houston area. But what was it like? Was it ever a dream of yours to play at this event when you were growing up just outside Houston? And once you started really focusing on music? You know, I loved the rodeo growing up. I was born in Methodist Hospital, you know, just down the road from here. And I used to come to the rodeo back when it was in the old Sam Houston Coliseum. And then when it moved to the Astrodome,

it was just something that my parents and I looked forward to doing together every year. And it, you know, I didn't dream of playing the rodeo because I just never considered there to even be a possibility. You know, I took guitar lessons and piano lessons growing up. But, you know, the idea of getting to actually play the rodeo just never even occurred to me. So it was in the year 2000 that I got to play it for the first time. And Robert and I, in fact, played it together that night. And then in 2001, I played it with Martina McBride,

and that was the last year they had the rodeo in the Astrodome. So I'm really proud of getting to do that. But the rodeo is just one of my favorite events in town all year long, and I look forward to it every year, whether I'm playing or not. Yeah, we have friends in town who who will not they make the parade is everything nothing everything gets scheduled around the parade the parade can never be missed ever it's uh the parade is fantastic and so it wasn't necessarily a dream of yours because it sounded like it was something almost so far-fetched that it couldn't ever possibly come

true so what was the experience like was it almost otherworldly when you were able to finally play here? Well, I just felt so it was a humbling experience, you know, just to think about all the times I'd been to the rodeo and all the great performers I'd seen over the years and to be able to ride out there, out to the stage on my horse was a great feeling. You actually did? I did i did yeah yeah yeah oh that's fantastic it was really really fun yeah well growing up that was all the that was the way the performance got to the stage and and uh and my days were growing up here in houston and so

i thought that's what i should do yeah we say listeners to this podcast will have heard our first episode on the houston livestock show and rode Rodeo. And Mr. Leroy Schaefer, the former chief operating officer who worked here for more than 40 years, told the fantastic story of George Strait's legendary first performance where he rode out after the show on a horse and rode laps around the arena and reared the horse up and waved his hat and the crowd just went ballistic. And it set the bar for all of his performances there to come.

So that's interesting. You have kind of a come. So I didn't, that's interesting. You have kind of a similar story. I didn't know that you rode the horse out to begin with. Well, George is a great horseman. And yeah, the first time I met George in 1986 was at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. And he did a reception before the show. And my parents and I were there. We were, I was on MCA

Records in Nashville and so we were invited there by the record company and and got to say hello to George and we were just awestruck by what a gentleman he was then and and of course he always he always is he's always a gentleman in his singing and his music but just in person he was so nice to my parents and and he said hello to us when we first walked in the room and then he kind of made his way around the room talking to everybody and before he left to go do his show he came back over to my parents and he said uh said mr miss lovett it's really nice to meet you and i tell you my parents were and we all you know we're just uh solid fans from from that moment on i, he just was such a gentleman. That's so glad to hear.

It's so good to hear when the reputation kind of is reinforced, when you get to see it live, when you get to meet people, and they actually are genuinely good people in real life. Well, they just don't come any better than George Strait. And we'll somewhat stick on that because, obviously, tonight you and your old friend Robert are playing uh on stage George Strait's following you and I asked Robert Earl a similar question but I kind of flipped it a little bit so I want to ask you about the energy that comes from playing a huge stage like this you

have 80,000 people who are going to be waiting out there in less than an hour and 15 minutes now as we count down what is the energy like to play with an old friend at this venue, on that stage, in front of that kind of crowd? You know, the experience of doing all those things together, it's just something that doesn't happen very often. First of all, for Robert and me to be together on the same show and to be trading songs the way we are tonight is just a lot of fun. It takes me back to our days of sitting around at Robert's house or at my apartment when

we were in school trading songs then. And then to be able to open the show for one of our musical heroes in this great stadium, NRG Stadium. I mean, it is, well, it'll be a surreal experience. You know, I feel so fortunate to play to the audiences that I get to play to. But it's rare that I play a place this size. And I only have a few times before in my career. And so I'm not quite sure what to expect other than I'm just going to go out there

and hang on and hope I can hear. Yeah, he actually said something similar, that it is kind of like hanging on and almost riding the wave, I think was the analogy that he used. You just got to go with it when it's something of this size. Well, not having a choice really makes it easier. Once you get out there, you just have to do it.

But no, we're both excited about it. And the stadium is such a great facility. And I've gotten to sing the national anthem here a few times. And so I'm a little bit prepared for the echo and what that's going to sound like. Sure, sure. And so I want to wrap up with one last thing. Like we said, we know you guys are heavily scheduled. It's going to be a crazy evening. So I want to do this one. I didn't want to dive too deep into any one song or any one album, but I kind of couldn't help myself.

Because one of your songs, Natural Forces, is one of my favorites. Oh, thank you very much. But it also has so, there's so much imagery in that song that I think listeners of this podcast will identify with. It'll resonate with them. I'm not going to go through everything, but I wanted to focus on one specific line and then just ask a question beyond that. The line was, my home is where my horse is. And so my question is what is what is the what is it about the image and the idea of the rider on horseback that has stuck with us over the years you kind of get that it almost draws from the western movies and the western culture that we see of the lone

rider riding into the sunset on his horse why is that stuck with us all these years even beyond when you can do that anymore the the horse is symbolic of our country of our the western expansion of our country of the development of our country i of course i'm a horse person i've been involved in the american quarter horse association the national reigning horse association national rain cow horse association and the National Cutting Horse Association. And so I'm a horse person, and I just have great respect for great horsemen like George Strait, people who are that skilled with horses. And it's something, you know,

becoming a horseman is a lot like becoming a guitar player. It's an endless pursuit. As accomplished as you might be, there are always people who are better than you are, and there are always people that you can look up to and learn from. And so it's analogous. Horsemanship and musicianship are parallel in my life, and I just have such great admiration for people who are good with horses. And I made up that song really thinking about the way our country came to be,

but just on a drive back home from the National Riding Horse Association Futurity, the big event of the year in Oklahoma City. Oh, really? One Sunday in December, I was driving the 440 miles home and had plenty of time to think and driving through Oklahoma. So that's why there's Oklahoma imagery. That's why there's a verse about the Raining Futurity. But it really is the horse in that song

is literally the horse but also represents the development of our country yeah I've always loved how that song takes the listener on a journey through different parts of American history there's all kinds of different elements built into it well thank you very much

from the kind of the modern somewhat to the modern horseman the long haul trucker is in there who drives from all the way across the country, from Buffalo to San Francisco. And you can imagine how that track used to happen in the days before there were long haul trucking. Thank you so much for listening. I've always, I've always loved that one. So we'll wrap it up there. Again, we know you got to run. So thank you very much for spending some time with us. We really appreciate it. Great talking to you, Chris. Thanks for having me on.

Thank you all for listening. And huge thank yous to Robert and Lyle for taking the time before their show. And a very special thank you from all of us here at the Legends of the Old West podcast to the team at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. It took an incredible amount of work to organize these episodes, and we couldn't be more grateful. It was a fun experience, and we hope all of you listening enjoyed it as well. We'll see you soon for more stories from the Lone Star State as we dive back into the early adventures of the Texas Rangers. Thanks again. Shop with Rakuten and you'll get it. What's it?

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