Robbie and Me

My love affair with Robbie Fulks began the old-fashioned way: I saw him for the first time across a crowd. He was long and tall, his hair gleaming red in the afternoon sunlight while he played a raucous boogie-rock barn burner. I’m not partial to latter-day roots rock, but Fulks’s heart beat pure charisma. Not the smarmy, cloying kind: the animalistic, magnetic kind. I stopped walking, stopped breathing, and stood in his thrall while he changed my life. I realized, watching him, that I liked country music. Robbie Fulks made a believer out of me.

It was maybe 12 years ago at Bumbershoot—is there a less romantic setting?—and I was on my way to the Honey Buckets or an elephant ear or something when I passed the stage where Fulks was playing. He sang with sparky, playful rage, and the lyrics, it slowly dawned on me, weren’t some greaser’s roots-rock fantasy. He was mocking roots rockers: “Three chords in every pop song! Four white guys in each band!/A ruthless media empire to saturate this land/Then, with our alt-­country comrades, and our brothers in neo-swing/We’ll reclaim music from the kids for our fat dead cracker King!”

He howled the last four words like there was a tornado in his throat. The struggle, such as it was, was over. I was his for life. Only two musicians have so permanently branded my brain with their live perfor­mances: satanic diva Diamanda Galás and country singer Robbie Fulks.

If Fulks were a representative ambassador of country music, we’d all be country-­music fans. To cut through some of the received bullshit about country musicians: Fulks is an atheist. He’s a vegetarian. (When I called him last week, he said he was at his home north of Chicago, “in the kitchen, cooking some cauliflower with some peas in it. A sort of Indian entrée. For my sons.”) He’s extremely witty and literate—his latest record, a 50-song download titled 50-Vc. Doberman, references Arthur Koestler and Flannery O’Connor—but never a show-off.

“Brainy country music is an oxymoron,” Fulks said from his kitchen. “I try to put a break on that. Really, any country music that doesn’t march in lockstep with the mainstream could ascend to that designation.” Fulks gave the kiss-off to the mainstream in his anti-Nashville yowl “Fuck This Town” (“They can’t stop the flood of assholes: There ain’t a big enough ASCAP”).

Now for his country bona fides: He grew up in North Carolina and Virginia, took up the banjo at 7 and the fiddle and guitar not long afterward. Many of his songs have to do with hard living, hard loving, and hard drinking, but his lyrics are linguistically nimble and warm with human pleasure and folly. They’re satisfying, the way Elvis Costello and Randy Newman songs are satisfying.

From the ’20s music-hall ditty “On the Corner of I Love & You”: “There will be moonlit rides by coach and horse/A fine hotel, some intercourse/And later on, a big divorce/Oh, how badly it shall end!”

An example from “Take Me to the Paradise” (if you’ve ever had a one-night stand that began in the bar of an old hotel haunted by the ghost of Truman Capote, this is your song):

Here the homosexual novelist/Full of rage in 1960/There the ill-coiffured ex-viscount/Watches empty seconds fly/Until the blood clot zeroes in/And grants him immortality again/[chorus] Take me to the Paradise, beauty sleeps inside/Drinking in the mezzanine with millionaires’ first wives/Take me to the Paradise, let me live once more/Greater men have faced these walls and fallen on the floor.

“Ill-coiffured ex-viscount”? In a country song?

Yes. And it doesn’t draw attention to itself—just nestles right in there like it belongs. I could quote Fulks lyrics all day.

Fulks has the brawn and the brains, his songs are sexy and smart, he’s worked with Ben Folds, Steve Albini, and other musicland big shots—so why isn’t he rich and famous?

“Well, you could spin a dozen different theories,” he laughs. “I don’t like to think about it too much—I’m pretty happy with where I am. But one theory is that I’m stylistically inconsistent. If I put out a record, you don’t automatically know what it will sound like. That creates a branding problem, I guess you could say.”

Maybe it’s his “branding problem” that I love—a roots-rock songs mocking roots rockers, country music that isn’t afraid to be smart, the occasional ode to the Bangles or Michael Jackson cover (Fulks has an entire arsenal of those). From the revelation of Fulks on that summer afternoon, I started searching: Willie Nelson, Bill Monroe, Roger Miller, plus Waco Brothers, the Meat Purveyors, and the rest of the Bloodshot Records catalog.

But Fulks is a peculiarly restless soul. His style slides around from honky-tonk and hardcore twang to hints of Tom Waits and Rufus Wainwright. His closest noncountry analogue might be Stephin Merritt—both songwriters constantly experiment, reinvent, and stiff-arm cliché. It’s impossible to predict what either will do next, but it’s almost always delightful.

Robbie Fulks is country music’s last, best hope. Too bad country music hasn’t figured that out yet.