Robert Earl Keen? That’s Another Story : The Texan’s Lyric Songwriting, Literate and Full of Emotion, Ignores Country Formulas

Robert Earl Keen’s latest album ends with a 7 1/2-minute anthem of defeat that is a gift to every downtrodden bar band on the planet.

Almost anywhere, on any given night, a hapless country or roots-rock ensemble is playing set after set in a gin mill that’s either deserted or packed with pestering drunks wanting to hear “Achy Breaky Heart.”

At the nub-end of the night, just before last call, the bereft bar musicians could strike up “Dreadful Selfish Crime,” Keen’s paean to wasted talent, and thereby immerse themselves in the comforts of a good, self-pitying wallow.

Had my first gig here in this neighborhood

We had a little band I thought was good

Hocked my old shotgun, bought a used P.A.

We got a quart of rum and drank it all that day

When the big gig come we were just too drunk to play

I am guilty of a dreadful selfish crime

I have robbed myself of all my precious time Keen is a 39-year-old Texan who belongs to the proud Lone Star tradition of literate, feeling-filled songwriting that recognizes no boundaries between folk, country and rock while providing an artistically ambitious alternative to the superficial formulas of the country mainstream.

Although he has been making records for independent labels since 1984 (the current one, “Gringo Honeymoon,” is his fifth), Keen remains something of a new arrival in the line that includes such luminaries as Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Guy Clark, Nanci Griffith and Keen’s old college buddy from Texas A&M; University, Lyle Lovett.

Keen, who plays tonight at the Coach House, is noted for his ability to tell stories with his songs. While some of them are sheer fancy, “Dreadful Selfish Crime” falls painfully close to some of his own hard experiences in the music business.

But Keen’s scuffling days now appear to be over. Speaking affably over the phone recently from Bandera, the small Texas town where he lives with his wife and infant daughter, he was able to tick off a number of modest but real signs of career upswing.

Among them, Keen says, is the sale of some 75,000 copies of “Gringo Honeymoon,” a very respectable total for an independent, roots-oriented release.

Among the dusty-voiced singer’s credentials is “The Road Goes On Forever,” a saga of murder and misplaced chivalry that Ely covered in 1992. It has surfaced again as the title track of the new album by the Highwaymen, the country super group that unites Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson. Gunplay is a recurring subject for Keen, but it is the basis for songs that emphasize character and plot, not violence and gore.

His latest album also includes a fictitious, romantic melodrama about a Mexican soldier and his faithful lover, as well as two long, valedictory songs about the losin’ side of life--”Dreadful Selfish Crime” and the even longer, and sadder, “Lonely Feelin,”’ a Dylanesque elegy that easily sustains its 8 1/2-minute running time.

There also is a richly evocative and philosophical love song, “Gringo Honeymoon,” in which Keen describes a luminous day of travels with his wife but maintains a poignant crosscurrent of melancholy with the underlying recognition that such perfect days are rare and fleeting.

“Merry Christmas From the Family,” based on real-life Keen family Yule gatherings, is as funny as it is pathetic, and it’s a pretty pathetic, true-ringing evocation of today’s fragmented, hard-pressed American family.

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Keen grew up in Houston, where his introduction to big-time live music was a Cream concert, and where he once rode his bike 12 miles to hunt down an album by the psychedelic rock band Spirit.

But Keen also listened to his brother’s collection of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard records. He didn’t pick up a guitar until he was at Texas A&M;, where English major Keen and journalism student Lovett used to hook up for song-swapping sessions on Keen’s front porch.

Keen moved on after graduation to the fertile music scene in Austin, where he played as a solo act and eventually began to fear the kind of stagnation envisioned in “Dreadful Selfish Crime.”

Keen said that he became acquainted around that time with Steve Earle, a rising hotshot who was full of advice about the advantages of relocating to Nashville.

“He said that if I stayed in Austin, I would end up like a couple of people I knew that were hanging around [and getting nowhere], and that was enough for me,” he said. “I was at a jumping-off point in my life, and [Earle’s advice] was like a sign.”

Keen moved to Nashville in 1985, and he instantly sold the first song he wrote there (it was a collaboration with Earle). He figured he had it made, but “it was the only time that happened.”

After two years of knocking on doors, auditioning and trying to hook into the Music City songwriting machinery, Keen had gotten nowhere. Earle became a star, and two more of Keen’s Texas friends and peers, Lovett and Nanci Griffith, also were winning acclaim and making great career strides.

In 1987, Keen and his wife, Kathleen, found themselves stuck on a highway shoulder near St. Louis, their car’s timing chain having broken on the way back to Nashville after a performance in Kansas.

At that moment, Keen says, as he stood fuming over an open hood, he saw Steve Earle’s tour bus speed by. Keen took that as a sign, too: his Nashville dream was over, and he and his wife soon relocated to the Texas hill-country hamlet of Bandera, west of San Antonio and home to about 1,000 citizens.

She got a job at a nursing home, and he “sat around for four or five months doing pretty much nothing. It was difficult to make ends meet and make sense of my life. At that point I didn’t know if I’d be able to stay in music.”

Keen says he got out of his doldrums when word got out on the Austin scene that he was back in Texas, and old acquaintances began offering him gigs. He says he soon realized that playing live, something he hadn’t done regularly during his Nashville stay, was vital to his music.

Keen made a live album for Sugar Hill Records in 1988 and followed it the next year with a studio album, “West Textures.” After 1990 he put together his touring band, which includes fiddle, bass, guitar and drums.

In 1992, the highly respected Ely cut two of Keen’s bloodier songs. In 1993, Keen’s album, “A Bigger Piece of Sky,” showed that he was capable of more than screen-reddening Sam Peckinpah scenarios.

Keen says his album sales have doubled with each release. “I seem to be getting more fans all the time, even from the mainstream. Once they’ve heard the music, they don’t make the distinction between Alan Jackson and me. They just say, ‘I like you, and I like Alan Jackson.’ ”

The rise of Alison Krauss, a committed bluegrass and folk traditionalist, makes one wonder whether progressive country might be able to make significant inroads among fans accustomed to more routine radio fare.

Like Keen, Krauss records for an independent label, Rounder, and doesn’t have a slick molecule in her musical makeup. Last week her album, “Now That I’ve Found You: A Collection,” ranked behind only John Michael Montgomery and Garth Brooks on Billboard’s country albums chart.

“I don’t know how to dethrone that [mainstream] group, and I don’t see that happening,” said Keen, who isn’t blessed with Krauss’ youth or her once-in-a-generation purity of voice.

“But I see that people get a little burned out on [repeated] rotation country radio, and they look for other things. It’s a true grass-roots movement. I did ‘Austin City Limits,’ and it was aired in February. A lot of people have come out because of that. I’ve sold a lot more records, and it means a lot more people have turned their friends on to it.”

Keen’s aim now is to extend his grass-roots movement to Southern California, where he will be headlining for the first time on a swing that was scheduled to bring him to Jack’s Sugar Shack in Los Angeles on Wednesday and to the Coach House tonight. His only previous area show, about 2 1/2 years ago at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, stands out in his mind as “a setback.” Keen says he was sandwiched into the middle of a bill with incompatible local acts.

“I had a smattering of friends show up. It didn’t work. It was not a smart bill at all. I just remember being in a daze.”

Northern California has been far more hospitable, he said. So has his home state.

“I have a great, great base here in Texas,” Keen said. “We do 1,500 people at a show here. We sell out every 600-person honky-tonk. We have a lot of fans here.”

The fact that his songs are full of lovingly etched local color doesn’t hurt his standing at home.

“I think it helps a lot,” said Keen, whose songs that don’t take place in Texas (or across the border in Mexico) are usually about leaving some other place to get back to Texas.

“When the redneck-rock movement first happened in the ‘70s, I was always tuned in to people who were going to sing about Texas,” he said. “I don’t beat the bandwagon, but the settings are in Texas, and people feel real comfortable with them.”

Of course, the songs aren’t generically about Texas, but about the losers, lovers and outlaws who parade through Keen’s narratives. Keen may stretch a single tale out to 7 1/2 or 8 1/2 minutes--one-fourth the length of your average Nashville album--but he is succinct about what enables his work to grab a listener’s attention:

“I always think people are interested in hearing a story in a song.”

* Robert Earl Keen, Gina Quartaro and Heads of State play tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. $12.50. (714) 496-8930.