Lyle’s Style
He’s not handsome. He can’t sing like Willie. He’s too smart and too shy. So why is Lyle Lovett a star?
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LATELY THE BOY FROM KLEIN HAS BEEN spending much of his time in Hollywood. Last year, following his telephone conversations with Robert Altman, Lovett boned up by renting several Altman movies and then flew to Malibu to talk shop. Altman served the musician some coffee and home-baked bread and, with Hollywood types like Rachel Ward flitting in and out of the house, told Lovett that he had him in mind for two movies, actually. The first one was titled L.A. Short Cuts and would be based on various Raymond Carver short stories. Altman envisioned Lovett as the baker in the stark, tragic story, “A Small Good Thing.” But since they had first met, Altman had begun work on another movie, a vivisection of Hollywood called The Player. The script called for two police detectives—one to be played by Whoopi Goldberg, the other to be Lovett’s part if he wanted it. “It’s small, but we’ll make it bigger,” the director told the musician. Altman added that Lovett, who had no acting experience, need not feel nervous: The character he would play was sort of a bad actor anyway.
The part of the detective was not a singing role. Clearly Altman, like the rest of Lyle Lovett’s fans, couldn’t forget the face. For Lovett, it was an opportunity to watch a creative force entirely different from his own at work. “It was amazing to see,” says Lovett, his voice boyishly exuberant. “He was constantly making spur-of-the-moment creative decisions. In my first scene, Altman had me picking a flower, sniffing it, and then tossing it away disdainfully. Later, he comes to me and says, ‘The flower scene is okay, but why don’t we try something else? Why don’t we have you crushing a bug with your hand?’ And I did. And it was such a little thing, but it also became the defining feature of my character.”
As word of The Player spread throughout the industry, more and more actors began to show up on the set, hoping for a cameo role. It was a spectacle Lovett couldn’t resist watching, though after a few days, he feared he might be getting in the way and therefore didn’t show up to observe the filming one afternoon. The next day, Altman greeted him by saying, “Where were you yesterday? We missed you.”
Without his making any effort, Hollywood had come to Lyle Lovett—he himself was now a player. To moviegoers, there was something hilarious and yet perfectly natural about seeing Lovett on the big screen, hiding behind corners, wisecracking, crushing flies. To cinema’s beautiful people, he was an exotic creature to be stroked and courted. Though Lovett refuses to get a film agent, his Nashville-based managers have received several offers from the West Coast. The only one Lovett says interested him was the possibility of joining the TV cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. “For a moment,” he says, looking positively Spock-like, “I thought of throwing it all away and joining the starship Enterprise.”
THE BUS ARRIVES AT RED ROCKS Amphitheatre a couple of hours before sound check, according to plan, like most everything else on this tour. Though Lovett enjoys telling people he has successfully avoided honest work all these years (his last stint as a laborer probably occurred in l974, when he worked at a Houston motorcycle shop), the aura of professionalism to the Lovett tour is obviously to his liking. His shows are punctual almost to the minute. His backup musicians dress sharply and have come to expect that any missed note will be a subject of later discussion. Before each show, Lovett makes out the set list, which is then distributed to the rest of the band by the road manager, Robert Bennett. At the end of each show, Lovett makes a decision about the encore and passes it on to Bennett, who in turn corrals the band and relays the information. Once the show is over, Lovett gives his crew the latitude to do what they wish. But Lovett has surrounded himself with veterans who will never be confused with Led Zeppelin in their road appetites. No one is going to jail on this tour.
The band piles out of the bus and wanders off to the backstage area. By four o’clock, two hundred or so Lovett fans are already sitting on the benches, screaming out his name. Lovett and the others are wearing their bus duds; they look to me like some Austin pickup band jamming in a park. During sound check, Lovett directs his band to play four songs that are not featured on tonight’s set list, and the crowd can tell by the musicians’ expressions that this is fun rather than work, which moves them to stand on the benches and dance—all except for one girl, who executes a continuous solemn we’re-not-worthy bow in Lovett’s direction. Lovett grins. Along with everything else, he is a gracious performer, supplying two-hour sets to even the most loutish crowds. When asked why, the wisecracker retreats to simplicity: “I just like to play.”
After sound check, there is dinner backstage. Lovett and I eat the catered cajun food and talk about the Mexican food in Austin. Lovett enjoys the road, especially touring by bus, and he says he does not vacation well; still, he can be coaxed into homesickness with little effort. When he says good-bye to me and retreats into a dressing room adjacent to the band’s communal room, I cannot shake the feeling that he will spend his time there sitting back with his eyes closed, thinking about his grandparents’ house in Klein.
A few minutes later, I look up to see James Gilmer, Lovett’s percussionist and longtime right-hand man, standing over me. “Lyle wants to see you in the dressing room,” he says.
I open the door. Lovett is standing in a sleeveless undershirt and jeans before a rack of perhaps fifteen suits. He turns and smiles briefly. “Help yourself,” he says, pointing to a tray of juice, mineral water, and beer. He’s thinking about the show, the set, the faces, note by note, word by word. “Every show is different,” he told me on the bus, “and the moment you believe otherwise is when you’re bound to screw up.” Now Lovett is pondering the differences, crafting this new evening in his imagination and willing it to come true. Suddenly his look is almost beseeching. “I hope you’ll do a better job than I have of explaining to people what my music is,” he says. “It makes sense to you, doesn’t it? You’re a Texan.”
That night, to me and to six thousand Colorado fans, the music makes perfect sense. After the instrumental opener, Lovett saunters across the stage, his left hand in his pocket, lost it seems in his gray musings while the crowd speaks to him in one unending shriek. We hear blues from his voice. Two songs later the four gospel singers launch into “Church,” the great Dixie spiritual shuffle off of Joshua Judges Ruth. Then come songs that could be described as country, others as desolate folk ballads, others as pure pop. Yet it all pours out of Lovett, who stands unchanging as he has always stood, this freakishly unalterable product of tradition and reckless imagination—stands there smiling in spite of himself, for tonight everything is wonderful.
And though tonight there’s no Hunter Thompson or Robert Altman in the crowd, Lovett’s great-aunt, who has a house in Dillon, has made it to the show. After the performance, he finds her backstage with her daughter. Lyle Lovett reaches for his family, smiling and hugging, before he’s finally jostled by a brace of MCA Records employees and asked to sign T-shirts, CDs, and photographs, all of which he seems happy to do. Only when the backstage area clears and the equipment load-out commences does Lovett’s high from the performance begin to diminish. Eventually he turns away and retreats to his dressing room, head down, brooding again. Another night.
Inside his dressing room he puts on his denim work shirt and his jeans. He zips up his suitbag. Outside, the bus is waiting. Then he looks up, and his face sports that great Lovett expression of puzzlement, amusement, and barely concealed regret. “It’s so strange,” he says. “You stand up there and play for all these people. And you don’t meet any of them. It’s just very strange.”
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