With Envy
Maybe you think he can’t sing. Maybe you think his lyrics are trite. Maybe you’ve never even heard of him. Pat Green wants you to know that none of that bothers him. He’s the guy who made Texas cool again, and you’re not.
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Yet for many music critics, Green’s success is simply bewildering. It’s not the fact that he refers to a Texas of old; it’s how he does it. They say that Green does little more than sing about tired, overused images—road trips down Interstate 35, beer-and-taco dinners, Luckenbach, Gruene Hall, and the love of a good Texas woman. Evoking the revered Texas singer-songwriting tradition that has produced such profoundly poetic writers as Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, Nelson and Lovett, reviewers have called Green a derivative songwriter with nothing original to say. Rob Patterson, a critic for the Dallas Observer and the Houston Press, not only wrote that Green’s music was “stunningly mediocre” but also described him as “Mr. Potato Boy with a battered cowboy hat.” Robert Wilonsky, who also writes for the Observer, argued that “Green writes his songs for the Lone Star circuit, milking the native audience’s deep-in-the-heart flag-waving to collect his wooden nickels” and that his act is no different from the cheesy Texas-shaped ashtrays that are for sale at an airport gift shop. “Yee-haw, ya phony,” snapped Wilonsky. The reviews have been so vicious that the Austin American-Statesman’s Michael Corcoran wrote last year that Green had become “the most reviled Texas artist since Vanilla Ice.”
“Look, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the deepest songwriter in the world,” said Green, giving me a congenial shrug when I visited him recently at his home in the Tarrytown neighborhood of Austin. He and his wife, Kori, a very pretty and very smart third-year law student at the University of Texas, had just moved in, and Kori was in the living room with friends, laying down a new rug. Green, meanwhile, was sitting in the back of the house in his office, which he had decorated in what he called “basic guy.” On his desk was a computer, which he used to play computer golf. On one wall was a drawing of Pancho Villa, a photograph of Louis Armstrong, and a medallion that read “Pat Green, Texas songwriter”—about the only evidence that suggested Green was a musician at all.
“My songs don’t get real dark about the human condition,” he said. “But there are a lot of people hearing these songs and saying, ‘This guy is speaking to me. This guy is singing about a life I like living, or I want to live.’ So how do you explain that?”
How does one explain it? Even if the critics are right about Green’s Texas-centric lyrics, what many of them are missing is the extraordinary impact this music is having on a new generation of Texans. Although his audiences include plenty of gun-rack bubbas and young rural-looking women with sprayed, crunchy hairdos, he is also drawing an incredible number of J. Crew fraternity boys and urban babes whose $60 Toni and Guy trims are hidden under cute cowboy hats. Green’s fans call themselves Green Heads, they joyfully scream “Pat F—ing Green” whenever he comes onstage, they wave their baseball caps and cowboy hats in the air, and with a yahooish fervor they greet each song with farmhand-style shouts, though it’s likely that many of them have never been on a farm. For them, Green is an accessible country music performer: His voice is not overly twangy, and his music is inspired as much by rock sensibilities as by steel guitars and George Jones. But above all, it’s the message, according to Casey Saliba, a freshman at Southwest Texas State, in San Marcos, who also happens to be dating my stepdaughter. “He isn’t like those old country music singers you listen to who sing about problems with love and divorce and going broke and all that old people’s stuff,” Casey told me one day as he dug through my refrigerator, looking for food.
In fact, Green is a Texas version of Jimmy Buffett, a good-natured guy who looks like most of the men in his audience, who takes off his boots and plays barefoot, and who bangs out easy-to-sing-along songs about the Lone Star State as a laid-back, freewheeling paradise where you can have more fun than you ever thought possible and where you deal with your problems by going on weekend road trips, drinking a little beer, and visiting classic Texas landmarks that many of these kids never knew existed. In his hit “Carry On,” Green sings: “Baby’s just a little bit tired of the city. / Billboards and bullshit got her down. / Seems like you need a little Hill Country, / A little back roads drivin’, / A little bit of that old top down.” Critics might cringe, but an assistant program director for KPLX-FM 99.5, the Wolf, a Dallas country music station, told Billboard magazine that “Carry On” could very well be an “anthem for the next new wave of country music.” For its part, the Wolf shot to number one in the Metroplex radio-ratings market last year in large measure because it reformatted itself as a “Texas country” station that played Pat Green songs several times a day.
“Pat’s appeal is not hard to understand,” said longtime Texas musician Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel. “Every generation needs its own fun-loving troubadour, and Pat’s this young, handsome guy with a lot of charisma, playing a real energetic music, teaching a new group of kids about the joy of acting Texan, about going on road trips and hanging out at roadhouses and drinking beer. We did those very types of songs ourselves in our time, and Pat is just updating them for kids today. To my eighteen-year-old son, Sam, my own songs about road trips don’t mean shit. But he does listen to Pat Green.”
Yet Benson admitted that he too is surprised at the number of young people who want to identify with this kind of music at this point in time. No less of an authority than Jerry Jeff Walker, who came to Texas in the late sixties from New York and helped set off the famed Austin-based redneck rock-progressive country movement with Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and others, is convinced that a new movement has taken root, one that includes Walker’s own twenty-year-old son, Django, who wrote one of Green’s hits, “Texas on My Mind,” and who has just released an album of his own, Down the Road. There are now dozens of young Texas-based country musicians, almost all of them under the age of thirty, singing songs about Panhandle sunsets, Highway 281, Del Rio, San Antonio (which they all pronounce “San Antone”), honky-tonk romances, Shiner Bock, hangovers, pearl-snap shirts, Texas-bound trains, and lonely cowboys. The musicians unrepentantly give their songs Texas-y titles—“Dance by the Rio Grande,” “Texas Time Travelin’,” “100% Texan,” “Somewhere Down in Texas,” “Hill Country Here I Come”—and they declare in almost all of their interviews that they care nothing about becoming Nashville stars because they prefer the rawer, unpolished sound of their Texas country music. Many of them go so far as to shout out “Nashville sucks!” between songs at their concerts.
It is hard to imagine that this new group of young musicians—the more notable names include Cory Morrow, Roger Creager, Jason Boland, Kevin Fowler, and Rodney Hayden—will come close to the mythical status of the Texas musicians who were part of the original redneck-rock movement. At the very least, they will never be as bacchanalian. “Kids like Pat and Django are very responsible and work hard and don’t care about causing a lot of insurrection on the stage,” said Jerry Jeff, who thirty years ago was renowned for drunkenly performing songs like “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother.” Nevertheless, the new breed’s music is selling. Southwest Wholesale, which distributes albums to major retailers like Sound Warehouse and Hastings Records, saw the sales of what it calls Texas music jump from $900,000 in 2000 to $3.2 million in 2001. “That’s almost all from these younger groups that normal country audiences have never heard of,” said Frank Jackson, Southwest Wholesale’s senior project manager. “Already this year, sales in this category are up more than twelve percent, and you’re seeing more and more record stores creating ‘Texas Music’ sections to showcase these albums.”
Why is it that kids who were born after the heyday of Nelson and Jennings—kids who have spent their lives immersed in boy bands, hip hop, alternative rock, and Britney Spears—suddenly find themselves identifying with a guy singing some song about Texas? “Maybe the answer is real simple,” said Green. “Maybe they’re finally figuring out that it’s a hell of a lot more fun to be Texan than it is to be anything else.”
Pat Green spent his childhood on a small horse farm just north of Waco with his mother and stepfather (his parents divorced when he was seven), but he wasn’t an old-fashioned country boy. For a show in elementary school, he performed a break-dancing routine. He liked pop and rock music, and he attended a Sheena Easton concert on the campus of Baylor University. When he was fourteen years old, he did start listening to a local country music station, in part to hear the voice of a female disc jockey whose picture he had seen in Playboy.
At the tiny private high school in Waco that he attended, Green was the basic class cutup, always affable and always willing to stay out late on Friday nights. After graduating eleventh in a class of thirteen students, he headed off to Texas Tech University, where he joined a fraternity and changed majors every few months—moving from architecture to psychology to family studies to engineering to physics to range and wildlife management to, finally, general studies. He was known among his friends for his ability to “shotgun” a beer. He started learning chords on a guitar, but it was only so that he could strum along to songs like “Shine, Jesus, Shine,” at the Christian youth camps he worked at during the summer.
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