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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Then he went to a concert featuring Robert Earl Keen, the Texas singer-songwriter who then had a sizable college following because of such tunes as “The Road Goes on Forever.” “I wanted to do that too,” Green told me. “I wanted to get onstage and have a good time and sing about all the stuff that was going on in my life.”
Green is the first to admit that he didn’t know that much “stuff.” He had experienced no anguished romance, no angst and gloom, no dark nights of the soul. “The thing about Pat is he didn’t really have negative thoughts at all,” said his wife, Kori, who met Pat at Tech. (On their first date, he showed her a photo album of his family and his dogs.) “And he didn’t have an internal audit button like the rest of us that tells us that what we’re doing is a little nerdy or ridiculous. So when it came to being a musician, it never occurred to him that someone might laugh at him when he got onstage.”
He began practicing his guitar every day in the laundry room of his dorm—he learned “Blackbird,” by the Beatles, and half of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama”—and he wrote his first song on the back of a report card. It was the tune about pouring Lone Star beer into his cereal and dipping Copenhagen. One day he drove more than three hundred miles with some friends to see Kris Kristofferson perform at Gruene Hall, then turned around and drove back to Lubbock that night. He became friends with another Tech student and fledgling country singer, Cory Morrow. In 1994 the pair staged their first concert, performing in front of a bunch of their roaring-drunk fraternity buddies at a local bar called Bash Riprocks. “Our number one concern was that we not drop our guitars out of nervousness,” Green said.
After Morrow quit school and moved to Austin to pursue his career, Green remained in Lubbock and began to build a following. “At first his audience was mostly guys who liked to drink while Pat sang,” said Kori. “Later on girls started showing up to meet the guys, and the audiences went from one hundred to two hundred.”
No one was yet predicting that Green had a future in the music business. In 1995, when he was 23 years old (he still hadn’t graduated from college), Green borrowed $12,000 from his family and friends and made his first album, Dancehall Dreamer, which included songs titled “I Like Texas” and “Southbound 35.” Two years later he released a second album, George’s Bar. By then he was back in Waco after finally graduating, working for his stepfather’s wholesale gasoline business and playing nightclubs and college parties on weekends. “What began to happen was that the Tech students would buy his albums, and then they’d take the albums back home wherever they lived in Texas, and their little brothers and sisters were soon listening to Pat,” said Kori. “Pat’s name weirdly began to get around. And soon it became this kind of in thing for college kids and high school kids to say they knew about Pat Green.”
Word spread fast. By 1998 small bars in college towns around Texas were booking Green. That year he also played an early show at Willie Nelson’s July 4 picnic and got his first booking at Billy Bob’s, where nearly two thousand people showed up to see him. Two of Billy Bob’s owners, Billy and Pam Minick, were so taken with Green that they quickly signed him to record a live album. “I hadn’t seen that kind of excitement in a young audience since Garth Brooks started making his rise,” said Pam. “But what made me realize Pat was going to catch on was watching the way parents who were there reacted to his music. They loved it.”
Not everyone was impressed. The reviewers from the alternative-weekly magazines began slamming Green—Rob Patterson went so far as to equate his rabid audiences with the crowds at Nuremberg rallies—but that was probably to be expected. What was surprising was that some older Texas musicians got in on the act. Robert Earl Keen told Patterson that he felt ambivalent about having inspired Green and the new group of singers like him. Charlie Robison, the popular 37-year-old country singer from Bandera (and husband of Dixie Chick banjoist Emily Robison) bluntly told the Austin Chronicle that Green’s music was not for “educated people or real music fans.” On his Web site, charlierobison.com, Robison also went after the entire new breed of Texas musicians. “I have problems with the current endless crop of people who pick up a guitar and a week later have twenty songs about Texas, Texas, Texas, beer, beer, beer, tacos, tacos, Guadalupe, Gruene Hall, UT, UT, A&M, A&M, etc.,” he wrote. “This is whoring a music I hold dear. If you ranch this land, grew up ranching it, and your family fought for its independence, as my family and I have done for 150 years, then you too would be insulted by people who take advantage of the Texas name and flag for financial gain.”
Robison recently told me he now regrets having made the comment about Green. “I’m sure some sort of jealousy was involved on my part about his popularity,” he explained. “I had been slaving for twelve years to write music about the Texas I knew, a Texas where people, including me, often felt like outsiders. But you have to give Pat credit. He was able to plug into this whole other audience out there ready to identify with his vision of what Texas is.”
Green was such an unabashed fan of Texas that one music critic wondered if he wasn’t “just some kind of satirist having us all on.” But it was real. He was just like the characters in his songs, always finding happiness either in an old pickup or in a dance hall with sawdust floors or in the music of legendary Texas singers like Nelson (whom Green persuaded to sing a duet with him on one of his albums). The first time he played Gruene Hall, he wept. When he married Kori, the ceremony was held in Luckenbach. At his concerts he sold a T-shirt that listed his name and everything he liked about Texas, including the Broken Spoke bar in Austin, the King Ranch in South Texas, mesquite trees, barbecue, bluebonnets, windmills, shotguns, fiddles, off-roading, and boots—a literal checklist of Texas icons.
In 2000 Green grossed more than $1 million in income from album sales, concerts, and merchandise sales. Yet because he was still ignored by the mainstream press, most older Texans had no idea who he was. Nor was he respected among the country music establishment, because he refused to sign a deal with a major Nashville record label. He didn’t need to. He was making up to $8 on every one of his self-produced albums that he sold. The Nashville labels were offering him only a standard contract, in which they would receive almost all of his album’s proceeds. “I was going to lose money if I signed with Nashville,” he said.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2001 that he signed a major-label deal. Republic Records, which happened to be based in New York, agreed to give Green more money up front (specific terms have not been disclosed). He also signed on with the William Morris Agency to get national bookings, and he found a hotshot Nashville publicist to get him media attention. He is now booked to appear on the Late Show With David Letterman in July, he has received some favorable reviews in national magazines (“Ten-gallon hats off,” declared People), and even several Texas music critics have had to declare that his music is improving. And they can’t say his lyrics are too Texified. His newest single, “Three Days,” a love song written for Kori, has no reference to Texas at all. “It makes me cry almost every time I hear it,” said my stepdaughter, Hailey. “He defines for me what true love is all about.”
The jury is still out on Green’s future, of course. “Thirty years ago, who could have imagined that some guy named Waylon Jennings was going to knock Barbara Mandrell out of her number one slot?” said Country Music Television’s Brian Philips. “We’re due for a new movement to sweep through and turn everything upside down again. This time, that movement might very well be led by Pat Green.”
Then again, it might not—which Green told me was just fine with him. “If I spend the rest of my life playing Texas dance halls, that’s fine with me,” he said. And despite his national bookings, Green was adamant about continuing to play the smaller honky-tonks around Texas whenever he got the chance. “That’s where I will always feel most comfortable,” he said.
That’s an understatement. Not long ago I took Hailey and her boyfriend, Casey, up to see him play in front of nearly four hundred fans at a hole-in-the-wall country bar called the Groovy Mule in Denton. Afterward we went back to Green’s bus, where he put the sweat-stained baseball cap that he had worn during the performance on Hailey’s head.
“Oh, my God,” I thought, “Hailey’s going to cry.”
“Oh, my God,” Hailey said, “I’m going to cry.”
“Hey, it’s not like I’m the Beatles or anything,” Green said.
“Well,” said Hailey, a tear trickling down her cheek, “maybe you are to me.”
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