Robbie Fulks–Chicago’s answer to twang rebels such as Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett–can’t help himself. When he visits Nashville he just has to play “(Expletive) This Town,” in which he exacts verbal vengeance on the city that done him wrong.
More than delivering just another rant from another failed songwriter on Music Row–“can’t get noticed/can’t get found”–Fulks realizes the fun is in the descriptive subtleties. He names names–“I thought they’d struck bottom in the days of Ronnie Milsap”–and good-naturedly ridicules such Nashville traditions as the writer-in-the-round showcases for aspiring (and usually starving) talent. Invariably, Fulks delivers the song with a grin the size of Tennessee and with such enthusiasm that even the locals can’t help but be amused.
“Surprising to say, I don’t think I’ve suffered at all in Nashville for writing that song–though I don’t think Ronnie Milsap has heard it yet,” Fulks says. “If anything, it’s helped me down there, because they appreciate the details. There aren’t many places in the country where they even know what a `writer in the round’ is.”
Fulks, 35, had been knocking around the folk clubs of Chicago for a decade before moving to Nashville in 1993 to try his hand at songwriting for a few years. He aspired to crank out tunes for mainstream stars such as Toby Keith and Garth Brooks, but found his left-of-center style wasn’t appreciated.
“For somebody doing old-school country shuffles in a simple language–two-verse songs with a hint of the blues in the lyrics–it’s just a really hard place to make it pay off,” Fulks says. “Quality writers have figured out a way to exist down there, but it just didn’t happen for me.”
Instead Fulks found himself back in Chicago and hooked up with Bloodshot Records, a label that proudly bills itself as the antidote to Nashville streamlining, the home of “insurgent country.” Like the label itself and many roots performers in Chicago, Fulks had come to country music through the back door.
Growing up out East–born in Pennsylvania, reared in Virginia and North Carolina–he was introduced to bluegrass by his father, then gravitated to rock, particularly British new-wave artists such as Elvis Costello and American roots rockers NRBQ. While attending Columbia University in New York he began performing at the Greenwich Village folk clubs, then followed his then-girlfriend to Chicago in 1983. Fulks began developing his songs at solo acoustic gigs on the local folk circuit–Holstein’s, Orphans, Hobson’s Choice–while giving guitar lessons at the Old Town School of Folk Music.
His songwriting attracted some interest from record labels, but most had no clue how he would fit in commercially. “A couple of (talent scouts) told me when I was sending out rock demos that I should be a country singer, but I resisted that because I didn’t want to be a cultural carpetbagger, pretending to be something I wasn’t,” Fulks says.
But country influences were seeping into Fulks’ music, through his interest in more rock and mainstream-oriented songwriters such as Costello, k.d. lang, Emmylou Harris and Marshall Crenshaw, who were dipping into Hank Williams Sr.-era Nashville for inspiration. Then while playing guitar with the Special Consensus Bluegrass Band in the late ’80s, Fulks got a crash course in honky tonk from the group’s fiddle player, Al Murphy.
“He introduced me to the league of artists below Haggard, Jones and Merle Travis, such as the Wilburns, Hank Thompson and Hank Penny, hundreds of others,” he says. “I got the impression the era I was interested in, from the early 1940s to about 1960, was a bottomless well of musical activity. It got me by the throat and wouldn’t let go.”
What excited Fulks about this music was its immediacy. “There was an energy in the playing and the lyrics were about real-life topics,” he says. “It didn’t sound like it was recorded over a period of years and digitally edited and honed. It sounded like it was recorded quickly and performed live, and I like that quality in almost any sort of music.”
Fulks offered his own takes on that tradition on his Bloodshot albums, “Country Love Songs” (1996) and “South Mouth” (1997). Though delivered in a Southern drawl over two-stepping rhythms and twangy guitars, the discs blended chilling realism (“Cold Statesville Ground”) with sarcasm (“She Took a Lot of Pills (And Died)”) that was as hard-edged as any punk band’s.
But with “Let’s Kill Saturday Night” (Geffen), his recent major-label debut, Fulks cuts back on the country sound. It’s still there, but integrated gradually as Fulks works in his other influences, particularly the late ’70s British pub-rock of Costello and Rockpile. There is also an erotic, soul-tinged duet with Lucinda Williams on “Pretty Little Poison,” a brief nod to Fulks’ bluegrass days with a 50-second instrumental, and tunes such as “Bethelridge,” ” `God Isn’t Real” and “Night Accident” that plug into the timelessness of Appalachian mountain ballads and the stark imagery of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories.
“Let’s Kill Saturday Night” isn’t about genre. It’s about songs. And it affirms that Fulks has joined the ranks of the ’90s best songwriters.
“Ever since I started playing music I was always interested in more than one or two kinds of music, but more like five or six,” Fulks says. “I like to be able to absorb and communicate everything I can, within the limits of my voice. With Bloodshot, it was an opportunity I had to grab and work however I could, to get noticed. And once those records were out there, my next job was to go beyond that and to keep pushing outward.
“Now every night when I’m on the road playing these different kinds of songs with my band, inevitably somebody will show up and say, `Why are you doing this?’ Their attitude is like I’m their little advocate for alternative-country out in the real world, so why would I betray the cause? And my answer is, because I can. Because I want to. The idea is to keep making records with no stylistic strings attached.”
