Texas country music legend Robert Earl Keen '78 joins TexAgs Live

Key notes from Robert Earl Keen interview

• My best friend in third grade was driving around, and we had a big Folgers can of Copenhagen spit. He took a sharp turn, and it spilled all over my pants. I don’t know why I thought this, but I said, “Where are you going to go to college?” He said, “I’m going to Texas A&M.” I said, “I think I’ll do that.”
   
• I have fond memories of Texas A&M. I had great classes and professors who have shaped the way I think now. Plus all the music. A&M is where I truly learned how to play music. I took this old guitar to A&M, my sister's guitar, and I strung it up. I got this book called the “10 Best Country Songs Ever,” and I learned nine of them. That is where I started playing. It was a hobby, but it took off from there. Once I learned the D chord, I wanted to play music all the time.
   
• I was surrounded by great storytellers all my life. My brother. My uncle graduated from here. Everyone else is T-sips. I really admired my uncle.
   
• The inspiration for the song "The Road Goes On Forever..." My wife and I moved from Nashville to Bandera. She worked at this nursing home. There was a young lady, Sheri, and she had an on-and-off boyfriend. Bandera is like a wild west town. I took the two of them and asked myself, “How far can you take this?” I’ve always had a passion for putting stories together. It just came naturally.
   
• Lyle Lovett lived about a block away from me. He was always riding his bike around. One day, he parked his bike and asked to play at the Basement Coffeehouse with us when we were younger. We hung out a lot. He was a journalism major, and I was an English major, which means I have a better vocabulary than him, but he is a better writer. We hung out over many summers.
   
• With “The Front Porch Song,” I was literally sitting on the front porch of 302 Church Street. I was thinking about similes and metaphors as to what sitting on the porch means. I was like, “Yeah, this is a funky song.” Lovett added some words to it. It really became a great piece to play.
   
• I grew up in Houston. The fact is that, Houston, I had no idea what a Chestnut or snow looked like. Some of my biggest memories are my brother's kid riding around in wagons, connected to lawn mowers and shooting BB guns.
   
• There were a few places on Northgate that were good to play at. Scags, Mr. Gatti’s, near the McDonald's, those were places you could play solo. As a band, though, we played Church Spaghetti Suppers, a little rodeo. At one point, I joined the Basement Coffeehouse. Back then, there were a lot more people to play music than places to play. Those places would be the mainstay of places to play music.
   
• It is a process. You set some aims and try to achieve them. I have played everything from a garage sale to the Kennedy Center. I like to count the music moments of my life. I played a show in New York City at the Bottom Line with John Phillips and John Stewart. Phillips wrote
  “California Dreamin'” & all the Mamas & the Papas songs. Stewart wrote songs for Fleetwood Mac. Phillips started playing a song called “San Francisco.” The guy who actually made that song was in the audience, and he came onto the stage and sang it with us. That is one of my great musical moments.
   
• I still have the sweatshirt from the Cotton Bowl against Notre Dame. That was one of the first things I did for the Aggies.
   
• Across from 302 Church Street was a Presbyterian Church. We’d stumble out there on Sunday Morning in our underwear and just start jamming. And then one day, one of the Sunday school teachers asked if she could bring her students to hear us perform. We would perform gospel songs, and yes, we wore pants for those.
   
• I still tour a lot. It is called my retirement. I found I really had no other purpose in life, and I kind of was just walking around, scratching my head, then someone asked me to perform, and I slowly started getting back into it. We did a large summer tour. We are going to do a Christmas tour, and we have stuff lined up in the spring.
   
• We would go to the A&M vs. Texas game every year. We would always be so close, but then something would go wrong. “The Aggie curse.” But now, I like what they are doing. I feel strong about them.