Robert Earl Keen and the Robert Earl Keen Band, Gruene Hall, New Braunfels, Texas, February 2008.

I guess the picture to the left is what started the ball rolling, so to speak. It was shot at Gruene Hall, a rickety, crumbling, one-of-a-kind dance hall in the truest Texan sense of the term, with a little point-and-shoot camera one February night as some friends and I took in a Robert Earl Keen show. It’s probably not much to look at but for some reason I recall getting home very late that night and immediately wanting to download this picture and see it on the screen. And I remember getting up the next morning, wanting to do nothing more than get it processed in the computer, working painstakingly to bring whatever I could out of this crappy, high-speed digital file to try and reflect the essence of the performance that I had seen the night before. For the first time in a long time, I felt like a kid developing Tri-X in the high school yearbook darkroom again–I thought I had…something! I knew it! And I couldn’t wait to see what it was. As I looked at the image the next morning, the portrait guy in me promised myself that some day, somehow, I was going to find a way to make a portrait of someone in this place.

Fast forward six months or so. Glossy magazine, an offshoot of the Austin American-Statesman, is doing a feature story on Texas musicians, one of whom is Robert Earl Keen. Would I be interested in shooting him, and did I have any ideas on how and where to shoot it? That picture, that show, that night popped into my head again. Did I ever.

Robert Earl Keen, New Braunfels, Texas, July 2008

A brief disclaimer: I really enjoy, and appreciate, Robert Earl Keen’s music. It’s raw, it’s honest, it’s funny, and it’s deep. It’s It’s also bluesy, folksy and a little bit country, which means that it’s an acquired taste, especially for a born-and-bred New Yorker and child of the ’80s. But I don’t tell you that to try and convert or convince you; I tell you that to give you a little bit of my perspective on the shoot.

You see, I spend a good amount of time working for Sports Illustrated and Golf Digest. Which is to say that I spend a good deal of my photographic life shooting pictures of extremely talented people who can do other-worldly things with the gifts that have been bestowed on them–people who awe us on television with their abilities, and whom we in turn lionize (and sometimes, canonize) in our newspapers’ sports pages and the glossy spreads of our magazines’ feature wells. I must confess, however, that for someone who documents these people as they work and gets to meet and work with them in person, this is a bit of a letdown because, to be honest with you, a good many of them turn out to be assholes who couldn’t care less.

You see, disillusionment is pretty much included in my job description. And so it was with great trepidation that I waited in Gruene Hall one hot morning in July, having positioned the cameras, loaded film backs, and set the lights. I’d done this too many times and met too many people whose talent I genuinely admired, who I was truly looking forward to meeting, and who disgusted me in the end with their arrogance and attitude. I was prepared for the worst. Call me jaded, but I’ve just found that it’s the best way to ease any disappointment.

What a pleasant turn of events it was, then, to discover that the man who is so easygoing on stage, who spins yarns about his old college landlord and tells corny jokes and forgets lyrics as he finger-picks his way through his old, folksy classics, and laughs and jokes and jams with his band as they meander through a set-list that is written half an hour before each show and changes by the minute was…exactly like I imagined, and hoped, he would be. Easygoing. Serious. Cooperative. Thoughtful. Engaging.

In a word: Genuine. And that’s all you really need to know.

The folks at Smitty’s were incredibly accommodating, giving us access to every part of the building, the interior of which is coated with a deep bronze patina brought on by 70 years of smoking meat inside the building, which started as a general store and butcher shop with a barbecue pit in the back. Available light doesn’t get much better than this, and I soon realized that cracking out the strobes I had brought with me would have been a sin on the magnitude of putting sauce on Smitty’s signature brisket (you don’t need it, trust me)–or, for that matter, using a fork to eat it. Smitty’s isn’t big on entertainment, though; they prefer to keep things simple. So it was fitting that Marty brought his Dobro along, picking and sliding effortlessly through improvised bluegrass licks, entertaining the locals during their lunch hour with the soft acoustic twang of the resonator as I let the light do its own thing and shot away.