So what do you do if you live in Austin, having just made the four-hour drive home from an assignment in Dallas, barreling down I-35 in the dark of night, wired on an overabundance of caffeine from the dozen or so Starbucks along the route, and have consequently arrived home at 11 p.m. with neither the inclination nor the ability to go to sleep? You ask yourself what day of the week it is.

If it’s Wednesday, you’re in luck. Because it means that James McMurtry is in residence at the Continental Club, doing his weekly, standing midnight show. Unload the cases of gear from the truck (but grab an 85 1.2* just for the hell of it–it’s dark in there), and then head back downtown. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just hit 40, feel like an old fart, and haven’t seen the other side of midnight since, well, the last time you saw McMurtry in the red-curtained sardine can on South Congress Avenue a couple of months ago. This time there’s plenty of room for everyone, with the mix of a hundred or so people (a light crowd for once, but so much the better) as eclectic as the music you’re about to hear.

It’s not exactly country, it’s not exactly roots-rock, it’s not specifically Americana or explicitly Texan or anything. But at the same time, it’s all of the above. It’s fun, yet unassuming. It’s serious, and it’s more than a little intellectual, played by a master wordsmith** who’s not too shabby with that guitar in his hands, either. Fork over eight bucks for the cover, five more for a Shiner Bock (and that’s only with a generous tip), and settle in for a two-hour set ranging from his hard-driving, meth-cooking, gun-toting, sub-prime lending staple “Choctaw Bingo” (which was at one point deconstructed to within an inch of its life by Ron Rosenbaum in Slate, with the recommendation that it should be our new national anthem) to an almost tear-jerking solo rendition of “Ruby and Carlos.” It’s as spontaneous as the game-time decision that got you here in the first place, with set-lists that change up from week to week and even the supporting cast shifting around (last time it was two over-served young(ish) ladies ad-libbing hip-grinding roles of the second-cousins in “Choctaw Bingo;” this time Harmony Kelly on the bass was an unexpected, fantastic addition). But the vibe is still there, and that never goes away. It’s the kind of thing, in the kind of place, with the kind of guy, that makes Austin what it is.

*That’s photo-geek speak for a Canon 85mm f1.2L lens which, coupled with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, was used to make all of the images above.

**Yes, it runs in the family. Larry is his father.

After years of playing with everyone who’s anyone (currently as a long-time member of the Robert Earl Keen band), he’s put together a collection his own original stuff. I told him that when I finally saw my pictures on the record cover I had a feeling in my stomach that recalled the way I felt when I got my first Sports Illustrated cover a decade ago. I’m that proud to be associated with the man and his work.

My fellow Austinites can pick up a copy at Waterloo Records; it’s also available on iTunes and on Marty’s website.

For the curious among you, here’s my favorite track–a piece called “If You Know What I Was Thinking,” which he describes as a “tribute to Roy Orbison, but without lyrics.” The lack of words is okay, though–the steel does all the talking, which is just fine with me.

I do advise caution, however. The first time I listened to it, it got stuck in my head. And it’s still there after a week.

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.

Yeah, 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.