Charlie Robison
Step Right Up (Lucky Dog/Columbia)
The right man for the job? Sony’s Nashville brass certainly hope so, because their balance sheets have lately been about as appetizing as a platter of day-old quesadillas. Funny how it’s always Texans (Willie, George Strait) who come to the rescue when Music City’s fortunes go in the toilet. Bandera cowpuncher Charlie Robison’s second release for the Japanese multinational would follow in that hallowed tradition but for one minor detail — it ain’t all that country. It is Texan as an armadillo belt buckle, however, a glorious mishmash of rock & roll, honky-tonk, R&B, and ethnic sounds doomed to the country ghetto of your local record store racks thanks to Robison’s unmistakable Hill Country drawl. Yes, this catchy collection starring alien abductees, flirtatious clergymen, and small-town scamps could only come from one place, and it’s not where the used-to-be Oilers play. Opener “Right Man for the Job,” NRBQ cover “I Want You Bad,” and “Sweet Inspiration” all owe at least a small roadhouse debt to Delbert McClinton, while “The Preacher” and “Desperate Times” are what English majors would dub character studies à la Robert Earl Keen, and “It Comes to Me Naturally” is straight San Antone Tex-Mex with a percolating Vox organ chaser. Neophytes might be fooled by the John Michael Montgomery-esque sentiment of “Tonight” or Dixie Chick Natalie Maines’ appearance on “The Wedding Song” into thinking Step Right Up more of the same young country radio fodder, but then again, Trace Adkins never plumbed the depths of loveless marriages in such painstaking detail, now did he? Laying to rest all doubts, “John O’Reilly” comes busting out of the chute like the Pogues’ Shane MacGowan on a bender at the rodeo. Texas is most assuredly still the Ireland of America, and God bless him, Robison cordially invites all those ham-fed (and ham-fisted) Music Row flunkies to step right up and kiss our sunburnt, Pearl-swilling, brisket-slurping, Skoal-chawing, Spurs-cheering, prison-breaking Lone Star asses.
This article appears in May 25 • 2001.