Somewhere between a sliced beef sandwich and another mouthful of Iron Works beans, Roy Heinrich has a
revelation. It’s not quite as shocking as the Seattle Supersonics’ 107-86
skunking of the previously do-no-wrong Chicago Bulls the night before, but
considering Heinrich’s line of work, it’s as insightful as all get-out.
“It ain’t brain surgery,” Heinrich says of his chosen vocation, country
music. (True to form, Heinrich pays the bills daylightin’ as a truck-drivin’
man.) “It’s supposed to be fun. It may not work every time, but nobody gets
hurt, nobody dies.”
True, an evening at the Broken Spoke is no SWAT team ridealong, and
country-music related deaths are way down since line dancing eclipsed longneck
tossing as the preferred form of honky-tonk horseplay. Still, the ins and outs
of heartaches and barstools are more challenging than, say, flipping patties at
Burger World. And Heinrich, a man whose extended family is so large Miller Lite
sponsors his family reunions, has been doing it since he was a tyke
bouncing around his daddy’s 1951 Ford pickup (specifically, “a three-quarter
ton with a granny four-speed”). But while most Texas pickers break in their
chaps (and chops) in a sawdust-and-chicken-wire way reminiscent of Fort Worth’s
famous old Jacksboro Highway, Heinrich chose a more circuitous path to his
roots; one that was more Johnny Rotten and Johnny Thunders than Johnny Gimble
or Johnny Bush.
“I had the first punk rock band in Houston,” says Heinrich. “I really liked
the idea of punk rock when it came out. [The band] was called Street Rage, and
all my friends thought I had lost my mind completely, and maybe I had, or maybe
I found it; I don’t know.”
One thing Heinrich did find during his stint in Street Rage were the keys to
the songwriting cabinet, though he’ll be the first to admit his initial output
wasn’t exactly Gershwinian in its polish. “That was really the first time I
really tried seriously writing songs,” he says. “We tended to more construct
songs with each other. It wasn’t like `Hey, I’ve got this great idea for a
song,’ it was like `Hey, man, listen to this riff.’ “
Heinrich spent several years in rock & roll and R&B cover bands; as a
child of the Sixties, he wasn’t as quick to embrace what he called his
“parents’ music.” Nevertheless, he had it in him, even if he didn’t know it
until it literally poured out of him. “When I started writing country songs, I
actually didn’t intend to sit down and write a country song,” he says. “But I
wrote a song and I went, `Duh, this is country.'”
After this revelation, Heinrich knew he had the country in him, but how to
reconcile it with his rock & roll sensibilities? After all, it’s a long,
long way from a ’51 Ford pickup with AM radio and a granny four-speed to a ’73
GTO with dual Edelbrock intakes and Skynyrd in the 8-track. Heinrich started
off as country when country wasn’t cool, then he was cool when cool wasn’t
country, but now he wanted to be both. And that took a little help from
Guitars, Cadillacs, etc., etc.
“I hate to admit this, but what really reconciled being hip and being
hillbilly for me was Dwight Yoakam’s first album,” says Heinrich. “Something
went `Clong!’ and I went `Okay. Now I get it. I can be what I should be but I
don’t have to worry about not being cool, you know, it can all work.’ About a
year after that, I went and saw Jimmie Dale Gilmore at Fitzgerald’s in Houston,
promoting his first HighTone record, and I went, `Okay, this makes even more
sense,’ and I went home and wrote four or five songs, and have kind of been off
and running ever since.”
Heinrich takes a simple, low-key approach to his songwriting, rarely veering
off the path of busted personal relationships drowned in Lone Star and neon.
The ties that bind, and how they get broken, are Heinrich’s stock and trade,
whether his Johnny Cash basso is crooning about his solid German Central Texas
clan in “Fayette County” (Heinrich insists the true musical talents in his
family reside in his accordion-squeezin’, polka-pumpin’ nieces and nephews) or,
well, honky-tonk heartaches in “Honky Tonk Heartache.” And whether it’s his
originals or something off his carefully chosen slate of covers, Heinrich’s
appreciation of tradition is self-evident in his music.
“I always enjoyed finding good material as much as I did writing it, or
rearranging something to fit the genre,” he says. “I still do that. I have
covers that I do now, classics that I’ll never give up. I will always love
`Crazy Arms;’ anything by Hank Williams — I usually do `Cheatin’ Heart,’ which
is the most obvious thing you could possibly do but, I don’t care; `I’m So
Lonesome I Could Cry;’ I’ve got a version of `Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone’
that I really like; I love `Ring of Fire’ by Johnny Cash. I could sit here
through dessert.”
Just like every cattle drive used to pass through Fort Worth on the Chisholm
Trail, every country song — if, indeed it’s a real country song — must pass
through Montgomery, Alabama, onetime home of a certain legend named Hank.
That’s right, just Hank. “There’s Hank Thompson and Hank Snow, but there’s only
one Hank,” Heinrich says. The same week he had his head-smacking songwriting
epiphany, he “wrote two or three more like it and went, `Oh. Okay. This is how
Hank Williams puts a song together.’ Every song I write, I just think of Hank
Williams’ format, not that I’m trying to rewrite his songs, but you know,
they’re pretty simple — two or three chords, verse and a chorus, no bridges. I
think I’ve got two songs that have a bridge in them.”
Heinrich’s songs may not be Bach fugues, and no, they’re not brain surgery
either, but they work. They’re simple, they’re honest, and they sound really
good after a couple of longnecks. Plus, they’re not Miles Davis or John
Zorn-inspired chop-busters — a fact that comes in handy, because Heinrich
chooses not to employ a regular band, relying instead on a revolving-door pool
of country music talent that comes and goes like the cast of a daytime soap
opera. Still, Heinrich says, he prefers it to the more normal ratio of one guy,
one instrument.
“It drives me nuts,” Heinrich says. “All of a sudden you can’t take a gig
because the drummer has to go fishing with his brother-in-law, or the bass
player has to build a chicken coop for his grandpa. So I got four or five
drummers, four or five bass players, four or five lead players, and they’ve all
been playing with me long enough they all know my stuff. It’s really fun, when
a group of `em that haven’t played together with me for a while will get
together and it just sparks… I got real used to doing that in L.A. It’s about
multiplied by 10.”
Heinrich learned more than that during his tenure as a session man in the City
of Angels. He got used to the harsh realities of the music-business machine,
which, if Hank Williams existed today, would probably slap a black hat on him,
make him grow a mustache, and pose him in front of a black Dodge Dakota pickup
as the next Tim McGraw.
“Somebody’d go, `Hey, here’s a name and a number, man,’ Heinrich says. “`You
gotta get in touch with this guy. He’s looking for country singer-songwriters.’
I’d call him up, send him a tape, and they’d go, `Really we’re looking for
another Garth Brooks.’ There didn’t seem to be a lot of vision.”
So he moved back to Texas, back to his roots, back to what he knew and did
best. And so far, as one of Heinrich’s German relatives might say in their
singular Central Texas dialect (which Heinrich affectionately dubs “plow
Deutsch,” due to their heritage and agrarian livelihoods), alles gut.
He’s got a solid new record out on Stockade records, Listen to Your
Heart, featuring guest appearances by some of High Noon, some of the
Derailers, Wayne “the Train’s” steel player Chris Miller, and Heinrich’s
girlfriend, Austin fiddler/singer Mandy Mercier. All of this puts him right in
the middle of Austin’s current country resurgence, spearheaded of course by
Junior Brown, but also featuring everyone from throwbacks Wayne “the Train”,
Don Walser, and the Derailers to Heinrich and his fellow working-class
honky-tonk heroes Charlie Burton, Dale Watson, and Cornell Hurd.
Heinrich thinks this sudden interest in Texas-based country music is all well
and good, but he isn’t losing any sleep over where he’ll be in five years,
pretty much because he already knows. Hey! It ain’t brain surgery, man.
“Country has always ebbed and flowed, you know,” he says. “If there’s a big
wave going on, and I happen to be on the wave, great. I’m gonna keep doing it
whether there’s a resurgence or not until I get tired of it, which probably
ain’t gonna happen.” n
This article appears in June 21 • 1996 and June 21 • 1996 (Cover).