1. How old were you when you knew your life was going to be art?  Very young.  I tried to sell my own drawings for a penny a piece at the end of our driveway when I was five years old.  I guess a lot of kids of my generation figured out at about the same age that they could make a little money by selling lemonade on the sidewalk; I discovered I couldn’t make any money at all selling art.  That was my first best discovery: I realized that anything that was produced to satisfy a market was anything but art; I also realized that if I was going to be committed to creating exactly what I wanted, I could never expect to make a living doing it.   

 

2. When did you start for real?  I started taking piano lessons in kindergarten.  I first performed on stage when I was five or six years old.  I was sixteen the first time I sang on stage.    

 

3. Were you single minded in this pursuit or did you train/educate for a "real" job?  Single-minded for a very long time.  I didn’t start to train for a “real” job till I was thirty-one.  I went back to school to finish my BA, then I went to grad school and earned three degrees -- an MFA, an MA, and a Ph.D. – in the hopes of parlaying my new credentials into gainful employment. 

 

4. School - Did it help, hinder, or immaterial?  When I was trying to decide whether I should go back to school, a good friend of mine told me that he’d never heard anyone say “I really regret having gotten a college education.”  I took both his advice and the proverbial plunge; but honestly, there are days when I regret my decision to quit making music for a dozen years to pursue the doctorate.  Academia in this country has been derailed.  While the reasons for its derailment are many, complex, and related, the results are pretty clear: (1) the traditional sources of funding are drying up, (2) universities are de-professionalizing  and impoverishing their professors while continuing to create a surplus of underemployed and unemployed Ph.D.s; (3) there are too many administrators, and they’re systematically hiring a managerial/administrative class to take over the governance of universities; (4) the new management then moves in corporate culture and corporate money; and ultimately, (5) the quality of education is destroyed and the students suffer.  It used to be that the intellectual dialogue was indiscriminate, not hegemonic.  Today’s professors must be very careful to include “trigger warnings” in their lectures.  Productive used to mean “he publishes”; now productive means “he gets grants.”  Tenure, which used to allow for professional development without the fear of being run out of academia on a rail for holding unpopular or unorthodox views, is quickly becoming a thing of the past.  This all adds up to one thing: the creation of a monolithic academic “culture” in which nepotism and censorship runs rampant.  Universities have become expensive “pay-to-play” diploma mills.  Furthermore, I’ve been caught between a rock and a hard place my entire “career.”  As a fifty-three-year-old white guy with a penchant for challenging so-called authority, I don’t necessarily fit the profile of the ideal college professor; I’ve been teaching at the university level for seventeen years now and I’m still employed as an adjunct.  If it comes down to having to choose between clinging to the rock or the hard place, I’ll choose the rock.  I don’t have to worry about trigger warnings while I cling to it.    

 

5. Who supported your decisions?  Anybody who’s ever seen me perform.

 

6. Do you have family?  And where are they?  Yes, I have family.  My Mom and Dad are in St. Louis along with five of my siblings and their children and grandchildren.  My other four siblings are scattered to the four American winds:  my brother Steve lives here in Austin; I have sisters who live with their families in Jacksonville, FL  and Puyallup, WA; and I have a brother who lives in Las Vegas with his wife and daughter.

 

7. What gigs stand out to you, looking back?  Performing on Austin City Limits with the LeRoi Brothers in the early 80s; opening for David Allen Coe in Ft. Worth to a crowd of his die-hard fans who expressed their desire for our set to end as quickly as possible by heaving beer bottles at the chicken-wire screen in front of the stage, when DAC came out to perform, he shamed the crowd for behaving badly and made them cheer for us anyway; playing on the roof top of the Hyatt Regency in Dallas in ’84 at the crack of dawn for Bill Kurtis and the CBS Morning News camera crew; any show in Scandinavia; playing “Viva Las Vegas” with James Burton at the Continental Club; and Churchwood’s most recent show at the ABGB in Austin.     

 

8. Who did you like performing with?  My brother Steve, Mike Buck, Evan Johns, Pat Collins, Bill Anderson, Jackie Newhouse, Billysteve Korpi, Adam Kahan, Julien Peterson, Eve Monsees, James Burton, Casper Rawls, Mark Younger-Smith, Stan Moore, Michael Maye, Tim Swingle – I could go on.   

 

9. What do you see as your best work?  Everything Churchwood has done to date.

 

10. Has your outlook on fame changed since you've achieved it?  I’m not famous.

 

11. Has notoriety changed you?  Not a lick, though I wouldn’t say I enjoy any notoriety; if I do, it’s more notorious than notable.

 

12. Do you feel satisfied with yourself?  Absolutely, but I’ll never stop reaching for more.

 

13. How do you want to be remembered?  As an authentic soul.

 

14. What are you currently working on? Churchwood’s fourth record and the LeRoi's first album in fifteen years.

 

15. Is it as easy as it looks?  It is if you don’t look down.

 

16. Is it fun?  Fun is second only to necessary. 

 

18. What would you say to wannabee performers?  Throw your oars overboard and let the wind take you where it will.

 

19. Do you have pets, what kind?  I do not, but I love to sit on my porch and watch the resident roadrunners hunt.

 

20. What's more important - Talent or hard work?  Work, of course.  You can have all the talent in the world, but if you’re incapable or unwilling to produce a body of work, you may as well hang up your guns.

 

21 Xtra. What is your take on MP3 downloads?  They’re here to stay for the foreseeable future, so what’s the point in complaining about them?  Ideally, I’d like fans of any music to hear it as it was intended: as collections with stories to tell.  A lot of work goes in to making a record: the writing, the recording, the cover art, etc.  These are all disparate dots that need connecting in order to be truly appreciated.  I think that any real fan, anybody interested in getting the whole story, would not only honor the work but would make an effort to experience it as the artists anticipated.  I could be wrong, but most readers wouldn’t think of picking up a book and reading chapters at random; instead, you honor the story the way the writer put it together.  That said, poets write books that are frequently read haphazardly and with no regard for arrangement.  A lot of readers are of the opinion that a collection of poetry is a random collection, that there is no shape that should be regarded.  That’s just plain wrong.  Albums suffer the same fate.  Music fans are ultimately cherry-pickers—the way music is packaged and marketed encourages cherry-picking: we like to hear what we want when we want to hear it.  In a way, this is what makes music so powerful—people think of their favorites as their own personal theme songs or as meaningful selections from the soundtracks of their lives.  That’s fine, and no artist wants to discourage that kind of connection with his fans, but the fact of the matter is that many records have a bigger picture, a real story to tell that can only be experienced by listening to all the songs in order.  So to answer your question, MP3 downloads encourage cherry-picking at the expense of engaging with writers and musicians in an artistic setting.  In the end, who cares?  One free download, like one free listen on the radio, can lead to life-long fandom—how can that be a bad thing?