About Me
Forget the labels... "Insurgent," "Retro," "Alternative," ... and focus
instead on the music. Some might try to copy old music, but ROBBIE
FULKS knows it, loves it, and brings its spirit, its humor, and its
otherworldliness to his own work. He's the man who famously gave Nashville the
middle-finger salute-in-song and then devoted an entire album to rare
and obscure country songs that almost no one in latter-day Nashville had
even heard. And while most current country music is calculated to form
an inoffensive backdrop to the suburban shopping experience, Robbie
Fulks writes songs that make you think and feel and quite often laugh
outloud. And now, in response to requests from "the two fans who follow me
around" (and a bunch of others who come up after the shows and write
into robbiefulks.com) he has finally produced a live double CD,
Revenge! And, of course, because it's by Robbie Fulks, it's a live CD
unlike any other live CD.Retailing at $15.99, Revenge! is two CDs for the price of one.
Half of the two CDs are new songs, including one that is guaranteed to
become a fan favorite, "We're on the Road." The double CD started off
as a single disc showcasing Robbie with an acoustic group of friends
(recorded in his adopted hometown, Chicago, last November) and his
hard-rocking road band (recorded in Champaign, Illinois last September).
Several track permutations later, it became clear that the two sets belonged
on separate CDs. "After that," says Robbie, "it was just a mental game
of how to get it so it felt right." The eclecticism that has always
been Robbie Fulks' hallmark is well in evidence. There's Cher's 1998
single "Believe," followed by "In Bristol Town One Bright Day" that sounds
as if it was written about three hundred years ago, but was actually
written by Robbie not so long ago. And then there's a deliciously obscure
hillbilly song, "I Want to Be Mama'd" by the very late, very weird
Jimmy Logsdon. And we're not yet halfway through the CD! Now add some jazz,
bluegrass, brilliantly incisive songwriting, and a guest appearance by
Kelly Hogan.Born in York, Pennsylvania, on March 25, 1963, Fulks' father was an
academic, and the family moved to Mount Joy, and Mountville, Pennsylvania;
Waynesboro and Charlottesville, Virginia; Wake Forest, and Creedmoor,
North Carolina. "My dad was kind of a pointy-headed '60s bluegrass fan,
and he was into folk music, too," Fulks says. "I think the necessary
angle for him to get into bluegrass was for it to have some kind of
educational overtone to it." Robbie picked up Aunt Stella's banjo when he
was seven and Aunt Mildred's fiddle a few years later, but by age eleven,
he'd focused on the guitar. He was awarded a scholarship to New York's
Columbia University, but spent more time hanging out in the Village. In
1983, with failing grades and a child on the way, he moved to Chicago,
and did whatever he had to do to pay the rent. Meanwhile, he immersed
himself in the Old Town folk scene. In 1987, he joined a bluegrass band,
Special Consensus, touring with them until 1990. "I was trying to make
a living from music and that left me half a dozen things I could do,"
he said. "Being a bluegrass guitarist was one of them. It allowed me to
learn some chops and make money for a couple of years, [but] it
eventually dawned on me that the only way I was going to be able to really
satisfy myself was just to go out under my own name and write songs."Robbie led his own Trailer Trash Revue at Chicago's Déjà Vu bar.
Newly-formed Chicago label, Bloodshot Records, recorded the Sundowners
playing one of his songs, "Cigarette State," on a 1994 compilation. Two
years later, the label gave into Robbie's demand for three thousand
dollars, and released his debut LP, Country Love Songs. This was an
album that friends handed on to friends, insisting that they must check
it out. In the profusion of new artists, new bands, and new labels, and
in the confusion of changing technologies, it was clear that a major
new talent had arrived.Robbie's second album, South Mouth, appeared in 1997. One of
the songs was a sour valentine to the Nashville way of doing things.
Since 1993, he'd been under contract to a major country music publisher,
trying hard to write something Nashville might like, and he enshrined
the experience in "F**k this Town." Nashville, he concluded, wanted songs
"to bolster people's upbeat fantasies about themselves and to ply them
with pious platitudes about their meager existences." He tried, but he
couldn't do it, so he left. The major label flirtation left an equally
sour taste. He was courted and signed by Geffen Records, and his 1998
Geffen LP, Let's Kill Saturday Night, was recorded in Nashville
with a sizable budget and big name guests, but, as Robbie said later,
"The plane got to the end of the runway, but wouldn't take off." The
label gave him back his contract, and he returned to Bloodshot Records for
the vault-emptying Very Best Of in 1999.There were two albums in 2001: a tribute to country music's lost,
forgotten, and downright bizarre anti-heroes, 13 Hillbilly Giants,
and an adventurous song cycle, Couples in Trouble. "I don't
like songwriters who keep making the same record over and over and so I
try not to be one of those myself," he said at the time. In 2004, he
produced a tribute to the sadly neglected Johnny Paycheck, Touch My
Heart. An astonishing array of performers from Mavis Staples to
Paycheck's former substance-abuse buddy, George Jones, signed on, and the
album made several of the year's best-of's. Another tribute album, this
one to Michael Jackson, still sits on the shelf. In January, 2005,
Robbie signed with Yep Roc Records, and his first album for the Chapel
Hill, North Carolina-based label, Georgia Hard, came out in May
that year. Since then he has been on the road, and, most recently, he and
Danny Barnes have scored a 1926 movie, Harry Langdon's Tramp,
Tramp, Tramp.
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