Larry McMurtry casts a long shadow. The author and screenwriter is at least partially responsible for Terms of Endearment, Brokeback Mountain, Lonesome Dove, Horseman, Pass By and The Last Picture Show, just to name a few. In 1980, he moved from Virginia back to Texas with his 18-year-old son James in tow.
“My father moved back to Texas in 1980 because he had a good year screenwriting and the Virginia state income tax got him pretty good,” said the junior McMurtry. “He moved back to Texas to get somewhere there wasn’t a state income tax. I went to school in Arizona at about that time; when I finally dropped out and left, I lived in North Texas for a winter. I had a friend open a bar in San Antonio, so I went down there and worked for him for a while before I ended up in Austin because my fiancé at the time was in grad school here. I had a record deal and I needed a band.”
James’s accidental arrival in the Texas state capital and home to SXSW worked well, and the young musician and songwriter began to create his own artistic legacy. He was centrally located, he was surrounded by talented musicians and his band managed to find a regular gig in town to help keep food on the table.
“[Austin] is almost half the distance between the coasts,” McMurtry said. “You can go out for three or four weeks, do a good job and come home and take a week off or so. Then you go up to the Midwest for a few weeks. You can do the short hops and keep your life together back home, whereas if you live on either coast, you have to stay out a lot to make it economical.”
Since 2002, McMurtry and his band have been playing at the legendary Continental Club each Wednesday night that they’re home. A bar that has been in its neighborhood for half a century, McMurtry describes the place as one that “used to be crack houses and are now boutique motels.”
When he took the gig, for a moment, his band was known as the Heartless Bastards — a name they shared with an up-and-coming blues rock band from Ohio.
“We both took the name at about the same time and for a while, we benefited from mutual confusion,” he joked. “They got a lot bigger than us, and we dropped the name. We don’t have the same members that we had back then.”
As the neighborhood has improved, so has its appeal to tourists, he explains. And as such, his band has been able to reach new audiences.
“People come there from all over the world just to stay there and go to the Continental Club just to see who’s there,” he said. “They might not have heard of me, but they go to the club just because it’s been there since the ‘50s and they’ve heard of it. So it helps expand the audience a little bit.”
Fortunate tourists aren’t the only new crowds beginning to take notice of McMurtry’s songwriting. His song “We Can’t Make it Here” was used by Bernie Sanders for his 2006 Vermont senate campaign. And after nearly 40 years and 12 records, 2015’s Complicated Game was listed atop Rolling Stone Country’s list of “30 Great Country Albums of 2015 You Probably Didn’t Hear,” where the offshoot of the nation’s most popular music magazine declared, “It’s a crime against the arts that McMurtry isn’t more widely recognized as the superior songwriter that he is – of, for that matter, widely known at all… it’s probably the most brilliant release of 2015.”
McMurtry didn’t really slow down to take notice.
“I have no idea,” he responds when asked if the distinction boosted sales or attracted new listeners. “There was also the regular Rolling Stone profile earlier in the year. I wasn’t on the road when the Rolling Stone Country list came out, so I can’t gauge it.”
It’s a list that includes country in its name, but lists McMurtry among many artists that often appear in an Americana format. There are peers like Dwight Yoakam on there, but there are also younger guys like Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors, Andrew Combs, John Moreland and The Lone Bellow.
“Americana is a radio format for people they can’t find to fit anywhere else,” he said. “I don’t know that it’s a definable genre. One of the guys they call Americana that I really like is [Alabama native] Jason Isbell. I think Jason Isbell and John Fullbright are doing great things right now.”
James McMurtry comes to the WorkPlay Theater on Saturday, September 12. The show begins at 8 p.m., and Tim Easton opens. Tickets are $15. For more information, visit workplay.com.