XL Cover Story: Calvin Russell, in spite of it all

With his 10th album just out, the Austin songwriter is a world away from his days behind bars in Huntsville and Mexico

By Michael Corcoran | Photos by Sung Park
April 21, 2005

 Video: Calvin Russell

Calvin Russell recently released 'In Spite of It All,' his 10th studio album.

1989 started off bad for Calvin Russell, who lost his father in a tractor accident and songwriting running buddy Blaze Foley to a bullet early in the year. But a few calendar flips later, the Austin musician received a call out of the blue that changed his career, or rather created a career for a singer who'd be lucky to draw 20 people to the Austin Outhouse at the time.

"You have a heet," announced Frenchman Patrick Mathe, who owned Paris label New Rose.

A demo tape Russell gave to Mathe at a party in Austin four months earlier had been released overseas as "A Crack In Time." Critics were falling all over each other comparing the gritty poet/rocker to everyone from Tom Waits and Creedence Clearwater Revival to Bob Dylan. The public, intrigued by the lines of hard living in the face under a hobo hat, snapped up nearly 100,000 copies of the album in the first year. Then, Russell was shown performing on a commercial for Swiss Oil during the 1994 World Cup and he couldn't walk around Paris or Amsterdam or Berlin without attracting a crowd.

"They really loved the hat," Russell says with a laugh. "That's how they knew it was me." A couple years earlier, Russell had been given a felt cowboy hat by a drunken patron at some dive, but because he didn't want to hear Merle Haggard requests all night, Russell cut around the brim to create the cartoony porkpie that would define his image as a trouble-tossed, yet tender troubadour.

It's a rep that comes with a rap sheet.

Russell has done two stints in the Huntsville prison -- for forgery and marijuana possession -- and spent much of his European heyday sweating a 1995 conviction for possession of cocaine back home; he eventually received eight years probation. Russell says he also spent eight months in a Nuevo Laredo prison in the mid-'70s after being caught smoking a joint with his brother in Boys Town.

His legal troubles are behind him, he says from one of his two trailers on 14 acres of land about 10 miles east of Austin. Today, the 56-year-old Russell, who just released his 10th studio album "In Spite Of It All" (German label SPV), which opens with a scorching version of Foley's "Oval Room," is as far away from his past as a person could be without finding religion. Russell lives in blissful solitude with a gorgeous 29-year-old Swiss wife and five dogs, financially secure and artistically appreciated. He talks about the past with the vigorous presentation of someone who sees where he's been as the price to be where he is.

"Prison in Mexico was actually easier than Huntsville," he says. "The first day (at La Loma federal prison in Nuevo Laredo), me and my brother were surrounded by the other inmates and they were pointing at my boots. I thought, 'Now we gotta fight all these guys for a pair of damn cowboy boots,' but that's what you gotta do in the joint." One of the prisoners pantomimed sticking a needle in his arm, then pointed to the boots. "He was saying we could trade those boots for some heroin and I thought, 'Well, that's cool. I've never done smack before and that sure beats getting your (rear end) kicked." The inmates tied the boots to a rope, gave it a tug and the boots went up through a hole in the ceiling. About an hour later, the rope came back down with a packet of heroin in a tin bowl.

Russell says an adage passed down from his great-grandmother, a Comanche Indian he says lived to be 106, best sums up his life. "She told me that everyone had two dogs inside them fighting. There was the good dog, the loving dog and there was the evil, violent dog. The one that won was the one you fed."

Car wheels on a gravel road

Calvin Russell lives on 14 acres of land about 10 miles east of Austin with his wife and five dogs, including Elvis.

It's been a life of hard luck and good times. Russell's father was a short order cook at the Sho' Nuff Cafe on South Lamar Boulevard. His mother was the waitress. They each had one child from previous marriages and had seven more kids together, though the first three died in infancy from congenital heart problems. Calvin was the fourth.

"We were always moving around, always about to get evicted," Russell says. "One night when I was 12, my daddy woke me up in the middle of the night and the car was all packed up. We drove all night." The "road trip" would last nearly a year and take the family, who survived doing odd jobs and migrant labor, as far as Alaska. "It was rough, but at the time we'd been living on a dead-end gravel street next to Pete Pistol's Wrecking Yard, so hitting the highway wasn't such a bad deal."

When the family returned to Austin, Calvert Kosler (his real name) was kept back three times at McCallum High School, then kicked out of school for good when he showed up at the senior picnic, six-pack in hand. "I was technically a 10th-grader, but I wanted to party with the kids I came in with," he explains.

The year was 1966 and Austin was becoming a hippie haven for longhairs tired of getting beaten up in less liberal locales. "Austin in the '60s was dirty, nasty, hip and dangerous all at the same time," says Russell, who made his living selling LSD, which was legal until October 1966. Russell's drug connection was a successful car dealer in San Antonio who had "turned on, tuned in and dropped out" of the straight life, converting his mansion into a counterculture flophouse.

Another benefactor to the peace and love generation was a wealthy, middle-aged West Austin woman who'd inherited a fortune after her husband's death and used the money to bankroll recording projects and feed and house a commune on her property. "One day we saw police looking at the back of the house with binoculars and that's when she said, 'Let's move to Mexico.' "

She bought a 60-passenger yellow school bus, ripped out most of the seats, put in a Lear Jet stereo system and rolled south on Interstate 35 with a group of kids in sleeping bags inside. The bus was stopped at the border, however. "They said something or other wasn't in order with the bus," Russell says, "but they also said we had to get haircuts." While the bus stayed on the U.S. side, Russell and his friends walked over to the Mexican side and met a pot dealer who sold them Mexican weed for $3 a kilo (2.2 pounds). Russell brought the marijuana back to Austin where he sold it for $10 an ounce in Prince Albert cans. In 1968, high on LSD, Russell used a credit card he says someone had given him to get a room at the Chariot Inn. When he signed the name on the card, he was guilty of forgery and ended up serving 15 months at Huntsville.

"I didn't think I was going to make it," Russell says of his stint at hard labor. "I had blisters on my hands, blisters on my neck from the hot sun. The guards were a sorry, sadistic bunch and they'd look for any excuse to whale on you."

It was during his first time in Huntsville, when Russell would pass the time making up jailhouse rhymes, that he started thinking he might have some talent as a songwriter. He'd played guitar in various teen bands, but didn't write songs. "I was just following what Shotgun McAdams, a black guy who got locked up for robbing Safeways with a shotgun, had been doing with his rhymes. That guy was a rap genius long before his time."

When Russell got out, he started frequenting Spellman's on West Fifth Street and fell in with a hard-livin' songwriting crowd that included Foley, Jubal Clark and Rich Minus. But hearing Townes Van Zandt for the first time, at a song-swapping session at Seymour Washington's former blacksmith shop in Clarksville, was the true epiphany. "He had this magical use of words," Russell says. "I remember he played 'Pancho and Lefty' and Seymour had tears streaming down his face. That's when I realized just what a song could do."

Van Zandt, sensing that this ex-con was a true outlaw, took in "Calvert Russell" -- he used his first and middle name on the bill until everyone kept misspelling and mispronouncing it as "Calvin" -- as a creative protégé. "I shut up around Townes and listened," he says. "All my intelligence just went right to him." By example, Van Zandt taught Russell to write in complete seclusion and to not play a song until it was finished. "You never saw Townes working on a song."

A tape meant for Charlie

Photo by Aubrey Edwards for AA-S Calvin Russell's wife, Cynthia, above, usually joins him for his Monday night gigs at the Longbranch Inn. The two met in Europe.

Material came slow to Russell, whose club sets were stocked with covers of blues artists such as Lightnin' Hopkins, Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters. But over the years he'd built up a catalog of 22 songs he was proud of. When Charlie Sexton was signed to MCA Records in the mid-'80s and ended up on the cover of Spin, Russell compiled a demo with hopes that the kid who'd grown up around drunken songwriters would record one of his songs. In early '89, Sexton was expected to show up at a birthday party for his guitar mentor, Ike Ritter. Russell had his demo cassette in his pocket when he played a short set of covers in Ritter's living room.

But before he could give the tape to Sexton, Russell was approached by visiting French label boss Mathe, who said he liked Calvin's style. "I gave him the tape I was going to give to Charlie and the next morning I got a call from Patrick. He said, 'I want to put this record out,' and I thought, well, Warner Brothers ain't knocking my door down, so, yeah, go ahead. I didn't expect anything to happen."

Then came the call about the "heet."

So here was Calvin Russell, boarding a plane for Geneva, Switzerland, ready to play his first European show, solo acoustic, in front of 3,000 fans. "I was the opening act for a rock band, so I didn't know what to expect, but the crowd loved it," he says. When he played Lille, France, with a full band a few months later, the audience was 7,000 strong and out of control in its enthusiasm. "I was petrified," he says. "I was afraid to adjust my amp. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop."

How could music so taken for granted in Austin hit so deeply with Euro fans? Overseas, Russell was exotic, a song tramp from Texas with a blazing electric guitar, a musical Charles Bukowski who could rip audiences apart. "They didn't want the roots stuff, the country stuff," Russell recalls. "They wanted to rock and, boy, we gave it to 'em." Contracted to play 75 minutes (for an average of $15,000 a night), the band would sometimes play three hours. Legions of fans started following them from country to country and the band was often given a Hell's Angels escort back to the hotel after gigs. Technically still an Austinite, Russell was playing in Europe so often that he got an apartment in Amsterdam.

While most of his musical associates were mired in alcohol abuse, including Van Zandt, who died of a heart attack at age 52, Russell says he was never really much of a drinker. "Psychedelics and some good herb -- those were my things," he says.

But after a French journalist described Russell as a Jack Daniels-swigging tunesmith in a major feature, big bottles of Jack started showing up backstage before every show. And Russell began partaking. "We liked to play on LSD," he says, "and when you're tripping you can drink all the booze in the world and not pass out." The hangovers got brutal and Russell realized that he was killing himself. These days he has an occasional beer, but stays off the hard stuff.

"We're pretty laid-back," he says of himself and wife Cynthia, whose family bought one of the trailers on the property and visits so often that the clock in the guest trailer is set on Swiss time.

He met his fourth wife nine years ago at a festival in the Alps. "Her daddy was a fan and he got his kids into my music, so they all came back after a show," he says. "That first night, Cynthia said she wanted to be with me, and I thought, 'I don't want to have nothing to do with a woman that beautiful. She's probably just looking for a big cocaine party.' "

A few nights later, Russell and his band were playing a show in Madrid and a band member said, "Hey, Calvin, there's that girl from Switzerland." Cynthia was near the front and afterward came backstage. "I want to be with you," she reiterated, and this time added, "forever." The couple was married two years later, when Cynthia was 22 and Calvin 49.

Don't let the glamor gap fool you -- the supermodel and the hobo poet are a perfect match. "Cynthia's just a village girl who likes simple things, like a clean house and playing host to her family," says Russell. "Our big night out is Mondays at the Longbranch. That's about all the partying we can handle." Uncomfortable with media attention, Cynthia politely declined to be interviewed for this article.

But that's OK. Calvin's got more than enough stories for the both of them.

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mcorcoran@statesman.com; 445-3652