Contentment found

Turning 40 for Austin musician Bukka Allen meant leaving the road for a good place in life

By Michael Corcoran
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, October 22, 2007

You'd be surprised at how many people, even those in youth-celebrated jobs, actually like hitting the big four-oh.

When Rosanne Cash turned 40 she said it felt like she finally fell into her body. Forty is the perfect age because you're not yet old, but you no longer have to be obsessed with staying young.

Forty has been the best year yet in Bukka Allen's life. Kid used to live for the road, playing as many as 300 shows a year, backing such acts as Ian Moore and Jack Ingram on keyboards. But this year he married Dallas-raised singer songwriter Sally Semrad. He now spends more time in his high-ceilinged, 100-year-old Buda house than on a tour bus.

"Your priorities change, in a very healthy way, when you get older," Allen says.

And he's found musical soulmates in cellist Brian Standefer and guitarist Robbie Gjersoe, who bring out the best of him on the startlingly original new album "Confidante."

The trio also performs as Screen Door Music, providing background music for everything from movie scores to AARP commercials.

"The pure musical communication I have with those guys is just so liberating," says Allen, the son of artist/musician Terry Allen and actress Jo Harvey Allen, who named him after bluesman Bukka White (pronounced buck-uh). The new album ranges from the tribal putdown of the title track (great drumming from Chris Searles) to the heart-aching "Behold What You've Found," which Allen sings as if he's trying to get over something. Standefer's cello is a gorgeous shader, while Gjersoe's guitar is emphatically understated, as if he's a member of Neil Young's band Sane Horse.

"We're all guys who play with a lot of people, so we really wanted to create something all our own," Allen says. Standefer plays in Alejandro Escovedo's band and has recorded with Patty Griffin, while Gjersoe splits time between the Flatlanders (and their various solo incarnations) and the Greencards.

The collaboration started about three years ago, when Gjersoe rented the upstairs portion of Allen's house, and the two would record instrumentals on the rare occasions when neither was on tour. "Some of the tunes were calling for a cello, so we asked Brian if he could come over," Allen says. One night, the wind blew the front screen door right off its hinges and the collective had a name.

Allen had finished writing most of the songs on "Confidante" when he met Semrad at the Saxon Pub in 2005. Allen was sitting in with Will Sexton, who gave him his first gig in Austin when Allen moved here in 1991 after graduating from the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

"After I met Sally and we started dating, I put off the project I had been working on," Allen says. "In order to sing those songs, I had to put myself back in the frame of mind that they had been written in. And I was so happy that I didn't want to go back there." The songs of "Confidante" touched on past relationships, periods of self-doubt and social disconnection. "I decided that I wasn't going to put the album out."

But after Semrad heard the demos, she pushed Allen to complete the project, which conjures shades of Tom Petty, True Believers, Leonard Cohen and Young's album "Harvest."

The album opens with "Cadillac Hotel," a song unlike any Allen had ever written, yet similar to the early songs of Tom Waits that inspired Allen to write songs in the first place. "My songs are usually based on inner thoughts, my reaction to emotions," Allen says. His lyrics usually seem to be written in a personal code. But "Cadillac Hotel" describes a small event in Allen's life exactly as it occurred.

"It was 4 a.m. and me and my dad were staying in a kinda seedy hotel in Venice, Calif., after a gig," Allen says. "I heard all kinds of things outside — glass breaking, that kind of stuff — and in the midst of that I heard someone playing a guitar." The theme of the song is that beauty can emerge from the darkness. "So I took out my accordion and played along with the guitarist. We never saw each other, but we played music together. It was just so cool."

Although most people assume Allen is from Lubbock, where his father mentored a trio of budding songwriters named Joe Ely, Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, he actually grew up in Fresno, Calif., where his family moved when Terry Allen got a job teaching art at Fresno State. "Lubbock was always in my life," Allen says. "My parents were always telling stories about Lubbock and my grandparents lived there, so I'd visit quite a lot." Lubbock was where a lot of first things happened, he said. His first kiss, at age 13, was in the front yard of his grandmother's house. And the first time he stepped inside a recording studio was with Lloyd Maines, who produced the demo that earned Allen, whose brother Bale is a noted artist in town, a full scholarship to Berklee.

"I almost quit that first year," Allen says. "I was pretty lonely, but then I finally met a group (of fellow students) I could hang with." Allen and his Berklee pals had a blues band called the One-Eyed Jacks and he thought about staying in Boston after school. But first he would give Austin a shot.

Soon after hitting this town of a thousand guitarists, Allen became an in-demand keyboard player. He also added the accordion to his repertoire, which helped him get his current gig with the BoDeans, who tour infrequently but financially successfully.

Just as his father doesn't separate his visual art from his music — they're just equal parts of the creative process — Bukka says he never really felt the difference between being a sideman and the one who sings. "The roles are different, but it's still just making music," he says.

Allen moved to Buda 10 years ago, when Buda was really Buda. "People were saying, 'Why do you want to live way out there?' and now you look at Buda and it's becoming Austin." He had saved up some money after steady touring with Ian Moore and had his eye on a big house for sale a few blocks from where he now lives. But someone beat him to it. "I was driving by and I saw this house," he says of his plantation-style home, which has posts with rings in the front yard to tie up your horses. Allen knocked on the door and asked the woman who answered if she would consider selling her house. "She said, 'You're a godsend. I want to move in two weeks.' "

"I just love this space — the high ceilings, the big front porch," Allen says, throwing a Frisbee to his 8-year-old border collie, Clovis.

"Can you believe that this ol' dog used to jump 7 feet in the air," he says as Clovis lets the disc sail 2 feet over his head. But you've never seen a more content mutt. Sally takes him out jogging every morning and that's just about as much exertion as he needs. Clovis is more of a hangout dog, enjoying the little things in his day without having to amaze folks with his Jordanesque leaps.

Maybe 8 is to dogs is what 40 is to humans.