Robbie Fulks

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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