American castes
McMurtry was born in Fort Worth, Texas in the year before the Kennedy assassination. His parents split up while he was still a toddler, and he grew up primarily with his father, writer and rare-book aficionado, Larry McMurtry.
McMurtry spent a good part of his formative years in Leesburg, Va., a city he’s described as neither truly Southern or Northern in nature. But whatever the temperament in that cusp country of Virginia, the abundance of old money and political power in the region is beyond dispute.
“We often try and promote the false notion that we have no class system in this country — but we do,” McMurtry said. “My father was amazed when he moved to the D.C. area, to run across people that didn’t even carry cash, because they were so rich and powerful. They could just give you a business card and you’d bill them, no questions asked.”
On Just Us Kids, McMurtry examines this American caste system at work in the song “The Governor.” Against a driving, blues-flavored guitar riff, the song tells of an expensive cigarette boat on a lake where it shouldn’t be, mowing down a modest watercraft. The angler in the little boat ends up as dead as yesterday’s catch.
“It’s a piece of fiction about class conflict,” McMurtry said of the song. “We like to say we don’t have royalty here, but we do have these dynasties — the Bushes are part of that, of course. And the problem with royalty is that they are always more beholden to their class than their countrymen.
“That’s why all those Bin ladens were allowed to fly to Paris on Sept. 13, 2001, and my drummer couldn’t get to Austin for a recording session. American citizens couldn’t fly on that date — but royalty sure could. They made a big show of George Herbert Walker Bush getting grounded somewhere on a commercial flight? You know damn well that if he’d wanted to get somewhere, there would have been a Lear jet in the air.”
McMurtry further examines the idea of the “more-equal-than-others” mentality in “Ruins of the Realm,” a time-tour of world empires that have come and inevitably gone, looking in the last verse or two at our own times.
“That one’s like a history lesson,” said McMurtry. “I started drawing parallels between the state of the country now, and the decline of various empires — starting with the Romans in the first verse, then I got a couple verses on the British, and now, our situation in the Middle East. And that verse on the South? That just kind of got in there, really because I liked the imagery.”

Two lines and a melody
While overt political outings may be relatively new to McMurtry’s oeuvre, his studies in social commentary are not. Since Too Long in the Wasteland, his 1989 debut, and throughout the eight albums that have followed, the population of his musical landscape can’t even catch a decent glimpse of the American Dream.
McMurtry tales speak mostly of damaged folk clinging without much purchase to the fringes of society — the disillusioned, the addicted, the rebellious, the trapped.  And while love songs are the mainstay of most rock, love in the McMurtrian universe is, at best, unrequited.
“I can’t make any promises about writing any (love songs),” he said in a radio interview with this writer, in the months before he recorded Just Us Kids. “I guess I am not much of a lovable guy. The songs don’t much turn out that way.”
A number of songs on Just Us Kids go on to prove his point. Lovers abound, but not the variety with starlight in their eyes. In “Ruby and Carlos,” a poignant acoustic ballad featuring intricate internal rhyme-work, tells of a middle-aged couple going their separate ways — he, trying to keep going as an road drummer while fighting Gulf War Syndrome-related ailments; she, a horsewoman who takes a bad spill off her colt, breaking her hip.
“Freeway View,” a rocker driven by former Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan’s barrelhouse piano, concerns a man trying to escape a relationship, but uncertain he has the willpower to pull it off.
“Hurricane Party,” a crowd-pleaser the band has been playing out for about 18 months, features a classic McMurtry character — a man waiting out the storm, thinking dusty memories of lost love and chances both, alone despite his presence in a bar full of other stranded folks.
“He is kind of beaten down by life,” said McMurtry of his “Hurricane” character. “He is looking back and not entirely happy with what he sees, either. He doesn’t seem to care that much that his house will still be there after the storm. He doesn’t care about much by that point, though.”
Whether he is writing about events on the world stage or a life lived loveless in a thicket-swaddled shotgun shack, McMurtry allows that the actual nuts-and-bolts of his writing tend to be much the same.
“It’s still about figuring out who is speaking,” McMurtry said. “Political songs start pretty much the same way as the others — with a couple lines and a melody. And if that works, if it keeps me up at night, then I keep on writing it.
“But the way political stuff can be more difficult is that they turn into sermons real easily,” he added. “And if they do that, you have to say to yourself, ‘Is this a good enough sermon? Does it have merit in pursuing beyond this point?’ And there are a lot of them I haven’t finished because the answer to that question was, ‘No.’ But the ones on [Just Us Kids] seem to work pretty well.”

Author: Linda East Brady