‘Captain Suburbia’: Roger Clyne finds latest muse in family life
By CHRIS HANSEN ORF
Get Out

After rigorously touring the country with his band, The Peacemakers, for the better part of the new year, Arizona troubadour Roger Clyne has barely settled into his Tempe home to slow down, kick up his bare feet and relax with a cup of coffee before the first crisis hits.

“I've been home almost 48 hours now,” Clyne says. “So I'm barefoot in my back yard, soaking up the sun, and my job is to watch our three desert tortoises. And I've slowed down so much that they've escaped.”

It seems that Rocket, the tortoise belonging to Clyne's youngest son, has rocketed off into the nether regions of the back yard.

“We have one for each of the kids, and I'm supposed to be the warden in the back yard,” Clyne laughs. “I went so slow they actually outran me. It's all right — even if we lose them for a couple of days, they always show up somewhere.”

Life on the road makes it difficult to keep up with the news — Clyne, who partly grew up on his father's ranch south of Tucson, was unaware that fellow singing cowboy Chris Ledoux recently had passed away — and then there are those little things that can change at home.

“I come back and my children have lost another tooth, my twins are coming up on their sixth birthday and the lawn has gone from brown to green,” Clyne chuckles. “The thing that moves the fastest for me now is time and the changes around me. It's like trying to slow down a stream.”

A break from touring

The singer/songwriter is back home for a few weeks of relaxation — sandwiched around two shows this weekend at Tempe's Marquee Theatre — before heading back out on the road for another leg of the tour, which will culminate with the band's biannual Mexico show May 14 at the Sunset Cantina in Puerto Peñasco.

The group, which also includes P.H. Naffah on drums, Steve Larson on guitar and bassist Nick Scropos, has been sprinkling in new Clyne compositions in recent shows.

“We want them developed as fully as possible before we put them on tape, so we're going to sprinkle in ‘Captain Suburbia’ here and ‘Goon Squad’ there,” Clyne says. Then he adds with a laugh, “If I'm not still stuck out here looking for the tortoise, we're going to do a couple of them (at the Marquee Theatre).”

“Captain Suburbia,” an incessantly catchy, bouncy pop tune that musically hearkens backs to Clyne's former band, The Refreshments, shows a side of him lyrically that most fans have not been privy to: The songwriter's life off the road.

“I think rock ’n’ roll teaches us in our youth that rebellion is a natural part of the process,” Clyne says. “It's a necessary development of the soul, that slaying of the dragon. I am out of that phase now — or maybe I've just learned how to incorporate that value — and I think that what rock ’n’ roll doesn't do a lot of is teach you how to live in peace within the system after we've been taught how to destroy the system.

“The thing we all feared in our teens was that ‘I am gonna be mowing my lawn in suburbia with pets and kids,’” Clyne explains. “And now I am so damn glad that I am here now. We still have to exist and live a human life inside, so ‘Captain Suburbia’ was my attempt to say, ‘Well, this is how I do it.’ It's the thing we were all afraid of, but it's a wonderful place.”

Creative direction is uncertain

While Clyne's writing is diverse, running the gamut from the alt-country tunes on the band's first release, “Honky Tonk Union,” to the rock- and pop- inflected writing on the band's latest disc “¡Americano!,” the songwriter is unsure of where his latest direction will take him.

“I probably won't know until the record is done,” Clyne says. “It's really tough to say. I am enjoying the pop format very much — with
‘¡Americano!’ I found myself back in a place where I was exploring the pop song more in the same way I was with (The Refreshments' first album) ‘Fizzy Fuzzy Big and Buzzy,’ only 10 years later.

‘‘I love the pop song — ‘Captain Suburbia’ is a pop song, and there are a couple of them that are on that order. It's tough to say — I just don't know how it's going to look or sound yet.”

While Peacemakers fans may have to wait for the band's next studio release — they have eight new songs worked out — a nice little stopgap will appear this summer when “Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers Live at Billy Bob's Texas” hits shelves on July 5.

The record will be the latest in a series of live albums recorded by artists at the enormous Fort Worth honky-tonk, putting the band in select company with such powerhouses as Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and the newest Texas icon, Pat Green.

The Billy Bob's Texas show was recorded earlier this month during the band's first appearance at the legendary club, known as “The World's Largest Honky Tonk.”

“It was awesome,” Clyne says of the gig. “We went into it with a little bit of trepidation knowing it's so big — if our contingent of 400 to 500 people show up, it might look small — but the best part was that there was more on the order of 1,300 to 1,500 people that showed up, and everybody knew the words and the crowd mikes were spiking. It was a ball, and a large part of that came from the fans.”

Spirited Indiana show

Another recent show that was by all accounts a very spirited event was a show in South Haven, Ind., dubbed “Here's To Life: A Tribute to the Music of Roger Clyne.” The show featured former Refreshments guitarist Brian Blush and several other groups performing Refreshments and Peacemakers material.

“It's humbling,” Clyne says of the tribute. “I feel like I'm in the flow and I'm doing what my life's purpose is. I am sorry I couldn't attend — I was out working — but I would have loved to have (jumped onstage). I wouldn't want to be there for too long because I wouldn't want to feel like I was hogging the ball, but if I could have been a fly on the wall, I would have loved it.”

As the hunt for the wayward tortoise continues in the Clyne back yard — the singer has recruited “four sets of eyes” to help him look — Clyne talks of the travails of a broken trailer on the road, playing a few forthcoming acoustic shows with Naffah in a few as-yet-unconquered states next month, and his good friend Andy Hersey, a singer/songwriter based in Tucson. Clyne suddenly pauses for a moment with an almost audible sigh of relief.

“Hey,” he says. “It looks like we finally slowed the stream down enough to find that tortoise.”

Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers
With: Chalmers Green (Friday), Muddy Violets (Saturday)
When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday
Where: Marquee Theatre, 730 N Mill Ave., Tempe
How much: $20
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