Music on the Edge

A skinny young woman with bottle-blond hair and a skimpy T-shirt was smoking and shivering outside a Fort Worth club on a recent evening. The tall, gangly McGlathery was talking to friends nearby and took notice. He peeled off his sweater and offered it to her. She gladly accepted. McGlathery was left shivering since he wore only a thin shirt, but he didn’t mind.

A few seconds later, he scratched his chin and complained about developing a staph infection. The woman’s eyes widened a bit, but she kept the sweater. She and her friend later followed McGlathery to another club. A couple of hours later, McGlathery was smoking weed with friends at an after-party.

“Hey, that skinny chick that got your sweater is about to leave,” a friend told him. “You better catch her if you want your sweater back.”

“She can have it. I only paid $1 for it,” he said.

McGlathery has a way with the ladies. He’s affable with most people as long as they aren’t telling him what to do or trying to get him to work a non-musical job. The Fort Worth native is 24, single, broke, struggling, and pretty damned happy. A former skateboarding prodigy, he picked up a guitar in his late teens. Several years ago he formed Big City Folk, a bluegrass-punk band that played all over the Metroplex before disbanding this summer.

Now he performs solo, plunks bass in other bands, runs sound at various clubs, and hosts an open-mic at The Cellar on Monday nights. He’s a charming frontman and emcee with a devilish smile and playful manner. Not long ago, a couple of young women wrote a glowing bio for him to use for marketing purposes on his Facebook band page. McGlathery read it, thanked them, and then wrote and posted his own version:

“He has the capability to do anything his ginormous heart desires, yet he sleeps in until 4 p.m. and smokes pot and drinks booze wasting his life into blurry speckles of time,” his new bio reads. “Don’t put your faith into Luke’s artistic endeavors. He will be playing whatever Fort Worth gig he can until he is completely shunned from the scene. What a shit show … .”

McGlathery comes across as aimless, but there’s a plan in there somewhere. He moved toward a musical career after giving up on formal education. In his junior year in high school, a teacher confiscated his phone one day. When he went to the office to retrieve it after class, he was told to fork over $50 or serve an hour in detention. Instead, he asked to make a quick call on his phone, pocketed it, left the building, and never went back.

Two years of logging long hours working at fast-food restaurants allowed him to save some money, which he spent on musical gear and a camera –– investments to help him earn a living.

“It takes money to make money,” he said. “You got to buy your gear, have your own instruments and P.A. system. I can run sound for a full band and can make money doing that. It’s all those investments I made that have made me well off now.”

“Well off” is relative –– very relative. He lives above a warehouse in an apartment without running water, which explains why he might be getting a staph infection. He uses the sink and shower in the downstairs warehouse. He wears used clothes, plays beat-up instruments, and cooks his eggs on a skillet heated by candles on his coffee table. “Candle-fried eggs,” he calls them. But he enjoys himself and typically has a smile on his face.

He riffs on his definition of “down and out” –– “I’m glad I’m not down and out like I should be, or like I could be,” he said. “I don’t like to be down and out, and so I do the best I can. I stay away from the hard drugs. I see people all fucked up on drugs, and they’re down and out. My mom’s in jail right now. I haven’t talked to my dad in a couple of years. I’m on my own, and I had to figure it out.”

McGlathery has role models, although some folks might question his choices. The first one he mentions is local songwriter Scott Copeland, who’s been beating around the bar scene for almost 20 years and supporting himself through music.

“Scott Copeland is a great inspiration to me,” he said. “He amazes me, and it inspires me to keep on trying. Vincent drives me to want to write more. The more people I get inspired by, the more I want to do it.”

McGlathery has no end game to speak of, no long-term plan. He plays mostly cover music at his shows. He’s got a decent voice but he’s not going to win The Voice. He can play numerous instruments, but isn’t a virtuoso at any. Mostly what he’s got is personality. Where will it lead?

“I just want to come out with some good records and play some shows,” he said. “There’s not an end goal for me. I just live it day by day and have fun with it. It’s more fun than waking up at 6 every day and going to work. I’m just letting it come as it comes.”

One thing that comes around every year at about this time is Christmas. McGlathery barely gives the holiday a thought.

“Man, Christmas ain’t nothing for me anymore,” he said. “I don’t talk to my parents. All I got is my sister but she’s struggling, got kids and a life of her own. I’ve got a few friends that will call me and check up on me, and I’m happy with that. It’s really just another day like my birthday or any other holiday. Seems like just a reason to party to me. I like to party. Maybe I will candle-fry two eggs and call it Christmas dinner.”

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The leader by example of this motley crew is Copeland, the tall, lanky, longhaired, trash-talking, hard-living former athlete and working stiff who chucked it all 20 years ago and threw himself into the local music scene. His songs are typically raucous, occasionally raunchy, and almost always damn good.

He returned to Fort Worth last Friday after a three-week excursion to Nashville, where he was pitching songs to publishers and making connections. Placing a song with an A-team singer such as Luke Wade or Kenny Chesney is the equivalent of winning the lottery, or at least hitting a big scratch-off ticket.

Copeland has had numerous songs recorded by other artists, most notably Cross Canadian Ragweed. Their version of “Lighthouse Keeper” earned Copeland his biggest chunk of change to date, although he feels it’s in poor taste to discuss amounts. But he recalls the feeling of getting that first big royalty check.

“When it came in the mail I flipped out,” he said. “I opened it in the street, and the mailman hugged me.”

Most of the artists who’ve recorded his songs are regional acts who might sell a few hundred or even a few thousand CDs. A songwriter gets 9 cents of every dollar earned from his or her song. A thousand CD sales puts $90 in the writer’s pocket. So even though locals like Emerson and McGlathery are impressed with Copeland’s ability to survive on music and look to him as a mentor, the reality is he’s as broke as they are. He left Fort Worth with $200 in his pocket when he headed to Nashville last month.

“I didn’t drink or smoke weed or nothing for three weeks,” he said. “I had a hotel paid for a week –– a friend did it for me as a present.”

He booked several gigs upon returning home and told his fans about them on Facebook, his favorite method of announcing shows and blowing people’s mind’s with his posts. He signed off on his latest with  “Merry Malcolm Xmas.”

He can joke about Christmas now because his kids are grown, but he recalls tough years. Christmas meant guilt because of the paltry presents he gave. Their stepfather always gave them better stuff.

“From me they get a book or a $25 gift card to McDonald’s,” he said. “It’s not one of my favorite times of the year. Christmas Eve is the No. 1 night for suicide in this country. It’s the most depressing and darkest time for a lot of people. I’ve felt that pain a few times.”

He lives in a $400 a month apartment and hasn’t owned a car in eight years. No cable TV. Solo gigs pay about $100, so if he can play three or four a week, he can keep $1,200 to $1,600 coming in each month. He takes cabs to solo gigs or hitches rides with friends or bandmates when he plays with others, paying them back in beer.

“I don’t have a pot to piss in, but I’m still a songwriter,” he said.

One of those buddies is guitarist John Zaskoda, who’s played hundreds of gigs with Copeland over the years. Copeland can be “an asshole” at times because it’s his nature to push people’s buttons, Zaskoda said. But underneath the bluster he sees a talented, good-hearted artist who’s turning into a Fort Worth legend before our eyes.

“There were times he was the only one who believed in him,” Zaskoda said, adding that Copeland will be thought of in 20 years the same way people now recall Stephen Bruton, T-Bone Walker, and other Fort Worth natives who made a splash through music.

On his first night back from Nashville, Copeland nabs a gig at his favorite haunt, The Basement Bar in the Stockyards. The regulars greet him warmly as he walks in the door carrying his guitar, and before he plays his first song he is already pushing buttons. He tells the crowd that Christmas is the time when Jesus commands us to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need for people we don’t like. A large group laughs from a table in the back, and Copeland asks where they’re from.

“Wisconsin!” they yell.

“Wiscahnsen,” he yells back, mocking their accents and their “low-middle-class vacation.”

“I haven’t smoked or drank in three weeks and, man, I just got stoned about an hour ago, and I’m like fucking really stoned,” he says to the crowd. “I don’t even know what I’m saying. But that was the plan, to get eighth-grade high.”

He plays a few more songs. A few in the crowd listen intently, but most chat away. Copeland finishes to a smattering of applause and leans into the mic.

“I’ve been doing this for 20 years, but to hear four or five people clap twice, it hits right to the core. It’s enlifting and uplightening,” he says.

The people who are paying attention chuckle. The rest keep drinking and talking. And Copeland, Emerson, McGlathery, and all the rest keep on picking and singing.