There are some bands you hear and immediately get transported back to a certain time and place.
For me, Cooder Graw is one of those bands.
If you were around the Texas music scene in the late ’90s and early 2000s, you couldn’t really miss them. They came roaring out of the Panhandle during one of the most exciting periods in Texas music, when artists like Robert Earl Keen, Pat Green and Jack Ingram had already helped lay the groundwork for what would become a massive Texas music movement.
Then came bands like Cross Canadian Ragweed, Jason Boland and the Stragglers, Roger Creager — and Cooder Graw.
Only Cooder Graw had a pretty good way of describing what they were doing.
“Loud country.”
Honestly, that’s about as accurate as it gets.
The story starts in Amarillo, where the band was playing covers at the Golden Light Cantina and slowly building a following. What makes their story especially interesting is that Cooder Graw wasn’t exactly your typical young band trying to make it.
Lead singer, songwriter and rhythm guitarist Matt Martindale had been an assistant district attorney in Gray County. Guitarist Kelly Turner was managing a manufacturing plant in Slaton. The members of the band ranged from their late 30s to early 50s when they got started.
They weren’t supposed to be the young guys with something to prove.
They were grown men who decided they wanted to make a lot of noise.
And they did.
The band’s first album, Home at the Golden Light, came out in 1998 and was primarily made up of covers. The album was self-produced by the band, although Matthew McConaughey — who had been a fraternity brother of Martindale — received an executive producer credit.
Then came the band’s first national release, the self-titled Cooder Graw.
Produced with Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel and Hayden Nicholas, the album helped establish Cooder Graw as one of the more distinctive acts coming out of Texas. Songs like “18 Wheels of Loving,” “Dirty Little Hometown Girl” and “My Give a Damn Is Broken” became favorites with Texas music fans.
The band followed that with Segundo, a live album that featured the first of several memorable Texas chart songs, including “Willie’s Guitar.”
Then came Shifting Gears in 2001.
“New Dress” and “Better Days” both became Top 10 Texas country hits, with “Better Days” spending an amazing 40 weeks on the charts. The song also became the band’s first music video to receive significant exposure on national country music television.
But if there’s one song that probably cemented Cooder Graw’s place in Texas music history, it’s “Llano Estacado.”
The band’s contribution to the Live at Billy Bob’s Texas series opened with the song, which became something of a loud-country calling card. It was eventually featured in a series of national Dodge truck commercials, exposing Cooder Graw’s music to an audience far beyond Texas.
And that was fitting.
Because Cooder Graw was a road band.
A serious road band.
For years, they were playing roughly 200 shows annually throughout Texas and across the Southwest. Along the way, they shared stages with some pretty impressive company — Willie Nelson, Alabama, Dwight Yoakam, Robert Earl Keen and Asleep at the Wheel, among others.
But eventually, nearly a decade of living on the road began to wear them down.
In 2006, Cooder Graw announced they would stop touring indefinitely. Their final show was December 31, 2006, at the Horseman Club in Fort Worth.
And for a while, that looked like the end.
Except it wasn’t.
Six years later, the band announced a reunion tour, beginning with an appearance at Larry Joe Taylor’s Music Fest in 2012. What was supposed to be a relatively short reunion turned into something more lasting.
The fans were still there.
And so was the music.
Cooder Graw eventually returned to the studio, releasing the six-song Love to Live By EP in 2016. Produced by Rich Brotherton and recorded at Congress House Studio in Austin, it sounded like the band had never really lost that combination of country songwriting, rock-and-roll attitude and sheer volume that made them unique in the first place.
That’s what I think makes Cooder Graw’s story so interesting.
They came along during a period when Texas music was exploding. They didn’t sound like everybody else, they didn’t look like every other young band trying to get a record deal, and they certainly didn’t seem interested in following somebody else’s blueprint.
They just played their songs, played them loud and got in front of as many people as they could.
And decades later, their music still brings back memories for a lot of Texas music fans.
