Stomping Grounds

Why your local folk singer could become your folk hero

I imagine interviewing Nick Mery is something like dealing with national acts. He schedules me on a Sunday just before his #goodjobtexas radio program, held at Studio 14 Hundred on West Avenue and broadcast on KROV 91.7 HD2. The show gets delayed. Then he disappears for a photo shoot. Then the guests (myself, local Texas is Funny Records owner Scott Andreu, and talent from River City Wrestling) are corralled into a room while Mery works out the schedule. Midway through our chat, he leaves for another shoot and our interview ends when the show starts.

The place is in quiet, somehow organized, chaos. Mery is calm, charismatic, and provocative as he genially plugs his day job ("Elegant Limousine is the number one limousine company in Texas"), dishes on the SA music community's chief obstacle ("The venues and the promoters… a lazy family"), and politely declines to say what CBS paid to license his 2009 Boy & the Bird EP. On air, Mery promotes anything SA arts-related. He hypes the upcoming Texas is Funny Showcase with Andreu before poking fun at RCW star A.J. Summers' height, between playing cuts of his favorite local music.

Mery is a consummate ambassador, easily read as either community-driven or Machiavellan. In fact, he's both. For proof, one can study not just his radio show, but also his musical excursions. In 2010, a Zeitgeist Management agent (repping Death Cab for Cutie, She & Him, and others) told Mery that if he wanted more than recurring blips of national recognition, the local music community needed to rally behind him. So Mery abandoned his folky Merykid project and started The Great '85 with Heather Go Psycho's drummer Diana Marie. The Great '85 played loud, conceptual rock all over SA, gaining Mery new followers and making theCurrent's "Best Local Albums of 2011" list. Mery went heavy because he wanted a larger audience for his music and his satellite projects.

"Now I can show people that the songs [they] like are still here, but it's in a different way," he said, referencing two forthcoming projects.

The first is Merykid's Lullwood, a collection of folk tunes exploring dreams. Where 2010's The Raccoon saw Mery incorporating gaggles of electronics, Lullwood is leafless. All songs are played on the piano, banjo, or guitar by either Mery or Edwin J. Stephens (The Fisherman, Blowing Trees), who has become something like the Mike Mogis to Mery's Conor Oberst. Early demos of "New Tricks" and "See Me Through" find the duo channeling Nick Drake with Southern soul accents.

Meanwhile, Mery is working with Polysynth Fusion as The Texas Weather. Mery refers to Mike Randolph (PF's creative center) not as a fellow musician but as an "avant-garde expressionist." Their forthcomingPluck unites Mery's popcraft with Randolph's improvised synth-driven, theremin-accented sound collages. It's all meant to work in the style of Mery's psycho-folk cover of Metallica's "Master of Puppets."

While Mery recently delayed both projects until late spring, he will perform with Randolph at the Texas is Funny label showcase Saturday at The White Rabbit.

When I asked Mery if he considers himself an advocate, he rejected the label. But then he told me how in 2010 he and Brandon Faucett (aka DJ Kirby and #goodjobtexas's director) initially offered visiting Strokes producer Gordon Raphael Studio 14 Hundred as an all-encompassing center for music recording and production. The studio had whatever they needed: professional photographers, audio engineers, cinematographers, a studio, radio room, and green screen. Meanwhile, it was about to launch #GoodJobTexas.

"The whole point of Gordon coming was to start a revolution which consisted of finding a place to unite the San Antonio music scene," Mery said. "Which is to say that they wanted everybody to have a place to record at where Raphael could be the nucleus."

But for reasons unclear, Raphael and company declined, instead setting up their own recording space near the airport. They recorded a few bands before he left a few months later.

It was a case where opportunity met preparation and luck still didn't strike. "In the week that he got to San Antonio, Rolling Stone gave him number one album of the decade," Mery said. (See "The Loser and the Lame," December 22, 2010.) "There's no way that [his visit] could be ignored on a national level" by the press. And yet it was. Just a cursory Google search of "Gordon Raphael" returns no national articles about his SA visit. No Rolling Stone, no Spin and certainly no Pitchfork.

With that missed opportunity in the rearview, Mery believes SA's music community should go back to working on its cogency, which he hopes his music and show can help provide. He's baffled there is only a smattering of FM programs promoting local music: Plugged In Sessions and Mery's own Live and Local (now hosted by Kevin Sanchez), both KRTU properties.

"[We're] creating what we think is missing from San Antonio," he said of #goodjobtexas. "We give creative people a place to be." That assessment may be a little loaded, but it's hard to argue with Mery's approach. If he's a shameless self-promoter, he'll be sure to include everyone he can under the spotlight with him. 

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