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The Weekly's wannabe George Plimpton, right, hopes he can remember the chord changes to 'Open Fire.'

Brown's bio calls him "a modern-day electronic troubadour," and the description's apt. Since he gave up working day jobs last year, he's stayed in friends' homes, constantly writing and recording music, and ventured out on the road for stretches of two or three months at a time. While he's built a long list of contacts he can draw on to book shows in advance, he still likes to investigate cities where he's never been before, trying to hustle a last-minute gig, and playing on the street if one doesn't come through.

Fort Worth folks tend to think of Brown as a novelty act -- not surprising, given the incongruity of a tall, skinny longhair who leaps around the stage like a high school girl doing cheerleading routines and who's known for throwing onstage temper tantrums when band members make mistakes. But it would be wrong to dismiss him, given the quality of his music. His lush chord progressions and beguiling melodies for tunes like "You and Me" and "My Favorite 1," the exhilarating rush of "Ain't Telling Lies," the sheer accessibility (and whistled hook) of "Private School," and the density and complexity of the shuddering keyboard jam "Open Fire" mark him as one of the most original and interesting musicians you'll encounter anywhere.

While most local musos are busy complaining that "We wanna record/tour, but we can't afford to," Brown's recording is prolific and his touring relentless, without any "support" beyond what he can earn from c.d. sales and shows booked on the fly by e-mail using public libraries' computers. Spend a few days with Nathan Brown, and one fact becomes evident: Few musicians approach their craft with so much focus and dedication.

Shakedown at the Ridglea

Before my first rehearsal with Nathan, I was warned, "Watch out. He's real particular about the way his music gets played." But the first time we got together at the house where Nathan was staying, sitting outside with a keyboard and guitar so he could show me parts, he seemed like anything but the music Nazi I'd been led to expect. Although he's schooled in music theory, Brown eschews the use of scores or lead sheets, instead opting to teach other musicians his tunes by rote.

After another rehearsal in my front room a couple of days later, Nathan invited me to play on his last hometown show before the tour, at the Ridglea Lounge with Dave Karnes on drums. Dave, a fixture on the local music scene since his teens, has known Nathan since they were freshmen at Southwest High School. They've toured together in a road company of the play Tony and Tina's Wedding, and Karnes has played guitar and drums on Brown's albums, but they'd only played one show together -- a sparsely attended gig at Scooner's.

Nathan was patient as we spent four hours running through the tunes, with intermittent interruptions as Dave rushed about trying to take care of some unspecified business. At the Ridglea, though, when I missed my cue on the first song, Nathan stopped the song and threw one of his trademark onstage fits, which a friend of Nathan's later told me was toned down to avoid freaking me out too much. "Fuck!" he yelled. "Fuck!" Finally, he got over it and we started the song again. "I guess I can't get too pissed off at these guys," he said, "since we've only had one rehearsal."

The funny thing was, once we were on the road, I never saw Nathan erupt like that. In contrast with the petulant prima donna he often plays at local shows, his out-of-town onstage demeanor was always light-hearted and fun. If I made mistakes during a show, we'd discuss them quietly in the van the next day. It made me wonder if that was one reason why, away from the Fort, Nathan often plays to rooms packed with dancing people who know the words to all of his songs, while here at home, he plays to smaller crowds, mostly made up of his friends and ex-bandmates.

A Chili Dog to Go

"You're going on the road with Chili Dog?" Daniel Gomez, current Goodwin guitarist/evil tyrant and former Nathan Brown's R&B bassist, regarded me with a mixture of surprise and amusement. Chili is an 11-year-old guard dog Nathan's had for 10 years, who frequently accompanies his master on road trips and is the subject of the song "The Pink Stuff."

Chili's bloodline is hard to determine. He looks like a dingo, with a stub of a tail that had apparently been chewed off when Nathan found him. The dog's trademark is a deep, menacing growl. It's easy to see why Nathan would take him along on road trips for "added security." On a subsequent trip to play a show in Lawrence, Kan., I felt privileged when Chili actually let me pet him. He's the least cuddly animal imaginable: His coat feels like a metal brush.

Gomez told the story of a tour when Brown left the dog in his care. "Nathan built this chicken-wire partition to keep Chili away from my dog. I still had to turn the hose on him so I could fill his bowls. That dog wouldn't let me feed him!" Gomez told another story he'd heard about the time Chili got loose in a Chicago park and Nathan found him by "following the trail of crying kids."

"You just can't do any of the things with him that you'd normally do with a dog," said Brown's friend Eric Martin. "Like petting him or talking to him or getting down in his face." The secret, it seems, is to just ignore Chili. Then, he's the calmest animal in the world -- like another person, one who can't talk. On one occasion, Martin forgot the secret after not seeing Chili for a few months and wound up getting bitten for his trouble.

I kept this in mind Tuesday morning, when Nathan and Chili swung by my house and I climbed aboard the van. Before heading to Little Rock for the first show of the tour, we stopped in Dallas at the home of Nathan's sister, Melissa Rishel, and her husband Bruce, so Nathan could rearrange the contents of the van and drop off a few items for safekeeping.

Packin' Neat

If one objective of a musical tour is to bring home some money, it makes sense to try to eliminate some of the expenses that touring musicians typically incur. Hotels, for example -- Nathan avoids these by either crashing with friends or folks he meets on the road or by sleeping in his van in Wal-Mart parking lots. (Unlike other merchants, the Arkansas-based retail giant has an official policy allowing transients to use their parking lots as overnight rest stops.) Nathan claims to sleep better in the van than he does in other people's homes.

Restaurants can be another drain on the touring budget. On the road, though, Nathan, a vegetarian, typically pays for no more than one hot meal a day, subsisting the rest of the time on provisions he buys in grocery stores or that his family and friends have donated. We left the Fort heavily laden with care packages from various members of the Brown clan: apples, granola bars, dried fruit, peanuts, pretzels, flour tortillas, tortilla chips, bagel chips, hot sauce, cans of beans and vegetarian chili, apple juice. There was dog food and turkey jerky for Chili and bottled water for all of us.

This strategy hasn't brought Nathan wealth, but it has kept him relatively self-sustaining. He returned from his first tour with $200 in his pocket and from his second with $300. The third tour wasn't as lucrative: In the end, he rolled into the 7-Eleven on Berry Street with a wallet as empty as his gas tank. On the fourth tour, with his band Pretend King, the three musicians finished up with about $250 apiece. "We could have had more, but those guys insisted on doing things like ordering $30 breakfasts," said Nathan. At the end of his last tour, Nathan was on his way home about $500 ahead when the van's transmission started giving trouble. A mechanic in Connecticut "did about $750 worth of work for $250." Then Nathan got a ticket in Oklahoma that cost him another $250. Oh, well.

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