Playing with History: Influential Duo Makes Greenville Show ‘Sweet’ for Reunited Foster and Lloyd

By Lance Martin Special for the Threadgill Concert Series

Count Radney Foster among the fans who will be at the Kenneth Threadgill Concert Series on Feb. 23 in Greenville. While he’ll be performing as part of Foster and Lloyd, a power duo that reunited in 2010 after a 20‐year hiatus, Foster says the other duo on the bill, Chris Hillman and Herb Petersen, are a pair he can’t wait to see. He credits them as major influences on the label‐defying music that made Foster and Lloyd a hit in the late ‘80s.

Foster says sharing the stage with Hillman in particular, who was a member of The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers and Desert Rose Band, will be a thrill.

“Chris was such an influence on Foster and Lloyd being both a Byrd and in the Burritos,” Foster said. “If you had to sum up Foster and Lloyd, it is a lot of disparate parts: you’ve got a Beatles influence; you’ve got a Buck (Owens) and Don Rich influence; and you’ve got an Everly Brothers influence. It goes from rockabilly to honky tonk to psychedelia.”

Foster remembers being introduced to The Flying Burrito Brothers in the early ‘70s, when he was learning guitar, and soon understood how The Byrds’ “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” album from 1968 “changed all kinds of things for everyone.”

“The Burritos, Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s ‘Déjà Vu’ record and all those things were just melting folk, and rock and country all together,” Foster says. “I was like ‘Wow, what the heck?’ and then a guy was like, ‘you’ve got to check out Chris Hillman and The Byrds.’ By the time I graduated high school, I’d connected all the dots. Bill (Lloyd) was the same way.”

Even then, Foster appreciated the seriousness that Hillman and his bands brought to the music.

“The thing that was cool is they really were trying to honor the music,” Foster says. “They were playing it as rock musicians but they took it seriously – it wasn’t a joke. I remember when the Beach Boys played ‘Okie from Muskogee’ with Beach Boys harmonies; it was (done as) a joke.”

Foster and Lloyd were known for their own style of harmonies and Threadgill fans should expect to hear a heavy dose of the duo’s catalog of hits that include “Crazy Over You,” “Sure Thing,” “Texas in 1880” and “What Do You Want From Me This Time.” “We do the older songs that were hits for us back in the day and then a lot of stuff off of the new record,” Foster says, adding that they’ll be backed by bass player Mike Vargo and drummer Keith Brogdan to produce a tight sound that wasn’t possible before Foster and Lloyd originally parted ways in 1990.

The sound, he says, “feels really like getting back in the groove and it’s really fun. I’ve improved on electric guitar and play much more than I used to. In the past, I would have played an acoustic and (Bill) would have played electric or we would have carried another electric guitar player for that twin Telecaster, Bakersfield sound. Now it’s just two Telecasters, bass and drums sound and that has gotten real tight. It’s neat to do in the studio and really cool to do live.”

Among the songs Foster and Lloyd are sure to play is “Picasso’s Mandolin” written with Threadgill alumnus Guy Clark. Back in the ‘80s, the three originally wrote what Foster describes as two songs and half of a third they all agreed wasn’t going anywhere.

“We ended up recording ‘Fair Shake’ and it ended up being a top five hit for us,” Foster says. “And Guy recorded ‘Picasso’s Mandolin’ on his next record.”

In typical Guy Clark minimalist style, he didn’t use the guitar lick or bridge that Foster and Lloyd had contributed to the song. So when Foster and Lloyd reunited and started working on a new album (“It’s Already Tomorrow”) in 2010, ‘Picasso’s Mandolin’ came up in discussion.

According to Foster, Lloyd is a notorious keeper of notes and still had his notes from their day writing songs with Clark. “There was one line Bill said has haunted me since we wrote it,” Foster says. “Guy had said it and it never made it into the song. It’s my favorite line we came up with that day: ‘The fork in the road is a piece of cake; you gotta eat the one you take,’ which is classic Guy Clark.”

Foster said that Lloyd suggested they re‐write the song just as Clark had done when recording it for his own album. So they commenced to adding a verse, bridge and guitar lick to create a new version that Foster says has turned into “a real crowd pleaser. It’s really fun.”

Foster says he expects this show to be every bit as fun as his last performance in Greenville, a 2009 song‐swap with Ray Wylie Hubbard, Walt Wilkins and Brandon Rhyder.

He said it was his first time to perform in an end‐around fashion with Hubbard. “On ‘Snake Farm’ (a Hubbard song), at the end it went on for quite some time and at the end I was trading licks with Walt, it was a thrill a minute. I’ll never be a Bill Lloyd as a guitar player, but that song is now in my wheelhouse. I know what to do.”

Greenville will be the penultimate show for Foster and Lloyd before Foster heads to Austin the following week for a recording session. He’s going to record an acoustic version of his debut solo album, “Del Rio, TX 1959.”

Foster describes it as more an unplugged version of the album featuring a bunch of ‘grassers, referring to bluegrass musicians including guitarist Jon Randall, multi‐instrumentalist Martie Maguire from the Dixie Chicks and Courtyard Hounds and several others. He said the sound will be “bluegrass a la the South Texas flavor that I grew up in.”

And while the Foster and Lloyd shows and recording project have kept Foster busy, he still finds time to write, because it comes to him naturally.

He had always thought of his first song as one he wrote for a girl when he was about 14. “It wasn’t a very good song, but I’m sure she thought it was at the time,” he said.

The story about that song was on his bio, but Foster’s mother, a teacher, corrected it, he said.

“She said, ‘you started writing songs from the first time you could write anything at all,’” Foster said. “She brought me a lyric that I had written in Sunday school when I was seven years old. She told me, ‘we didn’t know where it came from.’ It’s definitely in my DNA – it’s a blessing and a curse. It will wake you up at two in the morning.”

So it comes as no surprise that Foster and Lloyd’s first success together came as songwriters. What’s surprising is the name of the band they first helped to chart success. Their first Top 10 hit, a song called “Since I Found You,” was made successful by two sisters who performed as Sweethearts of the Rodeo.

Foster and Lloyd appear with Hillman and Petersen Feb. 25 at Greenville's Municipal Auditorium as part of the Kenneth Threadgill Concert Series benefitting the Friends of Main Street Greenville. Tickets are available in Greenville at Cavender’s, Calico Cat, the Magic Bubble and the Municipal Auditorium. For more information on the Threadgill Concert, call (903) 457‐3126.

(Martin, a Waco‐based freelance writer, is a former Greenville resident and frequent Threadgill Series contributor.)