Randy Rogers Band keeping country alive in the Lone Star State

Somebody call the San Antonio tourism board. The Randy Rogers Band has its new theme song: “San Antone.”

“I been gone for way too long/But you gotta go when you gotta go/Like Crockett at the Alamo/ Ya’ll can find me down in San Antone,” frontman Randy Rogers sings in the tender tribute to the Alamo City, his warm, husky voice tinged with Texas twang.

“That song will be on the set list until the day I die,” said Rogers, whose band returns to its Texas Red Dirt roots on its latest album, “Nothing Shines Like Neon.”

On Saturday, Rogers and his band bring the down-home sounds of the Lone Star State to another city he holds dear: San Luis Obispo.

“We love this town,” said Rogers, who counts Paso Robles winemaker Austin Hope among his friends on the Central Coast. “I feel very comfortable in SLO. It’s been a great experience every time I’ve played there.”

The Randy Rogers Band is co-headlining with Cody Johnson, an up-and-coming country singer-songwriter who Rogers called “hotter than a pistol.”

“He’s, to me, the best thing that could happen to country music,” Rogers said of Johnson, a Huntsville, Texas, native who worked as a prison guard and semi-professional bull rider before trying his hand at music. Johnson’s latest self-released album, “Gotta Be Me,” debuted at No. 2 on Billboard’s Top County Albums chart when it was released in August.

Rogers, 38, grew up in Cleburne, Texas, in the northeastern corner of the state.

For Texans, “Country music is kind of like Friday night football,” Rogers explained, soaked into the very character of the Lone Star State. “You hear it on the radio. It’s engrossed in every social situation you’re in.”

“If you go to the county fair and you don’t know how to two-step,” he added, “the girls don’t want to talk to you.”

So it’s no surprise that Rogers idolized George Strait, known as the King of Country, and the 1992 movie that introduced him to a wider audience, “Pure Country.” (Strait plays a country superstar who reconnects with his roots.)

“I watched it pretty much every week” when in sixth grade, Rogers said, “dreaming of being a country singer and being on the road and writing songs with the band.”

Rogers followed that dream to Texas State University in San Marcos, sandwiched between Austin and San Antonio. There, Rogers became a regular at honky tonks such as Cheatham Street Warehouse, renowned for its role in nurturing the progressive country movement of the 1970s.

As a college kid working retail, Rogers remembers showing up at open mic night and “literally reading the song lyrics off my register tape from work.”

During their senior year at Texas State, Rogers and his bandmates decided to get serious about music. They quit their jobs and hit the road in a 1988 Chevrolet Suburban named Peaches.

“We were all young, all single … just living on people’s couches, eating food out of their fridge,” said Rogers, who graduated from Texas State with a communications degree in 2001.

He’s been playing with the same lineup since 2002, the same year the Randy Rogers Band released its debut album, “Like It Used to Be.” His bandmates include Geoffrey Hill on guitar, Johnny “Chops” Richardson on bass, Brady Black on fiddle and Les Lawless on drums; utility player Todd Stewart fills in the musical gaps.

Although the Randy Rogers Band is among the Texas Red Dirt music scene’s best-known exports, Rogers said the band has struggled to find sustained mainstream success. That’s despite releasing four studio albums on Universal Music Group labels — “Just a Matter of Time,” “Randy Rogers Band,” “Burning the Day” and “Trouble” — and high-profile appearances on “Conan,” “Late Show with David Letterman” and “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”

The band even opened for Strait at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo in 2013, a personal highlight for Rogers.

“I’m always pushed outside the bubble when it comes to popular country (music),” Rogers said, lost in a commercial landscape littered with pop- and rock-flavored acts. “I feel like I was on the bench, but I never played. I never got in (the game).”

Rather than fret about missing opportunities, however, Rogers and his bandmates are making their own.

The band released “Nothing Shines Like Neon” in January on its own label, Tommy Jackson Records.

“I leaned on (my bandmates) pretty hard to make as country of a record we could make,” Rogers said.

He also wanted a collection of songs that were meant to be performed live.

“Everything for us is based on the show,” explained Rogers, since that’s how the band members make their living. “A lot of that comes down to what people can dance to. … You’re two-stepping. You’re drinking. … Maybe you’re singing along. You’re there to have a party, an experience.”

Featuring collaborations with the likes of Allison Krauss and Jerry Jeff Walker, “Nothing Shines Like Neon” ranges from rowdy party songs such as “Takin’ It As It Comes” — “That’s a fun-timin’, beer-drinkin’, hell-raisin’ kind of song,” Rogers said — to heartbroken barroom ballads like “Neon Blues” and “Tequila Eyes.”

The sweetly sentimental “Look Out Yonder” is a tribute to Rogers’ friend and mentor Kent Finlay, who died in 2015.

As the owner of Cheatham Street Warehouse, “Kent was the first guy to open the door to our band and to me personally as a songwriter,” Rogers explained. “He always had wisdom and encouragement and tough love.”

Appropriately, the last song Rogers played for Finlay was his duet with Jamey Johnson, “Actin’ Crazy,” “a funny song about the struggles of being in this crazy business.”

“I’m just trying to be the best songwriter I can be, with the best band I can be,” Rogers said.

Now that’s the kind of bighearted sentiment that would make any Texan proud.

This story was originally published November 9, 2016 at 10:20 AM with the headline "Randy Rogers Band keeping country alive in the Lone Star State."