Jay Nazziola’s hand shot up and he was beckoned to the stage. The night of their dismissal, the angry quartet went to an open-mike jam to bash away and they asked if there was a drummer in the house. The Mutts rehearsed every day for nine months, but when it became apparent that their manager/producer was keen on molding the next Diamond Rio, the Brauns resisted and were fired, as were guitarist Casey Pollock and bassist Chris Schelske. Inspired by Steve Earle, the first Son Volt record and “Unshaven” by Billy Joe Shaver, they set out to pursue a more alternative country sound.Īs younger brothers Gary and Micky stayed on with their father’s band, Cody and Willy were recruited to join the Prairie Mutts, a new country rock outfit from Bend, Ore. “They’ve been professionals from a young age,” Muzzie said of his sons who lived in mountain seclusion for about seven months a year and toured from Montana to California the other five months.īecause they were home-schooled by their mother, Cody and Willy got their GEDs at age 16 and moved away from home in 1995. “I think one of the main things I passed onto my sons is that you’ve got to play sometimes when you don’t feel like it,” Muzzie Braun said from the Clayton, Idaho, bed-and-breakfast he and wife JoAnn built in 2000 with their sons (who each have a guest room named after them.) The White Cloud Mountain Inn is just a mile up Slate Creek from the primitive house the Brauns rented for 24 years, less as a lifestyle choice than a necessity in the beginning, when the young couple with a baby on the way couldn’t find anyplace else in the area. L-r Micky, Gary, Willy and Cody Braun in 2006. “I hit the million mile mark at 17 years old/ Never saw a rainbow, much less a pot of gold.” Later on they get everyone on their feet with a boisterous hayride version of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Reckless Kelly eats the miles and motels like cherry pie. “My first love was a twisted, wicked road,” Willy sings early in the set.
But when the band hits the stage, they lock in tight and the 50 or so in attendance perk up. Mama said there would be nights like this. “Should have been here for penny beer night – the place was packed,” adds Willy. Reckless Kelly has never played here before, and it’s a Tuesday night, so walking to the back entrance of the sparsely populated venue, the members mimic the club owner excuses they’ve heard for 10 years: “We need to get you back when the students are in town,” says guitarist David Abeyta. Tonight’s gig is in Park City at Suede, a former dance club gone jam-band haven. You’ve got to believe in your music or the road just doesn’t make sense, Willy says, as the band’s tour bus idles loudly, expensively, in the parking lot of a strip mall in Utah. It’s fun, dragging your sound all over the country, but it’s also a lot of work and often frustrating. Their blue-collar country rock is made for the barrooms, where such songs as “Break My Heart Tonight” by Reckless and “Careless” by the Motorcars intensify with each liquored whelp. Out on the road, away from sweet home Austin, is where bands like these make their bones. Twenty-four years later, that shot on the biggest national stage seems even more removed from the real world, as Cody and Willy hit the highways hard and heavy with their Austin-based band Reckless Kelly, while younger brothers Gary and Micky are usually off in the other direction, carving up a following for Micky and the Motorcars. “We were a lot more nervous the second time,” recalls fiddle player Cody, now 36. Muzzie and the Little Braun Boys, all decked out in Stetson hats and matching Western shirts, so charmed the national audience with their old songs of the New West that Johnny Carson had them back a few months later. The band’s lead singer was father Muzzie Braun, himself a member of an all-brother band when he was growing up in Idaho.
Raised in a remote frame house without electricity or running water in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, Micky, Gary, Willy and Cody Braun had never heard of “The Tonight Show” until they appeared on it in 1989.
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