How the sad boy became the wise rock star.
Rhett Miller was 14 when he swallowed a handful of pills and washed them down with lighter fluid. The pills lived in a medicine cabinet, unusually robust because his mother worked for a psychiatrist, and the lighter fluid had the kind of casual skull-and-crossbones toxicity you could find in a house in 1984, the year our story begins but his almost ended.
But 14 brought a breaking point. His parents, his girlfriend, love curdled into loss. Many years later he would write athat more or less summed up his entire catalog. “I’m gonna sing this song forever about a girl that I once knew, and how she is always leaving. This is what I do.”” were rooms you could escape into like a novel, a universe written in verse and sound that reminded listeners they could be whatever they wanted — and Rhett Miller wanted to be an artist.
He played up to four gigs a week. Arcadia on Lower Greenville, the Prophet Bar over Theater Gallery in Deep Ellum. One summer, he lived in the Mitchell Building, an artist warehouse down by Fair Park. His first manager lived there, and one night Rhett fell asleep on the concrete floor of the guy’s pad. He woke up to find the guy’s hand down his pants, and the first words out of Rhett’s mouth were, “You’re fired.
In fall 1992, a guy from Tyler was playing the accordion on the porch of the apartments. Ken Bethea was an East Texas kid who had gone to the University of North Texas and bitten into the apple that was the Denton alt-music scene. He had a lame job in the defense industry, but he played banjo and guitar, and a guy named Robert Jenkins in the apartments told him he had to meet his buddy Rhett. Jenkins was the unseen actor in the Old 97′s formation, another artsy oddball from St.
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