“I was the ignorant one to trust him,” Klein says. “You take a wild bull, they might hurt you, but a pet bull will kill you. They have no fear. My dad almost got killed by a Jersey bull that was a pet.”
Lovett’s leg was broken in so many places that it couldn’t be set; it had to be pinned together. He performed his next tour sitting down, and was fortunate not to have been crippled. He doesn’t much like talking about the bull—he doesn’t especially enjoy answering questions at all—and sometimes, to deflect people who ask how he broke his leg, he shrugs and says mildly, “Just walking around.”
Lovett is tall and thin. His shoulders are narrow. He has long, ropy arms and broad hands. There are pleats in his cheeks, and wavy lines across his forehead. His eyes are pale blue. Their expression is intelligent and measuring to the point of guardedness. His ears are large and his nose is large and his eyes are small and close together, but they are arranged in such a fashion that his face has the solemn and handsome dignity of a workingman of the thirties, a farmer who hears the sound of your tractor stalling in the field and shows up to help you get it started.
For most of his career, his persona has been ambiguous. Billy Williams, his producer, says, “Lyle mistakenly sees himself as an ordinary human being.” Bonnie Raitt, with whom he made his first big tour, in 1986, following her bus in his pickup, regarded the way he looked—the skinny-legged suits, the hair rising like a bloom—as exotic. “He was always very sartorially astute,” she says. A Texas musician in Nashville who met Lovett before he was famous once told a reporter, “I took one look at him and pegged him for a French blues singer.” Lovett is not a demonstrative person. Raitt describes his temperament admiringly as “a banked fire.” Many women find him deeply attractive. Raitt also told me that sometimes when she and Lovett perform together and he looks over at her, she feels her “knees buckle.”
Lovett is smarter than most people he meets, but he conceals it. He has something of the typical country musician’s attitude that one must never affect to have risen above one’s beginnings. He is very polite, but his manners can conceal disdain. His habits of mind are meticulous, and he says he has difficulty doing anything casually. His sympathies are mostly charitable—he says that when he writes a song he imagines that he wouldn’t mind meeting anyone who liked it—but he is also prone to judging people harshly on little evidence and holding his opinions steadfastly.
Occasionally, Lovett dresses like the celebrated person he is—Prada and Armani send him clothes to wear onstage—but he nearly always wears cowboy boots. Lovett’s boots are made by a man in Austin named Lee Miller. One morning last summer, Lovett stopped by Miller’s to order a new pair.
Miller is in his late forties. His parents had a department store in Rutland, Vermont. “I hung out in the shoe department,” he told me. “I was fascinated by footwear.” He went to a bootmaking college in Oklahoma. Each year, an old bootmaker in Austin named Charlie Dunn hired the student who graduated first in the class. Miller went to work for Dunn, who was in the habit of driving off his employees. Miller grew accustomed to being fired, then arriving home and having Dunn call and hire him back. “He was from the old days,” Miller says, “when you said it like it was, then regretted it later.” Dunn died in 1993—he was ninety-five—and Miller took over the business. While Miller told me this story, Lovett and Miller’s wife, Carrlyn, discussed Lovett’s new boots. They decided they would be two-piece boots—that is, made from two pieces of leather, instead of four. “I love two-piece,” Carrlyn said. “They feel like you’re wearing socks with soles and heels.”
On a counter in the workshop were two boot tops stretched out flat. They were black, with red hearts and yellow arrows and white guitars embedded in them, and, in white letters, the name “Lucky Bill.” They had been attached to one of the few pairs of boots ever returned to Miller. “Lucky Bill’s a guy from someplace out West,” Lovett said, “and he was not happy with how they turned out. He took them to a bootmaker in Las Vegas or Reno, and made a videotape of the guy criticizing all the flaws—or what he regarded as flaws—and he sent the tape back to Lee with the boots.”
“He said the arrows were too dark, and the guitars couldn’t be read from the stage,” Miller said. “He’s a night-club singer, I guess, and he wore them for his act.”
“Two years ago, I walked into the shop and saw them and thought they were great, and I wore them for two weeks, even though they were too big for me,” Lovett said. “I walked around the Austin airport and everyone came up to me and asked me about the boots. I was going to make a videotape of them talking about all the things they liked and send it to Lucky Bill.”
“Instead, he’s writing a song about Unlucky Bill, who lost his boots in a card game,” Miller said. He told Lovett that he hoped to have the new boots ready in a few months. He unrolled several alligator hides he thought might be right for them, and then Lovett bought some shoe trees.
