5 things you might not know about Lyle Lovett

How much do you know about Lyle Lovett?

The Texas singer-songwriter is taping "Austin City Limits" with his Large Band on Wednesday at ACL Live and will play ticketed shows at the same venue on Thursday and Friday. Before he left for an extensive summer tour, I spent a couple of hours talking to him about his career over lunch at Julio's Cafe in Hyde Park.

Surprises kept popping up during our conversation, which was peppered with remarkable details. It’s rare for an artist to recall as many specific events, timelines and characters as Lovett does with ease. He remembers experiences from 40-plus years ago as if they happened yesterday. Here are a few things I learned:

Your Bryan City Council reporter

I was aware Lovett had written about many of his Texas-songwriter mentors for Texas A&M’s student newspaper, The Battalion, when Lovett attended the university in the mid-late 1980s. (No Depression magazine reprinted his 1979 articles on Steve Fromholz, Eric Taylor, Michael Murphey and Willis Alan Ramsey in 1998.) But I didn’t know that his main beat for The Battalion was covering the Bryan City Council.

“For a year and a half, I went to every City Council meeting in Bryan,” he says. “It was fascinating to see how heated the debate was over, you know, one curb cut or two for the new Exxon station, that sort of thing.”

Before 'The Front Porch Song,' there were the Front Porch Boys

I knew Lovett and Robert Earl Keen had met as students at Texas A&M, and that they co-wrote “The Front Porch Song,” which appeared on both songwriters’ debut albums in strikingly different versions. (Keen’s is basically a folk-ramble; Lovett’s is more melancholy.) But I didn’t know that Keen’s first band was called the Front Porch Boys, and that it was Lovett who named them.

Lovett used to park his car near the house where Keen and his roommates often jammed on their front porch, and he'd see them as he walked to class. "Finally I walked over and listened, stood in the yard and introduced myself," Lovett recalls. "The first thing I asked him was, 'Hey, would you have any interest in coming to play the Basement Coffeehouse?'" Lovett had recently started booking the campus music venue.

"And Robert said, 'No, we just play here. We don't even have a name.' I said, 'Well, it looks to me like you would be the Front Porch Boys.' And that's what they became. So I was really proud of that.”

More for subscribers:Robert Earl Keen's last show is coming, but the encore's already on

Does anybody remember Kiwi (the band)? Lyle does

I knew Lovett had been friends with Nanci Griffith and that they supported each other as rising young talents in the 1970s and ’80s. Indeed, Lovett’s first appearance on the “Austin City Limits” stage was as a backing vocalist for Griffith’s 1985 debut on the show. But I didn’t know he’d had similarly significant ties to the mid-1970s Austin band Kiwi, a now largely forgotten group that appeared on the second season of “Austin City Limits.”

Lovett booked the trio at A&M's Basement Coffeehouse, and in return they invited him to open shows for them in Austin. “Kiwi let me sleep on their foam mattress on the floor for two years every time I came to Austin,” he says. “That was important.”

Lovett's first encounter with Guy Clark

I knew that legendary Texas songwriter Guy Clark had helped connect Lovett with recording industry executive Tony Brown in the mid-1980s, a key step in Lovett getting a record deal. But I didn’t know they’d encountered each other at the Kerrville Folk Festival in 1980, when Lovett was a finalist in the fest’s New Folk contest and Clark was one of the judges. They didn’t meet that day; Lovett says he’s not sure if Clark, who died in 2016, remembered he had first heard Lovett’s songs at Kerrville.

More:Austin remembers Guy Clark as one of the best-ever Texas songwriters

“The judges were Bob Gibson, Allen Damron and Guy. None of this is important to me,” Lovett deadpans, then finally laughs. “I’m just kidding. I mean, it's really important.” Lovett didn’t win the contest. “After that, I would joke onstage that I went home and put all my Guy Clark records in the oven.” He assures, after another chuckle, that “of course I didn't do that.”

He got his start at … Mr. Gatti's?

My favorite revelation involved Mr. Gatti’s, the Texas-based pizza chain that started in Stephenville in 1964 and was flourishing in Central Texas by the mid-1970s. Austin had several Mr. Gatti’s locations back then, but it was not known as a live music hotspot. The one in College Station near the A&M campus, however, booked musicians.

“I played two years straight at Mr. Gatti’s in College Station,” he says. “They had a few performers that they rotated, but I had at least two nights a week.” He then went into some detail about the pizza joint’s assistant manager, Pete Bassett, who went on to help launch Rudy’s BBQ.

For subscribers:Read much more from my conversation with Lyle Lovett

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Five things you may not have known about Texas troubadour Lyle Lovett