Ever since Bobby Bare Jr. began his recording career a decade-and-a-half ago with his band Bare Jr., the contrast between his work and his dad's has been a readymade journalistic angle: folksong-loving country crooner begets warped alt-rocker. The former went into the Country Music Hall of Fame last year; the latter is the subject of a documentary on the doggedness required of a working, indie-scene veteran well into his 40s.
There was a time when Bobby Bare and Bobby Bare Jr. kept their performing lives entirely separate. Back in 1998, Bare Sr. told a journalist that he couldn't see a Bare-and-Bare concert bill working for him and his progeny, what with Junior drawing rock-club crowds that would probably be indifferent to an old-school mellow country hitmaker. That and Junior's band cranked their amps to levels guaranteed to clear rooms filled with Senior's silver-haired fans.
Today, talking to the Scene via conference call, father and son are putting on a charming two-man show from opposite sides of the country — the younger Bare speaking from a tour stop in Seattle, the elder breaking in from a fishing trip at a lake near Muscle Shoals.
"You can't believe how pretty it is sitting out here in this boat," says Senior. "Bobby, I just caught about a four-pound largemouth [bass]."
"Go-lly!" Junior responds.
This is a warm-up act of sorts for the father-son duo's upcoming City Winery gig. Like the show the Bares put on at The Bluebird in February, it'll be a guitar pull — just the two of them up there with their guitars, their repertoire and their rapport.
"We make a good comedy duo," says Junior. "The problem is that I notice halfway through it that he's playing hit after hit. I don't have any hits, and it's not fair. It's just not fair."
He's kidding, of course. If the commercial success his dad enjoyed from the Countrypolitan '60s through the Outlaw '70s really and truly makes him feel inadequate, he wouldn't have recorded his dad's first chart hit, "Shame on Me," for a 7-inch Fat Possum put out early this year.
The Bares first attempted a variation on the co-bill idea in the mid-Aughts, after Junior tapped Lambchop alums Mark Nevers, Tony Crow and William Tyler and produced The Moon Is Blue, his father's first solo studio album to have its initial release on CD.
"Then it was a matter of I knew that the people in my audience would totally get what Dad did," Bare Jr. recalls. "So we did three shows in cities where I had a really good audience already. And those shows were kinda like Dad would use my band and he'd do an hour, then we'd take a break, and then I'd come out with my band. His older audience could leave and not have to listen to the hard stuff."
By now, in Bare Sr.'s words, "Everybody knows that Bobby Jr. is definitely not riding on his daddy's coattails."
But not everybody realizes that these two have one of the more genially compatible parent-offspring musical relationships in town. It had an auspicious beginning in their sweet, Shel Silverstein-penned 1973 duet "Daddy What If," but much of what they've done together since has been less visible — like Junior selling T-shirts on Senior's tour, each of them contributing backing vocals to the other's projects and the occasional co-write. Then there's The Moon Is Blue and the Silverstein tribute album they co-produced a few years ago.
"I think about how lucky I am that my dad's totally awesome," says Junior. "There's a lot of people I know whose dads are jerks — real jerks."
"Most fathers take themselves very seriously," Senior points out. "But I don't."
What Bare Sr. takes most seriously, next to fishing, is the art and craft of songwriting. He's dabbled in it fairly infrequently, but he used to surround himself with writerly buddies like Kris Kristofferson, Hank Cochran and Tom T. Hall, and now champions the spiny sincerity of his son's compositions.
"Bobby's a good songwriter," Senior says. "The fact is, probably with what he's doing, he allows himself more freedom to write than I do."
Bare Jr's latest album, Undefeated, wallows in heartache at the losing end of love, and does so with absolutely devastating wit and exacting whimsy. Does dad ever worry that son will take unfiltered expression too far?
"Not at all," says Senior. "As a matter of fact, all the way through when he decided he was gonna be a songwriter and a singer, that's the one thing I said: 'Don't be afraid to put it out there.' "
Since Senior has such faith in his son's songs, Junior can't resist asking why he doesn't record them himself.
"You're not pitchin'," Senior deadpans.
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