Bryan Martin

Eric Girouard  0:00  This is Bucket, a weekly podcast for people who work in the trades and construction that aren't just trying to survive, but have the ambition and desire to thrive. The opportunity in the trades and construction is absolutely ridiculous right now. So if you're hungry, it's time to eat. We discuss what it takes to rise from the bottom to the top with people who are well on their way and roll up their sleeves every single day.

Jeremy Perkins  0:28  On this episode of Bucket talk, we're here with Bryan Martin. Bryan Martin comes right out of the oil fields, and he's gonna teach us all about his day in the life as a roughneck. Bryan, welcome Hey,

Bryan Martin  0:40  man, thank y'all for having me. Man, I've been been rocking these, these cowboys here, you know, for a little while now, they're comfortable. I love them, dude.

Jeremy Perkins  0:51  Hell yeah, hell yeah. No, I appreciate it. Um, reason I had you on today. I mean, obviously your, your your music is phenomenal. You've, you've managed to make a steak for yourself out in the country music world and and congrats on that. But a lot of people don't know about your story. You got blue collar roots. You are oil oil rig, oil field by trade, and I haven't had an opportunity to to interview somebody from the oil field, so I'd love to learn more about you. So let's go as far back as you can remember, and how you got into it, and some of the trials and tribulations you went through.

Bryan Martin  1:29  Man, when I first, when I first, when I was in high school, you know, I was, I was out there working in hay fields and all that stuff. And, you know, I've been working my whole life, my whole life, since I was 1213, years old, and before that, with daddy out in the yard, hanging motors up in trees. And, you know, I just think that that was one of those deals where I didn't have a choice to work. But in 10th grade, I realized they was going to play football no more because I was too old. I didn't fail that the time I tried to homeschool and, you know, work around the house. I failed. So when I wasn't gonna play football, I just went ahead and on my 18th birthday, and I I was on an orientation for a drilling rig company called Patterson. You know, you know Patterson, who's out there, my uncle told me. He said, You gotta tell him. You got six months experience saying, Oh, hi. He said that, you know, he's driller on the other side. And I said, I'll tell him. I got six months experience, but I ain't never seen a rig. I don't know nothing about it. He goes, Well, it's easy. You just don't go put a key in a B door on you. You get a friend, you work ass off like you do. Air works. So I went my orientation. I got there, and sure enough, I was going on, you know, one of the only ones up there on Greek, on the Greek Lord, had six months experience. And they found out real quick that I didn't have six months experience. And I was like, Oh, they don't hire nobody with that. You know that six months here I am. So I learned how to throw a chain pretty quick whenever I got called out on that. And so I started out learning how to throw a spinning chain on on Patterson rig 94 shout out to them boys. They sit out there grinding it out. Old Rutherford, my buddy Charles Rutherford, the one I did electric work with forever his his brother Roger Rutherford is who I broke out in oilfield with. And you know, he's my tool pusher. And he called me out quick, man. He said, You ain't no roughneck. He said, But you going to be and so that's where I started, was learning the hard way not to not say you don't know something if you don't, because that'll get you gotta get you killed out there, man. And you know, but then boys took me in. They taught me, right? We grinded it out. We became brothers. Over the years, everything I've been through, I've been with a lot of different companies, a lot of different rigs, but, you know, Patterson was who I broke out with. We went on. I moved on to work with gray wolf. I did the whole kid chasing a quarter thing. And then I decided, after I'd been working in the orphan about a year, that I was going to go to the army myself and get away from some of the drugs that was was going on still back in in the old school, you know. And I said, I'm going to go move in army, and I'm going to get myself clean, which is not a good rehab center, you know, go over there, you know, take one right before you get on the plane, you know, to get over there to boot camp for Fort Bend, Georgia. It's not a good place to start. But I learned, I learned real quick that I wasn't broken yet, and I wasn't as tough as I thought I was, you know. And so when I got over there, a lot of things are, were breaking me, man, I had been addicted for a little while to just about anything, you know, just trying to, you know, overcome the circumstances around my family and not my dad, my mom. But I was always trying to put myself as a buffer zone between everybody else. You know, I had, I lost my uncle. I. To addiction and everything. And so I was out there, and I learned quick that, you know, can't, can't come faking nothing, you ain't, and recruiters ain't always going to put everything down, and then they're going to want you to leave and come back in six months and restart. And you don't, you're almost done with all stuff, and you're getting everything done. And the best thing to do is just say, Okay, I'll be back in six months. Is it? Worst thing to do is to go, I ain't going no damn and to fight authority, because I learned quick that that only makes it rough. And it did, man, it made it rough on me. I didn't want to go home. There's reason why I was there. I want to do something good in my life. I knew I didn't. I knew I didn't have a real purpose back home. I didn't think, you know, well, after some things I can't, you know, describe, you know, had been going on in my mind and in the process of becoming a man, I went home, and after one failed suicide attempt, after coming home, I wrote the first song, and then I went to work on a rig again. And I worked there for 15 years, back, back on those rigs. And from there, I went from neighbors to, I think the longest I was with anybody was was HMP, and I was with them for on and off eight years. And we went to different I worked on probably seven or eight different rigs with those guys. And just my family man, I call HMP my family, but every person I've ever crossed in the whole field is my family. And just that

Jeremy Perkins  6:40  sounds good, yeah, and that's what I was gonna say. I mean, it felt like, obviously, you were going through a lot of stuff, and, and, and some a real rough point in your life. But what, what kind of stuck out to me was you said, you quickly said, I went back to the oil fields. And, you know, for me, you know, being in the shop or or being on a ship or whatever, there was the camaraderie. There was a camaraderie. There's a brothers that are going through the same shit as you're you're going through and and it was home, you know what? I mean, it was home. And it was, it was good to hear you say that. And thank you. You know, did you Was it hard going back and being part of that shit again, or did you just

Bryan Martin  7:27  now overcome that separate actually, it was the easiest transition I've ever made in my life. Yeah, but I mean, it's still hard work, man, but I ain't gonna lie to you, mentally, I was out. I swing a hammer, I hit, I run a hose, I hook up a line, I check, I listen to a motor, I check the oil. I Okay, this is easy. You know, there's a lot easier than, you know, that mental, that mental warfare, I was going through, you know, so, but, you know, I think that's the thing was, is my mental warfare has always been, I've never, I've never been ran off. I've never been, you know, to where I want quit a job, just to quit a job, and I never want to quit anything I start. So the whole mentality of, well, I'm you come back six months. We just gotta get you got saved tinnitus waiver, because there was something left out in your paperwork. We're gonna take a month to your payout. Payaway, though, because you, you know, it was left out in your paperwork for childhood asthma, you know, go ahead and get it out there. And I said, that's been gone, man. I said, We good, see, I'll wait here six months. When paper comes back up, I'll be right here for you sign that didn't work like that, you know. So, so I didn't want to go home, is all I want to do. And I didn't want and if I was going to lose my ranking, I would rather just been there and just kept on going, you know? But, yeah, it was something about the fact that this didn't want to go on and and that's the way it's been ever since, like, when I get a job, I get to a certain level on anywhere I didn't look to the oil field to fall out, because that's one thing you know about the oil field. Oil Field goes up, the oil field goes down. And it's a Becky, it's a beckon, order, man. And so many times you go, you get it work hard to get to a position. And if somebody above you just got a position. They got to take the same step back that you do. You just don't understand it sometimes. And when, when they're moving things around, they're trying to make it work, to keep a rig going, it's hard, because you feel like you're never going to spot you want to. And then sometimes you just get scared, and you say, I'm going to move over and chase another dollar on another company, you know, because they're at least telling me that, come on, come on as the you know what I've been trying to be. And it hurts, man, because you leave family every time you go trying to do that. And I've learned so much by working and building that brotherhood with people to know that we're all out here. We're all going to grab we're all going to come to. Ian sometimes and but we're here together. And if we're, if we're going through this together, we're not alone. And I think that that's something that people don't realize. It is rare to have a field where, like, this right here, a lot of people can't relate to you when you go talking to them about, you know, music, you know, it's like, oh yeah. So hard, man, stuff on you in it is killing you in it. And you go, you go, No, it kill me, man. But you know, it is lonely. But when you out there on the rig, you write songs with your brothers back you sitting on the back of a tailgate. Had to work looking at that rig turn and going, boys open. Hope that relief actually works from that, because I'm cracking open a cold and talking about relief, talking about pointing that look at it. You just moping over eating sandwich by the damn horse head.

Jeremy Perkins  10:54  So when you got on the oil rig early on, you said, you said you said you had six months experience, but you didn't, yeah,

Bryan Martin  11:04  I got six months and eight hours. What

Jeremy Perkins  11:08  was your first job? So now, now I've seen, I've seen and I've heard, you know, I got family out in Odessa and and that area. But it was kind of funny, because the real immersion I got with oil fields came from that show black gold, and that's my only experience with with anything in the drill rigs or anything like that. So it's kind of funny, because it's like, is it true? Are you out there whipping chain? Are you out there tripping pipe? Like, what's your first job out there? How do you, what's the hierarchy? How do you, I mean, are they 16 hour days? Like, is it what it is? It's

Bryan Martin  11:49  exactly what it is, man. And you know, the thing about that, that TV show is, uh, I worked out. I was working in East Texas, in Haynesville, shale, when I first started out in in Louisiana, sometimes and and when I went to West Texas, I could tell you right now, it's a, it's exactly like that show, you know, they might add some drama, you know, at the bar afterwards, but the work is where the work is where it is on the show. They didn't. They didn't. That's about the realest show I've ever seen it put on TV. They might edit it out a couple of things here and there, you know. But as far as like them, getting hit with them, chains and tones, playing around, knocking you out, you know, everything's that's all real. I've been tight, man, I've been I've had a loop catch me up when I was trying to make a hand and I'd say, I work both sets of tongue. We know. It is like you get out there and drillers over there, and you're trying and you're trying to, just as a kid, you're trying to impress that drill. I'm worried. I'm just, like, on the show, man. Just like that little mag, that little short orange heart headed dude they talked about all the time. That's me. I was that little short dude out there trying to just make them talk about man. I'm, no, I'm, but I got, you know, that's where the I still got forearms that they can't beat. An arm rise of nowhere, I promise you, but, but I ain't work. It ain't working two years, but, but, you know, it's one thing that you don't you hold, you hold a drill pipe like this, long enough to where you got that, that crook in your arm, and you're sitting there holding that drill pipe, waiting on the elevators for all the muse, you learn that if you drop it, you're gonna get your ass made fun of. First of all, you're probably gonna get say, they're gonna say, we're gonna run your ass off. You drop another and they're gonna make you think they will. It's the same thing as Is there anything else, but it's like you learn mentality of, I have to do this right, because not only my job depends on, but the people around me does. And the people around me life depends on. And when I started out working, I I started out trying to learn how to throw a spinning chain, because I told him I had six months experience. So I said on a mouthful, stump during in the middle of connections learning how to throw a chain. Because I was a chain hand, I broke out of chain hand, and I wouldn't the best, but at the end of that week, I was a guy, Ian Shambo with me, son, best chain hander, work faces, Earth you, I bet, I bet you. There's people over and overseas trying to throw a chain like me, that's real tough.

Jeremy Perkins  14:32  No, that's and that's wild, but like that, realistically, realistically. I know there's some Superman out there. I know there's some guys that have been out in the fields for, for a long time, but, but what's the lifespan of somebody on the deck? Right? What's what? How long can you work the deck before it's time to go into management, or or, or go inside to the I don't even know what that's called. When you're in, yeah,

Bryan Martin  14:57  toe, push your toe, push yours in. Uh, and company man, you know that company, you know they're out there, you know they're working with the with the gas company, you know, that's where you're trying to get to. And everybody's up and all the company men after telling you, yeah, well, first you got to make set of thumbs so you can make a hand. And, you know, if you want to sit out there, on, on that, in that, in that house, you got to know what I know you you ain't gonna know it until you put it in. And so, like that's in a tool pusher. He'll sit there, as long as you don't call him after his bedtime to tell him that you need a crescent wrench. You know, wake him up. Make him wake up in his in his time off, which he's been off all day. I'm just picking out. I'm digging on too, but, but, uh, and then you got the drillers and Derrick hands, forehands and motor hands, and, you know, they're all part of the crew. And sometimes, even on some of these, they got shaker hands. I have never been blessed to have a shaker hand.

Jeremy Perkins  15:58  What's a shaker hand?

Bryan Martin  15:58  So I, if you work on a five man crew, you got, you got a forehand, a Derek can, a motor man, a driller, and then you have a shaker hand. So you got all these things and lead Tong. So you got two, two roughnecks, two, four hands. You got a motor man, a Derek can, a driller. And saying, so that's what at the five man crew, if you work on a six man crew, you got shaker hand. So Derek can when he's up, when he's when he's pulling back pipe, he's got to be up on the derrick. Everybody else is on the floor, yeah? He's

Jeremy Perkins  16:37  100 feet up in the air, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bryan Martin  16:39  You got Derek cans, pulling slips, throwing tongs, motor man is usually up there helping them if they're not eating the sandwich by the most. And then he'll come up here and he'll help them rack back, pop if they tripping out of the hole and stuff like that. And you know, these upper just kind of making sure everything's going smooth. Derrick can he's up there to himself, just hollering down at the end, bitching by how slow they move. You know, drillers, drillers in there, hollering about how the Derek can ain't matching them fast enough. So it's just a it's a camaraderie. Deal with man that's five man crew when you come down a Derek a Derek can, has so many things to do. A motor man has so many things to do. Derek can has to go down on the pits, keep his mud right. He's got to mix his mud. He's got to send his sweeps. He's got to make sure that the mud stays heavy enough to keep the gas where it needs to be, not on the surface. You know. He's also got to keep the shakers clean. Change the shaker screens, because, you know, if you change, if you ever seen a set of shakers, like a mud shakers, or anything like that. So, like, you got them shakers and little screens, man, you got them rocks and that shield coming across there. Yeah, if it cuts one big old hole in it before you know it, your mud weight and everything gets messed up. You got all them solids in your tank. So you got to be back before checked in your mud pumps. You got to listen to them make sure they ain't no swabs about to blow, which is every five minutes. But, you know, I worked on gardener dinner for the longest not, and I can't get nothing bad to really say about the ones I worked on. But I'll tell you this, it's hard to be five places in one time, especially, you know, but that, but I know this, that you know, same thing with forehand floor hands got to be out there rigging up lines and making sure that everything's rigged up on the rig. It's like when you move a drilling rig, everything's got to be set up to be functionable, to be in operation. Then floor hand floor hand job is to go around behind that motor man and make sure that everything is tidied up, taken care of, you know, OSHA approved, ready to go. So it's a non stop process. By the time you get done drilling the Well, you got it right, right, ready to drill it, you know. So it's like, and you don't, you don't ever, back in the day, we never clean hand, really. We're just playing over, you know. But on these new rigs, man, you just got to be always on point. And it's all this technology stuff going on. It's a it's a deal of not getting complacent, I think the most, because everything out there key. So like you fall on a on a rig anywhere, you know you could die if you, if you have a joint bike come off of that catwalk and slinging into a rotating, you know, head or a rotary table. No kidding, Derek came down there playing on his phone or not mixing the mud, right? And with that kit, you know, it's just so many things you got to be responsible for, and that's the one thing I learned the most was I don't want my next position. I don't want my next raise until the person behind me at least knows what I know or better. And and that's hard thing to be, man, because you want that next position, you need the money. You got babies on the way. Yeah, you want that raise. And some people are hard. You. Hit it, and they don't want they don't they don't learn as fast. But you cannot rush the project. You can't rush the process of the guy that's behind you to get your raise and take and take a chance of risking his life, you know. And so that's one thing you learn in there, is that camaraderie, that brothership, whether you pissed off and mad at him because they don't listen to how hard hitting all this you were that same about eight years ago or five years ago, or whatever you got to relate to that. And no matter how you see it, most of the people you get mad at the most, you don't want to talk to at the work, they're probably the same something that you you were to deal with and at one time. And I think that's, that's the best thing I've learned in working is, you know, go out there, make sure you do your jobs. Motorman is out there checking on all the pump, I mean, the motors and the gens, and keeping everything running, making sure the cold start battery's got a fresh battery on it in the winter time, because if that rig goes down, it blacks out and battery's dead. You got you go look up the tool pusher trying to jump off the damn cold start. You know you're gonna like you had that done. But you know, we got things running $50,000 a day, and the company man's gonna run us off. They're gonna hire another company out here. You always gotta treat that iron like that. That iron is your iron, because if you don't treat it like it's your iron and you're earning a paycheck on it, and if you don't treat it like it's yours and just look like at it like now I want to be here. I don't care if that thing burns ground. I just want to go home. I mean, I hope something happens where we can shut down for a while. If you do that, sure enough, you know, eventually you'll learn if that iron is running right. Your family's running right. If I, if I had, Ian is doing good. Your brother's doing good, you know.

Jeremy Perkins  21:47  Now, now that's actually, that's an interesting point. Now I get it, you know, obviously you gotta make it your own and everything. But if you guys shut down, you still get paid or no, oh,

Bryan Martin  21:58  I mean, yeah, until the company runs us off covid, shut down. Celine, you know, Yeah, cuz you think about it, h 2s in the West Texas, like we I remember all time I could be walking up around the rig if he was working night shift. Man, you better be just ready to go walk up for an AC us long go off somewhere, and the boys just got off to go drink a beer. Now they're having to sit on that side of a instead of sleeping in that bed they want to go get in after their hits. They're all having to sit over on pipe racks and wait on east to west services to get there and evaluate it and clear it the site and all that stuff actually got old, but, you know, a lot of hands it was on, on on ship when we saw that. We're like, Shut up, man, dude, don't give a beer and come back to the pipe rack and just hang out with us. We're just hanging out. We're getting paid. And we learned real quick that, you know, that's an aggravating thing to do, but you don't want to work with Cascade trailer out there, fully suited and with masks on, trying to do the same job you're doing without it. So you know, as far as it seems when you shut down, they're finding a way to make you work through it, whether you know it or not. And when you you're when you have to work a whole shift, when you know when the mask on, all that PPE on, man, you'll be like, Damn I'm gonna go over and clog my damn HDS mind. I don't want to do that again, but now. But that's the thing. Man, is, it's it's a non stop process, 1214, sometimes 16 hours a day. There's a lot of times that a relief will get drunk don't show up. Or some of them just drag up. They can't take and if they don't show up, that driller go, hey bud, your driller just lay up. And my hand didn't show up. Mind staying up there and helping me out for a little while, I'll make it up for you. And I go, Yeah, man, it's running in the hole. There's 10 times I've worked 48 hours, you know, safely. Yeah, safely, guys, for anyone after Yeah, you know, not drug induced, just very, very much. No monster, energy drinks or nothing, either, just, just safely, okay, whatever y'all want to hear, whatever y'all want to hear. On that side, I don't care what they want to hear. You can't hang over there no more. But I think that it's, it's the one thing I'll tell you is we've had to work through it, and we know all. We all know bullshit side, that 2am mindset has to come and play at all times. If somebody you know, if you're you think about 2am mindset is, I always work like somebody saying over your shoulder where they are not, and always. Because if you get that 2am mindset of going to. Somebody's, somebody's not here, and I got to make sure this gets done, right? But I really want to kind of fuck off, because nobody here, still ain't, you know, don't fuck off, because it'll come. It always gets up to you, like, No. And the one thing that I've learned is, is my daddy taught me how to be that guy that has that 2am mindset, because, hey, I can't pick up a wrench and put that something on. If I pick up a wrench and I'm walking towards something to work on, and my daddy spots me, I feel like sometimes, even now I'm 10 hours away, he would pop out of the bushes and say, How you going? Hey, what are you doing? Turn it the wrong way. I ain't even put it on nothing yet. You okay? But you know what I've learned, though, is you have to have be able to work under that kind of person, especially in oil fields. I've been called a motherfucker more times. I've been calling my name. And I'm proud, and I'm proud of it. It made me what I am. And yeah, I would. I wish some people still had that skin that I'd have, and I wish, I think some people around me wish they did too, you know. But it's, you know, but I think it's, it's something that there's something in that that that gives you that work ethic that we have, that gets done instead of sitting around bitching and moaning about something,

Jeremy Perkins  26:21  there you go. There you go. So oil fields 15 years plus. How long you been out there?

Bryan Martin  26:27  Man, I'm like, I said, 18th birthday, all the way up until, well, I think, I think it's two and a half years ago, something like that. No shot, no two and a half. Two and two and a half years ago, I went full time music, but I was always doing oil field, and on my days off, I do electric work, because my dad was electrician. He was really electrician for H and P. I got him his job over and he's 40 years last electrician. And he didn't, he would never help me get into the electrical field, because he said, You ain't got sense to be out there working on all that electricity stuff, and I ain't gonna be the one that puts you out there and you get killed. So you just gotta learn that on your own. That's okay. So on my days off, I'd work for another company, our electric captain, walking in Texas on my days off, doing electric work, five, six days a week, and making, you know, minimum wage just starting out just to try to learn to trade, because if something happens, all oil and electricity ain't going nowhere. You know, if one go if one goes somewhere, the other one can't. If they both go somewhere, then we'll all be working candy cane. You know,

Jeremy Perkins  27:38  so well I have to ask, because it is part of your journey. But how'd you get your break?

Bryan Martin  27:49  Man, so about eight years ago, I want to say now I was in a I was in a tool pusher shack, or not? Yeah, about eight years, nine years ago, I was in tool pusher shack now singing this song called one hitch at a time. And because we always I wrote 3000 songs for our mates in Ashby, but most of them were about off it. Most of them was about oilfield and what we've been through being laid off and, you know, pipelining all that shit. And so I wrote a song called oilfield dad, and that song was my first big viral song. And Frank Fauci band, Frank Fauci band, reached out to us and was like, Hey, man, we'd like to have you record up there in Tennessee with us at quad studios, and we're gonna pay for Jason Parker. Chef. Jason Parker, he's offshore hand, and he's working for, uh, wood group out there. And he he was real good friends with Frank. And he said, I got you, man, don't worry about I'm gonna help you with that. I said, No, but I can't take no money to try to go record no song. And that's $1,700 it's gonna take me 10 years to pay you that so much back on the streaming and everything, and he goes, No, no, no, it's gonna be big, man. It's gonna be huge. Just trust me on and we went and done it, and thanks for for him. Shaking, shaking, shaking me out of that to go cut that song. Because to be honest with you, that song became something to me that I had to still sing every night. Everybody asked for it. There's old field hands still everywhere I go, and there's people that would have never heard that song because I had one line in there. It says, brings a tear to a rough next eye. And I said, I ain't putting that I ain't saying putting that song out. I was just, just for me and my babies. I'm just singing it to them. I said, I can't tell, yeah, I can't tell them hands. I cry every night like I don't cry, you know, I don't cry. There might be a tear, but it's like I was scared to death put that song out because of that line. And that just tells you how we brought up, man, and but, you know, and so that was the biggest first break, and seven years later, I'm still out. There in the cellar, and these old boys are, why ain't you been in Nashville? Why aren't you in on the boys? Why aren't you doing this? Why aren't you doing that? Some of them are like Hollywood over writing a song, you know, this, that and the other, you know. And that song wasn't really even that big, but it was big enough for the oilfield community to where I turned into this guy that everybody reached out to and he said, man, thank you for just relating to me. He says, I miss half the life to give more than I never had. It ain't easy being all feel bad, but you think about it, we're with these guys more than we are with our family. And yeah, if you're not happy or at least trying to make it work with the guys you're working with, it's gonna be miserable. And so you leave my book be trying to make something, you know, happy about it, or, you know, find some kind of joy in it, and whatever you're doing. And that might be even in the fucking getting caught a mother, you know, these guys might say you can't do something. And that's, that's what makes you get get happy the most when somebody tell you you can't, and then that, and that's what, that's what my mentality was. That's how I got my break on that was in 2019 oilfield, and everything fell out, and covid, I learned that I can't sit at the house. It's ain't my This ain't my bag. You know, I can't do this. I'm gonna go crazy, you know, two weeks on, two weeks off, and sometimes not, you know, longer than that, I can't sit at the house because my lady starts grappling too much after about a week, I got, she's dropping about what I ain't done there. And I got, I got a lot of things I got to do around here, and, you know, so I need to get back to work so I can at least tell these guys about how much my ladies grab from that new line at home, and we can grab about that place, but it's like, I can't. I went out there. I didn't have that and during covid, so I said, I'm gonna write some songs. Me and my lady want to go through a separation period for a little while. And, uh, mainly because, man, it was just tensions had just became so high because of that. I think a lot of people probably went through that man sitting at the house and not feeling like you're good enough for your family, not doing enough for your family, and not want to draw welfare check, never having to draw well for that chick, and, uh, refusing to draw well for a check. You know, I'll go flip a damn burger. I ain't drawing that chick, you know. But I said I went and did anything I could to get away from home and writing songs, doing everything. And I split up with her. I cut a TV off, and I cut a radio off, and I wrote 800 songs a year in a camp, you know, and all the songs you hear now that are, you know, the big ones that I've written, and everything else, all those songs came from that camp, and one of them was really in the struggle, which was something that I wrote for her back when I first met her, you know, I told her, I said, Hey, I just need you to stay with me. I'm gonna overcome this. I'm overcome that. I'm gonna get off of this. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna quit that drug. I'm gonna probably drink two bottles of not cool a day, but I'm gonna be alright, you know, I'm gonna do this, and I'm gonna replace it with that, the whole typical addict coming off of drugs, and the whole typical self destructed. It feels like he's gotta be miserable to do anything, and I put them through that at the same time. I know that that's that's on me, but without that, progress gonna happen. Man, it's like, you know, I think a lot of people need to realize that a lot of lot of people really need to realize that that's a process. You're You're literally changing yourself from a kid to a man, as you go by doing these things, making these changes, taking these scars. And that one year, I said, I'm going to put this out on social media, beauty and struggle, and I put it out on Tiktok or something like that. And I was one time, I think I was sitting in a van out on location, working on production side, because I finally got a job in production, because I learned that, guess what? You can work during covid over there with no more boys. Y'all, they wait. They just watching pump gages and trying to keep the keep it coming. And I did that, and that song blew up, and I put out more to shine on social media. It blew up. Still, didn't have the money to go record it. So here comes somebody that's got an idea that's signing to 35 records. So I signed with them, and I was with them with chain lyric Steve Steven champion now, but one of my best friends, and he goes out on the road with me now all the time, but he gave me a chance. He I was in his live one day, and I said, Man, I really like your comedy stuff. He said, Man, listen to your music for a long time. He said, I better go on tour. You want to go with me? And I said, Hey, okay, you guitar case, you know. He He said, No, you can come sit up on stage beside me and sing. So I went out on the road two. $150 a night, you know, and grinded it out Beauty and the struggle got recorded, and me and him wrote his first song he'd ever had, 30 minutes outside of the studio from where we spent to go cut that. And now he's, he's, he's, he's got, we got 17 songs together, and he did what I he did triple or three, four times what I did in 10 years. I was at 50,000 monthly at that time, had 285,000 total streams that year. And I think, you know, oilfield dad might have one, close to 1 million, I think, and and I went out on that road, and that beauty and the struggle started blowing up. And I was like, Oh, it never got put on a playlist or nothing, but this song just growing crazy. And so it just went from there to more than shine, to the next one. And then everybody started realizing that, oh, there's a build here. And I and I told my I'm 20 8pm by the way. I told my wife, I said, I said, I said, When, when, when we I came back to her and she wouldn't let me sell my last guitar. I said, I'm gonna sell that guitar and go back to work, because I think that's all it's it's driving me crazy. Probably because I wrote 800 songs before I came back home, I said, it's driving me crazy, and it's also taken away from us for all these years. They never made us no money. So no, it's like having a boat in the yard. You can't, ain't nowhere to fish with it, you know? I said, I'm, I'm like, I'm like, I'm going to just say I'm a guitar. And she said, Well, if you sell that guitar, you might as well eat it again. Because she said, It ain't, never been a guitar. She said, Hell, if anything, the only way you know how to talk us through that guitar. And so that hit me kind of hard. I said, alright, well, if I go, then if I go now, I ain't coming back until I saw I saw that we can make it without each other for a year.

And I've saw the way that this works, I said. So my thing is, if I go out and I leave now, I'm not leaving here to go play music and feel homesick and and go half heartedly into it. I'm gonna swing a swim. It's like a nine pound hammer, like I did at a rig. And I'm gonna make it work. And I'm not coming back till I do so if that's a year, 10 years wherever you tell my babies what I'm doing and why I'm doing it the way I'm doing. And I said, I don't want to hear, I don't want to feel guilty about the way out my work ethic and the way I work, because I don't, you never done a damn thing for me. And I'm, I'm fine with a can of Spam and a trailer, you know, you know, so spam's Good, man, yeah. So I went out in the first year we did those songs in Spotify, hit 12 million streams in one year. So we went from, you know, 285,000 to 12 million stream and then in this lat and then, whenever we did now, we did these, everyone's an outlaw and each other songs, they always a stair step. And I got signed to average Joe's. I swapped over to average Joe's. I brought Steven champion with me to average Joe's. And then we had we ride last November that popped off, and I was sitting in my house, and I had everybody tell me, man, you can't you gotta be a year and a half where you'll ever even work with a booking agency. I was still on a bar stool. A year ago, I was still on barstool doing 17 shows in 10 days, four $50.04 hour shows, you know, so like at barbecue joints and stuff, and literally, I got arrested outside of a place in Burleson, Texans. Shout out to Mansfield, shout out to Mansfield county jail for that, for for reminding me that you can't sleep in your car just because you ain't got the money for a hotel room, especially if you've been running a couple. I have my keys in my pocket. I thought I was being sick. I have my keys in my pocket. Had everything ready, and I got you in the backseat of the front seat. I should have been in the backseat, yeah? But they still can't. They still told me, it don't matter if he's in the backseat, no matter if he's in trunk. If we saw you, you can't sleep in your car. It's not an extension of your home anymore. And I went, well, it should be man, you know, to be honest with you, there's a lot of people who probably need it, yeah, because I think you pay that kind of money on something, you should be able to turn that so much into a mobile home anytime you need to, if it gets real.

Jeremy Perkins  39:27  I've always heard, I always heard as long as the key is running in the ignition, and then I heard as long as you weren't in the driver's seat. Yeah, and,

Bryan Martin  39:39  well, some, some states, I think it still is. I think Texas, certain places, I think they've been, you know, they didn't shut down all the the home the homeless, love shacks, you know? Yeah, yeah. But, um, speaking of ways, I got an old shack wagon. If anybody out there in Texas is looking for one, trying to get. It. I got, I got mirror, kind of Windows. It's called a dream machine. Hit me up on Instagram. Now, how much? How much for it. You ever seen that thing? No, it's a 70. It's a 7740 column. It's got, I'm talking, I'm talking about, it is shagged out. It was using that because we got

Jeremy Perkins  40:21  the paint and everything. Oh, dude,

Bryan Martin  40:23  it's got this. It's got lime green, you know, trim. It's got the scoop, you know. It's got the, it's got the damn asteroids flying across the sky. It's his dream maker on the side. On the inside, he's got, it's got a closet I found in there. It's got a Oh 94 Playboy hidden off in the backside of the closet. Only three or four pages were stirred together. I didn't go no further than that, but I said, man. I said, this thing is legit. It was catches. You know that girl, you know the pop star, Kesha, yeah? Kesha, yeah. It was in it was in that video, that magic band in that video, come on back?

Jeremy Perkins  41:04  No, I got that, yeah, I

Bryan Martin  41:05  got that thing for like, 12 grand, I think 10 grand, and I drove it two days. First day I drove it, it had exhaust leak. Now, sitting in traffic, I wind up getting lost for like three hours, and Ian thought I was gone for 30 minutes. I showed up for my radio interview. I was like, what's going on? Bucket like, where's my where's the radio saying? They're like, Dude, you're three hours late. We done had the corners looking for your I said, I ain't three hours late. I'm only 30 minutes late. They're like, No. And they come out there and had a fuel leak and exhaust leak. They said, Dude, you were just as riding around. I said, Well, yeah, I wind up on the wrong side of town, some girls trying to start a business. I didn't know what she was trying to do, but she was like, I got a band like this too, but my bed's hand is nice. I'm like, oh, no, it might have been that TCV ring I had. I put that TCV ring on. It was a Billy Ray Cyrus is off, still the king and my my man, my manager, produces all movies and all shows. And I couldn't write songs for about a week in this one room because it had a TCB ring and all these Elvis rings. And it had it said, left hand, right finger, this, that and the other. And I thought it was what they had logged whenever they took Elvis's rings off when he had passed away or something. So I was like, in a room, and I was just like, Man, I can't, I can't write nothing. I'm haunting by the damn ring back here. So I'd move out of a room. Finally, I talked to him about it. I said, Give me that Elvis ring. I said, like, this thing haunts me because that Elvis is ringing from that TV show, still the king, I said. He said, Turn your finger green, but you can have it. I said, Alright. And so I had it on that day. I think a girl thought I was up there trying to start a new, new business, well, but taking care of business. But now, so, yeah, man. So we offer the damn off of the shag wax we're so we've been, you know, running at it for the last they told me I couldn't do it. We wrote, we arrived, and I thought that Bailey Zimmerman had taken over Instagram like they weren't even twerking on Instagram anymore. It was, he was Bailey. And Bailey came out the pipelines, if you already know, and he came out of that he did, I think, his first video off of back of a work truck while he was working, and he did anything he could sing. And man, everybody fell in love with him. You know, I love his stuff, and I remember that I saw him doing it three or four times a day, and I in a very friendly competition way, just like you do in an oil field. I said, Man, I'm gonna make Bailey see my foot, because they told me I couldn't do this, this, this and this in a year and a half until I was on this certain level. Now that ticked in the oil field mentality of like, well, if you get that done and we give you a bonus, but you ain't gonna get it done. I go, Yeah, okay. So I made a bet with the label on her that I wanted his old truck just sitting out in the yard. I said, Bailey got a new Corvette. Well, I'm not running a Toyota Scion with all my falling out the back, and I'm doing my own merch and not running my own sound and doing all of it. I said, how about you give me that truck? And he goes, right. He said, I'll give you that truck. You hit 5 million streams a week on Spotify. I'll give it to you. And I said, What am I at now? He said, like 400,000 and he laughed about it. He thought I was crazy. I said, Well, shake my hand on, don't, don't, just like, talk about it. Shake my hand up. He went, Well, hell, by time you get it won't be worth having. I said, Well, that'll be my problem. Shake my hand on and then six months later, I took his truck and I hit 5.5 and he couldn't believe it. He said, Man, my lady's man of hell, she I just couldn't, never. Radio system in there. I just put new ends on it, and I said, Well, tell I get too mad, because at 10 million, I'm coming for your beach house an hour nine, five, and that was six months ago, you know? So, yeah, when I took a trip with six months ago, so I used to tell you how the timeline was six months ago. Before that, I had 400,000 screens a week, and then I hit five but that came from posting 10 times a day, sometimes when we ride, came out to tripling my social media within two weeks, I tripled all my social media into two weeks. But it said it took that work ethic of going. They told me, I'm at a certain level on Chart metrics, which I didn't even know what it was. But if you tell me what it is, and then you tell me what I'm basing off of I promise you I'll find the tools to work with. And that's what they did. I was at 58,000 ranked in the world, which is pretty good, not a seven, something, me, hey, or whatever, artist and and then in the first week, I wasn't, I was in top 4000 I went to outselling covid In the first week. And then the second week, you know, I had everybody lined up, said they wouldn't work with him for a year and a half. And then I had, I had a pick of the best of the best. And you can't get no better booking agent wise, in my opinion, as far as if you look at the track records and stuff, not saying there ain't some good booking agents out there. They have had some great track records. But it's my heart feels old school, country loving. Kevin Neal, you know, from WME, he started booking my booking my shows, and that was in two weeks, literally, from a bar stool, $400 a night, two weeks sitting out eating a steak with Kevin Neal and let me know I'm paying for this thing. Yeah, I don't owe you. Nobody, nothing. You ain't paying my damn steak. I'm I'm buying alright. And so we're sitting at a steak house, and, uh, and Kevin told me, We gotta learn me one song. He's Vern Gossen, chisel stone. He says, I love burn and I told him, I said, You gotta be kidding me. I said the first song I ever learned how to play was chisel stone by burn guys. And because my daddy, his whole thing was, you're pretty good with Jane O'Bryan gossip. He's like my friend. And so I would sit in there and learn those songs and come out of the house leave

Jeremy Perkins  47:28  

it to leave it to the old man. Yeah,

Bryan Martin  47:32  

mama had me recording damn songs at four and five, six years old, and I'm feeling I got tired of George straight. How you how long? How many times you guys seen George Street to get tired of? I was like, God, I'm tired of crossing my heart, my heart's crossing, crisscross three times, crisscross applesauce, my heart so like they I was like, I quit. I The music drove me to Hayfield North Yes. And then when I started living, I wrote a song, and that's what brought me back to it. But children stone was the one that Marty Robinson chilling stone and Bern guys, and was his two favorite people. My favorite song from the time I was 11 years old was Tim Pan Alley, Steve Ray Vaughn and I love Lead Belly and all the blues, so I mix two man, I mix between the two, and that's where we write came from. It had like a soulful off beat. Everybody thought I was crazy, because when I brought it to the studio, all these studio musicians said, Hey, man, we're just gonna fix the timing on this thing, and then we're gonna just roll with it. Everything's gonna be great, and you're gonna love it. And they did, and it was like, I said, No, I don't love it. I just sound like another song. And because it was a four, four, when I did a six beat on, on the weight when you come in, we ride down, you know? And then, and then on the other part of it, you know, where it's like, you know, moonshine, I was a five beat and everything. It was just off. And so it took us 45 minutes for studio musicians to change the whole structure of how they've how they've ever done music before. But when it comes out, you can't tell that as a listener, that it's that it sat off. But without that, it wouldn't have been that song. And that song blew up. It went gold. We just went to radio, just got back from LA we, you know, we went out and did all this stuff, and I'm grateful for it, man, because 15 years of grinding, I saw somebody who didn't think he could do it, to somebody who still don't know how he's doing it. But when you tell me I can't do it, I don't have a choice anymore, because my baby's Yeah, my babies eat, my babies gotta. Eat and you know, we went from single wide to buying this house. I never had fireplace, so I had to quit in the background, single wide worldwide

Jeremy Perkins  50:16  in two years, to be honest with you. You know, I'm fucking proud of you. There's a lot of, there's a lot of boys and girls out there that that have been through the shit and and, you know what it's it's nice to see a couple of us make it. You know,

Bryan Martin  50:38  people don't understand. They see the name. A lot of people don't see this guy like, you know, and that's why I thank y'all for sending me, you know, the boots and going, Hey, man, we don't want no bullshit. We don't want you to bullshit. We want you to work and tell them what you think about if you don't like them, you know, throw them out. Throw them out by the dog pen. Let dogs to put their head in it when it gets one time cold they got they do have good installation, you know, yeah. But y'all gave me an opportunity, instead of pitching me something to try to tell people was great, whether it was or not, Y'all said we just want somebody that's it's gonna whirl them and work, work in them and tell us what we can do to improve if we need taking criticism. That's something that people don't do anymore. They don't take constructive criticism, first of all, because we're hard headed. Second of all, what do we make you think we take the criticism? Not we do? You know, if somebody says, Oh, you can't do that, because you're this. Well, when I fix that, and I do that on my own, after telling you lucky, you know, you know, when I fix that and I come back and I do it, you go, you Well, you did what I told you to do. I'm like, No, I didn't. I did it on I fixed myself the way I wanted to, if I wanted to. If I had to fix myself the way you wanted me to, it would have took me a year and a half, right? So it's all about changing and adapting and overcoming and really and truly, you know, cowboy and me, you know, and where you're at in Maine and the work ethic you have probably ain't that different. You know, I got a cowboy mentality, you know, always rolling with whatever it takes, and yes, and doing the right thing at all times. And, you know, keeping it honest,

Jeremy Perkins  52:36  it's wild that you say that too, because it's, you know, I the older I got, the more I realized she's gonna be fucked up. Yeah, nothing ever goes smoothly. So you just gotta be able to roll with the up. You gotta roll with the fucked up. And

Bryan Martin  52:53  you also gotta be ready see when it don't work out, tell yourself, get the up. You know, quit being put you know, yeah, yeah. I almost said it, yeah, but, yeah. But, you know, that's the thing is, like, you know, we're talking about work, working class here. I'm sorry, you know, ladies, you know, some of the things we've been called in our life, you know, may not be, you know, appropriate for these times. I don't care, man, it all those things that make we've been called, and all the things we've been told and and the grinding and the toughness the old school way of doing things, has made this country what it is. And is there some way of calling somebody else you know, a weekly you know, you know, you know, and it makes them stronger. Then tell me, you know, show me there's some way getting somebody else up off their ass and motivated without hollering at them and telling them, hey, get your back down to that you're gonna get killed, and it and then, and then get getting it. I think the assertiveness is what gets people, gets the people's heads. It may hurt their feelings. They might go off to a corner somewhere when they're working and have a patty lip for a second, but when they walk away from it, they remember that moment for a long time, and the RE and then when they do, when they realize why they why they had to learn it that way, it makes them go back and go, shit. I wish I hadn't felt so bad about it in that moment.

Jeremy Perkins  54:33  It's that shock factor. It's like, it's like, everything's fun and games, fun and games, and all of a sudden you just hit them with that insult, and they're like, Yeah, and that split second will save your life.

Bryan Martin  54:43  Oh, yeah. And, you know, when I was kid, we used to fight it out. You know, we used to go across the cattle guard, but every time we swing it out, we'd be right back on the back of a tailgate, bringing a beer the next day or the next five minutes. And usually if whoever won the fight, they'd have them a. A extra shirt in the back seat. They throw tea and say, Hey, man, wipe that off. Let's get you know we're doing you got a pretty good left hook. But you know, taking hits in life is a lot harder than most people think, and you're for where you put your boots to what you put your hands to has to have a meaning to it. And like, that's what I believe in, too. And when you start a work company, a BRUNT workwear company like this man, you're taking a lot of risk to be tested at every accountability level you can be, because you're dealing with people straight from the field, straight from the source. But also it feels good to know that there's somebody behind that down pencil that knows it. It's like, I get, you know, it's like you sit in a JSA room and you read a JSA 45 minutes to do a five minute job. You go, wow, somebody who just went through there and analytically evaluated every wrong thing that could happen that probably hasn't happened yet. Some of them might have happened, but that might have been a dumb ass. You know, we have to listen to 45 minutes worth of shit because some dumb ass did one thing wrong, and now we got to take 45 minutes to a five minute job, because common sense ain't that common no more.