AMERICA AT LARGE:Described as "Johnny Cash, Jim Harrison, and Bukowski rolled into one" , the Los Angeles-born artist has led an extraordinary and productive life, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

WATER THE lawn, trim them old trees

Pray that your gut don’t fall down to your knees

And Archie Moore whispers in your ear: Get up, kid, you’re in your prime

Now the champ’s on the ropes, Arch; the pugilist is fifty-nine.

– Tom Russell: The Pugilist at 59.

Tom Russell, whose “Beats and Boxers” show opened at the Yard Dog Gallery in Austin last Thursday night, probably isn’t the first songwriter to have showcased his paintings of boxers at an art gallery, but he may well be the first painter to have included portraits of Roberto Duran and Allen Ginsberg in the same exhibition.

In the early 1980s musicians of every stripe, from remnants of the Beatles and Rolling Stones to rappers and heavy metallurgists, were flocking to Nashville studios. Russell was, as seems to have been the case for much of his life, bucking the trend, eking out a living performing country-tinged tunes in New York. (Whether Russell was at this stage a singer/songwriter moonlighting as a cab driver or a cab driver moonlighting as a musician is open to interpretation.)

One afternoon he found himself at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn when future Hall of Famer Roberto Duran showed up.

Russell, as did many others in the gym, suspended his own workout to join the throng of spectators, and eventually found himself entranced, virtually eyeball-to-eyeball with Manos de Piedra.

Duran squatted on his haunches, a still-twirling jump-rope in his hands, “and snarled right In my face,” recalls Russell.

“The look in his eyes reminded me of my then-girlfriend when she was mad.” (You might not want to tell Russell’s former girlfriend this, but it’s probably worth noting that Joe Frazier once likened that very same stare to that of the mass murderer Charles Manson.) The moment would, as so many of Russell’s experiences do, eventually be transformed into a ballad.

The Eyes of Roberto Duran, which its composer describes as “a love song”, is one of four boxing-themed compositions in the singer’s ever-expanding repertoire. In addition to the somewhat autobiographical lament The Pugilist at 59, he has also written songs about Muhammad Ali and Jack Johnson. (The list expands to five if you count the one about Aloysius “Shipwreck” Kelly, who had a brief turn as a professional boxer before he became the world’s foremost flagpole-sitter.)

As has also often been the case, The Eyes of Roberto Duran became a minor hit for the late Chris Gaffney before Russell himself had even recorded the song.

Russell’s first job out of college was as a teacher of English in Nigeria during the Biafran war; the audience for his earliest musical engagements was the clientele of a Vancouver strip club. His first novel, Bloodsport, was published only in Norwegian; his second book, Tough Company, represented the collected correspondence between himself and the legendary barfly and skid row poet laureate Charles Bukowski. He has recorded more than two dozen albums and written hundreds of songs, which have been recorded by everyone from Johnny Cash and Nanci Griffith to k.d. lang, Dolores Keane, and Dave Van Ronk.

The Masters degree he earned from Cal-Berkeley was not instrumental in getting subsequent positions as a circus performer in Puerto Rico and as a cab driver in New York.

Although he is identified with the Texas Country tradition (and once fronted a band called the Upside-Down Cowboys), Russell was born in Los Angeles and spent much of his boyhood on the backstretch at Hollywood Park, where he watched his father devolve over time from horseman to broken-down horseplayer. He moved to his current spread, a ranch outside El Paso around the time of the Oscar De La Hoya-Patrick Charpentier fight there. (Russell, whose own songs have been recorded by dozens of his contemporaries, has to be the only performer alive who could cover Marty Robbins’ El Paso without it seeming an ironic parody.) Fifteen years later he and his Swiss-born wife, Nadine, still live there, by far the most constant residence of his relentlessly peripatetic existence.

When he’s not touring, Russell regularly travels across the Rio Grande to Juarez, where he’s as apt to turn up at a bullring as a boxing ring. Other sports which have furnished motifs for his songs range from baseball (Mickey Mantle, in The Kid from Spavinaw) to cock-fighting. (Gallo del Cielo, which kick-started his moribund career 30 years ago when he sung it for Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, a passenger in his taxi.)

Unlike most performers, who regard touring as a necessary evil, Russell, whose itinerary annually brings him to Ireland, seems to thrive on the road. “When you get home you have to deal with cesspools and leaking ceilings,” he told a recent interviewer. “On the road I feel like a boxer or a bullfighter, going from city to city, throwing the jab, swinging the cape, trying to create magic.”

Writers as diverse as Cormac McCarthy and Pete Hamill voice their admiration for Russell’s songs, as do Tom Paxton and Richmond Fontaine’s Willy Vlautin, musicians separated by a generation. Lawrence Ferlinghetti (one of the subjects in the “Beat” portion of the Austin show, which also includes portraits of William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Neal Cassady) describes Russell as “Johnny Cash, Jim Harrison, and Bukowski rolled into one.”

What former champions Duran, Ruben Olivares, and the anonymous pug represented in Russell’s “Tomato Can” think of his artwork remains unlearned.

As an artist he is wholly self-taught, and says he paints mainly for relaxation and his own pleasure, but one of his canvases hangs in the home of talk-show host David Letterman, and when “Beats and Boxers” opened at the Yard Dog in Austin’s trendy SoCo area last week, three of the paintings in the show had been snapped up by buyers even before the wine was uncorked and the doors unlocked.