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Billy Joe Shaver's honky-tonk mystique
Country poet's up-and-down life shows in his lyrics
Copyright 2007
Houston Chronicle
Billy Joe Shaver
• When: 9 p.m. Oct. 26
• Where: Firehouse Saloon, 590 Southwest Freeway
• Tickets: $12; 713-977-1962 or firehousesaloon.com
If anybody would know the secret to life, it'd be Billy Joe Shaver — a man who has dealt with death, dismemberment and 68 years of other dings. His losses and excesses inspired some of the greatest songs in the English language, country music or otherwise.
He brings it up: "What do you want to ask me? The secret to life?"
Shaver smirks and resumes working on some brisket on a hot August afternoon at Rudy's Country Store and BBQ just outside San Antonio.
"So really, what do you want to know?" he asks after a few more bites. "Fire away."
His previous offer lingers.
So, Billy Joe Shaver — honky-tonk hero, old five-and-dimer, old chunk of coal, Christian soldier — what is the secret to life?
When he smiles, his eyes disappear into slits. He growls, "It's a secret, dammit!"
It was worth a try.
Shaver is less secretive about his storied life. It floods his songs. It informs his banter when he performs. And whether the question is about music or family members who died too young, he usually responds with blunt honesty.
"One thing about him," says a friend, singer-songwriter Todd Snider, "he isn't a bull (expletive)."
That's not to say Shaver isn't a wily charmer. At his hard-ridden age, he still has the kind of charisma that makes movie stars. When a woman clears the table next to ours, he playfully flicks a wad of butcher paper at her with what's left of his right hand. He gives a flirty wink, and a rascal's smile cracks above his crooked chin.
One gets the sense Shaver doesn't have to work as hard as, say, Mick Jagger for that pull. His marriage history suggests he's blessed with and burdened by it. He certainly doesn't sink as much effort or money into his look as Jagger does his.
Snider calls him "the man in blue" for his permanent outfit: denim shirt, jeans, boots. Sometimes it's topped by a brown cowboy hat, other times just his thick white hair. "He wears the same belt he's wearing on the cover of his first album," Snider says. "The guy knows what he likes. He doesn't seem to want that mystique, but he has it in spades."
Shaver wears that outfit through supper. He's dressed the same a few hours later onstage at Leon Springs Dance Hall. And he'll undoubtedly be wearing the same thing the following morning when he starts his day.
If he's buried in anything else, there could be hell to pay.
Shaver doesn't seem terribly aware that he cuts a mythic figure. "I just like to be comfortable," he says with a shrug.
He admits he's most comfortable touring, which he seems to be doing most of the time, whether it's a cross-country thing or Texas shows launched from his home in Waco.
But the road isn't without its potholes. Shaver knows. He wrote "it's dang'rous as hell on the highway of life." In March he shot a man outside a saloon in Lorena. He was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and a handgun charge. They're sufficiently serious to carry jail time should Shaver be convicted.
The secret to life is off the table, leaving this elephant in the room. Because it's a pending case, he can't really comment.
"It was a situation where it was him or me. I was just protecting myself. That's all I can say."
There's a long pause, the first. Perhaps a change of subject. His job. Life on the road. Does he still love doing it?
He looks puzzled. "What? Shooting people?" The eyes disappear, a big laugh. "No, not really."
Shaver's attorney said Billy B. Coker came at Shaver with a knife that night. Coker told police he'd talked to Shaver for an hour before they walked outside and he was shot, unprovoked.
Friends say it was no secret Shaver carried a gun; he held a permit. They also insist he never would've used it if he hadn't had to.
Later, without being pushed, Shaver almost touches on the incident.
"I'm easy to deal with most of the time," he says. "But there are lines that shouldn't be crossed. People will leave you packages or things; they'll bother you at home. It can be scary sometimes."
So now Shaver's in a peculiar position. He's a straight talker who can't talk about a big something going on in his life. He's also promoting a brand new album inspired by God titled Everybody's Brother having recently shot a guy in the face.
Shaver's life has always lived in his songs. He burned through the 1970s on a debauchery-filled tear that, in the long run, put some of his contemporaries in the ground prematurely.
He has scores of Waylon Jennings stories. Jennings' 1973 classic Honky Tonk Heroes featured nine Shaver songs, putting him on the map.
Shaver tormented Jennings almost as much as he respected him. "He was a mess, man," Shaver says. "He made it real easy."
Jennings wasn't without his moments, though. Shaver recalls a venue owner stiffing them at gunpoint. As they drove away, part of the venue blew up.
"Did you see that?" Shaver asked.
"I didn't see a thing, hoss," Jennings responded. Later Jennings revealed his stash of dynamite under the floorboard.
Shaver's talent was red hot during that time. He got his first publishing deal from country legend Bobby Bare, who admits, "He kind of spooked me. But then I got to listening to his songs and called him back in."
Those songs — Honky Tonk Heroes, You Asked Me To, Old Five and Dimers Like Me, the list goes on — seemed to flow effortlessly. They were stuffed to the seams with his particular vernacular, lines and phrases that have become iconic, pronunciations that were so country as to almost sound affected. He attributes it all to paying attention to what was happening in his life.
Old friend Kinky Friedman says Shaver reminds him of Hank Williams, van Gogh and Mozart. "His life and art are so intertwined," Friedman says. "As his life would be unraveling, his writing got sharper.
"And he writes with an economy of words; he's ruthless about that. It's never flowery. To take something simple and make it complex, we call that an intellectual. That's what I do. But to take something complex and make it simple, that's an artist. And he's that in every sense of the word."
Shaver was born in Corsicana Aug. 16, 1939. His quick-tempered father split early, so his grandmother and his mother, who worked at a lot of honky-tonks, were his caretakers.
Hank Williams made an early impression, as did Jimmie Rodgers and some black singers he'd cross the railroad tracks to hear.
He says he loved the poetry of Robert Service, but Shaver's formal education, as clearly stated in Georgia on a Fast Train, stopped after the eighth grade. The Navy didn't work for him, either.
Shaver didn't really have a prayer in Nashville, Tenn., where he lived, worked, played and fought for much of the '70s. The cover of his 1973 debut, Old Five and Dimers Like Me, was a photo of Shaver mischievously standing in a doorway next to a sign that read, "No Standing in Doorway."
His songs similarly were made without regard to rules or perception. They could be humble or brash, fiery or contemplative. Some — like Black Rose — were naughty and playful. With the passing of time, phrases like "honky-tonk heroes" became tenured pieces of country lingo. Then they were just what popped into his head.
"It was just some words inspired by what I saw in some of the places my mother worked," he says.
Shaver seemed on the brink of stardom through the '70s, but the outlaw movement that he helped push into motion rolled into the mainstream without him.
Friedman calls him the Che Guevara of that movement. "I guess Willie (Nelson) was its Castro. But Billy Joe was the true spirit behind it."
Bare makes a similar observation. "All that outlaw business was PR stuff, people building Waylon up in that image," he says. "But underneath, Waylon was a softhearted, sweet person. Billy Joe was the real deal. He was what everybody thought Waylon was."
Shaver never gained traction as a recording artist, but he also never quit recording. Tramp on Your Street, released in 1993, marked a sort of renaissance and rediscovery that has continued to the present. He found himself a survivor with a new audience, due in part to his smart lyrics and a bluesy drive, both largely absent from contemporary country music at that time.
Shaver says several times that he feels blessed. His trials have been well-documented, and that documentation suggests he's cursed. Despite numerous label deals that went bust, the forgotten nights of boozing and carousing, the familial squabbles, the 2 1/2 fingers he lost in a sawmill accident, the heart surgery, the broken back, the bad times that stand out span the year he buried his mother, wife and son.
He often repeats an unofficial slogan: Writing, recording and performing are "the cheapest psychiatry you can get." Shaver famously played a show a day after his son and collaborator Eddy died of a drug overdose at a Waco hotel Dec. 31, 2000.
"I know he's just devastated by these things," Snider says. "You can tell in his lyrics. But he's a different kind of cat. I guess that's what it takes to be the best poet in the world. It can be cathartic to get to play when things are bad."
At a 2001 New York show, Shaver soldiered through a set of songs from The Earth Rolls On, the last record he and Eddy made together. His guitarist that night, Jesse Taylor, has also since died.
"There's times I feel like everybody's gone except me," he says.
It's not entirely true. While we talk, he gets a phone message from Friedman, who apparently just lost more than his shirt in Vegas. There's always Nelson and Kris Kristofferson. But with each year, Shaver's posse of running buddies gets smaller.
Earth sounds ghostly today. Released after Eddy's death, it spills with warnings and despair and the strains the father and the son put on each other.
"We had at each other, didn't we?" Shaver says. He said they'd sit at the kitchen table and write. They called it Nights at the Round Table. "Boy, he took a few shots at me. And I reckon I deserved it."
Nearly seven years later at Leon Springs Dance Hall, a song from that album, Star in My Heart, tightens the throat. It's unthinkable that it was written and recorded before Eddy's death.
"Someday our paths may cross again in a better time," goes one line. "Though we are many worlds apart, I'm still your friend, and friends will always be friends forever," goes another.
Shaver sings it a capella this night, wringing out the song more than singing it.
Earlier in the day, he's equal parts hurt and angry talking about what happened to his son.
"It's a myth that you can't kick dope, it's (expletive)," he says. "You can, and I did. But you have to know where the edge is, especially if you play with that sort of stuff. Some people walk along that edge and fall. Some don't. Eddy fell."
Hours before the Leon Springs show starts, Shaver walks through the venue with the leaning lope of a stray dog. He belts back a Red Bull and hops onstage for a sound-check run-through of Get Thee Behind Me Satan, a new tune from Everybody's Brother, which will be released Tuesday.
He doesn't talk about the album as a prim gospel artist would, which is fine, because it's hardly a prim gospel record. The songs spring from his faith, but they're presented with the same driving honky-tonk sound he's used for more than 30 years. Mostly Brother sounds like a new Billy Joe Shaver album.
Even he admits, "I've had gospel stuff on there from the start. It wasn't the thing to do back then. I guess maybe now it's come around."
If there's a sliver of difference between the old and new songs, it's that Shaver's faith has taken its knocks and come out stronger. He says fans often ask to pray with him. He's happy to oblige.
"When I used to score some good dope, I'd call all my friends and have them over," he says. "It's the same thing with my faith. I can't help but share."
Shaver points out, "I've been a Christian all my life," but he credits a late-'70s awakening with changing his life.
Gone were the drink and drugs. But even in sobriety, Shaver's life never quite got straight and narrow. There were still tumultuous times rebuilding relationships with his wife, Brenda, whom he married three times before she died in 1999, and with Eddy.
Shaver was supposed to marry in April 2005 but called it off three weeks before. "Thank God," he said at the time. "This one just blew up. I let her think there was one more in me. . . . I was bluffing, of course."
By that fall, he was hitched again.
If the shooting incident suggests there's still a wildness left, Shaver couldn't be called unrepentant about his life.
"If I had it to do all over, I'd change everything," he says. "There's a lot of things I could've done better with my wife and my kid. It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice. I've learned that. I've learned that hard."
Despite his trials and a possible trial, Shaver the musician is as stable today as he's ever been. Houston-based Compadre Records has given his music a loving home. He's making good coin on the road, where his shows have grown from the couple of dozen middle-aged insiders who saw him at Leon Springs Cafe 13 years ago to an audience of a couple of hundred that spanned three generations at Leon Springs Dance Hall.
For some it's Shaver's outlaw allure. For others, there's an emotional connection to his endurance. He's a twisted thicket of extremes that represent the best and worst in most of us. He's humble talking about his faith and proud talking about his talent. He admits he can be ornery, but he's also warm and approachable. He insists on picking up the barbecue supper tab for a not-insubstantial entourage. He shakes hands and smiles at people between the venue and the restaurant.
His autograph is the same as it's been for years: "Bless you (name), your friend Billy Joe."
Then there's the whole gun thing.
He knows what Jesus would do. Christian Soldier, a song he wrote with Bare, included the line "it's hard to be a Christian soldier when you tote a gun." Shaver's the first to admit that at 68 and sober, he's still a work in progress. He said he was blessed, not perfect.
Bare says the shooting "didn't surprise me at all. My only surprise was something like that hadn't happened before. Billy Joe is Billy Joe. And he will continue to be Billy Joe. You've got to love him. At the same time, you know he's not going to back down. He's very sensitive. You've got to be to write songs like that. It's very hard to put your (butt) on the line with every song to where people know it's coming straight from the heart. Honesty like that is hard to come by in a writer."
Friedman says Shaver's "not an observer of life, he's a player. And that's so rare, because those guys don't make it. They don't last, the James Deans. They always die."
So Shaver goes about his business the only way he knows how, leading with his chin, his heart close behind. The way he did it 30 years ago, just without the booze and dope to take off the edge. He says he enjoys time at home, but he gets restless when he's there too long. So he stays on the road, where he's never completely at ease.
"There ain't no good reason for me to still be out here, other than God loves me," he says. "So I might as well do as I feel. And this is what I feel like doing."
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