The Ballad of Billy Joe Shaver
In his 64 years, the Corsicana native has been a cotton picker and a roughneck, a screwup and a scoundrel. He's hit the bottle, hit rock bottom, and been born again. He married the same woman three times, mounted multiple comebacks, survived a heart attack onstage and the deaths of nearly everyone he's ever loved. All of which explains why he's one of the greatest songwriters in the world.
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By 1968 Billy Joe had a job with singer-songwriter Bobby Bare's publishing company and began churning out songs. He got to know some of the other Nashville outsiders, guys like Kristofferson, with whom he shared the handsome-scruffy-hippie-poet MO. And the wild life suited him well. He did a lot of drinking, did a lot of drugs, and raised a lot of hell. "Drugs, doping, smoking, women," he says. "All kinds of drugs—speed, coke. I tried heroin once. The girl shot me up and it didn't do nothing. I was so goddam crazy. I was crazier than any of them. I went for it."
He stayed in touch with Willie, who invited him to play at his first Fourth of July Picnic, called the Dripping Springs Reunion, in 1972. After Billy Joe had played, he and some others were passing the guitar around backstage, singing songs. Billy Joe played one of his called "Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me." Waylon Jennings, who was often high on cocaine, liked it so much that he enthusiastically vowed to do a whole album of Billy Joe's "cowboy" songs.
Billy Joe stalked Waylon for six months, reminding him of his drug-addled promise, finally cornering him in a Nashville studio, where he was recording his next album. As Waylon explained to an interviewer a few years before he died, Billy Joe was drunk: "He said, 'You told me you was gonna do my goddam songs. Now are you gonna do 'em or am I gonna have to whip your ass?'" Waylon eventually sat down and listened to the songs, which had titles like "Honky Tonk Heroes" and "Old Five and Dimers Like Me," and was astonished. This was soul music for rednecks, koans from a honky-tonk lifer, with simple melodies and emotional, evocative words. Some were pure poetry: "I've spent a lifetime making up my mind to be/More than the measure of what I thought others could see" went the first lines of "Old Five and Dimers Like Me." Some were just songs about ragged old trucks and one-night stands. But all were from Billy Joe's life, things he had done or dreamed about, so they sounded true.
Waylon changed the course of his album right then; all but one song would be Billy Joe's. The resulting 1973 record, Honky Tonk Heroes, was the Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols of the outlaw country movement. All of a sudden country was cool. String sections and sequins were out, spare arrangements and blue jeans were in; the wet-head was dead, and real men grew beards and long hair. Hippies mixed with rednecks. And Willie and Waylon became big stars. Soon came Red Headed Stranger and "Luckenbach, Texas" and Wanted! The Outlaws, the first Nashville platinum album. Forget that the term "outlaw" was thought up by a publicist or that the notion of a gang of musicians hanging out and rebelling was just silly—the formula worked. And the songs were good.
Especially Billy Joe's. After Heroes, he was covered by Kristofferson, Bare, and Tom T. Hall; later came Elvis, the Allman Brothers, and John Anderson. They all heard the same thing in Billy Joe's writing. "His songs are so real," says Willie. "And Texas. They're pieces of literature. Everything he writes is just poetry." Success bred even more excess for the wide-eyed rogue, yet he also found himself drawn back to Brenda, whom he remarried. (She moved to Nashville and became a hairstylist for, among others, the late Johnny Cash.) In 1973 Billy Joe began releasing country albums of his own starting with Old Five and Dimers Like Me, singing in his Central Texas baritone about living hard and raising hell, all with that lazy, stripped-down, pot-smoking country feel. He moved from label to label—Monument, Capricorn, Columbia—but his performing career never got off the ground, and he considered quitting the business. In 1977, after another typically wild Nashville night, he had a terrifying vision of a silent, disapproving Jesus, with eyes glowing like red coals, sitting on his bed. Billy Joe went walking and found himself on the top of a cliff, trying, he thinks, to kill himself. Instead, he says, he was saved by Jesus. On his way down, the words and melody to a new song, "I'm Just an Old Chunk of Coal," started coming to him. He moved the family to Houston and went cold turkey on all his vices, but by the end of the decade, he and Brenda were divorced again. His career, by then, seemed over too.
In the mid-eighties Billy Joe found rejuvenation in an unlikely place: his broken home. Because of his wandering ways, his son, Eddy, had been raised mostly by Brenda. Now Eddy had grown up, and he was a gifted guitarist, a blues guy and a rocker schooled by, among others, the Allman Brothers' Dickey Betts, who had given the boy a guitar when he was twelve. Billy Joe started playing with his son, and Eddy co-produced his father's 1987 album, Salt of the Earth. Then, after Eddy spent time playing with the Allman Brothers, Dwight Yoakam, and Guy Clark, father and son started their own band, Shaver, and created their own sound, a roadhouse boogie with honky-tonk twang.
Billy Joe's career was reborn. Shaver began touring constantly; they also released seven albums for four labels, including Tramp on Your Street, in 1993, which sold more than 150,000 copies. The two grew their hair down to their shoulders, and with similarly coiffed drummers and bassists, Shaver looked like a Texas version of Lynyrd Skynyrd. "We were good," Billy Joe says. "Probably too good. Every show we did was perfect." Some of his fans would say that this is a father's love talking; they thought his rocker son played too loud, too fast, and too often, stepping on the melodies and into the quiet spaces of Billy Joe's songs. Billy Joe didn't hear or didn't care; he was loyal to the son he had once neglected, and together they were creating something new. Their band was integral to the rise in the mid-nineties of the Americana movement—rootsy, traditional-country-influenced rock and roll and so-called alt-country—which helped invigorate the careers of other old-timers too, especially Cash. It was a music for underdogs, and Billy Joe was the perfect saint for it, getting treated like a beloved grandfather by such magazines as No Depression. He was also discovered by new country acts like Pat Green, who covered his songs and proselytized about his influence.
But Eddy was truly his father's son. He got hooked on heroin, an addiction he fought for years, and took a turn for the worse after his mother died of cancer in the summer of 1999 (she and Billy Joe had remarried a second time in 1997). "He went into a tailspin," says Billy Joe. "They were like brother and sister. She was only seventeen when he was born." On December 30, 2000, Eddy was found in a motel room unconscious from an accidental overdose and was taken to the hospital; the next day he died. He was 38. Shaver had a New Year's Eve show scheduled for that night at Poodie's Hilltop Bar and Grill, in Spicewood. Billy Joe did it, with help from Willie, who put a band together for him and wound up playing more than Billy Joe, who mostly sat in the audience, consoled by friends. "Your normal cowboy wouldn't even have attempted to do it," says Willie. "Billy Joe is tough. They don't come much tougher." For Billy Joe, it was the longest night in a life full of them.
"PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB," READS the handwritten note taped to the screen door of the unassuming brick ranch house in a south Waco suburb. "I haven't slept in 2 days—Billy Joe." The white paper is faded from two and a half years worth of Waco sun and rain. "It's been up since Eddy passed," he says on a warm June day as he opens the door. The inside is dark and cluttered, and the only life comes from two pit bulls. "The dogs own it," he says. "I just live here."
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