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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The kitchen table is crowded with a fax machine and stacks of unruly papers. Tacked on the wall is a tour itinerary for the next three months. There are forty dates, everything from a private party at the YO Ranch, near Kerrville, to a show at the downtown Centennial Plaza in Midland to Willie's Fourth of July Picnic. Billy Joe spends a lot of time on the road with his band, most of whom are musicians half his age. It's a hard, unglamorous, and expensive life. In fact, Billy Joe loses money touring, taking his songwriting royalties and paying for the musicians, the van or bus, motels, and food. "I pay to play," he says. "But I love the road."
Along the fireplace are small stone monuments, sent by a fan, with Billy Joe's lyrics inscribed on them. There are also various Indian artifacts, and above the mantel are photos of Eddy and Brenda, who died only three months after Victory died. The truth is, Billy Joe says, he's the one who should be dead. He was the one prone to fights and being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people, doing something stupid because, well, that's just what you did when you were a hell-raiser. "We always figured I'd be the one to go first," he says. "We figured I'd never live to see forty. I had insurance out the ass on me—didn't buy it on either of them."
Billy Joe's wife, the woman he married three times and divorced twice, was his muse. "Every love song I've ever written was about her," he says. And as for his best friend and partner, Eddy, who died of the bad behavior his father had somehow navigated, Billy Joe is still devastated. He knew about Eddy's addiction but figured his son would conquer it. "I just assumed it would be all right," he says. "He did probably look at me and say, 'If Dad can do it, I can too.'" After a long pause, Billy Joe sighs. "You never get over it."
One song the two wrote together, "Live Forever" (Eddy wrote the music), is a transcendent work that sounds like an old bluegrass hymn:
I'm gonna live forever, I'm gonna cross that river
I'm gonna catch tomorrow now.
You're gonna wanna hold me, just like I always told you
You're gonna miss me when I'm gone.
Nobody here will ever find me
But I will always be around,
Just like the songs I leave behind me
I'm gonna live forever now.
After Eddy died, Billy Joe actually quit writing songs for the first time in his life. He also lost the urge to perform. It wasn't until six months later, when his old friend Kinky Friedman persuaded him to join him for some Texas shows, that he got back onstage. During one of those performances, at the hot, stuffy Gruene Hall on August 25, 2001, Billy Joe got a collect call from God. It was a heart attack, live and onstage. Billy Joe remembers it well. "I said, 'Thank you, Lord, for letting me die in the oldest honky-tonk in Texas.' I wanted to die. All this had happened, and I was going home to see Eddy, Brenda, and my mother." He survived and was then faced with a three-week Australian tour with the pushy Friedman. "I told him, 'I can't go. I had a heart attack.' Kinky said, 'So what? You're going to ruin my career.'" So Billy Joe went. Two days after coming home, he had quadruple bypass surgery.
The songwriting finally started coming again last year after producer R. S. Field, who had helmed Tramp on Your Street, enticed Billy Joe to record again. He wrote a couple dozen songs, which were whittled to the thirteen on Freedom's Child, a shimmering little autobiographical masterpiece, part country, part jangle. The album is proof that Billy Joe can still write a song. In fact, looking back over his work from the past decade, in some ways Billy Joe has actually gotten better as a writer as he has gotten older. Though he'll never top the youthful drive of "I Been to Georgia on a Fast Train," it's hard to imagine a more perfect love song than "Star in My Heart" or a more perfect religious haiku than "Son of Calvary" or a funnier send-up than "Leavin' Amarillo" ("Screw you, you ain't worth passin' through")—all three written in his second half-century. "I think I was born to write songs," he says. "That's why my eyes and ears are so open. But I can control it now. In the early days I couldn't stop 'em. It was the master of me. Now I've mastered it—I'm a master songwriter."
Now, as then, Billy Joe writes only about what he knows personally, yet he somehow takes the specific and makes it general; you don't have to have lost a son and a wife to feel the heartache of "Day by Day," the story of his family on Freedom's Child. Many of his songs are mea culpas about the past—his irresponsibility, his neglect of people close to him, his pursuit of pleasures of the flesh: "I been a drifter and a low-life loser," he sings on "Love Is So Sweet," "you can learn a lot from me . . ." Sometimes the old Billy Joe pops into one of his songs just long enough to seduce some woman or get in a fight. Part of his charm, at least in his songs, is that he keeps doing the bad stuff even though he knows it's bad. "He's absolutely honest," Kristofferson says. "Clear-eyed, no guilt, not a bit of artifice. That's why his songs have lasted."
Last year Billy Joe finally got some recognition from the industry when, at the Americana Music Awards ceremony, he was given the first Lifetime Achievement award for songwriting. It was, he said from the dais, the first award he'd ever received. And now, at an age when many of his peers are dead or retired, the wise old songwriter seems, as they say in showbiz, poised. He tours relentlessly with a great band. He's working on his autobiography with writer Brad Reagan, and he's also working on a collection of poems. And then there's the documentary shot by Luciana Pedraza, an Argentinean horsewoman and tango dancer, with the help of her boyfriend, Robert Duvall. Duvall, who met Billy Joe in Texas during the filming of Lonesome Dove, cast him as a recovering alcoholic in The Apostle in 1997. Pedraza was fascinated by Billy Joe's life and songs. She spent three weeks following him around with a camera and even interviewed his 102-year-old English teacher, Mabel Legg, who recited from memory a few of his poems, including "Space," which he wrote at thirteen. The documentary is done, and Pedraza says it will be out in February, in time for spring festivals.
In the meantime, Billy Joe's life is defined by two things: playing and sitting around at home waiting to play. All roads lead away from Waco, and he longs to be on them. "I love to travel," he says. "I love to play. I love that freedom, the only free place I've got left."
LAST SUMMER BILLY JOE PLAYED Willie's Fourth of July Picnic to about the same number of people he played to 31 years ago: kids, bikinied teens, college students with baseball caps turned backward, middle-aged women who sang along, men with gray beards who hollered and waved their hats. During Billy Bob Thornton's set before his, they chanted, "Billy Joe! Billy Joe!" The chant resumed as his band set up their amps; Billy Joe went to the lip of the stage, took off his hat, and waved at the crowd, his face set in a wide grin. Most stars wouldn't be caught dead onstage before showtime, but Billy Joe's fans are his last best hope. When the band started, he became like a great soul singer in a church of his own design, completely at ease, smiling, expansive, open to everything and everyone. He told funny stories and waved his hands like a preacher. He threw punches on "Honky Tonk Heroes" and got down on his knees and bowed at the end of "Live Forever." He played "You Just Can't Beat Jesus Christ" and gave his Zen-like benediction: "May the God of your choice bless you."
It took him awhile to get back to his bus after the show; in the backstage area, there were just too many people to hug, to reminisce with, and to hear words of solace from. He spent some time visiting with an old friend inside the bus, a man he hadn't seen in some time, another ex-drunk who had to quit the wild life to save his own and who told Billy Joe every detail. After a while they said good-bye ("I love you, brother"; "I love you too") and Billy Joe said, "It's gonna be all right. It's a fifteen-rounder, not a twelve-rounder."
Billy Joe went back outside and was stopped by two young women who had been looking for him for half an hour or so. They threw their arms around him, and he stood between them, hugging and laughing. Another woman, a little older, also approached and handed him a piece of paper she had written something on, which he put in his pocket. Soon a small crowd had gathered—old friends, musicians, backstage drifters—and he was surrounded, disappearing from view except for his brown hat, which seemed bowed in gratitude.
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