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RIP - Billy Joe Shaver

RoundRobin

By RoundRobin
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UTexasFight

UTexasFight 9579

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This one hits me harder than JJW...and JJW hit me pretty hard.

Jesus Christ, what a man.

 

This is a fun listen if you have 45 minutes. A lot of it I knew, a lot of it I didn’t, but does a good job encapsulating his life:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3roicsPe5kkzC6K6j4d8Th?si=4b_wIPNFTR6nEuAkSHSPeg

 

 

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hullabelew

hullabelew 3724

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Fuck.  Todd Snider is really taking a hit in all of this.  

Prine:  Todd was on Prine's "Oh Boy" records and toured with him constantly.
Jerry Jeff:  Todd's mentor
Billy Joe:  Eddy used to play in Todd's band.  Todd wrote the fantastic song "Waco Moon" about Eddy's OD.  

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C-Man

C-Man 27293

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I met Billy Joe Shaver at a friend's wedding in Fredericksburg many years ago. BJS was a friend of the groom's family and was the entertainment that night. Before that week, I didn't know anything about BJS. I didn't realize he'd written so many songs performed by other artists that I'd loved for years. My buddy made sure to give me the backstory the week before.

His set at the reception was magical. Billy Joe was nice enough to talk with me at length during breaks and then after he was done for the night. He was as nice as could be to take the time to shoot the shit with me. Hell, I wish I remembered more details from the stories.

Billy Joe will be missed tremendously. You are a true "outlaw country" legend. RIP.

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Ten Bears

Ten Bears 2484

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16 minutes ago, hullabelew said:

Fuck.  Todd Snider is really taking a hit in all of this.  

Prine:  Todd was on Prine's "Oh Boy" records and toured with him constantly.
Jerry Jeff:  Todd's mentor
Billy Joe:  Eddy used to play in Todd's band.  Todd wrote the fantastic song "Waco Moon" about Eddy's OD.  

and his dog Cowboy Jim and Neal Casal.  fuckfuckfuckfuck

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RexWilson

RexWilson 1348

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Witnesses interviewed by police report hearing Shaver say "where do you want it?" and then, after the shot was fired, "Tell me you are sorry" and "No one tells me to shut up." Coker told police the attack was unprovoked. Shaver's attorney declared that Shaver had shot Coker "in self-defense" after Coker threatened Shaver with a knife.[10]

In an August 2014 NPR interview, Shaver said that he shot Coker because he was "Such a bully" and that "I hit him right between a mother and a fucker. That was the end of that. He dropped his weapons and said, 'I'm sorry.' And I said, 'Well, if you had said that inside, there would have been no problem.'

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C-Man

C-Man 27293

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Rolling Stone obit:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/billy-joe-shaver-songwriter-dead-obituary-1082610/

Quote

Billy Joe Shaver, the outlaw-country music pioneer who wrote some of the genre’s greatest songs, died Wednesday in Waco, Texas, after suffering a stroke. He was 81. Connie Nelson, a friend of Shaver’s, confirmed his death to Rolling Stone.

Shaver’s hard-lived career classics included “Honky Tonk Heroes,” “Georgia on a Fast Train,” “Old Five and Dimers Like Me,” and “Live Forever.” He wrote nine out of the 10 songs on Waylon Jennings’ 1973 outlaw-country breakthrough Honky Tonk Heroes; Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, and Elvis Presley all recorded his songs; and in 2010, Willie Nelson called him “the greatest living songwriter.”

Shaver lived the outlaw lifestyle that others only sang about. In 2007, he was charged with shooting a man in the face at a bar near his home in Waco. The trial drew friends including Nelson and the actor Robert Duvall in support of Shaver, who was ultimately found not guilty and went on to turn the ordeal into a song, “Wacko From Waco.”

Born in Coriscana, Texas, on August 16th, 1939, Shaver was raised by his mother, Victory, and would later leave town to find a job working at a honky-tonk in Waco. He would often accompany his mother to her job at the local nightclub, where he became exposed to country music. In the early Sixties, Shaver moved to Houston and frequented a club called the Old Quarter, where he met Townes Van Zandt. They became drinking buddies, and their friendship led Shaver to Nashville. He scored an apprenticeship for songwriter Harlan Howard before working for singer-songwriter Bobby Bare.

“Billy Joe was already there before anybody was talking about an outlaw movement,” early fan Steve Earle said in 2010. “And I come from the generation that moved to Nashville because people started talking about an outlaw movement.”

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But Shaver had a hard time breaking through in Nashville, where he was rejected by artists like Chet Atkins. He found a fan in Kris Kristofferson, who recorded his song “Good Christian Soldier” for his debut album. In 1971, Kristofferson invited Shaver to play the Dripping Springs reunion — which inspired Willie Nelson to host his revered annual picnic — in Austin. Shaver’s performance at the picnic was famously uneven, but afterward, he attended a songwriting circle where he played “Willy the Wanderin’ Gypsy and Me,” a soaring ode to Nelson. Jennings liked what he heard. “He said, ‘Do you got any more of them cowboy songs?” Shaver recalled to Rolling Stone in 2010. “I said, ‘I got a sack full of them.'”

Jennings promised to listen to those songs. But for weeks, Shaver didn’t hear anything: “I wasn’t used to that drunk talk where they get high and say they’re going to do something and don’t do it.” Shaver traveled to Nashville to seek out Jennings at a recording studio. “I told him, ‘If you don’t listen to them, I’m going to whip your ass right here in front of God and everybody,'” Shaver said in 2010. “And I was ready.”

Jennings listened to the songs, including the swampy “Honky Tonk Heroes,” which became the title track of his next album. “He just slapped his leg and said, ‘I know what I got to do,'” Shaver said. Jennings’ 1973 LP Honky Tonk Heroes became one of the defining albums of outlaw country, but Shaver couldn’t catch a break as a mainstream artist on his own. After his debut album, Old Five and Dimers, was released in 1973 by Monument, the label went out of business. Shaver’s drug use escalated — one night in the mid-Seventies, he drove his car through the plate-glass window of a car dealership.
 “I was welcome anywhere I went because I wrote good music that entertained entertainers,” Shaver said. “It’s just that I didn’t have the management and stuff like that. They said I was unmanageable.”

In fact, Shaver’s life was peppered with tragedy. When he was 21, he lost two fingers on his right hand in a sawmill accident. (“I ain’t no finger-pointer,” he would joke. “I can’t.”). He married one of his wives, Brenda, three separate times and lost her to cancer in 1999. Around that same time, his mother (whom he sang about in “My Mother’s Name Is Victory”) died. Then, on the morning of December 31st, 2000, his son and creative partner Eddy Shaver, a fiery guitarist who recalled Stevie Ray Vaughan, was found dead of a heroin overdose.

A grieving Shaver performed that same evening at a New Year’s Eve concert with Nelson. “Willie put a band together. My band just went nuts, they all flaked out and went off crying and stuff. But Willie called me up … and said, ‘Billy, you gotta get back on the horse,’” Shaver said. “And I’m an old cowboy, I know what he’s talking about. So I got up there.”

Shaver told Rolling Stone he considered taking revenge for his son’s death — until Nelson’s cooler head prevailed. “I knew where [the drugs] came from — that drug dealer, I would have shot him up and killed him instead of calling the police,” he said. “But Willie talked me out of it. He said, ‘You’re best just leaving it alone.’ And I did. I just left it alone. But you don’t ever forget something like that.”

Billy Joe Shaver and Willie Nelson, following Shaver’s courtroom appearance for shooting a man in the face in 2007

John Doyle

Shaver trudged forward, releasing the final album he and Eddy had recorded, The Earth Rolls On, in April 2001. Freedom’s Child came in 2002, and in 2007, he released what would be his last studio album for nearly seven years, Everybody’s Brother.

That same year Shaver stopped into a Lorena, Texas, bar for a beer with his former wife Wanda, and ended up in an altercation with a patron. Shaver testified the man was rude to his wife and told Shaver to “shut the fuck up.” After the two went outside, witnesses testified Shaver asked the victim, “Where do you want it?” and then pointed a .22 pistol at his cheek and pulled the trigger. Shaver claimed self-defense and was acquitted. “I am very sorry about the incident,” Shaver said afterward. “Hopefully, things will work out where we become friends enough so that he gives me back my bullet.”

Despite never having a solo career as successful as the peers who cut his songs, Shaver’s solo recordings (and with Eddy as the duo Shaver) are country-music essentials: “Georgia on a Fast Train,” “Tramp on Your Street,” and “You Asked Me To,” among them. His optimistic track “Live Forever” became his signature song, with Shaver performing it onstage with arms outstretched. A devout Christian, he’d dramatically drop to his surgically repaired knees during “You Can’t Beat Jesus Christ,” an irreverent prayer in which Shaver calls his savior a “compound country kinda guy.” He further preached his faith in the equally rambunctious “Get Thee Behind Me Satan,” with John Anderson.

In 2014, Shaver released his final album, Long in the Tooth, which featured the duet “Hard to Be an Outlaw” with Willie Nelson. He professed his lifelong commitment to songwriting in a sprawling interview with Rolling Stone that same year, drinking Red Bulls he kept in a tattered bag at his feet.

“Not everyone can be dedicated to it. I’m a songwriter first and then whatever else I do second.… I enjoy the heck out of entertaining and I enjoy all the aspects of what comes with it, but the song is like the cheapest psychiatrist there is,” Shaver said. “And I pretty much need one all the time.”

Shaver recorded and toured up until his death. In January, he joined Tanya Tucker onstage at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium to perform “I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal.” In 2004, Shaver was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. But while he’s mentioned in the Country Music Hall of Fame’s exhibit devoted to outlaw country, his own induction has eluded him — an oversight that continued to confound the ornery Shaver.

“If you don’t want to put me in there, that’s fine. But I just don’t understand it to tell you the truth,” he said. “I feel like I am part of the foundation and maybe even a cornerstone. I think I’m that much.”

 

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phdhorn

phdhorn 6224

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I can't think of anyone else whose life I would have loved to have live more, while never wanting to have lived his life at all, both at the same time.

If Willie's songs are a sleek, stained plank of oak wood, BJ's are a dried out, grayed wooden board that's grimy, pocked, and dirty, yet holds up just as through the decades.

RIP.

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Guest Lobo

Guest Lobo

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7 hours ago, ztejas said:

God damn. 2020 still loading clips against musicians. 

John Prine

JTE

Eddie

Jerry Jeff

 

I know I'm missing a bunch.

Three of the best drummers ever---Neil Peart, Bill Rieflin, and Todd Nance (Widespread Panic) .

 

Shit, I lost count after Little Richard and then Jerry Jeff Walker. 

I am so fucking done with 2020.  But, it would seem, 2020 ain't yet done with us.  

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Kennythetiger

Kennythetiger 9490

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4 hours ago, phdhorn said:

I can't think of anyone else whose life I would have loved to have live more, while never wanting to have lived his life at all, both at the same time.

If Willie's songs are a sleek, stained plank of oak wood, BJ's are a dried out, grayed wooden board that's grimy, pocked, and dirty, yet holds up just as through the decades.

RIP.

I am not 100% sure of my memory, but I thought I had heard in a music documentary that Waylon Jennings described Shaver as “the only man I’ve ever been afraid of”.  

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phdhorn

phdhorn 6224

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7 minutes ago, Kennythetiger said:

I am not 100% sure of my memory, but I thought I had heard in a music documentary that Waylon Jennings described Shaver as “the only man I’ve ever been afraid of”.  

As a musician, it's really humbling because BJ and JJW wrote songs that are so freaking real because there's not "what if" to their songs but more like "that was". Both of those guys skirted the very fence rail between possibly being lifelong criminals and/or ending up dead in some alley, and being the influential musicians they were. A risk that most of us would never be able to take. I'm not sure I'll ever see the likes of that type of person again.

To this day, no movie has ever come close to sending me on a trip of imagination like when I heard Guy Clark sing his "Desperados" live at the old Austin Music Academy or whatever they called that place. I got chills at that moment and I still get chills thinking about it now. No one, and I mean no one, can tell stories like these outlaw guys could.

Edited by phdhorn
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Pablo

Pablo 495

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14 hours ago, hullabelew said:

Fuck.  Todd Snider is really taking a hit in all of this.  

Prine:  Todd was on Prine's "Oh Boy" records and toured with him constantly.
Jerry Jeff:  Todd's mentor
Billy Joe:  Eddy used to play in Todd's band.  Todd wrote the fantastic song "Waco Moon" about Eddy's OD.  

Shit man, I'm really worrying about Todd.  He mentioned he had Elizabeth Cook with him this past Saturday when he did the 2 hour JJW streaming tribute.

Stay strong, Todd, I really want to see you live again.

RIP, Billy Joe.  I didn't experience his music much, but knew he was a Texas Legend.

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hullabelew

hullabelew 3724

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EVERYONE needs to own "Unshaven:  Live at Smith's Olde Bar".  Eddy at at the top of his game, with Keith Christopher on bass.  Brendan O'Brien produced it and does a kickass job.  Don't remember who the drummer is.   And it also includes one of my favorite exchanges on a live record.  Billy Joe says, "More beer up here".   Then he yells, "Whoa....Don't throw it".  I love the bartenders at Smiths.  It is a balls-to-the-wall rock-n-roll, honky-tonk show.  

 

 

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hullabelew

hullabelew 3724

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Georgia On A Fast Train
Ride Me Down Easy
Chunk of Coal
Live Forever
Honkytonk Heroes

My brother swears the greatest guitar performance he ever saw was Eddy Shaver warming up before a sound check.  Marshal Amp facing backwards into a plexiglass panel.  
All great songs but their performances on the Unshaven able.....fantastic.

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