True to the Roots (24 page)

We chatted a little, and he told me to call Susan, his wife, to set something up. Later I did talk to Susan as well as others associated with Tried & True Music, the company the Walkers own. I tried and failed to make arrangements, sent questions via e-mail for review, and got promises of cooperation that ultimately failed to materialize. The whole project was fraught with spectacular failures and unlikely successes, and it didn't really rankle me so much that things didn't work out. For one thing, I know Jerry Jeff Walker in the sense that I know the words to his songs, which ones he wrote and which ones he covered. There were many other people I needed to get to know, Walker's son Django being one notable example, and the experience of writing this book was more instructive for the new over the old and familiar.

I don't know if it was Walker who said it first, but I know he was the first I heard describe the process of aging in this manner: "I used to take acid. Now I take antacid."

What a life he's lived. This quintessential Texan grew up in Oneonta, New York, wandered the country riding his thumb, sang on the streets of Key West, New Orleans, and dozens of other places, damn near killed himself on drugs and booze, and emerged to inspire a generation of Texas musicians and others, like the great Todd Snider, who migrated there.

An old album depicts Walker standing outside a honky tonk on the edge of a highway, lighting a cigarette with a guitar slung around his back. As I talked with him under the streetlights of Newberry, I thought of the man in front of me and the man from the album photo. Same guy more than thirty years later.

Probably what I value most about Walker is the nature of his concerts. They are unusually extemporaneous, and no set list is immune from radical departures. He sings what he wants to sing, and since his band almost always includes survivors of all those road trips, they move along without a hitch. Every time I've ever seen Walker, he's neglected to sing at least one song I expected and sang one that I'd never heard him perform before. It's not unusual to see him dredge up a tune like "Dear John Letter Lounge" that's from an album so old that I haven't even heard it on a turntable in a decade.

In his heart, from what I can tell, he still lives the troubadour's life.

Of course, audiences always have fans who are less experienced than I. They frequently scream requests, which almost always irritates Walker, who insists on doing his own thing. The only time I ever heard him relent was one night when he stopped, glared fiercely at the heckler, and said, "All right, goddammit, I'll do 'Railroad Fuckin' Lady.'"

That stopped the guy in his tracks. As for me, the only thing I've ever screamed at the stage was, "Play what you want to play, J.J.!" The man is best left to his own devices.

Out of all the entertainers in the world, across all the forty-eight years of my life, what makes Jerry Jeff Walker my favorite?

I think it is simply that listening to Walker always puts me in a good mood. At a May 2003 concert at the Neighborhood Theatre in Charlotte, Walker, now in his sixties, was a bit down in the back, and he spent most of his two-and-a-half-hour show sitting in a chair while he played his rhythm guitar and sang. Maybe that made him a bit more thoughtful than usual.

Many of my friends don't know who Jerry Jeff Walker is, and many of those who do are only vaguely aware that he wrote "Mr. Bojangles," one of the more widely recorded songs of the past five decades. They ask me who my favorite singer is, and when I say, "Jerry Jeff Walker," invariably they

ask, "Who?"

I only speak for myself; to me he is simply the best.

"Mr. Bojangles," by the way, is sometimes derided because it allegedly fosters racial stereotypes in its sympathetic portrayal of a street singer Walker encountered in a New Orleans jail many years ago. The song has nothing at all to do with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, the black tap dancer who appeared in a number of movies and stage presentations.

One of the less-known facts about the song, in fact, is that the character described in Walker's song was white.

Another significant bit of trivia is how the best-selling version of "Mr. Bojangles," by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, includes a line that is rather inexplicable, cast as it is in the midst of such a straightforward song. While one of the band's future members packed his car for a move to southern California, a college acquaintance told him he ought to check out this new song, and just before the trunk was closed, he tossed Walker's original 45-RPM single into the pile. The record remained in the trunk for months, and when it was finally retrieved, immersed in rusty water beneath the spare tire, it was a bit the worse for wear.

That's why the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, where the words to the song say, "and he spoke right out," sang, instead, "as the smoke ran out."

In Charlotte Walker sang "Mr. Bojangles" and many other songs, some of which he wrote and some of which he did not. He introduced many of the compositions with stories from a lifetime on the road. From Harry Stonebeck, the itinerant "artiste" who once accompanied Walker on one of his cross-country rambles, to the great rodeo cowboy Larry Ma-han and other kindred spirits, Walker provided running liner notes to a concert that would have been evocative without a word being spoken.

He likened his son Django to the main character in Guy Clark's tender song "The Cape." In fact, one of Walker's great assets has always been his ability to select great songs of other writers and weave them into his own collection. Among the highlights of the Charlotte concert were Clark's "LA Freeway," Ray Wiley Hubbard's "Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mothers," Steve Fromholz's "Man with the Big Hat" and "Singing the Dinosaur Blues," and Gary P. Nunn's "London Homesick Blues," all of which have become Walker standards.

Time may have settled Jerry Jeff down, but it hasn't broken his spirit, and even though his back sometimes troubles him, it doesn't prevent him from rising from his chair periodically to jam with the band.

The only conversation I've had with Steve Earle mainly concerned baseball, of all things. After a November 2003 concert at Charlotte's Visulite, I happened to be wearing a Boston Red Sox cap when I approached Earle outside the back door.

"You know I'm a Yankees fan, right?" he asked. A few weeks earlier New York had advanced to the World Series by beating Boston in the seventh game of the American League championship series.

"Let me get this straight," I replied. "Steve Earle is a fan of the team that epitomizes wretched capitalist excess?"

"I know, I know," he said. "What can I say? I've been pulling for the Yankees all my life."

"Well, that's a little different," I conceded. "If you've been a fan all your life, I can respect that and even admire it because that's the way I am with the Red Sox. There are some Yankee fans, though, who pull for them because they win all the time."

During the concert Earle had made the remark that his father once predicted that the older he got, the more he would love baseball. That's one experience the two of us have in common.

I think Earle is the most talented and intriguing performer on the American stage, and I respect him as much for his guts as his talent. My admiration is only amplified by his controversial song "John Walker Blues," about the so-called American Taliban, John Walker Lindh. First of all, it's a great song; in it Earle delved into what might make a kid from an upper-middle-class Bay Area background wind up being a radical Muslim fundamentalist. It's similar to the way he got inside the mind of a murderer in his song "Billy Austin." The notion that our troops are "defending freedom" is undermined by having controversial views suppressed on the home front. Freedom is antithetical to a society in which the political views of Steve Earle—or Toby Keith, for that matter—can be shouted down. As Earle frequently says at his concerts, his definition of patriotism apparently differs from that of his detractors.

"Some people say I'm paranoid," he'd said from the stage that night. "I can't say for sure that y'all are being watched, but I know for damn sure that I am."

Earle is often quoted for his remark that he would go to Bob Dylan's home, stand up on his coffee table, and tell Dylan that the late Townes Van Zandt was a greater songwriter. Given the opportunity, I might make the same claim on Earle's behalf, which, by the way, isn't meant to be disrespectful to Dylan.

Steve Earle is a difficult man to categorize, which means that he falls between the musical cracks to land in the realm of Americana. His songs run the gamut from country, blue-grass, rock, and folk to the blues. I think he's brilliant, but what do I know? As with most everyone else I like, mainstream radio remains uninterested.

Earle is passionately opposed to the death penalty, but his concert was free of the political diatribes some of the people around me expected to hear. At one point, however, late in the concert, he said: "This is what I think is really cool about my fans. I know that a lot of you don't agree with me, but I think you do believe that there ought to be a dialogue."

When I was eleven or twelve years old, my father took me to Columbia, South Carolina, to see the "Johnny Cash Show, the touring troupe that included Cash and the Tennessee Three, the Carter Family, Carl Perkins, the Statler Brothers, and Tommy Cash, the singer's brother. It means a lot to me that I saw Cash in his performing prime (it was probably a bit past his songwriting prime), along about the time of the recorded prison concerts at Folsom Prison and San Quentin.

I've seen Earle perhaps a half-dozen times over the years, but for the first time, as he stood on the stage in Charlotte, he reminded me of the Johnny Cash of my youth—not in sound, not in musical style, but in attitude. He had that lean, hungry, and energized look of Cash way back when. I told him this after the concert, and Earle said he had been out of the country when Cash died but that he was looking forward to the tribute concert, then just a few days away, in Nashville at Ryman Auditorium.

What country music has lost is its populist streak. All the songs on mainstream radio now seem to echo the same tedious themes. No one takes any chances. Patriotism becomes big in the music when it becomes big in the country, and, of course, it just so happens that patriotic songs tend to be a reliable way to make money. I'm not saying that all of this music isn't heartfelt; I'm just saying that the timing is awfully convenient.

Yet no one sings about the day-to-day problems of average people. Johnny Cash sang about the life he lived, which was full of highs and lows, triumph and heartbreak. So did Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, the Louvin Brothers, the Carter Family, and dozens of others. Now the singers are cowboys because they happen to wear the boots and hats.

I listen to the old concert albums from Folsom and San Quentin. Can you imagine Garth Brooks playing to an audience of convicts? Can you imagine him sympathizing with their plight?

I'm disturbed about the direction of the country right now, mainly because all the creative decisions seem to be made by people who only have business in mind. It's all so calculated, and that's true, it seems to me, of just about everything. I can see a common thread that runs through everything that af-ffects my life, from newspapers to sports to entertainment to politics to simple day-to-day events.

I think it's a vicious cycle. I think the Founding Fathers would be appalled.

I don't agree with everything Steve Earle has to say either, but I'm getting tired of the notion that he doesn't have the right to say it. I'm getting tired of the notion that some important people don't believe a controversial film account of Ronald Reagan's presidency is fit for public view. I'm getting tired of people who speak into a microphone on talk radio and TV stations across the country, many of them owned by a few huge conglomerates, and refer to "the media" as if they were not a part of it.

It seems to me that's what the knob on the radio or television set—ok, the remote control—is there for. This isn't about ideology. This is about freedom.

"Reckless Kelly" was Ned Kelly, the ill-fated Australian bandit whom Mick Jagger once played in a mostly forgettable movie.

Reckless Kelly is also the name of an Austin, Texas, band, although the Rolling Stones's Jagger really had nothing to do with it.

"We heard the name in school," recalls Cody Braun. "Willy [my brother and band mate] thought of it one day. We had a gig coming up that weekend, and we needed a name for the band. We found out more about [the bandit] later."

School was in Bend, Oregon, the band's home before moving to Austin and its vibrant musical scene about a decade ago.

"I guess we've played with every band in town," says Cody Braun. "It's great to be able to play with them as friends and people. There's so much music in Austin that has influenced and inspired us."

I'm particularly fond of the CD
Under the Table and Above the Sun.
With bows to Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly, Reckless Kelly mines the fields of elusive love and unreachable beauty.

"Everybody" strolls down the same street Orbison walked in "Pretty Woman." A lost love is so haunting that it intrudes upon every memory, every scene, every casual encounter.

A newer album has been released since these words were written, 2005's
Wicked Twisted Road
. It's splendid too.

Willy Braun's voice evokes the splendid style of Buddy Miller. Says Cody, who plays the fiddle and sings harmony: "We've been listening to [Miller] for the last three or four years. We even talked to him about producing a record. Our