Try as it might, life just can’t beat this self-professed “wacko from Waco” down — or at least, not to the point where he can’t climb back up again and throw a new song back in life’s face.
Billy Joe Shaver has long maintained writing songs is “the cheapest psychiatrist I’ve found,” so it stands to reason his concerts sometimes take on the feel of group therapy — particularly when his band goes quiet and his creaky voice breaks through “Star of My Heart,” a devastating song he wrote about his son’s death. Loss and endurance have so rarely felt so nakedly expressed in song.
Shaver has lived a lot in his 72 years, which have seen the Corsicana native lose bandmate and son Eddy to an overdose, a three-time wife to cancer, and several fingers on his right hand to a sawmill accident. He’s seen several of his record labels sink, taking his albums down with them. He’s been in more fights than he can count and nearly been in more marriages that he can count on what’s left of his fingers. He’s been tried for shooting a man in the face (long story short, the man lived, and Shaver walked). And few songwriters have more openly documented their cycles of sin and redemption as Shaver has, with songs that describe his restless ways and his aspiration for betterment. He’s unafraid to reveal his wrongdoings and he’s refreshingly accountable for them, per the lyrics of “Black Rose”: “The devil made me do it the first time, second time I done it on my own.”
Shaver’s newest album is Live at Billy Bob’s Texas, a CD/DVD set which offers a generous mix of work from throughout his 40-plus years of writing songs. Some of the songs are more closely associated with Waylon Jennings, Shaver’s old friend, who in 1973 made a landmark album, Honky Tonk Heroes, based on nine Shaver songs. There are also some scorchers from the ’90s, the period when he and his son performed a red-line style of rock/country hybrid as the band Shaver. And there are a couple of new songs (including “Wacko from Waco,” inspired by the aforementioned shooting and trial) meant to entice the long-time fans awaiting a new set of Shaver songs, which he’s working on. Shaver says he’s written about 14 new songs and has recorded four or five, with hopes for a release before the end of the year.
Until then, Shaver continues to play hundreds of shows each year, with songs about Saturday night revelry and unrelenting Sunday mornings best forgotten. Despite all the knocks that have come in his tumbleweedy existence, Shaver’s career is larger than any one anecdote. Despite his admitted flaws, he’s become a mythological sort of artist, a guy who lives to write and writes what he lives, prompting even Bob Dylan to reference him in song. Here, he talks about it all — the songs, the tragedy, the fingers, and Dylan — starting with the song that can hush the rowdiest crowd in an instant.
I like the way some of your songs have changed live over the years. “Star in My Heart” is the most striking to me, losing all the instrumentation.
Yeah, I like it better that way now, too. I did it once or twice and then we decided to finally just do it that way. It got to be this thing where it was touching so many people. Bad stuff happened to them and it seemed to help. There’s always a family member or a friend, somebody who goes too soon.
It must still be a tough one to sing.
Yeah, even now it’s not easy. But it’s gratifying to know it reaches people.
Are the shows harder to do as you get older?
No, as a mater of fact, they’ve gotten easier. I dunno, I know the songs inside out and I got a good group with me now. They’re younger, but that’s good, I like that. They play with more enthusiasm and they don’t have old habits.
“Ride Me Down Easy” is probably the most different from the version most people know.
Yeah, we kick it upstairs. A lot of our songs we’re doing that way. It does take off pretty good, so I’m thinking it might’ve been better to do it hard and fast like that from the get-go. But the Waylon version, I love it. It’s like a funeral dirge.
I’m sure he was open to creative suggestions.
(Laughs) Yeah, you don’t tell Waylon what to do. I learned that real quick.
I imagine you have more perspective now on the ways your careers were intertwined than you did then.
I certainly do. We’re two people that had lives that ran parallel. He understood every word I said and a lot of people didn’t. I think a lot of people found me to be too raw. For some they just closed their ears to it. But he was the guy to deliver it. I couldn’t possibly sing as good as him. Those songs were bigger than me, they were bigger than I could handle. It was just God’s will that I was able to hand them over to him.
There are stories of contentious moments. But would you characterize yourselves as being close?
Yeah, we got to be really good friends, real close. He called me a lot. He’d chew me out for 30 minutes and threaten me. He’d say, “If I catch you writing songs trying to get some kind of award I’m gonna shoot you between the eyes.” I told him not to worry, they wouldn’t give me any awards anyway. He didn’t care about that stuff. He always told them to stick it up their ass and twist it.
“The Git Go”’s title suggests a scorcher, but that’s not what you get.
No, that’s one I’ve been playing with a long time, man. A friend came to visit and told me to put a minor chord on that first part, that it’d make it sound a little more eerie. After that the song pretty much wrote itself. But he really did help me with it. That’s what friends are for.
Is your songwriting process as meticulous as Guy Clark’s, with the graph paper and all?
Oh no, it doesn’t matter to me where I write. When it hits me, it’s almost like having a baby on the trail or something. I don’t know when it’s actually gonna happen. That keeps the excitement in it.
You were close to the right age to get swept into rock or some awful hippie music, but you never did. It sounds like you took in more blues.
When I was a kid, 6 or 7, I’d go across the railroad tracks. There was a settlement of black people over there. There was a piano, a lone stand-up piano, on the front porch of one of the houses. It was a cotton picker’s house, real poor and everything, but they loved to play music every evening. So I’d go listen, and they didn’t mind me because I could jive, barefooted and everything. They sang and sang and sang. There was always somebody with a bottleneck. It was just sitting around and playing. I think that influenced me more than anything else. Hank Williams, also, of course. But everybody was influenced by him. Jimmie Rodgers, I recall the black people loved him too. They played his songs. I think they thought he was black.
The idea of escape informs a lot of your songs. How old were you when that became something you thought about seriously?
I couldn’t even remember, but it was early. My grandmother worried herself to death about me. I’d be gone for three days. She knew when she passed that I’d hit the road. She passed when I was 12 and I had to go to Waco to live with my mother and stepfather. We didn’t get along good so I stayed gone more than there. They went and signed for me with the Navy. I was 16. I remember at night the guys would be homesick in the bunks crying. I’d act like I was crying to fit in. But that was a fun time for me. Three squares a day and not getting kicked around — that was a good deal.
Sounds like your service was less eventful than Johnny Paycheck’s.
Well, I got kicked out, too. But then they found out when I was in the brig that this officer had hit me and knocked the heck out of me. I decked him, but he was wearing civilian clothes at a party so I had no way of knowing. But they put me in for that. Some Marine lawyer was looking for cases to work. He decided to do mine. He didn’t charge me and he made fools of them. So they gave me an honorable discharge. I got out of the Navy. I’d just turned 21 and went to work at the sawmill there in Waco. That’s where I cut my fingers off.
Do you remember what it felt like to saw off those fingers?
It hits you in the heart real quick. It never did bleed. It was real weird, I looked for my fingers in the saw dust and found ’em. Back then nobody tried to help you with anything. So I picked up my fingers and got in the truck and drove to the doctor’s office. He was an old Navy doctor, Dr. Tabb, a big old tall guy. He said, “Damn son, looks like you got a little trouble there. What’re you doing with them fingers?” I said, “I’d read something about Japanese people sewing them back on, so I thought maybe you can, too.” He said, “Nah, this is Waco, Texas.”
There was this beautiful nurse, good looking and built like what. She said, “Mr. Shaver, can I have them fingers?” She said, “You ain’t doing anything with ’em, are you?” She went and put ’em in a mason jar. I went to the hospital and stayed there a couple of days. Everybody was divorced from me because I couldn’t work no more. So I was driving home and went to the doctor’s office and I asked about the nurse. He said she’d gone back to New Orleans. So maybe there were people dancing some dance around my fingers, I dunno. I put a thing on the Internet looking for her but nobody sprung. I offered a good bit for them.
You’ve sort of turned the finger thing into a positive with the handprints on the T-shirts and all.
Yeah, I suppose that’s my version of turning a lemon into lemonade. (Laughs) You know there are still people wanting to buy those things. I can’t believe it. It seemed like a silly idea at the time, but sure enough, people liked it.
You’ve taken a fair few other knocks, right?
God, I don’t even want to think about it. I’ve had both shoulders worked on. One’s got screws all in it. I had a heart attack, four-way bypass. My neck’s been broke three times. Knee surgery. Jesus, I tell you what, there’s a bunch more. Back surgery. I’m much shorter than I used to be. I had four discs taken out of my back and neck. I hardly got no neck no more. I have to turn my whole body to turn my head. That’s easier now, though, you get used to it.
You’ve sung about your father running off on your family. So who taught you to fight?
Gosh, I don’t know. Ever since I was a little kid I’ve been a loner. Seems like I’ve always known how to fight. My daddy, I never did see him much, but he was a bare-knuckled fighter. One of those guys who loved to fight. He’d fight for money at the railroad yards. He just liked to fight. So maybe I got some of that. I don’t remember all of them that well. But you run into a lot of things. I broke a good guitar over a guy’s head one time. He ran at me and it didn’t seem like there was anything I could say to stop him. So I had to let him have it.
Sounds like you’ve put more miles on the odometer than other guys your age.
Yeah, think about it, if I hadn’t got beat up so much I might’ve lived forever. But I’ve been real lucky a few times. My best man broke my neck at my wedding. We got in a fight and he broke my neck. It’d already been broke before and I had a plate in there. If the plate wasn’t there it would’ve killed me. I was just lucky.
Um, why was there a fight at your wedding?
Oh it was an Indian wrestling thing. He was real good at it. We’d been drinking some of that bubbly. All my friends are old roughnecks and we were at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, so you can guess how that goes. Me and the last gal I married, she married me three times and we divorced three times too. Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, he’s a friend, he married us in that little chapel. I didn’t figure it’d last long anyway because I know him pretty well. I can’t believe he’s a minster.
Some people might’ve come to the conclusion that marriage didn’t suit them.
Uh, yeah. (Laughs) I’m out of that. I just ain’t getting married no more. I married my first wife three times. I never thought about it, I just did it. I loved her too much. This other one … they want to change you and it’s ridiculous. They want to change you from the person they fell in love with at first and it’s impossible. Then they quit you and go looking for another guy like you. My first wife took up with a convict. So eventually I ended up having to take care of him. I didn’t shoot him or nothing, but I crippled him up pretty good. So three times I married her and I was with her the last three years of her life. I did the right thing and stayed by her side. Nobody took care of her like I could. Then she passed and then my son passed. I just think he couldn’t take it. Him and his mother grew up together, so it was rough for a while there.
He seemed to let you have it for that with “Blood is Thicker than Water.”
We got after each other on that one. There was this big old round table made of whiskey barrels, and we’d sit there and play all night. We called it Nights at the Round Table. And we got after each other. That one in particular we wrote when she was still alive. It was tough but it meant something.
But it fit with your work. You really weren’t one to hide stuff like that in songs.
No, I like to lay it out there. I feel like if you don’t do that you’re not much of a poet. And I’ve heard people call me a poet and I appreciate it. I don’t think what I do is good enough, but I do write a lot of poetry.
Yours is particularly interesting because it’s so conversational. You sing the way you write and you write the way you talk.
Yeah, you’re onto something there. I don’t know exactly where that comes from, you just get to where you write like you talk. That’s the way we’ve been talking as long as I’ve been around.
You famously describe your education running through the eighth grade. But clearly there was some interest in how words worked together. Was there a teacher or mentor that got to you?
There was. I had an English teacher named Miss Legg. She was a twelfth-grade teacher and I was only in the eighth grade. But we had these homeroom things where people of all grades would come for an hour to study, like study hall. And she was the only one I knew that’d make you do something. Others just let us throw stuff at each other for an hour. (Laughs) So I quit not long after that and went into the Navy. But before then she gave me a poem to write. All of us. She said write a poem and I whipped one out. I was a kind of rough guy; I thought I was anyway. Rolled up sleeves and all that stuff, cigarettes in ’em. So that’s what I wrote. She asked me, “Where’d you get this?” I told her I wrote it, but she said, “Come on, now.” So she gave me something specific to write about and asked me to hand it in the next day. I bared down that night and really curled her toenails. She went on and on about it. She and I kind of became buddies. She gave me all these poets to read, this one and that one. But Robert Service, that was the one that stuck. He’s so simple. He wrote with a lot of action to the words. You could almost see what was going on. So I got in the habit of doing that, writing with action words. I still do that to this day. Most of my songs are written trying to tell the truth about trying to stay alive. The rest are about trying to get back in the house, with a few light-hearted things on the side; it’s observational things. I seldom write about anybody else. If I did, it wouldn’t be honest. I don’t know what’s going on with other people and the world, but I do know what’s going on with me. And I ain’t running out of material. All this stuff happens around me, so there’s plenty to write about.
Do you write every day?
Not necessarily, but I write quite a bit. I’m still writing a lot of poetry. I stick it in the storeroom. I have over 500 songs, which is kind of hard to believe. There’s always something to write about. And I guess I was just born to write songs. My eyes have always been wide open and I’ve been able to maintain that simplicity. I never did try to do anything different. I sing different, I guess. But it’s all simple. Which is a hard thing to do: to keep it simple enough that a dumb old boy like me can understand but so that the smart ones can get it, too.
Did you know all along you were going to come out of the shooting and trial with a song?
Tom T. Hall used to say something like, “Be careful now. Do me right or I’ll write a song about you.” I always liked him and his songs. I guess he’s kind of retired. He told me all the songwriters who actually make it are supposed to go to Florida to retire.
Would you retire?
Oh no, I won’t retire. (Laughs) I wouldn’t know how to retire. I’ve seen too many friends around here look like they’re 90 years old. They retire and become couch potatoes watching TV and looking older than they are. I don’t feel old. My mind’s still the same. So I don’t see any reason not to go around acting the same.
Like your line about the shirttail flapping in the wind.
Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Moving is the closest thing there is to being free. And I don’t mean moving furniture. (Laughs)
Are there any lines you’ve come up with over the years that still give you a jolt today?
Well just like everybody says, they’re like a bunch of kids. You love the buck-toothed ones just as much as the regular ones. It’s really had to pick out any one thing.
I loved the taste of aspiration in the “Cadillac buyers” bit in “Old Five and Dimers.” Did you ever end up with a Caddy?
No, I never did. But Waylon had one and he still sang the song. He came up to me and said, “Billy, I feel bad about owning this here Cadillac.” He said, “It makes me feel ashamed to be singing that song.” I told him to give it to me. (Laughs) That just made him mad and he stomped off.
If memory serves, he recounted losing a Cadillac in his biography.
Shoot . . . (Laughs) Waylon lost a lot of stuff.
Have you still not crossed paths with Bob Dylan since he name-checked you in a song three years ago?
You know what, I still never met him. Never met him, but I admire him so much. He’s a great writer. Almost makes you want to quit. (Laughs) He’s just one of them kind of guys, I really admire them. I’d been in touch with Levon Helm before he died and was gonna do a record with him, but then that hard weather hit and the old cancer came back.
Cancer seems like the one thing that’s left you alone.
Yeah, it didn’t tangle with me, and I’m lucky on that. My wife had it real bad. Of course there ain’t no good cancer. I wish somebody’d find a cure for it, darn it. After all this time, you’d think they’d have something.
Speaking of “all this time,” ... You’ve known Willie Nelson almost 60 years, right?
Since 1953.
Do you know any Willie stories we haven’t heard before?
I know him so well that I can’t tell a lot of the stories. And I suppose he could say the same about me!
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