I’ve got a lot of favorite songwriters, and Billy Joe Shaver is right up there. Like most people, I got into him through Waylon Jennings, and in particular Waylon’s Honky Tonk Heroes album.I’ve already done a post about that album’s title song, and this is another from the same disc. I fell in love with it, first for the lyrics and then for the odd chord progression, which no one but a guitar player would ever come up with, following one chord shape up the neck, then shifting to another key for the chorus.
The lyric is a nice example of Shaver’s gift for turning ordinary language into surprising lyrics. I particularly like the line “ain’t no comfort in the can” — he’s writing about being in jail in Matamoros, but “comfort in a can” was an advertising slogan for Edgeworth pipe tobacco.
I did a long interview with Shaver, which I’ve posted on my website. He said the thing that characterized his writing was its simplicity:
“I know my limitations and I write within a realm that’s simple. It’s real hard to write simple and stay simple but, when you get it down, simplicity don’t need to be greased. Anybody can understand it, if you keep it within that range and write as much as you can with as few words as you can.”
I get what he means but, like Chuck Berry, he wrote a lot of lines that aren’t flowery or self-consciously poetic but couldn’t have been written by anyone else. “I’ve been to Georgia on a fast train, honey/ I wasn’t born no yesterday.” If you think that’s a common phrase, try running “born no yesterday” through Google. And he followed it with “I got a good Christian raisin’ and an eighth-grade education/ Ain’t no need in y’all treating me this way.” That’s from his autobiographical masterpiece, “I’ve Been to Georgia on a Fast Train,” which sketches his hardscrabble youth with brilliant economy — “I just thought I’d mention, my grandma’s old age pension/ Is the reason why I’m standing here today…”
I never learned that one, because it wasn’t my life story and his recording is, to me, so definitive that it would be ridiculous for anyone else to do it. His voice fits the story perfectly, backed by a hot honky-tonk band, and it’s one of my favorite records.
I saw Shaver a bunch of times, the first time with his son Eddy, who was a hard rock guitarist and backed his father with a couple of similarly hard rocking pals. I reviewed that show for the Boston Globe:
It looks like some old drunk wandered up on stage to sing along with a young country-rock band. Billy Joe Shaver is rumpled and craggy, with a face like a beat-up barn door framed by stringy, shoulder-length gray hair. He stands stiffly at the mike in a sweat-soaked black t-shirt, making broad, clumsy gestures to punch home the words of his songs. His voice is strong, tagging favorite lines with a hard, Texas yodel, but sometimes he has to fight a little to find the pitch.
“I’m just an old chunk of coal,” he sings, and you believe him. “But I’m gonna be a diamond some day,” he adds, and the conviction is unmistakeable.
I’d forgotten the closer to that piece:
Meanwhile, rock star John Entwistle sits obliviously in the back room, chatting with his entourage. During the break, the Shavers are introduced to him, and the house photographer gathers everyone on the balcony for a group shot. Afterwards, father takes son aside for a whispered conference.
“Who’s John Entwistle?” Billy Joe asks Eddy.
“He’s the bass player for the Who,” Eddy whispers back.
“Oh,” says Billy Joe, nodding. “I guess that’s good.”
I saw him and Eddy again a couple of years later, doing an acoustic show, just the two of them, and it was magical. Then Eddy died of a heroin overdose and Billy Joe mostly stopped touring. I saw him once or twice more in Austin, sounding as craggy and heartfelt as ever. He often gets lumped together with Waylon and Willie Nelson, and he was good friends with both of them, but there was nobody like him.