My father was disappointed we didn’t have senior quotes in my yearbook. He suggested mine should be the entire lyrics of “Gettin’ By,” the song that opens Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Viva Terlingua.” It was a comment on my habit of “just living my life, easy come, easy go.” It wasn’t a compliment.
He was a walking contradiction, to steal a line from Kris Kristofferson, a songwriter with a poor voice whose covers of other people’s songs are among his most treasured works; a world-class asshole by most accounts whose generosity made the careers of other writers we might never heard of; a New Yorker whose biggest hit came before living in Austin was ever a gleam in his eye but who defined Texas music more than anyone, including Willie Nelson.
If I could start my career as a writer in any time and any place, it would be Austin, Texas in 1968. A group of singers and songwriters who were never good enough for Nashville’s vile orchestrations or didn’t want pay the price the establishment took from Hank Williams changed everything. Without the pressures of creating hits, they created art, stripping country to its roots, then fertilizing it with rock and jazz. Walker showed up after Michael Murphy and Steve Fromholtz and before Willie came back. He rented a recording studio on Sixth Street, borrowed Murphy’s band and recorded eponymous album “Jerry Jeff Walker,” and it was a big fuck you to everyone who thought they knew how to make a country song.
You can’t find the album streaming anywhere now, but it gave us “Charlie Dunn,” “Hairy-Ass Hillibillies” and “Old Beat Up Guitar.” But it was the Guy
Clark song “L.A. Freeway” that made that album literature. Walker’s cover was better than Clarke’s just as his cover of “Desperadoes Waiting on a Train” was better. Just as Texas as founded and then defined by people who weren’t born in Texas, Outlaw Country’s nexus was the man from New York. And make no mistake about it, the work he did from 1972 to 1975 when Ridin’ High came out defined the era and the place. As he got lost in cocaine and money woes, Willie became a movie star and Nashville took back over. George Strait was nice, but he didn’t have the edge. But was Jerry Jeff we missed. When my brother told me about this signer he’d heard in College Station, Willie wasn’t the frame of reference, “He might be better than Jerry Jeff,” he said.
Like all country music (no one named Luke or Dirks plays real country music) Walker’s songs were about pain. But it was a different pain. It wasn’t a pain you were sharing or that anyone else really understood. It’s a lonely pain that looks out the window and wonders if the girl who broke your heart ever sees that same bird. It’s a lonely pain that tells a lover, “it seems like you would have found your own self by now.” It’s a lonely pain that laments “We never want the things we’ve already got. We always want what we can’t have.” It’s a pain that sits alone in a room listening to those lyrics over and over, not telling anyone about the pain when the sun comes up, then goes back and does it again the next night. It’s the pain that lives in your heart, even after it stops hurting.
I got to see most of my musical heroes except Nanci Griffith. Jerry Jeff was the last one. It was always a crapshoot. A friend who was in college in the 70s told me she’d been to four Jerry Jeff concerts and had never heard him
sing a note live. My parents went to see him play with Willie Nelson when we were kids and when they returned my father gave us the disappointing news: Jerry Jeff had had car trouble and didn’t arrive until the show was almost over. “Car trouble, hell,” my mother said. “He was drunk. And Willie wasn’t happy.” My girlfriend finally took me to see him at Rockefeller’s in Houston during the Christmas season 1994. He played two shows and we caught the end of the last one. He drank a beer on stage toward the end and I knew that was trouble. The second show was a two-hour slide downhill.
It didn’t matter. The songs were great. The songs were mine, in my heart as permanent as a tattoo, as raw as a broken heart, as wild as Texas itself. He’s gone now. I read about it this morning and put “L.A. Freeway” woke my ex-girlfriend, who is now my wife, and said “He’s dead.” She knew. And now, as I finish writing this, Todd Snider is on YouTube live with a tribute. And he’s singing my theme song. So I’m gonna keep lettin’ it roll, lettin’ the high times carry the load and living my life easy come, easy go.
Oran Today 