The closest I ever came to actually meeting the man, was painting him a comical portrait of a cowpoke standing at the horse "Trigger's" grave, with "Here lies Trigger; He just couldn't Go No Mo" in a mock comic-lyrical eulogy — a chuckle, more than any editorial comment; a memento which I entrusted to a bartender who'd assured me he was connected to the crew of an upcoming live Walker appearance at a local venue — and that he'd get it to my hero's people. I'd graphically dedicated the artwork to Walker. "Rest easy brother" I was assured… I had no cash for a ticket. I never found out whether Jerry Jeff had ever seen it, much less accepted it.
That's showbiz.
I first discovered the 'outlaw genius' of Walker's music… how? I have two possible routes, and one of them has to be the right one. The Viva Terlingua years were recent history, and Walker was a guest performer on a TV show I happened to watch regularly — he seemed a tall, lean drink of water with a guitar and a stranger's sneer. One of the tunes he conjured was 'Contrary To Ordinary,' a subject that resonated somehow. I was hooked almost immediately, and made a mental note of the artist's name — it was easy to hold onto; a three-name, five syllable moniker… even a slight illiteration. Jerry Jeff… Walker. It was still on my mind during my next trip to Tower Records.
Tower was a music lovers' Disneyland then… LPs, 8-Tracks and that new convenient format for new music aficionados, cassettes! Yeah, Cassette Tapes were a new thing then.
I'd had plenty of blank cassettes, and had operated as if the only kind of cassette tapes available retail were blank… for one's cassette recorder, to be recorded upon. Cassette recorders attached to radios and therefor capable of recording directly off the air, were a revelation — a technological marvel. The concept of a prerecorded music album available as a Cassette Tape was an original idea that everyone wondered why it had taken so long to come about! At least in the part of the country where I lived and worked.
Tower Records possessed a new section to browse: the cassette albums. Soon, they also had that natural follow-up section, the Budget Bin — for cassettes. It was there that I happened to be browsing when my memory bank suddenly asked "and how about that Jerry Jeff guy?"
The most attractive feature of bargain cassettes was that they were Big Bargains; the budget selection was already offering product at merely a dollar each. And there… the muses smiled upon me. Each for only a dollar, were the albums A Good Night For Singing and Cow Jazz, two prominent — and then, fairly new — Jerry Jeff Walker offerings!
There was no debate which to get, they both were carefully placed in my cart, immediately. I HAD to hear more of this guy, whomever he was… and learn as much as I could about him! The fact that both albums had been sent to Dollar Bin Purgatory made no discernible difference to my listening tastes.
I don't recall what else I found and bought, that trip to Tower… I had procured sought-after treasure, for a most reasonable price.
So was that TV show appearance, or those two cassettes, my first actual indulgence into Jerry Jeff's universe? Between the two disparate measures, I'd made a crucial decision, that THIS GUY was now a permanent denizen of my music collection! And I never, ever, regretted it.
By this time, his 'Greatest Hit' Mr. Bojangles and its fabeled legacy were simply a vague reference point. I'd heard Sammy Davis sing it well before I ever heard Walker's original. I had already known whom Tom Waits was, and owned a copy of his Swordfish Trombone, upon which resided his addictive 'The Piano Has Been Drinking.' The incredulity floored me, that the first Walker recording I heard from that purchase, on Good Night For Singing, was the Waits tune, 'Heart of a Saturday Night,' covered by Walker in his own style — fast and rowdy at first, then calmed down to a ballad briefly before the fade-out. This already flirted with the award Best Music Purchase of the Year, in my world.
He'd created a whole new — and decidedly more palatable — take of Tom Waits. And a few minutes later, Jerry Jeff frosted the cake, with a song that promptly took a spot among my Personal Top Ten, where it remains to this day: 'Couldn't Do Nothin' Right.' It was a tune that spoke to me personally, tugged at my heartstrings, and rang with melancholy truth. A song that alone would eventually account for my wearing the tape out with repeated play, and necessitate a search for a replacement, and yet once more again, when Compact Discs evolved into the new 'preferred' format of serious music consumers.
As the following years rolled on, I discovered that even Jerry Jeff's supposedly sad music had a unique quality of lightening my emotional load, of cheering me up. It gave me a melodic assurance that I was somehow not alone. That others felt these emotions, had these troubles, processed them in ways similar to how I did.
My parents had been avid Country & Western Music fans, but their tastes were common and mainstream; traditional AM Radio fare; steel guitars, banjos, fiddles… with names of stars I'd heard many times on The Grand Ol' Opry program and all its related, packaged TV shows. Porter Wagoner, Loretta Lynn, Buck Owens, et al. Here, in my own life, was a figure they'd never heard of; a purveyor of a similar genre, but not an exact one. 'Outlaw Country' was just emerging. But what did it really mean?
There are plenty of alternate definitions of Outlaw Country, but though Jerry Jeff's influence may have been partially responsible for it, it was evolving away, even from that independent outpost. The term "Gonzo" became a thing. It was Folk-Rock-Outlaw… with emphasis on Backporch Relaxed. It viewed life with a chuckle and a melancholy tear. It found its roots in the free-wheeling but precarious 'Busking' life that Jerry Jeff had traveled to find himself at the secure and stable husband and family-man destinations he'd arrived at yet without abandoning his origins, symbolized by spouse Susan Streit… and where he had contentedly remained. Being a Jerry Jeff Walker fan was a statement of pride in that journey, and with its destiny, while still being just a tad jealous of his success.
Jerry Jeff accomplished that ultimate pinnacle in the modern music business; he owned his own label, and his career was not diminished by its self-imposed isolation. His manager was his wife — and her role was not one of nepotism, but became one of logistical genius.
Walker became synonymous with the Austin, Texas music scene — other "top names" were organs of Nashville, Tennessee, but none were its most vital. The Traditional Country Music Capitol survived as its hub whomever was prominent at the moment, even after the passing of nearly all its most ubiquitous stars, Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, Hank Snow, Roy Acuff, Johnny Cash and all the rest. But Jerry Jeff Walker was Austin. If you talked Austin music, you eventually talked Walker.
Along with Jerry Jeff, one got around to discussing and appreciating the names connected, closely or distantly, to him; Gary P. Nunn, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Austin's Guitar God John Inmon — who played lead in Walker's ensemble, and a dozen more of the Lost Gonzo Universe. If one got hardcore, also listed was the group Circus Maximus, upon whose Byrds-inspired tracks Jerry Jeff's smooth, youthful baritone vocals flowed like country wine. Jerry Jeff brought about newbies' appreciation of talents unknown to fringe-coastal fans — the Guy Clarks, the Townes Van Zandts… to arrive at Walker's connections to the few traditional 'outlaws' like, oh, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings.
Walker's full biography is chronicled elsewhere, by historians far more steeped in it. Yes, he wasn't originally a country boy, but a New Yorker named Paul Crosby... It's out there to be read. My purpose here is to describe what Walker became to me, a very average listener appreciative and caught up in the awe of the offbeat legend — the obsession from an outsider's perspective.
My obsession first fully revealed itself as a legitimate mania, with the discovery of an unnamed music catalog that had revealed the existence of the double-album A Man Must Carry On. I had no idea of its content, but I had to possess a copy… and could find it nowhere. The catalog listed it as 'sold out.' My good buddy from college, then currently working as a clerk at Wherehouse, sent a query out and found it was 'out of print.' After that defeat, I'd consigned myself as denied a cherished find.
That is until the Tower Records Bargain Cassette bin struck once more. The downside was that the second cassette cartridge in the set had a flaw and tangled irrepairably due to its age, or perhaps its cheapness. But I had sides A and B, if not C and D. The bottom-line: I wound up buying another copy of the set, when another showed up elsewhere, even at a steeper price, just to possess one complete set. A music lover must carry on. One of the prominent tracks on the double album was 'L.A. Freeway' written by Guy Clark, which introduced me to Walker's legendary random blurt of "Turn me loose, I'll never be the same!" to the live crowd listening. And the song itself became an anthem, during my own life's adventures in southern California, 'taking Hollywood by storm.' Also new revelations were his inclusion of the Hondo Crouch vocal of 'Luchenbach Moon' — which introduced me to the Hondo chapter of Walker's biography.
I never found every single one of Walker's albums, but his songs overlapped on so many other albums, that I eventually owned everything I loved, and/or deemed necessary. Today when something of Walker's catalog that I've never heard before, crops up, it's a pleasant surprise and a trip, awkwardly, down memory lane.
Walker did not write every one of his iconic recordings, but in many cases, became so associated with a given tune that it in turn became believed that he wrote it. A case in point was Paul Seibel's lazily melodic 'Long Afternoons.' Even a Bob Dylan work found itself briefly under the Walker spell — 'One Too Many Mornings.'
But as Jerry Jeff's life sped along and constantly evolved, so did the tone of his own music. The arrival of his children brought with them gems in his productivity like 'She Knows Her Daddy Sings,' 'Django's Lullaby,' and Walker's now perennial favorite 'The Pickup Truck Song,' which referenced his own childhood and early life — including Hondo — as well as those of his kids.
As Hondo Crouch, the founder of the musical tourist stop "town" of Luchenbach, Texas is both represented and honored in Walker's universe — the man and his landmark — so is the progress of Walker's own family that in its way carries on the tradition.
But the one drawback to the direction of Walker's output was his departure of the busker's philosophy, its sole focus becoming the retelling of his life story in song. Not a bad drawback, but a one-note direction; every lyric self-referential, every title a chapter heading of a same book.
Gone were the outlaw-poignance of lost loves and old roads walked at daybreak, that had enchanted me so as in the heart-string tugs of A Good Night For Singing and Reunion. Now albums like Moon Child and Scamp merely regaled Walker's listeners with musical photo albums of eras past. Those were good times, but they had all previously been celebrated — in albums that were themselves already definitive.
Though not exactly a fixture on radio, even on dedicated country stations, and rarely on television, Walker's sound and muse permeated. The ultimate sublime moment happened one afternoon in a suburban liquor store… I stood at the magazine rack, reaching for the latest issue of Mad. Over the store's sound system suddenly roared 'Let 'Er Go,' Walker's late-life anthem, celebrating the reminiscent look back upon his own life from the comforting trail's end of Belize, Walker's final residence. The clerks smiled, and semi-danced a subtle jig to it. Willie Nelson can't boast that.
Indy country music star Mark Dollar's rendition of 'Long Afternoons' — available to hear on Youtube — explores the territory to which Walker opened a crucial door, and subliminally invited his fans, those whom were also musicians, to navigate.
Walker's musical legacy is respected, even by those not into country music per se. He went from a young man walking a highway from New York to New Orleans, a guitar on his back, to music industry legend cherished and explored by the devoutly curious. From troubadour to star, to an aesthetic — how far a journey lived, and how self-absolute can that be?
Jerry Jeff Walker blew minds with his music, and blew them again by passing away — like a mere mortal — at 78, October 23, 2020 — from throat cancer. The same death as other icons, like Sammy Davis, Eddie Van Halen, George Harrison, and even Humphrey Bogart.
"Best-Of's" of various titles, and concert albums, abounded. Walker's final young musical ward — the Robin to his Batman — Todd Snider, allowed us all to rediscover Walker's legacy with a fresh take. On the day of Walker's demise, Snider posted a live solo concert on Youtube, before a video camera alone, to a grateful online audience; his tribute to the man, featuring a "greatest hits" list of Walker gems. He concluded by adding the most vulnerable of all Walker tunes, 'Laying My Life On The Line' and commenting that any young musician in search of his or her performance soul, should look up his late big buddy. I second that. Amen.
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