Honky Tonk Heroes Bear Family Records (BCD 15775-AH) Re-issue Produced by Richard Weize Released July 15, 1994 25 tracks, 79 minutes 16 seconds

Most country listeners are familiar with Billy Joe Shaver numbers through their versions by other performers. Everyone from John Anderson to longtime Shaver pal Willie Nelson has cut his songs, and current heartthrob Marty Stuart has already cut the first of what will likely be many high-profile covers of Tramp On Your Street tunes. But hardcore Shaver fans know that the 53-year-old Texan is often his most sympathetic interpreter. His 1973 debut for Monument, Old Five And Dimers Like Me is a much-sought-after collector's item, as are two succeeding records cut for Capricorn, and three '80s LPs that came out on Columbia. All these records feature Shaver's wizened tenor sharing his tales of lovable losers and no-account boozers; all are worth digging for.

Until the appearance of this Bear Family CD, all of Shaver's pre-Tramp recordings lay out of print. This CD includes the entirety of the two LPs that shaver cut for Capricorn Records, When I Get My Wings (1976) and Gypsy Boy (1977), as well as both sides of a single cut for MGM in 1974 (Lately I've Been Leaning Toward The Blues / I Couldn't Be Me Without You) and a previously unreleased version of Music City U.S.A..

Shaver's love of music is almost as old as he is. In Tramp On Your Street he tells of being a 10-year-old Corsicana kid enraptured by Hank Williams. In 1979 he remembered, "When I was a kid, my grandma took me down to the general store. She raised me on her pension check; it was always late. So she's sit me down on the cracker barrel while she made a deal for credit, and ask me to sing for folks. Only we didn't have a radio, so I didn't know all of the words to the songs. So I made 'em up, and people really liked my lines."

A stint in the Navy lead to a series of go-nowhere jobs, among them one at a sawmill that cost Shaver several fingers on his right hand. The accident helped prod him to work harder on his songwriting, and his personal charm led to friendships with Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Bobby Bare, the last of whom gave him his first paying job in the music business after Shaver appeared unannounced one day. As Shaver told Bob Darden, "At first Bobby told me he wasn't looking for any new writers, so I hung my head and started to walk out. Man, I must have looked pathetic because he said, 'Aw, wait a minute. Where's your tapes?' I told him I didn't have any tapes, that my songs were all in my head. But he let me stay anyway and play him one song (A Restless Wing). Before I was through, he was drawing up the papers to sign me." A July 1970 demo session, with Bobby Bare on guitar; remains unissued, though Bare continued to record Billy Joe.

Bare's commitment notwithstanding, it was Monument recording artist Kris Kristofferson who got Shaver a deal and produced his first album, Old Five And Dimers Like Me.

The Monument album made a bit of commercial noise: a single, the original version of I Been To Georgia On A Fast Train, fought its way to Number 88. But Shaver soon left Monument for MGM. A November 18, 1974, press release, identifying Shaver as "a singer-songwriter solidly into the contemporary pop/young-country crossover market," announced what turned out to be a brief association. The A-side, Lately I've Been Leaning Toward The Blues, showcased a knowing affection for Jimmie Rodgers, and the flip, I Couldn't Be Me Without You, was eventually picked up by Johnny Rodriguez, who took it to Number Three.

Shaver noted in 1979, "I took I Couldn't Be Me Without You from a poem I wrote my wife. Like anybody she took to leaving me when I was crazy. I called her at her mama's at four in the morning and read her this poem I wrote on a grocery sack. She liked that line, and that became the song."

Rodriguez gave Shaver a hit version of I Couldn't Be Me Without You, but even with shared production credits to Bare and Willie Nelson, the author's version didn't chart and Shaver was soon gone from MGM. "Jimmy Bowen was heading up the company ," Shaver says. "We got sideways about something. Both of us were bull-headed. I think I said I wanted all my stuff back at some point. Back then I was really crazy. Whatever happened was probably my fault. I was my own worst enemy back the."

Shaver was not without a deal for long. "I got to be friends with Dickey Betts from the Allman Brothers Band. Now Dickey heard Waylon's Honky Tonk Heroes album and he just figured that Waylon wrote all those songs and that got him pretty high on Waylon. Then he looked at the credits, found out who really wrote 'em, and that got him pretty high on me. I went down to Macon, Georgia, to visit Dickey 'cause he was such a big fan. He had a cabin back in the woods. We were out there, just messin' around playin' songs. I didn't know much about the Allman Brothers or Dickey at the time, to tell you the truth. We were just swappin' tunes, and he played Ramblin' Man. I told him I liked that and we kept on talking for a while. I asked him who wrote that song. He said, 'I did, and I sang it on the record.' I was pretty embarrassed, because that's one of my favorite songs of all time. Anyway, it was Dickey who got me on to Capricorn, the Allman's label."

The first Capricorn LP, When I Get My Wings, still stands as a bold expansion of the ideas Shaver started exploring on Honky Tonk Heroes. Its songs are full of characters traveling through al sorts of physical and spiritual dislocations, and its sound is wide and full, thanks to Bob Johnston's rock-tinged production and accompaniment that included Betts, Charlie Daniels, and pianist Chuck Leavell. Notes Shaver, "At that time no one was doing that kind of kick-ass stuff. Bob Johnston recognized that and he realized that his job was to make the record sound as much like the live show as he could and to make us feel comfortable. He was real good at that, real good. Man, I had a good producer on that, some good songs. The whole thing was pretty magical. I just didn't get pushed on it by the company."

Shaver received a bit more of a push from the company on Gypsy Boy. "It's getting a lot of pop play," Capricorn publicist Mark Pucci told a reporter at the time, although Shaver immediately countered, "Yeah we didn't count on that did we?" Its single, a version of the Honky Tonk Heroes standard You Asked Me To featuring Willie Nelson on shared vocal, climbed to Number 80. Gypsy Boy was a strong record, but it was done in by the friction between Shaver and producer Brian Ahern, who returned down many of Shaver's songs (among them Old Chunk Of Coal) and instructed Shaver to record some cover versions, something that he hadn't done previously and hasn't done subsequently. "I was in the shape that I had to do it," Shaver admits, although the record is full of fine performances. One reviewer nailed the problem with the record then he called the title track "a haunting, sometimes moving piece by Bob Carpenter, but it's not a Shaver song." And if there's one art at which Shaver excels, it's interpreting his own material.

The part of Gypsy Boy that came closest to the real Billy Joe Shaver was the cover, a Nick Taggert painting of Billy Joe with a child (looking much like his own son Eddy) clutching his arm. The child wears a fedora; both child and adult are either blowing cigarette smoke or blowing air into the cold. Billy Joe told Nelson Allen the story behind the image back in 1978: "Once in Nashville I had to go downtown to the Western Union to send my wife some money and I was an old blind man being guided down the street by a young boy who looked just like the boy on the cover. I ran across the street and handed the kid $20, which he slipped into his pocket without a word. He just kept leading the old man down the street."

Billy Joe's association with Capricorn didn't last much longer than that twenty, as the label began to fold shortly after Gypsy Boy came out. "Put it out, put 'em out of business,' Shaver says. "I was putting record companies out of business all through the '70s. I did one for Monument and they went down, I did one single for MGM and that ol' lion got tired out right away, then I did two records for Capricorn and they went out of business. Boy, I was bad luck." He may have been, but his songs never were. At their greatest, the songs of Billy Joe Shaver tell the stories of the people on the cover of Gypsy Boy, such people who he sees as having been marginalized. Whether he's writing songs for himself or others, working on a screenplay (a projected Honky Tonk Heroes film has yet to be shot), or simply lending his mythic presence to a project, Shaver is hell-bent on giving voice to folks who don't normally get one. That tramp on your street, he keeps on saying, might just turn out to be you or me.

--Jimmy Guterman
April 1994
Thanks to: Bobby Bare, Jack Emerson, Colin Escott, Otto Kitsinger, Andy McLenon, Billy Joe Shaver, Richard Weize
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