Jesse Dayton Mines a Lifetime of Collaboration for ‘Beaumonster’ Memoir and Album

EDITOR’S NOTE: As album releases slow down in December, we like to catch our breath and write about albums that came out earlier in the year that we didn’t get a chance to review but we think are worthy of your attention. (In this case, it’s an album that accompanied a book.) Beaumonster — the memoir and the album — was released in November.

About a third of the way through his breezy memoir, Beaumonster, rockabilly renegade turned country-rock firebrand Jesse Dayton writes about being on tour with the punk-rock Supersuckers.

“I’m used to being the odd man out,” Dayton writes of his affinity for both country and rock. “I know I’ll never be accepted in either camp.”

Maybe so, but the guitar-slinger from Beaumont, Texas, has nevertheless forged a richly varied and substantial career, and he’s done it in the way so many of the great Lone Star musical mavericks have done — striving for greatness by resolutely remaining himself.

Beaumonster (that is, someone from Beaumont) tells the story of a working-class kid who had “hillbilly and Black gospel music in my blood,” went on to play guitar for both Waylon Jennings and X (among many others), built a vibrant solo career, and branched out into stage and screen acting as well as screenwriting and directing. As the book makes clear, he did it through a combination of talent, ambition, discipline, and a willingness to push beyond his comfort zone.

As Dayton puts it when writing about touring with Social Distortion: “Playing country-music to punk-rock audiences … turned out to give me a bigger and more loyal audience.” The same thing happened when he hooked up with heavy-metal’s Rob Zombie for film and soundtrack work.

The memoir has been released simultaneously with a CD of the same title on which Dayton performs songs by some of the influential artists he has known throughout his career. In addition to Jennings, X, The Supersuckers, and Social Distortion’s Mike Ness, they include Willie Nelson, Doug Sahm, Kinky Friedman, and Townes Van Zandt. (Nothing, though, by John Lee Hooker, subject of a hilarious story in the book about the time Dayton met the blues giant.)

The now-Austin-based Dayton tells a story about driving to Houston for an Astros baseball game with Sahm and legendary Austin club owner Clifford Antone, who had discovered Dayton at 15 in a Beaumont club. From Sahm, Dayton gleaned a key reinforcement: “Doug had zero musical boundaries. … Being raised on the Texas-Louisiana border, I saw how genres could be more integrated because of all the different ethnic musicians who ended up in the same bands and writing songs together. Blues, Zydeco, country and western, and rock ‘n’ roll were all thrown around in one set by all the bands. Doug Sahm just confirmed what I had already been thinkin’.”

The Sahm song Dayton performs on the album is “At the Crossroads,” whose key line is, “You just can’t live in Texas if you don’t have a lot of soul.” Dayton brings plenty of that quality to his rendition, as he does to Nelson’s “Pretend I Never Happened” (adding an inventive guitar solo); Jennings’ “Just to Satisfy You”; and Friedman’s “Wild Man of Borneo” and “Sold American.”

By around 1997, Dayton writes, “I’d been ‘the kid’ on quite a few recording sessions full of old-timers. I was the young weirdo who was into older music. I felt comfortable around older people.” He also realizes his good fortune at getting to know the greats. He describes Jennings as “the coolest of the outlaws. … Waylon was like part Elvis, part outlaw Josey Wales, and part the wildest horse that even the most experienced ol’ cowboy could never tame. By the time I worked with him [in the mid-’90s] he had calmed down quite a bit, but you still felt like that side of him might show up at any minute.”

Of Nelson, he says, “He was our Beatles and our Stones.” He also tells about an after-hours visit to the Gibson guitar factory in Nashville with Kris Kristofferson, the “genius,” and devotes a whole chapter to Johnny Cash, whom he met while working with Jennings. “I mean, for all intents and purposes, if you grew up in the South, or out west, or in Texas like I did, and grew up around older people who listened to country and western music non-stop, there was Jesus Christ, and Johnny Cash was a close second.” When he met the Man in Black, Dayton writes, “he had morphed into a deeply spiritual person. … He had a spiritual aura that surrounded him.”

But it’s not all old country immortals, interesting as all that is. Dayton also recounts adventures with performers closer to his age, from Ness, The Supersuckers, and X’s John Doe and Exene Cervenka to Duff McKagan, Ryan Bingham, and Waylon’s son, Shooter Jennings. On the album he injects some country twang into X’s “Burning House of Love” and Ness’ “Story of My Life.” (The 10-song set is rounded out with lively takes on Van Zandt’s “White Freightliner Blues” and Ray Price’s “I’ll Be There.”)

Ironically, some of Dayton’s best-known music is not under his own name. For Zombie’s film The Devil’s Rejects, Dayton created the fake country band Banjo & Sullivan, known for such tunes as “I’m at Home Getting Hammered (While She’s Out Getting Nailed)” and “Tried to Quit (But I Just Quit Tryin’).” For Zombie’s Halloween II, it was Captain Clegg and the Night Creatures, this time a surf and psychobilly outfit. His work with Zombie led him to write and direct his first feature film, Zombex, which gave him the intimidating task of overseeing famed actor Malcolm McDowell.

“The Clegg thing just wouldn’t die!” Dayton writes. “It’s like a ghost record/movie that keeps haunting me and reappearing in my life over and over every October.” At least once a week, he writes, someone on the street will say, “Hey, wait, are you Captain Clegg?” While he’s grateful for the experience and the audience it has brought him, he’s happy to be back being Jesse Dayton. And this motorcycle-riding Renaissance man, who’s barely into his 50s, makes clear that “my journey is far from over.”

He also asserts: “The thing that helps me sleep at night is embracing the idea that I’m not for everybody.”

Maybe not, but those of us who appreciate his singular talents and drive to keep pushing himself eagerly await the next chapter.