In Gypsy Songman, Walker traces the truth and apocrypha surrounding the birth of the song and its tortuous path from inception to the charts. Among other things, he refers to the influence of a certain Welsh poet. “At the time, I had been reading a lot of Dylan Thomas, and I was really into the concept of internal rhyme,” he writes. Suddenly the word choices — ragged/baggy, grabbed/pants/stance, county/throughout/south — make more sense. Discussing Thomas during a recent interview, Walker said, “I heard him reading on an album. It caught my attention. A piece called ‘Under Milk Wood’. Somebody had it at an apartment in New Orleans. I just happened to be at a party with a group of people, listenin’ to it, and I was affected by it.”
Walker (no surprise here) tends to write like a lyricist. Short fragments. Many breaks. Mostly, this works, and sometimes it works wonderfully. After describing how the gonzo life deteriorated into a stoned parody that left him $150,000 in arrears to the IRS, $90,000 in arrears to American Express, and separated from Susan, his wife and the mother of his two children, he writes of the day he faced it all and made the decision to clean up and live. The laundry list of excess and decline closes with a spare, beautiful, line: “Then I went home to Susan, and I slept.”
Still, there are times when one wishes for a bit more exposition. It would be nice, for instance, after hearing why Jerry Jeff lent his eager musical support to both Clinton campaigns, to hear what he thinks of Clinton now. And while it’s understandable that song lyrics be included in text describing their genesis, the full-length selections often lose impact flat on the page. Toward the end, the narrative leans out considerably, so much so that Walker acknowledges as much midway through the chapter. “If you’re checking out the pages remaining in this book, and thinking that ten years are going to go by in a hurry, you’re right. Contentment doesn’t provide nearly as much drama as crisis and craziness.” Equanimity, again.
On the phone from Austin, Walker muses on equaminity. “The thing about getting older is they can’t threaten you anymore. You’re not as afraid of as many things. I played golf once with some guys on the Senior Tour and they were real polite, signed a lot of autographs and stuff, and I happened to mention it to Al Geiberger, I was playing with him, and he said, ‘Well, when we were young we were worried about our careers, and we were really heads down. We were playin’ golf and tryin’ to work on it. We had kids being born, houses to pay for. Now the kids are grown, the kids are gone, the house is paid for, and this Senior Tour is like a bonus. It’s kinda nice to go out of the house and be wanted. We look forward to it, and we’re not as uptight about what we’re doin’.’
“And I thought, yeah, that pretty well applies to like how we’re doin’ it. The problem I have is realizing that I sorta am what I am. I mean, at 57, I can’t really shock anybody or doing anything new to make ’em jump up. I’m pretty much gonna play the same sort of music over and over. I use the same band. I write different material, and that makes it interesting, but you’re pretty well gonna know what it’s gonna be. It’s gonna be Jerry Jeff stuff.”
With major labels a distant memory, Walker and his wife Susan have carved out a solid business with their own Tried & True Music label, an arrangement that allowed Jerry Jeff to scale down the madness while recording and touring at will. “People always ask me how come the music business has this trail of [ruined artists],” he says. “The artist is a dreamer, and it depends on how he gets involved with whether he is allowed to be creative and do his stuff, or whether he has to wake up and spend more time with his business and not his art. In my case it was my wife who took over to allow me to do my part while she took care of the business so that I’d have something to show for it. I have a pretty good fan base with the internet and all that stuff.”
The fans are hard-won, gathered over time, many from concession table sign-up sheets. “But it’s hard to make [the fan base] any bigger. With this new album (Gypsy Songman: A Life In Song, in simultaneous release with the book, and not to be confused with the 1986 release Gypsy Songman), it’s gonna be 40-or-50,000 hardcores, and a few stragglers. If they haven’t been drawn to it now, they probably won’t.”
The 17 tracks on the new Gypsy Songman album were cut in two days; nearly all are acoustic re-recordings of the songs mentioned in the book (of the two new tunes on the album, one is written and performed by son Django Walker). Jerry Jeff says he enjoyed revisiting the old work, and sees it as a wise way to manage all the material of a 31-album discography.
Other efforts to that end are in the works as well. “We’re about to do our tenth-year retrospective of Tried & True Music and pull all the stuff together in one place like a double-CD and have the best of, instead of keepin’ six or seven CDs out there. Pull all the others out of circulation, and sell that. We’re gonna keep two or three projects together, like Live At Gruene Hall.” Walker and his band will choose the songs. “We’ll pick what people have liked over a period of time. The requests. Like, ‘Navajo Rug’ [a Tom Russell tune] is a big popular song with everybody. I didn’t write it, but it’s one that we worked into the set and they love it, so that’ll make the cut.”
Although he was a formative member of Austin’s outlaw-country scene and is a longtime resident of the Central Texas hill country, Walker has grown restless again. He has a place in Belize he visits now and then, and one in the French Quarter of New Orleans he visits even more.
“Austin’s a lot bigger city than it was. It’s real expensive to live here now,” he observes. “I did a television show yesterday, I was up at about six o’clock, and I heard a lot of news I didn’t particularly care to listen to — traffic reports, big city problems, fender benders backed up and all that — and they were doing a story on housing. Of course everybody wants to live inside, they don’t want to drive through the crap, and this woman found a house, put a bid in over the asking price, and she was fourth in line. That isn’t conducive to nurturing starving artists.
“I’m always questioning what’s going on, like Austin, living here. I might make some moves. Allergies are bad, and it’s too crowded. But my band’s here, and my office is here, so I don’t know. We’ve been going out to New Orleans a lot, but we haven’t figured out how to combine the two yet. As far as the playing and stuff goes, the band and I are happy, we’re about to do an album of old jazz standards, and we’re actually rollin’ along better than ever. The only sense of urgency is, at least accomplish something every day. Whatever it is you want to do, you need to get going on it. Because that day will be past quick. Kinda like doin’ this book. I had to start a little bit at a time and keep after it, and that piles up. Pretty soon you got it done.”
Steve Earle’s line about those who would lock him up and throw away the key is a direct jab at the vicarious crowd, the ones who prefer to reward the artist for flaming out on their behalf — as long as he keeps flaming out. The line isn’t about prison, it’s about a different sort of confinement. There’s a reason for all the posthumous worship of musical icons who fall early — your Joplins, your Morrisons, right on up to your Cobains. They spare us any disappointment. As troubling as it is to watch an icon fall, it makes us more uncomfortable to see them climb quietly down from the rafters and put on a pair of carpet slippers. Or remain happily married, with a summer house in Belize.
“My goal,” writes Jerry Jeff, “is not to be on VH1 as one of the great tragedies of all time.” Gypsy Songman could have been a book in which an old man flails around trying to sustain the gonzo cred. Instead, it seems that when he took pen to hand, Walker let himself be guided by the words of his old friend Babe Stovall, quoted in Chapter Three:
“Jer’uh. Just ’cause a horse’ll go, don’t mean you gotta ride it to death.”
The kamikaze pilot has pulled back on the stick. The person has outlived the personality. The man who wrote the poems has survived the legend and the roaring, and he has a story to tell.
ND contributing editor Michael Perry tried going gonzo once, but then he hit a bridge.
