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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Billy Joe Shaver lost his wife and his mom the same year his beloved son died of an overdose. He never made any money, and he lives in obscurity in Waco, Texas. But the man Willie Nelson says "may be the best songwriter alive today" is still keeping on.
May 15, 2004 | In an early scene from a new documentary about his life, Billy Joe Shaver is dressed head-to-toe in denim and standing on the linoleum of his kitchen floor. He looks, as he always does, like he just came in off the ranch, and he takes a slug from a plastic gallon jug of water that he pulled from the refrigerator. "I usually just drink from this," he says to the camera. "Ain't nobody else here."
Shaver, the original country music outlaw, is alluding to the fact that his mother, wife and only son have recently died, leaving him, at age 64, almost entirely alone. The film, "The Portrait of Billy Joe," debuted in March at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, where Shaver's reputation as a songwriter preceded him -- as did his Job-like biography of trials and tribulations. That the film, currently making the festival rounds across the country and overseas, was produced by Robert Duvall and directed by Duvall's girlfriend, Luciana Pedraza, added to the buzz around the sold-out screening.
The 57-minute film is affecting and surprisingly funny, largely because Pedraza chose her subject well. She allows Shaver to tell his story in long, self-effacing monologues without cuts to interviews of famous friends or music critics. Where the film occasionally falls short in providing context for Shaver's life and career, it compensates with remarkable intimacy.
Shaver admits in the film that his dreams of stardom died years ago, but the documentary is part of a growing recognition that Shaver has been overlooked for too long. In the liner notes to his posthumous box set, Johnny Cash writes that Shaver was his favorite songwriter, while Willie Nelson claims in a blurb accompanying the documentary that Shaver "may be the best songwriter alive today." The love-fest transcends generations: Longtime fan Kid Rock recently volunteered to produce Shaver's next album.
Still, you may be forgiven for wondering: Who the hell is Billy Joe Shaver?
I've spent a lifetime, making up my mind to be
More than the measure of what I thought others could see
Good luck and fast bucks are too far and too few between
There's Cadillac buyers and old five and dimers like me
-- From "Old Five and Dimers Like Me," 1973
Shaver lives in a tattered two-bedroom house outside of Waco, Texas, with a rusted wheelbarrow in the yard and a handwritten sign taped to the front door that reads: "Do Not Disturb: I Have Not Slept in Two Days." He wrote that sign three years ago after his only son and lead guitarist, Eddy, died of a heroin overdose, and every late-night honky-tonker in Central Texas felt the need to stop by and pay his condolences. He's kept it there ever since.
The house, a low-slung brick structure with a creaky front-porch swing, sits about 20 yards from Interstate 35 on the south side of town. Known these days as the breeding ground for apocalyptic cults and homicidal basketball players, Waco is actually a city of 100,000 or so working-class folks, where Sunday-morning piety is matched by reckless carousing in beer joints on Friday and Saturday nights. Shaver is not famous here: He says his neighbors don't even know that he is a musician -- or, if they do, they don't care to talk about it much.
