Chords for Billy Joe Shaver: -How He Heard Waylon Jennings Passed Away

Hey friends, I want to talk about Billy Joe Shaver today.
I just got this book in the mail.
It's a Billy Joe Shaver honky-tonk heroes.
This was sent to me by John Rosier.
Rosier, I'm sorry, John.
I'm not sure how to pronounce your last name, but you see John in the comments down below.
He sent me this book and a bunch of other ones and I really really truly appreciate it.
Thank you, man.
But this is a really really great book.
Billy Joe Shaver's autobiography.
I bought this, I think it came out in 2005 and I bought it around then and read it and then lost it.
Maybe I gave it to somebody.
I don't remember but I was actually wanting this.
You will see this on eBay for
_ maybe 50 or 75 or 100 dollars for a while.
But it's been out of print, but they just recently reissued it since Billy Joe Shaver passed away.
So pick up a copy man.
It's really good. _ _
I wanted to start out with, you hear Billy Joe Shaver telling some of these stories in interviews and
sometimes the details would be a little bit different, you know, back and forth.
So I look at this book as being the definitive story.
I figure if Billy Joe Shaver is going to take the time to write a book,
he's gonna make this be the definitive story.
So what I want to talk about today
is a time there, I think _ _
his wife Brenda and son Eddie had passed away and
Kinky Friedman had booked a whole bunch of gigs throughout Texas just to have
you know, Billy Joe come out on the road and said he did this tour and it really
you know, was a shot in the arm, made him feel good to get out in front of these big sold-out crowds all the time.
_ If you hear _ hammering outside, my neighbors are building something.
I apologize.
But um,
_ _ he said that _
after he did that tour, he decided he wanted to put a band together.
So he put a band together and he was playing anywhere in Texas that he could and he had a
back problem where he had to remove three discs from his back and they put in some kind of a steel plate.
And the doctor said he was supposed to stay off the road for six weeks while it healed up and it's Billy Joe Shaver.
So of course he went out and started playing gigs after three weeks.
But he was playing one night down at Green Hall and
Texas, I believe it's Texas' oldest dance hall, great dance hall.
Anybody that's been there knows how special a place that is.
Billy Joe Shaver is playing there and it's a hundred and something degrees outside and it's a hundred and thirty degrees on the stage.
And Billy Joe was just sweating and feeling pretty rough and he has these huge chest pains.
He said it felt like an elephant stomping on his chest and he just _
realized he was having a heart attack.
So he reached in his pocket.
He always kept these nitroglycerin tablets in his pocket, but he had washed his shirt the night before and
the tablets had just turned into powder
crumbs.
So he reached in and tried to scoop all of those up he could and took the tablets.
But he said he was standing there on stage with his eyes closed thinking, oh man,
I'm gonna come and see Brenda and Eddie.
This is it.
This is the big one, you know.
And if there's any way to die, this is the place to die playing a honky-tonk,
playing on stage at Green Hall in Texas.
And he said he was completely at peace with dying in that moment.
I believe that even though he took the nitroglycerin to try to save his life,
I believe that.
He played for three hours,
you know, with that kind of pain and at the end of the gig
he's yelling at his guitar player, you know,
this is the last song and the guitar player was deaf in one ear and was thinking he was saying, you know,
one more song.
So he played another one.
But when the gig was over,
he was supposed to play the next night in Pflugerville.
So he drove, _
just north of Austin's where Pflugerville is.
It's like a northern suburb now.
And he checked into a hotel in Pflugerville.
He's laying there on the bed and he's thinking, oh God, please don't let me die in a motel room in Pflugerville.
_ _ I've heard him say that line in a few different
interviews and it's always a good laugh line, but man, you know,
there had to have been some serious, serious reality to that.
_ They ended up having the gig in Pflugerville the next night rained out and he went to the doctor and the doctor said he had
_ only one artery still functioning.
It was only 10%.
Everything was clogged and he needed a quadruple bypass surgery like immediately.
But the problem was he had a tour booked with Kinky Friedman in Australia
and he had to go do it.
Kinky was giving him a hard time saying you got to go do it and
you know, Billy Joe Shaver being Billy Joe Shaver decided he would do it.
So he got on a plane and
flew to Australia instead of having quadruple bypass surgery.
Did a month-long tour and
somewhere he said he was on some long highway in the middle of nowhere and they're listening to the radio and
him and Kinky heard that Waylon Jennings had passed away.
And that's how he found out about Waylon dying and they pulled off the side of the road and
they broke open some kind of he said they popped a [Eb] cork on a bottle, you know,
[N] I'm guessing that's whiskey or something and they at the side of the road
they stood there and they had a drink for Waylon Jennings, their fallen brother.
And I'm gonna assume they had a tour manager driving
so they didn't get back in the car and start driving after that.
_ _ But
he ended up coming home after a month and
they scheduled a surgery.
The doctor that did the surgery
he said was the best in the world and he just happened to be a fan of Billy Joe Shavers.
So the doctor claimed while they were giving him quadruple bypass surgery
the doctor was listening to Billy Joe's music and
_ _ then Billy Joe had a
stroke of fortune.
His friend Robert Duvall, the great actor, had
asked Billy Joe to appear in The Apostle.
I don't know if you remember that movie.
I saw that in the theater when it came out
and I remember the opening scene was just really, really great and really heavy and I liked that.
That's what I remember from it.
It's been a while now.
I guess Billy Joe Shavers was in it and I don't remember.
I'm gonna re-watch that so I can see him in it.
But because he
_ appeared in that movie _
Billy Joe Shavers got to join the Screen Actors Guild for that year and he got the Screen Actors Guild insurance
which is amazing and they paid for the
open-heart surgery or else he wouldn't have had insurance.
_ _ _ There's a whole other conversation to have about that.
Our favorite artists not being insured sometimes.
The Screen Actors Guild takes care of their own and Billy Joe Shavers was
taken care of by them and I think that's beautiful.
_ I want to share one more story that has nothing to do with that, but it's too good to pass up.
_ Earlier in Billy Joe's life
when he was in Nashville, still trying to break through, he lived with Hal Bynum.
He was sleeping on Hal's couch.
Hal Bynum would later go on to write,
You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucy.
You'll have a big hit with that.
But Billy Joe was describing the strangeness that was living with Hal Bynum.
He said, I went home early and woke several hours later
to find Hal kneeling in front of the couch and holding a rusty knife to my throat.
He didn't threaten me, but he kept the knife to my throat as he read aloud from Tennyson, Longfellow and other great poets.
I was all shook up, but I listened.
It was really great poetry and he read with such intensity.
But it started to bother me when Hal started reading to me on a regular basis each time
he woke me with the knife to my throat.
Each time I just laid there and listened.
Finally, I confided to a friend of mine what was going on.
He says, I can't figure out why I just lay there and take it.
I said, I guess I like the poetry.
No, my friend said, I think you like the knife.
_ _ _ That's a heavy, heavy metaphor right there.
You don't like the poetry.
You like the knife.
That's a heavy metaphor for
Billy Joe Shaver's life.
_ But if you haven't read it, get you a copy, man.
Just re-released,
reissued.
You know, if you're not much of a reader, if you don't
feel comfortable jumping into a big book, this is a really good one.
It's written in Billy Joe's voice.
You can hear his voice in your head when you read it.
And it's a simple read, man.
It all starts somewhere.
And the first third of the book is, you know,
Billy Joe telling stories and the second two thirds of the book is his lyrics.
It's lyrics to all the songs that he had recorded.
It's really good.
And I recommend you take a look at it.
I get nothing from it, you know, so
other than the joy of you guys maybe reading and that's always a good thing.
But if you enjoy this, man, click the like button down below and I apologize for my neighbors hammering out there and
subscribe to the channel, all that good stuff, and I'll see you down the road.
Much love to