Older And Wiser, But Walker Has No Regrets

Just gettin’ by on gettin’ by

Is my stock and trade

Livin’ it day to day

Pickin’ up the pieces wherever they fall.

Just lettin’ it roll

Lettin’ the high times carry the low

And I’m livin’ my life

Easy come, easy go

- Jerry Jeff Walker

It was 22 years ago when Jerry Jeff Walker first belted out that philosophy in a Luckenbach, Texas, dance hall. At the cutting edge of the progressive country movement, his life and career stretched ahead of him and the possibilities seemed limitless.

The hair is gray now, the features weathered and the voice a little more gravely from years of hard partying. The past two decades have seen a few musical highs pockmarked by frustrating fits and starts. Family life has tempered his wild side with a healthy dose of reality.

As Walker nears 53, the 10th year of running his own music company and preparing to release his 27th record this month, however, he clings fiercely to his freewheeling independence and professes no regrets about how things have gone down.

After all, this is the guy who found “Mr. Bojangles,” the subject of his biggest hit, while sleeping off inebriation in a New Orleans drunk tank in 1965.

“I’m happier now than I’ve ever been,” Walker said during a recent telephone conversation from the Austin offices of his Tried and True Music.

“Life’s a one-way deal, you know. We’re not practicing for anything. I think you just do what you do.”

What Walker does with a deft, plain-spoken narrative style is write songs about his beloved Texas and the quirky collection of characters that populate it. He writes them on his own terms and releases records at his own pace.

He cultivates a relatively small but fiercely loyal group of fans through what he calls the core of the business, his 40,000-strong mailing list and quarterly newsletter, a copy of which even goes to the first fan at the White House.

And President Clinton isn’t the only one who’s climbed aboard. Walker has managed to tap into a whole new vein of high school and college-age kids.

It’s that new fandom’s thirst for the hits that prompted him to produce “Night After Night,” a collection of his greatest songs recorded live at the Birchmere in Virginia last fall. The record is due this month.

He sees his resurgence among young fans as a reaffirmation of his credo that left-of-center can often be the most sensible way to turn.

Walker, born and raised in upstate New York, lost his father young and was raised by his grandfather, who became his mentor until he was killed one summer while the two were working in the field.

“I went on the road and I was kinda looking for something, or someone. It was the early ‘60s, and it seemed like it was a time that life was starting to dictate things to everybody.

“I think that’s what I was looking for in other people. People that hadn’t done exactly what they were supposed to do but had interesting lives. That’s where ‘Bojangles’ fit in, ‘Charlie Dunn’ and those characters (from his songs).”

One of those characters who had a profound impact on Walker’s life and gave rise to the lore of Luckenbach was Hondo Crouch, a Hill Country poet-philosopher-everyday character. Crouch and Walker became friends in the mid-‘60s when Crouch came to see his son-in-law open shows for Walker.

“I sort of followed him home to the ranch one night, slept on his couch and kept going back periodically to see him. We just stayed friends.”

They had drifted apart not long after Walker moved to Texas in 1971, where he signed with MCA and blended into a creative community that let him mix folk, rock, country and anything else to become one of the chief forces of the “progressive country” movement.

It wasn’t when but where he and Hondo Crouch came together again that became important.

“Somebody told me I had to go visit Hondo again because not only was Hondo being Hondo, but he’d found a town to be Hondo in, so that’s how we kinda drifted back there to Luckenbach.”

In 1973, Walker brought his Lost Gonzo Band to the bar and dance hall Crouch had bought and recorded what ended up being the first of many live albums and a benchmark, “Viva Terlingua,” including timeless hits such as “Up Against the Wall Redneck” and “London Homesick Blues.”

Twenty years later, Walker brought his new band, the Gonzo Compadres, back to the dance hall to record an anniversary tribute and the product of that session, “Viva Luckenbach,” stands as the best record he’s done in years.

He attributes his freshness to being away from the assembly-line mentality of Nashville.

“If I lived in Nashville I think I’d be nuts. Everybody wants to talk about the number of cuts, what they’re getting cut, things like that. It’s kinda nice being away from it where I can appreciate the different little songs people are writing.”

For Walker, going his own way these days means looking for quiet time rather than searching out the night life, though he’ll still make his way to the Austin clubs now and then to check out the local talent.

“I don’t really like to go out anymore because it’s too crowded. Relaxing for me is just sitting around and playing my guitar and, well, with everybody else running around, I’d just as soon be out of the way.”

He does pull out the stops each year for his now-legendary March weekend birthday bashes, when fans are invited to converge on Austin and Luckenbach to picnic, golf, party and watch Walker, perform at a couple of locations.

And his latest attraction is the Carribean nation of Belize, where he’s building a home and trying to figure how to get there more often.

“I’ve been trying to find a place down there for, oh, 20 years or so now, someplace that would not change too fast. Belize is kinda quiet and out of the way.

“And you know, it’s kinda like, we just like to play music,” he laughs in typical “Scamp” Walker fashion, “and we just wanted to find a way to do it barefoot.”