Jerry Jeff Died

Jerry Jeff Walker died. 

This one is harder. I really do not even know where to start or what to say. I’d guess that about eighty percent of my current friends never knew me at all when I made my living singing in bars. I ended up in larger venues, touring and doing comedy as well, but it all began in bars. In 1972 I bought my first Jerry Jeff Walker album. It was just called, Jerry Jeff Walker. I loved every song on it. Next I bought Viva Terlingua, and I did the same thing with that album. I read and reread the liner notes. I stared at the pictures. I learned the songs and sang them hundreds of times on stages. I had found someone who sang who I was, or more correctly, how I wanted to live. I ended up moving from Virginia to Austin, Texas. 

    

I was a regular at Luckenbach during the peak of what Luckenbach was. Back when Hondo (the unofficial mayor of the “town”) was always around. I used to stay at his house when I was too drunk to drive the 90 miles back to Austin, many times I just drove it drunk AF. It was a different world. I heard Hondo recite his poem, “The Moon” so many times I could have done it with him. I was living a life I owed to songs sung by one man, Jerry Jeff Walker. I was only in Austin about a year, but it is such an important segment of my life it seems so much longer. And when you’re twenty-two, a year is a long fucking time anyway. 

I am not sure where my words are going with this. Tears are fucking with me and eloquence is illusive, and as you know my brain is not itself (if you are keeping up). When John Prine died, that was massive. But now Jerry Jeff? Over the years, I met them both. I sang into the same microphone with Jerry Jeff on stage at Castle Creek in Austin with the Lost Gonzo Band (I had opened for the band that night). Yeah, I’ve been drunk with Jerry Jeff, but who in Austin hadn’t back then? 

 I ended up in inpatient rehab in 1990. But, I had lived those songs as fully as it was possible to live them and I had come out alive. I would not change that for anything. No, I would not. The best parts of what those songs are, and what they meant and mean, is still very, very much an integral part of who I am today. I might be in the Iron Range of FNQ, or the Kimberley but there is always a little bit of 70’s Texas in me. The “dirt road back streets” from Austin ended up in Birdsville. Australia is just Texas upside down.  

I owe a whole fucking lot to Jerry Jeff Walker.

“Just gettin' by on gettin' by's my stock and trade

 Livin' it day to day

 Pickin' up the pieces where ever they fall

 Just lettin' it roll lettin' the high times carry the low

Livin' my life easy come easy go.” JJW