BILLY JOE SHAVER
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But Shaver’s a bona fide outlaw, and country radio, if some recent hits are any indication, only likes Indian outlaws, self-described “wild ones,” and people who wish they were cowboys. Today’s outlaws are a far cry from the original outlaw movement of the 1970s, the progressive fraternity led by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson of which Shaver was a founding member. This crew broke free from conservative Nashville sensibilities and created raw music coupled with highly personal lyrics, looking to rough-hewn Texas traditions for inspiration. Hippies were happening, too, and the outlaws took note. Primarily fueled by the personal and artistic idiosyncrasies of Waylon and Willie, the self-named and -proclaimed cult of personality exploded into mainstream consciousness with the 1976 album The Outlaws. There was no subtlety to their message–the cover is a stagy remake of an old-west wanted poster, the four desperadoes (Waylon, Willie, Tompall Glaser, and Jessi Colter) gazing out balefully. The men look like biker cowboys; Colter, Jennings’s wife, was a modern version of Gunsmoke’s Miss Kitty. The album was a fuck-you to Nashville that beat the establishment at its own game. A compilation of mostly previously released material, The Outlaws nevertheless became the first country record to go platinum, and it brought the term “outlaw movement” into common usage.
But it also displayed the outlaws’ growing self-absorption, and how their undiluted, passionate music making was sometimes overwhelmed by their mythmaking. The cover of Jennings’s 1973 Honky Tonk Heroes is nowhere near as contrived and therefore expresses much more honestly how organically subversive the outlaws were. Waylon’s the dark and gnarly center of a scurvy-looking crew with a taste for beer, cigarettes, and quite possibly more authoritative substances. Shaver was a key part of Jennings’s posse at the time: on the cover of Honky Tonk Heroes, Waylon’s the ego around whom the gang revolves, while Shaver looks like the kid who’s just happy to get asked into the game. But in fact he’d brought the ball: he wrote most of the songs on what became an acclaimed album.
Live, this brutal confession edged against a kick-ass acoustic guitar-driven stomp. The narrator of the song loses his family while he’s out “making music / Traveling with a devil’s band.” Dark, long-haired Eddy smoked onstage, his slit eyes and downturned mouth frozen somewhere between disdain and a pout; watching him became a weird, exquisitely too-close-for-comfort experience when Billy Joe sang, “If I give my soul / Will my son love me again?”
