He kept trying to establish himself in the business but the
problem was not just a reluctant music industry. ”My reputation
around town was terrible. I was raising hell almost every night and
starting to get deep into drugs”. He lived his life – and his
foibles – in public. He would overhear comments like “Billy Joe
Shaver is a hell of a songwriter. Too bad he’s a drunk”. He tried
different musical approaches including a band called Slim Chance and
the Can’t Hardly Play Playboys which included son Eddy on guitar.
“We might have been the wildest hillbilly band in the history of
hillbilly bands”.
Things weren’t better at home. Billy Joe admits, “I was never good
at being married”, and that “Brenda left me more times than I can
count”.
Shaver described one incident when he’d been arrested and Brenda
came to get him out of jail. On seeing him, she decided to leave him
there – and to leave him for good “I’m headed to the airport, and
I’m getting the first plane back to Texas. I’m never going to see
your sorry ass again”. Billy Joe replied, “I wish you’d take a
train so I could write a song about it”. She came back to get him in
a few hours.
In 1978, he began to turn his life around. Coming home one night at
about 4 am, he walked into his bedroom, and saw a figure in the
midst of a “bright white light” sitting on his bed, shaking his head
and giving him the message, “How long? How long are you going to
keep doing this?”
He left the house, drove to a cliff, and contemplated his life. “I
didn’t feel like I deserved to live”. He came to a spot he had
previously visited with Eddy, “a hallowed spot” with an altar. “I
got between the altar and the edge of the cliff, and I could have
sworn I jumped, but I found myself with my back to the cliff and my
arms and head draped over the altar, begging God to forgive me”. He
started walking down the hill, humming a tune which eventually
became “An Old Chunk of Coal”.
I’m just an old chunk of coal
But I’m gonna be a diamond some day
I’m gonna grow and glow till I’m so pluperfect
Gonna put a smile on everybody’s face
The next day, he packed up their home, and the three of them moved
back to Texas.
Johnny Cash and John Hartford were the first of at least 10 singers
to record “Old Chunk of Coal”. Cash – who also suffered from
addictions – told Shaver that he sang that song to himself every
morning when he was in rehab.
Eddy began playing and traveling with his father, and Billy Joe went
to see Eddy’s principal to take his son out of school. However, Eddy
had also started adopting some of Billy Joe’s lifestyle. The
principal agreed to let Eddy go, saying “I won’t say anything as
long as you promise me one thing – you won’t bring him back”.
Eddy was a rocker, and few record companies were interested in the
mix of music the two of them made. In the early 1990’s they finally
found a sympathetic producer and recorded an album, Tramp on Your
Street, released in 1993. It garnered excellent reviews – No
Depression magazine says of it, “It was and is a masterpiece” –
and improved, but still modest sales. Things slowly began to
improve in Shaver’s career (the record company didn’t go out of
business until after releasing his second album for them!), but they
were to get worse in his personal life.
In 1998, Robert Duvall, a huge Shaver fan, got Billy Joe a part in
Duvall’s movie The Apostle. (In 2004, Duvall’s girlfriend
Luciana Pedraza directed a documentary on Shaver, entitled
Portrait of Billy Joe).
While making
The Apostle,
Shaver invited Brenda to join him on the set (since 1986, they’d
been in their second state of divorce). While there, they learned
she had advanced cancer. “That was the start of three years of hell
for us”, he wrote. However, she recognized that he was now a changed
man and agreed to marry him again and let him look after her.
Despite their stormy relationship, it’s obvious from everything
Billy Joe has said or written that he loved her deeply – he has
often said she was the only woman he would ever love.
“Did Brenda love me? I think she did. Once, after we remarried for
the last time, I asked her. She just smiled back at me, such a
beautiful smile. In many ways, it doesn’t matter. I stayed with
Brenda because I loved her, not because she may or may not have
loved me. But I think she did”.
It was during this period, that Billy Joe recorded an acoustic album
on which he and Eddy were the only musicians. The album,
Victory,
was named after Billy Joe’s mother’s first name. His mother, like
Brenda, was also dying of cancer. Many of the songs were ones he’d
written years before. It was an album about his life, his family and
his faith – he’s described it as a “gospel” album. It included the
moving song, “If I Give My Soul”:
I
had a woman once, she was kind and she was gentle
Had a child by me who grew up to be a man
Had a steady job, ‘til I started in to drinkin’…
It’s a lonesome life when you lose the ones you live for
If I make my peace with Jesus, will they take me back again?
If
I give my soul, will He stop my hands from shakin’
If I give my soul, will my son love me again
If I give my soul and she knows I really mean it
If I give my soul to Jesus, will she take me back again?
Soon after the album was recorded, in 1999, his mother died. Three
months later, so did Brenda.
More pain was awaiting him.
Eddy was extremely close to his mother, but his drug use had started
to get worse. He showed up at Brenda’s funeral, high on drugs, and
accompanied by Johnny Cash’s stepdaughter, Rosie Nix, “the junkie
from hell”. Eddy told his father that he was using heroin; Rosie had
started him on it, and he was soon addicted, and would make a number
of attempts to quit.
In
the meantime, the two of them recorded one last album together, The Earth Rolls On, including the song “Blood is Thicker Than
Water” which they co-wrote, and co-sang:
Billy Joe starts off:
You
come dancing in here with the devil’s daughter
Spilling beer and doing things you hadn’t oughta
You found her walking the streets carryin’ a sack of quarters
Now she’s stealing rings off the hands of your dying mother
If that witch don’t leave I believe I’m going to have to help her
…
Eddy responds:
Can’t you see I’m down to the ground, I can’t get no lower
I’ve seen you pukin’ out your guts and running with sluts
When you was married to my mother
Now the powers that be are leading you and me like two lambs to the
slaughter
I need a friend, I’m your son, and you’re always going to be my
father
Don’t you know that blood, blood is thicker than water
Blood is thicker than water
Of
course, the “devil’s daughter” was Rosie Nix.
In
December 2000, Billy Joe was called to the hospital in Waco. Eddy
had overdosed in a motel. He died early the next morning.
