POP MUSIC REVIEW : Jerry Jeff Walker Sings It as if He’s Lived It

However much Frank Sinatra might illuminate a lyric, it is always clear that it is someone else’s words he is highlighting. Jerry Jeff Walker, who has the vocal range of a drunk rattlesnake, is a whole other kind of saloon singer, but somehow he is able to bring a personal, revelatory quality to all he touches, whether he wrote it or not.

The way the veteran troubadour sings, you know he’s lived every sad byway and wry turn of his songs, with each tune invested with the depth and mood that a singer can only bring to his own songs. By the same token, many of the most personal, heartfelt songs in Walker’s Coach House performance Wednesday actually came from other pens.

Take Guy Clark and Richard Leigh’s “I’m All Through Throwing Good Love After Bad.” Walker made that song an ebullient celebration of the salvation love can provide, delivering it with the passion John Hiatt brings to his most personal songs. Like Hiatt, Walker had to travel a long, wet road before he got happy, and both men sing of their personal paradise with the unabashed joy that can only come from those who also have realized their personal hells.

Walker has always been a powerful songwriter in his own right, and there are a couple of fine examples tucked into his current “Navajo Rug” album. One of the strongest ones in his set was that album’s “Blue Mood,” a late-night wallow over life’s steep grade: “Hell, life’s mostly handshakes and divorces / True-blue friends that bend and sway / But the price for living honestly / Comes hard-earned every day.” The song also remarks on the deaths last year of Texas’ John Henry Faulk (a humorist who stood up to McCarthy’s blacklists in the ‘50s) and Stevie Ray Vaughan: “With the passing of John Henry / And the loss of Stevie Ray / I see the light of our own time / Get dimmer every day.”

Walker was backed by an excellent trio dubbed the Gonzo Survivors, a pared down version of his Lost Gonzo Band with guitarist John Inmon, bassist Bob Livingston and drummer Freddie Krc, who despite his vowel deficiency kept up a solid beat. Like practically everyone with a guitar and an Austin, Tex., ZIP code, Inmon is a dazzling player. He tore up Clark’s timeless “L.A. Freeway” with a sizzling solo, while the band kept the tune fresh with a rocking arrangement.

The 20-song set featured Walker’s screw-cap classics “Sangria Wine” and “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother,” which had the audience howling along. But there also were moments of soft reflection, such as “Pickup Truck Song” and “Little Bird,” while Clark’s “Like a Coat From the Cold” became a touching tribute to Walker’s love for his wife.

Perhaps he finds such empathy for other writers’ songs because most of the ones he covers are by his Austin cronies such as Clark and Chris Wall.

O.C.-bred Wall was discovered by Clark and Walker, records for Walker’s Tried and True label, and opened for Walker Wednesday (as he did when Walker played the Crazy Horse Steak House last in 1989).

Wall, who once tended bar just up the block from the Coach House at the Swallows Inn, has a clever, sometimes glib, way with honky-tonk songs, such as “I Feel Like Hank Williams Tonight” (which Walker sang Wednesday) and “Sure Is Smokey in Here.” He showed an even sharper tongue with humorous tunes, including his “Trashy Women” (which each singer assayed Wednesday), “Entourage,” a poke at ego-bloated stardom, and the gun-happy “Something to Shoot.” He followed one of his songs with the comment, “Boy, that was so country it had bad breath.”

That the 43-year-old singer can be cleverer was evidenced by his “He Lives My Dream,” an aching view of a footloose carouser observing a scene of domestic tranquility, commenting, “I’d trade one Sunday dinner for all the fame and glitter I’ve seen.”

Backed by Walker’s band, Wall was a solid performer. His voice might not yet have the character to place him among country’s elite, but his delivery was sufficient to support the claim he made in one unreleased song: “I ain’t no phony, and I ain’t no fake / And I ain’t got much, but I got what it takes.”