Nicked by the Truth : Billy Joe Shaver Brings His Life-Inspired Songs to Santa Ana

Certain songwriters can’t stand to admit that a lyric might be something other than an artifact of pure imagination and inspiration, that it might have been culled directly and unvarnished from the grit and grime of experience.

Billy Joe Shaver has no problem acknowledging that he sings songs drawn from life--namely, his own.

“A lot of my songs are from recall of years back. It keeps the youthfulness in the songs,” says Shaver, who at 56 has lived the kind of eventful, coming-up-rough life that rewards retelling.

There is no confusing Shaver, whose country recording career goes back more than 20 years, with some of the polished corporation men and women whose songs dominate today’s mainstream country charts and have little to do with either pure imagination and inspiration or unvarnished reality.

Shaver grew up the hard way in Corsicana, Tex.: no father, a mom who worked in a honky-tonk, little money, and a childhood that included such experiences as sneaking into a bar to hear Hank Williams, picking cotton for his uncles, and, as a young adult, getting his right hand mangled while working at a sawmill.

He learned to brawl and booze--habits that formed a big part of his reputation in the early ‘70s when he fell in with the likes of Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. But Shaver also had the knack of a born storyteller, and it served him well in songs that Jennings, in particular, turned into anthems for the so-called “outlaw” country movement that set its raw sound and rowdy themes against tamer Nashville conventions.

Shaver says he moderated his habits after a spiritual awakening some 20 years back, but his sound, as translated on the new live release “Unshaven,” has become anything but more moderate.

Fronting a band that also is called Shaver (the singer’s main sidekick is 33-year-old Eddy Shaver, who has been touring with his dad as lead guitarist since the age of 14), the old veteran has made a charged, edgy album that barges ahead like a steamroller when it isn’t pausing to be tender.

It’s part of a comeback that began in 1993 when Shaver, who hadn’t made an album since 1987, returned with the acclaimed “Tramp on Your Street,” a CD that featured his gnarled but lively voice and his alternately humorous and fervent stories of hard-won experience.

For “Unshaven,” he received help from unexpected quarters. Brendan O’Brien, known for his production work with such young alternative rockers as Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots and Matthew Sweet, got wind that Shaver was planning a live album and made it known that he, O’Brien, was a big Shaver fan and would like to help produce it.

Shaver says he gave O’Brien a free hand in picking the material, and the producer also got to play guitar on several songs.

The O’Brien connection hardly has made Shaver an expert on the alternative rock world: On the phone last week from his apartment in Nashville, he drew a blank when asked if he knew about his newly famous punk rock namesake, Billie Joe Armstrong, the singer-guitarist with Green Day.

“No! Is there another one?” the senior Billy Joe exclaimed amiably with a drawl and a laugh. “Green Day. I’ve gotta see ‘em.”

Shaver said he also has no connection with his other renowned namesake in the world of pop music, the doomed subject of Bobby Gentry’s sultry 1967 hit “Ode to Billie Joe.” That Billie Joe took a suicidal leap off the Tallahatchee Bridge.

“I wish everybody would pay what they owed to Billy Joe,” Shaver quipped. “I’ve jumped off a few bridges, but nothin’ like that. I was just havin’ fun.”

Listeners who encounter either of the two recent Shaver albums (or a newly issued, 18-song retrospective, “Restless Wind: The Legendary Billy Joe Shaver, 1973-1987”) will be able to piece together more about his life from his songs than we ever learned about Gentry’s enigmatic leaper.

Taken together, such songs as “Heart of Texas,” “Georgia on a Fast Train” and the luminous “Live Forever” tell a tale of hard beginnings, hard knocks schooling and sustaining religious faith.

“My father actually left before I was born. He never did pay any child support or come around, because my grandmother would run him off anyway,” said Shaver, who lived with his maternal grandmother until her death when he was 12.

In one of Shaver’s infrequent encounters with his father, “I remember him taking two cats and tying them by the tail, hanging ‘em over the clothesline, and they scratched each other to death. He was mean as hell, my daddy.”

Years later, when Shaver was in the military, he sought his father out while on leave in Dallas. “I spent three or four days with him and then we got in a big fight. I don’t know who won. We about beat each other to death.” Shaver saw him only in passing after that but nevertheless dedicated “Tramp on Your Street” to his memory.

“I loved my daddy. You know how it is. I’ve got that blood in me, and it served me a couple of times” when Shaver found himself in brawling situations where a tough streak proved useful. “You get crazy and fight your way through.”

In the early ‘70s, some of that inherited orneriness helped Shaver launch his career as a hit country songwriter. At a music festival in Texas, Waylon Jennings stumbled upon Shaver as Shaver sat in a trailer, informally plunking out a song called “Willie the Wandering Gypsy and Me.” An impressed albeit possibly inebriated Jennings told Shaver he wanted to record that one and any others Shaver might offer.

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Back in Nashville, where Shaver had moved in the late ‘60s, he tried to reach Jennings but kept getting the brushoff. Finally, he decided to confront Jennings at the studio where the star was recording. Jennings wanted no part of this song-mongering pest, and, as Shaver tells it, Jennings had a mutual friend, a disc jockey named Captain Midnight, escort Shaver into the men’s room. “He handed me a hundred-dollar bill and he told me, ‘Waylon wanted to give you this. You looked like you might be needing it.’ ”

A furious Shaver burst out of the bathroom, found Jennings and his entourage in a hallway and promised to give Waylon a thrashing on the spot if he didn’t at least listen to his material.

Whereupon Jennings “got me by the arm and said, ‘Hoss, you don’t do that [expletive] around here.’ I said, ‘I needed to get your attention.’ ” Jennings agreed to listen to one song on the condition that Shaver would disappear if he didn’t like it. Shaver kept strumming and singing and Jennings kept listening. Jennings’ next album, “Honky Tonk Heroes,” was made up almost entirely of Billy Joe Shaver material.

Others went on to have hits with Shaver songs--Bobby Bare’s “Ride Me Down Easy,” Johnny Rodriguez’s “I Couldn’t Be Me Without You” and John Anderson’s “I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal” all were big singles on the country charts. Johnny Cash, Kristofferson, Elvis Presley, the Allman Brothers, Willie Nelson and Jerry Lee Lewis also cut his material.

Shaver began releasing albums of his own in 1973, but the only hit he encountered was the figurative wall he crashed into when his excesses began to intensify. He says he had a vision of an admonishing Jesus one night in the mid-’70s, “shaking his head, saying, ‘How long will you do this?”’

He says the spiritual experience continued as he headed immediately for high ground overlooking the Harpeth River near Nashville. “Either I was going to go off that cliff . . . but I found myself on my knees, asking God to forgive me, to help me put my life back together.”

Between his faith, his close but sometimes thorny relationship with son Eddy and an ongoing, up-and-down relationship with his ex-wife Brenda, from whom he has been divorced twice, Shaver has substantial emotional capital on which to draw in writing songs--not even counting the tales of his wild country youth.

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He says he has a fresh batch of material ready for a new studio album, one that he says will contain “a piece of every direction I’m going in. ‘Tramp on Your Street’ worked well because it’s got all kinds of different stuff. That’s what I like. I don’t like to get in a rut.”

Since his comeback in ‘93, Shaver says he has been touring steadily with his band, which besides Eddy includes former Georgia Satellites bassist Keith Christopher and former Steve Earle sideman Craig Wright on drums. Their itinerary has included opening slots for Willie Nelson, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Hank Williams Jr.

Shaver says he is traveling these days with that most ferocious of hellhounds on his trail--the Internal Revenue Service. “They’ve got me owing over $200,000. I don’t think I’ve made that much in my whole life.”

But he says he’s not downhearted that all the hard roadwork hasn’t yet translated into a big commercial payoff. “It’s kind of like being a prizefighter. If the knockout comes, fine, but if not, we’ll keep on punchin.’ I know it’s what I’m cut out to do.”

* COUNTRY LISTINGS, F18

* Who: Billy Joe Shaver, with Jack Ingram, Laura Tyler and the Usual Suspects, and the Kari Gaffney Band.

* When: Saturday at 8 p.m.

* Where: The Galaxy Concert Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana.

* Whereabouts: Take the San Diego (405) Freeway to Harbor Boulevard, head north on Harbor and take the third right, Lake Center Drive. The theater is on the left.

* Wherewithal: $15.

* Where to call: (714) 957-0600.