At Peace With the Hard Years

Merle Haggard has averaged about 150 concerts a year since 1965, which means he’s on a stage for the 5,000th or so time on this weekday evening at the Crazy Horse Steak House in Irvine. It’s the fourth stop on a 28-city tour that will take him to 16 states over the next two months.

Many of the fans have been coming out to see Haggard for years, and they raise beer bottles and cheer loudly each time he sings one of the hits--and he’s had lots of hits, including 65 consecutive Top 10 country singles from 1966 to 1985. That’s more than Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson combined.

Those hits--including “Swinging Doors,” “Mama Tried” and “The Bottle Let Me Down”--were autobiographical tales of prison, heartache and poverty, and Haggard sang them with a character and conviction that made him the most influential country singer of his generation. There has always been poetry in his words and soul in his voice.

But if you listen hard to Haggard’s voice now, there’s a bit of a distance between the man and his words. Somewhere in all those shows and all those years, the early tension and bite have given way to a warm, even philosophical tone.

It’s not that Haggard, at 63, has lost his edge. His life has simply changed, and he reflects those changes in his new songs and in his approach to the classics.

After three divorces, five record labels, bankruptcy court, and various drug and alcohol problems, Haggard seems to finally be comfortable with himself. He is happily married and lives with his wife, Theresa, and their two children (a boy, 7, and a girl, 10) on a 180-acre ranch near Redding in Northern California. He even suggested in his autobiography last year that this will be his last year on the road.

But he’s already rethinking that decision, thanks in part to a new album that is being released by Anti Records, a subsidiary of Epitaph, a punk label best known for launching such acts as Rancid and the Offspring.

Anti/Epitaph may be a strange recording base for a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, but the label feels like a life raft to Haggard. It’s been more than a decade since he’s had a hit in the country field because his music--like that of other veterans such as Nelson and Cash--is considered out of step with the slick, pop-conscious sounds favored by country radio programmers.

For Haggard, the new album, titled “If I Could Only Fly” and due in stores Tuesday, could revitalize his career--or become a last hurrah.

“Everything sort of hinges on the new record,” he says, sitting in his custom-built tour bus before the Crazy Horse show. “To be honest, I get tired sometimes living off things I had already done. If I could be accepted as a top-drawer entertainer again, then I’ll stick around. If not, I’ll go home and whittle, and have a little fun raising my kids and going fishing.”

Haggard’s new label hopes to appeal to traditional country fans as well as the roots-conscious pop-rock audience that follows such veteran artists as Bob Dylan and Tom Waits.

Indeed, Epitaph signed Waits to its Anti label and marketed his “Mule Variations” album so aggressively last year that the critically acclaimed collection sold about 400,000 copies in the U.S., which is significantly more than Waits had been selling in recent years.

“I don’t just see Merle as a ‘country’ artist,” Andy Kaulkin, president of the Los Angeles-based Epitaph, said in a separate interview. “I see him as a really innovative artist whose music could appeal to a wide variety of audiences.

“I think the people who bought [Dylan’s] ‘Time Out of Mind’ or Tom’s ‘Mule Variations’ will also respond to this record if they hear about it. And the thing we do at Anti is to utilize some of the same street marketing techniques that we use to reach punk-rock kids who don’t depend on radio to find out about music.”

The press kit accompanying the album comes with testimonials from all sorts of Haggard fans, from Keith Richards to Elvis Costello. Admirers also range from Dylan to the Grateful Dead.

Kaulkin’s original idea was to put Haggard together with a producer who has a feel for both country music and a wider contemporary market--someone like Pete Anderson, who works with Dwight Yoakam, or Steve Earle, whose own albums were among the most acclaimed of the ‘90s.

“But he shot me down right away,” Kaulkin said. “He said he wanted to do his own thing. I got the idea that this was the first record he’s done in a long time where there weren’t any Nashville compromises involved.”

Bonnie Owens, who has sung harmonies on record and onstage with Haggard for most of his career and was married to him for a while in the ‘70s, says Haggard was discouraged by the way he’s been treated by the Nashville powers in recent years.

Owens was a cocktail waitress at the Blackboard, a country music club in Bakersfield, when she first heard Haggard sing.

“You knew right away that he was special,” she says now. “The thing that always struck me about him was his vulnerability. I don’t think he believed that he was really a star for so long. He couldn’t believe that people would listen to him the way they did to Lefty Frizzell, who was his idol. It probably took five years of hits before he started to believe that all this was real.”

Haggard had already experienced a lot of the hard times he sings about by the time he stepped on that stage at the Blackboard. The son of Dust Bowl migrants from Oklahoma, he was born in Bakersfield and lived for a time with his family in a converted boxcar.

His father died when he was 9, and, not wanting to be a burden to his mother, he spent a lot of time on his own. He hitchhiked, hopped freight trains and got into trouble with authorities. He spent time in reform school, and later three years in San Quentin for robbery and escape.

It was a traumatic time for Haggard, and his autobiography, “Merle Haggard’s House of Memories” (Cliff Street Books), recounts the pain in detail. He turned frequently to music for comfort and was inspired to think seriously about a professional career by a Johnny Cash concert at the prison.

One of the classic Haggard stories involves meeting Cash years later and saying how much he enjoyed Cash’s show at San Quentin. Cash said he didn’t recall Haggard on the bill, and Haggard explained that he wasn’t on the stage, but in the audience.

When Haggard got out of prison in the early ‘60s, he returned to Bakersfield and dug ditches for $80 a week. In his off hours, he sang and played guitar around the house.

Eventually, he joined a band and played at some local clubs, attracting enough attention to get signed by tiny Tally Records in 1963. His first single, “Sing a Sad Song,” cracked the Top 20 in the country field. He moved to Capitol Records, home of Bakersfield’s country star Buck Owens, in 1965 and the hits flowed.

Though a master of honky-tonk country, he also incorporated touches of gospel and Western swing. He taught himself to play the fiddle out of respect for one of his musical heroes, Bob Wills.

Everyone knew Haggard was a great singer, but what he also showed at Capitol was that he was an extraordinary writer. Besides blue-collar tales, from the bravado of “Workin’ Man Blues” to the distant dreams of “Hungry Eyes,” Haggard also drew on his prison experiences in such songs as “Branded Man” and “Mama Tried.”

Bonnie Owens says Haggard wrote about his prison experiences because he was afraid in the early days that someone was going to “expose” him as a former convict--so he wanted to lay out his story himself. He was eventually given a full pardon by then California Gov. Ronald Reagan, but the stigma still seems to haunt him.

In “I’m Still Your Daddy,” the most personal and affecting song on the new album, Haggard writes about a father explaining his prison past to his young daughter to prevent her from learning about it from classmates. He sings, “I’ve not always been the man I am today . . . / Let me be the first to tell you I was wrong.”

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With “If I Could Only Fly,” Haggard has given Anti/Epitaph his strongest album in years. The 12-song collection, which he recorded at his ranch studio, has some generic moments, but the key tracks carry the same philosophical tone that you sense in his singing at the Crazy Horse. In such numbers as “Leavin’s Getting Harder” and “Proud to Be Your Old Man,” Haggard isn’t trying to reach for a formula that once worked, but bring his audience up to date about his life.

Haggard, who once prided himself on his restless ways, even acknowledges his new feelings about settling down. “Just to want to be at home is not a crime, and leaving’s getting harder all the time,” he sings on the album.

In the album liner notes, Jonny Whiteside captures well the new Haggard, whose creative strength seemed sapped for years by career disillusionment and financial uncertainty. He writes, “To find Haggard optimistic and involved rather than forlorn and detached is a surprise, and the realization that this unusually content state of mind has led him to create some of the purest, most classic sounding songs in years is almost a shock.”

Sitting in the bus, Haggard nods when asked if he feels blessed.

“A lot people say they talk to God, but he’s never spoken to me,” Haggard says, the heavy lines in his face standing as reminders of his hard life. “But he has certainly steered me in the right direction. I’m a walking miracle. A person like myself would have to be a total idiot not to believe in God. Too many things happened to me that couldn’t have without some higher power.”

He pauses and looks through the bus window at some fans who are arriving for the evening’s show.

“The truth is I don’t think I could live very long if I quit,” he says. “It’s what keeps whatever youthfulness is left in my body. . . . I learned a long time ago that the secret, as a songwriter or as a singer, is that you have to bare your soul. That’s what I [discovered] I can still do. I think the album shows I can still give people a slice of my life.”

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Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, can be reached at robert.hilburn@latimes.com.