Songwriting outlaw Billy Joe Shaver inspires director

By Cary Darling

Billy Joe Shaver used to party like a rock star -- a country-rock star. The liquor was hard, the living harder still, all while he was leading a musical revolution, giving lukewarm Nashville country a blast of outlaw Texas cool.

But while the Texas native is a pioneer who has crammed three lifetimes of misery and magic into his 62 years, he's not one to boast. Quiet and self-effacing, he prefers to leave the talking to others. On this day over breakfast, it's Luciana Pedraza, the 32-year-old director of the Shaver documentary The Portrait of Billy Joe, which premiered this month at Austin's South by Southwest film and music festival. In her movie, the public gets to peer into the life of the man who has had two songs written about him: Kris Kristofferson's The Fighter and Tom T. Hall's Joe, Don't Let the Music Kill You.

"It's not a biography," insists Pedraza, a first-time filmmaker and the wife of a Shaver friend, Oscar-winning actor Robert Duvall. "[When] you make a documentary, you can go in so many directions. You take a different branch, and you have a different view. I could have done the history and his influences. But I couldn't get away from listening to Billy Joe's stories."

Those stories -- Shaver's sprawling life condensed to a crisp 55 minutes -- are the stuff of pulp novels. Mom worked in a Waco honky-tonk. Billy Joe left school after the eighth grade. Thrown out of the Navy. Lost fingers on his right hand in a sawmill accident. Married and divorced the same woman, Brenda, three times. Lost his mom and wife to cancer within a month of each other and then lost his only son, guitarist John Edwin Shaver, to a heroin overdose. Became, along with Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, an integral part of the outlaw country movement of the '70s that challenged Nashville's country-music supremacy.

All the while, the boy from Corsicana hated to perform but just loved to write, coming up with country hits, mostly for others, such as Black Rose, I Been to Georgia on a Fast Train and I'm Just an Old Chunk of Coal (But I'm Gonna Be a Diamond Someday).

For many years, songwriting was something he kept hidden while he broke horses and drove cattle.

"I always wrote, since I was 5 or 6, but I never told anybody," Shaver says over a plate of eggs and hash browns. "Brenda knew, but I never told anyone outside of that. Everyone thought you were a sissy. Even if you played guitar, they thought you were a sissy. So I carried it close to my chest. I knew it was something I was good at because my English teacher told me I was. She said this is something you can fall back on."

He soon learned she wasn't kidding, as his hard-charging life took a toll on his body.

"I got all broke up," he says. "I had my back broke, a plate in my neck. I've had a heart attack, four-way bypass, all kinds of stuff."

He gestures to his right hand with missing fingers. "I did this when I was 21. I had to actually fall back on writing," he says, laughing. "Usually, you fall back [from writing to another career.]"

In the late '60s, Shaver decided to seek, if not a fortune, then a life in music. That was one of the times he left Brenda. "She said, 'I need somebody with a real job.' I took off from Houston. I had $10 in my pocket and hitchhiked all the way," he says of how he ended up in Nashville. "I was going to go to LA, but I couldn't get a ride on that side of the road. I got on the other side of the road and the first guy took me all the way to Memphis."

Once in Nashville, Shaver landed a $50-dollar-a-week job writing songs for country-star-turned-music-publisher Bobby Bare. He soon became in demand, scoring hits for Bare and Johnny Rodriguez, while Kristofferson produced an album by Shaver. He wrote the bulk of Jennings' Honky Tonk Heroes disc, a record that's credited with launching the outlaw country movement.

But Shaver was hit by a streak of music-industry bad luck. Music recorded for such labels as Monument and the Allman Brothers' Capricorn Records languished as the companies went out of business. "I was there to have fun. It's still a hobby with me," Shaver says, noting he never thought much about success. "I never had management. I didn't really care that much. I never did. You can tell that."

In fact, that was one of the sources of conflict with Brenda. "My happiest time with Brenda was when we didn't have anything," he remembers. "We had each other. She used to get mad about it but I didn't -- because I had her full attention then. She wasn't out shopping."

He has had some releases in recent years, such as The Earth Rolls On (recorded with his late son as well as Wilco keyboardist Jay Bennett, and Springsteen drummer Garry Tallent) and Tramp on Your Street, but this film may be what finally exposes him to a wide audience.

That was one of the reasons Pedraza made the movie. She was impressed by Shaver seven years ago while Duvall was shooting the movie The Apostle, in which Shaver had a small part. "At the party, he played one of his songs, and I thought it was very beautiful. I got very moved through that," she recalls.

The Portrait of Billy Joe, which has yet to land a distribution deal, may be made part of a larger Texas tribute that Pedraza has in mind. She's currently working on a biography of Texas writer Horton Foote. The Lone Star State is a place that, even though she and Duvall divide their time between Virginia and her native Argentina, Pedraza feels is special.

"I like Texas a lot. I like driving around," she says. "It's just fascinating."

From: http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/8319149.htm?1c