San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Looking back on an outlaw music legend’s career
SAN MARCOS — A bout with throat cancer last year changed how Texas outlaw music legend Jerry Jeff Walker approaches his vast catalog of songs.
But only so much.
“It changed the keys I sing them in,” he quipped. “I can’t sing as high as I used to.”
Walker and his wife, Susan, appeared for a rare double interview Saturday hosted by the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University. Moderated by Hector Saldaña, Texas music curator at the Wittliff and a former San Antonio Express-News music columnist, the interview was part of “¡Viva Jerry Jeff! The origins and wild times of a Texas icon,” a career retrospective spanning Walker’s days singing protest songs in New Orleans all the way through his latest album, the recently released “It’s About Time.”
The retrospective runs through July 8 at the Alkek Library on the Texas State campus.
Based on the singer’s recently donated archives, the sightsand-sounds show includes letters, written lyrics, photos, a copy of Walker’s arrest report, even his oldest known recordings, restored from the original 1964 tapes.
Walker called the displays “eye-opening,” adding that much of it covers a period “I hadn’t thought of in a long time.”
“It makes me feel old,” interjected Susan Walker, long her husband’s business manager and the person often credited with getting Walker — perhaps best known for penning “Mr. Bojangles,” singing “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother” and recording the landmark “¡Viva Terlingua!” — back on track after his famous excesses in the 1970s.
Plenty of memory lane stories were told and plenty of laughs were shared during the freewheeling, hourlong Q&A attended by more than 170 colleagues and fans.
Asked about the first time they met, Susan recalled a party in her Austin home during which someone kept taking her records off the turntable
(mostly “Let It Bleed” by the Stones) and replacing them with a country album she later learned was a test pressing of “¡Viva Terlingua!”
Walker explained that the record company had given it to him and asked him to play it on different record players to see how it sounded and if the mix needed to be adjusted.
“But I didn’t have a record player back then,” he said, explaining why he kept putting it on Susan’s turntable.
Were there sparks when the two met?
“Oh, yeah, but not the good ones,” Susan answered, to much laughter. “I was trying to shoo him away, ‘Leave my stuff alone.’ ” (Only she didn’t say “stuff.”)
The first song of his she specifically remembers hearing? “That Old Beat Up Guitar.”
“I first thought it was an unbelievable love song,” she said. “Then when I heard it again I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s a love song to a guitar!’ But it was still a love song.”
Walker told how his wife helped guide his career, recalling a performance shortly after his father died when he started playing one of his favorite songs, “My Old Man.”
“Then a guy way up in the back row hollers — he’d been somewhere drinking — ‘Pissin’ in the Wind.’ And I just said ‘(expletive) it’ and I walked off. It took a while for Susan to calm me down and get me back on stage.”
Walker explained that “¡Viva Terlingua!” was a success because it was recorded live. In a recording studio, he said, you play the same song four, five, sometimes six or more times in a row and that kills any surprise the performance might contain.
“But when you record live, you have to be present in the song,” he said. “You forget you’re recording. The band will relax because they’re playing for people, not a machine.”
Walker brushed aside the idea that, released in the midst of the Watergate hearings, mere months before Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, “¡Viva Terlingua!” was a fun, good time record released at just the right moment.
“You don’t have control of that,” he said.
Susan, however, had a different perspective.
“I’d tell him go do another live album if the president will leave,” she said to uproarious laughter.
About the only outward sign of Walker’s cancer during the Q&A was a certain raspiness in his voice as he spoke.
San Antonio singer Rachel Laven opened the event by performing a trio of Walkerpenned tunes, including “Mr. Bojangles,” “Pickup Truck Song,” and “I Look For That Day Today,” the last an unpublished song re-discovered while “¡Viva Jerry Jeff!” was being developed and that Walker said has probably not been performed in more than half a century