Review: Mike Judge Presents Tales from the Tour Bus “Billy Joe Shaver”

If you fail at something long enough, you become a legend.

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Billy Joe Shaver fits in pretty well with the rest of artists covered so far in this show. He did drugs, drank, got married and divorced a few times, and, as Mike Judge puts it: “Like almost everyone else in this series so far, he shot a guy.” But the most apparent difference that sets him apart from them is not only that he’s still alive and kicking, but he does a lot of talking here.

Growing up, again like most of the previous subjects, in a remote area of the south with humble beginnings and exposed himself to many big music acts of that period and the music scene in general. His moment of inspiration was seeing a Hank Williams performance when he was kid. After getting tossed in a Mexican jail, he went back to Texas and got a milling job where he promptly got some fingers sliced off by a saw blade. He accrued a small band of great bandmates as well as close friends and drove all over the country for shows, but always came back to the Lone Star State.

Fellow musician and one time politician Kinky Friedman recall that Shaver’s optimism in the face of his tragedies is pretty remarkable, especially when your mother apparently takes off right after you’re born, but it does make for a great songwriter. Singer Bobby Bare met him as he first came to Nashville and sang the song “Black Rose”. Hal Bynum put him up for awhile, though at the cost of listening to Tennyson poems at alleged knifepoint. And he got tested on with drugs by Willie Nelson, who gave Shaver a big push in his career. But the biggest impact came from getting LSD toilet paper from the Grateful Dead.

In the early 70’s, during a drug-fueled journey through the crowds of the Dripping Springs Reunion (of which he was supposed to be playing) he wandered into a trailer and started singing some songs off the cuff, attracting the attention of Waylon Jennings. The two got to work on a record later titled “Honkey Tonk Heroes”, but while it turned out great for Jennings, their professional relationship likely didn’t mix.

Heading back home, he got married, divorced, married, divorced, and married to his first wife Brenda, who ended up dying to cancer, and then repeated the process with his second wife, Wanda, though without the death. In the story of their final wedding, Billy Gibbons (guitar of ZZ Top) married the two in Las Vegas. Then he arrived at the reception to find Shaver Indian Leg Wrestling with his best man, leading to him breaking his neck and Wanda calling it quits for the last time.

Which then leads to a brawl at a bar they stopped at on the ride home where Shaver pulled his signature .22 Derringer on a vagrant who may have had a gun…but probably a knife, according to most sources. In what I guess you could call a climax to the story, Shaver was put on trial with an attorney famous for defending hopeless but equally famous clients. Things weren’t helped by friend Dale Watson getting word of the incident and making a pretty incriminating song out of it, but he was eventually deemed not guilty, surprising probably everybody. The “Wacko from Waco” lived to wack another day, even as time wore his body out. But never his mind, through which he still writes songs to this day.”

OUR TAKE

As stated at the beginning, the main thing that helps these episodes stick out from the others is Shaver’s frequent presence in the retellings. This differs from Paycheck, Jones, and Wynette, who have long since passed before the show was in production, and Lewis, who only showed up at the end to give final thoughts. In this sense, the stories are colored a bit but offer insight from the perspective of the subject that we haven’t really been privy to before now.

Also, it might be because this is following up a two-parter, but this episode felt rather short. Almost like a breather between that and the next. What adds to this is that there is, or oddly seems, to be a less clear tragedy in this. No real falls from grace due to the thrilling lifestyle of show business or addictive and violent tendencies coming forth due to the abundance of illicit substances. Drugs are certainly in play, but not a huge part of the story. Might be a swing in the dark, but Shaver’s actual living involvement with things could very well have something to do with that, not that we’ll ever know.

Next time, a sort of spin-off occurs as a notable figure in this episode gets his own double feature as we look into the first of the Outlaw Country singers: Waylon Jennings.