I don’t know if you had the same experience, but my high school years were not only about discovering the opposite sex but about opening the door to music. Not music that I was told to listen to, or that my folks listened to (although they actually had great taste in music), or that I played as part of the school band, but music that somehow, someway, spoke to me.
Of course, initially this was rock and roll, which was the musical culture common to almost all teenagers. In my generation, you had to beable to speak fluent Beatles. But I also remember hoping that my favorite rock band, the Rolling Stones, would not spend too much time with the Fab Four and have their bad-boyness smoothed out by success. In hindsight, I liked the Stones better because they were a blues band. A friend turned me on to Paul Butterfield, and I went from his first album to the “Fathers and Sons” record with Butterfield and Muddy Waters to “The Best of Muddy Waters” and “The Best of Little Walter.” I didn’t listen to much rock and roll after I got into Chicago blues.
Country music was always kind of lurking aound, too. The first rock act I saw in person was The Byrds. They had just released “Sweetheart Of The Rodeo” album, a country record, and they played some of those tunes live in between their AM radio hits. The crowd booed, but I liked it and bought that album and put it on heavy rotation on the turntable in my bedroom.
The summer of 1969 I went to the Seattle Pops Festival and saw the Flying Burrito Brothers, a wild and woolly act fronted by Gram Parsons, who had dreamed up “Sweetheart Of The Rodeo” album when he was with the Byrds. A month later some friends and I camped out in a field in Tenino, Washington for three days to catch the second Sky River Rock Festival. The Burritos played every day. By the time I left Tenino I was sold on those guys. When I got back to Seattle, I got their debut album, “The Gilded Palace of Sin,” and I proceeded to wear that thing out every time I took a break from the blues.
I figured that this hippie country stuff was cool, but this had to be the equivalent to the British blues I had thought was so great until I found the real stuff. What I needed to do was to go down to Discount Records and pick myself up a real country and western album.
But unlike my experience with the blues, I had no leads. I went through the country bins in the record store and saw a lot of great album covers (I think that may have been the first time I laid eyes on Porter Wagoner’s“The Hard Cold Facts Of Life” album cover), but the odds that I walk out of there having spent $3.99 with a bad hillbilly joke on vinyl seemed awfully high.
“Okie From Muskogee” was the big smash country record that summer. I was appropriately appalled by its “message,” but the singer had a good voice, and the perversity of buying it and forcing myself to listen to a whole album of right-wing shitkicker music got the better of me and I walked of the store with a copy of Merle Haggard’s “Live In Muskogee” album.
The gods were with me that day. Even now, I can’t imagine a better introduction to country music than that record. This guy Merle Haggard, it turned out, had an unbelievable voice. And his band, The Strangers, were insanely great. Who the hell was this Roy Nichols guy on guitar? Merle did many of his hits, or course, on the record, and his songs were killer. He played these fantastic blues songs by some guy named Jimmie Rodger—and yodeled like a prince!
Even today I can listen to every second of that album in my head. Merle became my guide to a vast territory of unbelievable music. Jimmie Rodgers The Blue Yodeler. The serpentine drawl of Lefty Frizzell. The vaudeville numbers of Emmett Miller. Bob Wills and Tommy Duncan—discovering those wild men was like discovering America. Marty Robbins, Merle’s big early influence. It was such a fun time in my life, going deep every day, year after year, on all these rednecks and bluesmen and their gorgeous soulfulness.
I went off to New York City to go to college and saw my first Merle Haggard show at the Felt Forum, the smaller arena next to Madison Square Garden. Merle was thirty-two. The lady-killer-with-the-Hollywood-good-looks version of Merle was a sight to behold, but the voice that the young Merle Haggard had was one of the most amazing instruments every brought onto a stage. Everybody left that show wanting to be a Stranger, and it was a revelation to see and hear what a big part Merle’s wife Bonnie Owens played in his stage show and sound.
I saw Merle dozens of times after that. Like Sinatra, his voice got even better with age. Listening to Merle sing a ballad in his forties was an unforgettable experience. For several years Merle augmented The Strangers with a slew of legendary alumni of Bob Wills’ band, the Texas Playboys, and that outfit delivered the most enjoyable—and the most musical—shows I’ve ever seen. Merle learned to play a solid fiddle with that version of his band. I sat in the audience when Merle made his first appearance on Austin City Limits. (Check out the DVD of that show, “Live From Austin, TXC ‘78,” if you want to see Merle in his unearthly prime. I caught him in the small, 300-seat Backstage in Seattle, where he just slayed us with ballad after ballad in a really intimate show. A year before Merle died, Isaw him in a theater in Red Bank, New Jersey. The high end on his voice was gone, but he still had moments of glory, and he pulled out the fiddle that night.
Merle did things his own way, from the beginning. The writer Gerald Haslam grew up with Merle in Bakersfield. In his book, “Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California,” Haslam describes his awestruck admiration of Merle the youngster, who was hopping freight trains while still in grade school, this way:
“During his early teen years the handsome Haggard seemed preternaturally mature to us neighborhood kids, a Huck Finn unencumbered by formal education and unintimidated by authority; he escaped seven times from various reform schools (that tally would eventually rise to seventeen). He was in fact envied by many of his male peers and endlessly alluring to young women. Hag had already become singular. Some of his pals even had trouble understanding him, but nonetheless they found him to be an exciting companion.”
Back in the 1970s I caught a Merle Haggard show at the Opera House in Seattle. I snuck backstage, hoping to find Merle. That didn’t happen, but I did run into Norm Hamlet, Merle’s great pedal steel player, who was still working with Haggard when Merle died. I told Hamlet how impressive it was that Merle had had put together such a great band and kept it together for so many years.
“I’ve known Merle since he was fifteen years old,” Hamlet told me. “We all knew that if he ever got his shit together, he’d be big.”