God Loves Ya When You Dance

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Live Forever

On a hot August night in 2001, Shaver stood onstage at Gruene Hall in New Braunfels. The heat surged densely under the stage lights with the crowd pulled in close, and he could feel the pressure building in his chest with every breath. The singer knew he was having a heart attack, but played on.

The band's guitarist, his son Eddy, 38, had died on New Year's Eve, and his wife and mother passed shortly before that. In April, Shaver had released The Earth Rolls On, a brutally powerful reckoning. It was his final album recorded with Eddy.

"I knew I was gonna die," sighs Shaver, the pain of the period still palpable in his voice. "I had decided, well, this is it. I just didn't have a lot to live for. I'd lost my wife and my son and mother – anybody that meant anything to me."

He performed over three hours that night at Gruene Hall, lingering later to sign autographs. Afterward, he spent the night at a motel in Pflugerville. Only the next morning did he check himself into a hospital in Waco. All but one of the arteries in his heart had blown out. A quadruple bypass saved Shaver's life, but it didn't ease the heartbreak over his son.

Shaver had pulled his son out of school when Eddy was around 12, taking him on the road with his hard-charging band, Slim Chance & the Can't Hardly Playboys.

"It was me, Freddy Fletcher, and Dave Pomeroy, and Eddy would play guitar," remembers Shaver. "They was a rough, ragged bunch, and when we started out, we couldn't play very good so we'd get drunk. We'd get drunk and puke on stage, and the people in the audience thought that was funny for some reason, so everywhere we went we'd do that. And then people got to where they'd come and they'd puke and it was the puking-est damn mess you'd ever seen.

"Eddy'd just blow through it. He'd say, 'You guys don't have any art.'"

As Shaver sobered up in the Eighties and was born again (see "The Christian Life," Aug. 14, 1998), Eddy's guitar pushed him in new directions. The duo recorded under the name Shaver through the Nineties, releasing four albums, including 1993's resurgent Tramp on Your Street and '98's haunting spiritual Victory.

In the early morning hours of December 31, 2000, Billy Joe received a call that Eddy had overdosed on heroin. That night, the band had been scheduled to play at Poodie's with Willie Nelson, but now Shaver stood in a hospital having just lost his son and getting few answers.

"Willie called down there and said, 'I got a band together and you're gonna play tonight,'" recounts Shaver. "'Gotta get back on the horse.' Willie had been through that. So I come down there to Poodie's, and Willie had a good band. I'd get up there every once in a while and do one, but he did most of it.

"It was hard – it was hard. But I did it and it helped."

Old Chunk of Coal

"There's something about writing in the middle of the morning, you get a littlelooser," proffers Shaver at his kitchen table.

He looks down and taps his hand against the wood.

"Eddy and me, we'd sit right here at this table, pretty sturdy little old table, and we'd call it Nights at the Round Table. We wrote some really tough songs here. We wrote 'Blood's Thicker Than Water,' and I mean, we'd have at each other. He was a great talent, great son, good guy, but he couldn't get away from drugs, them hard drugs. It was sad because he never got the credit he should have got."

Most of Shaver's work over the past decade has been an attempt to deal with Eddy's death, and reconcile the loss with his core faith. Freedom's Child (2002), Billy and the Kid (2004), and Everybody's Brother (2007) are all strafed with the still-daily struggle, yet bolstered by the cornerstone of Shaver's spirituality.

"Every day I wake up and I think about him," sighs Shaver. "But I don't think you're supposed to forget them. At my shows, a good percentage have lost loved ones in that same fashion. Usually they'll come back two or three times and pray with me. It's a good feeling, knowing you're helping somebody even though you didn't set out to help them. I just set out to help myself. I was just trying to write myself out of misery. I just did what I had to do to maintain."

That perseverance runs deep through Shaver's work. "Try and Try Again" has become a live staple, alongside the likes of "Old Chunk of Coal." Meanwhile, his other new song on Live at Billy Bob's Texas, "The Git Go," finds similar strength. While "Wacko From Waco" may get requests, "The Git Go" proves on par with Shaver's best material. Against its sharp, bluesy critique of war, greed, and politics, the seeming futility of struggling meets a sense of hope through dogged determination.

"I've had so many things happen to me that I can't be bitter, because I have to keep going," attests Shaver. "I've been near death so many times, it ain't no big deal. And I don't blame God for anything. You can't. You got the gift of life from God, and if you run into a pitfall or something, well, that's the breaks. You gotta get up and go on."

The Git Go

The first weekend in August, Billy Joe Shaver ascends the stairs to Antone's stage uneasily. He's recently had his knee replaced and surgery on his shoulder. Vertebrae are missing from his back, and a previously broken neck still bothers him.

As he steps before the crowd, he lights up with a thick grin and doffs his cowboy hat to the cheers. A Billy Joe Shaver show is part sermon, part tall tales from the bar, as he weaves an arc of autobiography as introduction to his songs. He rips through his classics with fervor, shadowboxing against the beat of "Georgia on a Fast Train" and waltzing alone across the stage to "Honky Tonk Heroes."

At the heart of each show, the band turns its back to the crowd, Shaver hangs his hat from his respite guitar, and he beckons an a cappella "Star in My Heart." It's followed by the ever-poignant "Live Forever," with Shaver kneeling upon the stage through the closing chords.

"Love ya Eddy. Love ya folks," he calls heavenward.

And then as if to reaffirm his own message of perseverance, he launches back into the rowdy and raucous with "Thunderbird" and "Hottest Thing in Town." The crowd likewise breaks the stillness and erupts in a cathartic, joyous swing.

God loves ya when you dance.