Praise be songs of sin and salvation

CARL WILSON

"(c) The Globe and Mail  2002, All Rights Reserved"



Outside the walls of church or school, the first time music met God in my life
was in the back of a station wagon one night, driving from somewhere to
somewhere. My cousins already had said the rosary by the dashboard light, a
spooky enough experience for a visitor from a far-less-observant family. And
then came the Johnny Cash eight-track.


I don't know what album it was, but it had A Boy Named Sue and a lot of gospel.
I'd never heard Cash before, and felt like we'd tuned in some
fire-and-brimstone preacher: Since when were hymns entertainment? It seemed
like cultish indoctrination, and a cruel letdown from my Toronto relatives --
they were supposed to show me urban sophistication, and this was what I found?


Sometime on that same trip, I knuckled under and went to confession at my
cousins' church; the priest cursed me out violently for not making my mom take
me to mass more often, and my already rocky relationship with Catholicism ended
in bitter divorce.


From then on, the only religious references I allowed in my music were at least
partly blasphemous -- Jim Carroll's heroin-shooting altar boy was a favourite,
and I loved to hear Patti Smith sing, "Jesus died for somebody's sins/ but not
mine." Leonard Cohen got a pass (his Christ-besotted Zen Judaism wasn't
anybody's orthodoxy) and Jesus Christ Superstar held a perverse fascination.
But that was about it.


Adulthood brought a few encounters with Bible-thumping musicians, most
memorably New York free-jazz giant Charles Gayle screeching out imprecations
against abortion between sax solos. But I would skip over the gospel numbers on
Al Green albums. I learned to appreciate Johnny Cash, but his Christianity
continued to give me the wig, as did Bob Dylan's gospel phase.


Today, God, in all his or her or their forms, still strikes me as one of the
most wanton bogeymen the human imagination ever loosed on the world. But I have
to admit that half the world's great music has come out of the mystic. Seeing
Billy Joe Shaver in Missouri in June was the last straw for my gospel phobias.


Shaver, who hails from no less a faith-plagued locale than Waco, Tex., hauled
his 6-foot, 63-year-old self up on stage to play the most moving set of country
music I've ever heard. Through cussedness and bad luck, Shaver has never
achieved the fame of some of his friends, but when he takes the stage he has
all the force of legend -- as Torontonians will witness at his first local gig
in eight years, on Wednesday at Hugh's Room (2261 Dundas St. W, 8 p.m., $20,
416-531-6604).


He played the classics he wrote for everyone from the late Waylon Jennings
(whose 1973 disc of Shaver songs, Honky Tonk Heroes, was the Rosetta Stone of
the "outlaw country" movement) to the Allman Brothers, Bob Dylan, Elvis
Presley, George Jones, Jerry Lee Lewis, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson,
Billy Paul, Scott Walker, and Dylan and Cash themselves. He sang lines like
"The devil made me do it the first time/ The second time I did it on my own,"
and "I'm just an old lump of coal, but I'm gonna be a diamond one day."


He did material from The Earth Rolls On, his great album with his only child
Eddy on guitar, recorded after Shaver's mother and wife died within a month of
each other in 1999. And he previewed some of Freedom's Child, his first
recording since Eddy died of a heroin overdose on New Year's Eve, 2000.
Meanwhile, Shaver has undergone back surgery, had a heart attack on stage last
year and ended up having a quadruple bypass.


Songwriting is a profession Shaver has said he "fell back on" after severing
two fingers on his right hand in a sawmill accident at 28, and after stints as
a bronco buster, Navy man, roofer, boozer and brawler.


His father abandoned Shaver's honky-tonk-waitress mother, and Shaver himself
divorced Eddy's mother Brenda twice and married her three times (first when she
was 17, and last while she was dying of cancer).


This is a man whose life was a country song already, and he makes the most of
it in tunes such as I've Been to Georgia on a Fast Train ("I've got a good
Christian raisin'/ And an 8th-grade education/ I don't need y'all to treat me
thisaway").


So when he gently, humbly mentioned on stage that he owed it all to Jesus --
who he's said came to him when he was drugging, drinking and cheating, and
pulled him back from the lip of a cliff where he was about to jump -- all I
could think was, "Whatever gets that man through the day is fine by me."


My world already had been rocked that weekend by the electric gospel of "Sacred
Steel" guitarist Calvin Cooke, but I could chalk that up to sonics. What
impressed me was the unassuming character of Shaver's creed: You might have
your own beliefs, but Jesus works best for him. Who could object?


When a rural Texas cowboy poet sings of sin and salvation, it's as natural and
potent as the great Pakistani quallah singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan chanting
transcendent love songs to Allah. And not necessarily a campaign for converts.
Sometimes, we squeamish secularists are the ones who need to learn to live and
let live.


"There's many a moonbeam got lost in the forest," Shaver sings on his stunning
new family saga, Day By Day. "And many a forest got burnt to the ground/ The
son went with Jesus to be with his mother/ The father just fell to his knees on
the ground."


I hope I never get that deep into the woods. The point is that Shaver (much
like Cash) found his way out, not which light he travelled by. And when the
songs he's brought back run so deep and ring so true, you can't help wanting to
give thanks and praise.