The hard balance of real life renders Jon Dee Graham’s body of work all the more impressive

by Grant Alden

Truth is, I have been writing this same story for ten years or more. It has been about Tom House and Mike Ireland, Chris Knight and Mary Gauthier and, even, Gillian Welch and Steve Earle. Especially Billy Joe Shaver.

This is the story about not stopping.

It is the story about voices which must be listened to.

It is a balancing act, this story, written and thought about in the spare quiet when my wife and daughter are gone or asleep, or not yet awake.

“Here,” Jon Dee Graham asks softly: “Could you do something else?”

Yes, if I had to. To support my family.

“Yeah, but…” he says. “I’m so sick of people who presume to know God’s will. But I do believe that this is my work. This is not my job, this is my work. And just enough people agree with me that I’m allowed to do it. I’m never going to get rich, I’m never going to have the kind of teenage success that we all dream of.

“But I have a nice house. And my kids are happy. I’m pretty happy. I don’t know; I think that by doing my work it’s going to be all right. Foolish, maybe.”

Later, we will come to contemplate our mortality.

Now we face our lives. Whatever they are, not what we dreamed they might be. And what they aren’t. These are years of bargains made and kept and broken. Of aches that heal slowly (or never), and of families.

Especially, for we who are lucky enough, of families.

Unexpectedly rich and nuanced, these years in the middle, if one still attends to the process.

Jon Dee Graham attends. Not the best-known voice of my generation, but surely among of its most eloquent.

He attends with fierce devotion and takes precise notes, writing taut and incautious songs that lay out the whole joyous stumbling sprawling journey: love, children, demons, God, loss.

He and I were born a few months and several thousand miles apart in 1959. Our paths, naturally, have been quite different, but it is more than hopeful to spot another candle weaving down the road.

He has attended to these matters for five albums since 1997 — not discounting his contributions to the Resentments — and it truly does not matter where the newest release, Full, falls within the body of his work, for this is not a game, not a tournament, not a contest. This is real life. It is his body of work that matters, all of it.

 

A big wag-a-tail yellow dog bursts through the front door before the gate of the Grahams’ white picket fence has latched shut. His bark is merely a happy prelude to the joyful ritual of ear rubbing and chest scratching, and we are soon close friends. Humans follow in no particular order: Jon Dee, Gretchen Harries, and their son Willie, tenderly hauling the black and white fluff of a puppy with him, the joyful detritus of childhood sprawling across their lawn.

They live in a sturdy old house they have occupied for years, some blocks removed from the Continental Club; like all of Austin — like every tech city in the United States — the neighborhood is currently all dumpsters and sawdust. We retreat toward the backyard, hoping for quiet. In the living room, a still-elegant white Persian lifts its head, sniffs, accepts ear tribute, and then, spying the new puppy, stalks upstairs with all the fury and dignity of its 18 years.

The dog follows, Willie and his puppy trailing after and settling quietly into a hammock strung between the garage and a pecan tree. Gretchen kindly offers cappuccino, for we are keeping hours that suit neither rock ’n’ roll nor parenthood, and blurry from the effort.

“Petey. Or Peter,” Jon Dee says, introducing his dog. “Or Pedro, depending on the mood. He’s a rescue. He came to us with the name intact, but I like it. It’s a strong, clear name: Petrus. The whole church is built on Petrus.” Absently scratching Peter’s ears, he bends closer to them. “So, as a dog disciple you’re pretty good.”

This is why I have come.

This is where Jon Dee does his work, in close company with a handsome young man of nearly seven years, three critters, and his very smart wife, who teaches communications at various colleges. We are barely seated, not even caffeinated, and he has leapt into the thicket of ideas which make his music so arresting.

“There’s a lot of talk on the new record of the middle years,” nods Jon Dee. “A long time ago somebody told me, ‘Every band thinks they invented rock ’n’ roll.’ It’s just this glorious thing, like watching a kid walk for the first time, when you see a band which starts to rock. They’re like, ‘Wow, somebody turn on a recorder or something! We’ve discovered fire!’

“Well…some other people found it also a long time ago, but you found some really good fire. It’s hard. It’s hard. And when you get in the middle years, the best thing I can say about that is you really do sort of relax a little bit.”

 

Jon Dee Graham first discovered fire as a very young man in Quemado, Texas, a small border town (population 243 as of the 2000 census) in Maverick County on the southwest edge of the state. His older brother became a doctor, practicing in Kerrville; his sister is a nurse. “I have held on to my amateur standing in medicine,” he writes later, with characteristic humor.

“I grew up in a family of seekers,” Graham says. “We were physically very isolated. When I was growing up, our first church was the local Methodist Church. In fact, I played piano for them for a while [from ages 10-13]. That was my first actual gig.

“But the impression I got from my father was that he thought they were too lukewarm, that there was not enough passion, not enough commitment, and he wanted a God that would get their hands dirty. So we tried a few different churches, and one day he came home and had had a meeting with two nice young missionaries from the Latter-Day Saints.

“So that began our Mormon phase. We were Mormons for probably three years, until my father started actually reading some of the doctrine.…A church with many flaws,” he finishes with a quick laugh. “By then I was old enough to sort of sidestep the whole church issue.” Sort of.

He want from piano to guitar to tuba and back to guitar, from Quemado to the University of Texas in Austin, from the classroom to opening one night for the Clash with a punk band called the Skunks, from the Skunks to a brief touring gig playing blues with Lou Ann Barton, to the Gator Family (which included his first wife, Sally Norvell), to the Lift, who were apparently very popular in Austin.

And tumbled into the True Believers — joining his onetime rival, Alejandro Escovedo — who were both good and popular enough outside Austin to be signed to EMI, and unlucky enough to see their second album released seven years after the band disintegrated.

Graham and Norvell disappeared into the wilds of Los Angeles, where she directed videos and he toured with Michelle Shocked and John Doe and played some modestly unsuccessful songwriter gigs. Patty Smythe had a hit record with one of his songs on it; he served as a foil for bluesman Terry Garland on an undistinguished 1992 album called Edge Of The Valley, featuring an early workout on the traditional “Lonesome Valley” (to which he returned with far greater ferocity on The Great Battle) and Graham’s “October”, which resurfaced on Summerland. Graham and Norvell had a son named Roy — now 13 and living in Alameda, California — and then split up; Jon Dee retreated to Austin and hid for a time.

All of which is to say that he’s kicked around a bit, has stayed in some of the finest and worst hotels in the world, has eaten from deli trays and record-company credit cards.

 

By last year’s South By Southwest convention, it was a fair guess that Jon Dee Graham would not make a fourth album for New West, which had released Summerland (1999), Hooray For The Moon (2002) and The Great Battle (2004), as well as reissuing his 1997 Freedom Records solo debut Escape From Monster Island. A month later, he put the finishing touches on an eight-song acoustic EP titled First Bear On The Moon, which returned him to Freedom.

Much of the EP is drawn from a live performance of favorites at Austin radio station KUT, taped the day of George Bush’s second inauguration. The final three tracks, cut three months later, are new. “‘Best’,” he e-mailed, “is a good song; ‘Jesus Of The Freeway’ is an odd but engaging drifter’s gospel.”

But it is the final song, “Betrayed”, for which the EP is likely to be remembered. “[It was] simply put, my spite record,” Graham wrote. “It gave me a place to put my angry-at-the-record-company song and have something acoustic to sell off the stage that didn’t belong in any way to my old label. It was a fine little piece, but clearly an emotional and professional stopgap.”

It appears to have been an acrimonious parting, even by the standards of the recording industry. A year later, New West’s Cameron Strang frames a careful answer: “I’m a huge fan of Jon Dee’s, and we made what I consider to be three great records together. And that was the term of his initial contract; it ran through to the end. And for all kinds of circumstances, on both sides, we decided it was time to part ways. But it certainly wasn’t an easy decision. And we remain great fans of his music and, artistically, I think he’s an incredibly unique and terrific artist.”

“Let’s put it this way,” Graham says, pausing. “New West is a fine company that outgrew me.”

Does it matter?

“It matters greatly,” he answers. “In the year that I’ve been off New West, I made so much more money than I made on New West.”

He goes on to make a point which cuts both ways. “You spent $40,000 trying to get me on the radio? Are you out of your mind? How about buying me some new clothes for about $300, give me $1,000 health insurance, and take the rest of that money and give it to somebody building houses for poor people?

“What a waste. I mean, let’s be honest. I’m 47 years old. I write highly personal, highly confrontational, highly, highly, highly characteristic songs. I’m not going to be the next Johnny Cougar. And, God forbid, I don’t want that, either.

“But what I have found is there’s pools and eddies of people all over this country that really love what I do and get what I do. And on some level I think they believe that they need to hear what I do. And that’s enough.”

That means playing 200 dates a year solo, with his band, or as a member of the Resentments. (The Resentments are an Austin kind of supergroup, profiled by Joe Nick Patoski in ND #50, who play each Sunday night at the Saxon Pub, and tour on rare occasions. Graham’s collaborators in the Resentments are Stephen Bruton, Scrappy Jud Newcomb, Bruce Hughes, and John Chipman.)

“I play one weekend a month in Houston,” he begins. “One weekend a month in Dallas, one weekend a month in San Antonio, one weekend a month here, as well as playing two nights a week in Austin all the time that I’m here.

“I have a Midwest circuit that I do twice a year. I hit the Northeast once a year. I hit the Northwest once a year. If I do any more than that, I start to lose audience, because it’s no longer a big deal. That’s the thing about being a cult artist or whatever the f that means. You have to maintain your street credibility while at the same time having some sort of growing interest in you.”

At this year’s Austin Music Awards, held annually on the first night of SXSW, Jon Dee Graham was voted musician of the year. His son Willie joined him onstage in a fancy shirt, wielding a mean left-handed guitar, stealing the show, at least until gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman gave his stump speech.

 

Coming back down the wooden steps of his back porch, armed with a fresh shot of espresso, Jon Dee pauses at a cement statue, the yard’s only real adornment. “Are you familiar with Quan Yin? She is the Chinese equivalent of the Virgin Mary, the feminine side of that divinity. Check this out: She’s standing on a dragon, and the dragon represents life force. She’s standing on the dragon, and this vial right here? She’s pouring human teardrops, she’s feeding the dragon. Cold but true.”

It is the questing, questioning humanity of Jon Dee’s songs that has brought me to his backyard. And his intellect. His blunt and pragmatic honesty. But don’t misunderstand the purpose of the Buddhist statue on his steps. It’s just a reminder.

“Part of my personal practice is I pray and I read every day,” he says. “But that’s about as far as I’ll go with that.” The rest he gives up in his songs, or not at all.

“We’re meant to be social creatures,” Jon Dee had said when we first sat down, lighting one of his frequent cigarettes. “We’re soft-skinned. We have so little defense, we need to bond together in order to survive. That’s how society formed, not out of nicety but as a way for us to survive. OK, take that one step further. Inside every man I think there’s the spark of the divine. Somebody either wants to believe, does believe, or adamantly disbelieves. I know very few people who are just lukewarm about their belief in God…it’s hard to be an atheist, you know. You’re confronted daily.

“Being an agnostic even is such an uncomfortable position to be in that not many people would choose it. Being a believer has its own separate set of crosses. And so, yeah, there’s church in my stuff only because I’m looking for the stamp of the divine. There has to be something I can see. Looking for the work of the hand.”

Where do you find it?

“Other people. There’s a great line by Carl Jung. He says the divine inhabits the space formed between two people. He doesn’t say that creates the divine; the divine exists separate from us. But where it lives is between two people. So that’s why [when] you have a problem you take it to a friend, you start talking about it, ideas and solutions come up that neither one of you are really capable of. Because the divine exists in that space. And if you go into that space between two people, you’re more armed.”

He has needed those arms. The IRS audited the Grahams last year. Willie was diagnosed with Legg-Perthes Disease, a form of osteonecrosis (bone death) that attacks the hip socket. Oh, and then their insurance company — lucky musician, he had insurance — went bankrupt, which meant Willie’s disease became a pre-existing condition, and they were screwed. To put it politely.

In which way Jon Dee Graham was once again linked in the public eye — and onstage — with his long-ago True Believers bandmate Alejandro Escovedo, for both were dealt health issues that led to tribute discs, benefit concerts, and an unanticipated outpouring of public kindness. Jon Dee played some on Escovedo’s new album, and toured with him as a guitar player and opening act, but is now back to focusing on his own work.

Willie, too, is having a better year.

“He has to be x-rayed really regularly to track the progress of the degradation of the hip,” Jon Dee says. “And so month after month we’re looking at these x-rays of the femoral head. It’s just like the moon, there’s chunks missing, black areas, a whole thing going gray, gray, more gray, more gray. It just wears you down seeing this.

“We had a visit right before Christmas where the doctor points, there’s this little white thread coming up through the middle of the femur, starting to branch out at the top. New bone. It’s not rare, but it’s uncommon at this stage of his disease to be regrowing new bone. Of course the doctor backpedaled: ‘Now this may die, too, it doesn’t mean that we’re out of the woods.’

“But, you know what? I’ll take it. I’ll take it. And it’s just a sense of something greater than ourselves at work.”

 

The new album, which was released April 18 on Freedom, comes armed with one of the great lines of mature love: “I prefer that we remain.” Graham’s new album contains nothing like the uplifting joy of his best-known song, “Big Sweet Life” (from Summerland). It lacks the imprimatur of big-name session collaboration that drummer Jim Keltner gave Hooray For The Moon. Rising star Charlie Sexton didn’t produce, as he did on The Great Battle.

No. Full is just Jon Dee Graham, his songs, and his trusty band: bassist Andrew DuPlantis, drummer John Chipman, and multi-instrumentalist Mark Hardwick, with odd bits of help from his other mates in the Resentments. In some ways, Full conveys the same determined self-discovery that underpins Graham’s debut, Escape From Monster Island, the suite of songs he wrote after his first wife left, taking their son with her. At a minimum, it is his most private public work.

“These were intended to be demos at the least and an adventure at the most,” Graham e-mailed (we talked about God and life that morning in his backyard and I forgot why I was supposed to be there). “My band has rehearsed only twice in six years — songs are presented and worked up onstage Wednesday nights — so they were fit and savvy about playing songs of mine they had never heard.”

Producer Mike Stewart (who had been in charge of that Terry Garland album, and had known Graham a long time even in 1992) was in town from Amsterdam. “[He] suggested we informally throw down some songs…two days later when the chips had settled we had Full,” Graham wrote, though the CD booklet admits to a third day of work. “He has been some part or another of my career for so long that he was able to ‘facilitate’ and ‘handle’ me through the insane process of recording a two-day record. I know sonically it is full of corners and splinters and ragged ends, but it is the closest to what I hear from me — maybe ever.”

It sounds like four in the morning.

Almost nothing good can happen at four in the morning. Most places you can’t buy more booze; the children might wake up crying, or your spouse. There’s bound to be explaining to do, later. There is a terrible mirror, and one is surrounded by spectacular silence.

It is an unholy hour frequented by musicians and seekers, by those desperately lost and alone.

I do not miss it.

No, actually, I do. Just a little bit, now and again.

But I no longer seek it.

Except in music, and there my appetite remains unabated.

Full is an aching, seeking record, filled with apologies and regret and hope, but not so much hope. The music has been scaled back, simplified, until there is no mistaking the words, and their import. The opening “Jubilee” riffs off “Swing And Turn Jubilee” (recorded by Carolyn Hester and by Doc Watson and Jean Ritchie in the early 1960s), only Graham sings it “spin and turn jubilee” and supplies his own weary verses, converting a song of hope to a meditation on the waning years: “Time should be ashamed/Time should pack its shabby bag of tricks/And go away,” he sings.

The night before we spoke, he introduced “Swept Away” from the Whisky Bar stage with a question to the crowd. “Show of hands,” he said. “How many of you have planned your own disappearance?” Very few hands moved. “You’re all lying,” he growled happily, and let his guitar silence nervous laughter.

The song opens with a seductive guitar phrase, placid and caressing, and Jon Dee sings all too calmly, musing: “Well if you find my car/At a low water crossing/With the doors wide open/And the keys still inside/Just say so long, don’t say goodbye/I was swept away…”

It is not, entirely, about a man’s physical disappearance, though that, too, proves to be a matter to which Graham has given careful thought.

“Clearly, I’ve got a pretty nice life,” he says. “I’ve got a beautiful wife, a gorgeous son, a nice house. I do well at my work. But there’s always that…mmmm, you know? There’s always that.

“And when things get particularly hard, in the business, or you’re having a bad day…drive by that low water crossing and think, you know, I just might get away with it.

“You divest yourself of your complete personality,” he counsels, Willie now safely inside watching TV with his puppy. “That means you drop everything. You walk away with what you’re wearing on your body and then you go straight to the most rural, backwards, the most primitive-ass place you can find. And start over again. Because if you drop your phone, drop your wallet, take cash only, when you get there…that’s why that song is [set in] Mexico. First of all, it’s because that’s my spiritual home. But there’s nothing more irresistible in a small town than a stranger.”

You have, in your own way, disappeared a few times.

“Several times. Problem was, everywhere I went, I met me there, you know?”

Live and on Full, Graham chooses to follow “Swept Away” with “Something Wonderful”, each line repeated like a Buddhist chant, the guitars big, chiming and churning like Joshua Tree-era U2, of all things. “Something very wonderful is going to happen,” he sings in that great broken voice of his, as if singing will make it so. And maybe it will.

Two songs later he is alone with his guitar, a supplicant singing “O Dearest One”: “I swear now, to you, I did my best/But I guess/That my best is still/Not very good.” Later, on “Rosewood”, he adds, “You’re beautiful/And I am no damn good.”

“Holes”, the song from which the album draws its title, is as blunt: “Well I’m so full of holes/I whistle when the wind blows,” he begins. The chorus comes sadly: “Full, so full,” adding, carefully, “but I saved a little room for you.” It is a loping, beautiful piece; one of his best, one of his most honest, one of his most difficult.

Rough nights. On “Bonaparte”, he groans, “Calling Mr. Fix-it, tell me what to do/I seem to have set myself on fire.” “WCD”, addressed to a friend whose name he prefers not to reveal, is more direct: “There is no forever/No such thing as never.”

“The Garden” ends here: “Never will I hide myself again.” It is a prayer, not a promise. The imagined Eden of our youth is long gone.

 

Enough of that. That’s what comes after. This Full record is also about what happens now, in the middle years. It is about the tension between making art and making a living, between being a parent and a partner and being successful at one’s craft. It is about persisting.

About juggling.

“The biggest struggle with me,” Jon Dee says, clearing his throat, “is trying to find some sort of balance. For instance, I have to be completely alone to write. That’s just how it is. And it’s not, ‘Oh, I’ll be quiet, honey, I won’t rattle the dishes.’ If I know you’re there, you’re too there. And so most of my writing happens after everyone has gone to bed and is asleep, and I get up really early in the morning and I write then.”

You came to songwriting relatively late.

“I’d been writing songs all along, but not really writing songs. That was not my job. My job was to be the hotshot guitar player; that’s what I did. And I worked in some really interesting situations because of it. But there just got to be a point where what I wanted to do was write. God help us all, because it’s a hard job.”

Was it something you’d been putting away and off in some ways?

“Yeah. Yeah, because it’s…I mean, you can look at my songs and tell I’m not really making anything up. I wish I could be a storyteller that could build these incredible collections of characters. That’s not what I do. I’m a transcriptionist.

“I carry a pocket notebook, take notes all day long, but it’s a juggling act, and it has to be fluid. Your creativity and your work as an artist has to be like a liquid, which flows into the space which you will allow it. And so you allow it as much space as you can. But we’re grown men with families. There’s going to be a limited amount of space. Fortunately I provide a lot of the income for the house, so that’s respected, and there comes a point where I can say, ‘Daddy has to work…’”

Sometimes it is the songs themselves which demand.

“On that last record, that song ‘East 11th Street’ — ‘Children turn your cell phones on.’ That line popped into my head and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s cute,’” Graham says, still betrayed by the wonder of things. “Two days later, ‘Yeah, that’s all right.’ A week later, ‘Jesus, leave me alone!’ Four weeks later, ‘All right, I’ll write you down just to prove to you that this is not a song.’ Wrote it all down, wrote the whole song [his cell phone rings], and then went to the record company with all of my demos. They were like, ‘Oh, we love everything, all except this “Children turn your cell phones on,” we’re not sure what you’re getting at with this.’

“And so I said, ‘Well, sorry, it’s friends with all the other songs so it’s not going to go away. And I agree with you, I actually agree with you, but it’s apparently gotta be recorded.’ So when I went to work with Charlie [Sexton] on pre-production, Charlie goes, ‘Man, this is some of the best stuff you’ve ever written, with the possible exception of this “Children” song because it just seems sort of inane.’

“I said, ‘I know, Charlie, trust me, I know, but we have to record it.’ So out of 100 stations that they polled with it, how many picked that? 90. 90. And I’ve had the most amazing e-mails from people. I wasn’t even really sure what that song was about. It wrote itself and plopped in the front seat of my car and it wouldn’t go away. And anything that hangs around for three weeks demanding to be written, apparently it’s got its own idea, you know?”

Well, if you believe in the divine, you have to listen.

“Yeah. Ray Wylie Hubbard says, when the phone rings, pick it up.”

ND co-editor Grant Alden would like for the phone to have rung more often during the writing of this piece.