Interviews
American Bad Ass: The Merle Haggard Interview
by Felix Thursday (photo by Piper Ferguson)
Country music is dead. Merle Haggard is not--which is a miracle. 
Haggard was stealing cars when he was just fourteen, hopping freight
trains for kicks all throughout his adolescence, and by the time he
was twenty he was serving a three-year stint in San Quentin for a
failed restaurant heist (inebriated at the time, he mistook the
bustling business for being closed). He has been through multiple
divorces, various detoxes, and declared bankruptcy.
Yet for decades, Haggard has remained America's most prolific
and outspoken singer-songwriter. He has recorded over 40 #1 hits (more
than Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson combined), played for two
presidents, and published a best-selling autobiography. He is the only
California-born performer to be honored as an inductee by the Country
Music Hall of Fame and is the only country artist to ever be featured
on the cover of preeminent jazz publication, Downbeat. Not bad for a
Bakersfield-bred juvenile delinquent who was once branded as
"incorrigible".
Merle Haggard has (for the most part) put raising hell behind
him and raising a family ahead of him, settling down with his wife and
two children on his ranch near Redding, CA. According to Merle,
however, family life can be just about as taxing as the nightlife.
"I've got a young family. They won't let me be old. They think
I'm 28, and they treat me that way."
In addition to his paternal priorities, Hag has found his career
beginning to take flight again thanks to a partnership with the indie
stalwart record label Anti-/Epitaph, whose roster includes Tom Waits,
and punk icons Pennywise, Rancid and NoFX. If I Could Only Fly,
released last Fall, has put Hag back in the limelight, garnering
glowing critical praise and fostering his best record sales since the
emergence of Hat Acts such as Garth Brooks and Billy Ray Cyrus, and
the fall of country music. The unlikely alliance between Haggard--once
the honorary spokesman for the right wing contingent--and
Anti-/Eptiaph (still a counter-cultural citadel) may have
representatives from both camps struggling to put things in
perspective, but Merle insists that it's a move that's been long
overdue.
"If I'd have thought of it, I would have done it sooner. It gets
me out of the political circle of country music. I don't want to play
games any longer. I don't want to be something that four or five
record executives huddle up and exchange backrubs over. With direct
marketing and the capabilities that are available in America nowadays,
I don't need CBS anymore. I think we're gonna sell a lot of records on
this company--we're already outselling a lot of those new acts. The
neat thing about it is we're not like somebody who's depending on the
charts or airplay to sell records, we're selling them on the fact that
there's quality there. Once the record gets out there and someone
happens to hear it, they want a copy of their own. That's like selling
Best Foods mayonnaise--you're gonna sell some all the time. The
proof's in the pudding."
People might be surprised, too, to find an absence of patriotic
hymns on the new record, which are, perhaps, what Haggard (who penned
such Vietnam War-era anti-protest anthems as "Okie From Muskogee" and
"The Fightin' Side of Me") has come to be the most known--and
notorious--for.
"I was dumb as a rock when I wrote those songs--I really
believed in America. I've learned a lot since I wrote "Okie From
Muskogee" and "The Fightin' Side of Me"--I was as dumb as the rest of
America. Americans have educated themselves. They know there's a
double standard going on. There's not anybody in America with any
education or of normal intelligence who doesn't understand that we're
in the fight of our lives to maintain freedom in this country. We have
been taken over by tyrants; we're being militarized. You can't go from
your car to an airplane without being frisked down. We're real close
to licking Nazi boots. If people don't realize it and get a hold of
it, it's gonna slip right away. Those things we enjoy called freedom
and privacy and all that will be a thing of the past. The only way
you'll have it is if you have enough money to buy it. There's an
onionskin level of existence in America a lot of people don't realize
is there. The quality of freedom in America depends on the size of
your pocket book. If you don't have a big bankroll, then you can't
claim all the rights of America. It costs money to hire an attorney
and prove that you've got those rights.
"There's all kinds of stuff they cheat us with. There's an
onionskin level of dishonesty that goes all the way to the executive
office of the state and federal governments. It's right on TV; we can
look at it and watch it. We've watched the stuff that this governor
Gray Davis has done with the power bill. They way we're set up, all
they've got to do is come in and drop the gate. They've got us all
behind bars now."
What seems to tick Haggard off the most about contemporary
American society, however, is all of the apparent mandates put in
place restricting fun.
"They've completely done away with the nightlife in America.
There's no such thing anymore. The only states in the union that still
have a nightlife are Texas and Louisiana. The Mothers of America have
eliminated the bar business. There must have been 10,000 beer joints
in California when I started playing music, and all those were
breeding grounds for great musicians. Shit, that no longer exists.
When I got out of prison in 1960, I was 23 years old. From the time I
was 24 till I was 30, I lived a life playing beer joints that was more
fun than Donald Trump could have in America right now. The Rat Pack
didn't have no more fun than I had. But that is not possible in
America anymore. Fun has been totally outlawed. I'm proud I got to see
it before it all went away. And it did, it's all gone away. It's up to
you young men to bring it back. I can't pull the fuckin' wagon no
more.
"I can tell you this--you're letting it slip away. You need to
grab hold of it, don't let people push you around. I feel sorry for
you. If you were 50 years old, you'd be madder than hell. You'd have
seen America go from a paradise where a guy could go to a Saturday
night dance and have a fistfight, go home and heal up and nobody shot
at nobody, two lane highways, entryways into each city that were
unique, and the biggest thing that happened was the railroad train, to
this chaotic mess we've got going now. I'm sorry for you."
Part working-class poet and part homespun philosopher, Merle
Haggard hasn't kept up with the times, he's kept ahead of them. As Hag
himself likes to say, the proof's in the pudding.
This interview appeared in section M magazine, May 2001. For more on
Merle, read the completely unexpurgated interview on this here
website.
