Interviews
Merle Haggard Interview #2
by Felix Thursday (photo by Piper Ferguson)
Three failed marriages, a three-year stint in San Quentin, and
bouts with addiction, infidelity and the IRS, have given Merle Haggard
plenty to write songs about since strapping a guitar over his shoulder
forty years ago. 
They've also given writers plenty to write about
Merle Haggard.
In fairness to the journalists and chroniclers who have
attempted to encapsulate Haggard's life with their articles and
biographies, Merle doesn't dodge questions, and will take any topic
you can throw at him head-on. In fairness to Merle Haggard, however,
enough of his past has been put to pen and paper in his songs. At 64,
the man does not need to make any more amends.
Merle Haggard is indisputably country music's greatest living
singer-songwriter, recording over sixty top ten hits--more than Johnny
Cash and Willie Nelson combined. He has performed at the White House
for two presidents, and is the only California-born inductee of the
Country Music Hall of Fame. He has put his outlaw past behind him, and
now resides near Redding, CA with his wife and two children.
His days of rambling and carousing may be over, but his musical
career is far from finished. Two years ago he signed a deal with the
punk rock label Anti-/Epitaph, and released If I Could Only Fly, which
met with critical acclaim and quietly outsold several of Nashville's
"New Country" acts.
It may seem an unlikely partnership--pairing Haggard with a
record company that has some of punk rock's biggest bands, such as
NoFX, Pennywise and Rancid, on their roster--but Haggard doesn't seem
to feel out of place.
"Ah hell, they're as crazy as I am. They like me, and they're
proud to have me over there, so I'm proud to be there. They've got
some weird stuff hanging on the walls and all that crap, but that's
their business. What I believe in and what they believe in should be
left alone. I'm like George Carlin about that--whatever you believe
in, keep it to yourself. Let somebody else be spreader of the
absolute."
In fact, Haggard claims that he is happy to be outside the
"political circle" or country music, which is increasingly catering
its sound toward pop-oriented formulas. Consequently, many of country
music's greatest names--from George Jones to Willie Nelson--have
practically been blacklisted from corporate radio programming in favor
of the more consumer-friendly likes of the latest "New Country"
wannabes.
"The bottom line is this," Haggard says, "It's easier to
force-feed chickens than it is to give them what they want. The method
of broadcasting is force-feeding. It's about being able to clone
things that are working for you and not having to pay people and
individual markets to represent you so that you can put 800 stations
on the air and control it. The fact is that the conglomerate is a guy
who doesn't know anything about what he owns. All he and the
stockholders look at is the bottom line--whether it be films or the
citrus business. It's all done the same way. There's more payola going
on right now than there ever has been. You can't make a Wal-Mart store
take records by Merle Haggard when they've made some sort of deal all
the way down on boxing nobody but George Strait. The record companies
don't want to deal with me. It's a lot easier to deal with boys that
have no experience, who are still listening to lawyers."
Despite the blatant commercialization of country music, Haggard
has kept it real--still crafting honest and emotionally-stirring
songs, rather than compromising his creativity and integrity to fit
into Nashville's new superficial standards. His latest album, Roots,
pays homage to the legends who preceded and inspired him, such as
Lefty Frizzell, Hank Williams and Hank Thompson--hearkening back to
the days when country music was still played by people who lived the
lives they sang about. Roots also marks the return of Haggard's guitar
idol, Norm Stephens, who played and recorded alongside Lefty Frizzell
and Hank Thompson. Unbeknownst to Merle, Stephens had been living
practically next door to him for over twenty years in nearby
Cottonwood.
"It was like finding out that Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb was living
down the street," Haggard says of his discovery that Stephens was
nearly his neighbor. "He's been living here since 1954 and, to me,
he'd fell off the end of the world in the music business. I'd wondered
many times in my life where Norm Stephens went to and why he wasn't
playing, because he played on the first things that made Lefty
Frizzell a legend. Those were the guitar licks that I first started
learning how to play. It was my first inspiration. I wondered what the
hell happened to that guy all my life and Doug, my piano player, and I
were driving down the road and he asked me if I had ever heard of a
guitar player named Norm Stephens. I said yeah, that he played on all
of Lefty's first stuff, and asked why. he told me that he had an ad in
the paper and wanted to give kids lessons to help them develop Western
Swing styles and advanced playing lessons. it was just incredible
finding out that he was living here, and then to find him in good
health. He'd just retired from a career as a civil engineer. He'd
moved up here after he got out of the army in '54 and he played a year
with Hank Thompson, and Bob Wills offered him a job when he came
through here and he turned it down. He stayed up here and raised a
family. He's just an absolutely neat person."
Merle says that he plans to record and release additional
volumes to Roots, featuring further renditions of Lefty Frizzell's
work.
"We've got about twenty-three sides in the can so that's the
reason we said 'volume one'. We've got several other songs. We did
"Mom and Dad's Waltz", "I Love You A Thousand Ways", "More and More of
Your Kisses", and we're gonna do another session or two. In fact,
we're fixin' to record here right away."
Along with the renditions of country classics, Roots includes
three new Hag-penned compositions, showing that he has not lost his
songwriting edge. In fact, when asked to comment on the events of
September 11th, Merle disclosed that he had written a song about it
which he plans to record soon, "The Great United Flight", a memorial
to the heroes of Flight 93 that went down in Pennsylvania--and
candidly recited the lyrics:
There were heroes on that great United flight
They gave their lives and chose to die
To keep the White House white
Now, we all love the army
But civilians won that fight
Because there were heroes
On that great United flight
The great United flight,
Flight number ninety-three,
Without a gun of any kind
They defended you and me
Outlaws had the weapons,
Still they won the fight
Because there were heroes
On that great United flight
As for his immediate plans, Merle will resume touring and is
tentatively scheduled to perform with Willie Nelson on the David
Letterman show this January. He admits, however, that he is hesitant
to travel by air, and claims that he and Nelson will be driving from
their respective homes in Austin, Texas and Redding to the show which
is filmed in New York.
"I'm not gonna travel by air until they get the M-16s out of
there, or let me carry one too. I've got just as much right to protect
me as they have."
And, when asked if he plans to retire any time soon, he jokes:
"I looked at my tires and they're alright. I can't quit nothing.
Even the thought of it scars me. What the hell would I do? I'm too old
to play ping-pong any good. I was all set up to party on a houseboat
out here as a bachelor and die like Errol Flynn did, but the old man
upstairs had other plans for me. They say if you wanna make God laugh,
tell him your plans. Here I am, and I'm still doing what I used to do.
I try to do it better all the time."
