Dear Jerry,
You would have been 70 today. I lined up your five albums this morning on the side of the wall and started playing them front to finish, over and over. It’s the best way I can get in touch with your spirit, which you shared with me so generously for 30 years. I still get warm chills of joy when I think about how much your music–and you–changed my life. And it all started so normally. Sort of.
In 1979 I was spending some quality musical time in New Orleans and picked up the weekly newspaper there, The Figaro. Almost Slim’s review column was about your 1979 album GONE, or what was supposed to be your new album. More on that later. One of Slim’s lines mentioned “Stax-like horns.” Whenever I saw those words my soul always perked up. It was like a secret code for those of us who worshipped the sound trumpets and saxophones made in Memphis at the McLemore Avenue studio. It had something to do with the joyous cavalcade of notes filtered through a battling front of humidity and racism. The way the horns got past those challenges was a life-affirming example of what the human heart can do. It was the sound of freedom, no matter how the odds were stacked up against it.
It only took me a couple of weeks to find a promotional copy of GONE in the used bins at Inner Sanctum Records in Austin. I felt giddy when I saw the cover drawing: a multi-colored hand with the middle finger looking like Martian-inspired insect pinchers. Immediately I knew a normal artist would never have allowed that kind of image on their album. When I saw that you had drawn it, I was tipped there was some multi-dimensional boogie woogie going on inside your head.
Once I listened to the ten songs, I knew I had found a brother. Your voice came from the street, but there was an element of eternity in it too, like you’d seen the other side and wanted to let everyone know there was nothing to fear. Instead, the hereafter looked like an endless meadow of harmonious love, where people could climb on a cosmic groove and ride it forever. True soul music had been on the losing end as the ’70s progressed, but these songs married the past and the future in a way I’d never heard. As my own life was clearly hitting the wall, I heard something I was positive was going to get me over any and all obstacles. In the music of the spheres there is an undeniable hopefulness that cuts through everything. I like to call it a circle of fate, because doubt simply disappears when melodies and lyrics meld into that saving grace and the light breaks through.
Now I just had to find you and what had happened to the GONE album. When I moved to Los Angeles a few months later, I figured you’d be there somewhere. Wasn’t everyone in Los Angeles? Not sure why I thought that; it just came to me. I’ve learned to trust those visions because sometimes they’re all we have. In 1983, three years after arriving, at a musician’s kind invitation I went to see Leon Russell play in Beverly Hills. Backstage before the show began I saw a tall man wearing a cape leaning up against the wall. I knew, I just knew it was you Jerry, never mind that I had no idea what you looked like. So I went up, introduced myself and said how I’d been looking for you for four years. You gave me an irresistible grin and said, “Well, now that you’ve found you me what can I do for you?” We talked a bit, and you invited me out to a studio in Malibu where you were living then. It made me laugh because I was still a little new to the city, and here I was getting asked to join Jerry Williams at a studio in Malibu. A long way from Austin to be sure.
Driving there that weekend, looking at the shimmering Pacific Ocean out the window on my left, I felt the brush of a higher hand guiding me. How does this happen, I thought? Instantly, like always, I admitted I had no idea and never would. The why isn’t the point. The trick is to graciously accept these gifts, and do your best to follow their flow. When I got to Shangri La studio on Morningside Drive in Malibu, it was obvious the place The Band used to call home had seen better days. You and your son were living in one of the sheds in back, the only people on the property. You mentioned how times had been tough, but you just knew better days were ahead. It was always about your faith Jerry, one so strong it was contagious a continent away. You told me the story how the album GONE had been deleted from release at the last minute. It had something to do with you pulling a gun on chairman Mo Ostin in the Warner Bros. Records parking lot, asking for money to record more songs. The album that was destined to finally find the spotlight never got heard past the few initial promotional copies. Of course, giving up was never on your mind.
You gave me a cassette that Saturday with nine new songs on it, and promised it was only an inkling of what you had stashed away. I left floating on a cloud of inspiration. Spending time around a true artist has always done that for me. It’s probably why I found a career being around music that moves me, and trust in its power to provide.
Soon things began to rev up for you. At Warner Bros. Records president Lenny Waronker’s suggestion, Eric Clapton recorded three of your songs, and one, “Forever Man,” hit big. Lenny, along with A&R exec Ted Templeman, had signed you to Warner Bros. to record the GONE album. He once told me that when you first auditioned on piano in his office, you levitated a few inches off the floor when you played. And Lenny is not one to invoke those words lightly. Bonnie Raitt also heard your music and signed on as a lifetime fan. Your old Fort Worth running buddy Delbert McClinton had a Top 10 hit with “Giving It Up For Your Love,” which was on the GONE album, the one that never came out.
A pattern began to appear. Other artists who heard your undeniable songs were moved enough to sing them for themselves, betting they’d connect with the world. And over and over they were right. But as we talked more and became friends, I could hear the pain in your heart that no one was listening to you singing your own songs. You always felt that’s where your real strengths were: inside you. You wanted so much to share that love and it was painful to watch you wonder why it wasn’t possible. The night you played a show at the Trancas club in Malibu in 1984 was going to be a breakthrough, you thought. You had several special guests scheduled to be in the band, including Mick Fleetwood on drums, and invited all your friends. Unfortunately that evening none came, including Fleetwood. So you sat onstage alone at the piano and played an hour of the most divinely-wrought music I’ve ever heard. It was like watching a man in communion with God, no matter that he was alone on the mountaintop. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.
As false record label offers came and went, your song publishing royalties might have made you wealthy but the burning desire inside you to touch listeners directly became like a fading light in the distance. The fact that it had happened your entire career drove the knife in deeper. Your very first Atco Records release in 1970 with your band High Mountain Hoedown, produced by Charles Greene fresh from his work with Buffalo Springfield and Sonny & Cher, sank without a trace. Your debut solo album, produced by David Briggs and released on his Spindizzy Records imprint, also disappeared, along with its follow-up. The music business isn’t one for the faint-hearted, but you never quit believing in yourself Jerry. Over and over you’d try again, even after the GONE disaster on Warner Bros., never hiding in defeat.
As the 1980s were ending, you kept trying to hit that spark in the record industry to light a new fire. In his 2007 autobiography, Eric Clapton described you as “an incredible, larger-than-life character who looked like Jack Nicholson and sang like Stevie Wonder…I really loved his writing. In fact, musically I loved everything about him. He could be a little overwhelming in person, but that was entirely forgivable given the scale of his talent. He was great to work with, a wonderful guy, very funny, very talented and I knew we would be friends forever.” In real life, no label executives returned your call. From your big ranch in Oklahoma artists came and went to write with you, but still no one would give you a record deal. It was heartbreaking to watch it happen, and when you moved to St. Maarten in the Virgin Islands I thought it was your way of saying a small goodbye to the music world you loved so much. Still, the songs always came and your dreams somehow stayed the same.
The last email you sent me in 2005, from your lordbepraised@aol.com account, made me feel the path ahead was calling you again. You wrote, “I am ready to give all my music to the world, because I know it will help heal the planet. My songs are sent from angels, and it is those angels who have never let me down. I know where I belong and it is in my music. When the world hears it, everything will be as it should.” A few months later, on November 16, 2005, you were gone. I heard you had steered your yacht into an incoming storm, maybe chasing the sound in your head and the longing in your heart. You never came back.
A few years later I was trying to release an album of those nine songs on cassette you had first given me at Shangri La studio. But I felt one more song was needed, and through an associate was sent what I think was the last song you ever recorded. It was called “Love and Shelter,” and felt like a goodbye prayer from a higher ground, one man’s final request for redemption. I only listen to it on special occasions, like today, because it makes me feel like you had so much left to give. It also reminds me of our early friendship, when you would tell me of stories about joining Little Richard’s band when you were only 16 years old, and the other guitarist in the band, Jimmy James, took you into a train car’s bathroom to teach you the songs. James told you he’d make you a deal: if you taught him how to sing he’d teach you how to really play guitar. And how you weren’t surprised when a few years later, you saw a picture of Jimi Hendrix and realized it was the same Jimmy James. And playing Jack Ruby’s Dallas nightclub as a young teenager, and all kinds of other wild-eyed tales. They were never going to end.
I hear your songs constantly now, whether it’s Eric Clapton singing “Running on Faith” or “Pretending,” Bonnie Raitt’s inspired versions of “I Will Not Be Denied” and “Real Man,” Delbert McClinton’s stunning “Sending Me Angels,” and, yes, the Eagles “Guilty of the Crime.” Through them all your undiminished soul strikes through. There you are Jerry: grinning, laughing, talking, glowing; the man who taught me that believing in yourself is the prime prerequisite in life, fueled by a passion for the world and the knowledge that we are all the same, a fantastic floating realization of the continual expression of the human spirit. And that there is no end to this evolution. It is why we are here.
Thank you Jerry. I should have known that when I first saw you in that cape all those years ago that you had come to save us all. And you tried. Good Lord you tried Jerry. Which, in the end, is your greatest lesson of all: to never quit trying. I’ll think of the words in “Save Your Love,” one of your early demos you gave me: “I’ve always wandered alone / afraid and on my own / often I would think of you / memories lost and regained / often refrain me / on days that aren’t quite so good,” and ended “”You’ve often told me your feelings / hiding down deep within / where do I begin / I’ll keep on singing this song / hope you’ll sing along / maybe someday we’ll be friends / save your love like it means the world to you / that’s exactly what your love means to me / like a spirit lost and finally set free / save your love save your love for me…”
Saving your love Jerry (aka His Majesty Jerr), saving the love,
Bill