“Gary Stewart, king of the honky-tonks, has just thrown a knife at my head.”
Thus begins the whirlwind 500-plus page biography of the late country singer by Jimmy McDonough, the longtime music biographer best known for his books on Neil Young and Tammy Wynette.
But as the book’s very first sentence suggests, I Am From The Honky Tonks is anything but a traditional biography: Part Stewart family oral history, part passion project more than 30 years in the making, part first-person account of his own misadventures in Stewart’s Florida trailer park home, part gathering of wildcat road stories (some so crazy they strain belief), McDonough’s latest is one of the most adventurous and daring books about a popular musician to come in a long time. There are entire chapters devoted to various relatives in Stewart’s family and lost recordings of his that the world will likely never hear.
McDonough and Stewart’s long-brewing relationship, which began when McDonough profiled the singer for The Village Voice in the late eighties, eschewed the formality or distance of a traditional journalist and subject.
“This story has haunted me for close to forty years now,” as he writes in the book’s introduction. “No doubt I disappointed Gary as a friend, but I will not fail him as a biographer.”
In the following exclusive excerpt, part of a chapter titled Jukin’, that relationship is on full display. The excerpt begins with a 1988 trip McDonough takes to Stewart’s home in Fort Pierce, Florida, and ends with the reveal of a shocking event that changes the course of his subject’s life.
In January 1988 came another trip to Fort Pierce, this time with infamous photographer and soon-to-be filmmaker Larry Clark in tow to nab shots of Gary for the Voice article. I thought his documentary style would be perfect, since Fort Pierce and Tulsa seemed like two parts of the same neighborhood. With his immaculate white muscle T-shirts and shades, Clark turned a few heads in Fort Pierce, but he quickly fit in with the Stewarts due to his knowledge of old rock and roll — as well as quaaludes, which he and Gary discussed in detail.
Snapping a photo proved to be a challenge, however. Stewart was holed up in the bedroom when we got there, the vibe in the trailer was not good, and Clark got antsy — “Where is this guy?” I was sheepish. Joey Stewart told his mother we should just storm in, throw on the lights, and Larry could click away. Finally, after coming back from breakfast, we noticed the Confederate flag over the entrance to Gary’s bedroom was fluttering slightly in the breeze, indicating that he was potentially among the living. The excitement was akin to a Bigfoot sighting. Stewart eventually shuffled out, commenting on how his bedhead resembled Little Richard’s.
We rode over to George and Georgia’s house for a celebration of their fiftieth wedding anniversary. On the way Gary brought us up to date on his sex life, regaling us with tales of an all-female country band that had taken him to bed. Those days were over, Gary insisted. He was faithful to Lou now. He’d even tested himself with some knockout model on the road. “I took her to a motel room just to see if I could not be with her. I rolled around in bed with her, teased her all night long.” There was no actual sex, however, Gary proudly informed us. “Lou and I, we have such a great sex life — and it just makes it so much greater knowin’ that you’re the only one.” Gary reminded me of Brian Wilson in these strange, unguarded moments. Bizarrely childlike, full of wonder.
Arriving at his parents’ house, which overflowed with relatives — brothers, sisters, aunts, and uncles — Gary took in all the Stewarts. “Rebels, every one,” he said proudly. It would take me decades to unravel the weight of that statement. Meanwhile, George and Georgia held court, dishes of downhome food coming and going. Wearing a cockfighter’s cap, George gave us a tour of his chicken coops, taking out a bird for our inspection. Boisterous and welcoming, Georgia regaled us with tales from Gary’s childhood, but a concern for her son’s present state lurked not far beneath the surface. You could tell Gary hadn’t been visiting as much as Georgia would’ve liked. Seeing them together made me think of a story Roy Dea revealed only after I pressed. It’s a tale I would subsequently hear told by others, with many variations, but it went like this:
At some point in the Eighties, Georgia loaned Gary a large sum of money — the figure I was usually told was thirty grand (some say it was IRS debt). Eventually Georgia wanted her money back. Or her son’s house. Since Gary was on the road, Georgia rang up Lou, giving her hell. More than once. Lou taped one of the calls and played it for Gary when he returned home. He grabbed a pistol and headed to his mother’s, where he strolled into the living room and asked, “Momma, who are your favorite people in the world?” Georgia thought it over, then named relations back in Kentucky. Pulling out his gun, Gary said, “Well, Momma, don’t you ever say anything bad to Lou again or I’m gonna go up there with this gun and kill ’em BOTH.” Then he turned and walked out. “See, that’s the perfect Gary Stewart story,” said Dea. “He has not jeopardized himself, because he ain’t threatened his momma. He’s just gonna kill somebody else.”
* * *
Stewart was back in the saddle. There was endless music both in the trailer and at Rialto’s during that second trip. Donnie Coleman, Gary’s old bandmate from Rockfish Railroad/Train Robbery days, came by and lent dobro and high tenor harmony to many a number there in the trailer. Larry Clark coached Gary on the words to the Presley hit “Tryin’ to Get to You,” a sight to behold.
At some point Stewart ripped through “One Night,” the 1956 Smiley Lewis song that Elvis had not only recorded but absolutely demolished during his ’68 Comeback Special. When I mentioned how great it must’ve been to be Presley at that very moment — to not only be “back,” but blasting through the stratosphere like a rocket — Gary didn’t miss a beat. “Man, it’s a great feelin’, bein’ out there,” he muttered without a trace of ego. “The best feelin’ in the world. Better than any damn pain pill.”
The high wouldn’t last. Clark left, and that night we headed to Rialto’s. Gary was all revved up about a keyboard he’d just gotten, a Roland RD-300. He’d coveted the thing for weeks, and was determined to unleash it at the show that night.
After we got to the club, there was another detour to make. I hopped in a car with Stewart as some third party Gary seemed vaguely familiar with drunkenly drove us out in the sticks somewhere so Stewart could score. “Hey, I hope you got money for this,” he said to the driver. “’Cause I’m broke.” The guy handed Gary some cash and Stewart disappeared into a dilapidated trailer.
The wind rustled through the palms as I sat in the dark with the driver. “Boy, if Gary could get off that shit, he’d be bigger than ever. Bigger than Hank Williams.” This from the guy who gave him the funds to cop. Gary and Fort Pierce was a doomed union. It seemed half the town enabled him.
Eventually we made it back to Rialto’s. Stewart had a bad time getting a handle on the keyboard, although near the end of the night he slipped into a slow, mournful version of “In the Pines” that nearly had me weeping. The Rialto’s crowd chatted all the way through his anguish. “In the Pines” wasn’t ZZ Top.
Gary was dejected when we returned home. Silent. He had a bit of a cold from running himself ragged. He barked at Lou to return the keyboard and ambled off to the bedroom. I wouldn’t see him for another five days. Lou tried to entertain me; Jimmy Smith came by and we whispered jokes in the living room. But mostly I sat and waited. Do all celebrities do this sort of thing? I’d of course find out they were capable of much crazier, but at the moment I was stressed. A friend had given me the money to make this trip and I was envisioning returning home empty-handed. There were still questions to ask.
Every once in a while Stewart would stumble out to the refrigerator to chug some cola and grab a little candy, muttering a sentence or two as he returned to his crypt. Madness. At one point I stood outside the trailer with Donnie Coleman, pontificating on Gary’s fate as he lay comatose mere feet away. “I guess it’s like Elvis,” he mused, invoking a clichéd comparison that seemed inevitable but apt. “You can’t save a man from himself.”
But it was actually Gary who’d shortly utter the most ominous line in reference to Presley. “He needed to escape. I know how he felt, ’cause I’ve felt the same way and gone through some of the same things. I just haven’t lost my wife. That would kill me.”
* * *
In the middle of this graveyard quiet I had noticed a few worn boxes of 1/4” tapes and cassettes peeking out from a box in one corner of the trailer. Inspecting them, I deduced they were Gary’s session recordings and outtakes. Well, if that motherfucker isn’t coming out of the bedroom, I’m going to imbibe. I found a nearby friend of Stewart’s to loan me a reel-to-reel machine, strapped on some headphones, and took the plunge.
Talk about a revelation. Piles of outtakes, each more compelling than the last. By 5 a.m. on the fifth day in the double-wide gulag, I’d listened to everything but a box labeled “Lenny Dee.” Having little else to occupy my thoughts, I threaded it up. Might as well.
I was unprepared for what came next. Here was the Rosetta stone — perhaps the most spellbinding and mysterious recording Gary ever made. His anguished vocal soars over a raggedy four-piece band, the piano anchoring a distorted, howling guitar and a weird, twitchy mandolin that buzzes around like an out-of-reach mosquito. So otherworldly…it took me a second to recognize “Williamson County.” There’s a fine Music City rendition on Stewart’s first album — polished, jaunty, Nashville-perfect. This was something else entirely. It sounded like a Kentucky murder ballad from another planet, with Gary, who might be a little high, setting out on a long lazy march toward Hades after strangling his lover — a working girl who’s fallen for another. “Now the same hands that catered to her/ Are clutching at her throat.” The killer is damned for all eternity for what he’s done. “And I ride this nightmare all over Williamson County/The devil waits on my soul for his payment/I await the hunter of my bounty.” Gary practically screams the “devil” line, then pulls back, accepting his fate, making way for a long, keening guitar coda, like a junkyard ghost whistling down the tailpipe of a dead Plymouth Duster. The song evokes the chaos, tragedy, and soul of the Stewart clan like nothing else, the performance an unholy hybrid of rock, country, bluegrass, blues, and even psychedelia. Sitting there alone in the dark, I felt the full measure of Stewart’s talent for the first time, and reckoned with how deep that well was, how he’d been in the right place and time to absorb all that had come before him. It coursed through his veins completely and authentically, enabling him to alchemize all those genres into something utterly new and completely his own.
By the end of it I was in a trance. This bleak, unsettling hill country drone was a glimpse into the abyss equal to Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet,” the 13th Floor Elevators’ “May the Circle Be Unbroken,” or Reverend Julius Cheeks and the Four Knights’ “The Last Mile of the Way.”
Just then Gary shuffled out from the bedroom yawning. I ripped off the headphones. “Listen to this!” Stewart seemed just as shocked as I was. Who played on it? He couldn’t tell me. When was it recorded? He didn’t know, although he thought it had been done during his tenure at Bradley’s Barn, before RCA. He listened intently, traveling back there in his mind. The tape ran out, the loose end flapping around on its plastic spool as we sat in silence. Gary, staring into space, said softly, “I thought we were going to make records like that all the time — y’know, round up some pickers and play.”
Gary Stewart and his band The Honky Tonk Liberation Army outside Marlow’s Country Palace in Pikeville, Kentucky circa 1980. (L to R: Tuck Robinson, Gary Stewart, Ralph Profetta, Howard “Bingo” Folcarelli, “Boogie” Bob Melton, John Whalen, Tommy Ray Miller, and Darrell Dawson)
Courtesy of Grandal Stewart
That night Gary spun some Chuck Willis records as I wasn’t too familiar with his oeuvre at the time. He excitedly paced around the trailer, offering me any album I liked for keeps. Then we headed off to Rialto’s, where Gary closed his set with a Willis medley — “Born to Lose,” “Betty and Dupree,” “It’s Too Late.” Stewart had been a little obsessed with that last one all the while I’d been down there, and when he got to it in the medley, he just erupted. “She’s gone, she’s gone — where can my baby be?” he screamed, bringing the medley to a violent close. He poured everything we’d discussed back in the trailer into the performance, and left the stage breathless, bathed in sweat. A crowd of sixty or so had been mulling about the club. Some of them even clapped.
* * *
My last day in Fort Pierce, Stewart was in a foul mood. I was pissed off from being cooped up in the motionless trailer, and as I provoked him with more questions, resentment oozed out. I mocked him, calling him Moleman and Howard Hughes, and informed him that he was a drug fiend, a shut-in, and just plain nuts.
For a moment he looked at me like he was about to fly across the room and pull my eyeballs out with his fingers. “I’m forty-three years old an’ still a child — ain’t that great?” he snarled. “I’m a musician, a singer, a songwriter, a husband, and a human being — music ain’t the only thing in my life. I don’t owe my life to a damn guitar!”
Foolishly, I asked what value he offered to his family — or anyone else — by being conked out for days on end, telling him he didn’t care about anybody but himself. His long face, which on this particular day shone with the embalmed elegance of a Jerry Lee Lewis, got cloudy. “I tell you what…why don’t you stay a few more days and I’ll go back there and I’ll get down and then I’ll come out here and be with you when I’m down like that and you will never want to come back here. I stay away when I can’t do any good.”
Shortly thereafter Gary threw the knife in my direction, then scuttled off for the scroll he angrily read aloud, declaring his allegiance to the hills of Kentucky. All I knew was that I wanted to slither out of that trailer and run for it.
And just like that, the storm passed. I had to catch a train home, but Stewart was going to leave a gift on my recorder first. Lording over me with his acoustic, practically on fire, Gary sang “Williamson County.” Boom. “I’ve Just Seen the Rock of Ages.” Boom. “Silver Cloud.” Boom. Then “There Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down,” the Brother Claude Ely song he learned as a kid. As if sensing my anxiety over my friend’s travel loan, he laid down a Dickey Betts song in her honor — ”Nancy,” the icing on the cake being a spoken thank-you to her for getting me to Fort Pierce.
* * *
Georgia tagged along when we headed off to the station, Gina Stewart at the wheel. Gary and Georgia sang mountain songs as the car flew down the highway. Outside the car window a vivid tropical sun set on Florida, Gary’s craggy, sunglassed profile standing in relief. “This was the time of day I’d get real homesick out on the road,” he murmured. Before we said goodbye Stewart gave me the cheap gold bracelet he’d had on his wrist (“Gypsy,” it said) then encouraged me to write the story as I saw fit. “Don’t puss out on me, bud. Tell it the Jimmy way,” he said, giving me my identity in those last five words. It took me many years to realize the significance, and Gary would no longer be around to thank when I did.
Although it was by no means easy for him, Gary had invited me into his life, and shared it all, good, bad, and ugly. I’m ashamed to say I took much of it for granted at the time. Only now, nearly 40 years later, do I recognize the extent of his kindness.
* * *
A week later I called. Mary Lou had left. For good, Gary informed me. He was in great pain, and muttered about an open whiskey bottle by his side. Stewart admitted he had no clue how to change his ways at this late stage of the game. He also let me know how much shit my interrogations had stirred. “I need a friend who’s not a reporter,” he said, begging me to find Lou.
Four days after that, Lou called. Seeing the Elvis and Me TV movie had sparked her to call Gary. She was giving him one last chance, provided they exit Fort Pierce forever. They were going to leave in one week.
Three days later Lou called back. [Stewart’s son] Gary Joseph Stewart, known to all as Joey, had taken his life. The police had broken into his room at the Scottish Inn, a motel out on Okeechobee Road, and found him dead on the floor with a gun in his hand, victim of a self-inflicted shot to the head. He was twenty-five years old.
From Gary Stewart: I Am From the Honky Tonks, published by Wolf+Salmon. Text © Jimmy McDonough
