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E-mail StoryMerle, 'the seeker,' talks about the day he'll be home for good
| Thursday, Apr 3 2008 5:26 PM
Last Updated: Friday, Apr 4 2008 2:47 PM
You still detect wonder in the gravelly voice on the other end of the line.
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Merle Haggard played a sold-out show at the Fox Theater in February.
The Haggard family, from left, Theresa, Binion, Jenessa, and Merle at the dedication of the street named for Haggard in February.
Merle Haggard's son, Binion, played guitar with his father's band during Haggard's February show at the Fox.
This photo was taken in 1945 of Betty (Donathan) Smith and Merle Haggard in front of Betty's home on El Tejon Street. (Photo courtesy of Betty Smith)
Bonnie Owens, Merle Haggard and The Strangers.
George Jones, Merle Haggard, Buck Owens and statue designer Bill Raines posed for photos inside the Crystal Palace in 2005 before the unveilings of statues of the country legends commissioned by Owens.
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“Can you imagine,” Merle Haggard says, “that there used to be 30 passenger trains a day come to Santa Fe in about the same amount to east Bakersfield, Southern Pacific? And the railroad yard was about the expanse of six miles that laid out there beside Edison Highway ... “
“They used to make up trains at night, don’t you see? And they’d sail those cars on down there without any engine at about 20 miles an hour into the next train and it would hit real hard and it would sound like train wreck.”
It brings to mind a young kid lying awake in Oildale, a Santa Fe Railway man’s son hoping to join the commotion.
Bakersfield is unrecognizable, Haggard’s been known to say. And it must seem different every time he comes down, the last, most notable visit on Feb. 13 for the dedication of Merle Haggard Drive and his show at the Fox Theater.
You pick up different sounds as Merle Haggard, who turns 71 Sunday, talks on the phone from his ranch outside Redding.
Crowing roosters, a few rock guitar riffs, his teenage kids taking phone calls. The youngest of his "litter" of six are getting ready to fly the coop.
“We’re at the tail end of a beautiful period with these children,” he says.
The star made Merle Haggard Day a family event, sharing it with wife Theresa, their children Binion and Jenessa, and Merle’s older sister, Lillian, among many other relatives and friends. He asked a film crew to follow him around and record the day.
His publicist called The Californian a week later.
Merle was so happy, she explained, that he wanted to talk to the paper about it.
“It was kinda tender, touching for me,” he says the following week. “I don’t know whether anybody else felt the vibes. But it was really a great moment. For me not to respond and say anything, I just thought it was appropriate for me to say more than I did.”
And so an interview originally plotted for 30 minutes turned into nearly two (he recalled it as three) hours of meandering conversation you might have with a friend over waffles at Zingo’s Cafe, or some other eccentric pit stop on an American highway.
There was good-natured political bashing, then talk of movies, music and old-time radio, great train journeys of the world, killjoys, his mother’s lovely penmanship (a lost art), the death of a pet.
The rebel who imparted a warm nostalgia to songs like “Mama’s Hungry Eyes” and “Sing Me Back Home” appears to be coming back more often these days — he says that’s because of his aging relatives.
Merle’s not committed to the ranch. He and Theresa are liable to live anywhere, be it on a Lake Shasta houseboat where he partied it up in younger days or in Nevada, which is friendlier to the tax shy.
But Oildale’s famous son will be buried here. He and sister Lillian have their plots.
Bakersfield, Merle Haggard says, will always be home.
He believes he was silly to let go of that property by the Kern River.
HOME
The committee that organized the street naming took a rock from his old home by the Kern. It’ll get a plaque and a new home on Merle Haggard Drive.
That announcement was one of the most touching experiences of the big day.
“It could outlive the planet,” he says. “I suggested they put it at the airport.”
If you travel a few miles east of his road out to the bluffs, you’ll hit Greenlawn Cemetery. Buried there are Merle’s brother, Lowell, their railroading daddy James and, by most accounts, an endlessly patient mother, Flossie.
Haggard’s biopic will revolve around the woman he seems to have put on a pedestal. The working title is “Mama Tried.”
“She was a penmanship champion in the state of Oklahoma when she was 16,” he says. “She could scroll write as fast as you could talk. And she could do shorthand or longhand and won a championship and a scholarship for college. And her Daddy called her a liar and put her back in the cotton patch.”
How things could have been different if Mama had gone to college.
He breaks into raspy laughter.
“She never forgot that. He lived to be 95. My mother never got over that completely, I don’t think.”
The idea of a Merle Haggard film has been idling more than 30 years. Over and over Hollywood’s told him, “Just a few more things and it’ll be ready.”
He’s convinced the project will get under way by the end of the year. That’s because, this time, he’s writing it.
“I’m about 30 percent through writing my own movie,” he says. “I'm writing all the dialogue, the charactership, the way it lays down. I’m doing it on tape, explaining and I’m gonna have a professional reader come out and read it, like the last piece of (expletive) I heard. And if it doesn’t suit everybody better, then I’ll turn it back over to those who have failed for the last 35 years.”
He wants to go big budget, not the smaller, highbrow indie treatment. Robert Duvall was linked to past attempts at the film. Haggard might give him a shot at producing or directing.
Haggard says he’ll need an unknown to play him. The Blackboard, the Lucky Spot, all the old honky-tonks would be part of telling the story of his early life; the run-ins with the law, a tumultuous marriage to first wife Leona, the music that occurred as a “side effect” to his life. And he’ll tell that story through new songs. He’s working on the soundtrack.
The singer has taken in films of other stars: Ray Charles, old friend Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Hank Williams.
He finds it impossible to cram his entire life story — and his mother’s — into 90 minutes.
“The most interesting part of my life took place in those years of her striving to make it with her husband dying and a wild kid.”
Dreams and flashbacks will cover swaths of his life and explain the stories behind the music.
“We’ll go back from my mother’s point of view and visit her life in Oklahoma before I was born, if just for a moment. Then we’ll go back to her riding the bus to see me in San Quentin.”
“It’ll be about her and the story of my beginning success as sort of an undertow of the real story,” he says. “It’s more about her.”
AWAY
Why should we honor this guy? Merle got famous and took off. Buck Owens stayed. Now that was a man true to Bakersfield.
Locals have debated these points for years.
One Bakersfield.com blogger didn’t put it so gently: How does it feel to be a convicted felon (thief, burglary and robber) and have a town name a street after you?
“Did he have a clothespin on his nose when he was talking?” Haggard retorted. “I don’t know, everybody’s to their own opinion. Some people wouldn’t be happy with anything.”
A few things happened to him that didn’t happen to Buck, he says. Namely that time in San Quentin.
“I was pardoned by then Gov. Ronald Reagan unconditionally, so I don’t have to apologize to anybody about my past any longer,” he adds.
“The people that don’t want to forgive, it says somewhere in the Scripture they won’t be forgiven. So let ’em suffer and stew in those bad feelings, if they like.”
But that doesn’t answer the question of why he didn’t stick around.
“I must have been a seeker,” Haggard says.
He once settled on the Central Coast (a second home for many valley residents), in Grover City, where his mother and sister stayed for a while. As Haggard puts it, he hasn’t hung his hat anywhere for long.
“As soon as you find out Bakersfield is not the only place in California, it would be silly for a guy like me to isolate himself to Bakersfield,” he says.
Merle hopes the people who still have a chip on their shoulder will reconsider.
“If we can soften somebody’s heart and let them know I’m sincere ... maybe them old hard-nosed guys that didn’t want that street named Merle Haggard, maybe they’ll say, “Wahlll, maybe he’s all right after all.’”
In the old days Haggard never could have dreamed his hometown, which over the years has maintained a love-hate relationship with him, would roll out the honors as it did in February.
“It would have been an impossibility,” he says. “There's a lot of cliches, like if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans, or if you could see into the future, you wouldn’t believe it. My life has been a collection of unbelievable occurrences and I don’t know what it’s all about.”
MERLE HAGGARD ON:
SIDE PROJECTS
Merle met with potential business partners the morning of the street dedication about his idea of an organic mall with local products.
Maybe it would be home to a noon broadcast on satellite radio, perhaps something like one-time tour buddy Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour.
He’s on board with another environmentally friendly project, The Green Train. Powered by alternative fuels, it will travel the country starting April 2009, says project head Bob Wolf. Merle and other stars will give concerts at various stops along the way to raise awareness about the environment.
Haggard’s worked on an agreement with Wal-Mart, something along the lines of the Eagles’ album distributed exclusively with the corporation.
“It’s debatable, I guess, as to whether they’re destroying or building America,” he says of Wal-Mart. “But they are at the moment the greatest outlet of music in the world. They control about 70 percent of everything. ... If you make a deal with Wal-Mart, it’s like making a deal with 70 percent of the world.”
EGO
“I don’t need anything else to ever happen in my life,” he says. “I can pick up the phone and call most anybody in the world I want to and they’ll talk to me. And that means more to me than a big bank account. There’s power in that.”
Isn’t the hero worship creepy?
“You know, strangely enough, I never thought of it that way,” he says. “It came about gradually over the last 50 years. And it just, like, it finally got to where I kinda act like everybody knows me. And if they speak, I speak back. Here at the grocery store nobody gives me problems, nobody asks for autographs. There’s a lot of respect here in this town.”
NAME, FAMILY AND FAME
“It gets to where my wife, I’m sure, would like to never see the name again ... in the wrong time of the month, I’m sure she doesn’t want to hear it,” he jokes. “But the other time of the month, she loves it. It’s tiresome to be Merle Haggard’s child or Merle Haggard’s wife and overwhelming at the same time because they have to put up with everything I do, but they don’t get all the glory for it.”