Jimmie Gray——Musician
"We had so much fun in those days. Every day was like an adventure. And every night we’d play some great music. Boy, it was something."
Jimmie Gray——who passed away on August 28, four days after his 70th birthday and after a year-long battle with cancer——sat in the dimming evening light of his small, book-lined apartment a few years back and recalled fondly his days on the road. "Me and Townes and Ruester and Cody, we were all smart people." Jimmie laughed. "Well, maybe not me, but they were, and creative people; but we could really have fun too."
Evidence of the musical creativity——if not the fun——is abundant on three key Townes Van Zandt albums recorded live on the road by Harold Eggers in the late 1970s and featuring the ensemble of Danny "Ruester" Rowland (lead guitar), Owen Cody (fiddle), and Jimmie Gray (bass). Rear View Mirror, Roadsongs, and Rear View Mirror Volume Two capture this group of musicians at their best. Van Zandt was at the height of his powers, performing his brilliant songs ("Pancho and Lefty," "If I Needed You," "Flyin' Shoes," and many others) with a straightforward, disarming sense of comfort, drawn along with the musicians into seemingly effortless arrangements, weaving organic instrumental lines, rhythmic textures, and simple harmonies into a whole cloth of great American music.
A year ago, after Jimmie had been diagnosed with cancer and given a limited prognosis, he was able to step away from those all-too-real concerns and step back into his music. He played some intimate gigs with old friends Ruester, Boots Hill, and Roger Younger at Windows Off the Cumberland in Nashville. Shortly after that, sitting around the living room with a group of friends including Ruester, Jimmy Gingles, and others, along with his daughter, Julie, Jimmie was again taken back into the heart of his music, telling stories of his days on the road with Townes, and before that with Waylon Jennings, as the guitar player in Jennings' original band, the Waylors. Jimmie left the band because he couldn't stand wearing the uniform that Waylon insisted his band members all wear; "It was ridiculous looking," he said.
That night, with an acoustic guitar, he played and sang old country songs like they were second nature (they were), and he was persuaded to pull out some of his own compositions, which could have been country classics in their own right——"Two-Car Garage" ("You'll look out one morning at your two-car garage/And one of those two cars will be gone"), "Ice Water" ("What I'd give again just to hold you/But every fool down here wants ice water too"), "Honky-Tonk on the Moon" ("It'll be just you and me by the Sea of Tranquility with the big Earth shining in the sky/Then a little later, we'll slip off behind a crater and retire to the Moon's darker side") and other delights. Breathing with the help of a tank of oxygen piped through a tube into his nose, he seemed lighter than air, laughing and joking, remembering, and spreading the joy and love that he clearly felt deeply and that clearly were a big part of his music and of his life.
When a friend started playing "Dead Flowers" that night, Jimmie said, proudly, joyously, "Oh, that's the song I did in the movies." He was proud of his moment on the soundtrack of The Big Lebowski, but mainly he loved to joke about it, saying "That's the song that made me famous. My check should be coming any day now." As his friends took the song to its chorus and Jimmie's voice rose into its harmony ("Take me down, little Susie, take me down/I know you think you're the queen of the underground"), some chills went up some spines——something that happens often with musicians of this caliber——real, true musicians——but something that's always magical. The story was told by the smiles on everyone's faces——most beautifully by the smile on the face of the musician's musician, Jimmie Gray.