On being the Last Man Standing
Longevity is a blessing and also a burden. A blessing because you get to hang around to see your grandkids and maybe even your great-grandkids. But a burden because every day it seems like another friend has passed. Grieving becomes a full-time job. The last man standing can be lonely. Loss is something you don’t get over. That idea hit me hard when a friend’s wife died and he came to me for comfort. He saw me as a guy who might understand. The thing I know most, I told him, especially after my son Billy died in 1991, aged 33, is that you don’t get over it, but you will get through it. Best I can do is write a song.
On love and loss
I have to admit that I like songs about suffering love. I’ve experienced a lot of love, and certainly some suffering due to the loss of it. At age 10, when I put together a booklet of songs I had written, they had titles like Faded Love and Wasted Dreams and I Guess I Was Born to Be Blue. I’d already known a little something about pain and loss by then. My sister Bobbie and I felt the loss and abandonment of our parents, who left us with our grandparents when we were six months old, the kindness and love of our grandparents, and the loss of my grandfather, who taught me my first chords and bought me my first guitar. He passed, leaving my grandmother to raise us alone. All that love and loss by the age of 10. Some folks can live with heavy thoughts for a long time. Not me. I turn heavy thoughts into song. And the turning hardly ever fails to lighten the thought. It maybe even makes the thought disappear into thin air.
On meeting his fourth wife, Annie
The 1986 film Stagecoach was a remake of the classic western. I was shooting with Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash. The Highwaymen had just recorded a huge hit album that gave new life to our middle-age careers. The script for the movie was, in the measured opinion of Kris (the only actual movie star among us), “a piece of shit”.
We didn’t argue with Kris. After all, he’s a Rhodes Scholar. Kris overlooked the lousy script, though, and went along because it was really just a way for us to all hang out together. We were brothers. I also went along because I love westerns, even bad ones.
In addition, there was this no-nonsense woman named Ann Marie D’Angelo who made things a lot easier. On my shoot days, I was in her makeup chair for a couple hours each day, and we were having a great time. She was smart and funny and spunky and cute. One day, the producer asked that my hair be cut for a scene. We talked about it for a while in the makeup trailer, and all the while it was like we’d known each other for ever, or maybe in another lifetime. Neither of us thought it was a good idea. “Let’s just tell them no,” I said. That was the end of it. It didn’t feel like the first decision we’d made together, and as it turned out, it wouldn’t be the last. It was all so natural, like singing a verse into the chorus of a song.