In my very first post of music here on One Buck Records, Will Beeley was there, as part of the line-up of the very first All Pearls No Swine more than two a,d a half years ago. And as said in that APNS write-up, I planned to post more of some of the folks on it, with the first APNS being both a teaser for the series itself, as for the type of music and artists that would end up here on One Buck Records. So it was planned from the beginning that I would post a Will Beeley compilation titled So Many Miles Down The Road - The Music Of Will Beeley which incidentally was ready at the time this blog started, and then got pre-empted, and passed over for something else, again and again, and left waiting in the shadows. Kind of like Will Beeley himself.
It's maybe fitting, in a bittersweet way, that even my mission of redicovering Beeley got waylaid in the same way that the man's music career has. Beeley had three bites at the apple, but many years, even decades apart. And, when those bites didn't stick, Beeley went back to join the workforce. Something's got to bring the bacon home, and if it can't be music, it'll be something else. Like long-haul trucking. Little Feat's Lowell George might have been the king of the truck driving song ("Willin'", "Truck Stop Girl", "Six Feet Of Snow"), but he never hauled ass in a big rig down some highway. Will Beeley did, and happily so, after his music career repeatedly stalled out. Though most websites get it wrong, having him hit the highway in the early 80s after his music career as a performer stalled out.
Beeley wouldn't haul ass and liquid gases across highways for another twenty years, taying with the music business, but not necessarily as planned. After a career as a record store owner ended unceremoniously after only a couple of months, Beeley got hired as DJ in a club in San Antonio, then a ouple of years later moved to Albuquerque to work in talent relations & acquisitions for The Midnight Rodeo fpr 13 years. But in 2002, at age 51, he found himself aged out of the job and finally started getting into long-haul trucking, where he and his wife would split the miles between them, transporting cryogenic frozen liquids across the country.
So Many Miles Down The Road was a nod to that job, as well as how long his sporadixc music career had lasted without taking off. And then, as hinted above, something funny - or not - happened on the way to finally posting that Beeley comp in January. I was surprised, delighted and slightly aghast (for the just started write-up on this blog) when I realizd that he had published an album of demos from 1970 that I had missed when I compiled my compilation. So, Will Beeley got pushed into the waiting queue again as I scouted those 1970s demos, found they were all good to excellent and then went back to the drawing board on that compilation.
As has recently happened with Bob Welch, the readjustments changed the proposition entirely. What was for years a 24-track single disc compilation called So Many Miles Down The Road is now a gargantuan, 40-track two-disc anthology called A Highway Ain't A Home after one of those newly added demos. Of course, for the last twenty plus years, the highway was Will Beeley's home, but that he couldn't have known back in 1970.
Uh-oh. We're five paragraphs into what was supposed to be a simple write-up and haven't even talked about the music yet. Beeley is, at his heart, a folk-singer, with clear country influences creeping in over time. His private press debut Gallivantin' - only 200 copies were pressed, and the packaging is ultra-low budget - has him covering Bob Dylan and Buffy St. Marie, but his work at tims also recalls fellow Texan Townes Van Zandt or John Prine. The Allmusic review for his sophomore album Passing Dream wants to position that album as close to Outlaw country and even the alt country of the 90s, but a much closer point of comparison is Gordon Lightfoot, especially on that album. By the late 70s both Lightfoot and Beeley had done some hard living (Lightfoot was still in the throes of alcoholism), and that had put some strain on their voices, which really sound a lot alike on the songs from that album. And Lightfoot of course also let more and more country and pop influences infiltrate his folk during the 70's, much like Beeley here.
Except of course, Lightfoot did it over the course of severeal albums, so you can follow the evolution of his music in real time. With only Gallivantin' in 1971 and Passing Dream in 1979 (barely) issued, the same can't be said for Beeley. His third album, Highways & Heart Attacks is another story altogether. When speialist label Tompkins Square asked to re-issue Beeley's more-or-less forgotten albums, much to its author's surprise, he hadn't counted on the idea, that dece,t sales and write-ups - not to mention the whole trucker angle that almost all articles used - resulted in Tompkins Square proposing to foot the bill for a third album. Highways & Heart Attacks is half songs from the eraly to mid-80s, half written in the 2010s.
As a result, Beley's three periods of recording activity (1970, 1977 for Passing Dream, and 2018 for Highways & Heart Attacks) are quite distinct from each other - the clear-voiced folkie of the early 70s, the slightly rougher edged folk-pop and country crooner of the late 70s and the grizzled vet from the 2010s, whose voice is now equally grizzled. As such, it is easy to distinguish the songs and you will easily be able to identify which songs is from which epoch. For reasons of variety and flow I decided to mix songs from all eras.
Whether you like pure folk rock, or its roots-inflected permutations, you should find lots of things to like in here. Will Beeley had three stabs, and even if he couldn't make a career out of his music, but he made each of those stabs count. Join the singing trucker on his trails with A Highway's Not A Home - A Will Beeley Anthology...
Highway Songs
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Who's your favorite singer, songwriter or singer/songwriter from the Lone Star State?
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