By Mark Kneubuhl
Special to LIVE!
November 7, 2007

There are literally tens of thousand of stories of men and women down in the depths of alcohol and drug-induced disparity, who by discovering “God,” went on to a successful recovery. The Billy Callery story is not one of these. “I didn’t find God… He found me,” a humbled Callery said.

A prolific singer/songwriter in the 1960s and early 1970s, Billy Callery is most recognized for his classic country single, “Hands of the Wheel,” which went double-platinum on Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger album and more recently was re-released by Norah Jones.

“That’s when the real money started coming in… just adding more fuel to an already king-sized cocaine and heroin habit. And I was already a heavy drinker,” said Callery, who at the time was down from a healthy 190 pounds to just under 120.

From an outsider’s perspective things couldn’t have looked better. By 1975, the rising 28-year-old star, had a string of writing successes and had played or shared the stage with everyone who was anyone in country music.

“Then I started seeing faces in the mirror and cobwebs on my face that wouldn’t go away. I started talking to people that weren’t there,” Callery said. “I used to call them ‘porch monkeys’.”

“Things were gettin’ real bad. I learned that even my suppliers and some of my friends actually had bets on how long I’d live while I was just tryin’ to have a good time.”

The Outlaw Days

 

William Woodard was born in Indiana and moved to Kentucky after his father was killed flying B-17s in World War II. In Kentucky, Billy’s mother, Myrtle, re-married John Callery who ran one of the four major whisky distilleries in the small town of Owensboro.

“I had my first cigarette and shot of whisky by the time I was 12 years old,” said Callery.

With the town of Nashville only about 120 miles to the south, young Billy was never far from music. Besides being a pilot, his father was a big band horn player while his grandfather played with the like of Fats Waller and Red Nickels.

“I started writing music at an early age and although the big band sound had some influence on me, I took to the native Kentucky sounds,” he said.

Callery joined the Army right out of high school and then, in 1967, after serving his country, he packed his bags and went west, spending the next few years traveling up and down the coast playing with the likes of Taj Mahal, Rambling Jack Elliott, Little Feet, Doobie Brother Pat Simmons, and Arlo Guthrie, to name a few.

“Back then, the music culture and drugs were one in the same. I was doing “speckled birds” and “black mollies,” but we didn’t even know they were drugs… they just made us drink longer. There was some pretty serious deception going on at the time,” said Callery.

Toward the end of the 1960s, Callery moved to Austin, via Nashville, where he served a short stint as a staff writer for April-Blackwood Publishing (CBS).

By then his name was already well established in the music industry and he immediately was given the opportunity to open shows for Jerry Jeff Walker, Little Feet (who had also come to Austin), and Willie Nelson.

“Me and my partner, Roger Bartlet had a duo back then called LUSAZA (Lus-aza-goose). Our logo was a picture of a goose with a beer in one hand and a joint hanging out of his beak,” Callery said.

Callery and company were playing the “couch circuit”, as they called it, playing everywhere and anywhere, while sleeping wherever they ended up. While opening Jerry Jeff Walker’s shows, Callery worked more closely with him, and he recorded several of his songs.

“One day we were all playing somewhere,” Callery recalled, “and Jerry Jeff asked me to come and stay at his place. So I did… for two years.”

But it wasn’t long before Bartlet went his own way; first with Jimmy Buffet as the founding guitarist for the Coral Reefer Band and later moving to New York City, playing in various blues bands. Then in 1973, Willie Nelson recorded Callery’s, “Hands on the Wheel” and the album earned double platinum status.

“From that time until the early ‘ 80s I had pretty much swapped careers: Songwriting, recording and performing for cocaine. I had a 5-bedroom ranch house with a couple of Jags in the driveway. That’s when the ‘porch monkeys’ started to show up,” said Callery.

The bets were on

Besides the massive doses of drugs and alcohol, which sooner or later would kill anyone, Callery had other brushes with death in the 1970s, including a .38 being put up to his head and fired. The gun misfired.

Another time Callery was walking the Cain sisters to their apartment after a late night show in Austin. “All of a sudden these two guys pop out of the alley wearing black ski masks. It was about three in the morning and I was wasted and thought, ‘Wow, they must be coming from some crazy costume party.’ And then they started shooting at me and I hit the ground and got lucky,” he explained.

And still again, as if tempting fate, Callery and some friends decided to go rafting down the Colorado river when it was at flood stage, 14 feet above normal.

“We all loaded up on cocaine and booze and set off down the river in our inner-tubes,” Callery said. When they reached the dam there was a 20 foot wide water-funnel vortex, sucking everything down to the floor of the river, below the dam. Everyone was able to get to shore except Callery.

“I went straight down and through a culvert under the dam. I thought it was over and then I was shot out the other side where I found myself kneeling on a sand bar, half-drowned,” he recalled.

LIVE! asked Callery if there was ever a time that he had no where to go and looked toward God for help?

“Lots of people told me to let God and Jesus Christ into my life, and I never made fun of those folks but I thought that religion was for other people… not for me. I never had a religious upbringing. It just wasn’t a part of my life”, Callery said.

A shining cowboy

During the outlaw days, one of Callery’s good friends and “running buddy” was musician Milton Carroll. Both had shared the alcohol and drug-inspired lifestyle in the past until one day, Carol just disappeared.

In the meantime, things were bad and getting worse for Callery who made several failed attempts at kicking his drug habit. During once such attempt in 1982, he was sober for nearly a month when asked to play at Jerry Jeff’s Birthday Bash with Carroll and Charlie Daniels on the banks of the Colorado River in Austin.

“I just automatically went for the coke, thinking everything was fine, but on stage I was horrible. I was blowin’ it big time… I couldn’t even remember the words to my own songs,” said Callery. He could not kick the habit, no matter how hard he tried.

At one point during the show, Carroll walked right past Callery, not saying a word. “I thought he was coming over to say hi and he just got in his car and left,” said Callery. But a couple hours later, he returned.

“I was looking around for some more coke and here comes my ol’ buddy. He’s a big guy anyway, but he was wearing this bright white shirt, walking slowly and looking straight at me. It was almost like a vision,” said Callery.

Carroll told Billy that while driving home the Lord told him to turn around and help his old friend. He then asked Callery to pray with him to ask Jesus to come into his life. Callery admitted that he “just didn’t know about that stuff,” which Carroll took as a flat ‘no’ and walked back to his car.

“I didn’t go and get any more cocaine that day. And I didn’t know Jesus Christ either, but I knew He found me and I badly wanted to get to know Him,” said Callery.

Since that day, Billy Callery has been sober and drug free. “I even quite smoking… I carried one cigarette around in my shirt pocket for a whole year, just in case, but I never smoked it,” said Callery.

But recovery wasn’t easy and required “lots of love from God” and Callery’s self-prescribed regiment of hard work; including a return to Kentucky to clear the woods for his family and later working as a lumberjack in the Pacific Northwest.

“But my greatest gift from God was Him allowing me to go back to music without the drugs,” said Callery who has recently completed a new CD entitled, Ryder Comin’ In.

The new album, which Callery calls, “gospel with an attitude,” has guest appearances from old friends, Jerry Jeff Walker and San Angelo resident, T. Gozney Thorton, who has also just released a new CD, entitled, Legends Before the Fall.

“I know that Jesus Christ loves me and because of Him my life has become meaningful and real… and although I may think I have my hands back on the wheel, I know that it’s not me doing the driving,” concluded Callery.