I. The Beginning (or the End)
November 27, 1956
Stump Broke, Texas (population 342)For months the local holiness minister had been preaching the end of the world, declaring that mankind's fiery end would "make them A-bombs we dropped on them slanty-eyed little Japs look like a sissified girl-scout campfire." Though no more religious than the average Texan, the good folk of Stump Broke were mesmerized by his day-long sermons detailing the coming orgy of destruction--complete with blood rain, decapitating hail, supersized mutant insects, airborne Communist viruses--culminating in a final plague of uncircumsized Freemasons. Determined to get the best possible vantage point of the impending carnage, the Stump Brokers followed their preacher into the nearby hills.

Included in this exodus were Bea and Jordie "Pappy" Wayne, a pig rancher and World War II veteran who had spent the war in the Fort Benning stockade for lack of discipline and unspecified crimes against nature. After the war he had taken on Bea as wife and farm hand to "bear me up childrens, mind the hogs, cook, hunt, suck the p'isen out of rattlesnake bites and chop the goddamned wood." Although in the final month of her pregnancy, Bea insisted on making the eight mile uphill trek to witness the end of civilization.

Squatting together on their high place, the Stump Brokers awaited the Lord's final spectacle. But meanwhile another catastrophe was taking place right under their noses. As Bea went into labor, she was heard to mutter, "If only my baby could see the end!"

Thirty-six hours later the babe still had not come. Through lack of sleep, dehydration and mass hysteria, the Stump Brokers were hallucinating the Second Coming of Christ as a nudie-suited Hank Williams leading them through an endless chorus of "I Saw the Light." Finally, with the aid of divine providence--not to mention Pap rocking up and down on her belly--Bea's womb spit forth an eight-pound baby boy, born ass-first in the dirt under the Texas sun.

Jon Wayne had come into this world just in time to witness its end.

II. Formative Years
One afternoon late in 1965, during hog-killing, Bea took a walk down to the kill-pen to spend some family time with her husband and only child. As she turned the corner she witnessed Pappy teaching young Jon the fine art of knifeless pig castration: "Now I'll hold him and you just bear down with your teeth goddammit!"

Bea bought a bus ticket the next day and disappeared. The next ten years of Jon's life with Pappy remain a forbidden, hideous collection of secrets. Few details of what went on at "that pig ranch" have surfaced.
Pappy did have quite a record collection. As Jon puts it, "If there was ever a country western song made what that Pappy didn't have a record of it, I'll be boiled in shit!"

Pappy also owned a six-string Silvertone acoustic guitar (affectionately known as "The sumbitch") purchased at the Sears and Roebuck store in Corpus Christi. After Jon learned a few chords, the two would entertain each other into the wee hours, mimicking their favorite songs. They would drink popskull whiskey as Pappy mumbled incoherently "play that sumbitch, boy."

Inevitably the whiskey put an end to Pappy.

Just six weeks before Jon's twenty-first birthday, Pappy hightailed into town to get "countryfied"--a term he used connoting strong drink, loud music, natural women and Texas two-stepping. On his way back to the pig ranch that night, Pappy and his '59 Dodge truck plunged into a ravine and met a fiery death. According to the police report the abnormally high level of alcohol in Pap's blood caused him to spontaneously combust upon impact.

Jon collected the charred remains from the sheriff and brought them home to the pig ranch. He stayed up all night drinking popskull whiskey and playing his daddy's records, strumming along on the sumbitch for comfort. Although none of the local folk had known him very well, they all agreed he was a changed man: "He got real kinda mean after the old man went tits up--like a dog does or something . . . nobody'd drink with him."

Jon let the ranch deteriorate--the pigs learned to fend for themselves. One local recalled: "Goddamn, you ain't never seen nothing like it. There was pig shit, dog shit, flies, shit everywhere. The boy just sat there on the front porch, hitting on that guitar like he was slapping flies, singing some of them goddamn songs of his'n. It was like he was in a trance or something--you couldn't even call it music. Shitfire, I'd rather listen to a drunken indian piss on an armadillo."

Unwilling to let his limitations as a singer, musician or conceptual thinker deter him, Jon had begun writing songs. When asked of that shadowy period, he replies with pride: "Shit, it was easier to write my own than sing some other motherfucker's. I probably wrote 200 of them--most of them still pretty good."

That was to be Jon's last year in Texas.

Word of the tragedy eventually got to Bea, who was pursuing a career as a topless dancer in Brownsville. With Pappy gone, and with outstanding warrants for criminal activity ranging from bad-check writing to crossing the border for immoral purposes, she decided to come home. She found the ranch an utter shambles: "One of those damned pigs attacked me, yep. God-a-mighty, them droppings was everwhere!"

Always a resourceful woman, Bea decided to turn pigshit into cold hard cash. She instructed Jon to take a truckload of the droppings into town and sell them as "good quality manure." As soon as he had left on his errand, she turned to the job of house-cleaning. She figured that it would be easier to burn most of the contents rather than clean them and so built a large bonfire in back of the house. She began with Pappy's vintage record collection.

Returning home, Jon noticed an odd smell that cut through the stink of his unsold manure. When he saw the bonfire--and Pappy's prized records bubbling in black waxy lump--Jon went temporarily insane. He asked her what the hell she was doing and she glared back at him: "Boy, there's devil in that music. It killed your pap and now it's taken holt of you. I heard them songs you singing . . . now go tend the manure."

Jon bolted into the house to fetch his rifle and proceeded to shoot most of the pigs in the yard. Amidst the dying squeals, he dragged the pig bodies into a pile and then dumped the truckload of manure on them, shouting unspeakable obscenities at mother Bea. He made one more dash into the house to rescue his guitar, his liquor and the last of Pappy's records and bid farewell to Pappy's Texas pig ranch.

At the Greyhound Station in Stump Broke, he bumped into an old friend of Pappy's.

"Where you goin', Johnny?"
"California."
"California? Ain't that up there to Canadia?"
Unsure of geography, Jon muttered, "I don't give a good goddamn where the hell it is. That's where they make them records . . . goddamnit Bobby . . . Robert . . . out there in Fresno or some such. I hear tell Merle Haggard lives there . . . excuse me, yep!"

The year was 1979.

III. Fresno
Searching for work, women, liquor and like-minded musician-friends, Jon found employment on a mink ranch outside Fresno. It was here that he befriended a fellow minker: JIMBO. The two formed an immediate bond--based on common musical taste, broken homes, a taste for cheap whiskey and cheaper women.

Jimbo (22 years old) was playing drums on weekends with two of Fresno's popular local country bands, but was dissatisfied with the material, sound and overall attitude. Jimbo dragged Jon into local nightclubs and badgered him to "sit in" or enter talent contests. Patrons, clubowners and musicians alike found Jon's style too frank and just plain irritating; they mistook his obsessiveness for gross arrogance if not outright insanity. It became such an issue that Jimbo was soon let go of both working bands. One bandmate remembered: "Hell, he kept bringing that asshole from Texas in here. After the guy got up and did a song or two, people'd get so pissed off they'd start yelling and chunking bottles at the band. Shit, one night I caught one right above the eye . . . ."
Fate is drunk, and so were Jon and Jimbo. One day they got liquored up on the mink farm and let the animals stray into the scorching July sun. Seventeen minks were lost--and with them Jon and Jimbo's jobs.

The solution was obvious: form a band. Jon would handle lead vocals and rhythm guitar and Jimbo drums. Their search for a bass player led to BILLY BOB (a mere 19 years old), the janitor/organist for Fresno's Praisewater Mortuary. Billy Bob had never played a bass guitar much less owned one, but he did own a van which could provide transportation and shelter. Jon and Jimbo talked him into using his mortuary savings to buy a cheap bass and amplifier and the trio soon began rehearsing in marathon music-and-drinking binges. Billy Bob remembers: "Shit, I'd been playing organ for dead people for so long, I figured it was time to start playing music for live people's organs. It's a strange world we live in . . . don't you think?"

Jon's material soon took on the rudimentary appearance of actual "songs" and the band landed a gig at "THE HUBCAP," a trucker joint Jimbo knew of. The truckers, half-deafened by long hours in their noisy rigs, didn't seem to mind the group's presence, soon augmented by the addition of TIMMY TURLOCK on lead guitar. At first the others distrusted Turlock for not being "real country." As a youth the apprentice-diesel-mechanic/guitarist had enjoyed the advantages of indoor plumbing and even some book-learning. However, the foursome pulled together and soon built a strong following at THE HUBCAP.

IV. Hollywood
In April 1982 Spike Stewart exited Highway 99 in search of a beer and burger. He stumbled into THE HUBCAP--and his first encounter with the band. He remembers: "It was just insane in there. I thought I'd walked into the set of 'Deliverance.' Or some kind of outpatient facility. All these people, men and women, truckers and farmers and toothless old country people, were yelling like maniacs at the band and the guys in the band were yelling like maniacs right back at them. And the band played these songs I'd never heard before--but the audience knew every word and were singing along. I figured the guys had to have written these songs themselves because they were all so demented. As soon as each one ended, the place went nuts . . . . I forgot about the hamburger, but remembered the beer . . . I got drunk and had a wild time at that place."

After the show Spike persuaded Jon and the band to come to Los Angeles to audition for "nightclubs and record people." So Jon, Jimbo, Billy Bob and Turlock "mounted up" and headed South.

The band took up residence in the basement of Spike's Laurel Canyon home, just a stone's throw from Hollywood, the worldwide center of the entertainment industry. Unfortunately, the unnatural pace and air of Hollywood soon took its toll on Timmy Turlock, who became violently ill after losing a drinking bout with a case of peach brandy. The young guitarist was shipped back to Fresno to recover his health.

The rest of the band despaired of finding a replacement. One afternoon in a North Hollywood tavern they were bemoaning their predicament when country and western singer Marshall Canyon overheard them and said, "Hell, if all you're whimpering about is some goddamned guitar player to pick with then why not give old EARNEST BEAUVINE a call?"
Cutting an imposing figure, Beauvine (age 33, father of the Bovachord) was considered by many to be one of the best western guitarists in town and became the catalyst to bring the group to solid "countryfied" completion. "Hell," Beauvine says, "they already had a full course meal . . . I was just the damned dessert."

After performing in several prestigious L.A. showcase clubs, the foursome became a word-of-mouth hit. Obtaining money from an "undisclosed source," Jon brought the band into a studio. As Spike was called off to Japan on business the only persons to witness these historic sessions were the studio owner and an engineer, both of whom wish to remain anonymous.

Upon his return from Japan, Spike heard the tapes and blurted out, "Everything I thought about the band is true!" The Jon Wayne band immediately secured a contract for the release of the first album "TEXAS FUNERAL" on Statik Records in London.

V. Homecoming
While the album never broke into Billboard's "Hot 100," it qualified the band members to call themselves "recording artists" and helped to establish them as a "cult band" by the late 1980s. "No Go Diggy Die" became the band's catchphrase and a password for hipness among the West Coast cognoscenti. However, the strain of notoriety took its toll on Billy Bob, who sought solace in the bottle and underaged women. "Goddamn high school sumbitches," Jon remembers bitterly. To beat a statutory rape charge in Reseda, he pled guilty to a lesser charge of immoral acts with a minor. Upon the recommendation of a court-appointed psychiatrist, he was sentenced to an indeterminate stay at the Antelope Valley Sanitarium for the Criminally Insane until such time as he be deemed no longer a threat to society. Unfortunately, this restrictive environment, coupled with daily dosages of antipsychotic drugs, weakened Billy Bob's already tenuous grip on reality. When he is not masturbating compulsively, he will share with anyone who will listen his plans, upon release, to recording an all-organ album of mortuary favorites.

Meanwhile, Jon Wayne and the band forged ahead in stops and starts like a mule with a firecracker up its ass. Now on his second liver (a real lifesaver from a Chinese labor camp!), Timmy Turlock rejoined the band to play bass in the early 1990s. "TEXAS FUNERAL" was released on CD by Cargo Records in 1992. Buoyed by a mid-90s wave of troglodyte redneck chic (witness the Jessco phenomenon or the critical acclaim of the Ernest movies), the band reached a new generation of fans, including such Hollywood glitterati as film director Quentin Tarantino, a tireless champion of the band who wanted to include "Texas Funeral" in the soundtrack to his movie "PULP FICTION." Unfortunately, he was unable to locate anyone with the band in order to license the song for the film (Jon was on a three-month bender, Jimbo and Earnest were involved in "business dealings" involving the importation of medicinal-use marijuana, and Timmy Turlock was doing ninety days in the Orange County workhouse on a charge of bastardy.) However, Tarantino's persistence paid off and the song was included in the soundtrack of his less successful follow-up film "FROM DUSK TILL DAWN"--albeit to far less exposure.

However, this modicum of attention was enough to revive the group from their collective torpor. They reentered the studio to record their long awaited second album "TWO GRADUATED JIGGERS." If the Beatles' classic album "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" had taken seven months to record and was immediately hailed a masterpiece in 1967, then "TWO GRADUATED JIGGERS"--which took seven years to record between 1993 and 2000--should be ten times the masterpiece. In celebration of the album's release in December 2000, the group traveled back to Texas for a grand homecoming tour. Joining them was Garth Hudson, formerly of the Band, who described his role in the group as "to stay out of Beauvine's way and to tote that drunk bastard Turlock back to the tourbus after each gig." The tour was a smash success--with sold-out shows in Houston, Dallas and Austin. Of the Austin gig Jon recalls, "Goddamned college sumbitches." While regarded as a spokesman, even a prophet by many in the recording industry ("think of the Eminem crossed with Merle Haggard crossed with Ted Bundy," one enthusiastic rock critic has opined), Jon summarizes his career for me in the language of a timeless country music classic: "Lemme tell you something, mister. Music's like a Circle. A fucking Circle. And is the Circle fuckin' broken? God fuckin' yeah it's broken . . . like a broken fuck . . . goddammit get that fuckin' microphone outta my face or I'm gonna shove it up your ass, you goddamn yankee motherfucker . . . "
Touche. Rave on Jon Wayne! No Go Diggy Die!