Will Jacobs’ Fiery Piano Life
Stokes Danger into a Musical Inferno
By Jeff Clark
Something’s gone horribly wrong.
Piano player Will Jacobs fought a
pitched 40-year battle with his demons inside ragged honky tonks stretching from
Austin to Oklahoma City . Today he
plays rest homes, when they’ll let him.
For free.
Will’s just been approached by a
national agent wanting to set up a tour, he says. He won’t open for another
artist, he tells me. We sit inside his two room rented house.
Will can play nine hours and never
repeat a song. But nobody’s calling. “That’s got to get inside you a little
bit,” he tells me. “Someone sees you with a beer bottle or you cuss out an
audience and it haunts you the rest of your life.” Today he wanders the streets
of Weatherford, when he’s not laying brick or stone.
I visited
Will’s place a week ago. We talk a while, then he picks up his dead brother’s
blue guitar to play. The musician’s 59-year-old stare is captivating.
He doesn’t look away.
When Will
strums the acoustic guitar, he digs deeply into lyrics from his life’s front
row anguish. Will considers himself a Throw Away. His words. He tends to bond
with other Throw Aways of society, he confides. “We can be happy, you know.”
This man’s been married three
times, but confesses another lover always came first. “When I saw that big black
man unload that piano when I was a kid, when I saw those black and white piano keys
rolling down the ramp into my house, I knew the piano would be the love of my
life.”
Will’s lifelong musical tryst has
brought him insanity, he volunteers. “I’ve lost my mind over music, then music’s
brought me back. Music has been more a part of my life than the women were.” The
Rules Don’t Apply Here nightclub life seemed ready made for this man to exercise
some demons.
You can see
Will Jacobs walking two or three miles a day around Weatherford, if you know
where to look. He’s survived 10 years without a car. “The only thing I like as
much as playing the piano is walking. Sometimes it’s meeting someone. It gets tough
about the time the bills come due, but I’m living life the way I want to.”
He’s not
about Things, he wants me to know.
The man leans his body into and out
of our conversation, much as he does at the keyboard. He’s good in his own skin,
the heck with what anybody else thinks.
Jacobs has seen everything while
looking across the top of nightclub pianos – old couples dancing, still in love,
wicked bar room fights, anguished tears, rowdy laughter hiding sticky stinging beer-stroked
pain.
Playing to a honky-tonk crowd can
be like snake charming. The greats did this, he tells me – Hank Williams, Sr.,
as one example. “He’d look into the eyes of his audience – his music could make
that audience do whatever he wanted.”
“When I was a kid, people thought
the honky tonk music I played was of the devil.” Jacobs disagrees. “God isn’t
so strict he has to only hear Jesus songs. When you hear Hank Williams sing
“I’m so lonesome I could cry” that’s a human experience –that’s holy.”
Jacobs wakes up each morning and
asks, “Okay Lord, what are we going to do today?” His walks are spiritual
releases of stress, a way to exercise. “I meet 100 people a year walking. What
if one of them becomes a friend?”
Personal struggles
drive his art. “I’m on the other side of hurt now. I’ve struggled with alcohol
all my life. But, now I’m trying to keep my mistakes down to a minimum. We have
to be real with ourselves. Who we are.”
Bill Jacobs taught his son Will the
Missouri Waltz and the Boogie Woogie when he was six, growing up in Weatherford.
Bill played the accordion, the guitar, the piano and was song leader at York
Avenue Baptist for a time.
Three other men impacted Jacobs’
musical education. “Floyd Cramer taught me technique and simplicity. Ray
Charles, that I can arrange my own songs. And Jerry Lee Lewis showed me when I
was 11 – you can play the same song 100 different ways.”
You can play the same song 100
different ways.
Jacobs has played Toulouse in Austin , the Diamond Horseshoe in Puerto Rico , The Stumble Inn in Oakhill, the Cedar Chopper’s
Lounge in Cedar Park , Leon Kickers Palace Austin ’s
fabled Broken Spoke. He’s performed with David Wills (“I Need a Drink, Here’s
$20”), Johnny Lyons at the Flores Country Store outside San Antonio and Kenny Dale, among others.
“I played about 70 nightclubs. Some
of them I played once and a lot of them I played many times.”
Will hasn’t had a paying gig since
August 2010.
Truly creative people can be misunderstood,
he tells me. We talk of John Lennon and Edgar Allen Poe. “People that run the
world are clever, but not wise. They’ve got their own little boxes they never
get out of.” I can tell looking around Jacobs’ living room he can’t even see
his box in the rearview mirror anymore. Will’s house is a working museum filled
with achingly honest vinyl records and Polaroids from his attempts up music’s
high summit.
A compliment, I assure you.
“A lot of times when you’re not
born rich, you have low self-esteem, a chip on your shoulder. You normally
don’t ever get over it. There’s such thing as having self respect, however.
It’s not ego. You look people in the eye. How are you going to correct them, if
you don’t assert yourself? The problem in America is that everyone’s hiding
behind this politically-correct stuff. It’s like fake wrestling. The more I
keep my ego in check, the better I do.”
His eyes never leave mine, main
lining his uncensored thoughts into words the rest of us are then able to hear.
Musicians are struggling these days,
he confesses. “There’s a quarter of the world who want to hear blues, gospel
and what I do. But they’re not going out anymore. They’re jaded. The rest of
the world likes garbage.”
Jacobs has starred in bar fights,
been spit on, thrown out, and had a front row seat to 357 Magnum gunfire. The
stink of spilled Lone Star and the sour perfume of too-many-dance partners
slink along the underbelly of his venues.
Will sometimes lays brick or stone
to pay the bills. “My daddy made about $125 a week, so I guess we were poor. He
was a genius in electronics.”
The day I visited, we ran up the
street to Weatherford’s Keeneland Rest Home. They have a piano. They have an
audience. Jacobs might’ve said hello as we burst through the front door, but if
he did, I missed it. I do remember that he stepped around wheelchairs and
gossip and strode to the piano standing against the wall like he was cornering
a long lost lover. He began playing its keys fast and hard, throwing each song
to the ground.
No questions.
Just sing.
“The reason I play at rest homes is
important,” he tells me. “They’re dying in there. They deserve better.”
Women in wheelchairs rolled up as
Jacobs pushed through the first 1950s blue-suede hit. A former stuntman from
Gunsmoke walked up, introduced himself. One of Jacobs’ walking-around-Weatherford
discoveries.
People start swaying, patting their
hands in time, his loud playing fingers dancing up and down the keyboard. Will
plays songs his audience remembers, doesn’t start out with gospel music, not caring
if they think he knows God or not.
He does.
Jacobs makes intense eye contact
with his audience – a hint of danger or purity, I can’t decide which.
Is too much purity the root of
danger itself?
His finger-fueled riffs make it
hard to look away. I was impressed with his talent, as his textured voice
hot-boxed lyrics out into the audience. The Artist Will Jacobs came alive to
the touch of his lifelong love, the piano, singing for him beneath his electrified
fingertips.
His lover likes it rough.
“One night I sang this song I wrote.
I was sitting at the Cameron Road Inn in Austin .
Doing songs, having a good time. There’s this guy trying to pick a fight with me
because his wife’s over there swinging her hips for my benefit, so I play this
song. I was drinking beer and Weller’s Whiskey. I was cocky. The audience froze
because the song was so honest:
I looked for an answer, my whole life through,
just thinking that someone would appear in the room,
after 89 questions and 3,000 lies,
I woke up one morning and I opened my eyes.
They’re too scared to live, and they’re too scared to die.
And they shake their fists up, and they cuss at the sky.
They’ll drive to their churches, and they’ll drive to their bars,
because they’re running from the truth, in prestigious cars.
Don’t trust books, because they’re usually lies.
Just learn what you see, with your storybook eyes…
I want to like Will Jacobs. I respect
his danger, admire his courage. But no one’s calling him for gigs. Spring turns
into summer. His musical life could still go either way.
He knows it.
Will seems at peace with that
uncertainty, for reasons I can’t quite understand. “I know there’s a God. If
you help people out, that keeps it under control.”
Will’s house sits on the road I
take to visit my parents. It’s Saturday night. His lights are on. I have to
believe he’s home. I have to believe, for a long list of logical reasons,
tonight’s honky-tonks are missing out. Or maybe just taking a break, awaiting
Will’s second act.
“I need to connect to an audience
pretty soon,” he tells me.
Is too much purity the root of
danger itself?
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