Gary Stewart - Biography
By Jonny Whiteside
Gary Stewart was one of modern honky-tonk's most vibrant, unorthodox forces. A hard living hell raiser who whipped the 88's like Jerry Lee Lewis and gave out with an almost startling vocal style that mixed declamatory aggression with an intense vibrato and rocking, blues-informed phrasing, Stewart's mid-70's releases on Mercury Records were a consistently brash, unmatched series of exercises in creativity. With jukebox classics like “ Drinkin‘ Thing,” and “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles)” Stewart put an intense new twist on drinking songs and, on cheating numbers like “In Some Room Above the Street” and “Out of Hand,” he plumbed new depths of connivance, remorse and shame. A consummate misfit with a king-size rep as a wild man (which he celebrated in show stopping tunes like “Little Junior“ and “Flat Natural Born Good Timin‘ Man”) Stewart did not fit in with either the old school Grand Ole Opry set or the fast rising shaggy, Texas outlaw posse, instead carving out his own singular musical path during one of country's most tumultuous periods. Cherished by both country music insiders and rabid cult of hard country cognoscenti Stewart roared through the 70’s and early 80s with emphatic drive and aplomb, but by the end of the 20th century, with several fizzled comeback attempts behind him, the brooding, frustrated Stewart, tragically, committed suicide.
Born May 28, 1945 in rural Letcher Country, Kentucky to a poor family with eight other children, the Stewarts re-located to Florida in 1952 and within several years, the teenager, an avid fan of both country and rock& roll, had formed and was leading his own band, the Tomcats. Married at 16, Stewart kept rocking and worked the road as bassist with a local big beat act, the Amps, before settling in Okeechobee, Florida. There he toiled in a factory by day and , at night, worked the band stand at the Wagon Wheel Club, a local honky tonk. A meeting at the Wagon Wheel with country star Mel Tillis proved fateful, and after Tillis urged the kid to concentrate on songwriting and head for Nashville, Stewart, with writing partner (and former Tomcat) Bill Eldridge, began frequently making the drive to Music City circa 1964. Arriving at the height of Chet Atkins’ over-produced, countrypolitan “Nashville Sound” era, Stewart’s supercharged, rough around the edges sound was precisely the opposite of what Music Row execs were buying, yet after a few unsuccessful singles, Opry star Stonewall Jackson cover of Stewart and Eldridge’s “Poor Red Georgia” made the Country charts Top 50 in 1965. Not exactly boffo, but a step in the right direction. Despite that minor success, Eldridge lacked the stomach for Nashville’s regimen of all-night guitar pulls and daily rejections from song publishers and record companies and, in 1965, returned to Florida, leaving Stewart to his own devices.
The next few years were rough, but he had steady work--journeyman country star Nat Stuckey took Stewart on the road as his piano player, a job that he kept for the next several years. In 1968, Stewart signed a contract with independent label Kapp Records, but his first single went nowhere. Stewart’s subsequent release “Sweet Tater & Cisco” was another dud, but was re-worked as “Sweet Thang & Cisco” by Nat Stuckey, whose version went to the Top Ten in 1969; Kapp let Stewart go that same year. In 1970-71, Opry star Billy Walker also began recording Stewart’s material and had four chart successes with them, but Stewart’s own career remained stagnant. Decca signed him, put out one single and dropped the singer when it bombed. Stewart had tried just about everything in Nashville, even recording a demo of Motown soul tunes at point, but the results were negligible.
He headed back to Florida, where his party hound alter ego, Little Junior, took over. Free from Music city’s plodding constraints, Stewart kicked into high gear with a new Allman Brothers influenced style, developing a ferocious Southern Rock collides with honky tonk hybrid. As he raised rafters and emptied liquor bottles in the Sunshine State, Nashville-based Mercury producer Roy Dea came across Stewart’s demo of soul songs and completely flipped out; a bit of maverick himself (he already produced untamed Sun Records alums Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Rich) Dea later described Stewart‘s music as being “like a damn drug. It’s addictive.” Although it took two years, as soon as Dea, and another ex-Mercury producer Jerry Kennedy (author of Jerry Lee’s phoenix-like 1968 return) moved to RCA (where Waylon Jennings was already re-writing the rule book), the pairs first move was to sign Gary Stewart.
They got off to a rocky start--Stewart’s first single, the superb “Drinkin’ Thing” was DOA in 1973, but his version of the Allman’s “Ramblin’ Man did make the Top Seventy. When RCA doggedly re-issued “Drinkin’ Thing” in mid-1974, it reached the Top Ten. Following it with the sexually charged “Out of Hand,” Stewart made the Top Five, and in 1975, he scored his first country chart topper, when “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles)” hit number one. While the song’s were all non-Stewart compositions, the lyrics’ common psychology--a tangle of self-loathing, bitter irony and boozy introspection--were ideally suited to the singer, and provided the perfect introduction for what became on country‘s most complex and intriguing new voices.
He made good on that initial promise through a series of almost grim hits (a typical Stewart scenario found him “face down on the barroom floor, crying ‘my god, what I have come to?’”) that made George Jones seem like a Cub Scout. With brilliantly realized performances like “Ten Years of This,” “Whiskey Trip,” “Stone Wall (Around Your Heart),” Stewart’s devotion to musical dynamism and idiosyncratic vocals were unmatched and every one of his singles made, at least, the Top Fifteen, often rising even higher throughout the late 1970s. But the fatuous, dance-oriented jive of the early 80’s Urban Cowboy craze left very little context for a blood, guts and thunder honky tonk philosopher like Stewart, and his star--and record sales, steadily degraded. A deal with Los Angeles indie Hightone Records re-teamed the singer with Roy Dea, but the resulting albums Brand New (Hightone, 1988) and the weirdly titled I’m a Texan (Hightone, 1993) were decidedly underwhelming, especially as they were sandwiched between the labels own far more thrilling compilation re-issues of Stewart’s best 1970’s RCA titles (Out of Hand and Gary Greatest, Hightone, both 1991).
Stewart, again, de-camped to Florida, worked sporadically, recorded very little and drank a lot. In November 2003, Mary Lou, his wife of more than 40 years, suffered a fatal heart attack in her sleep, the final blow in what must have seemed by then, an endless string of thwarts and bad luck. On December 16 of that year, following a dinner with his daughter, Shannon, Stewart returned home and shot himself to death.
