There’s a lot of dialogue that didn’t make the cut in our Sunday feature on Merle Haggard. The renowned country artist born in Bakersfield and raised in Oildale got in touch with us after his February concert and street dedication ceremony. Wanted to thank the good people of Bakersfield on our pages.

He must have been in a good mood when we spoke over the phone in late February, because we talked about two hours. I like nothing better than a good conversation and that’s how I treated it. We went all over the map – it was, at various points, irreverent, sad, sweet, hilarious, and a little angry when he brought up the state of this country. So I thought I’d share some of the odd twists of our interview.

Some of you might say, “Yeesh, enough with Merle already.” We give him plenty of ink. I know what you mean. Seems like there’s been a wave of “Bakersfield Sound” tributes in some form or another over the past few months. There may be such a thing as Buck and Merle fatigue.

But some of you may be twiddling your fingers in joy and thinking, “How simply delightful!”

For those of you who still use the word “delightful,” here we go:

Did you come into town the day before (the show) and stay the night with your family?
As a matter of fact, we spent the night before in the emergency room in Monterey with my rhythm guitar player (Timmy Howard). He had a heart attack. My 39-year-old guitar player had a heart attack in Monterey and we stayed til the last minute and went to Bakersfield. I left my wife and daughter there with Timmy in the hospital. We had a lot of illness on that tour. We played eight days on that trip. Put Biff  in the hospital, the drummer. When I got home, he was sick with whatever the hell everybody’s had. We got it all on that trip.

7th Standard Road is such an unusual name, one of the most unusual street names in Bakersfield. And I wonder if that meant anything to you growing up. I read it was a landmarking, surveyor's term from the Civil War and it’s been around forever. Do you feel like you're usurping that and do you feel weird taking over 7th Standard Road?
It was an honor. It's not just a little, unimportant road. It's an important way. It’s been an important way for a long time and it's been there longer than I am and it was there when I was a boy. It’s just kinda, you know, thrilling to have that happen.
It was a really a great honor to have that road and I’m thinking maybe sometime in the future, if the prosperity keeps coming to Merle Haggard Drive, maybe they'll decide to change the whole 7th Standard Road all the way over to I-5.  If it prospers from it, there might be some benefit to the community.

I read in your (1999) autobiography, “My House of Memories,” “There’s been talk of naming a boulevard after me in Bakersfield. … Me, I’d rather see a bronze statue of my mother – lunch sack in her hand, print dress to her calves – erected on that corner.” The corner she used to wait at to take the bus to get to work.
That would be … of course, you can't have that.

Why not?
I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem ... They’re doing at the Smithsonian Institute a daily show that is dedicated to the development of Highway 66, which includes my family in transit from Oklahoma to California during the Depression. There's a lady in it who portrays my mother, with some of my donated artifacts from my living sister who carefully donated some of the things that was on the trip that was originally made from Oklahoma to California in ’35. So she’s not gone unnoticed by any means.

I read she labeled your name on your records while you were in juvy.
She had an indelible, beautiful hand. She wrote her entire life story in longhand and it was read at her funeral rather than having somebody preach. She's been to church every Sunday that she'd been alive. We figured that the religious thing was not nearly as effective as reading excerpts from her own handwritten autobiography.

ON THE DEDICATION
SB: What did you think of the turnout at the street dedication?

Haggard: Hell, there must have been 300, 400 people there, huh? Yeah, it was quite a decent turnout and I just .. every bit of it was a  total surprise. All the work those people went to make those different things appear, the thought that went into going out and getting that rock is to be commended, you know? Those folks really did a nice job for me. I appreciate it and I wanted to say it. In print.

YOUNG PEOPLE AND FED-EX
SB: There's a lot of brain drain going on in the valley. People stuck around Bakersfield, in the ‘50s and ‘60s. They lived and died in their small town, it seemed. Maybe I’m wrong. But now that kids are going to college and the media makes the big city seem like a dream world and all the kids want to live there. Seems like Bakersfield and Fresno and Visalia are losing a lot of their young people.

Haggard: It doesn't make sense. It seems like they would spread out and live where  hey want to with the Internet available. It looks like it would give them more freedom. You'd find them living in remote areas and things. You could do your business by FedEx. They’ll bring ya breakfast, FedEx will. (laughs)

I don’t think it would be very tasty by the time it got to you.
I'm telling you the truth! They got an ad on the deal. They'll bring you hot breakfast. By FedEx! (laughs)

Have you heard Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour (show on satellite radio)?
In fact, I was a guest on his show. It’s quite interesting. He’s doing well with that.

He plays a variety of music on his show.
He and I totally agree on that. That’s where I come from.

So that’s what you’d like to do, any and all kinds of music on your program? (Haggard would like to do a satellite radio broadcast.)
That’s basically what we do on stage. We play songs from ... We'll jerk out a Nat Cole song or we'll do a Chuck Berry song. Or we'll do an Elvis Presley song or we’ll do a Jimmie Rogers song or a Hank Williams song. Whatever, Hoagy Carmichael. We’ll do “Stardust,” we’ll do whatever we want. That’s the beauty of the band I work with and the people that understand close enough to research and realize the band is playing from the cuff and we’re playing from experience, 70 years of performing, you know, it’s done from the cuff. We don’t use any kind of paper.

Do you listen to (radio show) “A Prairie Home Companion”?
I love it.

Isn’t that great?
Have you seen the film?

Yeah, it was good.
I think so, too.

It was a little strange.
Boy, I think it was strange cause it was probably the closest to reality of anything that’s ever been filmed.

You mean the wandering angel from “Sideways”? (Virginia Madsen’s character)
I don't know about that part. (laughs) The overall look of it was like looking back at the Cousin Herb show in Bakersfield. Bakersfield’s own Cousin Herb show was on in five in the afternoon five days a week for 10 solid years from ‘53 to ‘63 and it was very much like that. It was done live and spontaneously with very little paper.

GREAT TRAIN JOURNEYS
SB: There's a great train journey through the Australian Outback, the Indian Pacific. Have you ever done that?
Yes, ma’am. I rode … I gotta tell you. (laughs)
... We did 22 days in Australia and we flew every place except this one trip. We decided to take the four day trip across the Outback and it was a sad, bad mistake. (laughs) It was the worst train I have ever been on or heard of in my life...

Why?
Oh, my God…

When I took it, it was lovely. I don’t know about you.
Well, they got mad at us. We had about 30 people on there and some of the guys were smoking.

What were they smoking?
They were smoking pot and they didn't want them smoking so I said, “Look, give us a car of our own,” and they gave us a car. We rented a car halfway across and they put the son of the bitch in the middle. We rented a whole car to put in the back so we could do without them being involved and instead of putting it in the back of the train they put it in on the middle of the train. They harassed us all the way across country and we made the engineer mad and he drove the train too fast and we nearly turned over on every curve. And it was a nightmare. It was like “The Poseidon Adventure.”

Well, there aren’t many curves in the Outback.
Oh, my God, but boy, when you hit them at the wrong speed, you notice ‘em more.

That’s pretty desolate out there. It’s kinda scary. If you break down, good luck to you.
What about that one place you stop out there where there ain't nothing but a chicken pen?

Exactly. There’s one place where two people live. It’s an abandoned mining town or something. There were only two people who lived there.
Look like the backside of Mars.

It's all red out there and dry but God, it's so romantic. In the middle of the night, the only lights you see are the moon and maybe one light from a cattle station and that’s it. That’s desolate, that’s a void, it’s amazing.
Of all the words I would have used to describe the Outback, it certainly not would have been romantic, but that gives me a new insight into the female …
That’s really good! (Loud laughter)

I like the void, like when you look out on the ocean at night, you see nothing.
Well, I understand that. But that Outback, now I don't know.

I traveled in comfort. Well, relative comfort.
The creatures crawling around over there would keep me so occupied that I wouldn’t be able to think about romance. (laughs) I'd be watching my feet for a black mumba or something.


ON GEORGE BUSH’S TERM
Haggard: Boy, I tell ya what. He's gonna go down in history as being the worst president we've ever had.

SB: They're joking about what his presidential library would have -- a trailer with a couple of Rambo DVDs.
They could put a burning bush in there. (laughs)

 
ON WILD FANS
Haggard: I don’t know, there's times that in the heat of the summer, we’re working parks, get into 15,000 – 20,000 people, a sea of folks. They’re all drunk and naked.

SB: Getting drunk and naked at a Merle Haggard show!
They’re throwing beer on each other. It's pretty hard not want to get the hell out of there, actually.

For yourself?
I'm just saying sometimes in America, there are people that in the middle of the day, believe it or not, in spite of George Bush, are drinking (Merle speaks in almost a leering voice) … and getting naked! And there's nothing that Home Security can do about it!

MORE ON BUSH
Haggard: This guy got in there and preached and set up a police state and preached the fear tactic. And, I mean, if we were to draw a cartoon of America, we'd be under the porch, looking out, wondering, “Should we come out now? Is it all right to come out now? It’s nine years after the fact.”

SB: Or a giant thumb pressing a person down and you can't get out from under it.
And McCain says we ought to be doing this same kind of stuff we’ve got going on in the government for the next 100 years. He said that war in Iraq may last 100 years! Really?!
There are people in America that still, in spite of everything they can do …
There'll be guards there trying to keep ‘em from having fun. I'll just shut the show down. I'll make the guards sit down. I'll say, “There'll not be another song written or sung until all the security sit down.”

In fact, why don't you join in? Take off your shirt, here's a bottle of whisky. You know you wanna do it.
Hell, they threw me in jail down in North Carolina for toasting one time about 20 years ago. The guy wanted me to do it out of a cup. He said, “Everybody out here got a whiskey, but you can't do it out of containers.” I said, “Well, that would be sorta dishonest and disingenuous at least.” And he said, “Well, I'll take you to jail if you toast on the stage.” And I said, “Well, you have to do your part, I guess.”
And when we got done with the show, they handcuffed me and my fiddle player and my  player and took us to jail and fined us $500 apiece for drinking in public. And it went downhill from there.
There’s a county up in extreme northwestern Washington close to the Canadian border who just outlawed (Merle pauses for dramatic effect, does the leery voice again and kinda sounds like a half-crazed hillbilly gold miner)  drinking … and dancing!

Drinking and dancing? It sounds like the ‘20s.
We played a show and they said they just did it and they were serious about it and do not joke about it. I said, “You gotta be kidding.” They couldn’t drive a ten penny nail up nobody's ass.

How do you outlaw dancing? What basis do you have for outlawing dancing?
I have no earthly idea what their intentions are. Suppression is the overall picture I get. I’m sorry to see it happening to America, but that’s what’s happening.

Well, you know, jail is kinda a badge of honor in that case.
If a guy ain't been to jail, I ain't gonna trust him. (laughs)

ROUGHNECKS
(On “There Will Be Blood,” a movie partly based on the Kern County oil industry. Merle showed an interest in the film.)

Haggard: Who did the music?

SB: A kid from Radiohead, Jonny Greenwood. And it’s not, they didn’t use music from the ‘20s or 1910s. It sounds very alien, but it works. It’s dissonant, but it scares the crap out of you and tells you right there this movie is not gonna be sweet and tender. It’s gonna be about corruption and pure hell.

Haggard: Ima tell ya what, old Bakersfield and old Oildale, you can get your plow cleaned anytime you wanted it.

What?
I said, Bakersfield and old Oildale was lined with beer joints and little dives and things where you could go get your plow cleaned anytime you wanted to.

(pause) OK ... Um, is that an innuendo, or do you literally mean a farmer ...
Put it in the newspaper and there'll be a lot of people understand it.

OK, but for my purposes, could you explain it to me because I wasn’t around in those days?
Well, used to instead of drive-by shootings and school shootings, all this stuff that fills the list of bad things that happen nowadays, in the old days, there was a lot of fights went on at these different beer joints so you knew where the problem’s gonna be. You knew there was always somebody who’d walk into invariably, playing music, somebody walk in with a chip on their shoulder and there’s always somebody, the village gunfighter attitude, willing to accommodate him. The streetfighters that existed among the nightlife that went on in Bakersfield would be a wonderful movie in itself having to do with people I can name, but won’t.

This town wasn't born from puppy dogs and rainbows.
It's not a sissy city.

LOSS
(A vignette that didn't get into the story.)

Nothing humanizes a public figure better than pets. Presidents and their advisers have known this for ages.
“He loves animals,” says longtime friend Ray McDonald. “One day we were coming back from lunch and we were driving past a horse and I didn’t think nothing of it. He was standing by a fence and he noticed the hoof was caught in the fence. He said, ‘I think that horse is hung up, Ray.’ He jumped out, run across the road and unhooks the horse from the fence. He loves animals and has got a hundred of ‘em.”
Merle is substantially less talkative when it comes to an Arctic timberwolf named Nicky. She died of cancer two days before the interview.
“They’re so misunderstood,” Merle said in an interview weeks before the show, when he felt there was a little hope someone out there might have a cure.
“People don’t realize they're the smartest canine line and I don’t think I've ever seen an animal that was so gentle as this animal is here, and just absolutely twice as smart as a dog.”
It’s his wife’s pet, he was quick to say.
“They have eyelashes,” he said then. “She’s beautiful.”
The family discovered her on the sidewalk in front of the house. She’d been with them 14 years. It was like losing a member of the family. She saved a bird’s life once. Walked it to the door and kept it away from the cats, slept near it.
When she died, they spent the entire day with her and held a funeral.
“That was for my wife,” he says quietly.
The Haggards buried her on a hill, pointing her east. Before she died, she leapt to her feet and ran in that direction, as if she’d spotted something.
A tiny suggestion: If heaven has room for pets, she’s probably there eating steak.
“She’s there eating deer meat,” he protests, the brightness in his voice returning. “She's eatin’ Bambi and Bambi don't have to die!”