After 17 years, Foley's voice can be heard again

By Michael Corcoran
Oct. 3, 2005

Blaze Foley: "If I Could Only Fly" Windows Media | Real Media Blaze Foley: "Clay Pigeons" Windows Media | Real Media

Casey Monahan 1986 AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN Tapes and CDs from country singer Blaze Foley's last studio recordings were thought to have been destroyed in a fire or lost by band members. That was until one CD was found in someone's car. "Wanted More Dead Than Alive" goes on sale at Waterloo Records Oct. 11 or online at waddellhollowrecords.com.

"Hey, whatever happened to that country album Blaze had recorded?" Someone asked that after the funeral and the question would pop up occasionally through the years.

A few months before he was shot to death on Feb. 1, 1989, Blaze Foley and a band composed of steel player Charlie Day and the Waddell brothers, bassist David and drummer Leland, recorded 10 tracks at the Bee Creek Studio in Driftwood. With Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard having just released their version of Foley's "If I Could Only Fly" weeks earlier, Foley had been in high spirits during the sessions, which were supposed to continue after two days of recording basic tracks live.

But after the studio hadn't been paid, the project was put on hold, a status that became permanent when 39-year-old Foley was killed by the son of a friend. (To the disgust of many fans, Foley's killer was found not guilty by reason of self-defense.)

Whatever happened to Foley's final studio work? The word was that the tapes were destroyed in a fire and the rough mix cassettes (and subsequent burned CDs) given to band members couldn't be found.

Foley just couldn't get a break when it came to studio albums. His supposed breakout LP, recorded in Muscle Shoals, Ala., in 1983, was confiscated by Drug Enforcement Administration agents after the project backer went down in a drug bust. Foley had only a box of the albums, which he would barter for beers and cab rides until they were all gone.

An earlier album, produced by Gurf Morlix, never came out when the masters were stolen from a car Foley had borrowed.

The Bee Creek sessions seemed destined for a similar fate until July 2005 when Leland Waddell received a call from an old friend in Indiana. The guy said he'd been cleaning out his car and found an unmarked CD. He played it to see if it contained anything, and he thought it sounded like Foley. Excitedly, Waddell asked the friend to overnight the disc and, sure enough, it was the rough mixes of those 1988 sessions. Problem was, the CD was barely listenable, the music buried under so much surface noise and crackling. But under the muck, Waddell could hear the magic.

He took the disc to sound engineer John Sheppard, a Pro Tools wiz who spent weeks cleaning up the tracks until, Waddell says, "it sounds just like I remember the sessions sounding."

Preserved on the album soon to be released were not only a sweet, stirring version of "If I Could Only Fly," with Kimmie Rhodes on backing vocals, and a great take of "Clay Pigeons," recently covered by Foley's songwriting idol John Prine, but two songs thought to be lost forever ‹ Calvin Russell's "Life Of a Texas Man" and Jubal Clark's "Black Granite." Foley's tombstone was made of black granite because of the Clark composition, which Foley often sang live.

"This is really the true Blaze Foley studio album," Waddell says. "The Muscle Shoals record was pretty good, but it wasn't really Blaze. He was backed by studio guys (plus Morlix on bass) who just saw it as another gig. We knew Blaze inside and out and went into that studio with the idea that we'd get the real Blaze down on tape."

As for the title, "Wanted More Dead Than Alive," Waddell says it was inspired by the way his friend has found more success in death in recent years than in life, with Haggard, Prine, Lyle Lovett and others recording tunes by Foley, the subject of Lucinda Williams' "Drunken Angel."

And now, more than 16 years after his passing, Foley has mysteriously reappeared to lay claim to those songs.

mcorcoran@statesman.com; 445-3652