He entered the world as Michael David Fuller in Malvern, Arkansas on 18 December, 1949. He left the world, after being on the wrong end of a bullet, as Blaze Foley on 1 February, 1989. His almost four decades on this planet were filled with songwriting, booze, and duct tape.
Foley grew up with music and alcoholism. His family performed gospel songs on the Pentecostal tent revival circuit. His father would take payment, sometimes in the form of canned goods, and would barter the groceries for liquor or pills. One of Foley’s sisters would later recall her first memory of her father, “I wondered why this angry man was punching me in the face.”
By the mid-1970s, Foley was living in a commune environment in Georgia, with his “half black Jewish girl.” They constructed a large tree house for shelter. His girlfriend, Sybil Rosen, would later warmly reflect on their hand to mouth existence, “We would heat up potatoes and wrap them up in towels. We put them on our feet to stay warm at night. In the morning, we would eat hash browns.” In the late 1970s, the couple moved to Austin, where Foley would eventually stay. During that period, the city’s counterculture seemed to be an organic lifestyle, instead of the marketing campaign that it is today (“Hey, let’s buy one of these ‘Keep Austin Weird’ t-shirts.”). The relationship with Rosen ended when Foley decided it would be fitting to try to regularly out drink his new friend Townes Van Zandt.
During the 1980s, Foley played in small Austin bars, when they weren’t banning him due to drunkenness, and lived in a car. At some point, he decided that duct tape was a decorative item and began using it to adorn his clothing. It has been said that at one point he made an entire duct tape suit. He released a few singles in his life, but album releases were never meant to be – master tapes were continually lost or stolen. In one instance, tapes from a session recorded in Muscle Shoals were seized by the government after the head of the record label was arrested on a drug charge. In a strange way, having less product released has probably been helpful to establishing his posthumous legacy.
In 1987, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard recorded Foley’s signature song, “If I Could Only Fly.” It’s a true heartbreaker about loneliness and being away from the one that you love. It was released as a single, but stalled at #50 on the country charts. Haggard loved the song so much, he recorded it again for a 1990 release and made it the title track. By that time, Foley had been killed after interjecting himself into a family dispute between one of his drinking buddies and that man’s son. His friends sealed his coffin with duct tape.
Many people first became aware of Foley as the unnamed subject of Lucinda Williams, “Drunken Angel.” When I saw her recently, she said the song was “about a fuck up who put duct tape on his shoes and duct tape on his guitar.” In more generous remembrances, she has referred to him as “a genius and a beautiful loser.”
In death, Foley has become a cottage industry. There have been several “lost tapes” that have turned into albums, live sessions that he recorded shortly before his death (more albums), and a tribute album by former band mate Gurf Morlix and another by various artists ISongs for Blaze, A Friend of Ours), which includes the song Townes Van Zandt wrote about his fellow elbow bender, “Blaze’s Blues.” In 2008, Sybil Rosen released a book about her times with Foley titled Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley and in 2011 the excellent documentary Duct Tape Messiah: Blaze Foley was released.
Foley wasn’t a great musician, indigent alcoholics aren’t known for their consistency, but he definitely wrote some keepers. Besides “If I Could Only Fly,” music fans should definitely seek out “Big Cheeseburgers & Good French Fries,” a witty take on ambition (or lack thereof) that could have easily been penned by Todd Snider and “Clay Pigeons,” about an outsider trying to “get back in the game” that was covered in 2005 by John Prine. If those numbers whet your appetite, dig into the CD soundtrack to Duct Tape Messiah and Gurf Morlix’s 2011 release Blaze Foley’s 113th Wet Dream.
Foley seems to have been a charming guy that was also an adept songwriter that could be both humorous and touching. He wrote honest songs about the human condition.
I’ll drink to that.