THE WAYNE DRURY PROJECT
present — patinaed photos of Jackdaw, a picture of his
former cat, a ukulele and a bumper sticker that says “Make
Tea, Not War” — hang on the wall behind Drury’s head.
“You invented alt-country,” says Vollstedt, smiling.
“They didn’t have that term back in the old days. I think it
came about because of people like you.” Drury laughs and
snorts, shaking his head.
“I’m serious,” says Vollstedt. “Because at the time, the
term didn’t exist. There was country, there was rock, there
was rhythm and blues, there was blues and there was folk
and it was pretty compartmentalized. And then groups like
The Byrds came along and they took folk music and
electrified it. So then they had to come up with a term so
they came up with folk rock … Then as things went on a
little further it wasn’t really rock ‘n’ roll but it wasn’t
country like Hank Williams. At that time country was pretty
strictly defined … Country was Nashville and so then they
came up with this term ‘alt-country,’ which if they had had
that term while Wayne was writing songs they probably
would have said, this is alt-country, but they didn’t have that
term because Wayne was busy inventing it.”
Gas Station Girl
Drury’s musical journey begins in White Plains, N.Y.,
where he was born in 1947. His mother bought him a harmony
ukulele and a Mel Bay chord book when he was five after
noticing his enthusiasm for ’50s TV personality and ukulele
player Arthur Godfrey. By the time he was nine, Drury had
saved up enough money ($29) to buy his first guitar.
“It was called the Carmencita,” Drury says, his cool blue
eyes twinkling behind black frames and his once long, corn-
silk mane buzzed closely to his head. By the time he was old
enough to legally drink, Drury had been “asked to leave”
Syracuse University, where he was studying painting and
sculpture, because he “didn’t have the money.” He moved
with friends into an apartment in the city, five blocks away
from rock ‘n’ roll pantheon, the Fillmore East. By day he
worked Brentano’s (the same bookstore where Patti Smith
worked), and by night he walked to the Fillmore.
“For five bucks I could see Ten Years After, Canned
Heat, Janis Joplin, Chuck Berry, The Who, Cream,” Drury
says. One afternoon in the dog days of summer, Drury was
sitting in his apartment with roommates. “It was hot as
hell. My apartment was four floors up. We were sitting
around saying ‘It’s hot, let’s get out of this city.’ One friend
says, ‘I’ve been to Eugene, Oregon. It’s real nice there.’”
By 1969, Drury had arrived in Eugene after hitching
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north from L.A. He had done a drive-away from New York
to L.A. in a ’65 Bonneville convertible with four friends
and his cat, Mona. Drury quickly settled into the Odyssey
Coffee House as a regular, becoming another member of
the counterculture, bohemian family.
“Not the Jack Kerouac kind of bohemian,” says Cyn-
thia Wooten, co-owner of the Odyssey with her late hus-
band Bill. “It was the dawn of a new culture and new
politics and a new way of being.” The Odyssey was not
only the center of Eugene’s counterculture movement, it
was the center of Jackdaw’s musical universe at the time
— it’s where Drury, Anderson and Crawford met, per-
formed, hung out and worked. It’s also where Vollstedt,
accompanied by his teenage buddies, came to watch Jack-
daw and rubbed shoulders with university students, hip-
pies, wanderers, Rolling Stone freelancers and the Merry
Pranksters in a cloud of cigarette smoke and coffee steam.
TARA STONECIPHER
Wooten even commissioned the artistically-inclined Drury
to create the first poster for the Oregon Country Fair (then
known as the Renaissance Faire) and several more after
that, and he also could be found washing dishes between
sets. Wooten remembers Drury as soft-spoken and
extremely bright. “His view of the world is just fascinat-
ing. He’s cryptic and I wouldn’t say cynical, but question-
ing all the time, but with this enormous heart,” she says.
Before long, Wooten recognized the burgeoning music
scene and helped start the Farmer’s Almanac On the Air,
an open mic that broadcast from the Odyssey live every
Sunday night. Drury, Anderson and Randy Crawford
frequently played the live show. “Everybody loved them,”
Wooten says. “I don’t know why none of us had the skills
or whatever to figure out a way to promote them, get them
agents, create a broader audience for them, but anyway,
that didn’t happen at the time.”
It was about this time that Drury wrote his first song at
his house on Ferry Street. Drury could not stop thinking
about a woman he’d briefly met while driving cross-
country — she served him sandwiches at a turnpike restau-
rant in Colorado. Strumming a Gibson guitar in his tiled
bathroom (because the acoustics “killed”), Drury wrote
“Gas Station Girl,” which soon became one of their signa-
ture songs, covered by local bands like Wheatfield and
broadcasted by local radio stations. After that, the songs
came “fast and furious” and soon he had written “New
York Central Line,” “Cimarron Rose,” “Country Song,”
“New York Phoenix” and more too numerous to list here.
“Wayne wrote the music,” Anderson says. “He would
show up in the afternoon and he would have a new song
… It was kind of like the sun coming up, ‘Oh here’s Wayne
with a new song.’ To me, it seemed effortless to Wayne.”
Anderson, who has called Drury the most creative person
he’s ever met, says Jackdaw was together for only “a few
intense years” before the members parted ways for myriad
reasons: marriage, moving away, the closure of the Odyssey
in 1972 because of an urban renewal project and health rea-
sons. At this point, Drury already had a catalogue of songs,
mostly unrecorded, but by the mid-’70s, Drury was having
bouts of numbness and paralysis due to MS. Managing the
autoimmune disease through medical supervision, diet, swim-
ming and cycling, Drury continued to walk, bike and write
music until 2009 when he had a kidney removed.
“My kidney died and I couldn’t play anymore. I went to
the hospital and they took it out and that’s that,’ says Drury,
sitting in his wheelchair under a tree in the nursing center’s