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Switching from noisy honkytonks to quiet folk festivals and coffeehouses can be difficult. Gagging a rowdy crowd is a challenge, because artists hesitate to disappoint or chastise fans paying money to see them. Walker has less trouble with that than most. "We're going to announce on my web site that if you want to see me with a band, do that; but if you want to come and spend X amount of money and have a table and a waitress where you can sit and see me in a listening club, I'll be doing those," he said. "I'll be able to play my wooden guitar and talk more. I just don't want people to start doing tailgate parties and then coming over to this little listening club and wonder why I'm not doing "Pissing In The Wind" or something like that -- wrong one, Bro', you're going to get kicked out."

Some people might have wondered if Walker was down on his luck after he listed himself on eBay in June 2001 under the auction title: "Jerry Jeff Walker Fishing Trip & Private Concert." The auction promised a fishing trip and private concert with Jerry Jeff in Belize. Marie Behan, of Dallas, won the auction for $12,600. She described the three-day trip as a thrill of a lifetime and said the Walkers made her feel welcome and warm, although it was obvious that Susan had organized the auction. "You could tell Jerry Jeff was not really a part in planning this trip at all. They just pointed him in a direction and said, 'Go,' and he said, 'OK,'" Behan said, laughing. "They were both so nice. Susan seemed like she was really glad we had come, and that counted a lot for me. You can tell she does that part of their lives for them, the making everybody feel comfortable. I think he's probably real shy. I got the feeling that he'd rather talk about anything but my adulation of him."

Walker wasn't desperate for cash; he was merely following the direction of his wife-manager, who is trying to raise money for the Walkers' nonprofit Tried & True Foundation. Susan Walker is obsessed with starting a school unlike any other in the United States, with a curriculum designed for young musicians right out of high school who want to forge a career in popular music.

"The first semester, these kids are going to learn about self-employment, about filing estimated quarterly taxes," she said. "I bet about 90 percent of these kids out there right now in Texas doing this music are selling crap with no sales tax number. And they don't even know that they're supposed to -- until somebody catches them, and then they fine them. Where else are they going to learn it? They're not going to go to college. This school is set up as a vocational school. Django wasn't going to go take him a math or science course [in a university]. He even lied to me about taking his SAT test. What option did I have for him? He was just going to hit the street with a band. Luckily, Jerry Jeff found [Paul] McCartney's school in Liverpool for him."

The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts opened in 1996 with financial backing from the ex-Beatle. About 3,500 people applied this year, and 200 were accepted. Django Walker attended the school in 1999 and 2000. He wasn't completely sold on the setup, but he learned enough to know what he would do differently.

"People over in Liverpool said, 'Why are you here? America is the land of opportunity,'" Django Walker said. "The whole time, I was wondering why there was nothing like this back home."

Django Walker didn't care for his instructors, whom he described as skeptical of country music. And he thought the curriculum was often too broad, including actors and dancers in addition to musicians. While he was in Liverpool, one of his songs, "Texas on My Mind," was recorded by Green and topped the Texas charts back home. Walker quit the school early, returned to Texas to take advantage of the song's popularity, and started touring and recording on his own.

Susan Walker praises the Liverpool school as a model but won't hesitate to customize the Austin version. She ended up teaching her son many of the business aspects that he had intended to learn in Liverpool. "Django got to take a lot more music classes than business classes the first two years he was there, and then the third year they were going to make him learn all this business stuff, and he said, 'I'm out of here,'" she said. "I'm going to make students do just the opposite. They have to learn the business first."

If his parents manage to get a school up and running, Django Walker has promised to serve as a board member and help develop the curriculum based on his Liverpool experiences. "I didn't fit in at that school," he said. "I can see my mom's school is going to be about music and sound technology, and it can be more direct. And there are some things you can't learn at school, that you have to learn playing live. That's one thing that should be incorporated in my mom's school -- once a week or something they have to go out somewhere and play live. I heard from a bunch of kids [in Liverpool] who said they would love to go to America and do this. It's going to be a great thing to have this school here."

A site in downtown Austin is earmarked, but Susan Walker doesn't anticipate opening until 2007. "The building that I've targeted is going to be vacant in three years, and it will take at least a year or two to get it ready," she said. Once the school is open, the Walkers will tap into their pool of talented friends to guest-lecture. "We've talked to a lot of our friends, like Jimmy Buffett and Garth Brooks, and approached them with this idea, and the first thing both of them said was, `We want to come teach,'" Susan Walker said. "That would be the ideal thing, to have them come in and spend two or three days or a week. Buffett is going to be great as a business teacher. He is a moneymaking machine, and I'd love for him to come and talk to those kids about sponsorships and endorsements. Garth, I believe, was the first guy who did a joint venture with a record label, so he actually owns his music. They've done it because they've been smart. They need to teach these kids you can be creative, you can be successful, and you can still take care of business."

Passion and a keen business sense mark Susan Walker's personality. Those traits helped her take control of her husband's career in the 1980s and head off a financial crash caused by Jerry Jeff's uneven oversight and big-spending ways. Susan Walker was no saint; she partied with fervor during the 1960s and 1970s and married Walker in 1974 as his crazed behavior was becoming legendary. By 1978, though, she'd had enough of the party and focused on a stable home life and being a good mother to the couple's newborn daughter.

Jerry Jeff remained a rounder. For a while, he was unwelcome in his own home. The partying was taking its toll on his voice, which was croaking and cracking at shows and on albums. The Lost Gonzos left Walker after MCA offered the backup band its own recording contract in 1977. "We would have stayed with Jerry Jeff if he had taken his career seriously, but he wasn't," Inmon said. "He was looking at it as an excuse to get high. Jerry Jeff at the time was making too much money for his habits and he was not doing good shows because he was too drunk and too stoned. A couple of times we felt we were in danger flying around in these airplanes because of his habits. It was nerve-wracking, and then you get to the show and he's too fucked up to do it. The band left en masse."

The '70s ended with American Express dogging him for $90,000 in unpaid bills and the IRS auditing his previous four tax returns. Walker soon found himself hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt after a decade of unchecked spending and partying. NEXT »

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