a love letter to Bob Livingston’s Gypsy Alibi
Dear Bob and your Gonzo Memoir,
Thank you for writing it down. Thank you for singing, songwriting, and playing it all. Thank you for sharing yourself and your story with so many of us all over this good earth.
Your memoir is an anthem to music, to Texas, to family (given, chosen, created), to the cosmic country scene, to musicians and their traditions everywhere, to travel, and to connection. It is also a hymn to what can happen when we collaborate and keep going. It is a ballad about endings that aren’t really endings at all.
I love that your very first chapter could be an ending, the epic fight with Jerry Jeff, gritty and graphic. You had us hanging on every word when you read aloud to us at the Devil’s Backbone in December 2025. And yet, this chapter/that fight was very much a middle, not an ending. You bring us, your readers, right back into it partway through your book when you refer us, simply, back to Chapter 1. (I’m not sure if this was a bonafide literary technique, but it sure worked.)
I love how your dynamic, tumultuous relationship with Jerry Jeff never ended, though perhaps your respect and trust became more dog-eared and frayed over the years. Still, your love stayed strong. Not even his passing could end your friendship, your brotherhood: we hear him in you today.
Your music career, too, ended dozens of times. I love that these were never true endings, but transformations. You (though you often credit coincidence) turned these apparent endings into new beginnings, riffing on the past and following your art in new directions. YouTubing on JJ’s private jet and live-streaming during Covid were cool, technology-plagued, new episodes of your job and your life.
Your marriage never ended! I love that, in world beset by scandal, divorce, betrayal, and broken partnerships, you and Iris are together. Fifty plus years later, she is dancing at your shows in her long Indian skirts, thick grey hair pulled back in a bun. Tiny and elegant as ever, I love to watch her face as she watches you on stage. What I would give to read her memoir of the adventures that you two have shared.
Your love of travel never ended, despite being constantly derailed. Your phrase is so true: I can’t get enough of it and I want to go home. I think of all the people you have touched with your music, your connection and your collaboration: musicians both accomplished and aspiring, diplomats, fans, artists, and everywhere that you learned from, shared with, and brought into your songs. It seems that your music doesn’t stop at borders or get caught up in a particular beliefs, culture or religion. I imagine there is a strong spiritual story woven into all of this: after all, true spiritual messages are about non-endings. You, the cosmic cowboy, are flinging your songs out into the cosmos.
And finally, I love how your memoir itself does not have an ending. Or maybe it has two or three or twelve – forth and back, forth and back. I felt you trying, in the last chapters, to draw your book to a close. But, finding this impossible, you bounced back in time to 2003, to running the trails with your son and his friend, beginning to weave your stories, lessons, and legends into this tale of a life.
Your book is encore after encore of endings and beginnings, Bob. I am lucky to be dancing to another one every month at the Devil’s Backbone Tavern.
Thank you again for having written it down,
Jennifer