Few artists can be said to have altered the course of musical history. The number of songs this can be said about is fewer still, which is just part of why Jason Schneider's latest book, That Gun in Your Hand: The Strange Saga of ‘Hey Joe’ and Popular Music’s History of Violence, is such a noteworthy achievement.

In it, Schneider not only traces the colorful backstory behind one of rock's most oft-covered songs, but makes the argument that it's had a foundational impact on modern music's relationship with violence. It's a compulsively entertaining read, and one that feels a lot lighter than its description might suggest. You'll definitely want to add it to your queue… after reading his Liner Notes interview, of course.

With this book, you take a song that most people think of as a Jimi Hendrix song and not only tell the backstory — it's actually a widely covered song, and had been before Hendrix cut what I guess most people consider the definitive version — but there's a whole hell of a story behind it, and then you have a larger argument to make as well. So where did this all start for you?

Well, it really just started back when I was 10 or 11 and the first time I played my dad's copy of Are You Experienced?, which had "Hey Joe" on it. It was just one of those moments I'm sure you experienced when you were young — you put on a record that you've never heard before, and it just… you're just transfixed for the next four or five minutes. From that point, Jimi became my favorite artist, and the song "Hey Joe" specifically — just, you know, the directness of it. The story it tells. 

It's a simple story, but it's a powerful one, of a guy shooting his cheating woman and from there, you can trace that story back to the beginning of blues and country music, which kind of helped me along that path. But then also, as I started hearing more music, I'd see this song popping up in strange places, different people covering it. And I noticed that it was written by a guy named Billy Roberts, who once I tried looking around for information about him, I couldn't find anything. Absolutely nothing about him. He never recorded the song himself. So the book really kind of started as me trying to solve this mystery of who Billy Roberts was, and trying to tell his story for the first time. And then that just kind of expanded into the influence of the song itself on so many different musical genres right up until today.

You're basically doing the work of a historian when you're trying to tell the songwriter's story. What's your background? How many of those skills did you already have in your pocket, and how much did you have to learn as you went along in terms of finding primary sources? There's a lot of tracking down that you have to do. It isn't very sexy work.

Right. Well, I've been writing about music since 1994 in Canada. I'm from a place near Toronto, and I started writing for Alternative Weekly in the '90s and then I became an assistant editor at Exclaim! magazine, which is Canada's national music monthly. I spent a long time writing about music — Canadian music specifically. That was a period when it was really kind of coming into its own. I wrote my first book in collaboration with a couple other guys I knew, which is really kind of a history of that period of Canadian music from 1985 to '95. And from there I wrote a couple other books about Canadian music. 

Once I started upon this idea of writing about "Hey Joe," it really kind of made sense to me that I wanted this to be kind of my contribution to international music journalism. Canadian music still doesn't really get the credit it deserves, but I think with this book, I knew there would be an international audience for it. That's what I'm seeing so far, which has been great.

How difficult was it to track down the information that you needed to tell the story?

It got easier once I started making a few connections. One of the main ones was a guy in Europe who started a website basically just to kind of catalog every known version of "Hey Joe," which is, to me, a crazy, crazy venture.

There are all kinds of versions I'd never heard before, but also, people would write in the comments section. Some of them knew Billy Roberts. They would share stories about him. But then there was also this controversy, actually, that he'd sort of taken the song from his girlfriend when he was living in Greenwich Village at the start of the 1960s. A woman named Niela Miller, who was a folk singer herself. One of her songs was called "Baby Please Don't Go to Town," which structurally is very similar when you listen to them kind of side by side.

It seems pretty obvious that Billy kind of took some liberties. But I was very fortunate to be able to contact Niela several years ago. She must have been in her 80s then. To get the whole story directly from her was great, and that sort of led me to some other people who knew Billy, and soon, the pieces started coming together. And once I felt that I had a grasp of Billy's life. I knew the book would take off from there.

You talk about Billy taking liberties, but very early in the book, kind of casually, you make a point that is correct, but I think might be surprising to some people who've never really thought about it this way or never dug into the folk music of the era, which is that original music wasn't really the rule. It was not uncommon to hear people singing folk standards, or adding new lyrics to them. You're still dealing with kind of a branch of the oral tradition there.

That actually kind of surprised me too, because I'm a huge Bob Dylan fan, so my knowledge of the whole Greenwich Village folk scene kind of starts with him, as it does for most people. But with Billy Roberts, he actually came to Greenwich Village almost exactly one year before Dylan.

So there's this whole year there where, yeah, as you said, there are all these singers who are kind of… their main focus is just to kind of carry on the tradition. And anyone who happened to write original material, it would kind of immediately get swapped around. And these artists, well… I found this great interview with Richie Havens, the great folk singer. He explained that at that time, very few people were interested in writing their own material. If they did, they didn't bother copyrighting it. Hardly anyone cared about making records. All of that changed once Dylan arrived.

But in that year where we're focusing on Billy and some of the other artists, yeah, it was completely wide open. Everyone just sort of saw themselves as part of the oral folk tradition, as you said.

In the beginning of the book, the story you tell is how this song jumped out. Billy and his partner were busking, and they happened to rope in a random girl who joined them, and she was taken by that one particular song.

I haven't gotten far enough into the book to know the answer to this question, but you get the sense from the way you tell that story that he really knew he had something special with "Hey Joe." You mentioned a lot of people not bothering to copyright their own material. Is that why he copyrighted "Hey Joe"? He knew that he had something special and he wanted to make money from it?

Yeah, I think that's fair to say. After he left New York, he moved on. He eventually settled and landed in Washington, D.C., and he was kind of part of that scene. One day he just decided, "Okay, I've got this song. Maybe I'd better copyright it." So the Library of Congress was right there, he went in, filled out the paperwork, and it proved to be a crucial decision. Yeah.

Obviously, Hendrix's version is the locus point for almost everybody with this song. I've seen that you argue that it could also be considered the birthplace of heavy metal.

Uh, yeah, I said that in another interview, and somehow that got spread around. I wasn't really making that strong of a claim about it. I was talking more about the actual recording process, like when Jimi went to record it in England with his producer, Chas Chandler.

So they're working in this small studio. At that time, 1966, that was just sort of the beginning of the Marshall amplifier. The Who were making their first records and using these big amplifiers. And that's what Jimi wanted. He wanted volume.

So yeah, so when they recorded "Hey Joe" in this tiny studio, Jimi's got his amplifier cranked up to 11. And the engineer had never worked in this way before. The stories I found were, you know, they're doing takes and there's all kinds of stuff rattling around in the studio and nobody really knows what to do. Eventually they found a balance, but… I think at that point, with Jimi, Cream, the Who, these were the bands that were really kind of embracing volume. Of course that led to heavy metal. So I guess that was really the only argument I was making.

The other argument, the one that's made in the book, is the way this song connects to violence in popular music. "Hey Joe" is not obviously the only murder ballad. Can you get into that argument a little bit more? That this is kind of ground zero for pop or rock being willing to address that type of thing?

I've been a fan of murder ballads, and other people have done great work researching them. but yeah, "Hey Joe" kind of comes out of that tradition. But in the way the verses are structured, I found it to be unique, just because it's kind of a conversation. There's really no other song that compares to that. And again, going back to Niela Miller's song, she had it structured as a conversation between a man and a woman. 

So that's one of the main things I think Billy took from her. One of the reasons so many people connect with "Hey Joe" is that you can easily put yourself into the song as either one of the characters, either as Joe or as the person asking him the questions. That simplicity gets to the heart of the listener asking themselves the question, "If I was in this position, what would I do?" 

I think all of us at one time or another, to some degree, have been in a position where if we can't keep it together, something bad might happen. So that's the way I look at it.

Are you still able to enjoy this song after writing this book?

Absolutely. Yeah. No, that's the funny thing. I wouldn't say obsessed. but I've loved this song since I was about 10 years old, and going through, all these different versions that I hadn't heard before… a lot of them were really, really eye-opening, not just by the major artists, but over the years, a lot of people have done really interesting things in almost any genre you could think of. 

When I was putting the discography together, when you get to the end of the book, you'll see that one of the last ones I found was by this band from Japan called the Golden Cups. They were a house band at a bar on a US Army base in the late '60s, so they had to know all the current hits. They'd hear them through Armed Forces radio, and so they recorded this version of "Hey Joe" that is just completely bonkers. If there's one version I've been recommending people to find to listen to, it's the one by the Golden Cups. It's just, it kind of takes every element of the song and mashes it together. And it's just crazy.

The last thing that I always ask is for people to recommend three indie artists. I would love it if you could recommend three indie Canadian artists.

I do publicity for a lot of great indie Canadian singer-songwriters, but yeah, there's a lot of people doing great stuff in Toronto right now. One of my long-time friends and favorites is a guy named Jerry Leger. The last album I helped him out with, he recorded with Mark Howard who, you know, worked with Daniel Lanois, Lucinda Williams, Tom Waits, all kinds of people. Yeah, Jerry's a great artist. 

Who else? There's, well, the last book I did was a biography of a guy named Art Bergmann, who was one of the founding fathers of the Vancouver punk scene. He's been called Canada's Lou Reed. He's working on some new stuff right now. And I also wish people would get to know a Toronto band called Change of Heart a little bit better. They were kind of doing grunge in the '80s before anyone else was, and they just put out their first album in about 25 years. Check them out, they're amazing.