He’s made music with Johnny Cash, X and Rob Zombie. Now Jesse Dayton’s telling tales

Jesse Dayton has some stories to tell.

Whether it’s befriending Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings or performing with broken ribs after a brawl on a Social Distortion tour, the musician gets into the gritty details in his memoir, “Beaumonster,” out Nov. 9 from Hachette Books. As befitting his day job, there’s a companion soundtrack out as well that includes artists and songs Dayton discusses in the book.

The book’s title “Beaumonster” pays homage to his hometown of Beaumont, Texas. As Dayton tells it, he was a boy who put down his baseball mitt, picked up a guitar and then lit on an adventure. Dayton has since lived an interesting life, but he also discusses the messier moments of his personal and professional life.

“Writing a book’s kind of like pulling your pants down and hanging your butt out the window,” Dayton said during a recent phone interview.

“It’s like, once it’s out there, it’s there. The thing that guided me through it was not throwing anybody under the bus but myself. And I made the book about the admiration I have for all the people who were kind enough to bring me along for the ride.

“But it’s also about how I screwed up during all of that. I wanted to show people this paradigm of, like, really great stuff and really bad stuff happening at the same exact time,” he said. “I mean, that’s show business. Really, it’s all smoke and mirrors.”

A little bit country, a little bit rock ‘n’ roll

At the time of our interview, Dayton was getting ready to catch a flight to Los Angeles from his home in Austin to play a Halloween show with Glenn Danzig. He’s coming back to Southern California to support the book and album with a series of small-venue performances where he plans to tell some stories that didn’t make the final cut of the memoir.

Back in the mid-’90s, Dayton says he was a bit of an outcast in the music scene: Too country to play rock, too rock for country gigs. Over the last 20 years, however, he’s thrived just doing his own thing.

“I’ll go play with Glen Campbell and then I’ll go play with Danzig,” he said, though this wasn’t always the case. “Back when I first met Johnny Cash, he wasn’t on all these punk rockers’ T-shirts. He was playing in Branson, Missouri to a half-empty theater and doing Taco Bell commercials. I don’t mean that as a slight to John, no one loves John as much as I do, but that’s what it was like back then and I was doing this stuff back then and it wasn’t really cool. This was long before the hipsters in Silver Lake knew who Townes Van Zandt was.”

Dayton met Cash just as producer Rick Rubin was helping revive the country icon’s career, and he connected with Kris Kristofferson who passed his name on to Waylon Jennings. Dayton eventually ended up recording with Willie Nelson (thereby playing with all the members of the Highwaymen country supergroup individually) and making an impression on the legend when he “borrowed” one of Nelson’s amplifiers — a favorite one, it turns out — and, well, Willie noticed.

Dayton still recalls nuggets of wisdom bestowed upon him from the country legends. He said Jennings put things in perspective for him about reading reviews of his work.

“He’d tell me, if you believe the good stuff, you’ve got to believe the bad stuff, too,” Dayton recalled.

As for Cash, Dayton wrote that the best piece of advice the legend gave him was: “You’re different, so be patient. It might take you a little longer, but you’ll have a longer career because of it. Don’t change. Just be you, Jess.”

Horror and Hollywood

When Dayton got to Los Angeles in the late ’90s, he opened for the punk rock band X. He befriended guitarist John Doe, who he would later play with during solo endeavors and even directed him in the 2011 horror film, “Zombex.” In 2015, while X guitarist Billy Zoom was undergoing treatment for bladder cancer, the band called Dayton to fill in on tour.

“Billy’s guitar playing is so interesting because there’s all this little stuff he throws in there. It’s not just a big riff or big lead guitar playing, there’s jazz stuff in there that he’s doing and he’s very nuanced,” he recalled. “But I got to throw a little of my own version in there, too. They gave me a lot of rope to hang myself with.”

When one of Dayton’s closest friends, “The Walking Dead” actor Lew Temple, landed one of his first roles in Rob Zombie’s 2005 film “The Devil’s Rejects,” Temple passed his name along to Zombie, who was looking to create a fake ’70s country band to compose the soundtrack for the film. After he and Temple wrote a bunch of “hillbilly horror songs” for the film, Dayton has been writing music for Zombie’s films ever since. In Zombie’s 2009 “Halloween II,” Dayton plays Captain Clegg, the leader of a fictional band called Captain Clegg and the Night Creatures that play the Halloween party scene in the movie.

“I don’t know if Rob Zombie knew what a gift he was giving me and my family,” Dayton said, noting that he gets royalty checks from the songs and offers to perform as Captain Clegg at Halloween parties around the world.

“When I worked with Rob, he said to me, ‘You need to write a song with the word ‘Halloween’ in it.’ So I did and I made little videos and I’d send them to Rob and he’d say, ‘Okay, good, but needs more blood.’

“I was like going through the Rob Zombie horror film school. I didn’t realize what being a part of ‘Halloween,’ the biggest franchise ever, meant at the time and it still happens now that people come up to me and go, ‘Hey, man, are you Captain Clegg?’”

Dayton said he’s already working on music for a new album and is enjoying hosting “Jesse Dayton’s Badass Country Show” every Wednesday on Gimme Country streaming radio. He also has a good idea of what his next book will be about.

He doesn’t party hard anymore. Seven years ago, he adopted a healthier lifestyle after a doctor told him he wouldn’t see 50 if his blood pressure and cholesterol levels stayed so dangerously high.

“The doctor was like, ‘Dude, you’re gonna be dead like pretty soon; You’re a heart attack and stroke waiting to happen,’” he said. “I walked out of there and changed my whole life. That’s what the next book will be about. If a guy from Beaumont, Texas, who grew up in this insulated bubble of gluttony, if he can change, then anyone can.”

Jesse Dayton “Beaumonster” Tour

When: 7 p.m. Thurdsay, Nov. 11

Where: Gallagher’s Pub, 300 Pacific Coast highway, Suite 113, Huntington Beach

Tickets: $15 at Ticketweb.com 

Also: 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 10 at The Whistle Stop, 2236 Fern Street, San Diego. $10 at eventbrite.com; 7 p.m. Friday, Nov. 12 at Campus Jax, 3950 Campus Drive, Newport Beach. $20-$60 at campusjax.com; 7 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 13 at Redwood Bar & Grill, 316 W. 2nd Street, Los Angeles. $20 at eventbrite.com.