The one-time country star, whose early 1990s run of hits included the No. 1 smash “I Don't Call Him Daddy” and the Top 5 songs “Reno” and “Not Enough Hours in the Night,” saw his career slip off the rails in dramatic fashion in the late '90s. Beginning in 1998 and intensifying after 2002, his arrests and trials have grown more numerous while his concerts, save for drunken karaoke performances, have dwindled and his albums have ceased.
His rap sheet since 1998 includes arrests for nonpayment of child support, driving while intoxicated, public intoxication, assault of a police officer and several incidences of possession of marijuana. He has been acquitted of some of those charges and juries have hung on some of the others, but he has compounded more than a few of those remaining by allegedly jumping bail and skipping hearings.
According to a report in The (Bryan-College Station) Eagle, Supernaw was on the docket before Judge Jim Locke for allegedly evading arrest after a wee-hours incident in Bryan in 2004 that also resulted in a public intoxication charge of which Supernaw was acquitted.
Supernaw's version of that night's events is as follows: He was walking down the street singing the Gourds' country-fried cover version of the Snoop Dogg hit “Gin and Juice,” a song that contains several profanities, whereupon he was apprehended by a man in pajamas who claimed to be a policeman but could have been anyone. That was why he ran from the man, you see.
Arresting officer Brent Boswell, who was in fact off-duty at the time of the incident, had a different take. According to The Eagle, he says he showed his badge to Supernaw, who was “obviously intoxicated” and loudly screaming curse words and gesticulating obscenely. Supernaw then ran from him and wheeled around in what Boswell characterized as a fighting posture. Boswell had no choice then but to level his pistol at the singer.
Of course Boswell would say that, Supernaw contends. He is one of them. According to The Eagle's report, Supernaw believes that Boswell is a cog in an immense international plot to silence him, “a political economic conspiracy” the existence of which Supernaw claims to have proved “time and time and time again.” According to Supernaw, the details of this scheme were many and various, and, after telling the court that he had ridden to this hearing from The Woodlands on a bicycle, he went on to detail these shadowy dealings.
In The Eagle's telling, Supernaw hinted that it began with his birth as the secret love child of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, and that things started to intensify in 2002, when he was, as he put it, “held hostage in Paris” for two weeks in a top secret “mentally retarded home for terrorists.” Since then, he served as a “test monkey” in an experiment studying the effects of marijuana on baseball players, and was later attacked by two police officers from the town of Montgomery, who wanted to break his arm and thus bring about an end to the 46-year-old's professional pitching career.
Judge Locke heard all this testimony and sent the jury pool home. Supernaw, he ruled, was not fit to be tried. He ordered that Supernaw undergo psychiatric evaluations. This was dropped after Supernaw pled no contest to a lesser charge of disorderly conduct.
A few days later, a similar hearing was slated for Supernaw in Houston. For weeks, Supernaw has more or less politely dodged meeting with the Houston Press for this article, but he has been sending us the occasional e-mail, some of which are lucid, others less so. The one tipping us off about the hearing was in the latter camp. It was his response to Steve Jackson, his attorney in the Harris County case, which Supernaw copied to us. Jackson sent along a reminder that Supernaw would have to be at court at nine in the morning on April 13 — Friday the 13th — to discuss his competency. As his e-mail made clear, Supernaw had other ideas.
“I need more advanced notice as that my only transportation at present is a bicycle,” he wrote. “I was planning on leaving Magnolia on Sunday to make it there for my trial on Tuesday morning. As I do not like to pedal in long britches, hopefully it will be OK if I were shorts in court. Also, at present I have a flat on my bicycle and about 14 cents in my pocket, and of course I am not competent to stand trial, as I have read in the papers that I am an alchaholik, bi polar, not fit to be a father, MF.”
