by Jessi Colter
Chips had just produced the brilliant Black on Black album for Waylon. I was crazy about the guy. His real name is Lincoln, but, given his gambling prowess, he goes by Chips. He has these extra-wide eyes and the face of a duck—a handsome duck but a duck all the same.
Chips first approached Waylon about producing me.
“I think it’s best if you weren’t around when we record,” Chips told Waylon.
“Why is that?” Waylon wanted to know.
“Because Jessi will look to you for direction.”
“And is that a problem, hoss?”
“It is,” said Chips, “if I’m the one in charge.”
“When it comes to Jessi,” said Waylon, “she’s the one who’s really in charge. She’ll just fool you into thinking you are.”
So with Waylon’s approval, Chips came to me with a proposal at the same time my Capitol contract was up. It was a difficult decision. Columbia had offered me a deal that would have prevented Chips from producing. That’s because Chips, along with his business partners Phil Walden and Buddy Killen, had formed Triad Records. They wanted me to sign exclusively with them.
“What do you think?” I asked Waylon.
“Your guess is as good as mine. Musically, no one’s better than Chips. But in terms of worldwide distribution, no one’s bigger than Columbia.”
My decision was to put the music first. I signed with Chips.
“Glad to have you on board,” said Chips, “but let me pick the material I think is right for you. I know you’re a great writer—and I love your songs—but I want to feature your singing. What do you say?”
I said yes.
The sessions took place at Chips’s Nashville studio, one of the best in the country. Everything fell smoothly into place. I was thrilled to sing songs like “Wild and Blue,” “I’m Going by Daydream,” and especially “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” written by Don Gibson, one of my early songsmith heroes. There’s something about that Chips Moman sound, cultivated in his own American Studios, that made me want to sing all night long. Chips put together his usual crackerjack unit of top-flight players and, if you can believe it, even caved in when I suggested that Waylon sit in on guitar. The record could not have turned out better. Musically, I made the right decision. On the business side, though, I made a mistake.
A month or so after the album was ready for distribution—the cover showed me in short hair and a denim vest—Chips came roaring over to Southern Comfort on his Harley. I invited him in and asked if he’d like some coffee.
“Sure thing,” he said, “but I’d better give you the bad news first.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Phil Walden and I had a falling out.”
“Which means?”
“Your record’s not coming out.”
“Why in the world not?”
“We’re folding the label.”
“Even before you get started?”
“Afraid so.”
“Well, I still love the music.”
“Me too,” said Chips. “I count it among my best productions.”
Today the LP exists only as a rare collector’s item. Naturally I wish more people could have heard it, but I don’t regret making it. I hold on to the hope that one day soon it will be rescued from dark obscurity and see the light of day.
The softening of my career came at a time that was not displeasing to me. Jennifer was a teenager and Shooter a toddler. They needed my undivided attention, and I was grateful to grant them just that. The path that I was following—allowing Waylon to follow his own path in his own way—always led back to the Lord.
I read in Psalm 150:
Praise God in his sanctuary: praise him in
the firmament of his power.
Praise him for his mighty acts: praise him
according to his excellent greatness.
Praise him with the sound of the trumpet: praise
him with the psaltery and harp.
Praise him with the timbrel and dance: praise him
with stringed instruments and organs.
Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him
upon the high sounding cymbals.
Let every thing that hath breath praise the
LORD. Praise ye the LORD. (KJV)
God was telling me to praise him—not because he needed praise but because the very act of perpetual praise liberated me from self-concern and preoccupation with Waylon.
I praised God for every day, for every breath, for every good thought that came my way. Mostly, though, I praised God for informing my heart of the very concept of praise. Without shouting his praise, whether silently or out loud in the full-gospel glory of the Greater Apostolic Christ Church, I’d never have been able to get past the brambles and thorns of fear and despair.
Chapter 23
PATIENCE
IT WAS 1984. WE’D BEEN MARRIED NEARLY FIFTEEN YEARS. My spiritual life had become increasingly independent. My prayers were consistent.
Touch him, dear Lord, as you have touched me. Pierce his heart as you have pierced mine.
But even as I prayed those urgent desires, I knew that the ultimate prayer still had to be for patience. In my willfulness, I wanted God to touch Waylon now, to pierce his heart today.
I had to repeat the same prayerful mantra: “The Lord might not be there when you want him, but he’s always right on time.”
His timing, not mine.
His will, not mine.
His grace, his mercy, his mystery, his wisdom.
That wisdom led me back to the fact that compassion, if fully realized, always allows for greater patience.
During the Christmas season of 1983, Johnny Cash’s family staged a successful intervention. Johnny, whose drug dependence was as severe as Waylon’s, agreed to go to the Betty Ford Center in California.
Bill Robinson, a close business associate of Waylon’s manager, came to me with the idea of a similar intervention. Waylon’s health had been dramatically deteriorating. Suffering from laryngitis, he had missed several gigs. He looked bedraggled. He was deeply depressed. His insomnia was off the charts. Wouldn’t it be best if the family confronted him with the truth of his desperate condition?
My anxious mind said yes, but my spirit said no. I knew Waylon as well as any woman can know a man. Waylon Jennings wasn’t Johnny Cash. I could see how Johnny, a believing Christian, might accept himself as a broken man requiring help. But Waylon was different. Call it a steely stubborn streak. Call it an uncommonly strong sense of self. The terms don’t matter, but the reality did. Waylon’s emotional reality was such that no outside influence could persuade him to do what he himself had not decided to do on his own. I concluded that an intervention would do more harm than good.
I had to wait. And wait. And wait some more.
I believe Shooter had much to do with Waylon’s ultimate decision to give up drugs. In one instance, Waylon discovered Shooter taking a straw and inserting it in his nose, clearly imitating his father. It was an act that devastated Waylon, who described it to me with tears in his eyes. Yet even after that incident, I knew I couldn’t push Waylon. I had to wait.
The first indication that the wait might be over came in March 1984 when Waylon came out and said, “I’m not going to quit, I’m just going to stop.”
“Fine,” I said.
“I’ll stop for a month. What do you think?”
“I think you need to figure this out in your own way and on your own terms. You’re a smart man, Waylon. You know yourself. If this is your plan, I’m with you.”
“I’m also thinking of us going out to Arizona. If I’m gonna stop, it’s gonna be easier to stop there.”
To be honest, I felt some trepidation about the trip. There had been a number of other attempts to come off drugs that had been less than successful. Once we’d gone to Malibu where we rented a house on the beach. As always, Waylon’s intentions were good. The weather was ideal, the coast peaceful and calm.
I stayed in prayer. And for a while Waylon stayed sober. But once back to reality and the grind of the road, he succumbed. That broke my heart. While I would always support Waylon’s attempt to break free of his addiction, I was afraid of building up too much hope. No matter, I agreed to accompany Waylon, making him extremely happy.
“Arizona’s always been good to me, baby,” he said. “It’s where I met you. It’s where I went out on those great trips to your daddy’s mine. I feel a peace in Arizona I don’t feel anywhere else. I think it’s the desert. The desert is deep. The desert leaves it up to you. And this time I think I can do it.”
After canceling all our gigs, Waylon, Shooter, and I rode on the tour bus from Nashville to Paradise Valley outside Phoenix. We had no plans. All we had was a rented house stocked with food. It was a glorious time of year to be in the desert. The cloudless sky was a blanket of blue. The air was clean. The jagged rocks, the flowering cacti, the audacious mountains were exciting and calming all at the same time.
March 31, a few days after we arrived, Waylon went to the bus where I knew he had a big stash of cocaine.
I wanted to say, “No, this last binge might kill you! If you wanna stop, stop now! Stop this very minute! You’re being foolish! You’re being headstrong! Come to your senses before it’s too late!”
Instead, I said nothing. Waylon went to the bus. That night I couldn’t sleep. When he came in the next morning, he looked like death warmed over.
“I didn’t do it all,” he said. “I left twenty thousand dollars’ worth of cocaine on the bus.”
“Shouldn’t you destroy it?” I asked.
“I just wanna leave it there.”
“Is that really smart?”
“It’s not smart, but it’s what I wanna do.”
I didn’t argue. I wasn’t there to argue. I was just there to be a loving presence.
Later, reflecting on the ordeal, Waylon told me that he couldn’t handle the withdrawal without having what he called an escape hatch. Yet he did handle it. The ordeal was painful both physically and emotionally. He said every bone in his body screamed out in anguish.
In his autobiography, I was deeply moved to read his description of those difficult days and his concern for me:
I’d sit out on the swing in the front yard, watching the sun come up. I’d still be there when the stars began to shine. As my mind started to clear, I got to seeing the look on Jessi’s face. It was hopeless and helpless. She was so sad, watching me vacillate between life and death, unable to do more than watch me go through it. . . . I slowly learned how to feel my emotions again. . . . I woke up one morning, toward the end [of withdrawal], and Jessi was sitting there by the end of the bed. . . .
“Jessi, my spirit’s dying and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
There wasn’t anything she could do but wait, pray in her fashion, and let me know that she was holding fast, right by my side. I couldn’t have done it without Jessi. She is the most giving person I’ve ever met, and anytime I felt like I just couldn’t stand withdrawing further, she let me know, by her gentle presence, what would be waiting for me on life’s other shore.1
We rode back to Nashville where, in Waylon’s words, Southern Comfort became his own “halfway house.” I was thrilled when he asked me to play old hymns on the grand piano in our living room. I played them for hours on end. Waylon just sat there, his eyes closed. On other afternoons he’d watch Shooter play in the front yard. Sometimes we’d go for rides. During one of those rides, he said, referring to one of his closest friends, “Have you told him I quit?”
That was the first time he’d used the word quit.
“You realize what you’ve just said, don’t you?” I asked.
“I said I quit.”
“Before you were saying you’d just stopped. You’ve never said ‘quit’ before.”
“Well, I said it now.”
“And you mean it?”
“Wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t mean it.”
That night Waylon went out to the bus and brought back a suitcase that he handed to me.
“What’s this?”
“Twenty thousand dollars’ worth of you-know-what.”
“And what am I supposed to do with it?”
“Dump it.”
I went to the toilet, poured it out, and flushed it down.
“What do you have to say now?” he asked me.
“Hallelujah!”
Waylon maintained his sobriety for the rest of his life, but the immediate aftermath wasn’t easy.
He had nightmares and struggled with his weight. He talked about the loss of his alter ego—the good-time Charlie, he called him—the man who was convinced he was nothing without cocaine. He viewed the death of good-time Charlie with a mixture of alarm, regret, and relief. It was a confusing time.
The fact that Waylon never again laid out another line is credit to the strength of his character. Beyond that strength, though, Shooter was another powerful motivator, another reason Waylon found the wherewithal to stay sober.
One of the poignant pictures that Waylon painted in his book focused on our son: “I was sitting with Shooter in a restaurant booth. He was on the inside, and he got his coloring book out. He was all of five years old. He put his left arm through my right, and we sat there for about an hour while he colored. Shooter hadn’t ever done that before. I’d never been able to sit so still for so long with him. I wasn’t about to remove my arm.”2
On the humorous side, Waylon’s protective attitude about Shooter could get out of hand. There was the time when a snake was spotted in a section of our yard where Shooter liked to play. Waylon became convinced that the only way to safeguard our son from dangerous reptiles was to buy a herd of pigs, since pigs are known to eat snakes. He had Maureen Rafferty, our ever-loyal assistant, running all over town trying to find hogs for sale. Fortunately, Waylon eventually dropped the idea, although his concern for Shooter’s welfare never diminished.
In heroic fashion, Waylon was able to white-knuckle his way through to the other side and live a sober life. Not everyone is capable of such a feat. I have friends who owe their lives to twelve-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous and Cocaine Anonymous. I know those programs are based on the acceptance of a higher power who can do for us what we can’t do for ourselves. I applaud those programs.
Other friends, like Johnny Cash, have found therapeutic modalities, like the ones offered at Betty Ford, to be lifesaving blessings. I have nothing but admiration for rehabilitation centers run by well-trained professionals with a heart for healing. Some addicts are slain in the Spirit of God and, just like that, their addictions are lifted. I witnessed such miracles in my mother’s church. The paths to recovery are many. The path one chooses is a highly individual choice that may not be right for everyone.
Waylon chose the most difficult path. He went to the desert where he set out his temptations and faced them down. I believe he was sincere when he wrote that my presence was a help. But in this epic struggle, I was an observer not a participant. The struggle pitted Waylon against himself. In a scenario where most men would fail, he prevailed.
Let me be plain: I do not consider Waylon’s way to sobriety as a template for others. I would never encourage anyone to rely, as he did, on sheer willpower. That’s usually a recipe for disaster.
I thank God that Waylon made it work. I thank God that I knew enough to stay out of his way. And I thank God that Waylon, whether due to his rugged individualism or headstrong constitution, had enough self-regard to choose life over death. It was a miraculous moment when Waylon’s will and the will of God finally met.
Chapter 24
TIME TO PARTY
I ALWAYS LOVED HOSTING SOPHISTICATED THEME PARTIES THAT celebrated milestones. But a sobriety party was something entirely new.
The first sobriety party was hosted by June Carter Cash for Waylon at their mansion on Old Hickory Lane. It was a small affair with a few friends like actor Robert Duvall,
himself an aspiring country singer and songwriter. June and Johnny each sang songs they had written to celebrate Waylon’s sobriety.
At that party Johnny took me aside to ask, “Jessi, do you think you could give me a party like this?”
I thought his request both funny and touching—funny because there was always a very mild brotherly rivalry between Johnny and Waylon, and touching because Johnny was so sincere in his request. When Waylon came out of the Arizona desert and went through his long drying-out period, he had often called Johnny.
“Of course I’ll throw you a party,” I told Johnny.
“I was hoping you’d say that,” he said.
I got the party-planning fever and decided on a fifties theme. I thought everyone would enjoy re-imagining a more innocent era when we were all a lot less world-weary. With the help of our endlessly resourceful assistant Maureen, who had a great imagination and love of celebration, things quickly fell into place. It was an afternoon picnic-on-the-grounds affair, casual except for me in my yellow-netted strapless prom dress and Waylon in his midnight-black prom tux. Johnny arrived wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his sleeve. June wore an aqua taffeta and lace gown, a perfect example of midcentury fashion. Robert Duvall came dressed up as June and his wife Gail dressed up as Johnny. He later led the hilarious ceremony that roasted the man of the hour.
Kris and Lisa Kristofferson, along with their firstborn, Jesse, flew in from California as surprise guests. I was so delighted that everyone showed up—Becky and Hank Williams, Connie and Willie Nelson, plus Rodney Crowell who led the sing-along.
The sobriety theme in no way diminished the joy of the party. Everyone stayed late into the night. We danced and laughed and joked and sang. I can’t remember a more fun-loving evening. The high point—at least for me—came the next afternoon when Johnny showed up at our door and hand delivered this letter.