by Bruce Feiler
Waylon, to his credit, claimed not to be surprised by the turn of fortune. “I was always aware that it was going to come down,” he told me. “Their loss,” echoed Willie. Far more distressing, though—to them and to many of their admirers—was the fact that many of the freedoms they had earned seemed to be disappearing along with them. Few artists challenge the musical norm anymore. Even fewer bring their bands into the studio. “I wish it was still like it was in those days,” Travis Tritt, the closest thing Nashville has to an Outlaw today, told me. “You’re in a situation now where the money is the generating factor behind everything. It’s a shame because the word ‘art’ falls out of the word ‘artist’ at that point. Creativity does, too. You’re not writing from the heart, you’re doing albums based on what’s commercial at the time. The cool thing about Waylon, Johnny Cash, and Willie Nelson is they didn’t pay any attention to that shit. They just did their own thing.”
“That’s what’s pissed me off about that night with Steve,” Waylon said. It was some months after that evening in the studio, and Waylon was sitting in a plush leather chair in his office on Music Row. “What pissed me off is that he wasn’t listening to anybody. I would never tell an artist not to sing something one more time. And to think I kept him from going to prison a few years back.”
Waylon was feeling feisty. He was perched underneath a wall full of photos from his glory days—Waylon in a mushed-down cowboy hat, Waylon and Willie sitting behind a microphone, Waylon with sweat dripping off his bangs. Across the alley, Garth’s management company was visible through the trees. (“He’s the most insincere person I’ve ever seen,” Waylon said of Garth. “I remember a few years ago an old buddy of mine who worked with Ernest Tubb was giving him an old record. He tried so hard to cry, but he just couldn’t make himself do it. He thinks it’s going to last forever. He’s wrong.”)
The conversation, though notably casual, had taken months to set up as Waylon went through bouts of illness, isolation, and just plain orneriness that left his handlers cowering in the face of his unpredictability. (Willie was no different. When he failed to emerge at the scheduled hour several days later for a conversation, his publicist called to report: “I’ve phoned him at home and at the World Headquarters in Austin. I faxed the bus and had him paged on the golf course. Be patient. Sooner or later, he’ll show.” Several hours later, my telephone rang. “Hi, Bruce,” came the gravelly voice on the other end. “It’s Willie.”)
Waylon chuckled when reminded he had threatened to shoot me. “It was part of my joke,” he said. “I got a lot of credit for things over the years when I was just joking. One time RCA had been giving me some shit. I said, ‘You sons of bitches. If you keep messing with me, I’ll get in the vault and burn the goddamn tapes.’ Well, they was so scared they went and hid my tapes in Indianapolis. They didn’t find them for five years. When they finally came and told me, I said, ‘What a bunch of assholes. I wasn’t going to burn my tapes. I might burn Elvis’s tapes, but I certainly wasn’t going to burn mine.’” At times, too, he seemed almost embarrassed—by his fame, by his drug abuse, and mostly by his reputation. “John Lennon one time said to me, ‘You know what? I thought you were crazy.’ I said, ‘You’re funnier than hell.’ He said, ‘No, I’m serious. People in England think you shoot folks.’”
But underneath, Waylon seemed most surprised that his once overwhelming power had evaporated. Even his disciples no longer seemed interested in listening to his opinions. “I had ideas I wanted to try that night,” he said of his evening with Steve Earle. “I had a guitar part I was going to do. I never got it out of the case. I think Steve was overly excited. Me and Willie had talked about it; we sure didn’t want to do a Steve Earle record. We wanted to do our own version. All he had to do was listen to us.” That he didn’t listen was what disappointed Waylon most. “This ain’t something that I don’t know about,” he said. “I have found out that every damn time I let somebody get too much control, it ain’t me.”
Willie, for his part, was much less confrontational. “It takes a lot of energy to fight those kind of fights that are really not winnable,” he said later. “I loved that night. I know Waylon was listening for something he wasn’t hearing. I just hope he didn’t hurt anybody. I think it was Waylon who said, ‘It takes a bad son of a bitch to whip my ass, but it don’t take him long,’” He chuckled. “Truth is, I never fought ’em as much as Waylon has. He’s fought ’em pretty good, and more power to him because he was right.” It was that difference in temperament, Willie believed, that has so far kept Waylon out of the Hall of Fame. “Waylon is not the greatest politician in Nashville,” he said. “He shot himself in every foot he has, plus a couple of fingers.”
(As for Earle, he felt the studio was too crowded. “My sense of the vibe was you guys shouldn’t have been here,” he said, referring to all the guests. “And I really was upset about it. It came within a hair’s breath of me clearing the studio, and I should have in retrospect.” As producer, he had never gotten into a fight with an artist, he said. “Of course, I’m not the first person that Waylon ever got pissed off at in a recording studio. But I feel bad that it happened. I think the atmosphere in the studio cut down on my ability to communicate with him. He was gone before I really realized he was uncomfortable.”)
Either way, what Waylon realized anew that night was how removed he had become from the town he once defined. Though he continues to live in Nashville (the result, he says, of his seventeen-year-old son, Scooter, who refuses to let him leave) and records there as well, neither he nor Willie has released a record on a Nashville label in years. Both are now distributed by independent labels. As Waylon sang in 1994, in a seeming nod to this passage: “We were the wild ones / The ones they couldn’t control.” “We were survivors,” he declared.
Though he claimed not to be bitter by his forced exile—(“The good thing about it is I won,” Waylon said) in truth, it was easy to detect a note of betrayal. “I don’t want to be remembered for the type of music that’s here now,” Waylon said. “It’s not that good. Have you heard anything out there that you recognize? They’ve got a couple of artists that it took them sixty hours to get their voices in tune.” Some artists, he said, excited him: Mark Chestnutt, Trisha Yearwood, “and that kid Wade Hayes—he doesn’t need his voice to be tinkered with.” But most, he confessed, left him flat. “All the emphasis is on being pretty and dancing around,” he said. “I would go nuts. There’s no feeling in that.”
Instead, the two aging rebels were left to seek new musical ground. Willie dabbled in reggae and alternative rock and drew in a new audience inspired by his ageless hippie image (his support for Farm Aid didn’t hurt, nor did his multimillion-dollar battle with the IRS, which he was slowly paying off). “There’s a lot of young people today that have never heard all the great country music artists,” he said. “They’re still interested in hearing Lefty Frizzell and Hank Williams and Bob Wills and all those guys that you don’t hear on the radio every day. The difference between those guys and me, plus being alive, is that I’m out there working every night.”
Waylon took up Appalachian folk music, produced a blues album, befriended and mentored a group of young rockers (including James Hetfield of Metallica), and even appeared on the Lollapalooza Tour with the Screaming Trees. “It was the best audience I’ve ever played to,” he said. “I just knew my ass was in trouble. But the thing that made it great was when you looked out there in those faces and they were grinning.”
In a way, it was the best thing that could have happened to them. Instead of taking Nashville’s normal route—retiring to Branson, Missouri, or the Grand Ole Opry, the twin Jurassic Parks of country—they set out once more in pursuit of the fresh, renewing the vow of rebellion they had made three decades earlier. “You have your time,” Waylon said, “then you go about your business. I put some people out when I first arrived; they had to make room for me somewhere. So now they’re doing the same to me. That’s just the way it
works. I go out every now and then and perform a few shows. Every once in a while, I cut an album. I’m happy.”
The best thing about the turnover, he allowed, is that more young people are interested in the music. And even if they don’t always revere old-timers like him, well, that’s the way it is with young people. Who would know that better than he? “The truth is,” he said, “I never wanted to be a hero. I don’t want that much pressure. If these people want a hero, they need somebody besides me. I’m a singer, that’s all, and a guitar player. When I go out there, what I owe those people in the audience is a good performance. I don’t owe them shit past that. That’s not being ungrateful. That’s being real. I’ve worked hard and I own my talent.”
Which is perhaps his greatest achievement of all. Having once, high on drugs, slayed a generation of heroes, the Outlaws, a generation later, had managed to escape the most potent drug of all—becoming heroes themselves.
VERSE III
NINE
THE INTERVIEW
The morning snow was piled so high on 66th Street that the white limousine had to make a six-point turn in order to back into the cramped loading dock on the first floor of the ABC Studios just off Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
“Now, you gotta be outta here by ten-fifteen!” the attendant barked at the driver, who wasn’t paying him the least bit of attention because, at that moment, the front bumper of his car was stuck on a small glacier of ice. “Susan Sarandon is coming to tape a show and we can’t keep her waiting. She’s a very important lady, you know.”
Inside the limousine, Garth Brooks nodded in bemusement and shivered from the cold as he squeezed himself toothpastelike out of the car, tipped his baseball cap at the attendant, and squiggled through the back door of the building into the refrigerated linoleum hallway. “Boy, I love New York,” he said under his still-visible breath.
Inside the Green Room of “LIVE! With Regis and Kathie Lee,” the pre-talk show flutter was well underway. Producers with clipboards and stagehands with cue cards scurried in and out of the cramped office space, plucked pieces of pineapple from the buffet, and hurriedly shuffled sample questions from the hosts to the guests. Presently, Peter Jennings arrived for a segment on his Bosnia special and introduced himself to Garth. “Hmmm, Capitol Records,” he said of Garth’s lightweight black jacket with the purple logo. “Do you wear it for love or money?” Garth looked down at the jacket. “Neither,” he said. “It’s free.” Jennings chuckled and sat down on the sofa. “He sure seems like a nice guy,” he said.
Momentarily Garth was beckoned into the studio. Though still puffy from the early hour, he shadowboxed to give himself energy, and, as he had done already several times that week—on Fox’s “After Breakfast” and Lifetime’s “Biggers and Summers” (out of loyalty to Jay Leno, an early supporter, Garth refused to appear on David Letterman)—strolled out into the TV glow. Once in view of the camera, he doffed his hat, brought his hands together, and performed his trademark altar-boy bow. The audience, mostly women, rose to its feet.
What followed was fairly standard morning television fare, watchable in that breezy, happy-happy way that Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford have perfected over the years. The interview consisted of some gentle teasing from the hosts (Regis: “You don’t go anywhere without that hat now, do you?”); a touch of self-deprecation from the guest (Garth: “I have to cover my balding head with something…”); and a little family bonding along the way (Kathie Lee: “You have two kids now, yes? And another on the way. I remember you said you might retire a few years ago if your music conflicted with raising your children. I think that’s lovely…”). There’s a reason country has prospered in the era of the television talk shows: Their intimate, confessional natures are uniquely suited to each other.
But what happened next is what defines a master of the media. During the commercial (“Two minutes, two minutes to air…”), several of the members of the studio audience began jumping up and down, waving trinkets and carefully wrapped gifts they had brought to give to Garth. One of the pages went galloping into the bleachers and retrieved the gifts, including a small teddy bear and a single red rose from one woman near the back row. It could have been a moment that passed unnoticed. But as the stage manager started counting the time (“Thirty seconds and counting…”), Garth leaped out of his seat, grabbed the rose and bear from the page, and went bounding up into the seats, two steps at a time. Arriving at the last row, he gave the woman a full-body hug. Then, just as quickly, he turned, sprinted down the stairs again, and as the red light reappeared on the camera, (“In five, four, three, two…”), squiggled back into his seat.
“Oh, my God!” Regis gushed. “You’re not going to believe what just happened! Can we get a shot of that woman?” And suddenly there she was, on national TV, shaking and smiling, with tears streaming down her face.
Later that morning, Howard Stern’s office called and asked if Garth would like to make an appearance at Howard’s birthday bash that evening. Mr. Brooks politely declined.
For much of its history, country music was all but ignored by the national media. Various reasons explain this lack of interest. First, a chronic regionalism in American life. Country, of course, was based in the South, which for much of the Age of Television was treated as an isolated bulwark of pigtails, incest, and preternatural racism. Second, a tradition of classism in America. Because of its association with overalls, car grease, and Jell-O molds, country has been linked with a lingering fear in America that white trash “elements” will overrun the Establishment. Blips in Nashville, like Johnny Cash or Patsy Cline, might be noted in finer circles, but they were invariably treated as regional eccentricities. Bubbas can fish, but they can’t make art. As Nick Tosches wrote about the elite New York media in his 1977 book Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock ‘n’ Roll: “It is so much more comfortable, so much more acceptable, to dislike rednecks than blacks.”
This general disregard (hillbilly until proven innocent) was only intensified with the formation of the defining organ of music journalism, Rolling Stone, which dramatically inflated the stakes surrounding pop music. Founded in 1967, Rolling Stone christened, then perpetuated the idea that rock ‘n’ roll could save the world. Country didn’t share that ambition and wasn’t perceived by outsiders to have it inherently. Among other things, country was for old people and the counterculture establishment believed pop culture belonged to the young. Also, Country music was thought to be too traditional, too sentimental, and—let’s be blunt—too retrograde, both politically and socially. Rolling Stone did cover the occasional country artist, usually proto-rockers like the Outlaws or Tanya Tucker. But by and large, the magazine never welcomed Nashville artists into the fold. None of this would have been so bad—after all, Country Music magazine, founded in 1972, never covered Led Zeppelin—if it hadn’t been for Rolling Stone’s far-reaching power within music and journalism circles.
The unprecedented success of Nashville in the nineties presented a new threat to New York editors. The two chief reasons the media had ignored country music—region and class—suddenly seemed even sillier than they had before. First, the South no longer fit its own stereotype. From pariah region—hot, isolated, poor—the South had become the chief engine of growth and change in American life. Spurred by a growing population drawn by service jobs and air-conditioned suburbs, the South began to redefine America—from politics (Clinton, Gore, Gingrich), to cable television (TBS, TNT, CNN). Second, the class makeup of the region had changed. Garth Brooks, as Rolling Stone noted with glee, had graduated from college with a degree in advertising. Vince Gill’s father was a lawyer; Trisha Yearwood’s the vice president of a bank. At least two performers—Mary Chapin Carpenter and Marcus Hummon—grew up overseas when their fathers were transferred abroad…one for Life magazine, the other for the Agency for International Development. Nashville artists had come a long way from the days of coal miners’ daughters.
Predictably, t
his cleansing of country’s dirty-fingernail past, coupled with Nashville’s up-to-date sound, made it even more threatening to the high-minded rock set, who suddenly realized that many country artists and their fans had grown up at the mall, just like them. The pop elite needed a new reason to ignore country, which it found soon enough: Country, they said, had sold out its roots. This marked a dramatic shift. Suddenly writers and critics who had never cared for Nashville decided they didn’t like current country music because it didn’t hold up to the old, which, of course, they hadn’t liked in the first place, but now decided to embrace since it was no longer knocking at their door. An odd sort of retro, PC-chic set in. Old country artists were like Indians—oops, Native Americans—who had been ousted from their rightful territory by a bunch of marauders. Though this view is obviously silly—all facets of American culture kick out the old in favor of the new—it was still widely perpetuated in the media. The ultimate message to Nashville was unavoidable: You might as well stop aspiring, you’ll never enter our club.