Waylon

by Waylon Jennings

  I didn’t want a drummer at first. I liked the boom-chicka-boom of Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two, bare and basic. But Richie had a kind of infectious smile, and you couldn’t not like him. The way he played reminded me of Sandy Nelson. Because we didn’t have a regular drummer, our sense of beat wasn’t definite. It snaked around. Richie didn’t keep a straight time or anything, but he was a sinuous drummer; he could keep that rolling rhythm going.

  I took him back to the bass drum and the snare. I hadn’t been used to drums, so I said, “Just hit the foot and the snare; don’t put anything else in there until I tell you.” Gradually we kept adding the other pieces of the kit: the toms, the high hat, the cymbals. But we made sure the rhythm kept pumping. Richie played a lot of the up kicks, the “ands” of the beat, and gradually we found our own style.

  The music started coming together at J.D.’s. On the weekends, we played afternoons as well as afterhours. At night we played four sets. In the first, I wouldn’t do dance music, and people would come out and sit for the opening hour and watch. By the second set they’d start dancing, and I’d be talking to them, having some fun, just like I’d been used to on the radio. It wasn’t that hard. Being funny is my second nature. Of course, being sexy is my first one.

  We were right by Arizona State University, and the students started coming around. All the other bands in town were western swing. We played all kinds of songs; I didn’t just sing country music. We did rock ’n’ roll and some folk music and some blues. We played things the cowboys liked as well as the students, the professors, the baseball players, and the rock ’n’ rollers. Everybody got along, which is how I started to realize that music can be a common denominator that draws people together. If they let it.

  At J.D.’s was where I learned the value of a band. I can’t imagine working without a regular group, getting up there every night with strangers. It’s hard enough to get used to another guitar. For a singer, a band is a crucial instrument, and I’ve never been without one.

  Richie was my right hand. Wiry and sharp-featured, he had been born in Bradley, Oklahoma, and grew up in Bagdad, Arizona. Bagdad is an open pit mine, is what it amounts to. His brothers are old roughhouse boys, and he was the baby of them. When I tracked him down on his Coors beer delivery route and asked him to come to Phoenix, the band truly became the Waylors, named after yours truly. He was always loyal; he would’ve killed somebody for me. We would be together for more than twenty years, and it took us that long to run it through the wall. We’re still as close as kin. I’m godfather to his son, and I named my son after him, and he named his daughter after me.

  Gropp was fun-loving, with a grin at the ready, and we were always winding each other up. You could say anything you wanted to him, and it would just run off his back. He’d laugh and come back with some comment. I always knew he was going to screw up somewhere, and he’d be the first to let you know if you made a mistake. He’d be on my left side, with that guitar pointing into my ribs, and if I hit a bum note or sang something flat, he’d lean over and mutter “Wrong.” That’s how that song came about.

  I’d be on stage and he’d be talking to me all the time. If I went “Oh, I love her so,” I’d hear him ask “What’s her ‘so’?” He drove me nuts. He was an excellent guitar player and had a good voice, but he never understood singing. He could scream as good as any rock ’n’ roller, though. He called me all kinds of nicknames, playing off my own: Penrod Jenkins was one. Gropp started calling me Waymore, after Waymore Svenson, the Swedish yodeler. That one stuck, and pretty soon it was how the Waylors referred to me.

  Ed Metzendorf quit right before J.D.’s, and Paul Foster came in on bass. He was about to get married and settle down, but he played with us while we made a name in Phoenix. Pretty soon the crowds were lined out the door to get into J.D.’s every night, stretching over the hill and practically into Scottsdale. We’d kick off the Cajun beat and that place would be romping to where the whole floor would be shaking. Then I’d turn around and do a ballad like Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” and you could hear a pin drop. When I went for the high note at the end, the crowd would come unglued. They just screamed. I was living and breathing and sleeping the life I loved; I ate it up.

  The club put a grill cloth with WAYLON and J.D.’s on it in front of the amp line. My reputation was spreading throughout Arizona. I was the hottest thing in town. I was making decent money for the first time, and paying the band. The crowds were listening to me, and I was getting to them. I could tell the girls liked me and the cowboys thought I was a good ol’ boy. But most important, in the middle of a set, I’d turn around and look at Richie and we’d be going off on this tangent, jamming, letting the song carry us along, and a smile of satisfaction would spread across our faces. I just knew musically that we fit.

  Most of the material we did at J.D.’s was covers (“He makes others’ hits his own” was the way they put it), but I still thought that writing a good song was one of the most satisfying things you could do. If a song says what you want it to say at the end, and draws a mental picture, there’s few things in life that can make you feel more creative.

  You can’t write a great song very often, but you can sure try. I filled up boxes with lyrics, and tried to put them on the rhythms I was playing. When I was at K-triple-L, I had written a song with Sky Corbin called “Young Widow Brown,” which Frankie Miller made a semi-pop hit out of in 1958. Both Sky and Slim encouraged me to write, but I hadn’t found what I wanted to say yet. We got into writing soap operas; I think one was called “Portia Faces Life.”

  We got a kick out of writing those songs, but I wasn’t sure I had any gift for it. The songs I was listening to in my head weren’t like the ones I was hearing on the radio. When Don Bowman, a San Diego disc jockey who had once worked at K-triple-L, called to ask if I might want to help him work on some tunes, I figured I may as well give it a chance.

  I’d never thought of him as a songwriter, but he had gone to California and made a name for himself, writing for, among others, Homer and Jethro. I knew he could be funny. Don and I had always gotten in trouble at K-triple-L. One of the ways the station paid for their lease was that every thirty minutes we had to announce “Studios atop the beautiful Great Plains Life Building in downtown Lubbock, Texas.” Well, one day it sounded awfully funny for us to say “Studios in the basement of the ol’ courthouse and it’s been condemned.” We didn’t have to say that more than three times and they had him on the carpet.

  We were a little out of control. We’d put on a long-play record and go out and bowl a few frames. Finally, they got to where they put up a sign saying “Waylon Jennings and Don Bowman are not allowed in the control room at the same time while on the air” and posted it right next to the FCC regulations.

  I remembered all this when he called me. We had gone our separate ways, and I was impressed at how far he’d traveled. He had just signed with RCA and had put out an album composed of mostly novelty songs, including the prophetic “Chet Atkins, Make Me a Star.” He heard I was playing around Phoenix and was curious to know if I wanted to collaborate. About the first thing he brought over was “Just to Satisfy You.” He had a verse and no melody, and we went ahead and finished that. It happened so quick, I thought that can’t be any good.

  We wrote several things together, and I learned so much from working with Don. He taught me that you have to have humor, whether or not the song itself is funny. If you get too damn serious, it becomes work. Every once in a while we’d get hung up on a phrase, and I’d go to the bathroom and take a piss, and while I was in there I’d think of a line. We called it a bathroom line.

  Don was friendly with Jerry Moss out in Los Angeles, and he took some of my demos over to him. Jerry was just starting A&M Records with Herb Alpert, a trumpet player who had struck gold the year before with “The Lonely Bull.” Jerry and Herb decided they’d like to try something with me.

  On July 9, 1963, a contract arrived at 2022 North Thirty-sixth Street, a
partment B1, in Phoenix, giving me a 5 percent royalty rate for two sides of a single: “Love Denied” and “Rave On.” The flip was the Buddy Holly song, while Bill Tilghman wrote “Love Denied.” It had a real high ending, almost like Roy Orbison. I think that was one of the things Herb and Jerry were impressed with, my range.

  Herb didn’t like country music, though as a singer, he felt there was a something about me that he didn’t feel was country. I think he was hoping I was more of an Al Martino, while I was leaning toward Flatt and Scruggs. There was a girl on the label at the time, Lucille Starr, who’d originally been in a group from Alberta called the Canadian Sweethearts. She’d had some success in the country market, and maybe they figured I could hit both.

  Folk music was also starting to be popular then. I loved Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and songs like “Don’t Think Twice” and “Silver Dagger.” I found The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the “Blowin’ in the Wind” album, in a dollar bin, and though I thought Dylan was the weirdest singer, there was something about his voice that pulled me in.

  Herb and Jerry brought me out to Los Angeles and did something in that vein, a version of Ian Tyson’s “Four Strong Winds.” We backed it with “Just to Satisfy You”; I think Jerry lead-whistled on it, and Herb played the horns on “Four Strong Winds.”

  Herb kept looking for something in me he couldn’t find. It just wasn’t there, really. He truly liked my singing, and he wanted me to make it, but even if you get a bigger hammer, you can’t fit a round peg into a square hole. One night we tried “Unchained Melody” countless times. I never understood, though I do now, what he was talking about. It was too far over my head. The only word that matters in that song is “hunger”; if you get that right, the song is yours. I never got it.

  I wasn’t comfortable in the studio. I was just too green. In L.A., I talked myself into a sinus infection and a cold. I thought, if I do this wrong, they won’t want to work with me anymore and it’ll be all over. Herb made me very nervous, because I respected him and wanted to please him so bad, more than anything he did at the recording. There was a greatness about him, and Herb and Jerry are two of the most caring, honest people I’ve ever met in the record business. They were wonderful to me.

  But it wasn’t right. We cut “The Twelfth of Never,” “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine,” and “Don’t Think Twice,” and for a third single, “Sing the Girls a Song, Bill,” backed with “The Race Is On.” A&M released my three 45s during 1964, one every couple of months from April through October, which helped my popularity at J.D.’s but didn’t make much of an impact anywhere else. “Sing the Girls” was a radio hit in Nashville and gave me some credibility; though if I could’ve used any encouragement, I had only to look out at J.D.’s nightly throngs to know I was doing something right. I just needed to figure out a way to capture it on a record.

  In the fall of 1964, I went into Audio Recorders in Phoenix, a studio owned by Floyd Ramsey, where Duane Eddy had done his earliest singles. Floyd owned a record label, Ramco, that had leased my Trend masters, and he had built a new, larger studio across the street. Richie, Paul, Jerry, and myself spent four or five hours one night cutting some of the most popular “screamers” we did in our live show.

  It was a varied bunch of material, an album to be sold at the club as a souvenir. We covered everything from rock ’n’ roll to folk and country; Mel Tillis’s “Burning Memories” and Buck Owens’s “Love’s Gonna Live Here” to Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice” and Buddy’s “It’s So Easy.” On Harlan Howard’s “Sally Was a Good Old Girl,” there’s a lot of howling and growling as the song faded into the desert air. We went a little wild with the echoplex on “Dream Baby,” one of two Roy Orbison songs. I still thought he wouldn’t be big because of that high voice. And yes, I hit the note true at the end of “Crying,” and drained it to the last drop of reverb.

  I was living on North Thirty-sixth Street in Phoenix when Kennedy was assassinated. I was there the first time I ever heard the Beatles over the radio. It was the first nice place I’d ever had.

  Lynne knew how to take care of money, and we were getting ahead. She had come from Pike County, Kentucky, where her dad had been a moonshiner. He had to move the family out to Idaho when Lynne was little, and he hadn’t been there too long when he was hit by a car going across the street in the little town of Chub-bock. The feds came and dug up his body to make sure it was him. He must’ve done something pretty wrong back in Kentucky for them to go to all that trouble.

  Her mother chewed tobacco, just a little pinch where you couldn’t tell, in her lip; and she loved me from the word go. Lynne wasn’t so sure. She never had respect for me as a man as far as intelligence went. She was older than me by almost a decade and couldn’t forget that. She had strong opinions on everything and thought she was so smart. She was smart, but she was never smarter than me. That’s where our problems started.

  Lynne did not trust men. She was married twice before, and I think she had a complex about not being educated. She liked to be in control, and that was always a hard call with me. At the beginning, the age difference was in her favor. It gave her an edge; she was more streetwise, tougher than I was, though I later realized a lot of it was based on sheer bravado. Then it turned around the other way, where she worried that I was going to run off with a younger woman.

  More problems in marriage are brought about by insecurity than anything else. If I said something about loving my mother in front of Maxine, she thought it took away from my love for her. For Lynne, the more popular I got, the more she suspicioned it was turning my head around. I’m sure there were moments she could feel me slipping away.

  We had some good times. Every Monday night we’d visit a restaurant in Scottsdale named Monte’s, where they had a great steak and salad with Roquefort dressing. We’d cook out in the backyard. We’d play cards. Working in bars, we didn’t go out much.

  Whenever we had too much time out of bed, we’d get in a fight. It must be a law of nature that the very things that turn you on about each other make you insecure later. We quarreled as many minutes as we were cuddling up, and the fighting may have been part of the lovemaking. One usually seemed to follow the other.

  I think you feel guilty when you’re married and start seeing somebody else. It was wrong, we both knew that. After my divorce came through from Maxine, we needed to justify our behavior, because it was all too easy to throw it up in each other’s faces when we got mad. “Oh, you were easy to get,” I’d tell Lynne, and she’d answer, “I didn’t have to do anything to get you in bed.” Neither of us could cast the first stone. In an odd way, I think we got married to see if we could get along better. After all we’d been through, went the reasoning, at least we ought to give it a try.

  I brought out what I called the marine sergeant in her. She was one of those people who could get mad and stay angry for two weeks, never speaking to you, even though you were in the same house. She had strength and weakness mixed up, always unsure of herself and her grip on me. Things were starting to roll my way, and there were more demands on my time. It couldn’t have been easy, but her way of holding on was to dig in and ridicule me. She was afraid of seeming vulnerable. It got worse when Maxine sent my kids to live with us. I was trying to do the best I could; still, I couldn’t get any cooperation from Lynne. She would not accept children by another wife in the house.

  Lynne had a miscarriage before we were married. She had nephritis, which is a kidney disease, and when she got pregnant we had to have an abortion to save her life. It was our most tender moment together; I felt so bad for her. She wanted a baby more than anything, and the loss really affected her. I don’t think she felt she was a full woman, and maybe she hoped that it would cement our relationship, to have a child that was truly ours.

  We brought Tomi Lynne home to our apartment when she was three days old. Through friends, Jo and Jan, we found a young girl who was going to have a baby; Lynne and I both knew the mother. She had become pregnant by a
married man, and financially or circumstantially she could get no support from the father. We arranged the adoption through a lawyer, and we chose Jo as her godmother. A couple of years later, I would return the favor by introducing Jo as my sister to “Ballad of Paladin” singer Johnny Western when he came to spell me at J.D.’s. When he left Phoenix, he took her with him, and they’ve spent the rest of the years since happily married.

  Our new daughter arrived on our doorstep in a bassinet that had “no information” written on it. Her underarms and her little feet were cracked and bleeding. No one had thought to put oil on her or anything. Tomi Lynne lay there in my lap that night; she was so tender and beautiful. People say babies can’t see, but she looked at me and she’d go to sleep, and then she’d wake up and look at me. I guess she felt secure.

  We were doing quite well. At J.D.’s I was taking home over a thousand dollars a week, and I was able to buy the first brand-new car I had ever owned, a ’64 Chevrolet. As a family, we moved over to Pierce Street, and then got a house in Scottsdale, on East Amelia right off Indian School Road. We needed the room because my kids from Maxine had arrived. They were a little confused by the new situation, though they tried not to show it. I’m sure my separation from their birth mother hurt them, dividing their tiny loyalties, but they seemed resilient enough. Like most kids from broken homes, I think they always hoped that it might miraculously change back. There wasn’t much chance of that, but they were happy to see me, running up the walk and throwing their arms around me, while Lynne watched from the side, giving me the cold shoulder, inwardly fuming.

  Lynne would show all the love in the world to Tomi Lynne, and none to my other children. She’d make them stay outside all day, and only let them come in to play in the family room and their bedroom, and eat in the kitchen.