She hated that they were there. All of her attention went to her little girl. Lynne would cuddle with her and kiss on her and never pay any attention to the others except to correct them, holler at them, or tell them to go to bed. She could never speak kind to them.
This went on for a year and a half, two years. One night they were all there, and she was playing with the baby, and the baby was squealing, and Lynne was laughing and tickling her. The other kids were in the room. Buddy was about four years old, and he walked up to her and put his hand on her arm. “Wynne,” he said in his little voice, “do you wike me?”
That broke my heart. “Sure,” she said. “I like you. Go set down,” and she went back to playing with the little girl, hugging her. She never kissed one of the other kids in her life. There was no affection there.
I kept thinking things would change, but it was never for the better. We could go for a week and not say a word to each other. One time she made me so mad I grabbed the metal closet doors and pulled them off, and cut my hands to keep from hitting her. She hated that my kids were around. They wanted Lynne to love them, and I saw them trying to win her approval. But she was cold to them, and consequently me. All she did was scold.
I thought, This can’t go on. So I called Maxine and told her I was going to send the kids back. I bought her a brick house, filled it with furniture, and packed up the kids’ clothes and toys in a trailer. I kissed Terry, Julie, and Buddy, and the baby Deana goodbye, for how long I couldn’t know. My brother took them back to Texas, and the night they left I sat up crying. I didn’t go to bed at all.
The next morning Lynne came over to me. I was still sitting in the chair, red-eyed. We hadn’t even spoken for two weeks. “Hon’, don’t be sad,” she said. “Everything is going to be all right. Don’t you worry, we’ll make it fine.”
I looked at her. “If you’d called me a rotten sonofabitch, or told me to fuck off or something like that, you might’ve been able to hold on to me. But you ain’t got a chance. I’ll never live with you.” And I got up and left. She tried everything she could to get me to come back. I couldn’t forgive her for making me send my kids away, though she was the first woman I ever thought I loved.
I had met Barbara at the Cross Keys: long blond hair, pretty blue eyes, built like you wouldn’t believe. Richie was the only unmarried man in the group and she became friendly with him so she could always be around. But he was just the excuse. Barbara Rood had her eye on me, even though I was still with Lynne, and I wasn’t exactly blind either.
I remember the night she showed up at the Cross Keys. Everybody did. It was like something out of a movie; she was the star. It was summertime and she was wearing a sundress. She pulled up in a red convertible outside the club with her girlfriend and walked in, the center of attention, tall and tan. Statuesque. Even in the glamor town of Phoenix, she stood out like a lighthouse in the fog.
We stayed away from each other as long as we could. We’d talk some, but we never did anything. Finally I went to Houston to have some talks with a record label there, and she came down. It was the first time we were together. She was never comfortable with what we were doing, and I wasn’t either. Still, it was hard to keep away, and we started seeing each other on the sly. I’d have to go over to her house in the daytime.
Barbara was a golden girl and a dear heart. Her dad had invented a cotton machine that picked up cotton between the rows that the boll puller would miss. He was worth about thirty million dollars, and she had a lot of money. She even bought a car the same color as mine. She was definitely more of a party girl than Lynne.
I wrote “Anita, You’re Dreaming” about her when we first got together. I had most of it done and Don Bowman helped me finish it. She was “Anita … dreaming of a world that just don’t exist.” I was telling her that it didn’t look like I was ever going to get loose from Lynne, and she was young and deserved a better deal than I could offer. She was dreaming if she thought it could happen.
But dreams have a way of revealing truths, and when I left Lynne, I went right to Barbara.
That wasn’t the only fantasy crossing the line into reality. Don had become friends with Bobby Bare, who had gotten out of the army and, rather than coasting on his Bill Parsons persona, had scored hits with “500 Miles Away from Home” and “Detroit City” under his own name. Bowman was always telling him about me, and he got to find out for himself when he was driving through Phoenix one time and heard “Just to Satisfy You” on the radio.
He brought the record to his producer in Nashville, Chet Atkins, and said he wanted to record it. Chet was familiar with “Just to Satisfy You” because Bowman had brought him a copy of the record, but he turned it over and said “Hell, this is the one I want to do.” So they wound up doing them both. “Four Strong Winds” turned out to be a big hit for Bobby.
Chet had also heard of me because he’d done one of my songs with Don, “Help Keep Ol’ John Out of Town.” It was a novelty song about this guy who’s fooling around with the wife of a country star who’s on the road, wearing his clothes and smoking his cigars. The punch line was “So buy all his records / And go see his shows / And help keep of John out of town.” Chet thought it was clever.
The next time Bobby came through Phoenix, in November of 1964, he headed over after his gig to J.D.’s and we did a duet on “Just to Satisfy You.” He had the next day off so he came to see me and the band play. Somewhere between Phoenix and Las Vegas, he got to thinking about it, and stopped at a pay phone.
“Chet,” he said. “I’ve just seen Waylon. He’s the best thing since Elvis. I know he and I are doing the same kind of songs, the same kind of material for the same kind of audience. But I dug everything about him: his voice, the way the band stays out of his way so you can hear him sing, his hold on the audience. He is so good, he deserves to be on a major label.”
Chet had heard similar praise from Skeeter Davis, who called him at home to tell him he should sign me, and Duane Eddy. It wasn’t like an agent or a manager coming in and hyping someone; that doesn’t mean anything. But coming from Bobby, who liked country and folk and had been a part of rock ’n’ roll, the recommendation meant something. We loved the same songs.
Bobby gave Chet my phone number.
To be on RCA and have Chet Atkins produce me. To have him call me and tell me he would like to sign me, having never even seen me. I’ll never forget that day. I was sitting at home, and I could hear this real gentle, kind voice on the other end of the phone, saying “We’d sure like for you to record for RCA. Would you be interested?”
Would I be interested?
It was impossible to say no. That was the ultimate. RCA—or Victor, as I’d seen on so many Jimmie Rodgers and Carter Family 78s—was recorded country music from almost the very beginning, dating back to the Bristol, Tennessee, sessions organized by Ralph Peer in 1928; and Chet was a legend. Not only was he a well-regarded artist and repertoire executive who could put a gold seal on your career, but he was a musician’s musician, an originator who had his own Gretsch guitar named after him: the Country Gentleman. He was Sonny Curtis’s idol!
You could book on the road without hit records, because you were on RCA and Chet Atkins produced you. God’s right hand, they called him. “Are you signed to a label?” Chet asked me.
A&M was just a little independent then, built around the Tijuana Brass. They hadn’t yet signed Captain Beefheart or Procol Harum or Cat Stevens or the Carpenters. From such acorns oak trees might grow, but at that time there wasn’t much more than a seedling sprouting. I had gotten the call that every country boy dreams of. I asked Herb and Jerry if I could get loose to go with RCA, though if they wanted me to stay, I said I would. “Sure, Waylon,” Jerry agreed. He knew they’d be unduly pressured to have a big hit with me if I turned down Chet’s offer. “We don’t want to stand in your way. We understand what Chet would mean to you.”
Herb understood as well, but he countered RCA’s bid with something more perso
nal. “I hate to give up,” he said. “I really think I could do it with you. I believe I can.” He offered me a percentage of the company, eight or ten percent, if I would stay. It was the hardest thing in the world to say “No, I really want to try this.” They were the best people for giving me my release, and still are. They taught me how to truly sing “Unchained Melody.”
When I look down today at my guitar, caught in the spotlights of whatever town is giving me a place on their stage, it’s essentially similar to the instrument I played at J.D.’s. It’s a Fender Telecaster; solid body, maple neck. It ain’t got but two knobs on it. You turn it on and you have the same sound all the way through.
You can put a guitar against you and feel it vibrating as you play it. They’re never really in tune, especially the B string. I hate the B string. What you learn to do is pull ’em into place with your finger. For me, they’re a lot like women. You can touch one of them in the dark and know she ain’t yours; or you’re with the right one.
My original Telecaster was covered in leather tooling by a cleanup man at Wild Bill’s named Howard Turner. He customized a 1953 model, a gift to me from the Waylors. Barbara was in on it. I think she bought the matching Fender amplifier, a black-face Super Reverb, and the band put a fifteen-inch “Living” Lansing speaker in it. We all had identical guitar straps with our names inscribed—Way Ion, Jerry, and Paul—and we wore short Mexican tuxedo jackets and matching pants with a stripe down the side.
I was still playing “White Lightning.” Only instead of standing on top of a concession stand in a drive-in, I was looking out over a sea of bobbing heads, swaying bodies, packed together too tightly to dance, all moving to the ricketty racket we were setting in motion from the J.D.’s stage. Buddy had always said to leave them wanting more, to quit while you were on top. Then they’d exaggerate to the good. I was aiming to leave.
In the desert, a few inches of rain can turn into several feet of raging water. That dry river bottom, located right next to J.D.’s, had been a rushing torrent in 1964, when the club had gone under in a flash flood, and they’d had to muck it out. I felt like the same flood had caught me in its current, swept me away on the river of music, giving me hope and possibility and the challenge of staying afloat. I didn’t want to drown in the next overflow, or have them find me years later in the River Bottom district.
There was another couple of sets to go on this night, and the next, and the next. At least now it looked as if I might be given the chance to keep on playing. Maybe for the rest of my life. It’s all I ever wanted to do.
CHAPTER 4
FROM NASHVILLE BUM …
I started out for Nashville with a yellow Cadillac and a yellow-haired woman. The band loaded an old Chevy flower car from a funeral home with our equipment, and I went to pick up Barbara.
We left late at night. I put her big red trunk with the brass fittings in the trailer behind the Cadillac and we drove off. I was getting a divorce from Lynne, and it wasn’t exactly clear in the whole world’s mind what mine and Barbara’s relationship was going to be. We weren’t about to risk any chances of getting stopped at the border.
The journey seemed to take forever. When we got to Tennessee, it was daytime. It might have been my anticipation, but all I remember are the winding roads before I got to the freeway, twisting and turning back and forth, like I was continually glancing back over my shoulder at my past life before heading into the future. We climbed over one hill after another, Memphis aiming east toward Nashville, until finally Music City stuck its head over the horizon like a rising sun. I could hardly believe this was going to be my new home.
It was a big step for me, a chance I was taking, and I was anxious to get started. I’d thought long and hard about leaving Phoenix, even asking another RCA artist passing through town what he thought of moving. His name was Willie Nelson, and he’d been having success as a songwriter. “Crazy” and “Funny How Time Slips Away,” for Patsy Cline, were already standards, and Faron Young’s “Hello Walls” was well on its way to becoming a classic. He was a fellow Texan, appearing across town at the Riverside Ballroom. We had never met before, but my first album was about to come out, and he’d also just gotten his start recording as an artist in his own right. He liked my singing and I liked his.
Willie came to town and sent word he wanted to meet me. I went over to the Adams Hotel and spent the afternoon finding out how much we had in common, asking him about Nashville and what I might expect. He had just moved there. I told him I had a good deal at J.D.’s. By then, I was up to maybe fifteen hundred dollars a week, clear. Not bad for a “sit down” job, as we called gigs that you didn’t have to go on the road for.
“Don’t move,” he told me. “And if you do, let me have that job!”
As usual, I followed the opposite course. I’d been in Nashville a couple of times during the previous year, 1965, looking around, cutting songs with Chet, and getting a feel for the city. I’d been there once before Bobby saw me, and tried to see if I couldn’t get something going. I found the doors closed. I didn’t know anybody then, and nobody knew me.
Eight months later, Chet’s blessing had made all the difference. I was the talk of the town. When I arrived, it was at Nashville’s invitation, and all along the grapevine the word was out. Sometimes you don’t need a hit record: If you go somewhere and set down and make enough noise, they’ll know it’s you that they want. They came to me. There was a buzz, and I was the buzzard.
Bobby Bare put me up when I went to record officially for the first time as an RCA artist. I spent three days in mid-March—for the record, it was the sixteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth—cutting most of what would become my first album, Folk-Country. In those sessions we recorded twelve songs, including my first single, “That’s the Chance I’ll Have to Take,” as well as a couple of B sides.
Chet let me bring my band in the studio: Gropp on guitar and Richie on drums. We’d been playing “Stop the World (and Let Me Off)” in the clubs, and had it all worked out. Chet did a wild thing. He liked the way Jerry dubbed his strings, muting them when he played, so he put a microphone next to his pick hand on the electric guitar. It was like a percussive drone.
I started playing the break. I looked over in the control room and realized “I’m playing guitar in front of Chet Atkins!” So I just grabbed me a string and held on for dear life. It made a good middle eight, though.
Folk-Country was Nashville’s scheme to snare some of the hootenanny folk audience, which was then starting to cross over to rock. Along with me, it was hoped that John D. Loudermilk, John Hartford, and George Hamilton IV might win a few extra converts to country. I didn’t mind the label; to me, folk music was the original country music, sung by folks, plain and simple.
I stayed over a couple of extra days and did one of Bare’s sessions, playing guitar and singing harmony on “Streets of Baltimore” and “Memphis,” making a little expense money.
We went back to performing in Phoenix. Though it wasn’t the megalopolis it is today, I was a big frog in a not-much-bigger puddle. The entertainment columnist at the local paper kept referring to me as “That Guy down at the River Bottom”: He couldn’t bring himself to say my name. People knew I was going to leave, and that only filled up J.D.’s even more.
My first single came out in May, and Chet called me back to Nashville on July 28 to cut a few more songs for the album. Among the newer things I did was “Anita, You’re Dreaming.” By the time I came back for a third time in the middle of February, 1966, cutting a variety of material that ranged from “(That’s What You Get) for Lovin’ Me” to the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood,” “Stop the World” had gotten into the Top Fifteen, and “Anita” was riding midway in the country charts. Folk-Country was coming out the next month. Chet had declared March “Male Singer Month” at RCA, and the company was riding high with ten entries in the Top Twenty-five. Included along with me was Porter Wagoner, Eddy Arnold, Hank Locklin, Jim Reeves, Archie Campbell, and Staff S
ergeant Barry Sadler with “Ballad of the Green Berets.” It was time to move.
First I had to let Phoenix know what they would be missing. If you leave on top, Buddy said, it’ll make it appear even bigger than it really is. Still, we couldn’t have gotten any larger unless we’d moved the show over to the Coliseum. On the first weekend in April, and my last weekend as a local performer at J.D.’s, it was monstrous. The word was out that this was going to be my fare-thee-well stand, and they packed close to two thousand people upstairs. Johnny Western warmed up the crowd, playing the appropriate theme from Have Gun Will Travel, while I waited backstage at my coffee pot, having another cup. Substitute the word guitar for gun and you had me. The Telecaster Cowboy.
Gotta travel on. Stage, that is. It was unreal, the crowd screaming their heads off, hanging on every word. I showed out. You can’t do it any other way. When they go that crazy, you can’t give them any less than your best, a hundred and twenty percent instead of a hundred and ten. It was a hell of a three days. People were happy for me; but there were a lot of folks crying in their beer because I wasn’t going to be theirs anymore. I kind of missed that part myself. Wish me luck; and this one’s a ladies choice.
Waitin’ for my big break to come
Livin’ on catsup soup, homemade crackers and Kool-Aid
I’ll be a star tomorrow but today
I’m a Nashville Bum
* * *
We like to have starved when we got to Nashville. We were jumping in with the big boys and girls; performers we’d heard on the radio all our life, and the thousands of hopeful newcomers that come each year to the hub of country music looking for a quick spin. We were giving up a steady job. Richie had a Thun-derbird and a playboy apartment and all the women he could ask for. He knew it was only a matter of time, but he hated to leave Phoenix.
Waylon Page 11