The Nashville we arrived in had Roger Miller’s name written all over it. He had just gotten nine Grammy nominations, with “England Swings,” “Husbands and Wives,” and “I’ve Been a Long Time Leavin’ “all on the Top Fifty charts at the same time. Not bad for a guy who used to bellhop and run the elevator at the Hermitage Hotel while he was trying to get someone to listen to his songs.
Red Sovine was driving “Giddyup Go” while the Statler Brothers talked about smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo. Buck Owens was “Waitin’ in Your Welfare Line” listening to Cute ’n’ Country Connie Smith crooning “Nobody but a Fool.” And hovering in the teens on the country charts was a newcomer named Waylon Jennings, whose “Anita, You’re Dreaming” sat between Little Jimmy Dickens’s “When the Ship Hits the Sand” and Roy Drusky’s “Rainbows and Roses” one week, and Kitty Wells’s “A Woman Half My Age” and Tommy Collins’s “If You Can’t Bite, Don’t Growl” another.
Over on Sixteenth Avenue South, they were breaking ground for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Win or lose, I was now part of it, a tiny patch in country music’s rich quilt.
I still needed a place to live and a way to feed the band. The second priority was probably more urgent. Until my records started selling, I was not going to be a big money man, and even then, a hit country album could only be counted on to sell twenty or thirty thousand copies. W. E. “Lucky” Moeller, a booking agent, had promised to keep me working, which in Lucky’s terms meant I wouldn’t be home that much.
Lucky sold volume. His principle was “Keep the ’billies on the road.” You might play three or four times a year at the Flame in Minneapolis or the Horseshoe in Toronto, crisscrossing the country with hardly any rhyme or reason. To keep the band busy, he would discount them at lower prices. I’d be on the road all the time, generating Lucky’s ten percent by the week or fifteen percent for one nighters, and it would get me a lot of public exposure.
Lucky was like a father figure to me. He wore black-framed glasses and had a thin mustache. An old-timer in the booking business, he was a match for Harry “Hap” Peebles in Wichita, or Smokey Smith in Des Moines. Over the years he booked anybody and everybody. He’d run his own clubs and dance halls in Texas and Oklahoma, and had managed Bob Wills and Webb Pierce, so he knew the business from both sides of the fence. He knew what he needed, and how to get it. He’d not only paid talent, he’d sold talent. He was like an actor who directs.
That sword could cut two ways. The clubs and carnivals and state fairs might be assured of shows, and your date sheet might be filled, but he didn’t fight for big money. Lucky would rather sell more dates at the same price, even into the next year, than hold out getting you the extra five hundred dollars that could spell the difference between subsistence and pleasure. And by booking you so far in the future, it might backfire, as Little Jimmy Dickens found out when he scored a major pop hit with “May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose.” He couldn’t break out of the low-ball contracts he had signed a year in advance. By the time he was able to book new shows at a bigger figure, the Bird of Paradise had flown up his ass.
Lucky paid it no mind. Even though you were scraping by, he’d say “At least you’re still on the road!”
* * *
Living out of a suitcase, I stayed in hotels with Barbara. We started at the Anchor Motel and worked our way around to the Noel, the Andrew Jackson, the Downtowner.
Before I’d left Phoenix, I’d talked with John Cash about sharing an apartment when I got to Nashville. But the closer I got to calling him up when I arrived, the worse an idea it seemed. I was hanging out with Barbara, and even though I’d gotten to know John a bit, there was still something of the starstruck teenager in me who had heard “Cry, Cry, Cry” over the car radio, making the only left turn heading west on Highway 54: “Everybody knows where you go when the sun goes down.”
I had met John through June Carter, who had crossed my path years before when I was still a disc jockey in Lubbock. I was a little in awe of the Carter family, as you might expect. When I’d gone to record in Nashville that last year, Mother Maybelle invited me to dinner. It was an even bigger thrill than having my records cut. It was like being given the Holy Grail.
My relationship with June had nowhere to go but up. The first time I met her was the first and worst time I ever got drunk. She was on a package tour that came to Lubbock to play the state fair. Ray Price was headlining, and Skeeter Davis was also on the bill. I was going to play bass for Ray.
When you played a fair tour, it was customary to visit about five or six towns around the fair’s location to publicize it. That was part of the deal. We’d perform two or three songs, setting up one little microphone, and finish by telling the audience to “come see us tonight” at the fairground. We did the circuit all day once, and June was riding with me. She and Carl Smith had already split up; she was just the sweetest thing you ever saw.
We were in Spur, Texas; it’s the desert. They’ve got rattlesnakes seven feet long and more, and coyotes. Where the cap rock starts heading down, that’s Spur.
The promoters told us we were going to have a hamburger fry at a nearby ranch. When we got out there and looked around, they’d pulled up the rug, put a microphone in the corner with some amplifiers, and had a little bitty table plumb full of booze. They were intending on us playing the music while they danced. There wasn’t no food nowhere.
I was starving to death. We hadn’t eaten all day. It pissed me off, so I just joined the party. I decided to drink the liquor, and had a little bit of everything on the table. I got so drunk, I stumbled outside and passed out. They left me there and put a pillow under my head, right in the middle of nowhere.
When I woke up it was getting dark. I opened my eyes, unsticking them one at a time, and looked right into the snout of a black and white spotted hog that had come up and was snorting at my face. I must’ve let out a bloodcurdling scream. He took off and hit the side of the house at full tilt, squealing and squalling.
June got me and walked me to the car and put me in the back of the station wagon. The next thing I knew they were letting me out at K-triple-L. I had to work that day.
She came back through Lubbock a couple of times before I left for Arizona, cute as a bug’s ear and funny as she could be. The next time I saw June was at J.D.’s around 1964, and she had John in tow. We hit it off. He liked me immediately. Beyond what we saw in each other as performers, we had a mutual respect, centered around the songs we knew as kids. Our backgrounds were so similar, sharing the poor cottonfields and a love of music back as long as we could remember. “You ever hear this one?” was where our conversation started, and it didn’t stop until we challenged each other back all the way to Vernon Dalhart and Carson Robison in the twenties. We shared the music more than anything else. We felt like old friends from the first time we sat down together.
Later I went to see him in Albuquerque, with Tex Ritter opening. John told me he was thinking of moving to Nashville. He was having some “trouble at home” trying to get June to marry him, and he needed a place to flop when he was there. “Why don’t we get us an apartment together?” he asked.
I didn’t know if he’d still be into it when I got to town, but when I called around Mother Maybelle’s looking for him, she told me “John’s really hurt.” I phoned him up and said, “If you’re serious, we’ll have no problem.”
It was just a regular one-bedroom, on the first floor of the Fontaine Royale Apartments in Madison, right off Gallatin Road. Barbara moved down the hall, about four or five doors away, which made it real convenient. We were trying to keep our relationship a secret until I got a divorce. Lynne wasn’t making it easy.
Mother Maybelle thought John and I would be “good for each other.” I’m not sure that’s the way I would describe our housekeeping style. It was like a sitcom; we were the original Odd Couple. I was supposed to clean up, and John was the one doing the cooking. If I’d be in one room polishing,
he’d be in the other room making a mess. Making himself a mess. He’d be stirring biscuits and gravy, dressed in one of his thin black gabardine suits, and the flour would be rising in clouds of white dust all over him.
June and Momma Maybelle would come over about once a week to scrape the place down, and Maybelle would feed us whenever she thought it was getting out of hand. She’d fix hush puppies, because she knew I loved them. After a meal there, we knew it was her way of telling us to straighten up. She played a good game of poker, and she’d even have a beer once in a while. Maybelle demanded respect, and John and I were only too happy to give it to her.
Both of us never slept. We put two king-size beds in one room, and there wasn’t space to walk around them. I don’t know why we got such a small apartment. He’d have to jump over my bed to get to his if I was there. We hardly used them, though. We were both always gone, and we usually only slept there as a last resort. I’d come in and find he was crashed, and he’d get up when I’d stagger in from the road.
We were so much alike in many ways, it was scary. We both dressed in black, like Lash Lame. Later, when we met Lash on the set of the Stagecoach movie, we were worried he was going to bust us for taking his style. Looking at John was like catching a reflection of myself; driven, restless, searching for acceptance. We liked to get wild, but we were funny, and we didn’t get mean. We used to egg each other on. It’s a worn-out word, but we were soul-mates, and our lives would continue to run parallel through all the changes the years would bring. There was a connection between us we didn’t understand then, and may never still. It’s kind of like knowing what someone’s going to say before they say it.
We flipped over each other from the moment we met, though at first we stood back. It was so sudden we were kind of afraid of each other. John and I were both manly men, and we liked to walk macho and talk macho; but after a while we learned we could be ourselves.
He had a defense when I first met him. I could break it down in minutes, just like we periodically kicked in the door. We were always locking ourselves out. John would get home crashing and put the night latch on, or I’d do the same thing. Whoever was stuck outside would have to batter his way into the apartment. We weren’t so much harmless as helpless. The landlord finally turned the door around, opening it out instead of in, to keep us from doing further damage.
We’d just get giddy and silly around each other, and laugh a lot. That would be when I’d be calling him John. Or Maynard. He had a lot of names. “Johnny Cash” was formal, as in “Mr. Cash.” There was Johnny when he was just lounging around. And then there was Cash. Sometimes you couldn’t tease John or he would become Cash. He was very seldom Cash with me. Cash was usually when he was mean, or when he was on drugs.
Me and John were the world champions at pill-taking, but we each didn’t let on to the other that we knew it. We never shared drugs. I can laugh about it now, saying, hell, I knew he couldn’t handle it; but he couldn’t. I guess he felt the same way about me. I had a problem, and he had a problem, but we never made it a mutual problem.
I hid my stash in the back of the air conditioner, while John kept his behind the television. He’d tear the place apart if he ran out. If we had started combining supplies and sources, we probably would’ve bottomed out and killed ourselves, feeding each other’s habits. We had enough mutual respect for each other, as human beings and as men, that we didn’t want to help destroy what we had between us. He could get so messed up it was unbelievable; it didn’t matter if he had ten pills or a hundred. He took them all. I wasn’t far behind.
I’d started popping pills back in Salt Lake City. Sheryl Millet, a guy who played guitar with me, was into them. When you’re young, you’re bullet-proof, and I thought nothing of staying up all night, singing and trying to write songs. John and I could never do that together. Two guys on amphetamines—we were too scattered. We worked at cross-purposes, trying to find a common axis. Strung out, lying to each other about what we were doing, it’s a wonder we got along as well as we did.
I never liked downers. I was hyper as hell and taking uppers on top of that. I never hit the ground for twenty-one years. I had incredible stamina; I prided myself on the fact that I could take more pills, stay up longer, sing more songs, and screw more women than most anybody you ever met in your life. I didn’t know when to stop, or see any need to.
I didn’t know till later that they were addictive. I thought they were medicine. Playing six nights a week in Phoenix, I’d use the pills as an energy boost. You’d be tired, but you wouldn’t know it. Later, when I got out on the road, and would have to drive eight or nine hundred miles to the next show, and the next one after that, arriving just in time to put my clothes on and hit the stage, they seemed the only solution to get where you were going. I was just trying to make it through the night, the day, and the following week.
Almost everybody in Nashville took pills. When Roger Miller and I got to be close, it seemed like washing down a handful of pills was a natural part of life. He was the cleverest and craziest man I ever met. He never quit being funny. He could think faster than anyone and forget it quicker. I’d say a cliché, and he’d write a whole song around it. If I’d ask him to repeat it, he’d shake his head and shrug. “Damned if I know what I just sang.”
If you listen to the songs he wrote, they’re like children’s rhymes. “You Can’t Rollerskate in a Buffalo Herd” or “Dang Me.” Even “King of the Road.” They were just novelty things that he thought were funny when he wrote them down. “England swings like a pendulum do.” It was like he decided to sing them as an afterthought. Kids love Roger’s music.
No matter how wasted he was, Roger always looked fresh. He might’ve been up for a week, but you’d never know it. Where we would stay in the same clothes for days, he carried a portable iron and always rinsed his shirts in the sink and pressed his pants.
He had briefcases full of pills, and we had as many names for them as they had colors. Roger took these things called Simcos, so we called him Roger Simco. They were what was known as an over-and-under: one side was a tranquilizer and the other would be an amphetamine, and they had a vitamin in them. There were Johnny White Crosses and Waylon’s Phoenix Flashes. L.A. Turnarounds were the best. We liked to say that you could take one and drive to Los Angeles, turn around, and come straight back.
Speckled Birds. Little bitty Desoxyns. Desbutol pancakes. Somebody would want to trade a couple of “Footballs” for some real “M&M’s.” Pills were the artificial energy on which Nashville ran around the clock and then some. They were the drug of choice; and for a while, it seemed like eighty percent of the people in that town were comparing notes on who was taking which ones and what they were doing to them. Pill talk.
In a way, they were a great leveler. “You got any pills?” was a query that drew Nashville’s elite and aspiring together, the haves and have-nots, and after the bars closed, we’d congregate at Sue Brewer’s to share uppers and downers and guitars and songs.
She called the place the Boar’s Nest. It wasn’t a club, but her apartment. The best music ever to come out of Nashville was written right on her floor. Sue had come to Nashville in the fifties with a country music star, who got her pregnant and kicked her out. Sue told him she’d screw every Opry star there ever was, the minute they hit town, and she’d make sure he knew about it.
She had a wall of fame that went plumb up to the slanted ceiling, filled with men’s pictures that each had numbers on them, in the order that she’d met them. I never got a number. We were too good as friends. She was the greatest country music fan on earth, all big eyes and dark hair. One of her favorite sayings was “The only time I ever said no was if somebody asked me if I had enough.”
Sue worked in a place called the Derby Bar until three in the morning, when she’d come home and set out the welcome sign. She’d stock the refrigerator, and every once in a while one of us would come in and give her a little money for beer and food. We’d sit on the cou
ch and deal poker, talk about the new things we were working on, or maybe finish a song. Struggling songwriters would stop by, like Kris Kristofferson and Dallas Frazier, and though it was an unwritten law that you couldn’t bug anybody, if you had a good song you could sing it for Faron Young or George Jones, Mack Vickery, or Merle Kilgore. It was like a jungle telegraph: If I came in early in the morning and sang a song, somebody might be talking about it in the afternoon to so-and-so, and maybe they would think to give it a listen. A lot of songs got cut that way. The Boar’s Nest was open well into the daylight, and sometimes, if she was taken with you, it could become a bed and breakfast. Finally she would grab three or four hours sleep, get little Mikey off to school, and head back to work.
She was like a sister to us. She’d cook in the evening if somebody was hungry, or watch as we passed the guitar and sang. Her heart was open to pickers and songwriters. When you’d play her a song, I don’t care if it was terrible, she’d go “Oh my Goood; that is so wonderful, you oughta show that to Webb Pierce.” I played her some bad songs, and it was the same reaction. She saw me through some rough times.
Sue’s place was located in a triplex apartment building at 911 B Eighteenth Avenue South. The building is still there; there were two apartments downstairs, but you’d take the middle door and head upstairs to the Boar’s Nest. To the right was a bedroom and left was the living room with the wall of fame. You could run into anybody and everybody there. People would park on the street or, if it was too crowded, just pull their car into the front yard.
One night Richie was coming up the steps and ran into Jack Clement. He knew Jack had produced Johnny Cash’s records, and thought this might be a good time to meet him. He said “Hi, Jack, I’m Richie Albright,” and stuck his hand out. Jack took it and promptly got sick in the bushes, hanging onto Richie’s hand and shaking it and throwing up.
Waylon Page 12