Waylon

by Waylon Jennings

  I was married to Barbara by now. After I got my formal divorce from Lynne, it was either get hitched or go our ways. I wasn’t ready for that. I loved her, and she did me. We thought marriage was the missing ingredient, and we added it to our already-spicy relationship on October 22, 1967. She was shaking like a leaf as she walked down the aisle at her parents’ house. I thought she might be scared, but when she got next to me, she said “Goddamn, I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”

  Consequently, I didn’t get out and around a lot. But Richie moved into an apartment behind Sue’s, and I would drop over and see him. I got to be friendly with little Mikey. I’d take him to buy a toy and pick something out. “How ’bout that?” I’d ask him.

  “Well,” he’d say, all of four years old, “that’s a little high-priced.” I think Mikey kind of looked at me as his second dad for a long time. His real dad always ignored him. One time he came by when Mikey was playing downstairs. He started walking up to Sue’s. “You better not go inside,” Mikey warned him. “Waylon Jennings is up there and he’ll knock you right back down them stairs.”

  Sue talked about sex till the day she died. She had cancer, several times, but she never let it stop her laughter. They kept operating, but it was a losing battle. I leased her a house, and took care of her for the last few years of her life, but there came a time when she just couldn’t stand the pain any longer. Even then, she could let loose that Sue Brewer smile whenever I walked in the room.

  We still give out two music scholarships a year in her name, and in 1984 I helped put together a television special in her memory. We called it The Door Is Always Open, because that’s the way it was at Sue’s house. Roger, Faron Young, Hank Williams Jr., Willie Nelson, Harlan Howard, Mickey Newbury, and me sat around in a circle and had an old-fashioned guitar pull, singing songs and telling tales about Sue. It was the best kind of tribute we could make to her.

  You could go to a lot of other good-time places to drink and hit on people—and that’s not to say you couldn’t do that at Sue’s—but the Boar’s Nest was where the music was. Sing her a song, and you had the key to the front door.

  Downtown, it was closing time at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge. Tootsie Bess herself might give you a big chubby welcoming hug when you came in, but she didn’t care for anybody when the night was over. She’d blow that police whistle, and if you didn’t move fast enough for her liking, Tootsie would stick you right in the ass with a hat pin. We’d spill out on the sidewalks and cross the street to Linebaugh’s.

  Broadway. On the shores of the Cumberland. Nashville, U.S.A. Beneath the long shadow cast by the Ryman Auditorium, home of the Grand Ole Opry, everything was happening, played out in a block or two that became a country music mecca for anyone who’d ever crossed a fiddle with a steel guitar.

  There was no Opryland or TNN. No Branson. Nothing had moved away. Nashville was a big small town down there, a place to hang out, with Ernest Tubb’s Record Shop and Roy Acuff’s museum to watering holes like Tootsie’s and the Wagon Wheel.

  Linebaugh’s served as the local cafe. It was the greasy spoon of the world. Their specialty was hot dogs split down the middle and served on a hamburger bun. There was a big plate-glass window all the way across the front, and you could look in to see who was there. It was just a square room, with some booths against the wall and tables in the middle. They had lights across the ceiling, as bright as a power station. It looked like it was daytime, all the time. They probably sold about fifty gallons of coffee over the course of an evening. Everybody was wired to the gills, staying up, looking for somebody to talk to. People clustered. You sat wherever you could find a seat.

  Once inside, you’d keep an eye peeled on the front door. Besides the folks already in there, one minute Roger Miller might come strolling through, or the Louvin Brothers, or songwriters like Hank Cochran and Harlan Howard. A big music publisher would have three people in tow. Marty Robbins was a day sleeper and spent the dark hours at Linebaugh’s. One night, about three-thirty in the morning, I was sitting there trying to write a song called “The Last Time I Saw Phoenix.” Tom T. Hall came by; I’d never met him. He was sobering up and pulled over a chair. He ordered a cup of coffee to get him home. I was about to crash myself.

  “What’re you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m writing on this song,” I said, and showed him what I had.

  “Can I help you?” He came up with a great verse, and part of another verse, and I finished that off. That’s all we said to each other. We wrote the song and didn’t even ask “How you been?” I didn’t see him again for another ten years.

  When it came time to lift a few, if it wasn’t past her curfew, you’d walk across the street to Tootsies. The backroom was where the hillbillies hung out, and it was as close to an extra dressing room as the Opry had. On weekend nights it was always packed with the stars appearing at the Ryman. Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas—they all raised a glass there. Their signatures covered the walls. I wrote my name top to bottom when I had the chance. It’s still there, just like Tootsie’s.

  Printer’s Alley, a small string of clubs and strip joints off the main drag of Nashville, was where you went when you wanted to do it up right (or was it wrong?). It was really an alley, originally home to a big newspaper print shop, and there were probably eight or nine clubs in a row, mostly pop-oriented cocktail lounges. The Black Poodle alternated between a strip joint and a country club; Skull’s was run by an old carny; and then there was the Carousel, which Boots Randolph eventually bought.

  The Rainbow Room was where a lot of Nashville musicians who worked sessions during the day gathered. Buddy Harman, one of the greatest Nashville studio drummers, used to play drums for strippers every night at the Rainbow, big names from that era like Candy Barr and Tempest Storm. When Boots took over the Carousel, he’d run jam sessions, and it wasn’t unusual to see Chet Atkins on guitar, Floyd Cramer at the keyboard, and Gary Burton on vibes.

  I high-tailed a lot with Johnny Darrell when I came to town. He was a fishing buddy of Bare’s, and a runaround buddy of mine, with a real rich baritone. He could smell a good song from twenty miles away, though he got to be very bitter, because he would find these great tunes and record them, and along would come a bigger artist and cover them and have the hit. It was like he was making demos for the stars. Johnny wasn’t on a major label. His first record was “Green, Green Grass of Home,” but I used to love to hear him sing “My Elusive Dreams,” “Hickory Holler’s Tramp,” and “With Pen in Hand.” He found “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” and gave it to me. Billy Reynolds was another friend. I knew Kris Kristofferson, but he was too bashful when I was around. He was so shy he never wanted to play me his songs. He would hang out with Richie more than he would me. He loved me and John, and one time when I got mad at “Cash” during a recording session and moved out, Kris thought that was the most awful thing that could happen.

  There was Leon Ashley, the frustrated preacher. Whenever he’d get drunk he’d start feeling guilty that he’d quit preaching. The next thing you knew he’d be singing hymns at the top of his lungs. Mack—Basil MacDavid, who worked with me and the Waylors—was around. So was Richie. With his long Beatle haircut, he had a girl in every bar. They were forever crying on my shoulder. I’d have to tell them he hated the thought of marriage. He’d been married one time, for about three or four months, and was really bitter about it. A whole three months; how could it get that bad? “She was terrible,” he used to say. “I ain’t never doing that no more.” Like me, it took him a long time to get it right. But he liked the ladies, and for their part, the girls had it made. Everybody would hit the road, and then somebody else would come to town. Those gals had a fresh batch every week.

  The whole town went into overdrive at the end of October when the country music disc jockeys held their annual convention. It had started when a dozen of the most influential country disc jockeys in America—Smokey Smith from Des Moines, Cracker Jim Brooker fro
m down at WMIE in Miami, Nelson King at WCKY in Cincinnati, Dal Stallard from Kansas City, Joe Allison from WMAK in Nashville—held a meeting to exchange ideas. Like the apostles, they founded a church: the Country Music Disc Jockey Association, which later became the roots of the Country Music Association as we know it today.

  These weren’t just radio announcers. All the disc jockeys promoted shows in their area, and there wasn’t one country artist in Nashville who could have his or her records played without working for the affiliated stations that played their records. It was a very cozy, inbred system.

  Soon, with four or five thousand disc jockeys gathering under one roof, the record companies discovered it was a perfect way to showcase their artists. They’d host suites with free booze and food, open all day and all night. It just kept getting wilder. They made sure the disc jockeys went home remembering what a great time they’d had in Nashville, in the hopes they’d play their records for the rest of the year.

  Nobody went to bed for a week. We’d terrorize the town. Everybody was drunk, everybody was high, everybody was everything. In the hotels, all the rooms had their doors open, and each had a little guitar pull going. People wandered the halls. You never knew who you would run into around the next corner.

  I performed there as a new RCA artist. Lynne came up with me from Phoenix, and I was on the same show as Willie. Hank Locklin was the older, more established artist headlining. Hank was sitting right beside me and across from Lynne, talking about that beautiful red-headed woman over there. “Look at her,” he kept saying. “She is so goddamn fine. I wonder who that is.”

  I allowed him to go on for a while, but finally I had to let him in on the secret. “Well, she’s my wife.”

  Hank didn’t bat an eye. “She reminds me so much of my daughter,” he said, real quick.

  I was walking with Barbara along the hall from the apartment I shared with John to the apartment I shared with her. We were having it out, for a change. The more she yelled, the quieter I got.

  Barbara’s hair was down that day. It was long, almost three feet down the small of her back, and I caught it from the corner of my eye, swinging in an arc. She had her hand back and cocked. She went plumb to Fort Worth to get that punch. I turned around just in time for her to hit me right in the chin.

  You do see stars. I felt my knees go. My first instinct was to fight back. She covered up her face like I was going to pop her one in return. But I got tickled when I thought of her stretched out, hair flying, eyes squinting, five foot ten inches of long tall girl taking aim at me. I just cracked up laughing.

  Really, it was Barbara who never knew what hit her. I’d taken her out of Phoenix, in the West where she felt at home, and brought her to Nashville. Transplanted, her desert flower couldn’t blossom; she just sat in the apartment all day. She hated Music City: what I was, what I was doing. She had a lot of innocence about her, and the music business brought out all her insecurities. She just knew that any minute someone was going to come along and I was going to run off. She thought I was going to be a big star and want to leave her.

  She didn’t stand a chance. Barbara was a good woman, but she got me at a point where I didn’t trust women. She deserved a better shot than she got. We fought like cats and dogs. When she got hysterical, I didn’t know what else to do but clam up. I wouldn’t argue. It was something I’d learned from Lynne.

  Barbara and I never got along on the road, and my drug use didn’t help. She didn’t use drugs; none of my wives did. I’d be up all night, roaming around, and she’d get disgusted and storm home. Then she’d get all torn apart not knowing what I was doing, and suspecting what I was up to. She didn’t want to be in hotels; she couldn’t take me on the stage, with the girls at my feet, throwing themselves at me. Everywhere we went, there was a town full of females. That just drove her up a tree.

  Yet she had a tender heart. If she saw a bird with a broken wing, she’d take it home and try to feed it and nurse it back to health. When it died, it was a traumatic experience for her. She couldn’t even step on an ant accidentally. Maybe she hoped that deep down inside I was some sort of stray cat that needed taking care of, looking for a home to be content. Love is like a mirror sometimes; we only see our own reflection.

  She wanted me to settle down and be a husband. Barbara was the only daughter of a very rich man, and her father once offered me anything I wanted if I would just make his daughter happy. He wanted to give me enough money so I wouldn’t have to travel, or even work. “I’m buying blue sky” was the way he put it. I don’t blame him, though. That’s what she had in mind, getting me away from the music business. The very thing that drew her to me she wanted to change. She couldn’t separate me from my image. She couldn’t separate the music from the man.

  She never understood what made me keep going after the sound I heard in my head, and why I wanted to perform so bad. Which meant she never understood me.

  * * *

  The first place I landed when I got to town was Harlan Howard’s Wilderness Music. If the nights were when the wild ones hung out and roared, the daytime trips took care of most of Music Row’s business. I would carry my guitar and visit the music publishers, like Tree, where Roger was based, and go from there to Acuff-Rose, or Cedarwood, or Central. We’d play each other songs and sit in on each other’s recordings. Session-hopping, we called it. You wound up in the corner of a lot of strange records that way.

  Don Bowman was “West Coast starvation buddies” with Harlan, and so was Bobby Bare. Harlan was everybody’s friend. His childhood hero had been Ernest Tubb, and he hadn’t grown up much since then. In fact, he thought that if you were really into country songs, Ernest probably had more influence than Hank Williams. Depending on how close you lived to Texas, he may just have been right.

  He had become Nashville’s leading songwriter in the early sixties and had a catalogue of Harlan songs a mile long: “Heartaches by the Number,” “I Fall to Pieces,” “Busted.” I’ve covered over seventy of them myself and even did a whole album called Waylon Sings 0l’ Harlan.

  He loved fishing, and there’s a shot of us in a boat together on that record. Despite the photographic evidence, and it might be noted that I’m sitting there with a guitar while Harlan is holding his pole, I didn’t care much for relaxing in a boat with a line dangling over the edge waiting for a bite. I didn’t have that much patience.

  I also remember the time when Barbara and I had come out to Center Hill with Bobby Bare. We were fishing with live spring lizards, and he told me to bait my hook. I said, “I can’t stand to touch them things.”

  They had a head like a snake. “Well, don’t think snake, think bait,” he told me. I tried to reach in the bucket. They were all squirmy. I’d get my hand only halfway in before I’d grab a lizard, panic, and sling it out. Finally I just gave up and sat back while Bobby snared three wiggling springers on a single hook. He reared back and cast it over yonder. Barbara was in the front of the boat with her hair pinned down and wearing a wiglet. He hooked her hair and threw the wiglet way off in the water, much like he once hooked a guy’s earlobe, before piercing for men became socially acceptable. “Let’s go in” was about all I could say.

  I was writing more and more, and Harlan talked to me continually about the craft, giving me advice. He used Jim Reeves as an example of “smart” singers who knew how to “snoop out a song,” to pick material. He even figured out a way to pitch songs to me. He’d say, “Here’s a song I wrote, and it’s a great song, but I wrote it for somebody else, and you can’t do it, but I sure would like for you to hear it.” He nailed me every time.

  Probably because he liked fishing, he taught me about hook lines. You can write a great song, but if you want an added guarantee, you’ve got to bait that hook. A title is important, but a hook line is what people remember; and singers can’t resist a good hook line and sinker. Sometimes he’d confuse me about my writing. “You can’t say the same word,” he’d emphasize, or “If you take time, yo
u can find another word.” Harlan didn’t like near-rhymes. He was a craftsman, and I respected that. He was particularly into titles. Harlan thought if you heard a song on the radio and the disc jockey didn’t tell you who it was, you should be able to guess the title and head immediately to the nearest record store.

  He wrote every morning, till it was time to hang out. I’ve never been able to be that kind of productive writer. I’ve got to have something that really turns me on to the idea, which is why so many of my songs are autobiographical. I’ll take things that happen to me and try to understand them, sometimes making them sadder or happier to encompass more of an audience; a writer’s prerogative. Harlan was different. He wouldn’t write if he was troubled or upset. In his mind, that was frivolous, though he’d remember the feeling and tap into it when he needed the emotion. An exception was “Yours Love,” which was a hit for me in 1968. He had written a poem to his to-be wife as a wedding present, and then, as he said, “writers are such sluts.” He put a melody to it and thought of it as his best, most positive love song.

  He found ways to get his creative juices flowing through the music, not through the use of diet pills. Paradoxically, Harlan saved them for his fishing trips, when he wanted to stay up all night under the stars and cast for bass. He didn’t like to write on speed; he thought it would get him past the point of sensible. He was usually right, me included.

  Harlan used to write without a guitar, just holding a legal pad. More than most, the strength of country music is its lyrics. I filled up pages and pages. I’d write about every notion that came to mind. When I ran out of paper, I’d scribble words on anything: napkins, matchbooks, dollar bills. I didn’t worry how to sing the songs. Melodies form a marriage with the words. They’ll tell you where they want to go, and you can always change them. Harlan’s first hit was “Pick Me Up on Your Way Down,” and when he sang it for you, his voice would rise on the first three words and fall on the last four. It wouldn’t make sense otherwise. Your melody goes where the words take you. I depend on a lyric to give me a melody, and a good lyric will pull the melody out of you.