Waylon

by Waylon Jennings

  You never knew who you’d see when you walked into his office in the 800 block of Seventeenth Avenue. Roger or Willie or Mel Tillis, back when he was first getting started as a singer, would be sitting around. Hank Cochran might be leaned up against the wall. Conway Twitty pulled up a chair when he stopped by, or Lefty Frizzell. Even Tex Ritter. Sometimes we’d have unplanned parties. It was like Grand Central Station.

  That’s where I first met Don Davis. Don had been a steel player for Hank Williams, and was married to Anita Carter when I came to town. The greatest practical joker on earth, he was running Wilderness at the time for Harlan. Lefty Frizzell and Dallas Frazier were notorious for throwing up when they got drunk. They’d make loud moaning crying noises. So Don got them in the back seat of a car, took them over the roughest stretch of road he could find, and had them drink warm beer. When they started hollering “Pull over, I’m getting sick,” he recorded it. That tape made the rounds of many a Nashville session.

  You could reach up and touch the stars in Nashville then, or at least get ribbed by them. Though some were a little aloof, most of the bigger names made me feel welcome. They kind of laughed at the “star” thing. I liked that. Carl Smith could make me real nervous. I tried my damnedest to look like him and sing like him; I e”en combed my hair like his, and I didn’t want him to notice. I knew he liked me a lot; he’d insist on me being on his tours. I wanted to tell him he was my hero, but if I said anything complimentary, he’d be real hard on me. “You little pipsqueak. Don’t be trying to suck up to me.” He let me know I was really all right by giving me a rough time.

  Porter Wagoner was another one who was encouraging. He was already a big star, all bright suits and television lights. There wasn’t a hair out of place on his head, but when he sang “Satisfied Mind,” you knew he wasn’t just a flashy dresser. He was perhaps the most even guy I’ve ever met in my life. I can’t imagine what he thought of me, looking like a tramp. In this crowd, I was the ugly duckling. Faron Young used to call me a greasy sonofabitch. They’d all tease me a lot; you can tell when somebody accepts you. I had all that hair, and Faron was losing his. He always told me, “You laugh, but yours’ll be goin’ one of these days, too.” Now, every time I see him, I point at my head, as if to say “It ain’t started yet.”

  You’d sit around and talk Nashville shop till maybe it was past eleven, and then you could head over to an illegal afterhours bar that someone had set up in a house down the Row. The Professional Club: You knocked at the door and they looked through a peephole, and if they knew you, they let you in. There was a pool table and blackout drapes over the windows. They’d be open all night, or until everybody left, and then, just as they locked the entrance, along would come John Cash with Glen Douglas Tubb, Ernest’s nephew, to break down the door.

  One night, Faron got hit with a cue ball there. He had to have his head shaved on one side, which didn’t help his hair. Another time I dropped some cigarette ashes down the pocket of my new deerskin jacket. I’m on fire! It flared up and burnt the sleeves right from my body. I kept patting at the flames, sitting there, too high to think of taking it off.

  We were swarming everywhere. Sleep was a waste of time. It was so exciting, all that stuff happening around you, that you were afraid to take a nap, scared you’d miss something. Napoleon only slept three hours a night; that was my big excuse to stay up. The cops would never bother you. They knew we were taking pills and getting high, but they’d just come by and wave, say hi, because we didn’t hurt anybody. The only people we were screwing up was ourselves, and we didn’t seem to care. They didn’t mess with us at all.

  Music Row was a neighborhood of houses, along tree-lined streets that made it seem more friendly. You didn’t have to have appointments. You could stop by to see Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins, and ask if they were busy. You were welcome everywhere, if you were welcome anywhere, though if they wanted to ignore you, they sure could.

  I had brought the Waylors with me. I needed a band for road-work, and they were my friends; in Tommy’s case, my brother. He was playing bass for me. But “sidemen” were not welcome on Music Row. We were in some big shot’s (don’t forget to dot the i) office one time, and whenever Richie or Jerry would make a comment or ask a question, the guy behind the desk would look at me and answer it. After a couple rounds of this, I could see the hurt in the band’s eyes.

  The next day I was going back to the same office. “C’mon guys, let’s go,” I said. “Nah,” they answered. “We’re going to hang around the hotel.”

  They had been with me through thick and thin. I tried to let the powers that be know how I felt. We’ve been hungry together, I told them. My band is here for the long run.

  “You don’t bring your own cliques to Nashville,” they told me, and “you don’t bring sidemen down on Music Row.” I took it all in.

  “Those guys are with me,” I said. “They’ve been everywhere with me. If they can’t be here, then I won’t be here. If they’re not welcome, I’m not welcome either.” I walked out.

  It was the same closed society at sessions. They didn’t understand the concept of a band. They let me use Richie, or they let me use Jerry Gropp, and then treated them like aliens. It was like you either played the road or sessions. They actually got mad when I wanted to use my band on my recordings. “Well, road musicians can’t play in the studio.”

  I’d say, “Why not?”

  “Well, they’re just not smooth enough.”

  I always wanted a live sound in the studio. Wonderful, I thought. Now we’re getting somewhere. I liked things that weren’t perfect. It was okay if the microphones leaked into each other, like a stage performance. I wanted to hear Richie’s foot drum, loud and clear. I wanted to feel some excitement.

  I could never play with a band that moves on the beat, or under the beat. I couldn’t get into it. It has to be on the edge. My music is built on edge; that’s the rock and roller in me. When I’d hear it on the beat, it felt like it was dragging. I needed it to push. The Waylors may not have been great musicians, but neither was I. Neither was all that slick shit I was hearing. That about wore me out. I couldn’t even find a place to come in.

  Guys like Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, Ernest Tubb and the Texas Troubadours—they had a style. You knew it was one of their records from the first intro. There was a certain weight in the guitars, a kick to the rhythm, an authority in the singing. They didn’t sound like everybody else.

  I had to figure Chet out. When I first got there, whether we worked together or just sat around and talked, he was real quiet. It didn’t take me long to understand how he responded to things, to read him, to see what reaction I could get out of him and know that I had him.

  For Chet, a smile meant “that sounds pretty good.” A grin was wonderful out of him in the studio. If he said “Man, I liked that,” it was probably going to be a number-one record. I often fantasized about being out in the studio recording, and Chet getting up in the control room, standing on top of the console, jumping through the plate-glass window, rising up, wiping the blood off and yelling “Goddamn, that is a smash!”

  And I’d say, “Chet, I’d like to try it once more. I think I can do it a little better.”

  It thrilled me to see his name on a record next to mine. If he thought you were good, something had to be there. Everybody knew that. Chet wasn’t overly demonstrative, but he was always listening. He had a kindness about him. He may have been shy, yet he knew when it was the right time to not say anything. He made me work at arranging the songs. He’d say, “You do it. You’re doing good.” If he saw me at a wall, he’d step in with a suggestion, but otherwise he let me find my way within the framework he set up.

  That was part of the problem. It was his framework, part of a Nashville sound that had been engraved in stone. They had a system. It was like an assembly line, and they rolled off records like clockwork, working more for efficiency than emotion, a song per hour and maybe a fourth if there was ten minutes till
the three-hour session was scheduled to end.

  Chet wanted me to be myself, but he wanted me to be myself with musicians he knew were great, that he’d been relying on. Chet had his comfort zone: a drummer that never wavered, a piano solo that tickled the same ivories, a smooth backing vocal from the Jordanaires or the Browns or the Anita Kerr singers.

  Chet wasn’t wrong. You wait all of your life to be able to go to Nashville and record with the likes of Chet Atkins. He’d hire the best musicians, guys like Jerry Reed on lead guitar, Fred Carter Jr. on dobro, Ray Eddington on rhythm guitar, Charlie McCoy on harp, or piano players like Floyd Cramer or Hargus “Pig” Robbins. I always thought you could’ve had a piano player that owned the world if he’d have Pig’s left hand and Floyd’s right. Ray Stevens would play keyboards and do harmony. Sometimes it made it harder to get my point across. Bobby Bare had told Chet when he went to record for him that he didn’t want any well-known musicians to play on his sessions. “Who am I to go up to Grady Martin and say ’Don’t play it like that, play it like this,’ ’Bobby would tell me. It wasn’t his place, nor was it mine.

  Bobby had told Chet that the best way to record me was with my band, but after the first session or two, Chet got nervous and called in the studio pickers. In his view, he probably had a point. Bands that work in clubs with the artist aren’t very fast about learning new arrangements, or changing things on the spot.

  Chet called it the Shotgun Method, and it had been around in country music since the twenties. It was partly an offshoot of recording in radio stations, like WSM, with one microphone in the middle of the room and ten people grouped around it, and the need to get four songs in three hours. Part of it was convenience, because the hits kept coming. Part of it was because there wasn’t a lot of competition, and part of it was that country records didn’t sell all that much in the sixties unless you went “pop,” which was considered a dirty word.

  Chet would get together with me and discuss who to hire in the studio, and we would wait to get to the session to work out the arrangement. At first I was a little hesitant about suggesting things, but Chet appreciated ideas. He believed that, in the record business, you sell an awful lot of records by not following trends; instead, the idea was to start a trend of your own. We both had the same idea, but we were coming at it from different directions. The important thing was to find somebody who was different, and unusual and appealing, and he thought I had an individual manner. “I found myself a star” was about the way he put it.

  You sang the song as it went down. You had about one overdub, and I could do my own harmony, but most of the time it was live in the studio. On one side would be the musicians; on the other would be the background singers. I’d be in a little booth. Chet usually stayed in the control room, head down, concentrating. He didn’t like to play on his own sessions, preferring instead to keep his attention on getting a good sound and the balance he wanted.

  One time he did pick his guitar on a session of mine. When he was done, I laid back and shrugged my shoulders. “Chet, that sounds pretty good.…”

  We’d gather around the piano before we started and sing the song over and over, structuring the arrangement. Chet and I talked over which particular effects or licks we wanted to use. He was a more open producer than someone like Owen Bradley. Owen made very clean, precise records, mostly telling people what to play. Chet was too modest for that. It was always easier for him to let the musicians express themselves. They all liked and admired him, and they wanted to help him get a hit. To the musicians, Chet was an equal, and they appreciated the fact that he could probably execute anything he wanted to as well if not better than they could.

  Chet listened to the musicians; he would watch their expressions to see what was going on. He listened to everybody, which is probably why he was a great producer. He was making so damn many records, though, juggling twenty or thirty acts, that he could hardly concentrate on each one. Still, despite his many artists, as well as his executive duties at RCA, he would always look to get something different in each record, trying to spot something in the rhythm section he could feature, to make the record sound distinctive.

  One of the ways we did that was with the twelve-string guitar. I like to think I helped introduce the instrument to the Nashville Sound. After I finished Folk-Country, I gave Chet a twelve-string, and he gave me the guitar that’s on the front of that album. They weren’t the luckiest of instruments: His was stolen, and mine met an undeserved fate at Barbara’s hands, smashed against the wall during an argument. Chet also got the idea of using a Spanish dobro on records from me. When he heard “Four Strong Winds,” he picked up on a guitar lick of mine that sounded a lot like a dobro. When he did Bobby’s version, he put Jerry Reed on the instrument, having him fret it with his fingers instead of playing it with a bar. He was sure that helped make it a hit.

  I had most of my second album, Leaviri’ Town, recorded in the February before I left Phoenix. On the last session of the three in which we cut things like “(That’s What You Get) For Lovin’ Me” and “Taos, New Mexico,” Chet came up with the left-field idea of doing a version of the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood.” It was this kind of unpredictability that endeared Chet to me. He loved those Beatles tunes, and I did too. After all, the Beatles were indirectly named after Buddy Holly’s Crickets. I think I had probably done the song a few times at J.D.’s. John Cash remembers me singing it there.

  Chet did the arrangement on “Anita, You’re Dreaming” because I was too close to that song. He loved that song better than anything, and he usually agreed with my choice of material. It takes a big load off an A&R man’s mind when you come in ready to cut. A couple of times Chet would find a song and play it for me. He picked material by what he liked. If he heard a song and thought, boy, that’s clever, he went with the gut feeling and never second-guessed himself. He always followed his first impression, and he could surprise you.

  Being a musician, Chet had to learn about caring for lyrics. He’d always listened to the music instead of the words, but as a producer, he saw how important it was to understand what the singer was singing. Words are so important to country music, you need to hear every one. He always tried to get artists to enunciate clearly, and I agreed with him. There are at least three different ways of saying the words “beautiful” and “darling,” and each has a different meaning.

  Hank Thompson, the western swing bandleader from Waco, Texas, was the first one I noticed who pronounced his phrases perfectly. In fact, he might have overdone it a little. Though he started out on WACO as Hank the Hired Hand, he was well-educated and would use big words in his songs; big for our neck of the woods, anyway. I think his Brazos Valley Boys were the greatest swing band ever, and he was a superb showman. Hank’s “Wild Side of Life” was hitting number one in 1952, just about when I was digging deep into my guitar; and though I never sounded like him, I always respected his perspicacity. What’d I say?

  The first proper album that I recorded after I was living in Nashville was a tribute to Harlan Howard’s songwriting. In two sessions spaced a week apart, on May 24 and June 1, 1966, the Waylors and I did twelve of Harlan’s numbers, one right after the other. We rehearsed the album the night before each recording session, setting the band up in Harlan’s office with a small two-track tape recorder. Don Davis helped on the arrangements. Some had been big hits and some hadn’t. One of my favorites was “Beautiful Annabel Lee,” which Harlan wrote after the Edgar Allan Poe poem. And I’m not sure we ever beat the office version of “She Called Me Baby,” despite all the leakage and phones ringing and general mayhem.

  All of our recording was done in RCA Studios. This was strict company policy, etched in magnetic tape. Chet thought there was nothing wrong with that. “Studios are all alike,” he told me. “Same equipment, everything.” But even at RCA, there were differences. Studio B was an older studio, with a reputation for warmth, a long room with a control room where the speakers had room to pump. Studio A was narrow
er and bigger, with high ceilings and a brighter sound. I cut more in Studio A, as a rule.

  If truth be told, Chet and I respected each other’s intelligence. I always had ideas, and he liked watching me make them happen. He wanted to see where I was going. I didn’t know how much room he gave me until he used me on some other sessions, playing twelve-string. I watched these other artists who didn’t bring anything to the table. They just went in there and Chet had to do all the work, arranging and everything. They were just standing there, waiting for their chance to sing.

  Gradually, though, I think I made Chet nervous. It was drugs, more than anything.

  He hated that, period. The first thing Bobby Bare had warned me was “Don’t tell Chet you do drugs. If he asks if you take pills, tell him no.” So, of course, about the third time I visited with Chet, he asked me if I did drugs. I thought, well, I’m not going to start this out wrong. I said yeah. Godomighty, he was mad. From then on, he was watching me. He didn’t know how to deal with that, and he couldn’t stand to see somebody throw their life away.

  He did not understand drugs, and he didn’t understand people on them. Chet didn’t want to understand them. He’d been through Don Gibson, and then Roger, and then here I come. Chet was from East Tennessee, where they drink moonshine all the time. When he thought high, he thought whiskey. He never took a pill in his life. “I think you got so many beats in your heart,” he’d say. “Why shorten them?”

  Don Gibson had pretty much run Chet around the block. A notable songwriter and performer with such songs as “Oh Lonesome Me” and “Sweet Dreams,” the latter of which he wrote for Patsy Cline, you could often find him flat on his back in Studio B, trying to do a vocal by singing up at the microphone. Chet even had an agreement that if Don couldn’t perform in the studio, they’d call the session off.