Waylon

by Waylon Jennings

  They offered me a spot on the Opry. There’s even a scene in Nashville Rebel where I pay my respects to Ott Devine, who ran the Opry in the sixties. At that time, you had to be on there twenty shows a year, and since it was broadcast on Saturday night, that’s usually the night that you make the most money out on the road. I needed that night to make the rest of the week come out right. I had to turn them down. They wanted to give me ninety dollars, union scale.

  At least I said no peaceably. John Cash had come to the Opry when he got his first record in the Top Ten country charts in Billboard. He’d sat out in the Opry manager’s office for three hours, dressed in his black shirt and pants, sideburns, and rockabilly shoes, until they finally relented and let him on the show.

  He encored seven times, and only had four songs out on the market. He sang “Hey Porter,” “Cry, Cry, Cry,” “So Doggone Lonesome,” and “Folsom Prison Blues” over and over. Hank Snow and Minnie Pearl made him welcome, which pleased John no end, because Hank Snow was his hero. He was so proud he had torn the Opry up.

  He joined the Opry but couldn’t make most of the Saturdays because he’d be out working tours with Jerry Lee Lewis or Carl Perkins or Roy Orbison. John would do one Saturday and miss three. Finally, they called him in and said that if he was intending “to be a member of the Grand Ole Opry,” he’d have to start showing up more.

  Ultimatums are not the best way to get on John’s good side. So he said, “Well, this’ll be my last night.” At the end of his final song, he dragged the microphone stand across the lights at the edge of the stage, breaking them all, one by one. “I was just having fun,” he told me, “watching ’em pop.”

  The manager of the Opry was less than pleased. “You don’t have to come back anymore.”

  “I don’t plan to,” said John, but when he got in the car with June, he started crying. Someday, he thought, they’ll want me back. In time, he did make his peace with the Opry. There’s nothing John liked better in those days than sitting in a dressing room listening to the Jordanaires sing gospel, or trading bluegrass verses with Bill Monroe or Flatt and Scruggs. He even wound up doing his network television show from the Ryman Auditorium.

  One of the phrases I always heard was “I wish New York and L.A. would leave us alone.”

  The Nashville Sound folks never realized that they actually did, to our detriment. If you were a country artist signed to Nashville, the record company treated you like an uninvited guest at a dinner party. They didn’t set a place for you at the table. They didn’t take you seriously. Their corporate base was in New York or L.A., and we were out of the power structure. No matter how many records you sold, all their promotion went to the big pop acts signed to both coasts. You had to fight and scratch for any attention at all from the record company.

  Country music reacted to that by drawing in the wagons, getting defensive, building a wall around Nashville that kept country artists in rather than outsiders out. I went west to Los Angeles and cut Kris Kristofferson’s “Lovin’ Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)” with Ricky Nelson’s band. At the time, he had a good bunch of guys with him, including Sonny Curtis. It was a great record, uptempo, with a guitar riff that was like a clarion call to arms every chorus. They wouldn’t release it because I recorded it in L.A. They didn’t want to start a precedent. They wanted all the hit records to be cut in Nashville.

  The closest I got to the top of the charts, as the sixties started running out of months, was “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line.” I waited a damn year to cut that song; Charlie Louvin’s bass player had the original version for Capitol. I didn’t want to cover him. I thought I’ll wait awhile, and if it doesn’t hit, I’ll go for it. I think he outsang me on it, but I had the best track. I knew it had the potential to go all the way, and it might had not “Harper Valley P.T.A.” kept it out of the number-one slot.

  I like to say that I was a legend before I was ever a hit in country music. I was kind of a fair-haired boy when I arrived in Nashville. Everybody loved everything I did, but I was not cutting consistent chart records.

  I never did feel at home. I didn’t know it yet, but the minute I got there, I was in trouble. I found myself trying to fit in, and having people wedging me in places where I didn’t work. I was being told, over and over, You just don’t do this, or You can’t do that. There’s a certain way we do things here in Nashville. We know what’s best for you. All you are allowed to sound like is the Nashville Sound.

  I would think of ideas, and before I would get a chance to put them down, or even hear how they worked out, they’d tell me I was wrong. What the fuck do you mean, it’s wrong? Well, it’ll make the record skip if we put a big drum beat in it. We don’t understand that rhythm. We have to smooth it out or we’ll never get played on the radio. And the best one of all: That’s not country.

  I always hated labels, and they kept trying to stick them on me. They didn’t know who I was or what I was about, and I tried my best to keep them in the dark. I remembered what Buddy had told me about not pinning yourself down. The things that weren’t country about me scared them, even though they tried to call me everything but straight country. They always needed a marketing plan—folk-country, Nashville rebel—to understand me, to try and put my feelings in a frame, and even then they didn’t get it. Music is just music. People who put labels on music are those who have to merchandise it. It makes their job easier for them.

  I wanted to cut my records a whole different way. I wanted to build the song in the studio, not the control room. I wanted the dynamics to happen out there, alive, with the band.

  I gave the Nashville Sound an honest chance, at first. I went along with what Chet, and later Danny Davis and Ronny Light, would suggest. I would use their bands and their pickers. Some of the musicians who played on my early records were great guys, but they were trapped by the number system. I’d go in, cut the tracks, come back the next day, and I wouldn’t even recognize that it was the same tune.

  When I first hear a song and it knocks me out, I can tell you what it’s going to sound like when I get through with it. It’s like a painter, a sculptor, and a poet rolled up in one; you should be able to see a picture, feel its shape, as well as hear the song’s emotion.

  I just did what felt good to me. It was like Grady Martin said when they asked him if he read music. “Not enough to hurt my playing,” he replied. The truth is I never understood that much about the mechanics of music. I’d come in wrong, and I’d turn the beat sideways. I was the only guy in the world who could hum out of meter. My guitar playing came from inspiration only. I did it out of self-preservation. I could never stand to practice. Everything I know I learned in front of an audience. Whenever I’d pick up a guitar, I’d start to play a song.

  Chet and I may have had our differences, but I think he liked the fact that I didn’t back up, and never have backed up. I don’t have a reverse gear when it comes to what I believe in.

  There’s more than one way to do things. There’s at least two ways, and one of them is your way. You damn well have a right to try it, at least once.

  I went through my marriages like Grant went through Richmond. I finally gave up. I said, hell, I’m not going to be able to be married. And just when I thought it was all over, when I quit looking, that’s when I found the right one.

  I started with Jessi on level ground. I was seeing Barbara before I left Lynne, and Lynne before I split with Maxine. Jessi, on the other hand, had just gotten unhitched from Duane Eddy. We were both free.

  It wasn’t like that the first time we met. I was in Phoenix working on “Norwegian Wood” in a studio there, and Duane brought her by. She was making her mark as a songwriter—Dottie West and Don Gibson had both done things by her—and she’d written a duet called “Living Proof.” Duane asked if I would help out with the demo and I said yeah. So they set her up beside me, on a box because she’s so little, and we sang into one mike. I thought, Man, she ain’t bigger than a nickel.
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br />   A cute little ol’ sweetheart was what she was. We had to move the box back because she had more volume than me, and we were all laughing about that. She was very respectful and everything. Not a bit flirty at all. I was married at the time, and she was too.

  It was funny, though. We got through, made a copy of the tape, and I saw them to the door. We said our good-byes, and as they walked away, she turned around and looked back at me again. I’ve thought about that ever since, because I stood there waiting for her to do just that. It was as if I knew she was going to.

  There was something there. The next time we crossed paths, she had separated from Duane, but they weren’t divorced yet. Her sister, Sharon, brought her to a show, and I got her up on stage to sing with me. I was apart from Barbara by then. I looked at her and said, “Hey, little girl … want to run off with me?”

  She gave me the eye back. “Call me in six months” was all she said.

  I didn’t see her again, but she caught me on a Buck Owens television special. I had on a gray Nehru suit that somebody had talked me into wearing, and weighed about 140 pounds soaking wet. I was gaunt and miserable. Skin and bones. “He needs me” was all she could think. She sent me a telegram saying she’d be home for Christmas, and if I could give her a call, she’d like to get together.

  She hocked one of Duane’s guns to get a new dress, a silver-gray wraparound number, and she came to J.D.’s to see me work. Her brother escorted her over to the hotel before the show. Lord knows what she thought. It was a whole other world from what she was used to, despite her marriage to Duane. The band was hanging out, four of us sitting around a table playing poker, me with no shirt on, a couple more sprawled across the bed, smoke curling around a room that looked as if it had been turned upside down. But Jessi wasn’t scared by it. She found it “different” and fascinating, and that was the way I thought of her, too.

  I was a perfect gentleman. We were honest with each other. I told her about my life, about my first wife and children, though she recalls I didn’t go much into my second wife. She listened and didn’t say much. Somehow she knew that I was in a place of hurt, and that I’d reached a point of trying to please my former wives and feeling like I failed. I was nowhere near over it, at a point where someone would have to take me as I was and who I was, raw and all. Right or wrong, I hadn’t been understood. Jessi had no idea how long it would be before I would open up to trust another woman, and it was a good thing she didn’t.

  One of our first dates was out to the Navajo Indian Reservation in Tuba City, Arizona. There’s nothing there, only the painted desert and two or three roads in the whole northeast corner of the state, each following an endless straight line that goes like an arrow until it hits the vanishing point.

  We left Phoenix about noon, and I drove and drove. It was getting late. I was supposed to play in a gymnasium for the Indians up there, and I didn’t know it was going to be that far. Along about dusk I almost hit the biggest horse I’d ever seen. It came out of nowhere, and when I hit the brakes, that horse looked at me as if to say “you stupid asshole.” I started laughing, thinking about the expression on the horse’s face, and she probably thought I was a crazy man.

  After the show, we stopped at a motel in Cameron. We walked over to a canyon, hand in hand, the desert surrounding us like a watchful eye. Suddenly an old man sidled in beside us, hobbling along with a cane. “Where you from?” I asked him.

  “I come from back east,” he told us. “I’ve been a traveling salesman all these years. My health isn’t too good, and my sons and daughters don’t really want me. Me and my wife lived out here, but she died about five years ago, and now I don’t have anything to live for.”

  I said, “That’s too bad.”

  Jessi said, “Oh well, there’s always the bottle.”

  I guess it was that spunkiness that attracted me to her. She never let me off the hook, and loved to pick at me and make me mad. She called it “getting my temper up.” Finally, I told her that she gave me “more shit than anybody,” and I was starting not to enjoy her very much.

  “I like to see the fire,” she said, pouring a little gasoline on the flames.

  Like a fire can hurt you, we both knew right off it was something that could be dangerous. And like a fire can warm you, she started drawing me closer, bringing me in out of the cold. She lit that fire under me, kept adding fuel, and pretty soon we began traveling together.

  Her momma was an ordained Pentecostal preacher, though she wasn’t judgmental about our relationship. Jessi had been playing the piano in church and revival meetings since she’d been a little girl, and it gave her an inner strength, even though when I met her she thought she was in the cavern of her life, where she’d thrown off all that she’d known and gone seeking her own answers. Jessi had come back to a point where she realized that she needed something more than she could ever know; and on that rock, she built her faith.

  For me, it was the music. For Mirriam Rebecca Joan Johnson Eddy, soon to be Jessi Colter, faith was expressed through the music. Together, we started learning the eternal melodies and infinite harmonies that has become our song of songs.

  Meanwhile, back at the ranch …

  Chet had decided finally to leave producing and return to playing music, and he put me with Danny Davis. He couldn’t have made a worse choice. We were oil and water. I’ve always had a tendency to treat people right, with respect and honor. But I came pretty close to putting my hands around Danny’s throat on more than one occasion, and I suspect he didn’t like me much either.

  Danny was the leader of the Nashville Brass, a big-band approach to country that was opening up new doors leading to crossover acceptance. He had known Chet since the 1950s, a former sideman who joined RCA’s A&R staff in 1965. Danny had grown up in Massachusetts where he’d gotten a classical education, and he brought an “orchestral” feel to country with his Nashville Sounds records in 1968 and 1969. Which was fine by me. I loved horns, as I always told Herb Alpert, and was certainly in favor of going beyond the boundaries of country; but as far as our musical tastes were concerned, we couldn’t have been further apart.

  I would go into the studio and do the tracks, and when I came back I wouldn’t recognize it as the same song. He’d overdub arrangements without asking me, and turn songs down without even playing them for me. He rejected “Abraham, Martin, and John” when I specifically picked it out. He wanted me to have my parts written out, and I liked to learn the arrangement on the spot. Danny would get bored, or make fun of me if I was trying to work out a chord change I wanted to hear. One time he was putting me down while I was overdubbing a guitar on a track, feeling paranoid because I knew he wasn’t on my side, trying to get comfortable out in the studio. Jessi and Johnny Darrell walked into the control room and overheard him. Jessi gave him one of her meanest looks. “If I told him what you said, he’d kill you.”

  I almost did. Him and all the musicians. I hate pickup notes. Always have. A note or two used to introduce a phrase, I think it’s like stompin’ your way into a song, announcing that you’re going to knock on the door before you actually do. It’s something that irritates me no end, and one day I decided to put a stop to it. Merle Haggard had borrowed a gun of mine and brought it back to Studio A. It was a .22 Magnum pistol, a buntline; a long thing. I walked into the studio and said, “The first sonofabitch that hits a pickup note, I’m going to blow his fingers off. And as for anybody still looking at his chart after the third take, your ass is dead.

  “And Danny.” I turned to him. “I don’t want to hear any shit out of you.”

  It was all over between us from then on. Maybe I was a little hard on him, but the last thing he should have been doing in this world is producing a country record on me, telling me what I can and can’t do musically. I don’t think Chet foresaw that. With my independent streak, he probably thought that all I needed was somebody to take down the titles and help me hire the musicians. Danny was the wrong choice, seeing as he’d j
ust become a successful artist himself with the Nashville Brass, and had his own reputation to think of. He couldn’t be as self-effacing as producers sometimes have to be.

  Chet knew I wanted to make my own records. He opposed that mainly because RCA had several producers, and if he started letting artists like myself and Bobby Bare produce themselves, he’d lose some people he was very fond of, like Bob Ferguson and Ray Pennington. He told me in later years that, among other things, he was trying to protect their jobs.

  Ironically, I’m a firm believer in producers. I can give someone a hard time when I’m not hearing it the way I think it should be, but I don’t think any of us knows everything. You need someone to help you do your listening, and I love to see what people hear out of me. If it doesn’t work, I’ll tell them, but usually, you shouldn’t have to even talk about it. The speakers will let you know when a song feels right.

  I like to see what a producer has in mind; and between me not being able to do what they think I can, and trying to do what they want me to, a lot of times you come up with something that neither of you might have thought of in the first place. You have to be prepared to take advantage of the unexpected.

  Danny didn’t care what I was about; in his eyes, the producer was there to control the artist. He did want the best for me, but that was a value judgment he wasn’t allowing me to make. “This guy could be the biggest star in the world,” he told Johnny Western, who wrote the liner notes for Waylon, released in January of 1970, “but he’s his own worst enemy.” That can never work. You have to trust the instincts of the artists you’re helping to record. I may not know that much about music, but I know what gets me.

  One of the stranger things to grab my attention was a song by Richard Harris written by Jimmy Webb. I wore out the eight-track of “MacArthur Park,” playing it in the limousine traveling between shows. It was one of the first times I ever realized that performance was the key to music, because here was an actor who could hardly sing, and his vocal mesmerized me. It was a wonderful song, and there was something country about it, especially that line about the “old men playing checkers in the park.”