Waylon

by Waylon Jennings

  I broached the idea of doing it to Chet in early 1969, and I guess that’s when he thought I was too far gone and turned me over to Danny. But it wasn’t until I met the Kimberlys out in Las Vegas that the concept for the song started coming together.

  They were two pairs of siblings married to each other, girl twins hooked up with two brothers, and a cousin playing bass. It kind of reminded me of my family back in Littlefield. They performed “MacArthur Park” as part of their show, and it got me thinking. I liked the song’s range and its epic feel, and I liked Verna Gay Kimberly. We had a thing going; she was unhappy and so was I. It was before I had re-met Jessi. Her and her husband were splitting up, and she and her twin sister didn’t get along. I didn’t want to see the group dissolve as well, because they were really good.

  I helped get them a deal with RCA, though they weren’t really country-oriented, and in the spring of 1969, we recorded an album together called Country-Folk. “MacArthur Park” was the lead-off track, and Danny and I got into it a couple of times over the arrangement. I knew exactly what I wanted the strings to do; I had to hum the parts. He probably had his own ideas. But the single got into the country Top Twenty-five that fall, and when the Grammys came around, it won for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group. By then, everybody was more than happy to claim it was their idea.

  Years later Robert Duvall introduced me to Richard Harris. “You bastid,” Richard said, throwing his napkin playfully on the floor and his arms around me. “Fuck you. You’re the one who stole my Grammy.”

  * * *

  I woke up freezing to death. Where was I? Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, I guessed.

  I got up and turned the air conditioner off. It was on high. The feeling was mutual. I went to the bathroom, then lit a cigarette and sat on the side of the bed, trying to think how I got there. In more ways than one.

  I had taken Barbara home for the last time, and went from Phoenix to Las Vegas. We were booked in a casino for two weeks, and I stayed up for nine un-straight days and nights, gambling and taking pills. Going a little out of my mind. I knew it was over between her and me, and I was still crazy about her.

  The last night we played there, before the show, I suddenly felt as if I couldn’t get my breath. I felt like I had an anvil on my chest. I was weak and dehydrated so bad, running on empty. I went upstairs and started drinking milk and ordering steaks. It was the afternoon. Verna Gay came over with one of her little girls and tried to get me to rest. I finally got to sleep, woke up for the show, and then got in a car and took off toward Minnesota somewhere. My next stop.

  I was a wreck. I caught some shut-eye by the side of the road, lying down in the car. Somewhere along in there, we pulled into a motel. It was a tourist court, a bunch of little cabins by the side of Any Road, U.S.A. I ate supper, then went to sleep again. I knew I might not wake up. I could hardly catch my breath. I was hyperventilating, sweat pouring off me. It was the last days of summer, 1968. That’s when I turned the air-conditioning on.

  Daddy hadn’t been dead very long when me and Barbara split. We went to the funeral together, and maybe two or three weeks later we’d gone through our final days. When you’re mourning, you reconsider your life. How many more things can you stack on to make it any worse? I could probably have stopped myself from going off the deep end if I had just lost one of them; but I was truly adrift in my own misery now.

  I put the cigarette out and laid back. As I settled in, I looked up and saw my dad standing at the end of the bed. I know it was him, and I’ll tell you why. My dad could not wear a necktie, or bear to have his shirt buttoned at the collar. His neck was real thick. He had a lot of gray hair on his chest, right up to his shoulders. He never had a shirt that fit him.

  He had on a pinstriped suit, brown, with little gray stripes in it. That’s how vivid the vision was. I noticed his neck. He had a Windsor knot in his tie; he was neat and dressed up.

  But he had the saddest expression on his face. He never said a word. He just gazed at me, with eyes that said “Don’t do this to yourself.” Daddy was worried about me. He was really hurt that I would do myself such harm.

  I guess I blinked, and suddenly he was gone. Daddy only had to look at me, and I knew.

  On the road, we thought we were bullet-proof. We loved the music, but music was secondary to what we were doing. All we did was party.

  We seemed to be in motion all the time. We’d be out there three hundred dates a year. We didn’t work all of them, but we couldn’t afford to go back. We weren’t making any money.

  The only thing left to do was have a good time. We were probably making terrible music, as I look back, but the edge was there. The edge kept it alive. It may not have been good, but it was rockin’.

  The only problem was that we were teetering and toppling ever closer to the precipice. You can only break the law of gravity for so long. Like Humpty Dumpty, we were overdue for a great fall.

  On February 9, 1969, the band was heading to Peoria, Illinois, riding in a pickup that had a sleeper stacked on top of it. You could rest in the back, and one person could fit crosswise over the top of the truck cab in a specially made bunk. I had ordered a Bluebird bus from down in Georgia, but it hadn’t been delivered yet. It was to be my first new bus.

  Richie was in the front and had just let Jimmy Gray start driving. Outside of Bloomington, along I-150 on the way to Peoria, they came to an old steel bridge over Kickapoo Creek. It was icy and snowy, and they had to make a sharp right turn. As they slipped on the black ice, the truck shimmied over and leaned a little bit to the side. Walter “Chuck” Conway, a bass player who had joined me just eleven days before, was asleep in the back compartment, over the truck cab.

  The poor guy never knew what hit him. The pickup made the turn untouched and kept going, but the bridge clipped the sleeper, shattering it and shearing off the alcove. Chuck fell plumb in the river. Richie ran and jumped in after him, but he was too late. They said there wasn’t a bone in his head that wasn’t broken, and he died at the scene. Stew “Allen” Punsky, a keyboard player, was also badly hurt.

  I was traveling behind them in the Cadillac, an hour or two after, and when I came on the scene, it scared me to death. The police found pot in the pickup, but when I went down to the hospital, those cops showed me the bag of marijuana and said “Waylon, you’ve got enough problems. We’re throwing this away.”

  It scared me, made me feel responsible, even though there was nothing I could’ve done. We played the date, using Hank Snow’s bass player, and I was just wobbling around, on pills and drunk. Merle Haggard and his manager, Fuzzy Owens, got me in a poker game and cleaned me out. I had four or five thousand dollars on me, and they won everything. They were there to get my money. That was it. I think Merle is a great singer and songwriter, and probably he was in as bad a shape as I was, but we’ve never been close since that night. I can still remember their faces. When I was broke, they said their good-byes and left. I never forgot that.

  Richie and Jimmy were in for some more trouble on June 10, when they were arrested for marijuana possession at the Rainbow Bridge border separating the United States and Canada.

  It had been a pretty tumultuous trip to Toronto. We were playing a week at Jack Starr’s Horseshoe Lounge, and one night, after the show, we went over to Aunt Bea’s afterhours club to have a little jam. Richie brought a trap case with him, and just as he slid it in the corner, he was coldcocked from behind by a big Newfie, which is what they call guys from Newfoundland in Maple Leaf country. “You hippie-looking sonofabitch,” he snarled at Richie, and belted him right in the nose.

  Richie’s long hair always attracted trouble, but we were used to it. A little redneck hootin’ and hollerin’ was always good for a show; it gave us something to prove. But up in Canada that week, the taunts were meaner, less good-natured. The war between “hippies” and “straights” was getting more intense, and songs like “Okie from Muskogee” weren’t helping, even if Merle insists h
is intent to be satiric was misinterpreted as flag waving.

  Richie was mad as hell. He came back to me, and I said, “Let’s go get him.” We all tore down the stairs. A Mountie already had him in custody, but that didn’t stop Richie. I don’t think he even saw the policeman. The Newfie was huge, about twice his size, and Richie had to jump up to hit him. That started everything going wild. Pretty soon somebody’s wrestling with the Mountie, the Newfie and Richie are rolling around on the floor, and we’re all bouncing around. I kicked that Newfie right in the nuts, as hard as I could, and all he did was growl like a damn bear or something.

  A cop swung a nightstick. I felt it go whistling past my head, just barely missing me. Sonny Ray, who was playing bass with us, yelled “You almost hit the chief!” and he took off after the cop, nearly knocking him out.

  That Newfie took on all of us. I grabbed him from the back and he kicked me off, ramming me into a corner. I turned to Curtis Buck and said, “He’s gonna whip all our asses.” Curtis said “No, he ain’t” and took a shotglass and hit that big guy right in the mouth. That took him out of the picture, and when the dust had cleared, Richie, Curtis, and Sonny were on their way to jail. It took us all night to get them sprung.

  We still weren’t home free. Heading back across the border to Nashville, our two-vehicle convoy—my Cadillac and the Dodge pickup—got stopped at the Niagara Falls crossing. Longhairs in limos? The Cadillac got through, but the pickup was thoroughly searched. Jimmy Gray tried to toss the “evidence” out the window, and that alerted the cops, and pretty soon they found themselves in the slammer. It was Richie’s second time in a week!

  Boy, were they mad. At the cops and each other. I was laughing and calling them criminals, and then I really gave them a reaming. I said, if you hadn’t messed with that shit, you wouldn’t get in trouble. I was kind of upset with them. If they’d just taken pills, like me, they’d have been okay. I even fired Jimmy. I was an easy boss, except when it came to dictating how you took your drugs. Of course, I never considered pills as being against the law.

  It was like a little game with us. We didn’t know we could go to prison for pills. We weren’t afraid of being busted because all you had to do was show your prescription bottle. Or get somebody to write a prescription. The big excuse was weight gain, though we were so skinny we could stand sideways and hide. We used to know a Dr. Snap out in east Nashville, in a rundown neighborhood, who would give us ’scripts. We could take them around the corner to the black drugstore and fill the prescription. We could get a hundred little yellow Simcos a week, or fifty Speckled Birds a month. I didn’t think there was anything unusual about it. I had a big bottle hidden, and I’d put some extras in a small bottle, and if I was stopped, at the border or driving along, nobody would bother me. Hell, I carried handfuls of uppers. I’d pull my pockets inside out and white Bennies would scatter everywhere.

  The thing was, I thought they were on drugs, and I was taking prescriptions. None of us realized that there was no difference. We’d gotten started on pills by getting them from doctors, or pharmacists, who gave us no warning. Booking agents slipped you the pills to help keep you going. That’s no excuse, but we never even thought about them being addictive. We didn’t know that they could kill you. Or make you kill yourself.

  I didn’t like anybody who drank. Never touched the stuff; that was my big boast. And cocaine, I thought that was terrible, at least then. As for pot, I didn’t enjoy sitting there grinning.

  Richie and I wouldn’t socialize much. He was with the band more. The drugs divided us, and as things grew more out of control, Richie started thinking about taking a break. He was just running himself down living on amphetamines, and had been for two years and more. He needed to head home for a while and settle himself.

  He came to see me on the bus. “I have to leave,” Richie said. “I’m wore out.”

  I nodded. “Man, I wish I could go with you.”

  Jessi and I got married the next day after Richie left. I can’t say one caused the other, but I was reaching out. Her hand took mine, and that was when I realized I couldn’t be complete without her.

  She wasn’t surprised. Jessi knew the time was coming when I’d ask, and she had the dress. I didn’t get down on my knees or anything. It was more like “You want to get married, don’t you?” We were both a little distant from our families at the time. She’d already had a big wedding, and neither of us were interested in an ornate ceremony.

  We went to a Las Vegas marriage mill on October 26, 1969. My bass player stood up as best man, and the justice of the peace started reciting the vows in a monotone. It was the forty-fourth wedding he’d performed that day.

  It hit Jessi funny and she started giggling, then laughing hysterically. The more she howled, the more serious I got. There might have been a little underlying tension. Here we were at one of the most important crossroads of our life, and she was giddy and I was impatient. Neither of us could really believe it. She could hardly get hold of herself long enough to catch her breath and say “I do.”

  But we did. Forevermore.

  CHAPTER 6

  “THERE’S ANOTHER WAY

  OF DOING THINGS

  AND THAT IS ROCK ’N’ ROLL”

  The Navajos call it the Long Walk. Forced into exile from their native land, marched to Fort Sumter in eastern New Mexico where the government attempted to turn them into farmers and traders; contrary to their hunting and shepherding ways, they endured five years of desolation before America admitted its failure and sent them home to the Wondrous Place.

  I had come to the reservation as I had many times before. The Indians liked me, and I felt at home among the Indians. Sometimes I think if it hadn’t been for them, I’d have to get something else to do. I could always draw a crowd there. They were among my most loyal fans.

  The Indians had initially been won over by “Love of the Common People.” In March of 1969, I had been booked to play Flagstaff, Arizona, by Johnna Yursic, a local boy; to promote the concert, he asked the area disc jockey, Mike McQuade at KGAK, to feature my current hit single, “Mental Revenge,” from the album I had out at the time, Jewels. It was a Mel Tillis song, but they didn’t like it at the station, so they started spinning the B side of “The Chokin’ Kind,” nearly two years old at this point. They couldn’t believe the reaction. Suddenly they were getting requests to play it before the record had a chance to fade over the air. Even after McQuade repeated it six times in a row, the phone would ring and a Native American voice would be on the other end of the line, asking to please hear “Common People” again. The “Navajo National Anthem,” as Mike said, was singing to them.

  “Living on dreams ain’t easy.” “Family pride.” “Faith is your foundation.” “The Love of the Common People,” if you think of “Common” as shared heritage, hopes, a tribe to cling to, and a warm conversation. Strong where you belong.

  At seven-thirty the parking lot in the recreation center where I was scheduled to play would be empty. By eight, it would be filled with what they called Navajo Cadillacs, pickup trucks with eight or ten Indians jammed in the back. They’d come out of nowhere. I could hear the song beating through their hearts as they stood bunched in a crescent, waiting for me to come out from the wings. There would be a half-moon of empty space in front of the stage. When the band finished their warm-up, I’d walk to the microphone and they’d surge toward me in a wave. They trusted that I understood them. They understood me, which at that time took some doing.

  When I first started playing the reservations, they didn’t applaud at all. They didn’t need to. I could feel their concentration, their respect, the riveting energy of their attention. They were shy people. I’d cut up with them, try to put them at ease. “Hey, where you goin’? Come over here and say hello”; and they’d make me feel easy too.

  Once I was standing backstage and a Tonto Apache came over to me. I don’t think he was a Mescalero. We were up in the reservation just north of Farmington, New M
exico. “Hey, Waylon,” he said to me. “Would you take a picture with my wife?”

  I said sure, but he’d have to bring her back to the dressing room. I couldn’t go out front.

  “Okay,” he replied, and headed back to the door. He turned around. “Hey, Waylon. You gotta camera?”

  Hey, Waylon. They took to me like kin, and I felt a bond with them that went beyond my great-grandmother. They had a basic credo of trust and honor, and they lived their religion all day, every day, in the shadow of the Great Spirit. We both handled liquor about the same way, only in their case, they couldn’t just buy a drink. If the cops caught them with alcohol, they’d take it away and put them in jail. So what they did was buy a whole bottle and swallow it all. They weren’t buying a drink; they were buying a drunk.

  The same was true of me, only it was my pill intake that was purchasing oblivion. I had a sense of loss, of unfulfilled purpose. Even though it’s hard to draw a comparison between the fate of a downtrodden, honorable people and one man’s struggle to have his music heard, sometimes I felt that Nashville was fencing me in the same as these proud Indian tribes had been enclosed in their reservations.

  I’d lost my way.

  The more I worked, the more in debt I got. The more my records sold, the further they receded from what I had in mind, the sound I wanted to hear, the impact I wanted them to have. I kept trying it their way, and I saw I wasn’t going to get it.

  In the summer of 1972, I had dates booked in the reservations north of Gallup. I’d gotten an antibiotics shot in town for a tooth problem, and Father Dunstan Schmidlin, the priest who booked us for the show, told me that when I went up into the Indian settlements, I shouldn’t eat or drink anything because there was an epidemic of hepatitis.