I remembered his warning right after I’d eaten some pie and drank some milk in a little cafe near the Colorado border of the Ute reservation. That night I witnessed the damnedest fight I ever saw in my life. A cop whose hobby was beating up Indians put on his gloves and waded into a crowd at a bar. There he was with his burr haircut, in his glory, pushing and punching them toward the door, and outside they were beating his car all to hell; there wasn’t one place that wasn’t dented.
When we got back to town, I felt like that car, sick and battered. We headed on to Buck Lake Ranch and played our show. I had on a gold shirt, and after we finished, exhausted, I went back to the bus and laid down. I couldn’t get up. My back was killing me; my kidneys hurt. Jessi came in and told me I was looking yellow. “Nah,” I said, real upset. “It’s the reflection of this shirt.”
They took me home. I didn’t even wake up during the ride. The next thing I knew was the doctor looming over me. I was saying “Bullshit, I ain’t going in no hospital,” and he came and stood by the bed, looking seven feet tall. I said, “Goddamn, you run a giant in on my ass.”
I didn’t even know what hepatitis was. I didn’t want to quit. I was ready to keep going. Give me some pills. I’ll get right up from here again.
I got to feeling worse. Jessi was just like a little chihuahua, nervous, not knowing whether I was going to live or die. Finally she talked me into getting treated at a hospital. It was the first time I’d pulled to a halt in years.
Stop and start over. It’s been the pattern of my life whenever things get beyond my control.
Lying there, I started thinking about what I’d won after ten years of banging around the honky-tonk circuit. My health was shot. I was nearly close to a quarter of a million dollars in debt, and getting deeper in the hole whether I played shows or not. The IRS was on my tail. I was paying alimony to three wives. If I went on the road I lost money. If I stayed home, I lost more.
As for record sales, I never got ahead of the five percent of ninety percent and the packaging fees and the overseas split and the studio costs and the multitrack accounting books. Whenever they gave you a piece of the royalties up here, they took it away down there. You couldn’t figure who owed what and why I wasn’t getting any with a team of lawyers and accountants, and besides, we were supposed to be aw-shucks country boys. They thought we were stupid, that we were so thankful to be able to play guitar and sing, so grateful that they gave us our start, and were happy they were there when we needed them, as long as we didn’t ask for any real power or look too closely behind the scenes. If you don’t make waves, RCA and Decca and Epic and Capitol were telling us, we’ll let you keep making records. Thanks, boss.
“Next year is your year.” That’s what they promised; but they were just stroking me. My year always seemed to be the next year, the one over the horizon, after the next single, the next album, the next tour, not the one in which I was struggling to keep my band and my music afloat.
Chet would’ve turned the world over to keep me going. He had all the faith possible in me. He took over the reins to the Nashville operations after Steve Sholes died in 1968, but though he could sign talent and spend some money, he didn’t have the kind of promotional power that he needed. He was a guitar player, not a company man. Sholes, who had been Chet’s mentor at RCA since the mid-1950s, had usually stood between him and the label’s executive offices in New York. Now it was Chet’s turn to call New York to get approvals, and they held him, and us hillbillies, at arm’s length. They still ran everything from both coasts, and we were caught in the middle.
I was tired of getting ripped off. Lucky Moeller was my manager as well as my booking agent, and I couldn’t understand, even after being on the road more than two-thirds of the year, every year, how I still owed him thirty thousand dollars.
I found it hard to grasp how I could write a song for my own publishing company, Baron, and get screwed. Baron was administered by Harlan Howard’s Wilderness Music. He sold half of his company to Tree Music, which meant they owned a piece of my company, too. I was finishing a song called “Yellow Haired Woman,” about Barbara, when Red Lane walked in. I was fixing to record it that day, and I asked him to help me finish it. I said I’d give him half of the song. In fifteen minutes we had it, and it wasn’t any big deal.
Red was a writer for Tree, and Jack Stapp, who ran Tree, said that they couldn’t share the publishing because Red was an exclusive writer for them. But you administer my company, I said, which is part of your company. Tree still refused to give me a share of the song. I said, “Fucker, that’s my song first.”
I went to Harlan and told him I thought that was wrong. He said he couldn’t help me. “They’re my friends,” he said. They weren’t any friends of mine; it was just greed on their part. They acted like I didn’t exist.
RCA celebrated my hospitalization by releasing Ladies Love Outlaws in September. It was a pretty good album, all things considered, especially with that sweet cover of me in full gunslinger regalia staring down at my five-year-old niece, Ladonna.
The only problem was that it wasn’t finished.
Most of the tracks on there had only scratch vocals, which is the way you sing when you’re concentrating on the band getting a good track. Sometimes they come out sounding all right, but more often you need to do them over, so you can concentrate on your performance. But they didn’t ask me anything about what I thought. They just put it out. I still cringe whenever I hear myself singing Hoyt Axton’s “Never Been to Spain.” It sounded like I’d never even been to Cleveland.
After Danny Davis, Chet placed me with Ronny Light. Ronny was young, one of the nicest people in the world, and didn’t deserve the misery I put him through. I got more freedom with him as a producer, although I was still using musicians who didn’t know what I was about. By then I was probably so peeved at the system, I gave Ronny trouble just for being around. When we cut “Good Hearted Woman,” I point-blank told him to stay in the control room and let me get on with doing it in the studio. I wanted him to make sure it got to the tape machine, and that he stayed out of my way. I was starting to realize it wasn’t the individual producer that made the difference.
Nashville had a definite, set formula for what a country record should sound like. There’s more than one kind of country music though—a wide range that takes in everything from bluegrass to western swing. Their country was smooth and pop, one road that led to a Nashville Sound. Well, I couldn’t do that. I didn’t want to do that.
I had an energy, and it made them afraid. In response, they tried to control me, make me a cog in their machine, and it didn’t stop with record production. Everybody got in on it: the marketing departments, the promoters, the talent bookers. “I didn’t like his last album; he had some songs on there that sounded like rock and roll to me.” Maybe there was a heavier bottom, a rock and roll beat driving a country song, but if there’s no edge in the music, there’s no edge in me.
“Why don’t you just do what you’re supposed to? What everybody else does?” After a while, I didn’t see the point. I never was a part of their world. They’d have on their rhinestone suits, or real fine-looking golf clothes, and here I am in my damn Levis and leather jacket, hair slicked back, all cigarettes and drugs. They “loved” my music, but they wouldn’t allow me to make it. They were afraid of me because I wouldn’t kiss their ass. They thought I was a troublemaker. I would ask for something and they’d tell me a dozen reasons why I couldn’t have it, over and over and over.
All I was trying to do was survive.
Richie had come back in early 1972. One of the conditions of his return was that he could have his own stash—meaning pot. I guess it worked for him. The first thing he’d done after leaving me was head back to Phoenix, buy a pound of grass, and lock himself in his room for a month, sleeping and eating and getting off pills. Eddie Fox, who had been with Marty Robbins, had drummed in his place over the couple years he’d been gone, but Richie and I were close en
ough to know that it was only temporary.
Having been away, he was a little shocked at the changes in me. He wasn’t the only one. I was lying in bed, getting more and more depressed over my prospects, wondering why I was sliding deeper into Nowheresville. I’d finally said to myself, I’m never going to have hit records. I’m never going to be a success in this business. I might just go back to a nightclub somewhere and play my music. It’s all over.
Richie listened while I told him all this. He’d thought I was at a real low when he left; now he saw that not much had changed, except for the worse. “You’re fixin’ to quit, aren’t you,” he said.
I thought, Yeah, I am. And figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. “Probably head back to Phoenix, maybe work in radio….”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Before you pack it in, I think we can give it one more shot. Just try it. There’s another way of doing things, and that is rock and roll.”
Why not? It made a lot of sense. I was mentally rockin’ and rollin’. It was an attitude as much as a music, and we were rock and roll in everything but our allegiance to country. Even then, there was a lot of rock in that. We were proud to be country, but that didn’t mean we had to be trapped by country music’s conventions, or the way artists were treated. Maybe if I stopped trying to fit in, and started saying “fuck it,” I was going to get a chance to do it my way. If it didn’t work out, I’d be the only one to blame.
Rock and roll was no stranger to my world. Every time I would go to Los Angeles, rockers would flock to the shows, helped along by Kris Kristofferson telling everyone about me. Gram Parsons, who joined country and rock at the hip with the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers in the late sixties, was among those who came to see me; he may have been the only guy that did more drugs than I could. “What I did was take your music one step further,” he told me. Even Dylan came down to the Palomino.
But Richie was talking about rock in a broader sense, from onstage production values, like carrying sound and lights, to such luxuries as roadies. “What’s a roadie?” I remember asking him. We were still humping our own equipment into the shows. Each band member would tote his gear into the gig, and one of the guys in the band would tune my guitar, and that was it.
Richie was especially referring to how rock music was regarded by the big companies. Jessi had seen Duane Eddy treated with respect and admiration when he came to Nashville to record the Twangy Country album. I knew that rock acts on RCA, like the Jefferson Airplane, got huge budgets to record, with promotion to match, while we were expected to make our albums in a few days. The Airplane had spent fifty thousand dollars on an album and then scrapped it and started over. Maybe that’s why Grace Slick was raising hell about America when I was on a television show with her. I was getting mad, telling her that I’m the first to agree there’s a lot wrong with our system, but it’s still the best out there, and she’s talking about communism and striking karate poses. “There ain’t a chance in the world me being afraid of you,” I said, and that turned her on. She was all set to send her German boyfriend off; I didn’t see her sharing her recording budget, though.
Nashville was just too insular, too caught up in itself. I needed somebody from outside the loop, who could speak the forked tongue. Someone who knew where the bodies were buried.
“I want you to meet Neil Reshen,” continued Richie. “You’re not going to like him at all. He’s not like anything you’re used to. You’re not going to trust him, but he’s what you need now. He’s your man. I just want you to talk to him.”
While he was back in Phoenix, Richie had done some road managing for Goose Creek Symphony, a country-rock band managed by a man named George Lappe. Neil had handled some of their business affairs, and Richie was impressed with his connections and cutthroat determination. “He can tell you things about this music business,” Richie told me, “what’s been holding you down and why, and what can be done about it.”
I had asked RCA for an advance on royalties, twenty-five thousand dollars, so I could get by while I was recuperating. At first the New York office agreed, and then Jerry Bradley came by my house. He was Owen Bradley’s son and had taken over most of Chet’s executive duties at the record company.
Richie had brought Neil around that day, and he was sitting quietly in the room when Jerry showed up. I was flat on my back. He didn’t know who Neil was, and I wasn’t about to tell him.
Jerry said to me, “If you will sign again for five percent, we’ll let you have five thousand dollars.” The royalty was the same rate I’d gotten as a newcomer. He went on about how bad he felt coming out there while I was sick and telling me that, and he even brought out my record royalty statements, to show me that this was all they could give me, though they wanted to help me in any way they could, and really, they loved me and thought of me as part of the RCA family. I thanked him and told him I would think about it.
After Jerry left, I sat down and went over the statements with Neil. He had a black beard that made him look like Abe Lincoln’s unsavory twin, and he was a New York lawyer, a carpetbagger, to boot. Reshen was about as un-Nashville as you could get. His company, Media Consulting, specialized in audits, and he had worked with Miles Davis and Frank Zappa. He was used to difficult clients.
Neil ran his eyes over the figures. “They’re a bunch of whooers,” was all he said. He didn’t need to add, or subtract, anymore.
When Bradley came back, I told him I wouldn’t honor the new contract. “Before I sign that, I’ll quit. I won’t be recording anymore.” Jerry later confided to me he was never so glad when anyone said no, that he felt like a snake trying to take advantage of me when I was down.
He also knew that Neil was no innocent bystander.
Driving back to the airport, Richie introduced Neil to Willie Nelson. Willie had retreated to Texas by that time and, like a lizard in his lair, hardly ever came out of Austin. “He’s going to be Waylon’s manager,” Richie said.
“Well, let him manage me, too,” said Willie. Typical.
There was a time when Neil fed me and Willie, and if it hadn’t been for him, I don’t know what we would have done. He helped us immeasurably. He got things for us that no country singer had ever gotten before. If we were going to become Outlaws, though we didn’t know that yet, we needed an Outlaw Lawyer, as Willie called him.
Neil was perfect for the part. He was like a mad dog on a leash. When he got his teeth into something, he never let go. He placed himself between us and the business-as-usual; and he wasn’t about to be distracted by somebody throwing us a bone. We knew it wasn’t going to be a forever thing. I told Willie, “Someday we’re going to have to run him off. But we can have a good ride.”
We never went to the trouble of working out a contract between us. Why bother? Neil was a genius at negotiation, and Willie and I had no chance of coming out ahead. He’d figure ways of beating people, or make people beat themselves. He would get these ugly looks. He must’ve practiced for hours on end making faces in the mirror, working out his responses.
He could sit silent endlessly. It would just drive you crazy. The first one that spoke gave in, that was the way they did things.
We were in Chet’s office, with all these executives from New York, negotiating my new record deal. Frank Manceine was there; so was Joe Galante. New York could tell Nashville what to do, but Nashville couldn’t tell New York: The power of attorney only flowed one way. Neil wanted me to see how it was done. He was making these faces; I wanted to slap him. But he knew what he was doing. If you peeve somebody to the point of anger, you jar them from their train of thought, and he wanted RCA off balance.
It was down to a twenty-five-thousand-dollar sum, and they were not going to give it to me. He wanted it. We were setting there, not a word spoken, and the silence got unbearable. After a while, I couldn’t take it anymore. “Chet,” I said, reaching over to a bowl on his desk, “where’d you get these peanuts?”
Neil glared
at me. “Shut up, Waylon.”
You could hear a clock tick in the room. It got even quieter. Minutes passed. I rose up, never said a word, walked out. I went to the bathroom to take a leak. When I came back, Neil greeted me in the hall. “You’re a fuckin’ genius,” he said.
“What?”
“Walking out like that. That sewed it up.” He was positively gleeful. “Where’d you go?”
“I had to take a piss.”
“That’s a twenty-five-thousand-dollar piss,” said Neil. “They asked me where you went and I told them I didn’t know. ‘Waylon’s mad, I’m sure. He’s crazy. He’s liable to do anything.’ ‘Will he be back?’ they wanted to know, and I shrugged. ‘I guess he’s gone, so we may as well call this to a close.’ And that’s when they gave us the money.”
It took Neil almost a year to get the contract sorted. RCA hadn’t officially picked up my option for 1972, addressing it in care of Chet instead of me, though I’d accepted an advance and been in their studios recording, which might have signified approval on my part. Still, without a formal agreement, it was a gray area whether I was officially still on the label. It probably served them right for sending me mail with “Dear Artist” inscribed as the salutation.
Neil chose to ignore the questionable option and immediately opened talks with other labels. It was probably the best time to apply pressure to RCA. There was something coming to the surface in my career. They saw that I was fixing to happen, with or without their help. Willie had been given a career boost with his shift to Atlantic, and that was one of the labels bidding for my services. RCA didn’t know when, or how, but they knew they would regret losing me.
It didn’t help that we caught them with their pants down. They were stealing me blind. One day I got the idea to find out what they were paying the songwriter, as far as mechanical royalties are concerned. If I’d been the only one to record that song, and I found out what the publisher received, I could compare it with my own sales statement.
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