Waylon

by Waylon Jennings

  Red Lane was the sole writer on “Walk on Out of My Mind,” and I was the only artist to record the song. From experience, I knew Tree Music, his publisher, wouldn’t stand for getting shortchanged, so I called him to find out how much money in mechanicals he’d made on that. I discovered they’d only paid me half of what they owed me, holding the rest “in reserve” for returns. The reserve amounted to one hundred fifty thousand dollars once we got through inspecting their books.

  I had to sue to get the money, and finally we settled for half of that, seventy-five thousand, because I couldn’t afford to keep fighting them. I needed cash for taxes and a bus. Even though it was mine, RCA wouldn’t give me the entire amount. But when Neil went up to their offices on Avenue of the Americas in New York, the computer kicked out two checks by mistake, each for seventy-five grand.

  He called me up as soon as he got back to his office. “You won’t believe this,” he said, “and I know you’re going to make me take them back.” I was always honest as the day is long, and wanted everything to be upfront. Neil used to poke fun at me because I always paid my bills on time. “Send ’em a damn dollar a month,” was his advice, “but you hillbilly boys always want that credit rating, don’t you?” He laughed. “You could not pay for something today and buy it from the same people tomorrow.”

  I surprised him this time, though. “Don’t you dare return those checks. You’re going to cash them both.”

  He said, “You know they’re going to find out about it and they’re going to raise hell, and they’re going to want their money.”

  “And when they do,” I said, “we’ll settle.”

  * * *

  WGJ Productions. It had a nice ring to it. Waylon Goddamn Jennings Productions.

  Free at last.

  When the smoke had cleared, I had gotten a recording contract I could live with. My percentage was up close to eight. Chet was amazed; it was a better deal than he had. “I didn’t know they gave out big contracts like that.” He told Neil they had him “till 1999 at five percent!”

  I also received seventy thousand dollars up front. When they handed me over the check, they asked what I was planning to do with the money. “I’m going to start a record label,” I answered. They couldn’t tell if I was serious or not.

  “I told you he was crazy,” said Frank Manceine.

  The best part was getting my own production company, which meant I could make records on my own and hand the completed masters to RCA. I finally had control over my music, how it was to be advertised and promoted, “sweetened” (in my case “soured”) and mixed. Chet always worried that I was out to destroy something; he thought I was determined to ruin country music, that there would no longer be a reason for people like himself or Owen Bradley to produce records. That was never my intention. There are always people who need ideas, but I’m not someone who can be told what to do musically. If you stop and think about it, it’s not because I’m such a genius. It might be that I’m not smart enough to follow instructions. I have to do what I feel.

  What I was fighting for was the right to try it my way. Just let me have mine.

  Win or lose, I was now able to use my band. Choose my own songs. Turn the bass drum up.

  In theory, that is. Though I agreed to record in their studios, with their engineers, I found soon enough it wasn’t going to work. They were on the phone half the time calling Jerry Bradley upstairs at RCA and telling him what I was doing. I was still screwed.

  “This Time” was a song I had written four years previously. RCA had said it wasn’t any good, but with my newfound freedom, it became the centerpiece of one of my first albums under the WGJ logo. Recorded in October of 1973, Willie played guitar on it and helped me put it together along with a couple of his songs: “Heaven or Hell” and one of my personal favorites, “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way.” As we worked, it became apparent that I was destined to go through the same runarounds every time I stepped outside Nashville’s musical city limits.

  Finally, I’d had enough. I moved the sessions to Tompall Glaser’s studios at 916 Nineteenth Avenue South, nicknamed Hillbilly Central. RCA protested mightily, but I told them this was the way it was going to be from now on.

  “That’s all you got,” was about the way I put it. Lash Lame would’ve been proud of me.

  RCA had no choice. “We can’t release this,” they told me. They had a contract with the engineer’s union that all their recording was to be done in-house, that RCA records could not release any record that wasn’t cut with an RCA engineer, and that RCA artists had to use RCA studios whenever they were within a two-hundred-mile radius of Nashville. Jerry Bradley even went to Washington to get a waiver for one album, but the union wouldn’t go for it. In the face of my stubborn refusal, RCA bit the bullet. They shipped the record and violated their contract with the union. That broke the whole system’s back.

  “This Time” went number one in June of 1974. It was my first chart-topping smash.

  True to their fears, RCA lost the deal with the engineers in Nashville when they released This Time. More, I set a precedent for other artists on the label. Since all had been contractually obligated to work at RCA, and recording expenses were charged against their royalties, when they found out that I could work in an independent studio, everybody split. Porter Wagoner said, hell, I’ve got a studio of my own and I’m going to record there. Pretty soon, RCA was only getting transit business; without a monopoly, they eventually had to sell their studios. I tried to buy one of them. I was up on the executive floors at RCA, and had my eye on Studio B, but they wanted to turn it into a museum, so I put in a bid for Studio A.

  Chet was standing there, lighting a cigar. “Why don’t you let me buy that?” I asked him.

  “You’ve got the nerve of Hitler,” he said. “You’re the reason we’re having to sell it.” He started laughing, but they still wouldn’t let me have the studio.

  Tompall Glaser and I were best friends. We’d met about the time that he broke up with his brothers, and I kind of took their place in his life. He had been in town a lot longer than I had, and I think I was a little in awe of him.

  I loved his singing so much, but when he started airing his opinions, and he had an opinion on everything, you couldn’t shut him up. One of my favorite Glaser Brothers songs was called “Words Come Easy.” In Tompall’s case, it couldn’t have been more accurate. He’d rather argue than care whether he was right or wrong. Tompall will dispute with God when he gets there; or the Devil, whichever one grabs him first. We had a good time tearing up Nashville, and there’ll always be a place in my heart for him.

  The Glasers stood outside the Music City hierarchy, fiercely independent. They had that Nebraska farm sensibility about money—you put some away and don’t touch it—and were good businessmen. They had started out as Marty Robbins’s backup vocal group, opening their own publishing company; their biggest songs to date were John Hartford’s “Gentle on My Mind” and Tompall’s own “Streets of Baltimore.” They used the proceeds to build their studio and offices over on Nineteenth.

  Both his brothers, Chuck and Jim, were a lot more reserved than Tompall, and I never got to know them that well. Among his brothers, he was the black sheep. I was the black sheep of Nashville. Together, we had the makings of a flock. We each needed somebody to tell us that if we weren’t exactly right, we weren’t all wrong. That was the foundation our friendship was built on.

  I hooked up with Tompall over a pinball machine. Probably we’d been introduced when the Glasers tried to pitch me songs, but mesmerized by the flashing lights and endless dramas of silver balls falling as they may, hanging at the Burger Boy, or JJ.’s Market on Broadway, me on pills and Tompall on whiskey, we would talk for hours about what we thought. Mental masturbation. We’d go play pinballs and get it all figured out.

  We could spend a thousand dollars a night, a quarter at a time. Tompall could stay up as long as I could. Bobby Bare had three machines in his office, and whe
n they were filled, or he closed for the day, we’d go all over town looking for pinballs, out Route 65 to a truck stop south of Nashville, down Dixon Road, then a grocery store a couple blocks from Tompall’s offices. When we found one we liked, we practically moved in. One night at the Burger Boy, Tompall was playing a certain machine he liked up front, but he wanted to be by me in the back room, so he dragged his pinballs up the steps and planted it next to mine. The owner just watched open-mouthed, though he didn’t say anything because we were probably paying his rent and more. Even after JJ.’s officially shut for the night, the clerk would sleep on the counter, waking up every now and then to change a hundred-dollar bill for quarters.

  They weren’t the kind of machines where you try to keep the ball going and rack up scores. You’ve got six squares and five balls, and you try to get your numbers to line up. It’s a little like bingo: three in a row and you get four free games; four in a row another twenty games; five and you win anywhere from twenty-five to seventy-five dollars.

  It took more luck than skill, because if you shook the machine too hard, it would tilt on you. There must have been some technique involved, however, because one afternoon these two hoods came into the Burger Boy and hit the machine just so, taking home a hundred dollars in about three hours. For us, once we put in a couple of rolls of quarters, there was no way we were going to win our money back. Pinballs required just enough attention to take your mind off whatever else was going on. A lot of time Tompall and I would talk business as we played. We shot the breeze and made decisions, one ball at a time, winning and losing hundreds of games as the hours passed.

  It was like a marathon. You could stand there, pumping quarters in, and get lost in your own thoughts, idling in neutral. You’d unwind so much that it was hard to stop and do something else. Sometimes we’d be at the machines for two or three days, waiting for the six card to fall into place. Tompall once kept track of our spending, thinking he could take it off his income tax. At the end of the year, he’d spent thirty-five thousand dollars on pinballs.

  One Sunday evening I had a date down in Columbus, Georgia. We were in the south part of town at a little grocery store. Captain Midnight, our sidekick, was with us. We couldn’t leave the machines. Every time we’d get close to finishing, we’d win a bunch of free games and have to run them off, which would start the cycle all over again. Finally, about three in the afternoon, we pulled ourselves away, got in the car, and started driving toward Georgia. A record came on the radio. It sounded familiar. “Is that me?” I asked the Captain.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “Did you record it?” I honestly couldn’t remember. It was actually an early Charlie Daniels song. It shows what state we were in.

  We drove to the show and got there late. They’d had to shuffle the order, waiting for me. The band was all set up. I went and did the show while the Captain slept in the car, and then we turned around and drove another four hours back to Nashville and the pinball machines.

  You could hypnotize yourself, the lights bursting, bells ringing, pulling the pin, flicking the silver ball, overhead fluorescent beams on the glass dazzling, get the three, get the five, bounce, rebound, ricochet romance. Those damned lights. I can look off to the side and they’re still blinking. I might really hit it, whacking the machine, getting it over to where it pays the highest odds. Pinball fever. Man, I’m really hot. Let me have another roll of quarters.

  The Captain could sleep anywhere. He didn’t have a home. Shuttling between my house and Tompall’s office, he kept us in balance, which was no mean feat considering that Tompall and I could go from talking to arguing, then back to friendship, all in the span of an evening. We were like kids about twelve years old. We’d each get mad and know why the other was mad, butting heads like two strong-minded and redneck ol’ boys. Captain could soften that.

  He was on the radio when I first got to town, a rock-and-roll disc jockey named Roger Schutt over WKDA, a two-hundred-and-fifty-watt station that was the tops in town despite its small size. 1240 on the dial, and every midnight, the Captain would come on. Roger gained some notoriety once when a guy who shot somebody called him, and he talked him into surrendering. Most of the people in town knew him as Midnight. Very few of his listeners could tell you his real name.

  Midnight gave up his career to be our friend. He just hung out with us. The Captain was a good listening post. He’d ride around with Tompall or me, and we’d get a chance to say out loud a lot of things we had been thinking. He’d been friends with Tompall since 1959, and probably had a lot to do with keeping Glaser and me together. He always said, “Tompall and Waylon are doing all the robbing, raping, and pillaging, and they’ve got me holding the horses.”

  Sometimes he’d relay messages from one to the other, usually because each of us thought the other one was crazy. It was quite a match-up. Everybody in town was holding their breath, thinking this can’t be.

  It was love of the music that brought Tompall and me together—that and a sense of our own independence. We were a little suspicious of each other when we first met, but as outsiders, our defenses were continually up, and being crazed didn’t help. If you gave Tompall a compliment, he’d say “Aw, don’t be bullshittin’ me.” He thought you were trying to cheat him.

  You could see more of the real Tompall as he’d drive around Nashville, steering his Lincoln Continental with his knees, strumming the ukulele. He and Captain Midnight would play a game. The Captain would call out songs from the thirties and forties, trying to stump him. Tompall could play at least a verse or a chorus from each one; he must’ve known every song recorded.

  Even if he didn’t trust anybody, Tompall was a smart entrepreneur. He knew the incomes and outgos of publishing, and how the totals were supposed to make sense in his favor. Me, I didn’t even have a personal checking account then. I’d just go to my road manager and ask him to give me some money. I’d get a wad of eight or nine hundred dollars and stick it in my pocket. Midnight used to follow me around when I would change my britches before a show, picking up a trail of dollar bills and pills. Tompall once asked me, “Why don’t you write a check?” I told him I didn’t have a checkbook. He took me to the bank and set up a checking account. Then anytime I needed to buy a hundred dollars worth of quarters, I could write a check. Pinball operators across the mid-South cracked open a case of champagne when that happened.

  Tompall also showed me how easy it was to make the studio your own. We were playing pinballs one night, talking about “Lovin’ Her Was Easier.” The next thing I know, Tompall’s making a phone call, setting up a session for him and his brothers at their studio. It was the first time I ever had my finger on the “red button,” as Tompall called it. I produced the song for them; it never did come out or anything, but I saw how much simpler it would be to do it for myself.

  Simpler. That was it. That’s what I wanted. Bringing it back to bass and drums and guitar. You’ve got to make them feel it before they hear it.

  * * *

  “What are you doing to my song?” Billy Joe Shaver asked me.

  “Billy Joe,” I told him. “You have the last word, but you have to leave me alone to figure this out.”

  “I just want to know what you’re doing to my song.”

  “I’m fixin’ to sing it, if you’ll let me.” We were working on “Honky Tonk Heroes.” He had originally written it slow, but in the middle of running it down, I stopped the take and started it cooking. Double-time. Though I’d “done did everything that needs done,” he didn’t understand what I was doing.

  Billy Joe was all up in the air. I was “messin’ with the melodies,” he told me, “screwin’ around the tune.” Anybody else wouldn’t have said anything to me, because they would’ve been scared I wouldn’t cut the song, but Billy Joe just did whatever he took a notion to do. He never had anything like this happen to him, somebody performing a whole album of his songs and show-casing him as a writer. He was so unusual, and the songs were great; but he jus
t couldn’t calm down.

  I was probably a little nervous as well. It was very nearly the first time I was in RCA without a producer, and everybody was on edge. The engineers would call upstairs every half-hour to Jerry Bradley, who’d ask what I was doing. “He’s high,” they’d say. Hell, yes, I was high. Loving every minute of my newfound freedom.

  When people you know are not wanting you to succeed, and you’re in the middle of it, that’s an impossible situation. If it wasn’t enough that the engineers were telling me what I could and couldn’t do, Billy Joe kept hounding me. “I will be a-watching,” he warned.

  “Let me tell you something,” I finally said to him in exasperation. “You are going to get your ass out of here and stop bugging me. I love your songs, but I’m starting not to like you worth a damn. Stand outside the studio, go for a walk, watch some television. I don’t care what you do. When I get through, you can come back in. If you don’t like it, I’ll change it and do it another way, but now get the hell on the other side of that door.” I was gruff, but I could understand why he might be feeling nervous. Songs can be like little babies, and you don’t want to think that someone’s abusing your child. Especially when you’re first starting out. I’d been through enough of that myself.

  They thought Billy Joe was from outer space when he first hit Nashville. He was so shy when I met him that he hardly looked up from the floor. Bobby Bare, who has one of the best noses for songs and writers in the business, brought him over for me to hear him sing. I didn’t even have a home at that time. Jessi and I were living in the Holiday Inn over on West End and Eighteenth.

  He asked if he could play me a song. All I could make out was mumbling. I couldn’t tell anything but that I liked the melody, and I understood no more than a third of the lyrics. Soon enough, Bobby got him in a studio and played me “Ride Me Down Easy.” It just killed me; I loved that song. I called Bobby and said, “Has he got enough material that I could do an album of his stuff? I think that guy can change the whole face of the music.”