Waylon

by Waylon Jennings

  Billy Joe had gone through a lot even before he started writing songs. He didn’t begin in “the business” (though he always called it a hobby) until he was nearly thirty. His daddy had left his momma before he was born in Corsicana, Texas, and he’d grown up around the honky-tonks of Waco. He’d had to drop out of school to work for a living, and had joined the navy when he was seventeen. He might’ve continued scuffling had not a sawmill accident clipped four fingers of his right hand and turned him into a songwriter. Billy always had a sense of humor about it, though. He was sitting on a bed one time playing guitar, and a guy who worked for me came in and said “Billy Joe, if you don’t mind me asking, what happened to your fingers?” Billy started glancing around and digging in his pocket. “Damn,” he said. “They were here just a while ago.”

  He slept in Bobby’s office while he struggled in Nashville, and eventually Kris took a liking to him, covering “Good Christian Soldier” on his Silver Tongued Devil album in 1971. I heard him singing in a backstage trailer at the Dripping Springs Reunion in Texas the next year, though Billy remembers it better than me. As he tells it, I heard him play “Willie the Wandering Gypsy” while they were passing guitars around. I came running in from the back and said “Hey, man, I’ve got to have that song.” Billy Joe agreed.

  He tried to call me when I got back to Nashville, but I was always in a meeting or on another call or “not in.” This went on for months. Even after Bobby brought him by, we had trouble getting together. He caught up with me one night at RCA recording. By then, Kris had produced an album of Billy Joe’s for Monument, called Old Five and Dimers Like Me, and he was feeling a little more cocksure.

  “I got these songs,” he said, “and if you don’t listen to them, I’m going to kick your ass right here in front of everybody.”

  He could’ve been killed there and then by some of my friends lining the walls, but I took Billy Joe in a back room and said “Hoss, you don’t do things like that. I’m going to listen to one song, and if it ain’t no good, I’m telling you goodbye. We ain’t never going to talk again.”

  Billy played me “Old Five and Dimers,” and then kept on going. He had a whole sackful of songs, and by the time he ran out of breath, I wanted to record all of them.

  His songs were of a piece, and the only way you could ever understand Billy Joe was to hear his whole body of work. That was how the concept for Honky Tonk Heroes came about. Billy Joe talked the way a modern cowboy would speak, if he stepped out of the West and lived today. He had a command of Texas lingo, his world as down to earth and real as the day is long, and he wore his Lone Star birthright like a badge. We all did.

  The music reflected this. It was so ragged, with mistakes and bad notes, that it hardly sounded finished; but it was as simple and to the point as I could make it. There was no mistaking what the songs were about. On “Ain’t No God in Mexico,” there wasn’t more than three instruments. You didn’t need a twenty-piece orchestra. It was all there. The song was true to itself. You could feel what was happening inside it.

  “Honky Tonk Heroes” had come directly out of Billy Joe’s experiences growing up. His momma and a girl named Blanche had run a honky-tonk called the Green Gables in Waco. She was a good-looking woman, red-headed and tough, and it was a classic dive, a dance hall with sawdust on the floor, spittoons, and a piano in the corner. The bar had a rail along the bottom, where you could stick your boot up and feel like somebody. Little eleven-year-old Billy Joe went there on summer afternoons, and the soldier boys from Fort Hood would give him nickels and throw him up in the air. That’s where he started singing, tapping his bare feet and making up songs.

  He wrote all this down years later, standing by the bar as a young man, hooking his boot heel on the rail and chicken-hawking tables, looking across to see who he wanted to dance with next. Seems like it was just the other day: the world of “lovable losers, no-account boozers, and honky-tonk heroes.”

  Like me.

  CHAPTER 7

  COUNTRY MODERN

  W’re on a motorcycle, me and Willie, riding past five miles of backed-up traffic, people hollering, car doors opening in front of us, flags waving, girls leaning off pickup trucks, frisbees flying, a different song from each radio as we zip along the shoulder, covered with Colichee dirt and shouting ourselves hoarse, heading for the Dripping Springs Picnic.

  Independence Day, 1973.

  Willie has called a gathering of the tribes to this dusty patch of ranch twenty miles west of Austin. He’s roped in Sammi Smith, who’s just had a big hit with Kris’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” and myself to help him bring it off.

  Naturally it’s pure chaos. We’ve got Ernest Tubb, Hank Cochran, Charlie Rich, Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge, Ray Price, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Bush, the whole Austin scene with Jerry Jeff Walker and Doug Sahm, and yours trulys milling backstage, along with seventy thousand of their most fervent fans out front. Rednecks and longhairs, rolling around together in the heat and the dust.

  Nobody has a clue about what they’re doing, when they’re going on, who’s in charge. Nobody can figure how to control it. Nobody wants to. Somebody steals the money and we don’t get paid.

  But there, right as rain, is Willie, beaming up at me. He knows it is the beginning of something.

  “We hot, ain’t we?” he says.

  We hot.

  If there ever was a free spirit on Earth, it’s Willie Nelson. He’ll tell you it’s because his philosophy of life is “follow your intuition.”

  It’s just that we go about it in different ways. Willie does not want to break the natural flow of things. He does not want confrontation. Whatever’s bound to happen, he figures, go ahead and let it. Willie would sooner bend than break, leaning backward until he throws you off balance and gets his way.

  With me, there’s no gray area. It’s all black and white. I’m in my element when I’m fighting for something. I’ll stand right out there in the dirt and take on everybody in town for his and my right to believe in whatever we think is worth caring about. And if a truck is coming and I’ve got my back turned, you better holler and not let it run over me, natural flow be damned.

  When Nashville started giving us both a hard time, Willie up and left for Texas. He didn’t go back. I stayed in Nashville. I guess in the end we both survived as best we knew how, and came out on the other side with our pride and music intact.

  He’ll never change, and I don’t think he should. He’ll give you everything, say yes to anybody, trust that events will turn out fine in the end. He’ll never be rich. He loves to be a gypsy on the road, playing that beat-up ol’ guitar, wearing that silly-ass headband, singing through the side of his nose and signing autographs after the show, which is where his concept of karma comes in. He thinks you should be thankful if Miss Fortune helps reimburse you for a deed from another life.

  I say, “Willie, I believe that what goes around comes around in this life, but I wasn’t with you in the other ones. You better leave me out of this.”

  He never does, though, and I’ve had to start my life over several times because of him. If he’d ask, I’d do it all over again. He’s my personal Willie, and I’m his Waylon. Yin and yang. Where there’s a Will, there’s a Way.

  Willie was like a god in Texas. People there think when they die they’re going to Willie’s house. He had been raised in Abbot and cruised through Waco as a door-to-door salesman before becoming a disc jockey in San Antonio. He gravitated to Nashville and Tootsie’s in the early sixties, selling “Family Bible” for fifty dollars before earning a songwriter’s living with hits for Patsy Cline and Faron Young, and penning Ray Price’s theme song, “Night Lights.” RCA made over a dozen records with him in the late sixties. Though he had some success, he was mostly known as a songwriter, and loving performing as much as he does, that eventually started to bother him.

  I didn’t see much of Willie when he lived in Tennessee. His home was out in Ridgetop, on the fringe of Nashville
, and when he wasn’t spending time with his family, he hung out with Hank Cochran’s crowd at Pamper Music in Madison. I was probably closer to his drummer, Paul English. His first wife worked at the Wagon Wheel downtown on Broadway, and I’d hear tales of her throwing an ashtray at him, and hitting Hank, or beaning Ben Dorsey with a beer bottle. Mostly our only contact was knowing that we were both outcasts on the same label. We’d play some shows together, but the road usually took us in different directions.

  In 1971, Willie’s house in Ridgetop burned down, and he got a deal with Atlantic Records’ new country division. Allowed to use his own band and do his songs the way he heard them, and intrigued by his popularity in Lone Star honky-tonks, he saw no need to stay in Nashville. He returned to Texas, settling in Austin, where he felt an affinity with the redneck hippie community centered around a converted armory named Armadillo World Headquarters. In those days, the combining of those two worlds was a big deal: long hair, pot smoking, and youth didn’t set well with country music or its truck stop audience.

  Willie helped bring all that together, or did all that bring Willie together? Pretty soon he was growing his hair long and playing in front of whooping crowds at the Armadillo Headquarters, calling me up and telling me I should come visit this little nightclub in Austin.

  I’d never worked the Armadillo before. I thought it was a cowboy place. After I set up, I peeked through the curtains and saw that it was a rock and roll club. We’d played a festival in Dripping Springs—they called it a Reunion—the previous July Fourth, but there were so many different performers on the bill that you figured some of the audience had to be yours. The Armadillo crowd was all young kids, longhairs, sitting on the floor. The smell of reefer hung heavy in the room. I thought about my head in the mouth of a lion.

  I was upset. “Somebody find that red-headed bastard and get him here,” I said. When Willie arrived, all smiles, I tore into him. “What the hell have you got me into?”

  “Just trust me,” he said.

  I said, “I know what that means in Hollywood, but it better not mean the same thing here.”

  I didn’t have to worry. They went nuts when I hit the stage, and even crazier when Willie came out to join me.

  It was a new way of thinking. We were going against the grain, and yet we weren’t alone in how we felt. Willie saw there were two streams of country music, moving parallel, sometimes further apart, sometimes growing closer. Each was just a little afraid of the other, and he wanted to bring them together.

  What better way than to have a Picnic? Though modeled on Woodstock, Dripping Springs took on a character all its own as it grew, the old and the new together. Willie invited Leon Russell to add his road show into the mix; Tom T. Hall, Ernest Tubb, and Charlie Rich blended a traditional spirit alongside relative newcomers like Kris and Billy Joe Shaver.

  Billy Joe especially had a wild Picnic. He’d played the night before at the Armadillo, passed out in the back, and woke up the next day to realize he’d been bitten by a brown recluse spider. He went to Johnna Yursic’s room, who by this time was road managing me, and Johnna put him in a cold shower to keep the fever down. It certainly didn’t do the trick, because later on Billy Joe was running all around backstage, healing people and thinking he was Jesus. About three in the afternoon he decided he was going to go out into the desert to die. He gave his car keys and billfold to his wife and went off, until he heard Sammi singing “Take the ribbon from your hair” and knew he wasn’t in heaven. Billy Joe came back, looking like a basted turkey, with the worst song you ever heard about dyin’ in the desert. He had decided to live.

  We’d never seen anything like it. Everything we did at Dripping Springs was wrong, and it didn’t matter. Nobody paid to get in; the fences were torn down. I’m singing “Bob Wills Is Still the King” and women are throwing brassieres on stage. My band just went to pieces. Girls with no tops, no bottoms, up on boys’ shoulders and taunting you. If you didn’t look, people were going to wonder about you; if you did look, they were going to know about you. They caught you either way. One ol’ gal took her clothes off and got up on a tall camera platform. She was just lying there squirming and some cowboy jumped up and mounted and went to work. It started a whole orgy over in that area. Debbie couldn’t do Dallas like she did. I never quite got used to that.

  Backstage it was pot, whiskey, pills. And some cocaine. Coke was just coming in, though I was still carrying pockets full of uppers. The whole audience was as twisted as we were: all day and all night drinking hot beer. I wanted to know when and where they went to the bathroom, since they weren’t about to give up their places in the front row to take a leak. There were streakers and star-struckers. It was a wonder nobody got hurt.

  We were having a time, that was for sure—one big ball. I don’t recall anybody looking sideways.

  Billy Joe put it best. “We were all melted into the same comet.” All we could do was grab it by the tail and hang on for dear life.

  Suddenly, we didn’t need Nashville. They needed us.

  Our vision of country music didn’t have any shackles attached to it. We never said that we couldn’t do something because it would sound like a pop record, or it would be too rock and roll. We weren’t worried that country music would lose its identity, because we had faith in its future and character.

  In trying to broaden its appeal, country music had gotten safe and conservative. Awash in strings, crooning and mooning and juneing, Countrypolitan may have been Nashville’s way of broadening its pop horizons, but it was making for noncontroversial, watered-down, dull music that soothed rather than stirred the emotions. It had honey dripped all over it.

  To be real. To sing the truth, regardless of whether we were walking contradictions or not. We wanted the freedom to use any instruments we wanted, or not use them, whichever the song itself demanded. Why limit yourself? Country music is the feeling between the singer and the song. The instruments are only there to help.

  When Roy Acuff sings “Wabash Cannonball” backed up by the Smoky Mountain Boys, and you take the Smoky Mountain Boys off and put on Henry Mancini’s strings, what have you got? Roy Acuff singing “Wabash Cannonball.” I loved all kinds of music, and I didn’t want to be limited in how I interpreted a song. I couldn’t be afraid of trying new things. I couldn’t accept the phrase “musically, that’s wrong,” because if I mixed a horn, a dobro, and a harmonica playing in unison and it worked, then that was like a whole orchestra in three pieces for me. You can’t worry what is or isn’t country. I had confidence in the intrinsic values of the music, and a belief in the varied styles it could encompass.

  Country was much stronger, had more depth and soul, than it was given credit. In a bid to become respectable, country music had been shying away from its rural past, its birthright in the honky-tonks and “skull orchards.” That’s why Billy Joe’s song was more than a celebration of colorful barflys; it was a return to roots that lay at the core of country music’s appeal: its beating heart and original sin.

  All of us had grown up and learned our craft in the honky-tonks. You can get out and dance and yell and scream and whoop and holler and nobody says a damn thing about it. Hit the biggest clunker in the world and it’s okay. At least you tried it. The honky-tonk might be low-class and low-rent, but that means you have to get even lower down with your music, cut it to the bone, make sure you don’t waste a note. You’re honing everything.

  I developed my whole style of performing in the honky-tonks. You have to learn a lot of songs, paying your dues six nights a week, four hours a night and two more afterhours on the weekends. I’d get bored, and start changing the tunes, moving the rhythms around, improvising the phrasing, stretching my boundaries. Putting the music out and having it come back. If it just goes out and lays in the audience, you haven’t reached them. If you get it back, amplified, then you become one with the crowd. When I learned how to do that, I never forgot.

  It’s a state of mind. I’ll never be a symphony picke
r, but I can turn any place into a honky-tonk. Years later, when I played the St. James Theatre on Broadway in New York, the manager was going on to me about how honored I should feel playing there. I knew I should’ve been more impressed, but frankly, I wasn’t. Walking out to the stage, I checked out the audience. “Look around,” I told them. “A honky is a honky and a joint’s a joint. I don’t give a damn if it is on Broadway.”

  Richie clicked his sticks together, cracked the snare, and we were off and honky-tonkin’.

  Kris Kristofferson was hardly a hillbilly. A Rhodes Scholar and a helicopter pilot, he was like nothing Nashville had ever heard before. He brought a new maturity and sophistication to country lyrics, an explicitness to the verse-singalong chorus-verse-sing-along chorus-bridge-verse-two choruses-and-out that was the standard country fare. Spelled X-plicit, meaning Sex.

  One time we counted up and Kris had used the word “body” a hundred and forty-four times in his various songs. Nasty nasty nasty. For a while Nashville was a little afraid of him; but his songs were undeniably poetry, and he taught us how to write great poems. He changed the way I thought about lyrics, and he said one time that I was the only one that really understood his songs.

  They all had double meanings, something like Kris’s life. His father was a two-star general, which must have been slightly conflicting for a guy who went to Oxford and wrote an essay on the visions of William Blake. He wanted to pen great literature, but instead Kris joined the Army Rangers in the early sixties and learned to fly helicopters, which came in handy when he landed a chopper on Johnny Cash’s tennis court by way of introduction. Presumably the hours of KP experience he picked up in the service also proved useful. When he first arrived in Nashville, he started at the bottom as a night janitor at Columbia Records. By day, he worked the bar at the Tally-Ho Tavern. That’s kind of like putting the fox in charge of polishing glasses in a chicken coop.