Waylon

by Waylon Jennings

  I saw him a lot at Sue Brewer’s, and was one of the first to do songs of his, like “Sunday Morning Coming Down” (though it was John Cash who had the hit) and “Lovin’ Her Was Easier.” Roger Miller broke the Nashville ice with “Me and Bobby McGee,” and John especially encouraged Kris by having him on his television show in 1969. By 1970, with “Bobby McGee” a posthumous smash for Janis Joplin, and Sammi Smith scoring with “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” Kris was Nashville’s brightest—in more ways than one—hope. His debut album was eagerly awaited, especially by hungry artists looking to cover his songs.

  Kris was a Texan, born in Brownsville, and in 1973 he brought chat Western heritage to good use by starring as William Bonney in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. He became a Dripping Springs regular, and though movies increasingly claimed his time as the seventies progressed, not surprising when you think how long Heaven’s Gate is, he had a lot to do with showing that country music wasn’t some Hee-Haw backwoods character with a bottle of sourmash likker and a corncob pipe, and that roots don’t have to trap you in the ground.

  “This Time” was my time. I shifted my base of operations to Hillbilly Central, got Tompall to administer my publishing company, and started practically living in his upstairs studio. At least it seemed that way. We could work around the clock. There were no windows, so you didn’t know whether the sun was going up or coming down, and how many times day and night had passed.

  There was a freedom there that I didn’t have any place else. Both of us could experiment. I would help him and he would help me. We’d record something that wasn’t worth shit, some dumb little ol’ idea, and pretty soon it would lead us to another dumb ol’ idea, and then pretty soon we’d have a good idea. We recorded a lot.

  Kyle Lehning, who became one of Nashville’s great producers, was our engineer, and he runs whenever we see him now. We gave him a trial by fire, Tompall and I. We plumb wore his ass out. He’d be sitting there, nodding, falling over after two straight days in the studio, and we wouldn’t let him go home. I even got him out there to play trumpet at six in the morning. One night, and Captain counted, Tompall worked on redoing a phrase eighty times. He wanted to get it just right.

  It was the same way we played pinball (the “marble machines,” as Willie saw them) incessantly. Willie’s taste was more for golf: “Once you hit one, you’re hooked.” I guess it’s the same with music.

  Hillbilly Central was like that scene in Blazing Saddles when they’re sitting around a campfire eating beans. We’d laugh so hard that sometimes we’d just lose it, go completely to pieces. Then we’d pick up those pieces and put them back together in an interesting shape, and that would be a song.

  We liked being best friends, me and Tompall. Captain Midnight remembers we’d be sitting around autographing pictures to each other—“To my Best Friend, Waylon,” “To my Best Friend, Tompall”—back and forth, passing them around. Shel Silverstein came in and said, “Aren’t you spreading this best friend shit a little thin?”

  Midnight would say, “What about me, boys?”

  The truth was we were all running buddies, Shel and Midnight and Ron Halfkine, who produced the Dr. Hook records (“On the Cover of the Rolling Stone”); and Ray Sawyer, who was Dr. Hook; and Kinky Friedman and Jimmy Bowen and Lee Clayton and Billy Ray Reynolds and Guy Clark and Donnie Fritts.

  It was a fraternity, and Nashville was our college town. I Felta Thi. The Elks, the Moose, the F.O.E. Eagles, and us. We had a clubhouse. Parties with music. Jack Daniels and speed.

  We could roar the cars up to the metal back door, climb the back stairs and hang out. One night I rear-ended my Cadillac into Tompall’s Lincoln Continental Mark IV. When I went in the office, I said, “Tompall, who’s just given you a brand new Ovation guitar?”

  “You did, Waylon,” he answered.

  “Tompall, who’s the best friend you’ve got in the world?”

  “You are, Waylon.”

  “Tompall, who stands behind you when nobody else will?”

  “You do, Waylon.”

  “Tompall, who just backed into your Lincoln Continental?”

  He chased me down the hall, through the space where the door that I sawed in half and nailed over Tompall’s window used to be. Why’d I do it? It got in my way.

  Neither of us could take a backward step, and we could argue about something or nothing, but we challenged each other. The studio gave us a great opportunity to experiment. There wasn’t anybody keeping score. I could take it back down to the drums and build it up in a different direction, using the control board as another instrument. I even learned how to engineer my own things. Hillbilly Central was high-tech, and yet we used it like a demo studio. Tompall was proud of the fact that he had the quietest signal-to-noise ratio in Nashville; our playing was dirty enough.

  It was a marathon, five or six days at a stretch. We didn’t know what to expect when we walked out the door, dark or sunlight. Not that we wanted to go anywhere. Everybody who came to town headed for Hillbilly Central.

  All we needed was Cowboy Jack Clement. My brother-in-law.

  Bubba was what he took to calling me after he married Sharon, and he called Jessi Sissi. I didn’t believe it either. The very same Jack who was part of the incredible vortex of energy that was Sun Records, who produced Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash and Billy Lee Riley, had recorded Charlie Pride, Don Williams, and Dickey Lee’s “Patches,” and who believed that music should be made because you liked making it, was actually related to me.

  He has a certain kind of insanity that’s incurable, and I told him that right to his face. There’s parts of him that don’t ever get near real life. Every once in a while I needed a dose of Jack Clement. He was a sheer-out genius, all soul. If you got around him at the right moment, he could put the world back on track.

  “Sometimes you give a grand performance, just for the hell of it,” Jack would say. “You waste it and throw it away. Around here, everybody gets to thinking that if you stand up and sing, you better break out all the microphones. By the time you do that, you spoil the whole effect. Sometimes you just have to let the music go, blow it off the walls.”

  Blow out the walls, was more like it. Jack liked to record musicians without earphones, trying to set up an environment that was live without sacrificing acoustics. He wanted everybody to be in the room, to be able to hear and see and interact with each other. Once the red recording light went on, he felt, it was hard to get people to stay creative. With earphones shutting off everyone into their own world, the music seemed to settle into familiarity. He pushed the music to get out in the open, living and breathing, and to that end he covered up the control-room windows with drapes, pushed his musicians to take chances, and turned off the clock so that everyone could feel free to follow their instincts. Designed by the theatrical designer for Oh, Calcutta!, his Studio B on Belmont Avenue, down the street from Jack’s JMI Records headquarters, was nicknamed Nashville’s Magic Studio.

  All magic needs a magician, and as a producer, Jack did it with mirrors and more. He would always try to get as much of it live as he could, though he was riveted on the rhythm section. The main thing was to capture the drums and bass, and even if you got the bass just right, you could work from there. I liked his concentration on the bottom. We felt the impact of the music’s heartbeat in the same way.

  He never liked to do the same stuff he heard on the radio, and his ears were always open. One day back in Memphis, after eating country fried steak with Jerry Lee at Taylor’s, the luncheonette next door to Sun, they had gone back to the session where “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin’ On” was cut. They ran the song down, a live favorite, in between takes of something else. They didn’t even listen back to it at the time. It was only when Jack and Jerry Lee were going over what they’d done that day that they heard “Whole Lot of Shakin’” and kept returning to it, fascinated by its off-the-cuff energy.

  Between takes. Jack understood that the best music at a sessio
n is usually heard when the musicians are reparteeing among themselves, trading riffs, fooling around. That was the personality he was looking to capture, all natural licks and inflections. He was out to harvest a crop. “It’s their music, their art,” he would say. “A producer can’t sing it for you.”

  He tried to set a stage, approaching recording like putting on a show. In terms of tempo, balance, moods, he heard an album as a voyage from cut one all the way through the fade on the last chord. A trip. Jack danced for you, up on his toes, a shadow moving around in the corner, giving you something to watch, anything to get you to take your conscious mind off your playing, to let you feel it rather than think about it. “I used to be a dance instructor,” he’d say when asked, “and when the band starts doing it good, I dance. Even if I’m hung over. No matter how bad I feel, if a guy starts entertaining me, I’m going to get up and let him know. If he sees me moving around, he knows that everything’s okay.”

  And like any good producer, he knew when to butt out. A lot of times he would just leave. He’d get somebody going in a certain direction, and then the best thing he could do was duck out and go down to the kitchen and whip up a snack. Leave ’em have it for a while. Then he’d come back and dance.

  Jack and I didn’t talk over the album that became Dreaming My Dreams. He knew the Glasers very well, having produced and written many sides for the brothers, and liked the homey atmosphere of Glaser Sound Studios, which is what the upstairs was officially called. It was small and compact, with a Studer twenty-four-track tape machine linked to an MCI board. We went to Hillbilly Central in September of 1974 and started cutting anything we felt like. On the back of that album, there’s a picture of me and Jack. He’s hovering over the control board, literally in the air, like some bearded angel, his hands raised like a conductor, while I’m cracking up and admiring my cigarette. It was a party. You hadda be there.

  It took about six months to record, working on and off, mostly in the daytime for once. The label was fighting us, more or less all the time, but we moved at our own deliberate pace. We used bassist Duke Goff and Richie from my band, along with Ralph Mooney, the great Texas pedal-steel legend who had come on board the Waylors in November of 1970, much to my eternal joy and amazement. He was, to say the least, a character. Chet Atkins likes to tell the story of when Mooney had been riding on a plane and found himself seated near Johnny Gimble. Johnny admired Ralph a lot and went up and said “Hello, I’m Johnny Gimble, the fiddler, and I want you to know that I really love your steel playing. I appreciate your work.”

  Mooney could drink a bit, and when he did, he usually turned mean. “Aw, fuck you,” he said to Johnny. Gimble slunk back to his seat.

  About a year later, he ran into Ralph on a session. They were having a good time, and Johnny said, “Hey, Ralph, you remember when we were on that plane a year or so ago, and I told you how much I loved your playing and you said ‘fuck you’? What did you mean by that?”

  Ralph said, “Don’t you know what I meant by that?” Johnny shook his head no. Mooney looked at him. “I meant fuck you!”

  I played guitar. Jack thought my voice and guitar were one and the same; they were a matched set. Coming from a guy who often said he was a sucker for good voices—“Somebody’s got a voice and good rhythm, I like to produce them”—that was high praise for my guitar. We built our guitar tracks, layering, ringing the strings to form underlying drones, and when he got to mixing, Jack acted on the music, making it more theatrical, giving it a mystique. It sounded real strange to me when I first heard it back, but I liked it and went with it.

  I was playing twelve-string dobro on a John Cash demo the first time I met Jack. I had the idea he didn’t like me, because he’d keep walking by without saying anything, though he’d look at me as he danced past. Finally I told John the next time he came by I was going “to stick this dobro right up his ass.” John assured me Jack loved my writing and singing.

  That was an understatement. He said I was his favorite cowboy after hearing me do “That’s the Chance I’ll Have to Take,” and if he had a million dollars, he’d give it to me and put me on a pedestal in his office and make me sing to him. He recorded that song with everybody he ever produced.

  On Thursdays, Jack would close Studio B and have his particular house band come over, guys like drummer Kenny Malone, Joe Allen on bass, and Charles Cochran, the pianist. It was at one of these informal sessions that Allen Reynolds got to producing Don Williams. They cut six sides one Thursday, and they wound up being Don’s first six released songs. I stopped over there one day and Allen was writing “I Recall a Gypsy Woman.” I told him “Finish it, and let me cut it.”

  “Why don’t you do it right now?” suggested Jack.

  So we did. We tried that, and a version of “Good Hearted Woman,” and when we got through, Jack went to RCA and said, “This is what he should be doing.” That real simple bass, and the harmonica, and me on the guitar with my thumb. Brer Rabbit’s hiding place.

  Allen Reynolds also wrote “Dreaming My Dreams” with Bob McDill; when I heard that song, it became the inspiration for the album. I sang it in one take. That’s all we had, and all we needed.

  I hope that I find what I’m reaching for

  The way that is in my mind.…

  Someday I’ll get over you

  I’ll live to see it all through

  But I’ll always miss

  Dreaming my dreams with you.

  “Waymore’s Blues” was a little earthier, born in the back seat of a limousine in Memphis. Curtis Buck was with me, and we got to trading blues lines, Jimmie Rodgers—style: “Woke up this morning it was drizzling rain / Around the curve come a passenger train / Heard somebody yodel.…” It was probably a complete steal, but so much of that early blues is part of the common musical vernacular of the South, it’s hard to tell who’s borrowing from whom.

  Country is blues. It still is. It’s the same song anyway you hear it; black or white, rich or poor. We’ve all been that man, singing about the woman we got, the woman we want to get rid of, the woman we want to get.

  Barbara used to call me Waymore, which she got from Jerry Gropp. It’s a sign of affection, a lighter version of Waylon, and a macho way of looking at myself with a sense of humor. There was a time, on drugs, that I had to have the attention of every woman when I walked into a room. Even if I wouldn’t have messed with them, I had to know there was a possibility. Some of “Waymore’s Blues” might sound like bragging, but I did try to say everything a good ol’ boy thought he could get away with, though I probably believed more of it on Dreaming My Dreams than I did when I cut Part II twenty years later.

  Jack and I had a little misunderstanding over “Waymore’s Blues,” and it brought the album to a halt. Jack got to drinking, and I was high. There were a bunch of people in the control room. Jessi and Sharon were talking real loud; it sounded like a bunch of turkeys gobbling. He was trying to clear them out, talking and laughing and moving his hands, though out in the studio I couldn’t hear him. I was trying to pick and sing and concentrate on the music, and it was like a circus in there.

  Jack started hitting the talkback button toward the end of the take. He was driving me crazy, clicking it on and off, and finally I just put my guitar down and said, “Everybody go home, it’s all over.”

  Jack came up and said, “Bubba, artists don’t call off sessions. Producers do.”

  “Not this time, Jack.” I was livid.

  “The session’s over today?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “and tomorrow, too.”

  I went home and didn’t say anything. About two weeks later, Jack called and invited me and Jessi over for dinner. He and Sharon were like Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher; they even dressed the part. Jack was straight as a board that night. “Bubba,” he finally said. “We ever going to get in there and work on that album again?”

  “This is going to sound awful funny coming from me, Jack, but you have to straighten up. The
re ain’t but room for one crazy person in there. One wild man. And that’s me.”

  We never did get a better take on “Waymore’s Blues,” which is why it fades so quickly on the record. Jack was a genius, though. He knew how to talk to musicians, pulling out things they never thought they’d play, and he put everybody at ease. He let them know when they found the groove. Just by showing up, Jack’s presence influenced a session. He set an atmosphere of “fuck the world, we’re here to create,” and if you made a mistake, he’d help you correct it, or work it into the arrangement. The same was true of his musicians. Charles Cochran was the only piano player I knew who ever told me he ought to lay out of a song because the piano didn’t fit. There’s not a lot of him on the final record, but his presence and knowledge was invaluable.

  Jack sang a high country tenor harmony on “Let’s All Help the Cowboys Sing the Blues.” He wrote it about himself, and so he wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb, he tucked his voice far back. A country tenor is where a guy sings a little too high. He was straining for the upper registers. “Looking for love, beauty, and IQ”—that’s Jack. Sing it, Cowboy.

  Dreaming My Dreams is my favorite album I’ve ever done. Whether it was Clement experimenting, or the sense of possibility I felt settling into Tompall’s upstairs studio, surrounded by friends, or my whooping yodeling on Roger Miller’s “I’ve Been a Long Time Leaving (but I’ll Be a Long Time Gone),” or Neil Diamond talking in the liner notes about the “soul itself” of the human voice, it was a special moment in time, hanging at Tompall’s, being brothers.

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