Hillbilly. That was the name we gave ourselves, but we weren’t hillbillies. It was really a joke. People in the Tennessee hills were hillbillies. Roy Acuff was a hillbilly.
Anybody with one eye and half-sense knows I’m no hillbilly. There wasn’t a hillbilly bone in my body. If we called ourselves hillbillies, it was to put people off guard, to put ourselves down and them on, to poke some fun.
We were country boys, but we weren’t from back in the sticks. It’s like when I used to be called the Telecaster Cowboy. I may have liked cowboys, and dressed like one, but I was a cowboy singer. There was a difference.
The difference often worked against us. Live, it seemed like country acts were regarded as hillbilly, considered too dumb to get the first-class treatment accorded other musicians in other musics. We played our circuit, which more often than not found us in out-of-the-way places for less money, and we knew it wasn’t about to change. You knew which club you would be playing in which city, and what state fair you’d be going to depending on the month. Maybe you could get a regular booking in Las Vegas, but that was as big as you were going to get.
I never figured out how I could owe the booking agency money after being on the road three hundred days during the year. The most you could ever get was two thousand dollars a night, and it often cost you nearly that much to get to the show and pay for food and lodging. The routings made even less sense. During the year I worked so much, I passed through Syracuse, New York, five times in one month and never performed there once.
You’d get stiffed about twenty percent of the time. The venues wouldn’t pay you, and that wouldn’t stop you from getting booked there the next time you came through town. Every once in a while, to show I was in control, I’d sometimes blow the date, never show up. I’d call Richie and tell him “Everybody’s on his own. I ain’t going to be there,” and he’d say, “I wish you would call me sometime when the promoter isn’t standing right here beside me.”
I’d go to Lucky Moeller and say, “Did you ever have a day you just didn’t feel like showing up for work?” He was sometimes too understanding. Lucky was from the old school, where you get a well-oiled machine running and not much can jar it out of its endless cycle. You don’t show up, somebody else will, and they could keep you out on the road, forever, if you liked. You got on that horse, and you couldn’t get off.
Lucky was a Kentucky Derby kind of guy. He was in his element pulling his big Mark III into the back parking lot at Louisville’s Freedom Hall to oversee the traditional race concert. Flanked by his son, Larry, and WINN radio’s Rob Townshend, I can see him in 1968, sandwiched between Roni and Donna Stoneman; they’re wearing white go-go boots and short plastic skirts, which made me wonder why Pop Stoneman always got on me for singing those “sex” songs. Pee Wee King and his Golden West Cowboys are scheduled to go on the revolving stage next, while Tammy Wynette signs autographs, and Tex Williams, Ray Price, Dal Perkins, and myself and the Waylors wait their turns. Little Johnny “Call For” Phillip Morris introduces each act.
This was Lucky’s world, all plaid jackets and shiny ties, and it was changing. No longer was it good enough to do things as they’d always been done, traveling the circuit, coming back more broke than when you left. There was an entire audience out there that Lucky’s down-home view of country music didn’t encompass. The Nashville that Moeller Talent represented was suspicious of the future, only now it was becoming the present, which made them the past.
The spirit of Dripping Springs was taking over country music. Sales of Willie’s, Kris’s, and my albums were skyrocketing, and we were invading the pages of mainstream rock magazines, like Rolling Stone, which had discovered Willie’s Austin scene. We could feel the undercurrent of media shaking the ground beneath our feet, like a distant rumbling that signals the onset of an earthquake.
Neil took advantage of this outside interest by booking a pair of shows more notable for their symbolism than their actual stage performances. To introduce me to New York, he arranged a week for me in January 1973 at Max’s Kansas City, a small and intimate club (the upstairs showroom wouldn’t hold more than a hundred people comfortably) on Park Avenue South that was known as the fabled home of Andy Warhol and glitter rock. They were more used to bands like the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls; before me, the closest they had come to country was the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
I looked out at the audience the first night. I had never seen such spangles, guys in earrings, girls with hair teased in four different directions, a Village underground deep in the heart of the city. I remembered how strange I’d felt when I first came to New York with Buddy. I tripped going up to the stage; with a drum kit and amplifiers, we could hardly move without stepping on the front tables.
“My name is Waylon Jennings,” I said before we started. “We’re all from Nashville, Tennessee, and we play country music. We hope you like it. If you do, I want you to tell everybody you know how much you like it. If you don’t like it, don’t say anything mean about it, because if you ever come to Nashville, we’ll kick your ass.”
All you have to do is open the door; people will walk through if your music can’t be denied. Our week-long stay at Max’s was a triumph. It was a full moon when we hit that stage, and night after night the Waylors started playing on a whole new level. Richie couldn’t believe it. He hadn’t been back with me that long, and he could see the turnaround. During the days, I did interviews with national magazines like Penthouse, spreading the word about Redneck Rock or Outlaw Country, depending on their perspective, and at night I worked on getting myself laryngitis. I was still a little weak from the hepatitis.
From there, we went to the West Coast, setting up our tent meeting at the more industry-oriented Troubadour, and visiting my old crowd at the Palomino. Crossing over didn’t mean that you couldn’t go back and forth.
Neil’s biggest move was to get me on a bill with the Grateful Dead at Kezar Stadium. With all the overhype, it was a breakthrough to play on the home field of Haight-Ashbury High, even though Janis Joplin had shown that it was a quick hitchhike between Austin and San Francisco. Musically it didn’t work. Deadheads don’t care if it’s Jesus Christ up there. All they’ve come to see is the Dead. I felt older than them; when I walked out, I probably looked like that sonofabitch who’d told them if they weren’t in by eleven o’clock he was going to ground them. My kids were old enough to be among that crowd.
In the end, it didn’t matter how the shows went, because the word of mouth whispered like wildfire. Neil brought it all home at the Disc Jockey Convention, where he staged an “Appreciation Concert” with me, Willie, Sammi Smith, and Troy Seals. The ballroom at the Nashville Sheraton was packed to overflowing. I opened with “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean” and closed with “T for Texas,” finishing at three in the morning. Three encores. Seventy-three. One for the money, two for the show, three to get ready …
Willie and I were in the same boat. Neil was paddling it, and as much as he had to fight for me, he had to keep Willie bailed out. I thought for a while he’d never leave Texas, but pretty soon his sense of an alternative country scene began to take hold, and Willie started becoming a genuine superstar.
He had shifted to CBS from Atlantic, where his first concept album, Phases and Stages, had concerned a marital breakup from the viewpoint of the wife. Willie could sympathize with that. He was a travelin’ man, and he never hid the fact that he would rather be out playing than home every night. His first love was always the road. Everything else played second fiddle. He didn’t mean to be a bad guy. At least, he figured, his wives got to be in the string section.
Atlantic had folded its country division in 1974, and Willie’s deal with Columbia gave him complete creative control, though when he worked up his first album under the new deal, another concept album about a mysterious Red-Headed Stranger, they still wondered what he was up to.
Willie got the title from an old ballad by Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith; he’d sung i
t to his kids and played it on his Fort Worth radio show. The actual song was a gothic Western mystery story that told of a dark rider who rode from town to town trailing his dead lover’s horse behind him. In Willie’s version, guilt and sin mixed with redemption as the rider became a young preacher who had murdered his adulterous wife and was forced to wander.
The concept proved flexible, an ongoing narrative that shuffled songs like Fred Rose’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” Hank Cochran’s “Can I Sleep in Your Arms,” Eddy Arnold’s “I Couldn’t Believe It Was True,” Bill Collery’s “Hands on the Wheel,” and the gospel chestnut, “Just as I Am,” to further the biblical themes of penance and passion.
Red-Headed Stranger was just Willie and his band, including his sister Bobbie on piano, a tribute to the cowboy virtues and vices we hoped to emulate. We were trying to put the West back in country and western. Willie practiced what he preached by recording at a small studio in Garland, Texas. The finished album only cost twenty thousand dollars and was tracked, overdubbed, and mixed in three days. That was quick even by Nashville standards.
Neil was fixing to play it to Columbia, and he thought he might have trouble selling them on the record. It was so sparse, sometimes just three or four instruments a song. He brought me along to help him explain it. We went with Jody Fisher, who worked for Neil then and works for Willie now. The meeting was up in New York with Bruce Lundvall, then a head of CBS, and we watched as he threaded the reel-to-reel tape of the finished album.
He let it play, about a song and a half. “It doesn’t sound complete,” he said. He thought it might be a demo. “There’s some pretty good things here, but this needs to go down to Nashville and let Billy Sherrill sweeten it. Put some strings on it.”
I got up, pissed. Willie and I both liked strings, but they’re right only some of the time. “Neil, you manage both me and Willie,’ but I tell you, if you don’t get that goddamn tape off that machine and get us out of here, then you won’t be my manager, and I guarantee you won’t be Willie’s.”
I turned to Bruce. I called him a tone-deaf, tin-eared sonofabitch who didn’t know nothin’. “I’m in your office, and I’m leavin’, but you ain’t got a goddamn clue what Willie Nelson’s music is about.”
As I started out the door, he said, “Wait a minute, Waylon. You come back. What am I missing?”
I said, “You’re missing everything. That’s what seventy thousand people come to Dripping Springs Picnic to hear. It’s why people will drive all the way from Colorado or Kansas to hear Willie sing. You don’t know a thing about it. That album is what he is. Billy Sherrill may be great, but he ain’t got a fucking thing to do with Willie Nelson. All he can do is cover him up.”
We sat back down and listened. Finally, Lundvall said, “I still don’t get it, but I’m going to release this album just like it is.” Then I got worried if maybe Willie wanted him to sweeten it up a little bit.
A year and a half later, Bruce Lundvall walked into my office in Nashville. He gave me a gold record of Red-Headed Stranger and said “This is from that tin-eared, tone-deaf sonofabitch. You were right. Here’s your album.”
With all of this, it was Jessi who had the pop smash.
Working on her first album, with producer Ken Mansfield and myself as co-producer, Jessi cut a song called “I’m Not Lisa.” It was about a girl who hears her husband call her by another woman’s name. She had written it one day in about ten minutes while practicing the piano. It was just an eight-bar phrase that she put aside, and she kept coming back to it as she learned about living in my world, and me in hers.
She had no particular connection with the name Lisa, and took the name Julie from an old song of mine, but she understood that natural insecurity that comes from a woman coming into the life of a man who has been married, or had a very close relationship with another woman, and how it takes a while to believe that maybe he didn’t leave his heart behind. Though it came out of her life, and our circumstances, Jessi didn’t analyze it any more than she needed. She knew she had touched on a universal feeling, and though it was certainly how she felt, it wasn’t just about her. It was about everyone.
One of the reasons Jessi had married me was because she always knew she’d be in music, and sometimes that takes understanding from another musician, someone who knows what the making of music means.
Still, Jessi had put her career on the back burner when we got together, trying to understand our rhythms, and be a mother to our extended family. She wrote the song then, when we were in our first Nashville apartment, amidst life’s uncertainties. She had six-year-old Jennifer, her child with Duane, who had been cradled and sheltered, and I had my teenage passle, who had been through hell and back. They didn’t know what to expect, after Lynne. I was happy to see Jessi was soft and gentle with them, but she also needed to get their attention, to have them respond, so she could help them.
As for Jennifer, she was a dear sweetheart. We were thick as mud. For a while, it wasn’t easy. I could tell she loved me, but she felt guilty about it. We’d be playing and laughing and hugging, and all of a sudden she’d say “I hate you. I don’t want to play.”
Finally, I had to call Duane, her father, and tell him that I respected his friendship, but that Jennifer was so loyal to him that she believed she couldn’t have feelings for both of us. “I want you to know that I will never allow anybody to say anything bad about you in front of her, and you have to tell her it’s okay to love me, too.” From then on, she called him Daddy Duane and me Daddy Waylon.
When I got sick, Jessi helped care for me, even learning to cook differently, knowing that her food was medicine. Nursing hadn’t been part of her repertoire till now, and standing there at the stove, preparing meals so my liver could work, so I wouldn’t die, she rose to the occasion.
Somewhere inside of her she knew that we belonged together. She never pushed me, or asked questions, even after we were married. I never quit doing drugs, even at home. I was still as crazy as ever.
I didn’t slow down any. Jessi just kept up.
In June 1975, she kept up and up. “I’m Not Lisa” broke off her debut album and slid pop, eventually becoming the number-four record in the country. Gold. It was a magic song, something every aspiring musician dreams of, but when it actually happens, that’s when the uncertainties begin. It’s a strange responsibility, to live up to the hopes of the people who come up to you and act like they know you. You might never have seen them before, but there is a relationship. They’re not family, not friends, not your lover, not your child; they’ve bought your record, and heard your song. They do know you, whoever you is.
Jessi had to figure it out. It was the first time she had the responsibilities of a solo act. She’d had a measure of success, written songs, been featured with Duane, and guested with me. Now it was her turn in the spotlight. There was a part of her that preferred to remain slightly behind the scenes, over on the left side of the stage, singing harmony on the chorus. Her giving, and forgiving, nature meant she felt uncomfortable standing in the center. She tried not to be overwhelmed by “Lisa,” so she wouldn’t become “I’m Not Jessi.” And she wasn’t; she was actually Mirriam.
Jessi was an agnostic when I met her. Maybe even an atheist. She had come to a crisis in her faith before we met, and tried all the metaphysical doors. She was not even able to open a Bible, working her way through many untraditional philosophies before reaching back to the God of her youth.
She had prayed before she went out on the stage of the Santa Monica Civic, at one of her first solo shows, and she thought her prayer was answered when she went out on stage, devoid of fear or insecurity, perfectly pure in the moment of performance. It was a feeling that lasted for the length of the show, and when she thought about it, as years passed, she decided it was simply about being free, of letting yourself go in the care of a Higher Power. The gift of faith. She lived it in her daily life, sang it every day at the piano when she turned to the psalms, and thou
ght that someday I would have the dogged and contrary conviction of a King David, which is why she was in turn able to help me in my journey through the valley of the shadow. She instinctively understood that maybe the place where people try to take refuge with drugs is a false security blanketing what is hidden in their spirit. As a substitute, or a replacement, she knew drugs were a competitor to this rise to self-discovery. Otherwise, why would they be needed?
Don’t ask me. I was too busy being a Night Walker, as Jessi called it. And being proud of her, for achieving her dream.
I never had a pop hit, at least on the Top Forty. For a while, in the early seventies, my favorite phrase was “I couldn’t go pop with a mouthful of firecrackers.”
People would ask me how I felt about “I’m Not Lisa” going gold. Did I mind?
Mind? Jessi was so happy, getting checks and buying presents for everybody she loves. For me, she put the down payment on our house, Southern Comfort.
But they’d continue: You’ve been struggling all these years, and here comes Jessi, first album, no reputation, and she has a million-selling record right out of the chute.
“Being a fuckin’ legend,” I’d have to say, “I don’t give a shit.”
* * *
Jessi was up for numerous honors at the 1975 Country Music Association awards. I wasn’t going to be the one to steal her thunder, knowing how much acceptance means when you’re first starting out, and so I went with her, even though I couldn’t tolerate the CMA.
They were suspicious of me, as well. “Waylon,” they greeted me as I walked in. “You’re not here to start trouble, are you?”
Who, ol’ Waymore? Just because one year I’d stormed out of the awards and didn’t mind telling anyone who would listen why. It was Kris Kristofferson’s night; he was a shoo-in for several categories. I had been scheduled to perform “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line.” They said they were strapped for time, and they wanted me to cut the song to one verse and chorus. I said, “Why don’t I just dance across the stage and grin? Maybe do one line. That’ll give you a lot of time.”
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