Waylon

by Waylon Jennings

  They told me not to get smart. Either I did it or I got out. They said, “We don’t need you.” I decided that was true, and I left.

  The CMA were always pulling fast ones like that. They were more concerned with their television show than honoring country music. One year they tried to make Ricky Van Shelton sing a song in the wrong key. They’d already cut the track for him to put his vocal over and he said it was too high. They told him to get off the grounds when he went out to his bus. Ran him off. They like to think that they’re doing it for You, the country music fan, but they’re really in business for themselves.

  Now they needed me again, because I was up for Best Male Vocalist, Song of the Year (“I’m a Ramblin’ Man”), Album of the Year, and Entertainer of the Year. As I walked in with Jessi, scratching at my tuxedo, her telling me I should have hit them, Neil came over to me. “You won Male Vocalist,” he whispered. “Jessi didn’t win anything.”

  So much for secrecy. If nobody’s supposed to know the awards before they opened the envelope, how did word get around? My heart went out to Jessi, and though my first instinct was to get the hell gone, I thought that maybe by staying I could raise some of the larger problems that faced country music, such as its close-mindedness and suspicion of change.

  When it came time for Best Male Vocalist, Tanya Tucker and Tammy Wynette made a great show of opening the winner’s envelope. I tried to be nice in my acceptance speech, thanking everybody for their support, though I knew that block voting and mass trading between the big companies—we’ll give you two hundred votes for your artist if you give your four hundred votes to our writer—probably had more to do with it than anything else.

  At least Glen Campbell, the host, was happy. “All I can say, Waylon, is it’s about damn time.” Predictably, the CMA got a few letters protesting Glen’s use of profanity.

  I was happier watching Charlie Rich get drunk and burn up the Entertainer of the Year award, holding a cigarette lighter to the envelope, please. They went to grab him, but when Charlie was drunk, it was best to stay out of his way. I remember riding back from a Dripping Springs Picnic in University of Texas coach Darryl Royal’s golf cart, and Charlie just wailing.

  Oh, yeah. John Denver won Entertainer of the Year. Now that’s what I call country.

  CHAPTER 8

  THIS OUTLAW SHIT

  Beyond the law. Outsiders. A whip and a gun, head ’em off at the pass, and good guys don’t wear black.

  If you look through the scrapbook of any kid who grew up in the forties and fifties, male or female, you’ll find a frayed sepia photograph of the child dressed like a cowboy, down to the spurs, six-gallon hat, six-guns drawn, looking about as tough as any six-year-old has a right to be. The great American hero, as filtered through the movies and popular lore, and now, in the hands of a ragged assortment of Hillbilly Central characters, country music.

  Excuse me; make that Pop music. Capital P, as in platinum.

  On January 12, in the bicentennial year of 1976, RCA released Wanted: The Outlaws. It was a compilation of mostly previously released tracks, starring myself, Willie, Jessi, and Tompall. The cover was pure Old West, a yellowed reward poster with the stagecoach air of the nineteenth-century frontier, Dodge City to Tombstone.

  We weren’t just playing bad guys. We took our stand outside country music’s rules, its set ways, locking the door on its own jail cell. We looked like tramps, Willie in overalls, me with my hair slicked back and Levis, fringe sprouting on our cheeks and chins. I’d begun growing my face fur in the early seventies, when I was down with hepatitis. I thought, hell, I’m not going anywhere. I think I’ll grow a mustache. Next I moved on to the beard.

  Jessi’s mom came to watch out for me when I returned home from the hospital. Her name was Helen, and she thought I hung the moon. I might be a wild man, but she’d had a vision about me a long time before and knew I didn’t mean Jessi any harm. Myself was another matter.

  “How’s my good-looking king of the road doing? Is my daughter treating you right?”

  She inspected my new facial growth, scraggly and scruffy as it was. It takes me a long time to grow anything. I don’t get a five o’clock shadow until two o’clock the following afternoon, and my face seems dirty for a month. I still don’t have any hair on my chest; it must be the Indian in me.

  “Son,” said Jessi’s momma, “that beard and mustache sure looks like a bunch of piss-ants going to a funeral.”

  “I don’t believe the way she talks in front of you,” said Jessi.

  I had grown it just for kicks, but when I looked in the mirror, it was like I was starting to look like myself. We all were undergoing transformations. I mean, can you imagine Willie without a beard and those braids? If we took on the guise of cowboys, it was because we couldn’t escape the pioneer spirit, the restlessness that forces you to keep pushing at the horizon, seeing what’s over the next ridge. When I put the black hat on and walked to the stage, carrying my Telecaster, I was staking my own piece of land where the buffalo roam. Don’t fuck with me, was what we were saying.

  We knew we were good. We loved the energy of rock and roll, but rock had self-destructed. Country had gone syrupy, dripping honey all over its sentimentality. Progressive country? Any music had better progress or it’ll get left behind.

  We were loose. Nothing to prove. I never believed you could tell people you were great; you had to show them. And increasingly, on the radio, at the concerts and festivals, we were getting our chance. We could see we were gathering a new audience, with their own shape and personality. A lot of times, they weren’t country music fans, but they weren’t asking us to change. They liked us the way we were. Country fans, maybe because they’d known me for longer, could sometimes give us a hard time. One night in Atlanta, some guy yelled at me, “Take that damn hat off, shave that face and do ‘Waltz Across Texas.’”

  I said, “You come around after the show and I’ll waltz you right up against the side of the wall.” I liked to challenge the audience.

  We were walking contradictions, and we didn’t mind. We were rebels, but we didn’t want to dismantle the system. We just wanted our own patch. In the South, especially, they try to live by the rules; it’s the legacy of the Bible Belt. Anybody that breaks the rules is a sinner. When you come into a working system, and start trying to change it, you are regarded as the Devil.

  Anybody can think whatever they want to think, but don’t try to tell me how to go about my “bidness.” It’s hard to tell a Texan what to do. We accepted the way people were and hoped they’d accept who we were. What we talked about was real, the truth. You could depend on it.

  Outlaw music.

  Hazel Smith, the great Nashville media specialist, writer, ultimate fan, and publicist for Hillbilly Central, christened it when asked by a disc jockey from WCSE in Ashboro, North Carolina, what to call the renegade sound that was bubbling out of Nineteenth Avenue South. He wanted to base a show around me, Willie, Kris, Tompall, and all the others who were making a name for themselves going up against the Nashville establishment. Other stations, one in Flint, Michigan, and another in Austin aptly named KOKE, were also starting to herald the new breed of rogue hillbilly.

  “Hillbilly Central” was the name of the column Hazel wrote for Country Music magazine. She had a bird’s-eye view of all the frantic comings and goings as she sat out in the front office and directed some of the stranger traffic that started dropping by. The building was open twenty-four hours, and she’d sometimes come in to work and find people strewn about the offices, passed out next to an empty wine bottle or an open bottle of pills. Another night of “losing weight.”

  I’d done a song of Lee Clayton’s titled “Ladies Love Outlaws,” about how women don’t look at a wild man and see someone hard. Like Jessi when she saw me on television, they think an Outlaw just needs somebody gentle to settle him down. Either they’re not scared or they’re just as wild as you are; I ran into quite a few like that.

  There
was a verse about Jessi and me in it—“Jessi liked Cadillacs and diamonds on her hands / Waymore had a reputation as a ladies’ man,” which was only partly true—but the song’s larger insight was the attraction we all feel for those who move against society’s grain. Bob Dylan sang “To live outside the law you must be honest” in “John Wesley Harding”; the Shangri-Las called the Leader of the Pack “good-bad, but not evil.” It’s a common theme, dating back to Robin Hood and forward through Jesse James to Thelma and Louise.

  To us, Outlaw meant standing up for your rights, your own way of doing things. Most lawbreakers are common criminals. Bonnie and Clyde were nothing but a couple of idiots. So was Billy the Kid; you can look and tell he wasn’t all there. They got attention by killing people. The ones who shot them, heroes like Wyatt Earp or Bat Masterson, weren’t any better. Those lawmen didn’t want to walk the same side of the street when Johnny Ringo or Clay Allison came to town. The ones that got killed were those who couldn’t aim, farmers with rusty guns they used for shooting snakes, innocent bystanders.

  If I had an Outlaw hero, someone to set my standard and measure my progress, it was Hank Williams. He had touched me way back in Littlefield, through the strength of his songs and the soul of his voice. I especially loved his Luke the Drifter recitations, morality tales like “Pictures from Life’s Other Side” or “Too Many Parties and Too Many Pals,” usually recorded the Morning After the Night Before. Everything I did in Nashville, anything anyone did, was measured against Hank’s long, lanky shadow.

  You’d hear all these stories, how he pulled a jukebox that didn’t have his records on it out to the street and shot it full of holes, or ran around all night dead drunk and pilled out and still gave the greatest show you ever saw. We thought that was the way to do it. Does your wife cheat on you? Well, I heard Hank’s wife did, if only in all them lonesome blues. Did Hank miss concerts? We could, too. Did Hank write great songs and read funny books and take pills and swarm?

  I wanted to be like him. We all did. Even his contemporaries held Hank in awe. Faron Young brought Billie Jean, Hank’s last wife, to town for the first time. She was young and beautiful, and Hank liked her immediately. He took a loaded gun and pointed it to Faron’s temple, cocked it, and said, “Boy, I love that woman. Now you can either give her to me or I’m going to kill you.”

  Faron sat there and thought it over for a minute. “Wouldn’t that be great? To be killed by Hank Williams!”

  He wound up driving Hank and Billie Jean around in Hank’s Cadillac, with the two of them loving it up in the back seat. All of a sudden, it got very quiet in the car. Faron thought he should say something. “Hey, Hank, that left fender got a little rattle in it.”

  “Shut up, boy,” said Hank. “Watch the road and keep driving. I bet you wish you had one that rattled like that.”

  Hank loved Audrey, his “main” wife, though life between them was unbearable. The night he married Billie Jean, on stage in New Orleans, he turned around to his steel player, Don Helms, and said, “Shag, I’m gonna marry Billie Jean tonight. Audrey be up to get me tomorrow.” He worshipped Audrey, he really did. They both were screwing around, and he was surely a woman hound, but I think in some of his songs, like “Your Cheating Heart,” Hank was really writing about himself.

  After Hank died, it became almost an unwritten law in Nashville to try and put the make on Hank’s Old Lady. Audrey always liked her boyfriends to have coal-black hair. One night, when Hank Jr. was on the show, I was walking from the bus with her, and she said, “Darling, have you ever thought about dyeing your hair black?” I told her I liked it fine the way it was, thank you. I may have laid down in the back seat of the Cadillac Hank died in when Hank Jr. showed it to me, but I wasn’t about to try any of his other sleeping positions.

  Both Hank’s ex-wives said I reminded them of Hank. Billie Jean, who later married Johnny Horton, came to town one time and wanted to meet me, so Harlan brought her over to the office. Johnny had been killed in an auto accident. She asked me, “What are you doing later when you get off?”

  “Look, lady,” I said, “you killed Hank Williams and you killed Johnny Horton and you stunted Faron Young’s growth. So you just leave me alone.” We both laughed, me a little nervously.

  If we were all walking around trying to fill Hank’s boots, for me, it was literally. Hank Jr. gave me a pair of Hank Sr.’s cowboy boots, and sometimes, late at night, I’d put them on and stroll around the house. They fit pretty well. I could feel his presence hovering over me. I wore them to the studio one midnight, and while we were recording, a big lightning storm blew up. It hit a tree out in the parking lot, which then fell over my brand new El Dorado. We went out to look at it, and sure enough, the tree was fully covering the car. We raised one branch, and then another, and backed the car out. There wasn’t a scratch on it.

  We went back to the studio and started recording again. While we were out in the room, lightning struck the building, over-loading the recorder, scoring the black facing off the tape. They made me take the boots off after that.

  Another night, I was upstairs in the office with my feet up on the desk. I had the boots on and I was talking about them, and about Hank. All of a sudden, the pictures on the right-hand side of the wall slid off their hooks, crashing to the floor. Everybody left in a hurry.

  “Are you sure Hank done it this way?” Each time the bus would break down, or you’d get stranded, or drive five hundred miles to a gig only to find it had been cancelled, we’d compare our troubles to Hank’s. We wanted to be like him, romanticizing his faults, fantasizing ourselves lying in a hotel room sick and going out to sing, racked with pain, a wild man running loose even if it meant dying in the back seat of a blue Cadillac on the way to greet the new year in Canton, Ohio. That was part of being a legend.

  Driving to Hillbilly Central one morning during the Dreaming My Dreams sessions, I was thinking about Hank’s influence and the example he’d set for us, both good and bad. I grabbed an envelope from the seat and started writing, one hand on the wheel, the other balancing pencil and paper on my knee. When I got to the studio, we immediately recorded it—me and Richie managed to turn the beat completely around—and I read it off the envelope. Two weeks later, our bus driver, Billy, came to me and asked if he could have the envelope with the original lyrics. He’d found it on my music stand. I looked at it, and I swear I couldn’t read a word. It was just scribbling.

  Lord it’s the same old tune, fiddle and guitar

  Where do we take it from here?

  Rhinestone suits and big shiny cars, Lord

  It’s been the same way for years.

  We need a change.

  Somebody told me, when I came to Nashville

  Son, you finally got it made

  Old Hank made it here, and we’re all sure that you will

  But I don’t think Hank done it this way

  I don’t think Hank done it this way

  Ten years on the road pickin’ one-night stands

  Speeding my young life away.

  Tell me one more time just so’s I understand

  Are you sure Hank done it this way

  Did old Hank really do it this way

  Lord I’ve seen the world with a five-piece band

  Looking at the back side of me

  Singing my songs, one of his now and then

  But I don’t think Hank done ’em this way

  I don’t think Hank done ’em this way.

  With its relentless four-on-the-floor rhythm, phased guitars, and eerie drones, “Hank” didn’t sound like a standard country record. There was no clear-cut verse and chorus, no fiddle middle break, no bridge, nothing but an endless back-and-forth seesaw between two chords. Jack mixed the guitars together so they sounded like one huge instrument, matching their equalization settings so you couldn’t tell where one blended into the other.

  It felt like a different music, and Outlaw was as good a description as any. We mostly thought it was funny; To
mpall immediately made up Outlaw Membership certificates and handed them out to select visitors at Hillbilly Central. We did feel like we were connected, but our musics were very different from each other. The only thing bringing us together was our attitude. We needed a change.

  It wasn’t just us. After the 1974 CMA awards, in which Olivia Newton-John took Female Vocalist of the Year, a more traditional Association of Country Entertainers (ACE) protested Nashville’s pop swing. Ernest Tubb, George Jones, and Tammy Wynette (the meeting was held at Tammy’s house) were also being denied their hearing by a wider audience. For Nashville, the door still swung one way, and Music City was usually ACEd out.

  We were trying to break it open from the inside. That didn’t make us any more popular. They thought we were dirty, and hell, we were. You try staying up for a week straight, or rather, un-straight. Every Outlaw needs a last stand, and we liked pretending we were at the Alamo. Willie was Jim Bowie; Kris, Davy Crockett; Tompall was Buddy Ebsen; and I was the goddamn cannon fodder. Open fire!

  We had ourselves a handle. CB radio was big then. We could feed our white-line fever as the Silver Eagle bus crisscrossed the superhighways of America, talking to other mass transports in the same way the media found our catchphrase and ran with it. It was almost like a hook in a song. We had a hit phrase.

  In magazines and newspapers, radio and television, Outlaw music became the byword for a country music underground. A movement grows because there’s a need out in the wilds of society, asking for a certain type of individual, insight, or emotion. People liked what we were saying. There was a mood that was craving our message of freedom and a fresh start. It didn’t matter whether we were Outlaws or not, country-rock or rockin’ country. You are only what your audience thinks you are, anyway. We represented New.

  Helping spread the word was Chet Flippo, who wrote reams of you-are-there copy for Rolling Stone and other alternative rock journals, a roving reporter inside Hillbilly Central. He witnessed firsthand the backstages, the hotel lobbies, and late-night coffee shops a late-night band of “born scrappers” might frequent. On the back of Wanted: The Outlaws, he wrote: “Call them outlaws, call them innovators, call them revolutionaries, call them what you will. They’re just some damned fine people who are also some of the most gifted songwriters and singers anywhere.” Amen.