Waylon

by Waylon Jennings

  RCA was delighted. They’d tried to find a description to categorize my music since the days of Folk-Country, and now they finally had a Concept. The marketing department breathed a sigh of relief. At last: an image.

  Jerry Bradley, RCA’s Nashville chief, heard them down the hall. Jessi’s success, Willie’s success, and my success was impossible to ignore, as was the constant stream of media attention. He decided to jump on this careening bandwagon, asking me to put together an Outlaw anthology. I had been doing package shows with Willie and Tompall under the Outlaws concept. RCA had the rights to Willie’s back catalogue, Jessi and I were lawfully wed, and when Bradley suggested the idea to me, I asked for Tompall to be included.

  I liked Jerry, but he drove me a little nuts. He didn’t have a clue about music, though he always tried to get involved in it, usually by remote control. I’d bring him a finished song, and he’d say, you need to do this, you’re going to have to change so-and-so, and I’d go back into the studio and pretend to move the faders, and he’d okay it. He never knew I didn’t fix a thing.

  We’d have fights so loud in his office that secretaries would be grabbing aspirin bottles and running for cover. Jessi was sitting with Wally Cochran, a promotion man, one afternoon when I was in Bradley’s office. Jerry called me a liar. I lost my temper, started cussing him up and down, and tried to get him to step outside. You could hear me all over the building. Wally was picking up the phone when the argument started and he stopped midway, frozen, the receiver inches from his face, stunned and unsure whether to rush in and save his boss. Jessi just read the paper, never losing her cool.

  Jerry was Owen Bradley’s son, who founded one of Nashville’s premier recording studios, Bradley’s Barn, and ran Decca when it was the home of Webb Pierce, Ernest Tubb, Brenda Lee, and Patsy Cline. He might have had a little something to prove, coming from a different world than I did. He was in the old style, and it was hard for him to break from his background. “You ain’t got nothing to say about it,” I’d tell him, but he fought me every step of the way.

  He was a good merchandiser, though, and Wanted: The Outlaws was his baby. A reporter from The Tennessean had once asked him if he would support this so-called “music of the future,” and Jerry said that if I was selling the amount of records that Charlie Pride did, he’d be a fool not to. Sure enough, Neil did an audit and found I was already selling more records than Charlie. After that, he jumped in front of the bandwagon and started pulling.

  I didn’t like calling us the Outlaws, because there was already a rock band named that; my idea was “Outlaw Music.” If I had to do it over, I’d argue till I almost got him convinced and his mind changed, and then I’d quit. In hindsight, it did work out pretty well.

  There wasn’t anything slick about the album. It was loose-limbed, and true, and that’s what people were looking for. They couldn’t find it in rock and they damn sure couldn’t find it in country.

  We were the only alternative they had.

  Some of the things on Wanted: The Outlaws were over ten years old. I sweetened and updated some of the vocals, added harmonies, and got Willie in to sing with me on “Good Hearted Woman.” He was so high when he was doing his part he was dancing a jig out in the studio. Willie’s cuts came from his Yesterday’s Wine collection, with “Me and Paul” being a tale of his road adventures with longtime drummer Paul English, who looked out for Willie. Jessi and I had done “Suspicious Minds” together back in 1970—we still perform it live in concert, a quarter of a century later—and she sang her beautiful “I’m Looking for Blue Eyes.” Tompall recorded a new version of Jimmie Rodgers’s “T For Texas,” and we licensed him doing Shel Silver-stein’s “Put Another Log on the Fire” from MGM. Shel was an honorary Outlaw in our eyes.

  I remixed the album at RCA’s studios, on the sly, going in late at night. “Honky Tonk Heroes” seemed to fit the concept, as did Willie and I dueting on “Heaven or Hell.” We never did decide which one of us was which.

  As an album, our true fans had probably heard most of it before. For the newer people, who needed a sampler of Outlaw Music to understand what all the fuss was about, it was a perfect introduction. To set the stage, the album opened with “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys,” a new song in which I tried to link up “the cowboy ways” I’d always admired in my “high-ridin’ heroes” with “modern day drifters…sadly in search of / One step in back of / themselves and their slow-movin’ dreams.” It was an oddly downbeat way to begin the album, but it seemed to sum up the frontier loneliness that often came hand in hand with our ideals of rugged individualism.

  I kept thinking of Hank, passing alone, with no friends or family around him. That was one of my secret fears, to “die from the cold / In the arms of a nightmare.” It may have been why we didn’t mind being lumped together, though we were all unmistakably individual. There’s nobody like Willie Nelson. There’s nobody like Kris, or Tompall, or Billy Joe. There’s really nobody like me, and I know that. There’s a loneliness and a pride there, Outlaws or in-laws, under the same roof that made us a family.

  All of a sudden we found ourselves besieged with some long-lost relatives. Wanted: The Outlaws moved into the pop charts, and by December had sold over a million copies. It was the first country album to do so. Outlaws became hip, forecasting the rise of the Urban Cowboy, and pretty soon a lot of people began showing up on the doorstep of Hillbilly Central, flashing their horseshoe belt buckles and Jack Daniels bottles and proclaiming their enemy status.

  David Allen Coe was the most sincere of the bunch, though he wasn’t as rough as he wanted everybody to think. Before he became the Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy, complete with Lone Ranger mask, he had spent considerable time behind bars, depending on which story you heard, from reform school to the Ohio State Penitentiary and on to death row, for killing another inmate in self-defense. Paroled, he headed for Nashville where his songwriting skills brought him more renown than his bad-ass bragging. He had written “Will You Lay with Me (in a Field of Stone)” for Tanya Tucker, and was on his way to penning the classic “Take This Job and Shove It” for Johnny Paycheck, who also took to waving the skull-and-crossbones Outlaw banner. “I’m one of youse now,” said Johnny, calling me up. “I’m an Outlaw.”

  I said, “Have you been stealing antiques again?”

  The first time I met David, at the Demon’s Den in downtown Nashville, he took me home to see his wife and firstborn baby. We rode in his custom hearse, and he told me all the things he was fixin’ to do that I wasn’t doing, and why wasn’t I doing them and how tough he was and how he didn’t take any shit.

  His mouth was getting him into trouble. Though he had once belonged to a motorcycle gang, he had gotten on the wrong side of the California Hell’s Angels. He was afraid if he went to the West Coast they were going to kill him. I said, “David, all your life you wanted to play the guitar and sing and write songs and make a living. But if you want everybody to know how tough you are, sooner or later you’ll blow it.”

  “I am tough,” he growled.

  “You’ve been in prison, David, or at least you say you have, and you know when you stroll down that aisle between the jail cells, every sonofabitch in there knows whether you’re tough or not, just by the way you walk and carry yourself. If you have to tell somebody, you ain’t tough enough.”

  David didn’t know what to think. He wrote a song called “Waylon, Willie, and Me” at the same time that he started taking potshots at us in interviews, saying that Willie and Kris had sold out, that I was running around wearing white buck shoes, and none of us were really an Outlaw. He was the only Outlaw in Nashville, an ex-convict that had killed a man with a mop handle, and if he ever caught Glen Campbell, who had a hit called “Rhinestone Cowboy” years after David started driving his hearse down Broadway with his nickname emblazoned on the side, he’d know where to stuff his goddamn rhinestones.

  I saw him in Fort Worth and I put my finger right up to his chest. “You gotta k
nock that shit off,” I told him. “I ain’t never done anything to you.”

  “They just set us up,” he protested. “You know I love you, Waylon.” He showed me his bus. He’d painted it black: the grill, the bumpers, mirrors, everything. Just like my own Black Maria, with the ghost of Hank Williams inside.

  I couldn’t stay mad at him for long. When it came to being Outlaw, the worst thing he ever did was double-parking on Music Row. He could drive me crazy, but there was something about David that pulled at my heartstrings.

  It’s a miracle Tompall and I got along as long as we did.

  He was a Jack Daniels boy, and by this time I had switched to cocaine. There’s no room in the middle with either of them.

  Richie says that he introduced me to cocaine. To get me off the pills, if you can believe that. With Dr. Snap out of the picture, prescriptions were harder to find, and there was some bad shit on the market. I wasn’t going to stop, no way, so Richie gave me some cocaine. “Look, Hoss, try this.” I liked it. For the next ten years, I liked it.

  Life could be good at Hillbilly Central. We spent hours in the studio, Richie and I, absorbing recording techniques, layering and balancing, our producing taking shape. There was no shortage of drugs. When Tompall finally sold the building, whoever bought it tore up the carpeting and the walls. They found all kinds of dope stashed away. When you’d been up a long time, you could get paranoid and start hiding shit. A couple of days later, you’d forget where you hid it. The whole place was like a getting-high time capsule.

  You never knew what you might find. For a time, I’d leave the back door of the studio at 4:00 A.M., go down the stairs past where Captain Midnight, Donnie Fritts, and Billy Swan were throwing Bowie knives at a target, and there, sleeping under them like a street person, was a girl we called Crazy Helen, who had followed me from Saint Louis. We tried to bar her from the building, but occasionally she’d slip through and lock herself in the bathroom. I didn’t know what to do with her. I tried to give her money to get back home, but after two or three days, she was back. “I sent you home,” I’d say to her.

  “You didn’t tell me to stay,” she replied.

  Finally, Jessi came to my rescue. I was recording one day and Helen had gotten inside. Jessi knew exactly how to handle the situation. She walked over to Helen and said, “You love Waylon, don’t you?”

  Helen nodded. “Well, I do too,” said Jessi. “Isn’t he great?” She didn’t go and cuss her out or be mean to her. Soon after that, Helen stopped coming around.

  For Tompall’s and my friendship, success was proving much harder to deal with than adversity. We weren’t overnight sensations by any means; both of us, even by Nashville standards of longevity, were veterans. We had been recording, touring the country, and writing songs for more than a decade. We knew our way around the business, and the pleasure.

  Still, without a common enemy to unite us, our best-friendship quickly fell apart. We toured together some, him with a new band that featured a black drummer and guitar player from Bobby “Blue” Bland’s group, but a projected Outlaw Express never made it out of the starting gate.

  Johnny Cash once told me, “You never go into business with your friends.” Once I moved my publishing company over to Tompall’s, we were asking for trouble. Tompall didn’t trust anybody. I’m probably too trusting, or at least I was then. Somebody has to give me a reason not to trust them. You have to go back to square one; until you do me wrong, I trust you. If a lot of time we judge people by the way we ourselves are, I always wondered in the back of my mind about Tompall. If he doesn’t trust anybody, should anybody trust him? So we became more wary around each other. Trouble answered us.

  Neil wanted to look at Tompall’s books. He didn’t have anything to do with my publishing, and he wanted in on that. Neil said he needed it for the IRS, but I think he was just trying to catch Tompall off guard. I went along with Neil, and Tompall took it as a personal insult.

  Even Captain Midnight couldn’t keep our opposite poles in balance after that. We had made a good triangle, the Big Three, running around town having a pinball. Captain tried to be the peacemaker, but it was brutal for him. He was caught in the middle. It started on an Outlaws tour in the West: California. Midnight would go and open up for us with a few jokes. If he didn’t draw any gunfire, the rest of us would head out on stage. Tompall and I weren’t speaking, and the Captain was getting tired mediating between the two camps.

  When it finally looked to be over between Tompall and I, to the tune of $300,000 in suits and countersuits, I offered Midnight a place in my organization. He said, “I’d love to, Waylon, but Tompall has probably one friend left in the world, and I think that’s me.” Tompall was right on the edge, he thought, and after a while, I understood the decision he’d made. Tompall wasn’t speaking to his own brothers, least of all me. He did need somebody. I wasn’t him.

  I’ll always miss Tompall, though. We had a lot of fun, and we found a freedom together; he’s a part of my life. I still think of him whenever I run into an old pinball machine like the kind we used to play. Richie had a birthday party, about five years ago, in a bar over in Franklin. They had an ancient pinball machine in the back and I hadn’t seen one for years. We were playing it, getting it up there, making it move way over to the wall where if you hit it, you hit it big. I must’ve run up a thousand games on that sucker. I left it with the Captain to finish off.

  I should call Tompall and tell him about it. Maybe I could give him a holler and we’d drop in a few quarters. I know he’ll tell me it’s not where he’s at anymore; he’s not that simple-minded. That part of his life is gone forever, and don’t be calling him for things like that, he doesn’t want to hear it.

  I thought it might be fun, me and him to go over and play that pinball machine once. For old times’ sake.

  Here comes cocaine.

  It’s the same as pills, but it’s smoother. Lasts shorter. More jolt, more expensive.

  “You got any pills?” That used to be the rallying cry of the late-night set. We shared our stashes then. Two or three pills and you could be up for twelve hours, writing songs, swarming, with enough left over for the next couple of days.

  Not with cocaine. Those lines vanished quicker than you could spoon them out and roll up a hundred-dollar bill. After a while, even the haves couldn’t afford to share with the have-nots. It started breaking up the ol’ gang of mine.

  Cocaine doesn’t last. I was looking for that speed jerk. I needed more to do more, and more, and with enough cash flow to keep the level in my body up so I could stay awake for seven days (“It felt like a week,” joked the Captain), I couldn’t be still, wobbling around, sure thinking I was having fun. And I guess I was.

  I was the happiest druggie you ever saw. Laughing and cutting up all the time. None of that down garbage. I would sometimes get to draggin’ before I’d crash, but all I had to do was say goodnight and fall out, just like somebody clicked the television off, recharging until I was ready to go again.

  Everybody told me how great I was on drugs. I didn’t realize the ones that were patting me on the back were the ones I was giving drugs to. I thought I was one in a million.

  If they hadn’t been killing me, and killing the people around me, I’d probably still be doing them.

  There was the Burger Boy, over on the left. I was at the intersection of Eighteenth Avenue South and Broadway, sitting in my car. Across the street was J.J.’s, where we spent days and nights on those pinball machines. Right there at the corner.

  Can I get you to fill it up? High test. Unleaded.

  I was coming right down the next corner when I realized it was all over. I pulled up at this corner, and then that corner, looking this way and that way, always thinking around the next corner something’s going to be happening.

  It had been like that for months. Every time I’d look for something to be going on, everybody’d be gone. There was nobody around.

  I saw Captain Midnight across t
he street. I pulled the Cadillac over to him.

  “Where you going?” asked the Captain.

  “I wore this goddamn town out,” I said. “There ain’t nobody doing this shit but me. I’m going home.”

  That was the night I quit roaming.

  CHAPTER 9

  BUSTED

  It was dark in the office. I didn’t bother to put the lights on. I knew the dawn would be coming soon.

  I was hiding out. Doing cocaine. Trying to write. I’d sit behind my desk with two lines of lyric on the paper in front of me, sometimes for two, three hours, thinking. Another two lines, these scraped neatly in parallel white rows and chopped with a razor blade, lay in readiness on the side. I’d have an idea for a song, but my mind would be running and speeding so fast I’d forget the next phrase before I had a chance to put pen to paper. I had snorted myself into a trance.

  What was I hiding from? Not from anything in particular. I had become a prisoner of who I was, the identity I’d helped to create. Maybe it’s not natural for a country boy to have all that money flowing in from every which way, and people following along in its wake, coming at him, wanting a piece of his reflected glory. Maybe I felt, down deep inside, I didn’t deserve it. Maybe it was the cocaine, which had taken on a life of its own.

  Jessi had a picture painted of herself next to our bed at home. She’d put it by the desk in my upstairs office to remind me what I was missing. I’d think about Jessi, alone, waiting, but I couldn’t hold on to the thought.