Sometimes I think he likes courting disaster. When he pulled his car off the road recently and took a nap, only to wake up being arrested for pot possession, I thought he was the only person in the world who could get busted for “sleeping under the influence.”
But if I’m there for him, he’s there for me. On the night after they booked me for the cocaine they couldn’t find, Willie was appearing at Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium. I joined him on stage and the crowd gave us a standing ovation. I went up to the mike and said “I didn’t do it.” The cheers got louder.
We made some good records together. There were more than a couple Waylon and Willie albums, and I’ve got the belt buckle to prove it. We celebrated the first one by heading up to New York to the Rainbow Room high atop Rockefeller Center for a gold-record party. I had been partying the night before at a Super Bowl victory bash with the Dallas Cowboys, where we’d wound up singing Elvis Presley songs till the wee hours.
Willie and I flew up to New York the next morning. I wasn’t in the best shape to do a bunch of interviews. We had started at ten in the morning and kept going till eight that night. They promised me dinner, and we were sitting off in a corner of the Rainbow Grill. I was trying to sweet talk/put the make on Jane Pauley from the Today show; singer Tracy Nelson was sitting on Willie’s lap. I thought she was his daughter, and I was trying to talk him out of screwing her.
I had my long coat on, and it was draped over a heater, so I was sweating even more than my usual overheating. There was no food, and flashbulbs were constantly going off in my face. I pulled out a switchblade comb and the photographers all jostled forward like I was going to stab someone. I wanted to throw Joe Galante out the window, though he was one of the only executives that was ever straight with me at RCA. Even the sight of the Empire State Building didn’t phase me. It was so lit up, and I was so lit up, it looked like a cathouse.
“Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” was mine and Willie’s tip of the cowboy hat to our mustang values. That there was no other country that could have birthed this country music was proven in mid-1978, when the Outlaw clan was invited to the White House by President Jimmy Carter. Willie and his wife Connie went, along with Jessi, my son Buddy, and a few Waylors. I didn’t go. I had been in a room down the hall, doing a snort of cocaine with a local football hero. I had told Willie to call me, but he acted like he couldn’t find me. Maybe he thought I was too screwed up. When he got to the White House, Willie talked with the President about “Amazing Grace,” which wasn’t so amazing at that.
There’s some friends you can be away from for a year, and then you get together and it’s as if you pick up the conversation right where you left off. You’ve never been apart.
And Willie is a part of me.
I kept withdrawing, spending more time at my upstairs office, never going anywhere. I knew, as far as the drugs were concerned, when I wasn’t fit to be seen, and I kept getting farther and farther into my own world.
They say cocaine is a social drug, but it was the opposite with me. I went within myself more, except of course for calling up my friends late at night, waking them up and wanting to talk.
I was so addicted, I would get up in the middle of a sound sleep and go to the bathroom at three o’clock in the morning to do a toot. I was hooked as much on the taste of cocaine, the sting in my nose and throat when I would snort it, as the high. I’d stay up for a little while, smoke a cigarette, and get back in bed.
The more I hid, the more records I sold, and the bigger the shows got. Neil liked the fact that I was playing hard to get. “Waylon’s crazy,” he’d tell promoters. “You better give him some money or he’ll blow up your building.” I wouldn’t talk to the press at all, and when I did, I asked for editorial rights.
People magazine had pissed me off one time. They had hounded me to do an article on Jessi and I, and finally I said okay. Her mother had just died, and her heart was broken. They took pictures of her and me, talking about us like we were a couple of hillbillies, and called her mom a Holy Roller. At the end of it, they said that Jessi wanted me to get a vasectomy, and I said no, in my “male chauvinist” way, because I might want to have kids someday by another woman. I never trusted the press again.
It lost me a cover of Rolling Stone. Chet Flippo had written the article, but when I asked for prior approval, they didn’t give it. I don’t blame them now, and had I known what Rolling Stone stood for, I might have relented. But once I draw a line in the sand, nobody crosses over. Sorry. They weren’t going to get me no more.
Paranoia was an occupational hazard. I knew they were watching me, and I was watching everyone around me. I installed closed-circuit television cameras in the halls so I could see who was coming and going. I had a private outside entrance and a buzzer to open the door from upstairs. I stationed my band manager, John Ullrich, at the window with a pair of binoculars to track a car circling the block looking for a parking place. I was mostly fooling, but I only laughed every other time. “Chief,” he’d say after a night on sentry duty, unshaven, black rubber from the binoculars around his eyes like a raccoon. “There’s a Volkswagen that’s been going around this block all night long, and it’s changed license plates four times.”
I’d found out the hard way you could go to prison for cocaine. You couldn’t be roaming around with a big bunch of it on your body. Carry pills in your pocket and they wouldn’t even know what they were; you didn’t have to re-up your high every half hour or face crashing. That didn’t mean I couldn’t do some very stupid things. One time I went all the way to Bucksnort, Tennessee, about thirty-five miles outside of Nashville, and I gave a check for some cocaine. I was so messed up, I didn’t even know where I was at when I was out there.
Only my closest friends were allowed in the inner sanctum. I’d sit with other drug guys and do drugs together. I usually furnished them. We’d talk and listen to tapes. I found some songs on demos that were so bad you couldn’t even tell there was a tune; or I’d string together songs from different records and make up a tape of my favorite stuff. Tapes of tapes of tapes.
Jessi would come up and spend time with me, staying in the office, not doing anything much. I wrote a song called “Gemini Twins” with her in the room once, and I got into that drifting-off space thing. I wouldn’t let her talk for about three or four hours, because I couldn’t get the last two lines right. She just sat there. What a dear heart.
We played games, poker and backgammon and bumper pool and board baseball and spades. We would go from the office right to the bus and keep playing the entire way to the show. Richie remembers we started a game of spades in Nashville and then set out for Fort Worth, dealing cards all the while. When we got to Texas, after about twelve hours, we stayed in the bus another three or four hours snorting and spading. His hand was so gripped up from clenching the cards that he had to soak it in hot water, because he didn’t think he’d be able to hold the stick for the show.
Gambling. It was a way to pass the time, to keep your nerves on edge as you moved through those long blank spaces between towns, the twenty-two hours a day spent in limbo waiting for two hours of show to begin.
When we invented Farkle, a dice game with its own inner rhythm, our gambling moved into high gear. Those pots would get pretty damn big; you could lose a lot of money. We liked to bet; we’d lay odds on the monkey screwing the football. Anything. Jerry Allison, when the Crickets toured with us, played a lot, and so did Tony Joe White. We never really kept track of who owed what. It was more for the excitement, like craps, with people standing around hollering and egging each other on.
Farkle was related to a game they play in bars to buy drinks, called Horses. Rance Wasson and Gordon Payne, a pair of my guitar players, helped me come up with it. You rolled the dice in a cup and it was scored by three of a kind. You used five dice in all, four of the normal white variety and the fifth black, with my Flying W symbol in the four position as a wild card.
Three
6s equalled 600. Three 5s equalled 500, though three Is equalled 1000. Four of anything was still counted as a three, though if you got five of a kind, you won right there and then. The object was to build on your score and be the first to reach 2500. There were all sorts of choices you could make along the way, strategies and subrules about which dice to roll again and how to add up your point total, though if you rolled and didn’t get any dice in common, you lost the points you had and were out of the game. That was called Farkling.
Up on the wall of my office is a photo of the Farkle gang. There was Richie and Jerry “Jigger” Bridges, my bass player who had joined the Waylors in November of 1978 from the Muscle Shoals studio. There was Marylou Hyatt, who ran my office. There was Lisa Lightning, Randy Bob, Judy, and Crank, which was what we called Gordon. The first time he had gone out on the road with us, the Hell’s Angels had gotten him all twisted up on crank, a speed derivative. He was trying to light his cigarette with a motel key, and smelling a fire hydrant, thinking it was a flower.
Deakon Proudfoot and Boomer Baker were also in the photo, on loan to us from the Angels’ Oakland chapter. They were the best security I ever had. They could slice through a crowd without touching anybody, me following along in their wake, and were as loyal as they could be, second only to their motorcycle blood-brethren.
I was playing at the Boarding House in San Francisco when I met them. Deakon came up, and the first thing he said was “Waylon, I don’t know what you’ve heard and I don’t care. I love America and I’m an American. I don’t like a lot of things that are happening, but I like your music,” and he sat down. From that day on, we were friends.
They appreciated the Outlaw element, and that my give-a-shitter was broke. We were alike in a lot of ways; they knew I was pretty well strung out, too. They kept trouble from happening. The word went out that you don’t start fights at a Waylon Jennings concert, or it might be “ball peen hammer time.” Boomer was always smiling, gold teeth and all, though nobody fucked with him because you didn’t want to get on his bad side. We all contributed pieces of gold to his teeth. He was Jessi’s security, and he worshipped her. They’re still good friends.
Deakon was the preacher, and he could dance, despite the fact that he’d had some of his toes cut off in a motorcycle accident. He weighed almost three hundred pounds, and nobody was more nimble on his feet. When a girl rushed the stage once, aiming straight for me, he grabbed her and started waltzing her around, slowly turning and pirouetting her off to the wings.
He would’ve gone to the wall for me. I knew that because he allowed me to argue with him. Something would happen with the Farkle, and he’d grab half the dice and I’d grab the other and we’d stare and glare at each other. Deakon would stick his bottom lip out, like a kid. We’d call each other names. Other people that got in their face like that, the Angels would probably push it in.
He would stick like glue to me. He didn’t want me to be alone. In those days, Jessi didn’t travel much with me, and if you didn’t watch closely, I’d be out and gone, in all these strange towns. Deakon would follow me around, and I used to keep him up for so long he’d be seeing double. When we finally got to a hotel room, he’d sit down in a chair and in two minutes he’d start snoring. He’d rattle the windows he’d snore so loud. And there was a gentle thing to him as well. He made sure that when I slept, deep and hard as I did when I was crashing, I knew where I was when I woke up. He’d shake me, and before I’d have a chance to get curious, he’d tell me the day of the week, the city we were in and at what hotel, and tell me when and where my show was and how long I had until showtime.
The last time I saw Deakon, he came by the house. He had a girl with him on his V-twin Harley, and he had his colors flying. He hadn’t worn his patches on the road with me. His beard was bushy and full of gray, and we were sitting out in the back on rocking chairs, talking after dinner. “I need to figure out how to get from here to Wyoming,” he said, and he took out his granny glasses and started peering closely at a map. I started laughing. I wished I had a camera handy to take a picture. “Look at you, Deakon. Ol’ macho’s getting old.” He grrrr’ed at me like a big papa bear.
I asked them one time why they were Hell’s Angels. “It’s the only family I’ve ever known,” answered Boomer. “I can depend on them.” There’s a lot to be said for that.
It wasn’t all madness. One cold morning in 1978, I heard that Jerry Moss was leaving messages for me all over Nashville. I went and knocked on his hotel door; I had never forgotten what gentlemen he and Herb were when I needed to get out of my A&M contract.
Jerry wanted to speak to me about a concept album named White Mansions that Paul Kennerley, an Englishman, had written with my voice in mind. Paul had heard “That’s Why the Cowboy Sings the Blues” on London radio, and it set off his imagination. The object was to tell the story of the Civil War through Southern eyes. His hero was Matthew J. Fuller, a Confederate captain, who loved Polly Ann Stafford, a belle of the local plantation. Villainy was provided by the redneck Caleb Stone.
It was a country-and-western opera, ambitious in scope and heavy with superstars. Eric Clapton and the Eagles’ Bernie Leadon made appearances, John Dillon and Steve Cash (who played Caleb Stone) of the Ozark Mountain Daredevils helped construct the music, and Jessi took the role of Polly Ann. I was cast as the Drifter, heralding the South’s impending doom through songs like “Dixie, Now You’re Done” and “They Laid Waste to Our Land.”
We flew to England on the Concorde. I wore these elephant-ear cowboy boots that Larry Mahan, an old bull rider, had given me. They were pretty sharp, except the right foot seemed tight. By the time we got to England, my toes had swelled up so much I couldn’t get the boot off at all. Later, I found out that it was a half-size smaller than the other. I walked around Olympic Studios, where we recorded White Mansions with producer Glyn Johns, with one boot on and one boot off.
Glyn only put two or three microphones on a drum kit; he understood the art of mike placement. He introduced me to the Boss phase shifter for a guitar and guided the week or so that the sessions took. On the night we finished mixing, Glyn brought over the final album to Paul’s house to listen, and we sat there as the sun came up over the British Isles, till it was time to head back to America. The only sad note was that, unknown to Jessi, her father had passed away during the last hours of making the record. She might have been singing “Story to Tell” at the moment of his passage, or “Last Dance,” where she’s telling her loved one good-bye and saying that she’d do anything to keep that smile alive, to have him come back and have that last dance together.
The South never had a chance in the Civil War. Toward the end, they didn’t have food or machinery or people. Paul told his narrative of the War from his Englishman’s perspective, which meant he didn’t have to take sides. He understood the tragedy. For the South, a cause that is wrong, and built on something that shouldn’t be, like slavery, can’t be noble. The North was no better, burning their way through Georgia and waging a war based on economics and politics as well as human rights. All they did was win. My character worked both sides of the conflict, a troubadour, more or less, and a musician who sang songs, not necessarily good and not necessarily bad.
White Mansions was a lovely record, and it touched me in a deeply personal way, as a man whose house is built on a Civil War battlefield and a Southerner. Though it probably went over the heads of its intended audience, making the album was one of my most enjoyable experiences.
There was no chance that The Dukes of Hazzard television show would prove too smart for its target viewers. A moonshine excuse for car chases and watching Catherine Bach’s ass in her trademark cut-off jeans, that long-legged good-lookin’ thing, it was incredibly popular. Bo and Luke Duke’s ongoing war with Mayor Boss Hogg and Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane provided about the only plot line needed. I was the narrator, or “The Balladeer” as they called me, and though I never appeared onscreen, for six years, beginning in January 1
979, I got to say things like “Happy as a pig eatin’ slop” and “Meanwhile, Bo and Luke Duke, not knowing that Uncle Jessie was disguised as a door, shot his knob off.” Down home. Yee-hah!
The idea for the series grew out of a movie called The Moon-runners, which in itself was a sequel to Thunder Road, the Robert Mitchum classic about backwoods stills and corn-likker cookin’. His son, Jim, had starred in The Moonrunners, and Ralph Mooney and I had done the soundtrack. CBS, looking for a Beverly Hillbillies crossed with Starsky & Hutch, called to ask if I would provide the voice-overs for The Dukes. My disc jockey training was about to come in handy. I learned a lot about the rhythm of words, even though the writers kept writing things like “wuz” for “was,” as if I wouldn’t get it, and even got to bring it inside sometimes: “As welcome as a skunk at a picnic or Waylon Jennings at a CMA banquet.”
They liked the way I sounded, so they asked me to write a theme: “Just two good ol’ boys / Never meanin’ no harm.…Been in trouble with the law / Since the day they were born.” They thought that was good but said all it needed was something about two modern-day Robin Hoods, fighting the system. So I wrote “Fighting the system, like two modern-day Robin Hoods,” and they didn’t even know they wrote the damn line. It was my first million-selling single, and one of the easiest records I ever cut. Even today, every time I look out on my driveway and see General Lee, the orange Dodge Charger they gave me with the rebel stars and bars painted on its roof and a big 01 bull’s-eyeing the door, it makes me laugh. Great car for eluding a sheriff.
Live, the more things got insane around us, the more focused was the playing on stage. It was a great band we had then; everybody took a verse on “The Weight” except Richie and Mooney, who didn’t sing. We’d tape each night with a cassette recorder, and every evening, as the seventies went through their final spin, the whole band would sit on the bus and listen back to the show. That’s how different it sounded, how much everybody enjoyed their chance to play music, night after night, and cared about what they were doing.
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