Waylon

by Waylon Jennings

  The band could do just about anything. It didn’t matter what the tune was. It just seemed like somebody would grab a hold of it and go. Get it started in one direction, and then change direction, zigging and zagging.

  Mooney was at the heart of it. He was a cult legend in his own right, a steel-guitar genius, and he was in his heyday. When I played in England and introduced the band, Mooney got a bigger hand than me. He could be cantankerous, but he had a touch on his instrument that went beyond steel decorations. If you weren’t in the pocket for him when he took his ride, you would be by the time he came out the other side. If it was early in the show, and things hadn’t quite found their groove yet, he had the unique ability to put it there, pumping the pedals and stroking his bar across the strings.

  Mooney was a few years older than the average Waylor, but he’d put the time to good use. He’d been born in Oklahoma and caught the steel fever from listening to greats like Leon McAuliffe and Noel Boggs. Moving to California, he grew up on nonpedal steels, shifted to Sho-Bud when they began adding pedals and knee levers, and over the years had backed everybody from Wynn Stewart to Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. He was probably best known for writing Ray Price’s “Crazy Arms,” which he penned after Mrs. “Moon” left him in 1950, while they were living in Las Vegas and he was getting “crawling, falling down” drunk. She came back when she heard the song.

  If Ralph was shy when he was sober, he could be a holy terror when he got near the bottle. He knew how much I respected him, though, and I gave him a lot of room to play around the melody. The whole band had that freedom—Richie and Jigger, Rance on rhythm and Gordon on lead, Carter and Barney Robertson—and we were tight as a drum and loose at the same time. Richie, with me almost twenty years at this point, would lean back on his drum stool like Levon Helm from The Band, and Gordon’s guitar was J.J. Cale swampy. Carter had a beautiful voice, and she sang backup harmonies with me; Barney played rattler piano. The Robertsons weren’t into the drugs; they tolerated the rest of us, I think.

  As the seventies closed, Richie moved formally into producing me. He’d learned his lessons well, and both What Goes Around Comes Around and Music Man were bookends of my music in overdrive. Virtually identical in cover look and personnel, the two albums revolved around his resolute bass drum, while the guitars swirled, traded licks, and I rode the rhythm section like a palomino. We all knew we were skating along the edge. You couldn’t look down or slow up, ’cause you might fall off. You just had to go faster. On Rodney Crowell’s aptlytitled “I Ain’t Living Long Like This,” we burned through the am-I-baby’s and the wheels-go-round like there was no tomorrow.

  These Waylors could have stood on their own. In fact, whenever I disappeared from a session, Richie cut most of an album on them. But when one of the members came to me and wondered when he was going to get equal billing, I had to draw the line. “Sorry, son,” I shrugged. “I’m gonna tell you something you might not realize.

  “I’m all you got.” I put my arm around his shoulders. “Tomorrow, if you leave, they’re going to say ’Where’d he go?’ And I’m gonna say, ’Well, he ain’t here no more,’ and they’ll say ’Damn, we’re going to miss him.’ But they’re still going to be out there, waiting for me to come around and count off the set. It don’t work the other way. That may sound awful and conceited, and maybe it ain’t fair, but it’s true.”

  It was a great show production-wise, and quite a caravan. We carried our own sound and lights in a Mack truck, and there were two or three buses. There was even a separate bus for T-shirts, which were sold by another Angel traveling with us from the Oakland chapter, Rick Talbot. He had several girls that came along to help him sell them, and what have you. Rick could hoot up a storm when he set his mind to it; he was the funniest guy and could keep you in stitches. One night he was out in a freezing rain, running all around, drinking from a gallon bottle of Blue Nun. As he went to get on the bus, he missed the door and fell in the wet. A few minutes later he tried to get up, but he was frozen to the ground, still laughing away. They had to pry him loose.

  The more raunchy I got, the better the crowds liked it. I didn’t talk at all. I didn’t say anything; I didn’t have anything to say. I just came out and started playing, and when I got through I said “Bye.”

  Out and back in, that’s the way I liked it. You form a circle with your audience. Even in my stupor, I was always in tune with their moods. I could tell you what tempo songs to do next, or how they should feel. I couldn’t tell you which one, but I knew, if I was in tune, and they were tuned in to me, I could move ’em around. I could pull their chain with “Bob Wills” or “Hank” anytime. These were country music fans, even though they acted like rock and rollers. Which is why “I’ve Always Been Crazy” was such a big hit live. On a good night, and it seemed like they just kept getting better, I could take the crowd with me for a ride. I like to drive.

  Our crew had come over from rock and roll stages. They were used to Loud. You could put a match out if you held it next to Richie’s monitor mix. We were playing auditoriums, arenas, football fields. Deakon formed a production company, Charlie Magoo Productions, and booked me and Willie together at Spartan Arena in San Jose, California. Delbert McClinton and Jessi opened the show, and there were as many people backstage as there were out front. The Hell’s Angels had the run of the place. I broke a tooth before I went on and did my whole show with it cracked straight up. I almost reached in there and pulled that sonofabitch out. Willie said, “If you decide to do it, be sure and tell the audience.” I have never understood what that meant.

  We did it on percentage, splitting the take three ways. It was the first time Willie and I had played together for a while, and we each took home $150,000, which is still the most money I ever made for one performance.

  As much as we were making, though, it seemed like it was costing more and more to keep the show on the road. Even discounting the six-figure sums I was spending on cocaine, the tours were running well in the red. People were hanging out and getting paid for it. We had close to fifty bodies on our payroll, and I wasn’t sure what any of them were doing. There were twenty people more than we needed on the crew. If I saw somebody twice in a week, I’d ask Richie, “Are they working for us?”

  My records were selling faster than they could manufacture them. The shows were sold out. We were doing it on our own. Everybody else just tried to keep up.

  Including us.

  For every million dollars I was taking in, I was spending double. I was going broke when I was the hottest thing in the country.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but there was a hole somewhere. The money was pouring down.

  One day in the spring of 1981, my friend Bill Robinson, Richie, and I sat around at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in L.A. looking at a pile of papers strewn about the floor. My cash flow had dried up. I owed more than two million dollars. The bank had stopped my account because I was $860,000 overdrawn.

  I always thought that if you make money, money will take care of itself. Willie was a lot like that, too. We didn’t want to know about the business. All of a sudden, I was broke. This Outlaw “bit” was not only gettin’ out of hand. It was out of pocket.

  The first country album to ship gold may have been I’ve Always Been Crazy; but I’m not stupid. It was time, once again, to stop and start over.

  CHAPTER 10

  I’M ABOUT TO SING IN MY PANTS;

  I’VE BEEN DRY-HUMMING

  ALL DAY AND I’M GONNA GET

  THE TUNE-ACHES

  Everybody whose wife is going to have a baby, raise their hand,” I asked the crowd from the stage of Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  I raised mine.

  Terry, my eldest son, was working for me, and he just about fell over. The audience cheered. I could hardly start the next song I was so happy. I had talked over the phone with Jessi before I went on for the show, and the doctor had confirmed what we had suspected. She was pregnant.

&n
bsp; Cain’s is an old western swing honky-tonk graced with pictures of Bob Wills and Spade Cooley on the wall. It’s been there for decades. My blood was probably racing from the excitement; we had thought about a child of our own for so long.

  That night the stage lights seemed even brighter than usual. They had me blinded. I was high. The stage was tilting; I couldn’t see anything, and I was starting to fall. I looked out at the room, and focused on a long column that stretched up from the floor to the ceiling, locking it with my eyes, using it to regain my balance.

  That was the night I learned about centerposts. You’ve got to have one, something to measure yourself against and grab hold of whenever you feel life is swinging out of control. If you don’t have one, you’ll fall. Musically, Hank Williams was my centerpost. It’s always gone back to him, the one who did everything wrong and everything right.

  As for living, I realized at that moment that my centerpost was Jessi. I was not complete when I wasn’t around her.

  Someone to relate to. That’s part of our being, and what better relation than a child?

  Jessi spiritually prepared in her heart that she would be ready when there came time to have a baby. It was part of a commitment we had made to each other, to be somebody each of us could believe in, no matter what came to pass.

  The baby was planned down to the night that we conceived. We both knew we needed to, if we were going to; we heard the clock ticking. I had just passed forty, and Jessi was close enough. I think she had kept waiting for me to come out of the drugs, and when she saw I wasn’t nearly ready to give it up, we both knew what the deal was. We took a chance.

  That chance took us to Nashville Baptist Hospital in the early morning hours of Saturday, May 19, 1979. June Carter Cash had come down to keep us company. John was on his way. We were playing spades, laying out the cards on Jessi’s stomach.

  I hadn’t been in the delivery room when any of my other kids were born. It wasn’t done that way in West Texas. They didn’t want any of those big tough cowboys to faint away watching their wives give birth.

  It wasn’t any different for me, though times had changed. “You need to go in there,” the doctors said, but the closer the contractions came, the more I thought I could better occupy myself going out to get some cigarettes.

  I looked at Jessi. You could almost feel the energy moving through her, caught in some elemental force of nature. It was like she had a whole sandstorm boiling up inside her.

  “Is there any way I can talk you out of this?” I asked.

  She smiled and shook her head no. We were as totally together as man and woman could be.

  “I’ll go with you.” I put on the hospital garb and sat there with her in the delivery room, holding her hand.

  An intern came in. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen, and he was beside himself. “John’s here,” he blurted. “John wants you to know he’s here.”

  Jessi nodded that was okay.

  “Mr. Cash is outside,” he repeated. “Johnny Cash is out there.”

  Jessi rolled her what-happened-to blue eyes. She said, “Would somebody give this boy a quarter so he can go call somebody who gives a shit, ’cause I’m trying to have a baby here.”

  Men can never really relate to being pregnant, giving birth. All I could do was listen to the heartbeat and feel the kick. The baby was attached to her body by the cord, part of her being as well as the child it was becoming. The room took on a rhythm of its own. All those heartbeats.

  We didn’t know what the baby would be, boy or girl; we weren’t sure till the last minute. There had been a little redheaded boy that Jessi saw in church. He was all over everything, pure boy spirit, and just the cutest kid. His real name was Shooter.

  They put the baby on Jessi’s stomach, right where the ace of spades had been dealt not ten hours earlier. He was hollering.

  Jessi looked over at him. She was glistening. I felt lightheaded. “We got us a Shooter,” she declared, as Waylon Albright Jennings promptly peed all over the nurses.

  “Do you want to go bankrupt?”

  Bill Robinson stood up, shrugged his shoulders, and spread his hands. Richie looked forlorn. There wasn’t much any of us could do. The figures didn’t lie. I was swimming in red ink and about to go down for the third time.

  “You’re broke,” he said, laying it on the bottom line for me. “Everything you’ve got is in hock: your buildings, your home. The bank has closed your accounts. You’ve spent your advances.”

  The worst thing was that I had been giving it away. So much money was flowing through my office that I never bothered to count it. And after a while, nobody else did either, except to take out their share. There were a lot of shares.

  We had seventeen people in the Nashville office alone. There was a road manager, a band manager, a publicist, a secretary, a booking agent, a receptionist, gofers, and personal assistants all around. The assistants had assistants, and everyone was “on staff.” Marylou Hyatt, who came into my organization in April of 1977, answering a want ad for a “Booking Agent Assistant,” told me one time that I had someone who opened the door and another who closed it.

  On the road, we put the tour in entourage. It was controlled chaos. There were separate crews for the lights and sound, production managers, roadies for the musical equipment, and trucks and buses to haul the caravan from town to town. We were pulling huge audiences—11,000 in Minneapolis, 14,000 in Colorado’s Red Rocks—and the fact that we had a constant cast of characters gave a certain stability to the crap-shoot conditions we’d find awaiting us at each gig.

  Of course, I didn’t know what was out there, because I never got off the bus. Take a shower up in the hotel and then come back downstairs. Wait for the show. Killing time.

  I’d see Bill Robinson backstage on my way from the bus to the microphone, standing in the wings by the curtains, when I’d work on the West Coast. He was tall and gainly, with a shock of black hair. He never said anything to me, and after a couple of times, I began to recognize him. Finally, I walked over one night and said, “What do you do? Have you got a job?” Maybe I’d hired him already.

  Leather and Lace.

  Live at Max’s Kansas City, 1973. (courtesy Bob Gruen/Star File)

  The Outlaws go gold: Tompall Glaser, me, Jessi, Willie, Chet, and RCA execs

  Jerry Bradley and Harry Jenkins.

  A week without sleep and I’m having a good ol’ time … I think.

  Waylon and Willie…

  … and Willie and Waylon …

  … and Jessi and Willon and Waylie.

  America has been good to me and Johnny Cash.

  Muhammad Ali at Shooter’s christening, 1979.

  A Beatle writes …

  Meeting President Carter, with Shooter a babe-in-arms.

  Now Bill, about that tax cut … (courtesy Skipper Gerstel)

  The CEO of Waylon G-D Jennings Productions. (courtesy Beth Gwinn)

  Robert Redford gives me and Willie acting lessons for Electric Horseman, (courtesy Jimmy Ellis, The Tennessean)

  Hank Williams Jr. and I trade licks in April of 1987. (courtesy Jerry Floyd)

  On the Hee-Haw set with Minnie Pearl and Roy Clark.

  “Happy Birthday to me …”

  Neil Diamond has always been a special friend.

  I feel privileged to be in these gentlemen’s company: Bill Monroe, Porter Wagoner,

  Carl Smith, and Little Jimmy Dickens.

  The Highwaymen in the studio with producer Chips Moman, 1989.

  Christmas with Shooter. He’s all of eight years old. (courtesy Beth Gwinn)

  The Jennings Clan, post-me: (l. to r.) Terry, Josh, Debra, Taylor, Julie, Buddy, Kathy, Tomi Lynne, Jennifer, B.J., Josie, Deana, Shooter, Jessi. Not pictured are Johnny, Whey, and Ricky, (courtesy Billy Mitchell)

  My bride on our silver anniversary, {courtesy Billy Mitchell)

  No, he just liked my music, and as a theatrical movie agent with offices on Rodeo Drive, he was here as a f
an. Bill became one of the brightest spots in my life. He represented Jim Garner, and as I got to know him, I was able to confide in him about the growing financial mess in which I was finding myself.

  Richie had spoken with him as well. I had put Richie in charge of overseeing my business, in the same way that I’d produced records with him. I’d get it started and split, leaving him to clean up the loose ends. Only now, those loose ends were unraveling quickly, and out on the road with me, being my drummer, he just couldn’t be in two places at once. Richie would come off a series of dates, cross-eyed from touring, and there would be five pages of decisions to be made. I looked to him to make sure it was working, but even though he had the responsibility, he couldn’t have a clue about what was happening.

  That fall it had come to a screeching halt. Payroll was due, and the banks had stopped what wasn’t left of our money. I tried to get ahold of Neil and he had disappeared. Don’t ask me where.

  He had been supposed to get the money from somewhere. Don’t ask me where.

  I was supposed to have been one of the top-earning entertainers of the seventies, and the money had vanished. Don’t ask me where.

  Where, where, where. It was like I had woken up from a long sleep on the bus, between towns, and for a second you look around and don’t know where you are. Removed. And when you do realize, a sense of stepping outside yourself, seeing the whole map of where you’ve been and where you might be heading, then you really wake up and realize you’re there. Shits Creek.