Waylon

by Waylon Jennings

  I’d quit smoking. John hadn’t, and they were trying to clear his lungs before they operated. He had to wait a few days, and all the while he kept asking “How ya doing?” and I’d say “Couldn’t be better.”

  The fact was that I had seldom felt worse. I was allergic to morphine, though it took them a while to figure that out. Lying in the recovery room, I couldn’t get my breath. The oxygen they were feeding me seemed hot. They tried changing the tanks. Jessi was looking at me, and my eyes were wild, because I didn’t know what was happening.

  They finally diagnosed the problem and put me on Tylenol 2. That was all. It figured; after all my drug use, I had to be allergic to morphine. If I coughed, it felt like a herd of horses had stamped across my chest. I had told the doctors before not to get me strung out on anything, because I didn’t want to repeat my addiction problems. They took me at my word.

  I couldn’t tell John because I thought he’d run off if he knew how bad I was hurting. When they finally operated on him, I went in and told him I was sorry about lying to him.

  “Eat your heart out,” he laughed. “I ain’t allergic to nothing.” He could have all the morphine he wanted.

  You can find humor in everything. I couldn’t believe that after cutting your chest practically in half, they got you up to walk on the second day. Two male nurses came in to get me ready for my stroll. The first thing they did was sit me up and set me right on my nuts. I’m too macho to have one of those boys reach in there and pull my balls out, so I’m stretching and straining to pick myself up, trying to maneuver them around, when this female nurse comes in with a syringe for me. It was about a foot long.

  Her name was Chloe and she was beautiful. “Okay, Mr. Cowboy singer,” she said. “You’re going to get up and walk now, or I’m going to stick this right in you.”

  “I don’t need you, Chloe,” I groaned. I did, though, as I got shakily to my feet.

  I had no wheels. I was weak and drained. Jessi would walk by my bed, and each day I would try to pinch her on the butt. I’d keep missing, but on the fourth day I knew I was getting stronger because I grabbed her.

  Being in a hospital is a great leveler. “I’ll tell you what the equalizer is,” I said to John one day when we were sitting around.

  “What do you mean?” he asked me.

  “The thing which makes you one with every human being in the world. When they get you up to walk you, you can hardly stand up, and they put that little gown on you. You’re about halfway down the hall, and you feel the draft from behind. You know you ain’t got no back, and you got no shorts on, and people are looking at your ass.

  “That superstar shit goes right out the window.”

  I was more depressed that Christmas than I’d ever been. I was missing cigarettes, a habit I’d nourished since my days out in the Littlefield clubhouse. Right to this day, if I’m dealing cards, I’ll stick my hand in my shirt pocket, searching for a smoke. Even when I play solitaire. My cousin Wendell had told me that there were only five days of actual nicotine withdrawal to worry about; “chewin’ the rugs,” as he called it. After that, you just had to stop reaching for them.

  My hitting-bottom ran deeper, though. I couldn’t see any future, even though I’d been granted a fresh start. I think your mind believes that you die when they stop your heart to perform the bypass. It can’t understand the fact that life can be interrupted. As the brain deals with that, reconnecting its damaged roadways, you try to realize what it means to be brought back from the dead. My daddy died when he was fifty-three, and now I had the chance to outlive him that he never got. My own mortality weighed heavily upon me.

  I must’ve been in that mood right before the operation. I wasn’t sure about how much time I had left. I was feeling bad all the time. That’s the thing when you’re having heart problems; you deteriorate very slowly. Those veins don’t stop up overnight. You begin wondering if you ever felt good.

  A Man Called Hoss was an album that grew out of an idea I had for a one-man show, a monologue to myself about where I’d been, singing my story. Divided into chapters, each illustrated by a song, I told my self-tale, from prologued birth to the last chapter, “The Beginning.” My “Living Proof,” as I called it in chapter 7.

  I worked on the concept with songwriter Roger Murrah. I had done two or three of his songs, including “Where Corn Don’t Grow,” and I liked the sparse way he approached things. To the point. Chorus and bridges are fine, but sometimes they’re crutches to get you through the story. I was always cautious about overwriting. A song is like a circle, and to return it to where it begins is the storyteller’s art. A round trip. “Bringing it home” I always called it.

  Somebody talked me into doing a narration between the cuts, and I’ve regretted that part of the album, though it remains one of my favorite records. If you have to tell somebody the story as you’re singing it, you don’t have faith in the power of the songs, and the songs didn’t need any extra help. “Rough and Rowdy Days” related the fable of John and myself as well as I could tell it, sitting across a kitchen table, and I always wanted to write a song with four lines in it that lasted six minutes like “Where Do We Go from Here.”

  We tried it out as a one-man show in California, and also at Duke University. It was just me singing to tracks, and telling stories, and enlivening these songs as we went along. It was fun to do. Bowen called it an audio-biography.

  Autobiography. It’s like a travelogue. You think, “I’ve been somewhere,” and you want to tell people about it. Maybe they’ll see some of themselves along the journey, but most of all, you tell your story to get it straight, at least in your own mind. To figure out what you’ve done right, and where you’ve gone astray, and why maybe the wrong things turned out to be needed for the right things to happen.

  You look back over these events, pieces of time, characters and question marks, each funny and sad, light and dark in their own way. The last chapter should always point forward. That’s the moment you have left to do something even better. A sequel.

  “Storms Never Last” was a song of Jessi’s that seemed to open the way to the future. She had found the phrase while waiting in a doctor’s office and, watching what I was going through, had written it as a personal song to me. She was going to throw it away, but I had her change “Waylon” to “Baby.” She recorded it first, and then later I did a version of it in 1980, on my Music Man album. The words seemed to mean more and more across the years as we faced down each crisis, a wave of doubt looming large and getting smaller and finally disappearing as we passed over and through it. We became ever closer to one another, her anchor to my ship at sea.

  You followed me down so many roads, baby

  I picked wildflowers

  Sung you soft sad songs

  And every road we took

  God knows our search was for the truth

  And the cloud brewing now won’t be the last

  Storms never last, do they, Jessi?

  Bad times all pass with the wind

  Your hand and mine stills the thunder

  You make the sun want to shine

  Shooter was the cornerstone between us. He’s not what you might expect from a kid of mine. He likes industrial rock groups like Nine Inch Nails and Ministry and has turned me on to Enigma and Metallica. He says he doesn’t care for country music, but he learned drums from Richie Albright and plays congas with me on summer tour. He’s got a room full of computers and programs his own video games, a post-modern child of the future as much as I’m a pre-primitive father.

  I can’t help it. I wouldn’t want to help it. I’ve always been crazy about kids. If there’s a crowd of adults and a kid, I’ll go straight for the kid, every time. Sometimes I feel like the Pied Piper. My dad was a big tease when it came to children, and maybe it’s a little bit of my daddy, or my own sense of being a daddy, that helps me to instantly get down on their level. After a few minutes they think they’re just as big and tough as ol’ Waylon. I can argue
with them, play their games, and they’re never afraid of me.

  It’ll be funny. Sometimes I scare grown-ups half to death. One night in Austin, I came out of the Armadillo and it was dark. A couple walked up and asked me for a photo. He was shaking, and she was trembling. They had a little girl with them, and I looked at her, trying to think of a way to make them feel comfortable. “Are you afraid of me?” I asked, and she answered me with a little grin and shook her head no. Then she came over and gave me a hug. That’s always been my barometer with myself. You can’t fool children.

  Kids love to tell me what to do. One of my favorite little friends is my goddaughter Haley Hyatt, Marylou’s child. She’d ask me if I was tired and if my back was sore. When I said yes, she’d take one finger and rub a corner of my shoulder. “Does that feel good?” she’d ask. “Is that helping you?” I had to admit it did. Then she’d say, “I’m kind of like your mother, aren’t I?”

  “You sure are, honey,” I’d agree.

  Then she’d stick that finger right in my face and start shaking it. “Okay, then you better straighten up,” she’d scold, giving me all kinds of what-for. Jigger’s daughter, Jessica, is another one who spends most of our time together telling me she knows what’s best, and I better do what she says and why she’s the boss.

  I got Haley back when she had chicken pox. She hated having those spots on her face, and finally I told her to gather a few of those pox when they fell off and put them into an envelope and send them to President Carter ’cause he’d just raised my taxes. She turned to her mother. “Way-a-lon is sometimes so silly.”

  Playing music helps keep you childlike. The first thing a kid will react to is a song. From the time they’re born, we put little jingle bells over the top of their cribs and sing to them. Shooter used to go to sleep to my music; he called them “Daddy tapes.” Later, he played my records. He couldn’t read the labels, but he recognized the Flying W when he saw it. I’d ask him, “Shooter, do you know any songs?” He’d play “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” over and over until it had skips and scratches. Then he’d sing “Are you sure Hank / Are you sure Hank / Are you sure Hank…,” just like the record.

  I never wanted him to go to school. In my mind, when you put the little book into his hands and sent him into the building, it was all over. He might never come back. I wanted to have him tutored, and on his first day, after he’d put his little arms around my neck, I stayed outside and waited under a nearby tree. If he’d walked out of that school, we both knew he’d never have to go back, but he stayed, and when he graduated years later, I stood under that same tree and thought about how much he’d grown, and me with him.

  I used to wear my cowboy hat wherever I went. One day we were going out to a toy store, and he took the hat and said “Let’s leave that in here so people won’t bother you.” Nobody did.

  He’s got more than one vote in our family. It may jump up and bite me in the rear end one day, but I’ve always told him, if I say no to you, you have a right to ask why. If I don’t have a good enough answer, then I’ll try to see it his way. The best thing I can give him is my ears and my attention. A lot of times, especially with my other kids, I haven’t followed that through. I blew it in so many ways with them, back when I wasn’t much more than a kid myself. Harlan Howard says that he thinks artists and musicians should wait until they’re in their late thirties before settling down and starting a family. Before then, you’re much too focused on your career, hanging out with your cronies, staying up late plunking guitars. All those things that don’t make you a good husband and father. I was trying to become a success and in some ways I was very selfish. With Shooter, when he asks, “Dad, can I see you for a minute,” I make sure there’s nothing that’s going to stand in the way of our talking.

  He never mentioned my time on drugs; later, he would relate it to when “Daddy used to cuss.” Not that my language has ever been pure. Still, I figured I would have to tell him someday, if only because he might hear it from somebody else first. Other kids can be really cruel in their innocence and honesty. I knew it had to come from me.

  “Shooter,” I started. “Remember when you talked about when Daddy used to cuss.” He was hooking up an electronic gadget.

  “There was a reason. I still cuss, but that time there was something else involved.”

  “What?” he asked, deftly despatching a squad of alien hell-fighters.

  “I was on drugs.”

  “Oh, you mean you drink beer?”

  “No, I did cocaine.” He furrowed his brow, because he’d heard of it. “I was on drugs for twenty-one years, and I haven’t been on them for a long time. Somebody’s going to tell you someday and I just want you to know that I told you first. It’s not anything I’m proud of, and there’s nothing I can change about it, but it was a real scattered, bad time for me in there.”

  The next day the school called and said they were going to have a discussion about drugs and wanted to be aware of just how much I had let Shooter know about my past. They didn’t want to say anything that might make him wonder about me.

  Instinct. When I get the feeling I should do something, I do it. Right away. I go by my animal senses. One time, a woman “stalker” started following me around, writing me letters, going to my hometown, talking to my mother and the newspapers. She thought she was the Queen of Sheba. I was Solomon, typecast again. One morning, I got up with the kids and told them never to leave school with anybody but Richie, our housekeeper Maureen, or Jessi. That afternoon she tried to kidnap two of them.

  Jessi and Maureen liked to work up to things, and they were a little concerned about Shooter’s reaction to the news. The day after I told Shooter about the drugs, he was in the living room playing quietly. Maureen came in and said, “Shooter, are you okay?”

  He said yeah. “Is there anything bothering you?” asked Maureen.

  “Nope.”

  “Did anything Dad say yesterday about drugs and things bother you?”

  He perked up. “About him kicking coke? Nah.”

  I had another confession for him that I had to face, about leaving school in the middle of the tenth grade. I always felt that one of the worst things I ever did was not finish my education. I could blame it on myself, but I always thought that you can’t go to a child with a paddle in your hand and expect him to learn through fear.

  Governor and Martha Wilkerson of Kentucky had gotten to be my friends and they wanted me to do a benefit. I didn’t even ask them what it was about. It was a black-tie type of thing, and as I went off, after my last song before the encore, I asked one of the guys who worked for me what the benefit was for. He told me it was for Martha’s Army, a program designed to encourage high school dropouts to get their General Equivalency Diploma.

  I went back out and talked to the crowd. “I really believe in learning,” I said. “Now I’ve got a pretty good job, but I have never walked into an office where I didn’t feel a bit intimidated because I knew on the other side of that door there was somebody who was educated. And I’m not.”

  When I left the stage, Martha was on me like a duck on a junebug. “You’re going to get your GED,” she said. And I said I would.

  I was always telling Shooter how important school was; now I was honor bound to prove it to him. It gave me a chance to really show him what it meant to me, and in a way, what he meant to me.

  “My mind is thirty years from learning mode,” I said to him one day after they sent me the books and tapes to study. My best thing is to have somebody work with me. “You’ve got to help me.”

  He was studying fractions at the time. I hadn’t thought of fractions ever, except how to divide the door at a show or Hank Williams singing “If you love me half as much as I love you.” So we sat down and worked together. He would be my teacher. Sometimes I’d be doing good, and he’d be so proud, and other times he watched me struggle. He made up questions to ask me and gave me tests. We learned together, and he was thrilled to be able to te
ach his dad something.

  By the time I took the equivalency test, I was as ready as I was going to be. I worked on it all one day, and after eight hours, I got up and was more exhausted than I could ever remember. It wore my brain out and made me believe that anyone who understands algebra should go to a treatment center.

  Still, I passed the exam, and I got my diploma. Littlefield High School sent me a ring, class of ’89, which I’m proud to wear on my right hand every single day, and means I’ll be attending my twenty-fifth reunion in the year 2014. If my third-grade teacher could only see me now.

  MCA was in turmoil, and they had me for two more albums. I didn’t want to be in the middle of that. Bowen and I had scored one number-one country record with “Rose in Paradise,” and our work together had been a positive thing, but the upheavals at the company seemed, insurmountable. That’s when I called Jimmy and asked him for a favor. To let me go.

  “There’s only two things in my life,” he said to me. “One of them’s love, and the other is business. And you ain’t never been business.”

  In November of 1989, I moved over to CBS, where Epic said they would give me what I wanted: creative freedom and no “control compositions,” which in effect penalizes you for writing your own material as an artist. Bob Montgomery was my producer, a good songman whom I’d known peripherally in Lubbock when he was the middle-man in Buddy, Bob, and Larry.

  “I’m not intimidated by you” was Bob’s favorite line to me. It was the most I got out of him. I heard that phrase so many times I began to wonder why he was being so defensive. He was really hot to team me up with Willie. “I want Willie involved in this,” he said almost the first day we were in the studio.

  “Oh no, you don’t,” I told him. “Not in Nashville. Willie don’t give a shit about this. He’ll bring some songs he likes to do, but he’s not into that other stuff. He could care less about the arrangements. Think of him as Sinatra. He likes to come in and sing and leave.”