Waylon

by Waylon Jennings

  “So’sFort Worth.”

  There’s the four of us standing there, grouped around microphones. The Highwaymen. John, Kris, Willie, and me.

  I don’t think there are any other four people like us. If we added one more, or replaced another, it would never work. Nobody else was considered when the idea for a group first starting growing. There was never a fifth wheel.

  John says that we came together because we all have a life commitment to the music. We know the same songs, but we sing them from different perspectives. We can blend the early country of the Carter Family with Texas swing, southern gospel, and rockabilly, and each of us feels comfortable singing real slices of life. There’s not one of us who hasn’t come face to face with his own mortality, and many’s the time we’ve gone through our struggles and survivals together. There’s a blues song that talks about the “key to the highway.” That’s our friendship, unlocking any door that stands between us, and it keeps four very different individuals together.

  It ain’t easy. We love each other, but give-and-take can still get shaky, at least until we lean back and start playing the music. All of us are used to having our way and doing things our own way. Maybe we should be called the Highwaysmen. If anything, though, our troubles erupt when we worry too much about upstaging the other guys, getting in their way.

  When we first took the Highwaymen out live, it looked like four shy rednecks trying to be nice to each other. It almost ruined it. That didn’t work, for us and the audience, and it was really bothering me, how different we were on stage than when we were sitting around in the dressing room. We had just come back from Australia, and were set to play a week at the Mirage in Las Vegas. After the opening night, I was fixin’ to quit. I talked to John about it and he was feeling the same way. “I get a little nervous,” he said. “I don’t want to look like I’m trying to steal your thunder.”

  That was it. We were boring each other and the audience. It may be hard to think of Johnny Cash as intimidated, but that’s the way we were. You can’t have four big guys tiptoeing around each other on stage. Nobody has a good time.

  So we decided to help each other out, whether each of us thought we needed it or not. Don’t ask. Just do it, and don’t worry what the other one thinks. Make fun of each other, cut up, poke some much-needed fun. Willie would be singing “Crazy,” and I’d run up to the microphone and add “Stupid …” They may have seemed little things, but they were enough to make us loosen up and not take ourselves so danged serious. By the end of the week, with Willie dancing across the stage and John and Kris singing harmony neck-and-neck, we had the wildest show, and it made us a group.

  John had brought our four personalities together initially, in Montreaux, Switzerland, in 1984. Every year, he had a television Christmas special, and that holiday season he wanted us all to come over. We were interviewed one afternoon when we had arrived in Europe. A nervous journalist came in and asked, “Why Switzerland? Why would you do a Christmas special in Switzerland?”

  He stuck the microphone over in front of me. I said, “’Cause that’s where the baby Jesus was born,” and he dutifully wrote that down.

  Actually, it was the Highwaymen who had the immaculate conception. We got along “handsomely,” as John put it. We started trading songs in the hotel after we worked on the special, and someone said, like they always do, we ought to cut an album. Man, this is forever.

  Usually everyone goes their separate ways after that, but the idea took hold. Chips Moman had come over to Switzerland to do sound, and when he came back to Nashville, he was working with Willie and John, recording a duet to finish out John’s album. I stumbled in to visit, and a little later, Kris came by.

  We remembered a Jimmy Webb song called “Highwayman” that we had all liked in Switzerland, and since we were in the same place at the same time, we did a track on it. Then another, and another. The album was underway without us even knowing it. It was the first of three we’ve done under the collective name of the Highwaymen.

  There used to be another group called the Highwaymen, who were best known for the folk tune “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” and they sued us over the name. They had long since retired, but we did a charity show with them opening and squared it away. Highwayman came out in 1985, containing things like “Desperadoes Waiting for a Train” and Johnny’s “Big River,” which he wrote after listening to delta-influenced blues singers like Robert Johnson and Pink Anderson. We toured, learning how to unwind with each other, and returned to the studio in early 1990 for Highwayman 2. As an album, it could have used a little more time spent on it. We ran in and out too quick, and we didn’t have that one great song. It’s hard to find material that goes over with four people, each with strong let-it-all-hang-out opinions.

  Our last album, The Road Goes on Forever, came out in spring of 1995, and I think it’s our best, so far. Three’s the charm. It was produced by Don Was, who has worked with me, Willie, and Kris individually, and is one of the nicest, most unassuming guys you’d ever want to meet. Don’t let him fool you, though. He orchestrates his sessions with the skill of a master conductor, and the week we spent as the Highwaymen in Ocean Way, choosing songs, working up arrangements, dodging film crews, and getting the tracks down, required some complex juggling. Through it all, Don was at his ease, moving everything forward, keeping everybody loose and alert, and letting nothing phase him.

  He had helped me a lot when I returned to RCA’s fold at the end of 1993. They had put out a double-CD box set of my career there, Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line, and seeing my work as a whole, and the respect with which I was accorded, I started listening when they asked me to newly record again. Vice president Thom Schuyler understood what my music was about, and that’s all I’ve ever asked.

  I went into the studio with Don in January of 1994 to cut the songs that would go to make up Waymore’s Blues (Part II). We clicked from the start of the first take, which was the title cut. Before we began, I had told Don and the band, which included drummer Kenny Aronoff, guitarist Mark Goldenberg, keyboardist Benmont Tench, and steel player Robby Turner, to forget about everything they had ever heard me do. “I want you to play what you feel in these songs. I’ll take care of the Waylon Jennings part.”

  Don himself played stand-up bass, with his shoes off, no less. “Don,” I said. “I’m country, but I’m not that country!”

  For his part, Don was looking at what he called my essence; he wanted to create an instrumental texture, a pad of colors, rather than have the usual trading of licks. He didn’t want to lose me in a sea of arrangement. He called it impressionistic, like a painting, and when we heard “Waymore’s Blues Part II” come over the speakers, I understood what he was getting at. It had been twenty years since I had cut “Part I,” and you could hear the many changes I’d been through as the atmospheres swirled. I was still saying the things that every macho you-don’t-mess-around-with-me guy might say, but I probably didn’t feel the need to live up to them as much now.

  There were things like “Wild Ones,” where I remembered the times when me, Willie, and Jessi had come to town and how we had shaken Nashville’s hierarchy up in our fight to keep the music honest. There was “Endangered Species,” which I wrote with Tony Joe White, acknowledging some simple virtues that were maybe in danger of becoming extinct. There were more like me at one time, the song was saying, and though “a man in love is what I want to be,” it was also talking about the way you carry yourself, and how where once the song and the performance of the song was the thing, now videos have shifted the emphasis to looks and showmanship. Sometimes the visuals take the romance and fantasy away from the hearing, and “that’s what makes me / An endangered species.”

  “Old Timer” was very dear to my heart, a poignant tale about an old mountain man from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, who loved a woman from Saint Paul. She came to visit her brother, and they met each other in the wilds. He could never tell her he loved her; he was too “tough” for that,
but he cleaned up and bought some fresh clothes and thought about the new feelings coursing through his body. “I don’t know about love,” he mused as he trudged through the deep snow to see her, “but I was quite taken in by it all.” In the end, she went back home, and though he acted like it wasn’t any big deal, he asked to be buried up high in the hills, where “I bet on a clear day you can see all the way to Saint Paul.” I was proud to tell that story.

  And I was proud of the album, because it felt like I was back in command of myself, sure of my creativity, knowing I was reaching for something I hadn’t done before, and finding it. You can feel very alone in the studio. It’s just you, the microphone, and your guitar. If you have a friend in the control room, and a band you trust, that’s when the magic happens.

  We’re all fans of each other, and that’s what makes watching the Highwaymen such a treat. For us, most of all. Sometimes I’ll be just sitting back and enjoying the show when it’s my turn to come in. We’re our own appreciative audience.

  With the best seat in the house, we get to see each other as we really are, and how we react to the fame that surrounds us. Me and Kris think John and Willie are like Truman and MacArthur sometimes. They won’t admit it, but there’s a little bit of competition between them. Willie might be late getting to the stage, and John will say, “Where’s Willie? I’m going back to my dressing room.” Both of them enjoy their star power. When John went to the Eastern bloc countries, they called him “Your Majesty,” and he liked that, until he found out it was a guy from the KGB. We try not to take it too seriously, though.

  Most of us spent so much time wandering in the wilderness on our way up the ladder that we were able to adjust gradually to our renown. I always felt that was the best way to do it, to struggle and build a following. If it happens overnight, it’s likely to leave in the next morning.

  Legend. Superstar. Entertainer. To me, that five-pointed badge is there hanging on your dressing room door. When I come to work, I pick it up, and after I’m done with the show, I leave it hanging there for whenever I return, or the next artist to use.

  You are whatever the audience thinks you are, whatever they care to call you while you’re in the spotlight. You owe them a good performance. More than that? The rest of the time you’re a human being, and that’s all you are. If you get past that, if you think that you’re more special than your talent and your luck, then it comes back to haunt you.

  In the Highwaymen, none of us are too big to be picked on, to have their ribs poked and tickled. I never cut anybody any slack. If I tease you, that means I love you. If I don’t say a word, better watch out: I don’t want you around.

  I love to get on Willie about his headband or his guitar playing. There’s no way he could get that busted-up guitar of his in tune, so that’s why I tell him he uses such wobbly vibrato. He’s trying to keep those strings from banging into each other.

  We all wind up taking different roles in the Highwaymen. John is bigger than life. His presence makes us larger, and his compassion keeps opening us outward; yet there’s a dark menacing side, something that he has no control over, and that gives us an element of danger and unpredictability. Sometimes he looks like he comes from a different historical era. He could’ve been Jesse James, or the Apostle Paul. It was Paul who said, “Woe be unto me if I don’t preach the gospel.” He knew that if you share what is buried deep within your heart, then what is buried deep in your heart saves you; if you don’t bring it out, then what’s hidden within your heart will kill you. John Cash walks that line.

  If he’s Paul, Willie must be Saint Peter. He floats freely, founding his church on whatever rock he cares to perch on. It’s tough to get him to make a decision, because he never plays favorites. He used to bring the whole show to a standstill with “Angels Flew Too Close to the Ground,” but to him it was just another song. He’s not there for the money, nor has he ever forgotten where he came from. I still think Willie will wind up back in the honky-tonks. We were down in Texas not too long ago, and he had worked all day and night, until two o’clock in the morning, on his sixtieth birthday special. His daughter was playing at a local club, and he went down there after and played for hours, the club jammed and him jamming. That’s where he’s the happiest.

  Kris taught us how to write great poetry. Politically, he swings us to the left; and I’d hate to think what would happen to him if Leonard Peltier was guilty. He wants everybody to have a fair shot, even if they’re wrong. He’s great for getting things simple, and to the point, and he’s probably the only theatrical performer among us, a true actor in every sense of the word. Kris is probably the most enthusiastic about the music. Willie’s not enthusiastic, but he probably needs the music more than any of us. John loves the music, pure and simple. When we were rehearsing for a tour, John came in and wanted to do “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” We had already learned some twenty tunes, and nobody wanted to add another one. Except Willie. He’d be happy to learn it. We found out why on opening night. Only Willie set up a music stand off to the side of him and played along. Wish I’d thought of that.

  We don’t spend too much time worrying about if it’s got four parts. If it does, great, and a song like “It Is What It Is” off the third album lets us pass the song around like a hot potato. Part of the fun is guessing who sings where; others rely on the ensemble effect. We’re making so much noise, it doesn’t matter that one’s starting on a verse while the other is ending up a chorus.

  Don had his hands full in the recording, because we all are stylists, and we got that way by sounding like nobody else. It’s tough to get us singing in harmony. Kris and I are probably the closest in voice; I can phrase with Willie better, since I’ve been doing it for so long. I know where he’s going, even if I can’t figure out why.

  They depend on me to do the worrying, to advise them on the business, to watch out for all of them. I don’t mind, unless it makes me responsible for more than I can handle. Which usually brings me to Jack Clement. Sure enough, the Highwaymen were playing the Fort Worth Livestock Show, preparing to go to Europe, and I started fretting about how the stage might sound in a strange continent, and how someone speaking a foreign language, who doesn’t know who we are, or what we sound like, could ground us. Thinking about who might help us out, I remembered someone who had worked with all of us at one time or another, that “good friend of mine,” Jack Clement.

  It seemed like a reasonable idea to bring Jack along to watch over the board. After the first night, however, he called Willie in the morning. “Come on down to my room, Will,” he said with that lilting melody in his voice. “You’ve got to do something about your rhythm. You start in last week and wind up next week. You’re not on the beat. You’ve got to sing on the beat.”

  “Fuck you, Jack,” retorted Willie, and then came back to me chuckling, and said,“I’ve always wanted to say fuck you to somebody whose real name is Jack.”

  Then he stopped laughing. “What’s with him?” he wondered. I told Willie not to worry and went to Jack and asked him to knock it off.

  Jack was only getting warmed up. He had more suggestions. Why does the band have to make all that noise before the curtain rises? I said, heck, that’s part of a show. He said, “Why don’t you put a table on the stage? Then you guys could play cards while one of you was singing.”

  I said, “Jack, I want you to listen to me. The soundman you’re working with can’t speak English. He needs you, and we don’t. Consider the front of the stage out as your domain and leave the rest to us. And especially, stay away from Willie. I’m one of the few people who can tease him about his singing. As far as rhythm, that’s his style, the back-phrasing and everything. He spent years figuring out how to do that.”

  It went along pretty well until Jack tried out the local schnapps. He got in the elevator with Willie and a bunch of other people and said, “You’re really fucking ’Good Hearted Woman’ up. You’re doing it twice as fast as you’re supposed to.”

  I
t’s tough to light Willie’s fuse, but he was on the phone with me in seconds. “He’s driving me crazy,” he yelled. I wanted to sing “Stupid.” Willie wouldn’t slow down. “I want him out of here.” Then he stopped short. “Do I do ’Good Hearted Woman’ too fast?”

  I said yeah, but Jack wasn’t the one to tell him.

  It was my job to break the news. I took John with me. “Willie don’t want you here,” I said. “I told you not to bother him.”

  “I didn’t mean no harm,” said Jack, a little sheepish and hung over. And he didn’t.

  Kris came by a few minutes later and John told him what had happened.“Oh, no,” said Kris. He was on his way to smoke a joint with Willie before we went on.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Why don’t you smoke two joints? When you get about halfway down on that second one, lean over and say, ‘Maybe you were a little hasty about Jack?’”

  Sure enough, Willie comes back, eyes twinkling, and half-smiling. “Aw,” he said. “Let’s give Jack another chance. I’m sure he meant well.”

  That night, Jack was behind the mixing desk, choreographing the show in his mind, slapping the echo and twiddling the eq. Doing his dance.

  Even stars have stars. I’ll be the first one who starts leaving when they begin talking about legends. I’m not comfortable with that. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have legends of my own that can turn my knees to jelly and my mouth into a silly grin.

  Ernest Tubb always called me Son, which meant he liked me. He took me on his bus one time and chewed me out for smoking. He was always trying to quit himself, and died from emphysema because of it. In later years, he took to chewing gun, though it didn’t help.

  I sang on an album of his once, though he wasn’t there. They had his voice on the tape, and at the part where I was supposed to come in, he’d say “Aw, sing it, Waylon.” I melted. I got so taken listening to him say my name that I forgot to open my mouth. It made me feel just like that kid in the back room of Grandpa’s cafe, squeaking along to the jukebox and holding my broomstick for dear life.