Waylon

by Waylon Jennings

  Ernest was my hero; he wasn’t my role model. He drank pretty good, and probably had his faults, but I don’t think entertainers are cut out to be role models. I have a hard enough time being a role model for my child; your kid shouldn’t have to look up to me. They should be looking up at you, their parents. Don’t put the responsibility on me, though I would never do anything mean or dishonorable in front of a kid. I have a respect for their young minds and open honesty.

  A hero is when you feel honored to be in their presence, to have crossed their path. When Hazel Smith brought Bill Monroe over to the Honky Tonk Heroes sessions as a surprise, I tried to be calm, but I felt my hands sweating, and I was shaking. My daddy had Bill Monroe’s picture on the wall at home. In our house, it was the flag, the Bible, and Bill Monroe. Sometimes Bill Monroe was first.

  I think of that whenever I’m asked for an autograph, on my way out of a restaurant or backstage at a show. If you sign one, you have to sign them all; sometimes, there’s just too many people to do the line justice, to get your picture taken for the bragging rights, to snap a souvenir of your dream date with Waylon. But people like to know they stood on the same patch of ground as you, and maybe the last chorus of that song was for them.

  You get it back, seeing yourself in other people’s eyes. Tompall and I had set up a booth at Fan Fair one year, the annual Nashville meet-and-greet for the country hardcore, with a pinball machine and Us. It would’ve been better if we just played and jawed, and people watched us as if we were in J.J.’s, but instead we decided to sign autographs.

  A little blind girl walked up to me. “Is it really you?” she asked.

  I said, “Yes, it’s me.”

  “Can I touch you?” And she reached up and took hold of my hands. She held them tight. Then, she put her fingers up to my face, tracing its outline. Her own face was showing me every feeling she was having, the realization and the wonder and the joy combined.

  From her blind eyes, she saw me. Tears came sliding down her cheeks, and mine.

  Sometimes meeting your ideals is a little sad. I was having a party in Atlanta at the Albert Pick Motel when I found out Jimmy Reed, the great “Baby What You Want Me to Do” blues-man, was in town. I sent a car for him and he came over. Johnny Cash had given me a twelve-string dobro guitar, and one of the strings had broken. Jimmy looked at it and said, “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen an eleven-string guitar before.”

  It was a wild party, with strippers on one side of the room and guitar pulls on the other, but I never got up from sitting in front of him, watching him play that dobro, all night. He would get to playing, and he would squeal when it started sounding good. At one point, he looked at a horseshoe ring on my finger that George Jones had given me, with a big diamond in the middle. “That’s a pretty ring.” He sighed. “I used to have one like that.” He held out his hand to me, and there was a gold-plated ring with the setting gone. “Old Jimmy, he ain’t doing so good no more.”

  That about killed me. I thought, here I am, a cocky little guy, and here’s this great man, and they’ve robbed him of everything. I’m sure he was a pain in the ass sometimes, and stayed drunk a lot, but he was Jimmy Reed, who sang about the “Bright Lights, Big City” and “Big Boss Man,” and he deserved better. He had been kicked out of his hotel and had another week to go in Atlanta, so I got him a room at the Albert Pick for the remainder of his stay. At least I was able to do something for him.

  That’s the difference between the white and black blues. Black musicians go to the source, dead on, right to the heart of it, maybe because they have to fight even harder to make themselves heard.

  All you had to do was listen to Miles Davis’s voice to know how much he had screamed in his life for the right to blow his horn. He’d rasped his throat in a hospital, blowing it out trying to get loose from drugs. It was like he had no vocal cords left.

  “Who’s the whitey?” he asked when Neil, his manager, brought me over to his house. He wouldn’t look at me for a while. “You know that new roadie you hired for me,” he said to Reshen. “He called me a motherfucker.” Then he glanced over in my direction and added, “I don’t mind being called a motherfucker, but when he said it, it had an Irish accent and too many r’s.” We laughed, and I knew he had accepted me.

  Sometimes guys whose talent you’ve admired from afar become your close friends. John Cash was like that, and every once in a while I would step outside our relationship and be a little in awe of him. The same is true of George Jones. He has more complexes than anybody I ever met—“I can’t sing that low,” he’ll tell me, even though both of us know just how low we can go, given the wrong opportunity—and to talk with him, you’d never think that here is one of the greatest country singers alive. But he is.

  Singing is George. He tries to live, breathe, and eat the song while he’s singing it, and he’s told me that, especially when he’s in the studio, his mind goes completely blank but for the focus of the story and the melody in his throat. He imagines the man, or woman, he’s singing about and how they might be reacting to every word.

  On the other hand, he doesn’t pay a lot of attention to the world around him. When he played Sacramento, California, recently, some of his band went up to Donner Pass to see where those pioneers got stranded in a nineteenth-century snowstorm and started eating one another. When they got back to the hotel, George wanted to know where they’d been. They told him they’d been to see where the Donner Party had turned cannibal.

  “Wouldn’t you know I’d miss something like that,” said George. “I’ve been on the road so long, I ain’t seen a newspaper in two weeks!”

  Nobody could match my state of mindlessness like George when we were in our glory days. We both enjoyed our success and got a little overwhelmed by it. In George’s case, it was alcohol that was his demon of choice, one beer leading to another, and not helped by the fact that the only places you play when you’re starting out are honky-tonks, bars, and lounges. There are more George Jones stories than he could possibly forget, almost as many as Hank Williams, and he likes to claim that his memory is “blurry.” I’m always happy to help him remember some of his more cantankerous moments. Like the evening he came over to visit, on a spree, and started flailing about in my living room, yelling at Mary Mann, Shooter’s grand-godmother. When it looked as if he might go to sleep, I had the bright idea of giving him a big glass of whiskey to help him nod off. Wrong.

  He started tearing everything up. I ran into the room and he threw a metal-framed picture at my head. It just missed me; if it had landed half a foot to the right, it would have knocked me cold for a week. I tried to get him to calm down, but he kicked at me. Finally I had to sit on him. He even played possum on me once, which shows you how he got his nickname, pretending he was choking. When I let go and said “George, y’all right?” he hit me in the face.

  I didn’t know how much longer this could go on. I was on drugs myself at the time, and after about thirty minutes, I began to get tired. Cocaine doesn’t last that long. Jerry Gropp was with me, and he tried to hold down George’s feet. George kicked him in the thumb and broke it. It seemed like he was getting stronger, or I was getting weaker. I had no choice but to tie him up, lift him up on the couch, and try to see he was comfortable. I never felt so bad in my life, thinking, Here’s the greatest country singer that ever lived, and I’m tying his ass up.

  “Now you be still,” I told him. “I’m going to call your manager to come pick you up.”

  George sneered at me. “I’ll get you, you Conway Twitty—actin’ sonofabitch,” he said.

  I couldn’t hold back a laugh. “What do you mean by that? You hit me in the face and kick me in the nuts, you cuss the ladies in the house, you break my guitar player’s thumb, and now you call me a Conway Twitty—actin’ sonofabitch? I’m the one who’s gonna do the gettin’.”

  When he went in for his heart bypass a while ago, his wife, Nancy, called me in Vicksburg, Mississippi. “George isn’t going to
stay in the hospital unless he talks to you.”

  I went in to visit him. I told him what to expect and that there was nothing he could do but lie back and wait for it to be over. Remembering Bill Robinson’s little joke with me, I couldn’t resist asking him what he intended to do with his DeLorean, with the batwing doors and six hundred miles on it. “You might write down on a piece of paper that you want me to have it.” I could hear him swearing and hollering at me down the hall.

  After the operation, he wouldn’t go to physical therapy without me. They wanted him to walk on a treadmill, ride a bicycle, and do some stretches. He said, “I ain’t doing it unless you do too.”

  “I don’t need to do that. There’s nothing to it. It’s like spitting over a log.”

  He leaned over to me. “I’m depending on you not to let them make me do something that’ll make me look silly.”

  I said, “George, after all you’ve been through, there ain’t a thing these doctors in here could do that’d make you look any sillier than what you’ve done to yourself.”

  George and I met back when I was a disc jockey at KLLL. I asked him if he liked bluegrass music and he said, “Hell, no.” We’d run into each other now and again, though I don’t think he knew I sang until we met up at Sue Brewer’s a few years later in Nashville. But I’d heard his records, both as a country artist who scored with “Why Baby Why” and some of the more rockabilly-type things he was cutting for Starday’s H. W. “Pappy” Dailey, out of Houston. Like me, George could’ve probably gone rock if he chose to, but having spent a lot of time watching Hank Thompson and Bob Wills through the windows of his local honky-tonk, and listening to the Opry on Saturday nights, he decided he didn’t really like rock and roll. One time, though, I heard him on the Louisiana Hayride. Elvis was taking it away from everybody, and George got pissed. He came on before Elvis and did Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” in that growl voice and just wiped him out.

  From the mid-fifties through the seventies, George rode the whirlwind of country music. He had dozens of hits, recorded with and married Tammy Wynette, and led a life that sounded like an entire country jukebox all rolled into one. By the end of the 1970s, he had bottomed out from drinking and slid into bankruptcy. Sound familiar?

  It may have been the blind leading the blind, as George puts it, but John Cash and I came to his rescue. We didn’t ask if we could help. We just did, helping George keep his home, cars, and buses. We tried to keep it a secret, but he found out through the bank. I know he’d do the same for me, if I needed it.

  His talent is raw, natural, and I don’t think he knows why he’s such a great singer. He just is. It’s not something he’s developed. He never seemed to progress or lose it; like Elvis or Willie or Jerry Lee Lewis, the first time you heard him, he was just as good as he is now.

  The best thing we ever cut together was a record of “Night Life” that we did on one of his albums for Billy Sherrill. I’m singing so high you wouldn’t believe it’s me. On another all-night session, we sat on two stools, facing each other across a Plexiglas baffle and filled up four reels of tape. We were both gone, and I don’t think we ever finished a song. One of us would start laughing, or we’d take turns passing out. Jigger just sat there holding his bass, watching these two pitiful people chasing each other’s tail.

  Everyone imitates George these days, and yet he can’t get played on the radio. That’s true for a lot of us from an older generation. It used to worry me, but once you accept that it’s not going to change the way you sing a song, and it’s not going to stop people from coming out to see you play—in fact, maybe they come out and see you play because they can’t hear you on the radio—then you say it’s radio’s loss. George has been making records for forty years. At one time he was on four different labels. They couldn’t burn him out with a torch. He’s still here.

  Connie Smith and I practically came to town at the same time. She arrived in Nashville in June 1964, signed by Chet to RCA after Bill Anderson discovered her at a talent show in Elkhart, Indiana. From the time she was five, Connie always wanted to be a country singer on the Opry. Her first song, “Once a Day,” hit number one on the charts, and a year after she arrived in Nashville, she was asked to become a member of the Opry.

  She’s a “feel” performer. Even when she went into the studio, she didn’t overly learn her songs; she’d know part of them and fill in the gaps as she went along, and was usually just as surprised at what came out of her voice as everyone else.

  I had met Connie on the package shows organized by RCA, and kept in touch when she left secular music for a while to follow her faith and raise her family in the seventies. A few years ago she was going through a divorce, and I called her one morning, just wanting to check up and see how she was doing. She told me things were rough, and shared some of her troubles. Jessi makes a good pot of coffee, I let her know, and I was on my way to come bring her over to the house.

  I beeped the horn at her front door. She had just gotten out of the shower and had her hair up. I was waiting in the car in my pajamas and cowboy boots. I thought, wouldn’t it be funny if we got in a wreck. We’d hit the tabloids for sure.

  From then on, Connie has been part of our family’s inner circle. You can always find her and Jessi singing at the piano, and when we went to Israel in 1993, she accompanied us. It’s an amazing country, even if you take the religion out of it. If you think of our history as lengthy, stretching over a couple of centuries, here’s a piece of land that people have been fighting over for thousands of years. It kind of puts you in your place.

  I saw something there that proves to me how much life doesn’t stand still. We were up in Galilee, at Peter’s house, and came back through Jericho. As we started the return to Jerusalem, the four of us crammed into a van, I looked out over the desert. There was the brightest little pin of light I’d ever seen. I asked the Palestinian who was driving us what it was, and he said he didn’t know.

  As we got nearer, it grew brighter. I began looking for three camels on the horizon, bearing gifts. Finally, I saw that it shone from a Bedouin tent, stark against the wilderness. They’re nomads, and they’ve been moving back and forth since the beginning of time. It was quiet, and the night had turned cold and clear. At first I thought the light might be a campfire. Then I took a closer look, and saw it was the glow of a television.

  Nothing stays the same. In Calgary, Canada, an old cowboy came into our hotel and started talking to me about these two prize bulls he had on his ranch. One was named Willie and the other Waylon. He had on a sheepskin coat, a big cowboy hat, his Levis stuffed into his boots, and a mustache stained and dripping with snuff. While we were talking, I heard a high-pitched sound. It was his beeper going off.

  I thought, don’t that beat all.

  I feel the same way about some of the younger guys, and girls, in country music. You can smell the change in the wind, whipping up the tumbleweeds. There’s surely a new generation out there, and it’s ready for its turn in the follow spot. I don’t intend to be old and in the way, or let anybody run me off. Sometimes, it’s only natural we’re going to tussle over the same turf. Country music is a lot like Israel; everybody wants to build a church on its holy shrines. Still, I like to think that we’re all talking about the same spirit, the one that makes us want to pick and sing, and all the fussing and fighting over who gets played on the radio or headlines the state fairs don’t amount to much more than a range war.

  We need new blood. I once suggested to promoters that they have special nights where they let in kids under fifteen free, to bring them into the country-music fold. They need their heroes, just like I needed mine.

  The best of the new performers remember where they came from, who opened the doors they step their line dance through, and don’t try to figure they invented a pair of tight jeans and a guitar. Marty Stuart loves the old Opry tradition, and I saw just how much one night when he and I were sitting around singing with George Jones. George coughed, sp
it a wad of phlegm into a handkerchief, and cleared his throat.

  “There’s people in this world who would kill to do that with their voice,” I joked to Marty.

  “If I thought it would make me sing like him,” answered Marty without missing a beat, “I’d swallow it.”

  Sometimes it seems like Marty is everywhere. He’ll jump in and start playing even before he’s asked. “You’re the musician from hell,” I once told him, but you can see he’s having more fun than anyone in the world. Connie says that watching Marty and Travis Tritt run around together is a little like catching a glimpse of me and John in the old days. They feed off each other and go a little further than they would if they were by themselves. If Marty’s around, and he sees Travis, he’s going to be a little more Marty, and vice versa. Two is better than one, and both of them will push the other a little harder.

  Travis is about my favorite new singer. What a talent, and a writer. He hones his songs, cares about them, and he knows how to work that rock-and-roll hoofbeat so it turns into a stampede. For me, he’s a cross between Hank Williams and Ray Charles, and when I hear him sing “Old Outlaws Like Us,” I know he’s one of the brightest hopes of country music today.

  Of course, the next generation better not believe everything they hear. At this point, I’ve been accused of all manner of carousing. Mostly, it’s something that I might have done, or would have done, or couldn’t even imagine doing. Pretty soon it’s etched into stone. If I led the life that people think I did, I’d be a hundred and fifty years old and weigh about forty pounds.

  There’s enough wild nights to go around, though, and I do enjoy letting the newer cow-punkers on the block know about the rigorous standards of roaring they’re expected to uphold. Joe Galante from RCA once called and said, “Clint Black really likes you. Can we go to lunch and you can tell him some old Waylon and Willie stories?”