In 1965, Jennings hitched up with Chet Atkins and RCA-Nashville. Chet had heard about Waylon from two trusted sources: comedian Don Bowman, a 1964 discovery of Chet’s who had worked on radio in Lubbock, Texas, with Waylon in the late 1950s; and Bobby Bare, who had signed with RCA in 1962 and got his first dose of Waylon at J.D.’s in 1964. “Well, he always had that charisma,” said Bare on meeting Waylon for the first time. “And he was doin’ speed so he had that element of danger about him. Speed people do; you don’t know what they’re going to do next.”
In March 1965, Waylon recorded twelve songs for Chet, including an arrangement of the old ballad “I’m a Man of Constant Sorrow.” Chet was known for keeping a tight handle on the studio reins, choosing the session musicians and the songs, but on these sessions, he eased up. He let Waylon’s band, the Waylors—bassist Paul Foster, guitarist Jerry Gropp, and drummer Richie Albright—dominate the instrumentation, and inexplicably gave Waylon the freedom to include five of his own songs, including “That’s the Chance I’ll Have to Take,” his first number-one country record.
Chet was pushing Waylon to the folk-pop audience, which boomed on college campuses and in large urban centers. But Waylon’s first recordings sounded more like a cross between Elvis Presley’s post-army records and the pop troubadour Frankie Laine than the Kingston Trio. No matter. Chet merely stuck the title Folk-Country on the album and hoped for a cash bonanza. It never materialized. But Chet persevered. He believed he had signed the next Johnny Cash and was anxious to prove it.
EACH MAN HAD recorded elsewhere before they hit Nashville: Kris in Britain while at Oxford; Waylon in Texas and California; and Willie in Texas and Washington. But they forged a path to Nashville, an unimposing city that seemed far more accessible to young climbers than New York and Los Angeles. In that Tennessee town, music business doors swung open and a handful of smoky bars that served as industry haunts brokered connections for the uninitiated. In its studios, talented and efficient background musicians converged with powerful record company producers and publishing companies bulging with great songs. These forces, like departments at a Hollywood movie studio, created and sustained stars who sold millions of records and helped bring the music of Nashville to the world.
The wellspring of this Nashville Sound first percolated in the mid-1950s, when producers Chet Atkins at RCA and Owen Bradley at Decca fended off the threat of rock and roll by injecting country music with middle-of-the-road flavor (strings and crooning background vocals added to please pop listeners). The strategy produced some of the greatest recordings in twentieth-century popular music, including “She’s Got You” by Patsy Cline, “He’ll Have to Go” by Jim Reeves, and “Detroit City” by Bobby Bare, stirring up brisk demand for Nashville product.
Inasmuch as the music aspired to pop markets, the term Nashville Sound became forever linked to middle-of-the-road embellishments. But the engine also embraced the hard, traditional sound of country music as well as rock-and-roll flavorings. Even though Chet had declined to produce Elvis Presley in the 1950s because the Hillbilly Cat recorded too late at night, he wasn’t above jacking up the bass or goosing the electric guitar man if he felt the market would like it. Owen Bradley, too, straddled the fence between rock and country, producing sessions by country queen Kitty Wells while propelling Brenda Lee to the high echelons of rock and roll. So the Nashville Sound paid no mind to musical genres—its studios and musicians could accommodate in a single day the likes of Connie Francis, Perry Como, and Porter Wagoner. Rather, it prided itself on the lockstep efficiency of the machine, which kept up with demand, occasionally produced music that echoed itself, and helped make country music a global commodity worth $60 million annually in the mid-1960s.
Producers mindful of corporate budgets had little choice but to work efficiently. Ideally, four songs emerged from a three-hour session, forcing background singers and instrumentalists to learn songs within minutes of walking in the door. The best of the musicians—drummer Buddy Harman, bassist Bob Moore, pianist Floyd Cramer, guitarist Harold Bradley, and others—circulated through the city’s studios, while the two big vocal accompanists, the Jordanaires and the Anita Kerr Singers, hummed beside them.
Along with the musicians, the big publishing companies—Tree, Cedarwood, Acuff-Rose—always camped at the studios; their writers and pluggers could come and go as they pleased, often crashing recording sessions with their new songs in tow. With each major-label artist releasing two and sometimes three albums a year, demand for songs was constant, but the creative reservoirs of even the best writers were only so deep. When fifteen compositions by the legendary songwriter Harlan Howard appeared on the country charts at the same time in 1961, it was as much an indictment of the industry’s parochialism as it was evidence of Howard’s greatness.
The quality of Nashville’s product also slipped when kickbacks in the form of shared writing credits for artists or outright cash payments from publishers to producers gave special prominence to underserving songs. To make matters worse, producers who kept their own publishing companies ran straight into the headwinds of ethical probity. Whom did they serve: their pocketbooks or their employer? In a 1996 interview, Chet Atkins responded to the manager of one of his 1960s artists who had wildy charged that he owned a piece of every song he ever produced: “That’s the biggest fuckin’ joke I’ve ever heard. I never owned a piece of any song anybody did. I had a little publishing company before I went on the payroll [with RCA]. I think Jim Reeves wanted me to publish one of his songs. [Running RCA-Nashville] was just a sideline for me. . . . I was making $50,000 or $100,000 a year in royalties off my guitar playing. So I didn’t need that. Mr. Jim Denny of Cedarwood Publishing would send people over and say, ‘If you record this, you get 10 percent.’ And I said, ‘You know, I don’t do that.’”
Bar none, Chet Atkins remains Nashville’s most beloved figure. For years, the city’s musicians had dealt with visiting New Yorkers who came to supervise sessions, but Chet was a veritable local boy who had played all the roadhouses and dawn patrol radio shows that everybody else in town had played. And when he ascended at RCA-Nashville, he never seemed to change, propping his office door open to any old friend who happened to stop and taking his lunches in unassuming cafeterias that sat on every corner. In the studio, artists loved his soft touch. “Chet was so secure within himself and his own knowledge,” says former RCA engineer Jim Malloy, “that he didn’t have to be running around the studio like a chicken with his head cut off like some of these people do, hollering and screaming. Because Chet knew that the worst that could happen is that he could pick up the guitar himself and play the whole thing. Chet picked great musicians and he let them play and every so often Chet would rise up and hit the talk-back and [make a recommendation] and, sure enough, it was always better. Chet was brilliant.”
Chet liked his scotch and spent his nights out in Printer’s Alley, which made him part of a certain in-crowd, but Waylon Jennings, at least, found him to be something of a square, mostly on the topic of drugs. Although Chet never objected to pot, he lectured Waylon about the latter’s liberal use of amphetamines, part of a long-standing feud on the subject that was summed up by Waylon during the 1960s, when a friend of his suggested that he record a song about pills. The sulky Texan replied that “Chet Atkins thinks it’s a sin to even look at one.”
Waylon could be just as dismissive of Chet’s leadership, which the singer found intransigent. It was a rare broadside against the easygoing chief, but not one without some foundation. For the most part, Chet demanded that his artists record in Nashville even when leaving town might have invigorated their sound, but releasing an artist to another RCA studio in Los Angeles or New York was an admission of failure and, besides, Chet, in partnership with Owen and Harold Bradley, owned and collected rent on 806 Seventeenth Avenue South, the building that housed RCA’s offices and its massive Studio A. It behooved him to keep the artists recording there.
RCA at 806 Seventeenth Avenue South
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Courtesy of Metropolitan Government Archives of Nashville and Davidson County
And Chet, his eye on the machine’s fluid operation, by and large supported the virtual lock that Nashville session musicians had on recordings; that disappointed more than a few artists who would have preferred using their own band. After allowing Waylon to use members of his band on his first sessions, he promptly barred them. For a while, Chet let Willie use drummer Johnny Bush and steel player Jimmy Day, who traveled with Willie, but he soon reversed course. “When we’d get to Nashville, Chet didn’t like it,” Bush told the country music historian Rich Kienzle. “He kept sayin’ the drums weren’t makin’ it. If you hear some of Willie’s recordings, he liked a little rhumba and a Bolero beat. That’s what Willie wanted. Chet hated it.” By the autumn of 1967, Chet prevailed. He expelled Bush and Day from Willie’s sessions. “Chet had to have control, not Willie,” moaned Bush.
Chet’s obstinacy no doubt grew in part from his loyalty to his boss in New York, the portly Steve Sholes, who brought Elvis Presley to the label in 1955 and who must have been a father figure to Chet (whose own father was absent from his early childhood). “I worked for Steve,” he said. “I didn’t work for RCA.” Sholes, who ran the division that oversaw country music, had given the struggling guitar player a recording contract in 1947 and made sure that he had plenty of session work. By and by, Chet became Sholes’s eyes and ears in Nashville. Then, in 1955, Sholes officially put him in charge. It presented Chet with his lifelong dilemma: he had transcended his impoverished childhood and gained a tall measure of respectability in a growing industry, but his guitar increasingly lost out to his RCA responsibilities and he found himself negotiating with the big wheels in Nashville, a task for which his asthmatic, country childhood had left him royally unprepared. The position tied him in knots, and some say it was to blame for his long and ultimately losing battle with cancer, but he pressed on in order to please Sholes.
At any given time, thirty to thirty-five artists populated RCA-Nashville’s stable, and even with a handful of staff producers at Chet’s disposal, executive burdens tugged at him from every direction. “I spread myself too thin,” he acknowledged. “But that’s the way all the labels did it in those days. You’d make a bunch of records and just throw them out and see what stuck to the wall.”
A quiet place. . . . Nothing of the life here that gives color and good variety to the cities in the East and West. Just a good, ordinary, humdrum, business town.
—O. Henry
Two
* * *
Nashville Sounds
THE EMPIRE OF Texas laid claim to many of the music industry’s outlaws, which may be more than coincidental. After all, few parts of the country boasted more fertile musical earth: from the hard blues of the Deep Ellum district in Dallas to the western swing that lit up the ballrooms and beer gardens of Houston to the rockabilly that sizzled along the highways from Lubbock to Longview. Latin rhythms floated up from the south and kissed the polka music that German and Czech immigrants brought with them in the nineteenth century. Gospel mingled with field hollers while country music inundated the radio airwaves and dance halls. The Lone Star State’s spectacular roster of native talent included Ernest Tubb, Gene Autry, Lightnin’ Hopkins, T-Bone Walker, Roger Miller, Janis Joplin, George Jones, Bob Wills, Ornette Coleman, Scott Joplin. And Waylon, Willie, and Kris.
Kristofferson was born to middle-class parents in Brownsville on June 22, 1936. One cannot drive south of Brownsville and still be in the United States. A major port of entry to Mexico, especially during Prohibition, when Texans lined up to drink freely across the border, the city hummed during the difficult 1930s thanks to its busy port and verdant farms, which stretched over the Rio Grande valley as far as the eye could see.
Kris’s memories of childhood linger on the Mexican music he heard, the old rancheros that were everywhere, and going to school barefoot. “I think there was something I wrote at the time, a list of dislikes,” he says. “And I think mine were my sister and shoes! . . . But I always really loved Brownsville. Something about the feeling of it. Looking at it now, when I go back, it looks so much like it’s south of the border. But it was definitely a good place to grow up.”
Brownsville’s first airport opened in the 1920s, and it would be the scene of separations and reunions in young Kris’s life. His father, Henry, flew for Pan American World Airways in the 1930s and joined the army with the outbreak of the Second World War, where he rose to the rank of full colonel. “He was really a highly respected guy,” says Kris. “First guy to fly over the Himalayas at night. And later on, when he was a major general, he was handling the Korean Airlift.” His mother, Mary Ann, learned to be father and mother to Kris and his two siblings.
The family left Brownsville in 1947 and lived in a succession of states before settling in San Mateo, California, near San Francisco, where Henry had returned to the military, this time with the newly established U.S. Air Force. It was 1950, the beginning of Kris’s high school years. As his father moved up the ranks, Kris lettered in football, led a number of student clubs and activities, and pulled impressive grades. In 1954, he entered Southern California’s Pomona College, his mother’s alma mater, where he continued his football career, joined ROTC, and majored in English. He proved passionate and masterful at creative writing, winning awards from the Atlantic Monthly for his short stories.
When Kris qualified for a Rhodes scholarship in 1958, nobody was surprised. “I thought I was special and I got conceited,” he recalled in 1971. “But when I got to Oxford they had no respect for me at first. They thought I was a cowboy. Then I showed them by getting the highest grades in philosophy.” However, Oxford spelled the beginning of the end of his academic career. His prose writing and study of Romantic poet William Blake soon gave way to the call of Hank Williams. In London, he tried out his songs in coffeehouses and then won a talent contest that promised a deal with Top Rank Records. Kristofferson recorded a few tracks, but the gambit was voided by an obscure recording contract he had signed back in California. For the time being, flirtations with the music industry were exactly that. He left Oxford at Christmas break in 1960.
Kristofferson ignored his musical impulses long enough to join the army in the spring of 1961 and marry a former classmate named Frances Beer. By 1962, the couple had a child, and Kris was rising in the ranks. Taking to the sky like his dad, Kris flew helicopters and joined the admired Airborne Rangers, serving most of his stint in West Germany, like Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash before him. Like at least Cash before him, he drank like a frustrated novelist and played country music with a band of like-minded comrades. In the mid-1960s, Kristofferson received an assignment to teach literature at the U.S. Military Academy, at West Point, New York. “But I didn’t want to do that,” he says. “And I really didn’t want to keep staying in the army. I didn’t resent any of the time that I spent in there, but I didn’t want to make a life of it. And I did want to be a creative writer. A songwriter. I had already fulfilled my commitment; I had been in the army for almost five years. I remember running into an officer that I knew when I was at the Pentagon, trying to get out of the army. And I was very lucky, because he got me out. They were sort of dragging their feet because nobody wanted somebody to get out of the army after you were selected to go teach at West Point! But I don’t know . . . I’d done all I could in the army, I think.”
AS KRISTOFFERSON’S BROWNSVILLE bustled in the 1930s, Waylon’s hometown of Littlefield, Texas, hoped that drivers racing from nearby Lubbock to New Mexico might stop for coffee and gas. Sitting squarely in the state’s stovepipe, the town claimed about 3,500 residents when Waylon was born there on June 15, 1937. Like many families in West Texas, the Jenningses winced as the Depression drove down cotton prices and dust-bowl conditions swept across the plains. With few factory jobs to be had and cotton farming in decline, they waited for better news. “It’s never been easy to make a living in Littlefield, and we had it
harder than most,” said Waylon in his autobiography. “I don’t think anybody had anything in reserve for a rainy day. Even the more well-to-do farmers lived from one harvest to another. When we got up in the morning, all we had was the daily prospect of hitting the cotton patch, or getting in the truck, or going down to the warehouse.”
It’s almost a cliché in the young lives of country music greats who weren’t Rhodes scholars, but Waylon, too, escaped the rigors of poverty through music. He recalled belting out folk and western songs with family and friends and learning to play borrowed guitars. At the movies, he marveled at the romantic blend of crooning and shoot-outs in the Gene Autry and Roy Rogers westerns, and on Saturday nights, the family roasted peanuts and reeled in the Grand Ole Opry and the Louisiana Hayride on the radio. Waylon, like Kristofferson, idolized Hank Williams, but his father loved Bill Monroe, falling silent whenever the bluegrass king’s high tenor sliced through the family’s shabby living room.
Years later it was clear how much his father’s love of Monroe had rubbed off on Waylon. Monroe’s lady friend Hazel Smith was working in the office of Waylon’s associate Tompall Glaser in the early 1970s when the aging bluegrass star stopped by for lunch; she suggested they say hello to Waylon, who was recording close by at RCA. The moment she and Monroe peeked into the control room, somebody called out that a “pretty good high-tenor singer” was in the house. “When Waylon walked out and saw Bill, he was visibly shaking,” says Smith. “Because it was Bill Monroe. He told me later, ‘In my house, in Littlefield, Texas, it was the Bible on the table, the flag on the wall, and Bill Monroe’s picture beside it. That’s the way I was raised.’”
Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville Page 3