Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville

by Michael Streissguth

  When Reed recorded Crowell’s “You Can’t Keep Me Here in Tennessee,” the young outlaw edged away from the seedy West End world and toward the Old Hickory Lake possibilities that Guy Clark enjoyed. New chances and golden opportunities abounded for Crowell. Like when he visited the Palomino Club in North Hollywood, California, to see his new Texas friend Mickey Raphael playing harmonica with Willie Nelson. “Unbeknownst to me,” recalls Crowell, “Willie says, ‘There’s a songwriter in the audience, and I’d like him to come up. I’m going to sing a song of his.’ So I went up onstage and sang ‘Till I Gain Control Again’ with Willie. And I remember floating up there and going, ‘Oh, I’ve just been knighted by Willie Nelson.’ It was a pivotal moment for me because I felt like I was really in. I felt like I was really an artist.”

  Paris of the thirties, my ass, it was one big con.

  —Kinky Friedman

  Seven

  * * *

  Hillbilly Central

  SINGER AND SONGWRITER Miriam Eddy caught Waylon’s eye in Arizona in the early 1960s, when she was married to the wizard guitarist Duane Eddy. Her wild dark hair and eyes like a doe’s could rivet any man, so, naturally, when Waylon met her again in 1968, he hadn’t forgotten her. “She had separated from Duane,” wrote Waylon, “but they weren’t divorced yet. Her sister, Sharon, brought her to a show, and I got her up on the stage to sing with me. . . . I looked at her and said, ‘Hey, little girl . . . want to run off with me?’ She gave me the eye back. ‘Call me in six months’ was all she said.”

  Within a year, they married and forged a musical partnership that became central to the outlaw music legacy. He helped her sign with RCA and coproduced her first sessions. Working as Jessi Colter, an old family name with outlaw resonance, she played keyboards for Waylon on the road, and, shortly after their marriage, appeared on The Johnny Cash Show in a stunning red dress while Waylon sang his 1969 hit version of Chuck Berry’s “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man.” In 1970, their duet cover of Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds”—produced by Ronny Light—tore up the country charts. Like Tammy Wynette at George Jones’s side, Jessi polished Waylon’s image, and their marriage set the stage for Jessi’s run of hits in the mid-1970s. Waylon’s run of big hits, however, got rolling independent of Jessi. For that, he had manager Neil Reshen to thank.

  From the very start, Reshen took up the Waylon banner and refused to let it touch the ground. “He was a typical go-get-’em kind of guy,” says Billy Ray Reynolds. “We played Max’s Kansas City in New York and when you stepped on the subway, there was a big poster of Waylon and it said, ‘Waylon: His Music Ain’t All That Sweet.’ He had them plastered everywhere. We did a week there. It was just phenomenal. Anybody who was in New York at the time, they all came to see us. . . . From there it was just kind of a mushroom that exploded.”

  In 1972, Waylon unhooked Reshen’s muzzle. The new manager charged that RCA had let Waylon’s contract lapse by failing to pick up its option, and demanded a host of concessions from Chet and company. The two parties clashed for months, while Reshen let rumors fly that Atlantic coveted Waylon just as it had Willie Nelson. In May, Waylon recorded four songs with Ronny Light at the helm, and then, in what amounted to a strike, disappeared from the RCA studios for six months. Among that last quartet of songs that Waylon recorded that day was one from Willie’s pen: the appropriately titled “Pretend I Never Happened.”

  Waylon wanted the moon: control over advertising budgets and artwork, a big advance, and the right to produce his own records. No doubt, he had taken note of the artistic freedom everywhere around him—on the streets of the West End, in Austin, in the songwriting career of Kristofferson—but his demands also echoed those of young directors and movie stars in Hollywood who were extracting big budgets from the big studios to make movies without interference. The old lions out west conceded that youthful autonomy paid dividends; however, the big labels in Nashville weren’t so sure. Not even Kristofferson produced his own records.

  According to Waylon’s biographer R. Serge Denisoff, Atkins and his heir apparent Jerry Bradley tried to deal with only Waylon, without Reshen, but the singer rebuffed them, forcing the executives to joust with the prickly New Yorker, whose chinstrap beard misleadingly gave him the look of a cherubic Mennonite. Angry phone calls and threats dragged on for months, until an autumn meeting of the parties at RCA-Nashville during which Reshen restated his demands and the executives finally listened. By the end of the day, RCA green-lighted Waylon’s request to produce his own records, as well as an advance that hovered around seventy-five thousand dollars and an 8 percent royalty rate.

  In a statement to the press on November 27, 1972, RCA trumpeted its continued relationship with Waylon, and less than a month later, Waylon returned to the studio, recording tracks slated for the album Lonesome, On’ry & Mean. He brought his own band and turned first to Vince Matthews and Jim Casey’s “Laid Back Country Picker,” which failed to make the final album cut and remained unreleased for thirty-one years. The finished album smelled a little like his previous RCA outings because it mixed old and new tracks, but Waylon’s deep and easy vocals and the churning country-rock sound unleashed by the Waylors on the title track charted a new course for Waylon. “While Steve Young, the terminal country and folk music outsider, may have penned [“Lonesome, On’ry & Mean”],” wrote critic Thom Jurek, “it is Waylon’s delivery as an anthem that bears in it all of the years of frustration at not being able to make the music he wanted to that is heard in the grain of its lyrics.”

  WHEN THE TENSE negotiations over Waylon’s contract subsided, the singer is said to have looked the weary Chet Atkins in the eye and assured him that his quarrel had been with the company, not him. Obviously, Waylon sensed that the negotiations had drained Atkins. And he was right. Within days of Waylon’s return to the studio, the producer-guitarist abandoned the helm.

  “It was after five o’clock one afternoon, and I was in my office,” says Jerry Bradley. “Chet was in a meeting with Waylon. And Chet was behind his desk, and Waylon was sitting on a couch. Chet called me in, and said, ‘Jerry, I need you to come in for a minute.’ And I came in and Chet and Waylon were in a very heated discussion about drugs. They were going at it pretty good and Chet said, ‘Well, that isn’t going to matter, because I’m quitting tomorrow.’ I didn’t say anything. Waylon said, ‘Well, who’s going to take your place?’ Chet turned [to me] and said, ‘He is.’ And Waylon said, ‘Well, hell, I want off the label.’ I just kind of shrugged my shoulders and didn’t say nothing.” RCA rushed out another press release announcing that Chet would still be working with roster artists but wanted more time to perform and record. Jerry Bradley was now in charge, although insiders knew that he’d been essentially running the office since 1970.

  News of Chet’s departure overshadowed Waylon’s revolutionary contract, but in time the country music industry got the point. For the first time in anybody’s memory an RCA artist based in Nashville would determine his own path in the studio. But most in the business never knew that the tempestuous negotiations to win that freedom had driven Chet Atkins from top management.

  IN MARCH 1972, as Waylon and Neil’s quarrel with RCA had taken shape, Willie Nelson made plans for the Dripping Springs Reunion, plainly intended to be the Austin area’s very own Woodstock. Promoters envisioned selling almost two hundred thousand tickets for the three-day festival, which featured towering Nashville stars such as Roger Miller, Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs, Loretta Lynn, Roy Acuff, and Hank Snow as well as their younger counterparts in the songwriting world, most notably Kris Kristofferson and Lee Clayton. Performances by Waylon and Willie and Kris were slated to close the extravaganza on Sunday, March 19. Strangely, few Austin-based performers joined the bill. At the very least, however, the combination of Snow, Kristofferson, Acuff, and Clayton announced the old guard’s step to the side for youth culture, whether in Austin or Nashville.

  Willie’s name drew the stars, but Willie controlled neither promotion
nor the weather nor the venue. Staged at a ranch outside Austin, the planners had tried to plant grass to create lush seating in the farm-yard amphitheater, but the seeds never sprouted and concertgoers pitched their camps on hard dirt. They also endured unusual heat, dusty wind, and emcee Tex Ritter’s bad jokes. Still, the Texas working folk with their beer and the hippie contingent with their pot carried on without a care, taking in a rich array of performances.

  “You’d look out there and it’d be hillbillies, cowboy guys, and then you have the hippies, all having fun together,” says Donnie Fritts, who went with Kristofferson. “I think that was a big part of what was developing there in the seventies. And then you got on the stage with Willie and his family and Waylon and whoever was there. It was one of the most important gatherings of the seventies, bringing all the different acts and people together in one place. And it happened through Willie Nelson.”

  From a money standpoint, the festival flopped. But various reporters lured by the hillbilly Woodstock hook memorialized Willie’s big dance on the dry plains. Rock-and-roll photographer Jim Marshall showed up with cameras dangling around his neck, along with Rolling Stone’s writer Grover Lewis and photographer Annie Leibovitz. They found all of the egos, groupies, drugs, backstage drama, and audience foolishness of one of those big-time rock-and-roll shows. “Everywhere now there are spiraling cairns of empty Pearl and Jax and Lone Star beer cans,” observed Lewis. “A rawboned high-school kid in a wide-brimmed straw hat, a white shirt with pearl snaps, a Texas belt buckle, and those kind of Wrangler jeans that drape down across the boots, covering all but the toes, trips over one of the piles on his way back from a Porta-Can and goes sprawling, ass over teakettle. He lurches to his feet and grins vacantly. . . .”

  Onstage, Tex Ritter barred Tom T. Hall from answering his loud encores, and Loretta Lynn sashayed through a set of saucy hits. Backstage, the stars and promoters argued over money and allotted stage time. Earl Scruggs generously stuck around to fill in for acts such as the Light Crust Doughboys and Merle Haggard, who didn’t show, and Waylon Jennings revealed his wide streak of magnanimity, according to Dave Hickey, who was hired by the festival to coordinate talent and later contributed regular meditations on Texas warbling to Country Music magazine. Hickey observed that Waylon and the Waylors had finished their segment and pocketed their money when they learned that one of country music’s stalwart names—whom Hickey did not identify—was refusing to play until his cash appeared. “Then, without it being asked or implied,” he wrote, “Waylon reached into his pocket, pulled out the roll of bills he had been paid, and handed it back to the promoter. ‘Here you go,’ he said. ‘Give the old fart his money. . . .’ The promoter nearly burst into tears, and when he tried to thank Waylon, Waylon grabbed him by the shoulders and pointed him off toward the ‘country music star’s’ bus.”

  When the last tones blared from the stage, Rolling Stone’s Lewis approached Willie and asked if the whole three-day spectacle was worth repeating. Nelson’s pensive eyes dropped down. “You mean if the same people was runnin’ it, or somebody else was?” he replied. “I don’t know about the same people.” Indeed, Willie returned. The following year, this time on Independence Day, Dripping Springs let the nation know once again about the growing multi-striped cult of Willie, instigating a string of annual July Fourth picnics elsewhere around the state that would be far better attended, more profitable, and just as circus-like.

  Amid the Dripping Springs hullabaloo, Waylon Jennings encountered Billy Joe Shaver’s songwriting. Shaver, whose “Good Christian Soldier” had made Kristofferson’s Silver Tongued Devil album, was Texas-born but like Kinky Friedman and Rodney Crowell and others he had brought his goods to the Nashville marketplace and remained. Waylon’s guitarist Billy Ray Reynolds had first encountered the songwriter in the late 1960s, when Reynolds was screening submitted demos for a publishing company owned by steel guitarist Pete Drake. “I was just worn-out, just completely worn-out and the boxes were just full [of demos],” says Reynolds. “There must have been a couple thousand reel-to-reel tapes in there. So one day, kind of like drawing in a raffle, I was going to find something at the bottom and pull it. I stuck my arm down there and got a tape and came out with it. I put it on the reel-to-reel. It was the worst singer I ever heard and terrible guitar playing rhythm. But I listened to the song. It was almost like listening to Shakespeare. It was well written and just knocked me out. I called this boy, and I said, ‘I don’t know who you are and you don’t know me and there’s nothing I can do for you. But I just want you to know that I just heard one of your songs and it just knocked me out.’ He thanked me and about two weeks later I came in one morning to work and I looked up and there was the ugliest, meanest-looking human being that you ever saw. Standing in the door way. It was Billy Joe Shaver.”

  Down in Dripping Springs, Shaver had ridden to the festival with fellow songwriter Lee Clayton and Rolling Stone journalist Lewis, who made Shaver a main character in his story. Lewis followed Shaver as he performed as part of a songwriters’ set, critiqued the armed security, and chatted with a hippie chick. By the end of the article, Shaver was smiling silly over Waylon’s interest in two of his songs: “Black Rose,” about interracial romance, and “Willie the Wandering Gypsy and Me,” about you know who.

  In his autobiography, Shaver recalled Waylon tumbling out of his Dripping Springs trailer cum dressing room when he heard the songwriter playing “Willie” backstage. “He asked me if I had any more cowboy songs,” wrote Shaver. “I said I had a whole stack of them. He said he wanted to do an entire album of those songs, and told me to come to Nashville so we could record it. (He didn’t know I already lived in Nashville or that I’d already written a song for Kris. . . .) The whole conversation didn’t last ten minutes, and nobody signed anything.”

  BACK IN NASHVILLE, hairstyles may have remained above the ear around the offices of RCA, but elsewhere in the industry Waylon and more than a few men and women in their thirties began to look like young people strolling on the West End sidewalks. Nowhere was this more apparent than on 916 Nineteenth Avenue South, where Tompall, Jim, and Chuck Glaser ran a studio that married country music’s Brylcreem past with its long-locks present. Its doors propped open to let in the young breezes sweeping through the West End, the so-called Hillbilly Central offices became an outlaw safe haven. Former employees recalled Willie Nelson lazing on the front lawn, and Waylon haunting the offices at three in the morning.

  The Glaser Brothers had come to Nashville in the late 1950s after performing as a teen vocal group in their home state of Nebraska. In prairie theaters, the trio sat on stools and harmonized while their father, Louis, hid behind the stage curtain and announced songs. Later, they rated an appearance on the popular Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts and then latched on to Marty Robbins, whose 1957 do-wah hit “A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation)” demanded that crooning singers appear behind him onstage.

  The Robbins gig brought the brothers to Nashville, where they parlayed their act and association with the golden hitmaker into a small empire. When Robbins wasn’t on the road, they joined other package shows, including Johnny Cash’s. And they formed a publishing company that signed, among others, John Hartford, who laid the company’s golden egg: “Gentle on My Mind.”

  Jim Glaser recorded on Starday and then RCA while writing several hits for the family publishing company, and Tompall played guitar on sessions, including Johnny Cash’s, and collaborated with Harlan Howard to write “The Streets of Baltimore,” a big hit for Bobby Bare in 1966. That same year, the brothers teamed with Jack Clement, who produced their string of moderately successful albums on MGM. In one big way, the brothers were a lot like Clement: they spent the spoils of their latest successes on developing their business presence in the music industry.

  Although Chuck was said to have the business eye, Tompall emerged as the strongest personality among the brothers and the face on their business endeavors. He also proved to be the most difficu
lt. The singer often butted heads with Marty Robbins when the brothers worked for him, and he once came to blows with Jack Clement, according to Jim Casey, who saw it all. Says Billy Ray Reynolds, “Tompall was pretty much an alcoholic and just arrogant. He looked over at me [one time] and he was drunk and his eyes were all watery and he said, ‘You’d probably knock the hell out of me if I got smart with you.’ I said, ‘Let’s just don’t go there, Tom. Let’s be friends.’”

  Tompall Glaser.

  Photograph by Alan Mayor

  Around the music business, Tompall’s tirade against the folk-rock Byrds was legendary. On March 15, 1968, the folk-rock band had somehow wrangled a guest spot on the Grand Ole Opry, and Tompall was hosting its segment. He introduced the songs, and the band performed the scheduled “Sing Me Back Home,” but then Gram Parsons veered off the set list and sang “Hickory Wind,” which he dedicated to his grandmother. “You could see Glaser turn red from the neck up,” Byrds road manager Jimmi Seiter told Parsons’s biographer, David N. Meyer. “He was fucking livid. He thought we told him the wrong songs on purpose.” Backstage, Tompall stormed at Parsons.