By 1972, Tompall demanded that people accept in him the independence Parsons had asserted on the Opry. Though still under contract to MGM, he had become another independent producer, although not just another independent producer: he produced himself in his own setting, the Glaser Sound Studios. It was exactly the model Waylon had set his eyes upon when he and Reshen renegotiated with RCA.
The studio hosted a fraternity of singers, songwriters, and Nashville dropouts living the verse of a strumming and bumming honky-tonk song. “It was just people hanging around, getting a little groove on, having fun,” says Donnie Fritts, sounding as if he were describing a barroom in Austin. “We threw knives in the back of that place for hours at a time. We got really good at it, too.” Former disc jockey Roger Schutt, known to all of Nashville by his old WKDA radio moniker “Captain Midnight,” slept in the office at night and took care of little jobs for Tompall during the day, when he wasn’t throwing knives. Struggling songwriter Peck Chandler, from Oklahoma, camped out in an outbuilding devoid of electricity, screening songs for the brothers’ publishing company to earn his lodging. “They had an extension cord from the studio running over the property and into his room, and he slept on a mattress on the floor there,” says Even Stevens, who briefly wrote for the Glasers and later produced Eddie Rabbitt and others. Occasionally, adds Stevens, Chandler’s screening of songs involved nothing more than holding to his ear a tape submitted by a starving writer, grunting dismissively, and tossing it across the room.
In the Glasers’ prairie box house, which was large by Music Row standards, business carried on with a semblance of normalcy, but at night the studio and offices awoke like a junkie in need of a fix. Sessions burned into the small hours until Tompall and his entourage peeled out into the streets in search of pinball machines, drinks, and greasy food. It was the bohemian-outlaw spirit of the West End run amok. In 1973, Dave Hickey ventured out with Tompall and his guys, who this night included Billy Joe Shaver and Roger “Captain Midnight” Schutt. “I discovered two principles of Glaser nightlife,” wrote Hickey. “First, no pinball machine is passed by unplayed, and, secondly, any establishment which possesses a pinball machine hasn’t much luck in trying to close while Tompall is playing the machine.” Cruising like pimps in Tompall’s 1972 Lincoln Mark IV, the gang stayed out until the edge of dawn, finishing up back at the studio with a few hangers-on from the Burger Boy. “The Jack Daniel’s goes around again,” observed Hickey. “‘Midnight’ goes out on the couch, Shaver goes to sleep on the floor. Tompall picks up his guitar and starts playing the spiritual medley from [his new] album, and suddenly all the energy is back.”
Tompall had encountered Waylon over the years, first in Phoenix, when the Glasers were touring and Waylon was disc jockeying, and then in Nashville, when Tompall tried to pitch him songs from the brothers’ publishing company, but their relationship took hold in the early 1970s, when Waylon’s relationship with RCA soured. According to Billy Ray Reynolds, Waylon had never really liked Tompall, but while the two were on tour in Europe, they found common ground. “We wound up in England at the same hotel. We just so happened to be in the lobby and Tompall came through and I said, ‘You all got to get together and talk about the studio thing. We ought to do some demos over there.’ They sat down on the couch, and I was gone about two hours or more and I came back and they were still sitting on the couch, right in each other’s face, the biggest buddies you ever saw.”
Waylon needed a place to house his publishing company, in addition to a studio where he could work out of RCA’s reach. So he married his publishing interests to Tompall’s and then set up his physical office at Hillbilly Central. The union of two independent spirits began. “You know, before Waylon and Tompall got together, they didn’t know there was anybody else like them,” said Hazel Smith, who worked for the Glasers at Hillbilly Central. “I think both of them secretly thought they might be crazy. They’d both been going their own way alone for so long, it never even entered their minds that someone else might feel the same way about country music and Nashville. They were both full-grown men, but still you like to know you’re not alone.”
PUTTING ON HOLD for the moment the transfer of his recording activities from RCA to the Glasers, Waylon returned to RCA’s studios after Lonesome, On’ry & Mean to make the album that many consider his artistic zenith and the outlaw movement’s first album: Honky Tonk Heroes. Recorded in the late winter and early spring of 1973, the record’s roots coiled down to Dripping Springs and Billy Joe Shaver. In his autobiography, Shaver claimed that he returned to town after Dripping Springs assuming that Waylon had agreed to record a whole album of his work, but, of course, the Rolling Stone article that had so prominently featured the young writer only mentioned two songs.
According to Waylon’s drummer Richie Albright, the idea for an entire album of Shaver’s material sprang from a discussion with Bobby Bare, who published Shaver’s songs and had invited Waylon over to listen to a whole clutch of them. The sparse stories of about highways lost and found appealed to the singer, despite the writer’s skimpy track record, so he plucked a few more to go with the two from Dripping Springs. “If Waylon liked the song, that’s what we did,” says Albright. “He could find a good song in the worst demo that you ever heard in your life. I wouldn’t listen to it past the first verse, and he’d put it out. He’d start playing something and see the expression on my face and he’d say, ‘Just listen.’ So I’d give it a good listen and sure enough, he knew a good song. He had this Cadillac Deville and in the backseat there’d be cassettes stacked high. He’d say, ‘Boy I got a good song the other day.’”
In the months after Dripping Springs, while Waylon battled with RCA and then completed Lonesome, On’ry & Mean, Shaver badgered him. “I’d leave messages at his office and he wouldn’t call back,” said Shaver, “or I’d call and they’d say he was on another line—I knew damn well he only had one line.” Finally, he burst in on one of Waylon’s sessions at RCA. “The walls were lined with girls and bikers and all kinds of hangers-on,” remembered Shaver. Waylon sent Captain Midnight out of the studio with a hundred-dollar bill for Shaver if he’d just get lost. “That just pissed me off even more—I told Midnight to tell Waylon he could stick it up his ass. Midnight wasn’t about to do that, and I’m pretty sure he just stuck that hundred-dollar bill in his pocket.”
On February 19, 1973, Waylon pulled Tompall into the RCA studio as he finally turned to the Billy Joe Shaver songs, only they soon discovered that Shaver remained an annoyance. “We were doing the album and Billy Joe was around,” says Albright, “and we [began] ‘Honky Tonk Heroes,’ so we cut the first part of the song and we stopped, and Waylon said, ‘This is the way we’re going to do it.’ And Billy Joe had been sitting in the back and he come walking up, saying, ‘What are you doing? You’re fucking up my song. That ain’t the way it goes.’ Pretty soon Waylon and Billy Joe are just hollering at one another. Billy Joe didn’t understand the way we were putting it together. Finally Waylon said, ‘You just sit back. When we get finished, you can tell me if it’s right or wrong.’ So he finally agreed with that and then we put it together and he said, ‘Yeah. That’s good. That’s the way it goes.’”
Billy Joe Shaver (right) proved taller than Willie Nelson.
Photograph by Alan Mayor
When it came time to pick a single to release from the Shaver sessions, RCA promotion man Elroy Kahanek says, the company didn’t see one, so it asked Waylon to tack on to the album one more song from his sessions. There were no leftover Shaver songs, but there were a few others, including Steve Young’s “Seven Bridges Road,” Jimmie Rodgers’s “T for Texas,” and Shel Silverstein’s “The Leaving Coming On.” Finally, Waylon chose “We Had It All,” written by Donnie Fritts and Troy Seals. “That was really weird,” observes Fritts. He recalls cruising around one night in Waylon’s Cadillac with Waylon, Shaver, and Captain Midnight when Waylon vaguely announced that somebody else was getting writing credit on the album.
“Whose song is it?” asked Fritts, worried about Shaver’s temper. Waylon mentioned “We Had It All” and, to Fritts’s relief, Shaver just shrugged. “It was a blessing to be on that album, obviously. It was also very strange, having one song not by Billy Joe. It seemed like a lot of people didn’t like it.”
Laden with dubbed-in strings and lots of echo on Waylon’s vocals, “We Had It All” departed sonically from the balance of the album, not surprising in light of RCA-Nashville’s checkered history with the album format. On the charts, the single proved one of Waylon’s worst showings in years, discouraging the company from investing much more promotional effort in the album. “Their attitude then was that’s not going to work,” says Kahanek. “Let’s go on and concentrate on something else.”
Nonetheless, critics celebrated the album. “After many years of overproduction on record,” applauded Rolling Stone, “Waylon Jennings’ new album offers an opportunity to hear the crisp, robust no-nonsense sound which has been his trademark since his early days with Buddy Holly’s Crickets.” The review and others like it sensed his newfound freedom to make records the way he liked to make them. The theme carried over to the album cover, which snubbed the dreamy portraits and stilted scenarios that graced most country music albums in favor of the just-hangin’-out portraiture of the Beach Boys’ Sunflower (1970), Tracy Nelson’s Mother Earth (1972), and the Allman Brothers Band’s At Fillmore East (1971), to name a few. On Honky Tonk Heroes, Waylon and his unkempt friends clutch drinks and guffaw at some unknown remark. Perhaps they’ve just poked fun at Jerry Bradley or Chet Atkins, or repeated a ribald joke told last night at the Burger Boy. In any case, the picture symbolized a renegade spirit that clashed with corporate ethos and linked with rock-and-roll cool. The album itself christened country music’s outlaw era. Indeed, it was quintessentially outlaw, coproduced by Tompall, who kept one foot on the West End streets, recorded generally without RCA’s influence, connected to Texas through Billy Joe Shaver and, of course, Waylon’s origins, and bathed in risk, having gambled on the work of an untested songwriter.
WHILE HONKY TONK HEROES staggered on the charts, Waylon continued to spar with RCA. In September 1973, manager Neil Reshen announced again that Waylon was splitting from the company, claiming breach of contract and trumpeting an imminent deal with a new label. In an interview with the Tennessean, he pointed to disagreements over Waylon’s creative direction. The following day, RCA tersely replied that its artist was bound by the contract negotiated the previous November. “He tried to get out of the contract,” said Wally Cochran, head of artist relations, “but there’s nothing he or anybody else can do about it.”
Reshen’s appearance in the paper was more than just a ploy to boost albums sales with a dash of real outlaw rebellion. Instead, he was probably reacting to RCA’s objection to Waylon’s plans to record his next album at Glaser Sound Studios. During the Honky Tonk Heroes sessions, Waylon had blanched under the watchful eye of the RCA staff, which he claimed reported his studio drug use to Jerry Bradley.
One of the impediments to Waylon’s dashing off to another studio was the recording engineers’ union, whose contract demanded that RCA-employed engineers run the board on all company sessions. Waylon’s move to the Glasers would leave the engineers in the cold, handing Jerry Bradley his first big Waylon problem since rising to Chet’s old perch. “I’m in the middle because I loved the artists, but I’m management,” pleads Bradley. “I have thirteen, fourteen engineers down here, and I’m trying to figure out how to do sessions. We had to coordinate that. It was a ridiculous situation to mix the freedom of making a session with a union, and we gave the union fair warning that it wasn’t going to last.”
During this latest round of negotiations with Reshen, New York–based vice president Mel Ilberman stepped into a hallway and asked Bradley if he really wanted to keep Jennings. “The answer was yes,” declares Bradley, who remembers Ilberman’s response. “‘Well, we got to get through this union problem.’ It wasn’t whether we wanted to keep Waylon or not keep Waylon: it was the union problem. Waylon wasn’t going to let us keep sending the damn union guy everywhere he went. Ultimately, they just shut the studios up.”
RCA sent an engineer to Waylon’s first sessions at Glaser, but that never happened again. As Bradley points out, after a few years RCA and other labels merely divested themselves of studios and let artists record anywhere they wanted. It was a second blow in Waylon’s favor: he’d brought down Chet Atkins and then toppled the engineers’ union.
NO CEREMONY ANNOUNCED Waylon’s first session at Hillbilly Central. Tompall just marched in one morning and told everybody to make way for the nighttime arrival of Waylon. He’d be with his producer . . . Willie Nelson. Who was no more a record producer than he was a duck trapper.
The building that housed Glaser Sound Studios as it appears today.
Photograph by Michael Streissguth
Glaser engineer Kyle Lehning scratched his head at the sight of Willie, but bolted upright when he spied Waylon. “I was in the studio playing a Wurlitzer electric piano through a wah-wah pedal into a guitar amplifier, just kind of farting around with it,” says Lehning, who would go on to have a highly successful producing career. “And when Waylon walked in the door, he didn’t say, ‘How are you?’ He didn’t say, ‘Hey, I’m Waylon.’ He said, ‘I hate those things.’ I turned it off and said, ‘Yep, you’re the artist, go in.’ And the band set up, put up all the gear, bass player came in. Within a half hour, tape was rolling. And Willie was in the control room with me. The very first thing they recorded was J. J. Cale’s ‘Louisiana Women.’ And they kicked into it, and I was young and I thought, ‘This is pretty cool, Waylon’s pretty cool, I like this whole thing.’ But this is how arrogant I was: While we were doing the playback of the first take, I hit play and went back out in the studio and turned the Wurlitzer back on and just started playing the Wurlitzer through the wah-wah player to the sound of the take coming through the door. And Waylon comes storming in there and said, ‘Hey, hoss, show me how to run this tape machine and put that on this record!’ And I thought, ‘I’m gonna like this guy!’”
Waylon’s first number-one song, “This Time,” came out of his first recordings at Glaser, not to mention the top-five album of the same name. And Lehning’s Wurlitzer indeed made it to the final master, as well as his keyboards, which he played when Jessi Colter wasn’t around; unexpectedly, he even contributed a trumpet part on the album’s “Heaven and Hell.” Such unscripted seasoning defined the studio and fueled the search for the right feel rather than sonic perfection.
Like Lehning, Music Row photographer Alan Mayor witnessed the uninhibited collaborative spirit at Hillbilly Central. “I was at a Shel Silverstein show at the Exit/In and was invited back over to Tompall Glaser’s studio. Tompall and Shel were working on an album and they were trying to pick a single and they were playing their material for us and at the same time a very wired Waylon kept running to the door, sticking his head in and saying, ‘Shel, I’m stuck. I’m trying to write this song, and I can’t think of the lyric to go with it.’ And he would give the line and Shel would just pop out the line and Waylon would say thanks and disappear for a few minutes. Then he’d come back in and say, ‘I’m stuck again.’ And Shel would toss him that follow up to the couplet and Waylon would disappear.”
If Lehning was delightfully shocked that so many of his fingerprints appeared on This Time, he was mystified when Waylon collared him and took him on the road for a few months. “Jessi was opening for Waylon, and Waylon said, ‘Why don’t you come out and play second keyboard to Jessi on the road?’ Jessi was playing grand piano and she had that kind of great gospel feel and style, and I played a Fender Rhodes with this crappy-sounding string ensemble through a Fender amp. Imagine how awful that sounded. So I learned her show, which was about thirty minutes. We were in Sacramento, California, and I played her set—and Waylon’s band backed her up on the road. And Waylon was just standing in the wings with that
leather Telecaster of his on his body. And Jessi got up and started to walk off the stage, and I got up and started to walk behind her. And Waylon said, ‘Where’re you going?’ I said, ‘Well, she’s done with her set.’ And he said, ‘Oh no, you’re going to play with us now.’ I said, ‘God, Waylon, I don’t know your set!’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Hoss, there’s only three chords!’ I loved him for that. And he knew I played guitar and he would not let me see his hands! He never called the song title or anything. He’d just end one song and start the next. So I was always looking around and trying to figure out [the key]. It was funny. Finally, by osmosis I figured out the show.”
It was more difficult to figure out how to react to the Hells Angels, who rushed to see Waylon whenever he played San Francisco venues like the Boarding House. “It started with a couple or a few and the next thing I knew, every place we’d play, it would look like a biker convention,” says Billy Ray Reynolds. Waylon was like an accessible Sonny Barger to the gang members, out there on the road where bikes could follow, his dress accenting the up-yours rhetoric that appeared in magazines and newspapers across the country. “I refuse to be two different people,” he would say. “I’m my own man. I’m as good as the best and as bad as the worst.” When the bikers showed no signs of disappearing, Waylon allowed them to provide security at shows, provided they left their stripes and guns at home.
But Hells Angels—who smelled like Altamont—unnerved Waylon. “Waylon had this tough-guy image, with the black hat, Mr. Outlaw and all this stuff,” says Lehning. “But he was anything-but in those kinds of situations. We’d pull up to a venue and he’d be looking out the window [and say], ‘Here they are, here are the motorcycles.’ And he’d be like, ‘Oh, God.’ He was just afraid somebody would get hurt. It was not fun. But these guys loved him. And I remember him sitting on the bus going, ‘Okay, I guess I got to walk out here.’ And there would be this one particular Hells Angels guy named Deakon. And he’d walk off the bus and go, ‘Deakon! Brother! Good to see you. Yeah!’ And I could just see him going, ‘I hope he doesn’t pull a gun!’”
Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville Page 14