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

by Michael Streissguth

  And on the gilded stages of Las Vegas, Elvis reflected back the adoration, anointing more than a few of the outlaws’ creations. Most concerts in the 1970s drew from Kristofferson’s well—“For the Good Times” and “Why Me”—and spun dramatic performances of Willie’s “Funny How Time Slips Away.” And when the King churned out Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie,” as he did frequently, he connected to the heartbeat of the West End, Combine Music, which had championed some of the best Nashville-bred music ever. He even covered Waylon and Billy Joe Shaver’s “You Asked Me Too,” straight from Honky Tonk Heroes, the first outlaw album.

  In 1975, Elvis’s cover of Billy Swan’s “I Can Help” earned Kristofferson’s bass player an audience with the singer. Kristofferson drooled over Swan’s meeting with royalty, wondering what he was like. “I remember Billy telling me about it,” says Kris, “and I said, ‘Well, geez, is he fat now?’ And Billy gets his Billy look on his face and says, ‘Well, yeah.’ But then he started to smile and said, ‘But he was Elvis.’ I’ll never forget that.”

  Elvis had always inspired whispers in Nashville, mostly over his covert visits from Memphis to record at RCA, which had begun in 1956 and continued into the 1970s. He often crept into RCA late at night and escaped before first light, igniting talk on Music Row about the publishers who had gotten cuts on his sessions and karate demonstrations that he’d given when he should have been singing. Staff producer Ronny Light might turn a corner or open a door to find Elvis on the premises, but he got a truer picture of the big fellow from chats with Felton Jarvis, who exclusively produced Elvis. In conversations, Jarvis marveled at Elvis’s Graceland world, where servants made any dessert he wanted at any time of the day or night. But desserts, Jarvis would tell friends, were merely the low-hanging targets of Presley’s whims.

  When it looked like Jarvis might be leaving RCA to work independently as Presley’s producer, he scooted down to Memphis to measure Elvis’s feelings about the deal. “I talked to him when he got back,” says Light, “and he had this look like he didn’t quite know what to think. I said, ‘Did everything go okay?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got a story I got to tell somebody. You can’t tell anybody this. The strangest thing happened. I was down in the music room and we were talking about artists.’ Felton had done an album on Fats Domino and he’d done Tommy Roe. They talked about different things they’d done and music they liked. Elvis was playing albums. This could have been like three o’clock in the morning. He said, ‘Do you like guns, Felton?’ And Felton said, ‘Oh, yeah.’ He said, ‘I got to show you my guns.’ And he brings out a pearl-handle. So he had three TVs in this little room with a low ceiling down in the basement, and then all of a sudden he’s shooting up the walls and the TVs. He said, ‘I’m thinking my hero’s gone crazy. I got to do something. What do I do? I can’t call the police. I’m frozen and then Elvis says, ‘I’m tired. I’m going to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.’ And Felton knew where he was going to sleep. It was upstairs. So here he is in the shot-up room that smells like gun powder. He doesn’t know what to do. He goes up to his bedroom and he lays there and looks at the ceiling and thinks, ‘What am I going to do?’ He lay there for hours, and he finally went to sleep.

  “So Felton wakes up hours later. It was almost daylight before they went to bed. The sun’s coming in the window and Felton says, ‘I can’t believe what happened last night. I must have dreamed it. It can’t be true.’ He goes downstairs to see it. The TVs are fine. The room is fine. It’s not shot up. But he could smell fresh paint and plaster. Somebody [had come] in the hours they had slept.”

  The only story more mind-boggling was the death of Felton’s charge after years of drug abuse. It hit Nashville like a thunderclap. On the steamy afternoon of August 16, 1977, as the news flew around the world, Nashville donned its mourning clothes. Fans emptied record stores of Elvis albums, and movie theaters booked his old films, while music industry veterans recalled the artist’s long-ago visits to the Grand Ole Opry and his many Music City recording sessions. “Oh, everybody was crying!” remembers Hazel Smith. “Everybody was brokenhearted. Elvis belonged to us.”

  On August 16, Gordon Payne pulled up to the traffic light at the intersection of Thompson Lane and Nolensville Road, near the Woodbine neighborhood south of Nashville, when the news crackled on the radio. A few blocks away, in Berry Hill, Elroy Kahanek—who’d been fired from RCA—left an audio store with a stylus he’d bought for his new boss, Jack Johnson, who managed Charley Pride and Ronnie Milsap. “It wasn’t a half a mile back to the office, and when I pulled into the parking lot, the sky turned dark and it just started thundering and lightning. And I walked into the office and Jack was there and he said, ‘Guess what?’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Elvis just died.’”

  Willie Nelson wasn’t in Berry Hill or Austin or Conifer, Colorado, where he and Connie had moved in the summer of 1976. He was in Memphis, Tennessee, preparing for a show with Emmylou Harris at the Mid-South Coliseum. Rodney Crowell was flying in from Nashville to meet the rest of Emmylou’s band at the airport, and he figures Elvis died while he was still in the air. When the plane landed, some Memphis reporters arrived hoping to interview James Burton, Glen D. Hardin, and Emory Gordy, who split their time between Elvis and Emmylou. “I don’t know how they got there so fast,” marvels Crowell. “They descended on the guys from the band. It was a dark night, but I’ll never forget it.”

  The big venues of Memphis would shutter their doors two days later for Elvis’s funeral, but, strangely, Willie’s show carried on against the eerie mood that drifted across Memphis that night. A spectator later recalled that Emmylou took the stage and never mentioned the King, and then Willie, too, performed without acknowledging the obvious. While the music played, a thin figure swayed in the wings, stepping into the stage lights only when Willie summoned him. It was Jerry Lee Lewis. He crooned behind Willie on a few numbers, and then the headliner motioned to his sister Billie to move from the piano. Lewis sat down and dove into a set of gospel music, the night’s benediction for the King.

  But Crowell read the Killer differently, spying a swagger in the old boy’s step. “Looked to me like he was celebrating,” he says. “He’s the king now.”

  CROWELL, TOO, HAD reason to celebrate in 1977, although not over Presley’s death. Since running away and joining Emmylou’s travelers, he’d been at the core of her first two number-one albums: Elite Hotel (1976) and Luxury Liner (1977). His “Till I Gain Control Again” on Elite Hotel proved a wondrous vehicle for her soaring vocals as did Luxury Liner’s “You’re Supposed to Be Feeling Good”; both songs landed on the B sides of top-ten country hits, and were some of Crowell’s first big paydays since lighting out of Houston in 1972, a young outlaw in the shadow of Kris Kristofferson.

  During those days with Emmylou, Crowell showed enough potential that her manager took over his career and helped him win a contract at Warner Bros., which spawned his first album, Ain’t Living Long Like This. The project was a pure spin-off of the Emmylou phenomenon: Brian Ahern, Emmylou’s husband, produced the album and the heart of her Hot Band dished out the instrumentation. Willie Nelson added background vocals, and Willie’s harpist, Mickey Raphael, served up a large helping of funky licks.

  Far from a commercial success, the album nonetheless gave Crowell another showcase and formed a bridge between the gritty West End street life of the early 1970s and then-current commercial country music, particularly the outlaws’ music. Certainly other men and women who immigrated to the West End in the late 1960s and early 1970s, whether to attend Vanderbilt or to find cheap rents, climbed into the recording industry by the late 1970s: Paul Worley was playing sessions and producing and Marshall Chapman signed with Epic, for example. But Crowell mingled with country music’s biggest commercial forces. Willie’s appearance on Crowell’s album was obviously meaningful, but by 1977, when it hit the stores, Waylon, too, was connecting with the Houston kid. The top-dog outlaw recorded “Till I Gain Control Again
” for his Ol’ Waylon album of 1977 and later turned to “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” “Ain’t Living Long Like This,” “Old Love, New Eyes” (cowritten with Hank DeVito), “Song for the Life,” and “Angel Eyes.” On the road, Crowell slipped away from Emmylou’s band and with his own small group opened a few dates for Willie, and, then, Willie, too, dipped into the young artist’s well, taking his turn at “Till I Gain Control Again” and “Angel Eyes.” Johnny Cash soon discovered Crowell and presently became his father-in-law, but Waylon’s and Willie’s attention to the singer as he graduated from Emmylou helped steady his legs in the country music business.

  Crowell’s relationship with Waylon particularly rang of that old West End magic, although the old outlaw and the young outlaw had never crossed paths there in the early days. In the innocent neighborhood, Crowell had shuffled from bar to bar in search of tips and experience, while Waylon had found risk personified at Hillbilly Central. In them, the Professional Club gamblers and the Bishop’s Pub ramblers had joined forces at the forefront of country music in the late 1970s, helping to propel the new and invigorating singer-songwriter phenomenon of the 1980s, over which Crowell and his then-wife Rosanne Cash reigned.

  BUT THERE WAS still the matter of cocaine, which had taken root in that same West End habitat. When Rodney and Waylon finally sat down to discuss a direct collaboration, this in the wake of Rodney’s magic production of his wife, Rosanne, a snowdrift seized up their wheels. “The head of RCA says, ‘I want you to do with Waylon what you’ve done with Rosanne,’” remembers Rodney. “So Waylon was already a friend of mine, but we go to have this meeting. And it turns out Waylon’s all gacked on coke, and I’m all gacked on coke, and we come to this meeting and I start posturing around like a know-it-all asshole, telling Waylon what we’re going to do. And Waylon just says, ‘Fuck you! Get the fuck out of here!’ Waylon was a sweet guy, but he basically just said, ‘You asshole. Who do you think you are, coming in here, telling me you’re going to change my music?’ I went, ‘Oh . . . who do I think I am? He’s right.’ He nailed it. Later on I called him and said, ‘I’m so sorry, I was loaded.’ He says, ‘I was, too.’ I could have had a run producing Waylon Jennings records, but I was just a frozen-brained idiot.”

  Even with its present day vulgar, ugly, plastic look and sound there is a little something else left for anybody who was once under Nashville’s spell. As one walks or rides down any street in Nashville one can feel now and again that he has just glimpsed some pedestrian on the sidewalk who was not quite real somehow, who with a glance over his shoulder or with a look in his disenchanted eye has warned one not to believe too much in the plastic present and has given warning that the past is still real and present somehow and is demanding something of all men like me who happen to pass that way.

  —Peter Taylor

  Twelve

  * * *

  Ain’t Living Long Like This

  THE TWENTY-THIRD OF August in 1977 found Nashville still pondering the death of Elvis, but Waylon and Willie conspired to puncture the downcast mood. It was time again to play outlaw, so in front of an entertainment press corps still very much in Elvis mode, they demanded that the Country Music Association (CMA)—the industry’s top trade association—withdraw their names from 1977 award contention. Despite whatever private competiveness that may have existed between them, they did not wish to see their solo recordings up against each other in categories such as Single of the Year, Album of the Year, and so on. Furthermore, they believed the large number of votes controlled by big record labels undermined the integrity of the honors. “These awards are like the Academy Awards to some extent,” said a statement issued by Bill Conrad, Waylon’s publicist. “A lot of unnamed people who are privileged to vote, vote for their own camps. Show business politics are like any politics, and Waylon is just not interested.”

  The CMA and Waylon, specifically, had sparred throughout the 1970s: Waylon had refused invitations to attend the organization’s awards show in previous years and when he did accept, the show’s producers ordered him to restrict his “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line” to one verse, which moved Waylon to storm out of rehearsals. In the wake of Waylon and Willie’s announcement, the CMA nominated them for Best Vocal Duo of the Year, which meant they wouldn’t be in competition against each other, but the men stayed home anyway and continued to smear the CMA. In the end, the disheveled duo never forced change at the organization, if that was their aim, but the controversy slung them back into the newspapers, until the next time they tangled with authority.

  In the midst of the storm over Elvis’s demise and while Waylon and Willie planned their protest, an extraordinary streak of vice squad activity targeting illicit alcohol sales cut across Nashville. Early in August, police had raided an unlicensed private club called Top of the Block, on Elliston Place near the Exit/In, arresting gamblers, drug users, and the manager. According to the Tennessean, police confiscated “six pistols, four decks of poker cards, a pair of brass knuckles, several bottles of pills, and several packets of white powder believed to be cocaine.” Seven days later, the coppers again stormed the Top of the Block before invading two other joints: the Varsity Club on Fourth Avenue South and the King of Clubs on Thomson Place. And then four days after Elvis died and three days before Waylon and Willie hollered about the CMA, the vice unit netted one more private club, walking nonchalantly into One-Eyed Jack’s on Edmondson Pike and ordering drinks without as much as producing a membership card. “They served us, took our money, and then we arrested them,” declared one of the detectives.

  Just when it seemed that Metro police might seize the governor’s very own liquor cabinet, federal narcotics agents elbowed aside local authorities on the city’s front pages. In late August, they followed a package of cocaine into the heart of Music Row and prepared to arrest its intended recipient, the outlaw Waylon Jennings.

  WHILE WAYLON’S PUBLICIST faced reporters over the CMA controversy on August 23, Waylon headed to the American Sound Studios, located in a Romanesque house on Seventeenth Avenue South, right next door to his office, where he was coproducing a Hank Williams Jr. album. It was one of those sessions that epitomized West End attitude: loose, unpredictable, and studded with characters. Of course, Waylon and Hank amply filled the center, but they were joined by Jack Routh, Johnny Cash’s son-in-law, who was pitching his songs, and the L.A. disc jockey Hugh Cherry, who had emceed Cash’s Folsom Prison show back in 1968 and was producing a radio documentary on Waylon. You never knew who else might show up.

  Earlier in the day, Mark Rothbaum, an aide to Neil Reshen, had slipped twenty-three grams of cocaine into an envelope addressed to Waylon’s office and dispatched it by courier to Nashville. At the airport in New York, a suspicious clerk unsealed it and found the white substance tucked in a sheet of yellow legal paper. When federal drug enforcement officers arrived, they confiscated twenty-two grams and sent the rest on to Waylon, tipping off agents in Nashville that his secretary, Lori Evans, would be collecting the package at the airport.

  In Nashville, the G-men watched a cabdriver retrieve the package from the courier counter and hand it to Evans, who slipped into a Ford Bronco and sped off to Music Row. Unaware of the eyes watching her, she cruised past the old homes in the neighborhood, pulled into the back parking lot, and walked into the studio, where the session was in full swing. Waylon stood in the vocal booth preparing to overdub harmonies to Hank’s lead on “Storms Never Last,” while Evans stepped into the control room and dropped the package on a chair near Richie Albright, who was behind the board that night.

  Waylon hustled into the control room, snatched the package, checked the contents, and headed back to the booth. Albright cued up “Storms Never Last,” which Jessi Colter had written, and Waylon tackled his vocals. Meanwhile, the feds gathered at the back entrance, where a security guard pointed them to Albright. When they approached the control room, the drummer-producer quietly bore down on the talk-back button so Waylon—who was ou
t of sight in the booth—could hear everything.

  “They said they were there because they knew a package had come in, and they were there to investigate,” says Albright. “I said, ‘Show me your search warrant.’ Well, they had a search warrant for the office, which was next door to the studio. They had the wrong number. I said, ‘This won’t work because it’s the wrong address.’ They said, ‘We can get another one.’ I said, ‘Okay. But that takes a little while, to get the judge and all of that stuff.’ They said, ‘We’re going to stay here.’ I said, ‘We’re going to go ahead and record because this is costing [hundreds] an hour.’ They said, ‘We’ll just stand back here but we’ll be in every room.’ I said, ‘Every room except [the studio]. We’re going to keep working. Those microphones are so sensitive that they pick up every move.’ So they bought that.”

  Waylon nervously left the booth and approached the agents in the control room, playing dumb and listening intently while they explained that more agents would be returning soon with another warrant. Albright told Waylon they needed to get back to work. He played a track at high volume so he could escort Waylon, and now Hank, back to the vocal booth and find out where the coke was. It was on the floor in the booth, said Waylon.

  Putting Hank in the booth gave Albright an excuse to set up another microphone, which got him close to the powder-filled bags. Ever the fixer, he grabbed them, stuffed them in his pants, and finished with the microphones. He wadded up the courier envelope and threw it deep into an opening in the wall before returning to the control room. Who knows if Albright actually recorded the harmony vocals that the men sang, but by the time they finished, the agents had returned with their warrant and prepared to search. Just then, as if on cue, one of Neil Reshen’s lieutenants in Nashville burst into the studio, and Waylon tore into him. The lawmen turned toward the flare-up, while Albright stole into the bathroom and flushed the evidence down the toilet. “They were banging at the door, and I came out and said, ‘I had to pee.’ Boy, that guy’s face was as red as a beet.