Waylon (15 page)

You can put a guitar against you and feel it vibrating as you play it. They’re never really in tune, especially the B string.
I hate the B string. What you learn to do is pull ’em into place with your finger. For me, they’re a lot like women. You can
touch one of them in the dark and know she ain’t yours; or you’re with the right one.

My original Telecaster was covered in leather tooling by a cleanup man at Wild Bill’s named Howard Turner. He customized a
1953 model, a gift to me from the Waylors. Barbara was in on it. I think she bought the matching Fender amplifier, a black-face
Super Reverb, and the band put a fifteen-inch “Living” Lansing speaker in it. We all had identical guitar straps with our
names inscribed—Way Ion, Jerry, and Paul—and we wore short Mexican tuxedo jackets and matching pants with a stripe down the
side.

I was still playing “White Lightning.” Only instead of standing on top of a concession stand in a drive-in, I was looking
out over a sea of bobbing heads, swaying bodies, packed together too tightly to dance, all moving to the ricketty racket we
were setting in motion from the J.D.’s stage. Buddy had always said to leave them wanting more, to quit while you were on
top. Then they’d exaggerate to the good. I was aiming to leave.

In the desert, a few inches of rain can turn into several feet of raging water. That dry river bottom, located right next
to J.D.’s, had been a rushing torrent in 1964, when the club had gone under in a flash flood, and they’d had to muck it out.
I felt like the same flood had caught me in its current, swept me away on the river of music, giving me hope and possibility
and the challenge of staying afloat. I didn’t want to drown in the next overflow, or have them find me years later in the
River Bottom district.

There was another couple of sets to go on this night, and the next, and the next. At least now it looked as if I might be
given the chance to keep on playing. Maybe for the rest of my life. It’s all I ever wanted to do.

I
started out for Nashville with a yellow Cadillac and a yellow-haired woman. The band loaded an old Chevy flower car from
a funeral home with our equipment, and I went to pick up Barbara.

We left late at night. I put her big red trunk with the brass fittings in the trailer behind the Cadillac and we drove off.
I was getting a divorce from Lynne, and it wasn’t exactly clear in the whole world’s mind what mine and Barbara’s relationship
was going to be. We weren’t about to risk any chances of getting stopped at the border.

The journey seemed to take forever. When we got to Tennessee, it was daytime. It might have been my anticipation, but all
I remember are the winding roads before I got to the freeway, twisting and turning back and forth, like I was continually
glancing back over my shoulder at my past life before heading into the future. We climbed over one hill after another, Memphis
aiming east toward Nashville, until finally Music City stuck its head over the horizon like a rising sun. I could hardly believe
this was going to be my new home.

It was a big step for me, a chance I was taking, and I was anxious to get started. I’d thought long and hard about leaving
Phoenix, even asking another RCA artist passing through town what he thought of moving. His name was Willie Nelson, and he’d
been having success as a songwriter. “Crazy” and “Funny How Time Slips Away,” for Patsy Cline, were already standards, and
Faron Young’s “Hello Walls” was well on its way to becoming a classic. He was a fellow Texan, appearing across town at the
Riverside Ballroom. We had never met before, but my first album was about to come out, and he’d also just gotten his start
recording as an artist in his own right. He liked my singing and I liked his.

Willie came to town and sent word he wanted to meet me. I went over to the Adams Hotel and spent the afternoon finding out
how much we had in common, asking him about Nashville and what I might expect. He had just moved there. I told him I had a
good deal at J.D.’s. By then, I was up to maybe fifteen hundred dollars a week, clear. Not bad for a “sit down” job, as we
called gigs that you didn’t have to go on the road for.

“Don’t move,” he told me. “And if you do, let me have that job!”

As usual, I followed the opposite course. I’d been in Nashville a couple of times during the previous year, 1965, looking
around, cutting songs with Chet, and getting a feel for the city. I’d been there once before Bobby saw me, and tried to see
if I couldn’t get something going. I found the doors closed. I didn’t know anybody then, and nobody knew me.

Eight months later, Chet’s blessing had made all the difference. I was the talk of the town. When I arrived, it was at Nashville’s
invitation, and all along the grapevine the word was out. Sometimes you don’t need a hit record: If you go somewhere and set
down and make enough noise, they’ll know it’s you that they want. They came to me. There was a buzz, and I was the buzzard.

Bobby Bare put me up when I went to record officially for the first time as an RCA artist. I spent three days in mid-March—for
the record, it was the sixteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth—cutting most of what would become my first album,
Folk-Country.
In those sessions we recorded twelve songs, including my first single, “That’s the Chance I’ll Have to Take,” as well as
a couple of B sides.

Chet let me bring my band in the studio: Gropp on guitar and Richie on drums. We’d been playing “Stop the World (and Let Me
Off)” in the clubs, and had it all worked out. Chet did a wild thing. He liked the way Jerry dubbed his strings, muting them
when he played, so he put a microphone next to his pick hand on the electric guitar. It was like a percussive drone.

I started playing the break. I looked over in the control room and realized “I’m playing guitar in front of Chet Atkins!”
So I just grabbed me a string and held on for dear life. It made a good middle eight, though.

Folk-Country was Nashville’s scheme to snare some of the hootenanny folk audience, which was then starting to cross over to
rock. Along with me, it was hoped that John D. Loudermilk, John Hartford, and George Hamilton IV might win a few extra converts
to country. I didn’t mind the label; to me, folk music was the original country music, sung by folks, plain and simple.

I stayed over a couple of extra days and did one of Bare’s sessions, playing guitar and singing harmony on “Streets of Baltimore”
and “Memphis,” making a little expense money.

We went back to performing in Phoenix. Though it wasn’t the megalopolis it is today, I was a big frog in a not-much-bigger
puddle. The entertainment columnist at the local paper kept referring to me as “That Guy down at the River Bottom”: He couldn’t
bring himself to say my name. People knew I was going to leave, and that only filled up J.D.’s even more.

My first single came out in May, and Chet called me back to Nashville on July 28 to cut a few more songs for the album. Among
the newer things I did was “Anita, You’re Dreaming.” By the time I came back for a third time in the middle of February, 1966,
cutting a variety of material that ranged from “(That’s What You Get) for Lovin’ Me” to the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood,” “Stop
the World” had gotten into the Top Fifteen, and “Anita” was riding midway in the country charts.
Folk-Country
was coming out the next month. Chet had declared March “Male Singer Month” at RCA, and the company was riding high with ten
entries in the Top Twenty-five. Included along with me was Porter Wagoner, Eddy Arnold, Hank Locklin, Jim Reeves, Archie Campbell,
and Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler with “Ballad of the Green Berets.” It was time to move.

First I had to let Phoenix know what they would be missing. If you leave on top, Buddy said, it’ll make it appear even bigger
than it really is. Still, we couldn’t have gotten any larger unless we’d moved the show over to the Coliseum. On the first
weekend in April, and my last weekend as a local performer at J.D.’s, it was monstrous. The word was out that this was going
to be my fare-thee-well stand, and they packed close to two thousand people upstairs. Johnny Western warmed up the crowd,
playing the appropriate theme from
Have Gun Will Travel,
while I waited backstage at my coffee pot, having another cup. Substitute the word
guitar
for
gun
and you had me. The Telecaster Cowboy.

Gotta travel on. Stage, that is. It was unreal, the crowd screaming their heads off, hanging on every word. I showed out.
You can’t do it any other way. When they go that crazy, you can’t give them any less than your best, a hundred and twenty
percent instead of a hundred and ten. It was a hell of a three days. People were happy for me; but there were a lot of folks
crying in their beer because I wasn’t going to be theirs anymore. I kind of missed that part myself. Wish me luck; and this
one’s a ladies choice.

Waitin’ for my big break to come

Livin’ on catsup soup, homemade crackers and Kool-Aid

I’ll be a star tomorrow but today

I’m a Nashville Bum

* * *

We like to have starved when we got to Nashville. We were jumping in with the big boys and girls; performers we’d heard on
the radio all our life, and the thousands of hopeful newcomers that come each year to the hub of country music looking for
a quick spin. We were giving up a steady job. Richie had a Thun-derbird and a playboy apartment and all the women he could
ask for. He knew it was only a matter of time, but he hated to leave Phoenix.

The Nashville we arrived in had Roger Miller’s name written all over it. He had just gotten nine Grammy nominations, with
“England Swings,” “Husbands and Wives,” and “I’ve Been a Long Time Leavin’ “all on the Top Fifty charts at the same time.
Not bad for a guy who used to bellhop and run the elevator at the Hermitage Hotel while he was trying to get someone to listen
to his songs.

Red Sovine was driving “Giddyup Go” while the Statler Brothers talked about smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo.
Buck Owens was “Waitin’ in Your Welfare Line” listening to
Cute ’n’ Country
Connie Smith crooning “Nobody but a Fool.” And hovering in the teens on the country charts was a newcomer named Waylon Jennings,
whose “Anita, You’re Dreaming” sat between Little Jimmy Dickens’s “When the Ship Hits the Sand” and Roy Drusky’s “Rainbows
and Roses” one week, and Kitty Wells’s “A Woman Half My Age” and Tommy Collins’s “If You Can’t Bite, Don’t Growl” another.

Over on Sixteenth Avenue South, they were breaking ground for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Win or lose, I was
now part of it, a tiny patch in country music’s rich quilt.

I still needed a place to live and a way to feed the band. The second priority was probably more urgent. Until my records
started selling, I was not going to be a big money man, and even then, a hit country album could only be counted on to sell
twenty or thirty thousand copies. W. E. “Lucky” Moeller, a booking agent, had promised to keep me working, which in Lucky’s
terms meant I wouldn’t be home that much.

Lucky sold volume. His principle was “Keep the ’billies on the road.” You might play three or four times a year at the Flame
in Minneapolis or the Horseshoe in Toronto, crisscrossing the country with hardly any rhyme or reason. To keep the band busy,
he would discount them at lower prices. I’d be on the road all the time, generating Lucky’s ten percent by the week or fifteen
percent for one nighters, and it would get me a lot of public exposure.

Lucky was like a father figure to me. He wore black-framed glasses and had a thin mustache. An old-timer in the booking business,
he was a match for Harry “Hap” Peebles in Wichita, or Smokey Smith in Des Moines. Over the years he booked anybody and everybody.
He’d run his own clubs and dance halls in Texas and Oklahoma, and had managed Bob Wills and Webb Pierce, so he knew the business
from both sides of the fence. He knew what he needed, and how to get it. He’d not only paid talent, he’d sold talent. He was
like an actor who directs.

That sword could cut two ways. The clubs and carnivals and state fairs might be assured of shows, and your date sheet might
be filled, but he didn’t fight for big money. Lucky would rather sell more dates at the same price, even into the next year,
than hold out getting you the extra five hundred dollars that could spell the difference between subsistence and pleasure.
And by booking you so far in the future, it might backfire, as Little Jimmy Dickens found out when he scored a major pop hit
with “May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose.” He couldn’t break out of the low-ball contracts he had signed a year in
advance. By the time he was able to book new shows at a bigger figure, the Bird of Paradise had flown up his ass.

Lucky paid it no mind. Even though you were scraping by, he’d say “At least you’re still on the road!”

* * *

Living out of a suitcase, I stayed in hotels with Barbara. We started at the Anchor Motel and worked our way around to the
Noel, the Andrew Jackson, the Downtowner.