Waylon (24 page)

They’d load me in the back and I’d sleep all the way to wherever we went. Usually I’d been up for days, taking over-and-unders,
and when I’d crash, there wasn’t anything that could wake me up. Richie would come in the back periodically and listen for
my heart to see if I was still alive. I wouldn’t move, all the way from Nashville to Syracuse.

We had a horse trailer cut down to carry all our equipment in, and when it hit a bump everything in it bounced nine feet in
the air. I could never figure out why my amplifier sounded different every night. Usually I’d look in the back and the speaker
was hanging on by one screw.

The sound in the clubs was terrible, because there were no p.a. systems. You never even thought about a monitor. The difference
between having a good sound and a bad sound was whether you could hear anything coming off the back wall. Like a beer bottle.

The honky-tonk circuit. It was inbred and in bed. Some of the business people in town were partners with guys out there buying
the acts. This one over here was poker buddies with that guy who runs the record company. Another books the record company’s
acts and together they own a building. A music publisher controls a radio station; the disc jockey writes songs and wants
a record deal. Nobody was in competition with anybody; everybody stayed out of everybody’s way.

It was a family thing, which would have been nice if they didn’t try to keep it all in the family. It was like the Grand Ole
Opry, bless its heart.

I’d played at the original Ryman Auditorium with Bare the first time. I sang harmony with Bobby on “Come on Home” and “Sing
the Blues to Daddy.” It’s a moment every singer dreams of, and I wasn’t any different. That was one of the few things that
ever scared me. I didn’t get nervous till I got out there, and then I looked down and I knew that Hank Williams, Red Foley,
Ernest Tubb, and all those immortals had just stood there in that one place, and I wondered what the hell I was doing there.

They offered me a spot on the Opry. There’s even a scene in
Nashville Rebel
where I pay my respects to Ott Devine, who ran the Opry in the sixties. At that time, you had to be on there twenty shows
a year, and since it was broadcast on Saturday night, that’s usually the night that you make the most money out on the road.
I needed that night to make the rest of the week come out right. I had to turn them down. They wanted to give me ninety dollars,
union scale.

At least I said no peaceably. John Cash had come to the Opry when he got his first record in the Top Ten country charts in
Billboard.
He’d sat out in the Opry manager’s office for three hours, dressed in his black shirt and pants, sideburns, and rockabilly
shoes, until they finally relented and let him on the show.

He encored seven times, and only had four songs out on the market. He sang “Hey Porter,” “Cry, Cry, Cry,” “So Doggone Lonesome,”
and “Folsom Prison Blues” over and over. Hank Snow and Minnie Pearl made him welcome, which pleased John no end, because Hank
Snow was his hero. He was so proud he had torn the Opry up.

He joined the Opry but couldn’t make most of the Saturdays because he’d be out working tours with Jerry Lee Lewis or Carl
Perkins or Roy Orbison. John would do one Saturday and miss three. Finally, they called him in and said that if he was intending
“to be a member of the Grand Ole Opry,” he’d have to start showing up more.

Ultimatums are not the best way to get on John’s good side. So he said, “Well, this’ll be my last night.” At the end of his
final song, he dragged the microphone stand across the lights at the edge of the stage, breaking them all, one by one. “I
was just having fun,” he told me, “watching ’em pop.”

The manager of the Opry was less than pleased. “You don’t have to come back anymore.”

“I don’t plan to,” said John, but when he got in the car with June, he started crying. Someday, he thought, they’ll want me
back. In time, he did make his peace with the Opry. There’s nothing John liked better in those days than sitting in a dressing
room listening to the Jordanaires sing gospel, or trading bluegrass verses with Bill Monroe or Flatt and Scruggs. He even
wound up doing his network television show from the Ryman Auditorium.

One of the phrases I always heard was “I wish New York and L.A. would leave us alone.”

The Nashville Sound folks never realized that they actually did, to our detriment. If you were a country artist signed to
Nashville, the record company treated you like an uninvited guest at a dinner party. They didn’t set a place for you at the
table. They didn’t take you seriously. Their corporate base was in New York or L.A., and we were out of the power structure.
No matter how many records you sold, all their promotion went to the big pop acts signed to both coasts. You had to fight
and scratch for any attention at all from the record company.

Country music reacted to that by drawing in the wagons, getting defensive, building a wall around Nashville that kept country
artists in rather than outsiders out. I went west to Los Angeles and cut Kris Kristofferson’s “Lovin’ Her Was Easier (Than
Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)” with Ricky Nelson’s band. At the time, he had a good bunch of guys with him, including Sonny
Curtis. It was a great record, uptempo, with a guitar riff that was like a clarion call to arms every chorus. They wouldn’t
release it because I recorded it in L.A. They didn’t want to start a precedent. They wanted all the hit records to be cut
in Nashville.

The closest I got to the top of the charts, as the sixties started running out of months, was “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the
Line.” I waited a damn year to cut that song; Charlie Louvin’s bass player had the original version for Capitol. I didn’t
want to cover him. I thought I’ll wait awhile, and if it doesn’t hit, I’ll go for it. I think he outsang me on it, but I had
the best track. I knew it had the potential to go all the way, and it might had not “Harper Valley P.T.A.” kept it out of
the number-one slot.

I like to say that I was a legend before I was ever a hit in country music. I was kind of a fair-haired boy when I arrived
in Nashville. Everybody loved everything I did, but I was not cutting consistent chart records.

I never did feel at home. I didn’t know it yet, but the minute I got there, I was in trouble. I found myself trying to fit
in, and having people wedging me in places where I didn’t work. I was being told, over and over, You just don’t do this, or
You can’t do that. There’s a certain way we do things here in Nashville. We know what’s best for you. All you are allowed
to sound like is the Nashville Sound.

I would think of ideas, and before I would get a chance to put them down, or even hear how they worked out, they’d tell me
I was wrong. What the fuck do you mean, it’s wrong? Well, it’ll make the record skip if we put a big drum beat in it. We don’t
understand that rhythm. We have to smooth it out or we’ll never get played on the radio. And the best one of all: That’s not
country.

I always hated labels, and they kept trying to stick them on me. They didn’t know who I was or what I was about, and I tried
my best to keep them in the dark. I remembered what Buddy had told me about not pinning yourself down. The things that weren’t
country about me scared them, even though they tried to call me everything but straight country. They always needed a marketing
plan—folk-country, Nashville rebel—to understand me, to try and put my feelings in a frame, and even then they didn’t get
it. Music is just music. People who put labels on music are those who have to merchandise it. It makes their job easier for
them.

I wanted to cut my records a whole different way. I wanted to build the song in the studio, not the control room. I wanted
the dynamics to happen out there, alive, with the band.

I gave the Nashville Sound an honest chance, at first. I went along with what Chet, and later Danny Davis and Ronny Light,
would suggest. I would use their bands and their pickers. Some of the musicians who played on my early records were great
guys, but they were trapped by the number system. I’d go in, cut the tracks, come back the next day, and I wouldn’t even recognize
that it was the same tune.

When I first hear a song and it knocks me out, I can tell you what it’s going to sound like when I get through with it. It’s
like a painter, a sculptor, and a poet rolled up in one; you should be able to see a picture, feel its shape, as well as hear
the song’s emotion.

I just did what felt good to me. It was like Grady Martin said when they asked him if he read music. “Not enough to hurt my
playing,” he replied. The truth is I never understood that much about the mechanics of music. I’d come in wrong, and I’d turn
the beat sideways. I was the only guy in the world who could hum out of meter. My guitar playing came from inspiration only.
I did it out of self-preservation. I could never stand to practice. Everything I know I learned in front of an audience. Whenever
I’d pick up a guitar, I’d start to play a song.

Chet and I may have had our differences, but I think he liked the fact that I didn’t back up, and never have backed up. I
don’t have a reverse gear when it comes to what I believe in.

There’s more than one way to do things. There’s at least two ways, and one of them is your way. You damn well have a right
to try it, at least once.

I went through my marriages like Grant went through Richmond. I finally gave up. I said, hell, I’m not going to be able to
be married. And just when I thought it was all over, when I quit looking, that’s when I found the right one.

I started with Jessi on level ground. I was seeing Barbara before I left Lynne, and Lynne before I split with Maxine. Jessi,
on the other hand, had just gotten unhitched from Duane Eddy. We were both free.

It wasn’t like that the first time we met. I was in Phoenix working on “Norwegian Wood” in a studio there, and Duane brought
her by. She was making her mark as a songwriter—Dottie West and Don Gibson had both done things by her—and she’d written a
duet called “Living Proof.” Duane asked if I would help out with the demo and I said yeah. So they set her up beside me, on
a box because she’s so little, and we sang into one mike. I thought, Man, she ain’t bigger than a nickel.

A cute little ol’ sweetheart was what she was. We had to move the box back because she had more volume than me, and we were
all laughing about that. She was very respectful and everything. Not a bit flirty at all. I was married at the time, and she
was too.

It was funny, though. We got through, made a copy of the tape, and I saw them to the door. We said our good-byes, and as they
walked away, she turned around and looked back at me again. I’ve thought about that ever since, because I stood there waiting
for her to do just that. It was as if I knew she was going to.

There was something there. The next time we crossed paths, she had separated from Duane, but they weren’t divorced yet. Her
sister, Sharon, brought her to a show, and I got her up on stage to sing with me. I was apart from Barbara by then. 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.

I didn’t see her again, but she caught me on a Buck Owens television special. I had on a gray Nehru suit that somebody had
talked me into wearing, and weighed about 140 pounds soaking wet. I was gaunt and miserable. Skin and bones. “He needs me”
was all she could think. She sent me a telegram saying she’d be home for Christmas, and if I could give her a call, she’d
like to get together.

She hocked one of Duane’s guns to get a new dress, a silver-gray wraparound number, and she came to J.D.’s to see me work.
Her brother escorted her over to the hotel before the show. Lord knows what she thought. It was a whole other world from what
she was used to, despite her marriage to Duane. The band was hanging out, four of us sitting around a table playing poker,
me with no shirt on, a couple more sprawled across the bed, smoke curling around a room that looked as if it had been turned
upside down. But Jessi wasn’t scared by it. She found it “different” and fascinating, and that was the way I thought of her,
too.

I was a perfect gentleman. We were honest with each other. I told her about my life, about my first wife and children, though
she recalls I didn’t go much into my second wife. She listened and didn’t say much. Somehow she knew that I was in a place
of hurt, and that I’d reached a point of trying to please my former wives and feeling like I failed. I was nowhere near over
it, at a point where someone would have to take me as I was and who I was, raw and all. Right or wrong, I hadn’t been understood.
Jessi had no idea how long it would be before I would open up to trust another woman, and it was a good thing she didn’t.

One of our first dates was out to the Navajo Indian Reservation in Tuba City, Arizona. There’s nothing there, only the painted
desert and two or three roads in the whole northeast corner of the state, each following an endless straight line that goes
like an arrow until it hits the vanishing point.

We left Phoenix about noon, and I drove and drove. It was getting late. I was supposed to play in a gymnasium for the Indians
up there, and I didn’t know it was going to be that far. Along about dusk I almost hit the biggest horse I’d ever seen. It
came out of nowhere, and when I hit the brakes, that horse looked at me as if to say “you stupid asshole.” I started laughing,
thinking about the expression on the horse’s face, and she probably thought I was a crazy man.

After the show, we stopped at a motel in Cameron. We walked over to a canyon, hand in hand, the desert surrounding us like
a watchful eye. Suddenly an old man sidled in beside us, hobbling along with a cane. “Where you from?” I asked him.

“I come from back east,” he told us. “I’ve been a traveling salesman all these years. My health isn’t too good, and my sons
and daughters don’t really want me. Me and my wife lived out here, but she died about five years ago, and now I don’t have
anything to live for.”