Waylon (26 page)

It had been a pretty tumultuous trip to Toronto. We were playing a week at Jack Starr’s Horseshoe Lounge, and one night, after
the show, we went over to Aunt Bea’s afterhours club to have a little jam. Richie brought a trap case with him, and just as
he slid it in the corner, he was coldcocked from behind by a big Newfie, which is what they call guys from Newfoundland in
Maple Leaf country. “You hippie-looking sonofabitch,” he snarled at Richie, and belted him right in the nose.

Richie’s long hair always attracted trouble, but we were used to it. A little redneck hootin’ and hollerin’ was always good
for a show; it gave us something to prove. But up in Canada that week, the taunts were meaner, less good-natured. The war
between “hippies” and “straights” was getting more intense, and songs like “Okie from Muskogee” weren’t helping, even if Merle
insists his intent to be satiric was misinterpreted as flag waving.

Richie was mad as hell. He came back to me, and I said, “Let’s go get him.” We all tore down the stairs. A Mountie already
had him in custody, but that didn’t stop Richie. I don’t think he even saw the policeman. The Newfie was huge, about twice
his size, and Richie had to jump up to hit him. That started everything going wild. Pretty soon somebody’s wrestling with
the Mountie, the Newfie and Richie are rolling around on the floor, and we’re all bouncing around. I kicked that Newfie right
in the nuts, as hard as I could, and all he did was growl like a damn bear or something.

A cop swung a nightstick. I felt it go whistling past my head, just barely missing me. Sonny Ray, who was playing bass with
us, yelled “You almost hit the chief!” and he took off after the cop, nearly knocking him out.

That Newfie took on all of us. I grabbed him from the back and he kicked me off, ramming me into a corner. I turned to Curtis
Buck and said, “He’s gonna whip all our asses.” Curtis said “No, he ain’t” and took a shotglass and hit that big guy right
in the mouth. That took him out of the picture, and when the dust had cleared, Richie, Curtis, and Sonny were on their way
to jail. It took us all night to get them sprung.

We still weren’t home free. Heading back across the border to Nashville, our two-vehicle convoy—my Cadillac and the Dodge
pickup—got stopped at the Niagara Falls crossing. Longhairs in limos? The Cadillac got through, but the pickup was thoroughly
searched. Jimmy Gray tried to toss the “evidence” out the window, and that alerted the cops, and pretty soon they found themselves
in the slammer. It was Richie’s second time in a week!

Boy, were they mad. At the cops and each other. I was laughing and calling them criminals, and then I really gave them a reaming.
I said, if you hadn’t messed with that shit, you wouldn’t get in trouble. I was kind of upset with them. If they’d just taken
pills, like me, they’d have been okay. I even fired Jimmy. I was an easy boss, except when it came to dictating how you took
your drugs. Of course, I never considered pills as being against the law.

It was like a little game with us. We didn’t know we could go to prison for pills. We weren’t afraid of being busted because
all you had to do was show your prescription bottle. Or get somebody to write a prescription. The big excuse was weight gain,
though we were so skinny we could stand sideways and hide. We used to know a Dr. Snap out in east Nashville, in a rundown
neighborhood, who would give us ’scripts. We could take them around the corner to the black drugstore and fill the prescription.
We could get a hundred little yellow Simcos a week, or fifty Speckled Birds a month. I didn’t think there was anything unusual
about it. I had a big bottle hidden, and I’d put some extras in a small bottle, and if I was stopped, at the border or driving
along, nobody would bother me. Hell, I carried handfuls of uppers. I’d pull my pockets inside out and white Bennies would
scatter everywhere.

The thing was, I thought they were on drugs, and I was taking prescriptions. None of us realized that there was no difference.
We’d gotten started on pills by getting them from doctors, or pharmacists, who gave us no warning. Booking agents slipped
you the pills to help keep you going. That’s no excuse, but we never even thought about them being addictive. We didn’t know
that they could kill you. Or make you kill yourself.

I didn’t like anybody who drank. Never touched the stuff; that was my big boast. And cocaine, I thought that was terrible,
at least then. As for pot, I didn’t enjoy sitting there grinning.

Richie and I wouldn’t socialize much. He was with the band more. The drugs divided us, and as things grew more out of control,
Richie started thinking about taking a break. He was just running himself down living on amphetamines, and had been for two
years and more. He needed to head home for a while and settle himself.

He came to see me on the bus. “I have to leave,” Richie said. “I’m wore out.”

I nodded. “Man, I wish I could go with you.”

Jessi and I got married the next day after Richie left. I can’t say one caused the other, but I was reaching out. Her hand
took mine, and that was when I realized I couldn’t be complete without her.

She wasn’t surprised. Jessi knew the time was coming when I’d ask, and she had the dress. I didn’t get down on my knees or
anything. It was more like “You want to get married, don’t you?” We were both a little distant from our families at the time.
She’d already had a big wedding, and neither of us were interested in an ornate ceremony.

We went to a Las Vegas marriage mill on October 26, 1969. My bass player stood up as best man, and the justice of the peace
started reciting the vows in a monotone. It was the forty-fourth wedding he’d performed that day.

It hit Jessi funny and she started giggling, then laughing hysterically. The more she howled, the more serious I got. There
might have been a little underlying tension. Here we were at one of the most important crossroads of our life, and she was
giddy and I was impatient. Neither of us could really believe it. She could hardly get hold of herself long enough to catch
her breath and say “I do.”

But we did. Forevermore.

T
he Navajos call it the Long Walk. Forced into exile from their native land, marched to Fort Sumter in eastern New Mexico where
the government attempted to turn them into farmers and traders; contrary to their hunting and shepherding ways, they endured
five years of desolation before America admitted its failure and sent them home to the Wondrous Place.

I had come to the reservation as I had many times before. The Indians liked me, and I felt at home among the Indians. Sometimes
I think if it hadn’t been for them, I’d have to get something else to do. I could always draw a crowd there. They were among
my most loyal fans.

The Indians had initially been won over by “Love of the Common People.” In March of 1969, I had been booked to play Flagstaff,
Arizona, by Johnna Yursic, a local boy; to promote the concert, he asked the area disc jockey, Mike McQuade at KGAK, to feature
my current hit single, “Mental Revenge,” from the album I had out at the time,
Jewels.
It was a Mel Tillis song, but they didn’t like it at the station, so they started spinning the B side of “The Chokin’ Kind,”
nearly two years old at this point. They couldn’t believe the reaction. Suddenly they were getting requests to play it before
the record had a chance to fade over the air. Even after McQuade repeated it six times in a row, the phone would ring and
a Native American voice would be on the other end of the line, asking to please hear “Common People” again. The “Navajo National
Anthem,” as Mike said, was singing to them.

“Living on dreams ain’t easy.” “Family pride.” “Faith is your foundation.” “The Love of the Common People,” if you think of
“Common” as shared heritage, hopes, a tribe to cling to, and a warm conversation. Strong where you belong.

At seven-thirty the parking lot in the recreation center where I was scheduled to play would be empty. By eight, it would
be filled with what they called Navajo Cadillacs, pickup trucks with eight or ten Indians jammed in the back. They’d come
out of nowhere. I could hear the song beating through their hearts as they stood bunched in a crescent, waiting for me to
come out from the wings. There would be a half-moon of empty space in front of the stage. When the band finished their warm-up,
I’d walk to the microphone and they’d surge toward me in a wave. They trusted that I understood them. They understood me,
which at that time took some doing.

When I first started playing the reservations, they didn’t applaud at all. They didn’t need to. I could feel their concentration,
their respect, the riveting energy of their attention. They were shy people. I’d cut up with them, try to put them at ease.
“Hey, where you goin’? Come over here and say hello”; and they’d make me feel easy too.

Once I was standing backstage and a Tonto Apache came over to me. I don’t think he was a Mescalero. We were up in the reservation
just north of Farmington, New Mexico. “Hey, Waylon,” he said to me. “Would you take a picture with my wife?”

I said sure, but he’d have to bring her back to the dressing room. I couldn’t go out front.

“Okay,” he replied, and headed back to the door. He turned around. “Hey, Waylon. You gotta camera?”

Hey, Waylon.
They took to me like kin, and I felt a bond with them that went beyond my great-grandmother. They had a basic credo of trust
and honor, and they lived their religion all day, every day, in the shadow of the Great Spirit. We both handled liquor about
the same way, only in their case, they couldn’t just buy a drink. If the cops caught them with alcohol, they’d take it away
and put them in jail. So what they did was buy a whole bottle and swallow it all. They weren’t buying a drink; they were buying
a drunk.

The same was true of me, only it was my pill intake that was purchasing oblivion. I had a sense of loss, of unfulfilled purpose.
Even though it’s hard to draw a comparison between the fate of a downtrodden, honorable people and one man’s struggle to have
his music heard, sometimes I felt that Nashville was fencing me in the same as these proud Indian tribes had been enclosed
in their reservations.

I’d lost my way.

The more I worked, the more in debt I got. The more my records sold, the further they receded from what I had in mind, the
sound I wanted to hear, the impact I wanted them to have. I kept trying it their way, and I saw I wasn’t going to get it.

In the summer of 1972, I had dates booked in the reservations north of Gallup. I’d gotten an antibiotics shot in town for
a tooth problem, and Father Dunstan Schmidlin, the priest who booked us for the show, told me that when I went up into the
Indian settlements, I shouldn’t eat or drink anything because there was an epidemic of hepatitis.

I remembered his warning right after I’d eaten some pie and drank some milk in a little cafe near the Colorado border of the
Ute reservation. That night I witnessed the damnedest fight I ever saw in my life. A cop whose hobby was beating up Indians
put on his gloves and waded into a crowd at a bar. There he was with his burr haircut, in his glory, pushing and punching
them toward the door, and outside they were beating his car all to hell; there wasn’t one place that wasn’t dented.

When we got back to town, I felt like that car, sick and battered. We headed on to Buck Lake Ranch and played our show. I
had on a gold shirt, and after we finished, exhausted, I went back to the bus and laid down. I couldn’t get up. My back was
killing me; my kidneys hurt. Jessi came in and told me I was looking yellow. “Nah,” I said, real upset. “It’s the reflection
of this shirt.”

They took me home. I didn’t even wake up during the ride. The next thing I knew was the doctor looming over me. I was saying
“Bullshit, I ain’t going in no hospital,” and he came and stood by the bed, looking seven feet tall. I said, “Goddamn, you
run a giant in on my ass.”

I didn’t even know what hepatitis was. I didn’t want to quit. I was ready to keep going. Give me some pills. I’ll get right
up from here again.

I got to feeling worse. Jessi was just like a little chihuahua, nervous, not knowing whether I was going to live or die. Finally
she talked me into getting treated at a hospital. It was the first time I’d pulled to a halt in years.

Stop and start over. It’s been the pattern of my life whenever things get beyond my control.

Lying there, I started thinking about what I’d won after ten years of banging around the honky-tonk circuit. My health was
shot. I was nearly close to a quarter of a million dollars in debt, and getting deeper in the hole whether I played shows
or not. The IRS was on my tail. I was paying alimony to three wives. If I went on the road I lost money. If I stayed home,
I lost more.

As for record sales, I never got ahead of the five percent of ninety percent and the packaging fees and the overseas split
and the studio costs and the multitrack accounting books. Whenever they gave you a piece of the royalties up here, they took
it away down there. You couldn’t figure who owed what and why I wasn’t getting any with a team of lawyers and accountants,
and besides, we were supposed to be aw-shucks country boys. They thought we were stupid, that we were so thankful to be able
to play guitar and sing, so grateful that they gave us our start, and were happy they were there when we needed them, as long
as we didn’t ask for any real power or look too closely behind the scenes. If you don’t make waves, RCA and Decca and Epic
and Capitol were telling us, we’ll let you keep making records. Thanks, boss.