Waylon (29 page)

Midnight gave up his career to be our friend. He just hung out with us. The Captain was a good listening post. He’d ride around
with Tompall or me, and we’d get a chance to say out loud a lot of things we had been thinking. He’d been friends with Tompall
since 1959, and probably had a lot to do with keeping Glaser and me together. He always said, “Tompall and Waylon are doing
all the robbing, raping, and pillaging, and they’ve got me holding the horses.”

Sometimes he’d relay messages from one to the other, usually because each of us thought the other one was crazy. It was quite
a match-up. Everybody in town was holding their breath, thinking this can’t be.

It was love of the music that brought Tompall and me together—that and a sense of our own independence. We were a little suspicious
of each other when we first met, but as outsiders, our defenses were continually up, and being crazed didn’t help. If you
gave Tompall a compliment, he’d say “Aw, don’t be bullshittin’ me.” He thought you were trying to cheat him.

You could see more of the real Tompall as he’d drive around Nashville, steering his Lincoln Continental with his knees, strumming
the ukulele. He and Captain Midnight would play a game. The Captain would call out songs from the thirties and forties, trying
to stump him. Tompall could play at least a verse or a chorus from each one; he must’ve known every song recorded.

Even if he didn’t trust anybody, Tompall was a smart entrepreneur. He knew the incomes and outgos of publishing, and how the
totals were supposed to make sense in his favor. Me, I didn’t even have a personal checking account then. I’d just go to my
road manager and ask him to give me some money. I’d get a wad of eight or nine hundred dollars and stick it in my pocket.
Midnight used to follow me around when I would change my britches before a show, picking up a trail of dollar bills and pills.
Tompall once asked me, “Why don’t you write a check?” I told him I didn’t have a checkbook. He took me to the bank and set
up a checking account. Then anytime I needed to buy a hundred dollars worth of quarters, I could write a check. Pinball operators
across the mid-South cracked open a case of champagne when that happened.

Tompall also showed me how easy it was to make the studio your own. We were playing pinballs one night, talking about “Lovin’
Her Was Easier.” The next thing I know, Tompall’s making a phone call, setting up a session for him and his brothers at their
studio. It was the first time I ever had my finger on the “red button,” as Tompall called it. I produced the song for them;
it never did come out or anything, but I saw how much simpler it would be to do it for myself.

Simpler. That was it. That’s what I wanted. Bringing it back to bass and drums and guitar. You’ve got to make them feel it
before they hear it.

* * *

“What are you doing to my song?” Billy Joe Shaver asked me.

“Billy Joe,” I told him. “You have the last word, but you have to leave me alone to figure this out.”

“I just want to know what you’re doing to my song.”

“I’m fixin’ to sing it, if you’ll let me.” We were working on “Honky Tonk Heroes.” He had originally written it slow, but
in the middle of running it down, I stopped the take and started it cooking. Double-time. Though I’d “done did everything
that needs done,” he didn’t understand what I was doing.

Billy Joe was all up in the air. I was “messin’ with the melodies,” he told me, “screwin’ around the tune.” Anybody else wouldn’t
have said anything to me, because they would’ve been scared I wouldn’t cut the song, but Billy Joe just did whatever he took
a notion to do. He never had anything like this happen to him, somebody performing a whole album of his songs and show-casing
him as a writer. He was so unusual, and the songs were great; but he just couldn’t calm down.

I was probably a little nervous as well. It was very nearly the first time I was in RCA without a producer, and everybody
was on edge. The engineers would call upstairs every half-hour to Jerry Bradley, who’d ask what I was doing. “He’s high,”
they’d say. Hell, yes, I was high. Loving every minute of my newfound freedom.

When people you know are not wanting you to succeed, and you’re in the middle of it, that’s an impossible situation. If it
wasn’t enough that the engineers were telling me what I could and couldn’t do, Billy Joe kept hounding me. “I will be a-watching,”
he warned.

“Let me tell you something,” I finally said to him in exasperation. “You are going to get your ass out of here and stop bugging
me. I love your songs, but I’m starting not to like you worth a damn. Stand outside the studio, go for a walk, watch some
television. I don’t care what you do. When I get through, you can come back in. If you don’t like it, I’ll change it and do
it another way, but now get the hell on the other side of that door.” I was gruff, but I could understand why he might be
feeling nervous. Songs can be like little babies, and you don’t want to think that someone’s abusing your child. Especially
when you’re first starting out. I’d been through enough of that myself.

They thought Billy Joe was from outer space when he first hit Nashville. He was so shy when I met him that he hardly looked
up from the floor. Bobby Bare, who has one of the best noses for songs and writers in the business, brought him over for me
to hear him sing. I didn’t even have a home at that time. Jessi and I were living in the Holiday Inn over on West End and
Eighteenth.

He asked if he could play me a song. All I could make out was mumbling. I couldn’t tell anything but that I liked the melody,
and I understood no more than a third of the lyrics. Soon enough, Bobby got him in a studio and played me “Ride Me Down Easy.”
It just killed me; I loved that song. I called Bobby and said, “Has he got enough material that I could do an album of his
stuff? I think that guy can change the whole face of the music.”

Billy Joe had gone through a lot even before he started writing songs. He didn’t begin in “the business” (though he always
called it a hobby) until he was nearly thirty. His daddy had left his momma before he was born in Corsicana, Texas, and he’d
grown up around the honky-tonks of Waco. He’d had to drop out of school to work for a living, and had joined the navy when
he was seventeen. He might’ve continued scuffling had not a sawmill accident clipped four fingers of his right hand and turned
him into a songwriter. Billy always had a sense of humor about it, though. He was sitting on a bed one time playing guitar,
and a guy who worked for me came in and said “Billy Joe, if you don’t mind me asking, what happened to your fingers?” Billy
started glancing around and digging in his pocket. “Damn,” he said. “They were here just a while ago.”

He slept in Bobby’s office while he struggled in Nashville, and eventually Kris took a liking to him, covering “Good Christian
Soldier” on his
Silver Tongued Devil
album in 1971. I heard him singing in a backstage trailer at the Dripping Springs Reunion in Texas the next year, though
Billy remembers it better than me. As he tells it, I heard him play “Willie the Wandering Gypsy” while they were passing guitars
around. I came running in from the back and said “Hey, man, I’ve got to have that song.” Billy Joe agreed.

He tried to call me when I got back to Nashville, but I was always in a meeting or on another call or “not in.” This went
on for months. Even after Bobby brought him by, we had trouble getting together. He caught up with me one night at RCA recording.
By then, Kris had produced an album of Billy Joe’s for Monument, called
Old Five and Dimers Like Me,
and he was feeling a little more cocksure.

“I got these songs,” he said, “and if you don’t listen to them, I’m going to kick your ass right here in front of everybody.”

He could’ve been killed there and then by some of my friends lining the walls, but I took Billy Joe in a back room and said
“Hoss, you don’t do things like that. I’m going to listen to one song, and if it ain’t no good, I’m telling you goodbye. We
ain’t never going to talk again.”

Billy played me “Old Five and Dimers,” and then kept on going. He had a whole sackful of songs, and by the time he ran out
of breath, I wanted to record all of them.

His songs were of a piece, and the only way you could ever understand Billy Joe was to hear his whole body of work. That was
how the concept for
Honky Tonk Heroes
came about. Billy Joe talked the way a modern cowboy would speak, if he stepped out of the West and lived today. He had a
command of Texas lingo, his world as down to earth and real as the day is long, and he wore his Lone Star birthright like
a badge. We all did.

The music reflected this. It was so ragged, with mistakes and bad notes, that it hardly sounded finished; but it was as simple
and to the point as I could make it. There was no mistaking what the songs were about. On “Ain’t No God in Mexico,” there
wasn’t more than three instruments. You didn’t need a twenty-piece orchestra. It was all there. The song was true to itself.
You could feel what was happening inside it.

“Honky Tonk Heroes” had come directly out of Billy Joe’s experiences growing up. His momma and a girl named Blanche had run
a honky-tonk called the Green Gables in Waco. She was a good-looking woman, red-headed and tough, and it was a classic dive,
a dance hall with sawdust on the floor, spittoons, and a piano in the corner. The bar had a rail along the bottom, where you
could stick your boot up and feel like somebody. Little eleven-year-old Billy Joe went there on summer afternoons, and the
soldier boys from Fort Hood would give him nickels and throw him up in the air. That’s where he started singing, tapping his
bare feet and making up songs.

He wrote all this down years later, standing by the bar as a young man, hooking his boot heel on the rail and chicken-hawking
tables, looking across to see who he wanted to dance with next. Seems like it was just the other day: the world of “lovable
losers, no-account boozers, and honky-tonk heroes.”

Like me.

W
’re on a motorcycle, me and Willie, riding past five miles of backed-up traffic, people hollering, car doors opening in front
of us, flags waving, girls leaning off pickup trucks, frisbees flying, a different song from each radio as we zip along the
shoulder, covered with Colichee dirt and shouting ourselves hoarse, heading for the Dripping Springs Picnic.

Independence Day, 1973.

Willie has called a gathering of the tribes to this dusty patch of ranch twenty miles west of Austin. He’s roped in Sammi
Smith, who’s just had a big hit with Kris’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” and myself to help him bring it off.

Naturally it’s pure chaos. We’ve got Ernest Tubb, Hank Cochran, Charlie Rich, Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge, Ray Price,
Loretta Lynn, Johnny Bush, the whole Austin scene with Jerry Jeff Walker and Doug Sahm, and yours trulys milling backstage,
along with seventy thousand of their most fervent fans out front. Rednecks and longhairs, rolling around together in the heat
and the dust.

Nobody has a clue about what they’re doing, when they’re going on, who’s in charge. Nobody can figure how to control it. Nobody
wants to. Somebody steals the money and we don’t get paid.

But there, right as rain, is Willie, beaming up at me. He knows it is the beginning of something.

“We hot, ain’t we?” he says.

We hot.

If there ever was a free spirit on Earth, it’s Willie Nelson. He’ll tell you it’s because his philosophy of life is “follow
your intuition.”

It’s just that we go about it in different ways. Willie does not want to break the natural flow of things. He does not want
confrontation. Whatever’s bound to happen, he figures, go ahead and let it. Willie would sooner bend than break, leaning backward
until he throws you off balance and gets his way.

With me, there’s no gray area. It’s all black and white. I’m in my element when I’m fighting for something. I’ll stand right
out there in the dirt and take on everybody in town for his and my right to believe in whatever we think is worth caring about.
And if a truck is coming and I’ve got my back turned, you better holler and not let it run over me, natural flow be damned.

When Nashville started giving us both a hard time, Willie up and left for Texas. He didn’t go back. I stayed in Nashville.
I guess in the end we both survived as best we knew how, and came out on the other side with our pride and music intact.

He’ll never change, and I don’t think he should. He’ll give you everything, say yes to anybody, trust that events will turn
out fine in the end. He’ll never be rich. He loves to be a gypsy on the road, playing that beat-up ol’ guitar, wearing that
silly-ass headband, singing through the side of his nose and signing autographs after the show, which is where his concept
of karma comes in. He thinks you should be thankful if Miss Fortune helps reimburse you for a deed from another life.

I say, “Willie, I believe that what goes around comes around in this life, but I wasn’t with you in the other ones. You better
leave me out of this.”