Waylon (30 page)

He never does, though, and I’ve had to start my life over several times because of him. If he’d ask, I’d do it all over again.
He’s my personal Willie, and I’m his Waylon. Yin and yang. Where there’s a Will, there’s a Way.

Willie was like a god in Texas. People there think when they die they’re going to Willie’s house. He had been raised in Abbot
and cruised through Waco as a door-to-door salesman before becoming a disc jockey in San Antonio. He gravitated to Nashville
and Tootsie’s in the early sixties, selling “Family Bible” for fifty dollars before earning a songwriter’s living with hits
for Patsy Cline and Faron Young, and penning Ray Price’s theme song, “Night Lights.” RCA made over a dozen records with him
in the late sixties. Though he had some success, he was mostly known as a songwriter, and loving performing as much as he
does, that eventually started to bother him.

I didn’t see much of Willie when he lived in Tennessee. His home was out in Ridgetop, on the fringe of Nashville, and when
he wasn’t spending time with his family, he hung out with Hank Cochran’s crowd at Pamper Music in Madison. I was probably
closer to his drummer, Paul English. His first wife worked at the Wagon Wheel downtown on Broadway, and I’d hear tales of
her throwing an ashtray at him, and hitting Hank, or beaning Ben Dorsey with a beer bottle. Mostly our only contact was knowing
that we were both outcasts on the same label. We’d play some shows together, but the road usually took us in different directions.

In 1971, Willie’s house in Ridgetop burned down, and he got a deal with Atlantic Records’ new country division. Allowed to
use his own band and do his songs the way he heard them, and intrigued by his popularity in Lone Star honky-tonks, he saw
no need to stay in Nashville. He returned to Texas, settling in Austin, where he felt an affinity with the redneck hippie
community centered around a converted armory named Armadillo World Headquarters. In those days, the combining of those two
worlds was a big deal: long hair, pot smoking, and youth didn’t set well with country music or its truck stop audience.

Willie helped bring all that together, or did all that bring Willie together? Pretty soon he was growing his hair long and
playing in front of whooping crowds at the Armadillo Headquarters, calling me up and telling me I should come visit this little
nightclub in Austin.

I’d never worked the Armadillo before. I thought it was a cowboy place. After I set up, I peeked through the curtains and
saw that it was a rock and roll club. We’d played a festival in Dripping Springs—they called it a Reunion—the previous July
Fourth, but there were so many different performers on the bill that you figured some of the audience had to be yours. The
Armadillo crowd was all young kids, longhairs, sitting on the floor. The smell of reefer hung heavy in the room. I thought
about my head in the mouth of a lion.

I was upset. “Somebody find that red-headed bastard and get him here,” I said. When Willie arrived, all smiles, I tore into
him. “What the hell have you got me into?”

“Just trust me,” he said.

I said, “I know what that means in Hollywood, but it better not mean the same thing here.”

I didn’t have to worry. They went nuts when I hit the stage, and even crazier when Willie came out to join me.

It was a new way of thinking. We were going against the grain, and yet we weren’t alone in how we felt. Willie saw there were
two streams of country music, moving parallel, sometimes further apart, sometimes growing closer. Each was just a little afraid
of the other, and he wanted to bring them together.

What better way than to have a Picnic? Though modeled on Woodstock, Dripping Springs took on a character all its own as it
grew, the old and the new together. Willie invited Leon Russell to add his road show into the mix; Tom T. Hall, Ernest Tubb,
and Charlie Rich blended a traditional spirit alongside relative newcomers like Kris and Billy Joe Shaver.

Billy Joe especially had a wild Picnic. He’d played the night before at the Armadillo, passed out in the back, and woke up
the next day to realize he’d been bitten by a brown recluse spider. He went to Johnna Yursic’s room, who by this time was
road managing me, and Johnna put him in a cold shower to keep the fever down. It certainly didn’t do the trick, because later
on Billy Joe was running all around backstage, healing people and thinking he was Jesus. About three in the afternoon he decided
he was going to go out into the desert to die. He gave his car keys and billfold to his wife and went off, until he heard
Sammi singing “Take the ribbon from your hair” and knew he wasn’t in heaven. Billy Joe came back, looking like a basted turkey,
with the worst song you ever heard about dyin’ in the desert. He had decided to live.

We’d never seen anything like it. Everything we did at Dripping Springs was wrong, and it didn’t matter. Nobody paid to get
in; the fences were torn down. I’m singing “Bob Wills Is Still the King” and women are throwing brassieres on stage. My band
just went to pieces. Girls with no tops, no bottoms, up on boys’ shoulders and taunting you. If you didn’t look, people were
going to wonder about you; if you did look, they were going to know about you. They caught you either way. One ol’ gal took
her clothes off and got up on a tall camera platform. She was just lying there squirming and some cowboy jumped up and mounted
and went to work. It started a whole orgy over in that area. Debbie couldn’t do Dallas like she did. I never quite got used
to that.

Backstage it was pot, whiskey, pills. And some cocaine. Coke was just coming in, though I was still carrying pockets full
of uppers. The whole audience was as twisted as we were: all day and all night drinking hot beer. I wanted to know when and
where they went to the bathroom, since they weren’t about to give up their places in the front row to take a leak. There were
streakers and star-struckers. It was a wonder nobody got hurt.

We were having a time, that was for sure—one big ball. I don’t recall anybody looking sideways.

Billy Joe put it best. “We were all melted into the same comet.” All we could do was grab it by the tail and hang on for dear
life.

Suddenly, we didn’t need Nashville. They needed us.

Our vision of country music didn’t have any shackles attached to it. We never said that we couldn’t do something because it
would sound like a pop record, or it would be too rock and roll. We weren’t worried that country music would lose its identity,
because we had faith in its future and character.

In trying to broaden its appeal, country music had gotten safe and conservative. Awash in strings, crooning and mooning and
juneing, Countrypolitan may have been Nashville’s way of broadening its pop horizons, but it was making for noncontroversial,
watered-down, dull music that soothed rather than stirred the emotions. It had honey dripped all over it.

To be real. To sing the truth, regardless of whether we were walking contradictions or not. We wanted the freedom to use any
instruments we wanted, or not use them, whichever the song itself demanded. Why limit yourself? Country music is the feeling
between the singer and the song. The instruments are only there to help.

When Roy Acuff sings “Wabash Cannonball” backed up by the Smoky Mountain Boys, and you take the Smoky Mountain Boys off and
put on Henry Mancini’s strings, what have you got? Roy Acuff singing “Wabash Cannonball.” I loved all kinds of music, and
I didn’t want to be limited in how I interpreted a song. I couldn’t be afraid of trying new things. I couldn’t accept the
phrase “musically, that’s wrong,” because if I mixed a horn, a dobro, and a harmonica playing in unison and it worked, then
that was like a whole orchestra in three pieces for me. You can’t worry what is or isn’t country. I had confidence in the
intrinsic values of the music, and a belief in the varied styles it could encompass.

Country was much stronger, had more depth and soul, than it was given credit. In a bid to become respectable, country music
had been shying away from its rural past, its birthright in the honky-tonks and “skull orchards.” That’s why Billy Joe’s song
was more than a celebration of colorful barflys; it was a return to roots that lay at the core of country music’s appeal:
its beating heart and original sin.

All of us had grown up and learned our craft in the honky-tonks. You can get out and dance and yell and scream and whoop and
holler and nobody says a damn thing about it. Hit the biggest clunker in the world and it’s okay. At least you tried it. The
honky-tonk might be low-class and low-rent, but that means you have to get even lower
down
with your music, cut it to the bone, make sure you don’t waste a note. You’re honing everything.

I developed my whole style of performing in the honky-tonks. You have to learn a lot of songs, paying your dues six nights
a week, four hours a night and two more afterhours on the weekends. I’d get bored, and start changing the tunes, moving the
rhythms around, improvising the phrasing, stretching my boundaries. Putting the music out and having it come back. If it just
goes out and lays in the audience, you haven’t reached them. If you get it back, amplified, then you become one with the crowd.
When I learned how to do that, I never forgot.

It’s a state of mind. I’ll never be a symphony picker, but I can turn any place into a honky-tonk. Years later, when I played
the St. James Theatre on Broadway in New York, the manager was going on to me about how honored I should feel playing there.
I knew I should’ve been more impressed, but frankly, I wasn’t. Walking out to the stage, I checked out the audience. “Look
around,” I told them. “A honky is a honky and a joint’s a joint. I don’t give a damn if it is on Broadway.”

Richie clicked his sticks together, cracked the snare, and we were off and honky-tonkin’.

Kris Kristofferson was hardly a hillbilly. A Rhodes Scholar and a helicopter pilot, he was like nothing Nashville had ever
heard before. He brought a new maturity and sophistication to country lyrics, an explicitness to the verse-singalong chorus-verse-sing-along
chorus-bridge-verse-two choruses-and-out that was the standard country fare. Spelled X-plicit, meaning Sex.

One time we counted up and Kris had used the word “body” a hundred and forty-four times in his various songs. Nasty nasty
nasty. For a while Nashville was a little afraid of him; but his songs were undeniably poetry, and he taught us how to write
great poems. He changed the way I thought about lyrics, and he said one time that I was the only one that really understood
his songs.

They all had double meanings, something like Kris’s life. His father was a two-star general, which must have been slightly
conflicting for a guy who went to Oxford and wrote an essay on the visions of William Blake. He wanted to pen great literature,
but instead Kris joined the Army Rangers in the early sixties and learned to fly helicopters, which came in handy when he
landed a chopper on Johnny Cash’s tennis court by way of introduction. Presumably the hours of KP experience he picked up
in the service also proved useful. When he first arrived in Nashville, he started at the bottom as a night janitor at Columbia
Records. By day, he worked the bar at the Tally-Ho Tavern. That’s kind of like putting the fox in charge of polishing glasses
in a chicken coop.

I saw him a lot at Sue Brewer’s, and was one of the first to do songs of his, like “Sunday Morning Coming Down” (though it
was John Cash who had the hit) and “Lovin’ Her Was Easier.” Roger Miller broke the Nashville ice with “Me and Bobby McGee,”
and John especially encouraged Kris by having him on his television show in 1969. By 1970, with “Bobby McGee” a posthumous
smash for Janis Joplin, and Sammi Smith scoring with “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” Kris was Nashville’s brightest—in
more ways than one—hope. His debut album was eagerly awaited, especially by hungry artists looking to cover his songs.

Kris was a Texan, born in Brownsville, and in 1973 he brought chat Western heritage to good use by starring as William Bonney
in
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
He became a Dripping Springs regular, and though movies increasingly claimed his time as the seventies progressed, not surprising
when you think how long
Heaven’s Gate
is, he had a lot to do with showing that country music wasn’t some Hee-Haw backwoods character with a bottle of sourmash
likker and a corncob pipe, and that roots don’t have to trap you in the ground.

“This Time” was my time. I shifted my base of operations to Hillbilly Central, got Tompall to administer my publishing company,
and started practically living in his upstairs studio. At least it seemed that way. We could work around the clock. There
were no windows, so you didn’t know whether the sun was going up or coming down, and how many times day and night had passed.

There was a freedom there that I didn’t have any place else. Both of us could experiment. I would help him and he would help
me. We’d record something that wasn’t worth shit, some dumb little ol’ idea, and pretty soon it would lead us to another dumb
ol’ idea, and then pretty soon we’d have a good idea. We recorded a lot.

Kyle Lehning, who became one of Nashville’s great producers, was our engineer, and he runs whenever we see him now. We gave
him a trial by fire, Tompall and I. We plumb wore his ass out. He’d be sitting there, nodding, falling over after two straight
days in the studio, and we wouldn’t let him go home. I even got him out there to play trumpet at six in the morning. One night,
and Captain counted, Tompall worked on redoing a phrase eighty times. He wanted to get it just right.

It was the same way we played pinball (the “marble machines,” as Willie saw them) incessantly. Willie’s taste was more for
golf: “Once you hit one, you’re hooked.” I guess it’s the same with music.

Hillbilly Central was like that scene in
Blazing Saddles
when they’re sitting around a campfire eating beans. We’d laugh so hard that sometimes we’d just lose it, go completely to
pieces. Then we’d pick up those pieces and put them back together in an interesting shape, and that would be a song.