Waylon (31 page)

We liked being best friends, me and Tompall. Captain Midnight remembers we’d be sitting around autographing pictures to each
other—“To my Best Friend, Waylon,” “To my Best Friend, Tompall”—back and forth, passing them around. Shel Silverstein came
in and said, “Aren’t you spreading this best friend shit a little thin?”

Midnight would say, “What about me, boys?”

The truth was we were all running buddies, Shel and Midnight and Ron Halfkine, who produced the Dr. Hook records (“On the
Cover of the
Rolling Stone
”); and Ray Sawyer, who was Dr. Hook; and Kinky Friedman and Jimmy Bowen and Lee Clayton and Billy Ray Reynolds and Guy Clark
and Donnie Fritts.

It was a fraternity, and Nashville was our college town. I Felta Thi. The Elks, the Moose, the F.O.E. Eagles, and us. We had
a clubhouse. Parties with music. Jack Daniels and speed.

We could roar the cars up to the metal back door, climb the back stairs and hang out. One night I rear-ended my Cadillac into
Tompall’s Lincoln Continental Mark IV. When I went in the office, I said, “Tompall, who’s just given you a brand new Ovation
guitar?”

“You did, Waylon,” he answered.

“Tompall, who’s the best friend you’ve got in the world?”

“You are, Waylon.”

“Tompall, who stands behind you when nobody else will?”

“You do, Waylon.”

“Tompall, who just backed into your Lincoln Continental?”

He chased me down the hall, through the space where the door that I sawed in half and nailed over Tompall’s window used to
be. Why’d I do it? It got in my way.

Neither of us could take a backward step, and we could argue about something or nothing, but we challenged each other. The
studio gave us a great opportunity to experiment. There wasn’t anybody keeping score. I could take it back down to the drums
and build it up in a different direction, using the control board as another instrument. I even learned how to engineer my
own things. Hillbilly Central was high-tech, and yet we used it like a demo studio. Tompall was proud of the fact that he
had the quietest signal-to-noise ratio in Nashville; our playing was dirty enough.

It was a marathon, five or six days at a stretch. We didn’t know what to expect when we walked out the door, dark or sunlight.
Not that we wanted to go anywhere. Everybody who came to town headed for Hillbilly Central.

All we needed was Cowboy Jack Clement. My brother-in-law.

Bubba was what he took to calling me after he married Sharon, and he called Jessi Sissi. I didn’t believe it either. The very
same Jack who was part of the incredible vortex of energy that was Sun Records, who produced Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash
and Billy Lee Riley, had recorded Charlie Pride, Don Williams, and Dickey Lee’s “Patches,” and who believed that music should
be made because you liked making it, was actually related to me.

He has a certain kind of insanity that’s incurable, and I told him that right to his face. There’s parts of him that don’t
ever get near real life. Every once in a while I needed a dose of Jack Clement. He was a sheer-out genius, all soul. If you
got around him at the right moment, he could put the world back on track.

“Sometimes you give a grand performance, just for the hell of it,” Jack would say. “You waste it and throw it away. Around
here, everybody gets to thinking that if you stand up and sing, you better break out all the microphones. By the time you
do that, you spoil the whole effect. Sometimes you just have to let the music go, blow it off the walls.”

Blow out the walls, was more like it. Jack liked to record musicians without earphones, trying to set up an environment that
was live without sacrificing acoustics. He wanted everybody to be in the room, to be able to hear and see and interact with
each other. Once the red recording light went on, he felt, it was hard to get people to stay creative. With earphones shutting
off everyone into their own world, the music seemed to settle into familiarity. He pushed the music to get out in the open,
living and breathing, and to that end he covered up the control-room windows with drapes, pushed his musicians to take chances,
and turned off the clock so that everyone could feel free to follow their instincts. Designed by the theatrical designer for
Oh, Calcutta!,
his Studio B on Belmont Avenue, down the street from Jack’s JMI Records headquarters, was nicknamed Nashville’s Magic Studio.

All magic needs a magician, and as a producer, Jack did it with mirrors and more. He would always try to get as much of it
live as he could, though he was riveted on the rhythm section. The main thing was to capture the drums and bass, and even
if you got the bass just right, you could work from there. I liked his concentration on the bottom. We felt the impact of
the music’s heartbeat in the same way.

He never liked to do the same stuff he heard on the radio, and his ears were always open. One day back in Memphis, after eating
country fried steak with Jerry Lee at Taylor’s, the luncheonette next door to Sun, they had gone back to the session where
“Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin’ On” was cut. They ran the song down, a live favorite, in between takes of something else. They
didn’t even listen back to it at the time. It was only when Jack and Jerry Lee were going over what they’d done that day that
they heard “Whole Lot of Shakin’” and kept returning to it, fascinated by its off-the-cuff energy.

Between takes. Jack understood that the best music at a session is usually heard when the musicians are reparteeing among
themselves, trading riffs, fooling around. That was the personality he was looking to capture, all natural licks and inflections.
He was out to harvest a crop. “It’s their music, their art,” he would say. “A producer can’t sing it for you.”

He tried to set a stage, approaching recording like putting on a show. In terms of tempo, balance, moods, he heard an album
as a voyage from cut one all the way through the fade on the last chord. A trip. Jack danced for you, up on his toes, a shadow
moving around in the corner, giving you something to watch, anything to get you to take your conscious mind off your playing,
to let you feel it rather than think about it. “I used to be a dance instructor,” he’d say when asked, “and when the band
starts doing it good, I dance. Even if I’m hung over. No matter how bad I feel, if a guy starts entertaining me, I’m going
to get up and let him know. If he sees me moving around, he knows that everything’s okay.”

And like any good producer, he knew when to butt out. A lot of times he would just leave. He’d get somebody going in a certain
direction, and then the best thing he could do was duck out and go down to the kitchen and whip up a snack. Leave ’em have
it for a while. Then he’d come back and dance.

Jack and I didn’t talk over the album that became
Dreaming My Dreams.
He knew the Glasers very well, having produced and written many sides for the brothers, and liked the homey atmosphere of
Glaser Sound Studios, which is what the upstairs was officially called. It was small and compact, with a Studer twenty-four-track
tape machine linked to an MCI board. We went to Hillbilly Central in September of 1974 and started cutting anything we felt
like. On the back of that album, there’s a picture of me and Jack. He’s hovering over the control board, literally in the
air, like some bearded angel, his hands raised like a conductor, while I’m cracking up and admiring my cigarette. It was a
party. You hadda be there.

It took about six months to record, working on and off, mostly in the daytime for once. The label was fighting us, more or
less all the time, but we moved at our own deliberate pace. We used bassist Duke Goff and Richie from my band, along with
Ralph Mooney, the great Texas pedal-steel legend who had come on board the Waylors in November of 1970, much to my eternal
joy and amazement. He was, to say the least, a character. Chet Atkins likes to tell the story of when Mooney had been riding
on a plane and found himself seated near Johnny Gimble. Johnny admired Ralph a lot and went up and said “Hello, I’m Johnny
Gimble, the fiddler, and I want you to know that I really love your steel playing. I appreciate your work.”

Mooney could drink a bit, and when he did, he usually turned mean. “Aw, fuck you,” he said to Johnny. Gimble slunk back to
his seat.

About a year later, he ran into Ralph on a session. They were having a good time, and Johnny said, “Hey, Ralph, you remember
when we were on that plane a year or so ago, and I told you how much I loved your playing and you said ‘fuck you’? What did
you mean by that?”

Ralph said, “Don’t you know what I meant by that?” Johnny shook his head no. Mooney looked at him. “I meant
fuck you!
”

I played guitar. Jack thought my voice and guitar were one and the same; they were a matched set. Coming from a guy who often
said he was a sucker for good voices—“Somebody’s got a voice and good rhythm, I like to produce them”—that was high praise
for my guitar. We built our guitar tracks, layering, ringing the strings to form underlying drones, and when he got to mixing,
Jack acted on the music, making it more theatrical, giving it a mystique. It sounded real strange to me when I first heard
it back, but I liked it and went with it.

I was playing twelve-string dobro on a John Cash demo the first time I met Jack. I had the idea he didn’t like me, because
he’d keep walking by without saying anything, though he’d look at me as he danced past. Finally I told John the next time
he came by I was going “to stick this dobro right up his ass.” John assured me Jack loved my writing and singing.

That was an understatement. He said I was his favorite cowboy after hearing me do “That’s the Chance I’ll Have to Take,” and
if he had a million dollars, he’d give it to me and put me on a pedestal in his office and make me sing to him. He recorded
that song with everybody he ever produced.

On Thursdays, Jack would close Studio B and have his particular house band come over, guys like drummer Kenny Malone, Joe
Allen on bass, and Charles Cochran, the pianist. It was at one of these informal sessions that Allen Reynolds got to producing
Don Williams. They cut six sides one Thursday, and they wound up being Don’s first six released songs. I stopped over there
one day and Allen was writing “I Recall a Gypsy Woman.” I told him “Finish it, and let me cut it.”

“Why don’t you do it right now?” suggested Jack.

So we did. We tried that, and a version of “Good Hearted Woman,” and when we got through, Jack went to RCA and said, “This
is what he should be doing.” That real simple bass, and the harmonica, and me on the guitar with my thumb. Brer Rabbit’s hiding
place.

Allen Reynolds also wrote “Dreaming My Dreams” with Bob McDill; when I heard that song, it became the inspiration for the
album. I sang it in one take. That’s all we had, and all we needed.

I hope that I find what I’m reaching for

The way that is in my mind.…

Someday I’ll get over you

I’ll live to see it all through

But I’ll always miss

Dreaming my dreams with you.

“Waymore’s Blues” was a little earthier, born in the back seat of a limousine in Memphis. Curtis Buck was with me, and we
got to trading blues lines, Jimmie Rodgers—style: “Woke up this morning it was drizzling rain / Around the curve come a passenger
train / Heard somebody yodel.…” It was probably a complete steal, but so much of that early blues is part of the common musical
vernacular of the South, it’s hard to tell who’s borrowing from whom.

Country is blues. It still is. It’s the same song anyway you hear it; black or white, rich or poor. We’ve all been that man,
singing about the woman we got, the woman we want to get rid of, the woman we want to get.

Barbara used to call me Waymore, which she got from Jerry Gropp. It’s a sign of affection, a lighter version of Waylon, and
a macho way of looking at myself with a sense of humor. There was a time, on drugs, that I had to have the attention of every
woman when I walked into a room. Even if I wouldn’t have messed with them, I had to know there was a possibility. Some of
“Waymore’s Blues” might sound like bragging, but I did try to say everything a good ol’ boy thought he could get away with,
though I probably believed more of it on
Dreaming My Dreams
than I did when I cut Part II twenty years later.

Jack and I had a little misunderstanding over “Waymore’s Blues,” and it brought the album to a halt. Jack got to drinking,
and I was high. There were a bunch of people in the control room. Jessi and Sharon were talking real loud; it sounded like
a bunch of turkeys gobbling. He was trying to clear them out, talking and laughing and moving his hands, though out in the
studio I couldn’t hear him. I was trying to pick and sing and concentrate on the music, and it was like a circus in there.

Jack started hitting the talkback button toward the end of the take. He was driving me crazy, clicking it on and off, and
finally I just put my guitar down and said, “Everybody go home, it’s all over.”

Jack came up and said, “Bubba, artists don’t call off sessions. Producers do.”

“Not this time, Jack.” I was livid.

“The session’s over today?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, “and tomorrow, too.”

I went home and didn’t say anything. About two weeks later, Jack called and invited me and Jessi over for dinner. He and Sharon
were like Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher; they even dressed the part. Jack was straight as a board that night. “Bubba,” he
finally said. “We ever going to get in there and work on that album again?”

“This is going to sound awful funny coming from me, Jack, but you have to straighten up. There ain’t but room for one crazy
person in there. One wild man. And that’s me.”

We never did get a better take on “Waymore’s Blues,” which is why it fades so quickly on the record. Jack was a genius, though.
He knew how to talk to musicians, pulling out things they never thought they’d play, and he put everybody at ease. He let
them know when they found the groove. Just by showing up, Jack’s presence influenced a session. He set an atmosphere of “fuck
the world, we’re here to create,” and if you made a mistake, he’d help you correct it, or work it into the arrangement. The
same was true of his musicians. Charles Cochran was the only piano player I knew who ever told me he ought to lay out of a
song because the piano didn’t fit. There’s not a lot of him on the final record, but his presence and knowledge was invaluable.