Waylon (32 page)

Jack sang a high country tenor harmony on “Let’s All Help the Cowboys Sing the Blues.” He wrote it about himself, and so he
wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb, he tucked his voice far back. A country tenor is where a guy sings a little too high.
He was straining for the upper registers. “Looking for love, beauty, and IQ”—that’s Jack. Sing it, Cowboy.

Dreaming My Dreams
is my favorite album I’ve ever done. Whether it was Clement experimenting, or the sense of possibility I felt settling into
Tompall’s upstairs studio, surrounded by friends, or my whooping yodeling on Roger Miller’s “I’ve Been a Long Time Leaving
(but I’ll Be a Long Time Gone),” or Neil Diamond talking in the liner notes about the “soul itself” of the human voice, it
was a special moment in time, hanging at Tompall’s, being brothers.

* * *

Hillbilly. That was the name we gave ourselves, but we weren’t hillbillies. It was really a joke. People in the Tennessee
hills were hillbillies. Roy Acuff was a hillbilly.

Anybody with one eye and half-sense knows I’m no hillbilly. There wasn’t a hillbilly bone in my body. If we called ourselves
hillbillies, it was to put people off guard, to put ourselves down and them on, to poke some fun.

We were country boys, but we weren’t from back in the sticks. It’s like when I used to be called the Telecaster Cowboy. I
may have liked cowboys, and dressed like one, but I was a cowboy singer. There was a difference.

The difference often worked against us. Live, it seemed like country acts were regarded as hillbilly, considered too dumb
to get the first-class treatment accorded other musicians in other musics. We played our circuit, which more often than not
found us in out-of-the-way places for less money, and we knew it wasn’t about to change. You knew which club you would be
playing in which city, and what state fair you’d be going to depending on the month. Maybe you could get a regular booking
in Las Vegas, but that was as big as you were going to get.

I never figured out how I could owe the booking agency money after being on the road three hundred days during the year. The
most you could ever get was two thousand dollars a night, and it often cost you nearly that much to get to the show and pay
for food and lodging. The routings made even less sense. During the year I worked so much, I passed through Syracuse, New
York, five times in one month and never performed there once.

You’d get stiffed about twenty percent of the time. The venues wouldn’t pay you, and that wouldn’t stop you from getting booked
there the next time you came through town. Every once in a while, to show I was in control, I’d sometimes blow the date, never
show up. I’d call Richie and tell him “Everybody’s on his own. I ain’t going to be there,” and he’d say, “I wish you would
call me sometime when the promoter isn’t standing right here beside me.”

I’d go to Lucky Moeller and say, “Did you ever have a day you just didn’t feel like showing up for work?” He was sometimes
too understanding. Lucky was from the old school, where you get a well-oiled machine running and not much can jar it out of
its endless cycle. You don’t show up, somebody else will, and they could keep you out on the road, forever, if you liked.
You got on that horse, and you couldn’t get off.

Lucky was a Kentucky Derby kind of guy. He was in his element pulling his big Mark III into the back parking lot at Louisville’s
Freedom Hall to oversee the traditional race concert. Flanked by his son, Larry, and WINN radio’s Rob Townshend, I can see
him in 1968, sandwiched between Roni and Donna Stoneman; they’re wearing white go-go boots and short plastic skirts, which
made me wonder why Pop Stoneman always got on me for singing those “sex” songs. Pee Wee King and his Golden West Cowboys are
scheduled to go on the revolving stage next, while Tammy Wynette signs autographs, and Tex Williams, Ray Price, Dal Perkins,
and myself and the Waylors wait their turns. Little Johnny “Call For” Phillip Morris introduces each act.

This was Lucky’s world, all plaid jackets and shiny ties, and it was changing. No longer was it good enough to do things as
they’d always been done, traveling the circuit, coming back more broke than when you left. There was an entire audience out
there that Lucky’s down-home view of country music didn’t encompass. The Nashville that Moeller Talent represented was suspicious
of the future, only now it was becoming the present, which made them the past.

The spirit of Dripping Springs was taking over country music. Sales of Willie’s, Kris’s, and my albums were skyrocketing,
and we were invading the pages of mainstream rock magazines, like
Rolling Stone,
which had discovered Willie’s Austin scene. We could feel the undercurrent of media shaking the ground beneath our feet,
like a distant rumbling that signals the onset of an earthquake.

Neil took advantage of this outside interest by booking a pair of shows more notable for their symbolism than their actual
stage performances. To introduce me to New York, he arranged a week for me in January 1973 at Max’s Kansas City, a small and
intimate club (the upstairs showroom wouldn’t hold more than a hundred people comfortably) on Park Avenue South that was known
as the fabled home of Andy Warhol and glitter rock. They were more used to bands like the Velvet Underground and the New York
Dolls; before me, the closest they had come to country was the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

I looked out at the audience the first night. I had never seen such spangles, guys in earrings, girls with hair teased in
four different directions, a Village underground deep in the heart of the city. I remembered how strange I’d felt when I first
came to New York with Buddy. I tripped going up to the stage; with a drum kit and amplifiers, we could hardly move without
stepping on the front tables.

“My name is Waylon Jennings,” I said before we started. “We’re all from Nashville, Tennessee, and we play country music. We
hope you like it. If you do, I want you to tell everybody you know how much you like it. If you don’t like it, don’t say anything
mean about it, because if you ever come to Nashville, we’ll kick your ass.”

All you have to do is open the door; people will walk through if your music can’t be denied. Our week-long stay at Max’s was
a triumph. It was a full moon when we hit that stage, and night after night the Waylors started playing on a whole new level.
Richie couldn’t believe it. He hadn’t been back with me that long, and he could see the turnaround. During the days, I did
interviews with national magazines like
Penthouse,
spreading the word about Redneck Rock or Outlaw Country, depending on their perspective, and at night I worked on getting
myself laryngitis. I was still a little weak from the hepatitis.

From there, we went to the West Coast, setting up our tent meeting at the more industry-oriented Troubadour, and visiting
my old crowd at the Palomino. Crossing over didn’t mean that you couldn’t go back and forth.

Neil’s biggest move was to get me on a bill with the Grateful Dead at Kezar Stadium. With all the overhype, it was a breakthrough
to play on the home field of Haight-Ashbury High, even though Janis Joplin had shown that it was a quick hitchhike between
Austin and San Francisco. Musically it didn’t work. Deadheads don’t care if it’s Jesus Christ up there. All they’ve come to
see is the Dead. I felt older than them; when I walked out, I probably looked like that sonofabitch who’d told them if they
weren’t in by eleven o’clock he was going to ground them. My kids were old enough to be among that crowd.

In the end, it didn’t matter how the shows went, because the word of mouth whispered like wildfire. Neil brought it all home
at the Disc Jockey Convention, where he staged an “Appreciation Concert” with me, Willie, Sammi Smith, and Troy Seals. The
ballroom at the Nashville Sheraton was packed to overflowing. I opened with “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean” and closed with “T
for Texas,” finishing at three in the morning. Three encores. Seventy-three. One for the money, two for the show, three to
get ready …

Willie and I were in the same boat. Neil was paddling it, and as much as he had to fight for me, he had to keep Willie bailed
out. I thought for a while he’d never leave Texas, but pretty soon his sense of an alternative country scene began to take
hold, and Willie started becoming a genuine superstar.

He had shifted to CBS from Atlantic, where his first concept album,
Phases and Stages,
had concerned a marital breakup from the viewpoint of the wife. Willie could sympathize with that. He was a travelin’ man,
and he never hid the fact that he would rather be out playing than home every night. His first love was always the road. Everything
else played second fiddle. He didn’t mean to be a bad guy. At least, he figured, his wives got to be in the string section.

Atlantic had folded its country division in 1974, and Willie’s deal with Columbia gave him complete creative control, though
when he worked up his first album under the new deal, another concept album about a mysterious
Red-Headed Stranger,
they still wondered what he was up to.

Willie got the title from an old ballad by Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith; he’d sung it to his kids and played it on his Fort
Worth radio show. The actual song was a gothic Western mystery story that told of a dark rider who rode from town to town
trailing his dead lover’s horse behind him. In Willie’s version, guilt and sin mixed with redemption as the rider became a
young preacher who had murdered his adulterous wife and was forced to wander.

The concept proved flexible, an ongoing narrative that shuffled songs like Fred Rose’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” Hank
Cochran’s “Can I Sleep in Your Arms,” Eddy Arnold’s “I Couldn’t Believe It Was True,” Bill Collery’s “Hands on the Wheel,”
and the gospel chestnut, “Just as I Am,” to further the biblical themes of penance and passion.

Red-Headed Stranger
was just Willie and his band, including his sister Bobbie on piano, a tribute to the cowboy virtues and vices we hoped to
emulate. We were trying to put the West back in country and western. Willie practiced what he preached by recording at a small
studio in Garland, Texas. The finished album only cost twenty thousand dollars and was tracked, overdubbed, and mixed in three
days. That was quick even by Nashville standards.

Neil was fixing to play it to Columbia, and he thought he might have trouble selling them on the record. It was so sparse,
sometimes just three or four instruments a song. He brought me along to help him explain it. We went with Jody Fisher, who
worked for Neil then and works for Willie now. The meeting was up in New York with Bruce Lundvall, then a head of CBS, and
we watched as he threaded the reel-to-reel tape of the finished album.

He let it play, about a song and a half. “It doesn’t sound complete,” he said. He thought it might be a demo. “There’s some
pretty good things here, but this needs to go down to Nashville and let Billy Sherrill sweeten it. Put some strings on it.”

I got up, pissed. Willie and I both liked strings, but they’re right only some of the time. “Neil, you manage both me and
Willie,’ but I tell you, if you don’t get that goddamn tape off that machine and get us out of here, then you won’t be my
manager, and I guarantee you won’t be Willie’s.”

I turned to Bruce. I called him a tone-deaf, tin-eared sonofabitch who didn’t know nothin’. “I’m in your office, and I’m leavin’,
but you ain’t got a goddamn clue what Willie Nelson’s music is about.”

As I started out the door, he said, “Wait a minute, Waylon. You come back. What am I missing?”

I said, “You’re missing everything. That’s what seventy thousand people come to Dripping Springs Picnic to hear. It’s why
people will drive all the way from Colorado or Kansas to hear Willie sing. You don’t know a thing about it. That album is
what he is. Billy Sherrill may be great, but he ain’t got a fucking thing to do with Willie Nelson. All he can do is cover
him up.”

We sat back down and listened. Finally, Lundvall said, “I still don’t get it, but I’m going to release this album just like
it is.” Then I got worried if maybe Willie wanted him to sweeten it up a little bit.

A year and a half later, Bruce Lundvall walked into my office in Nashville. He gave me a gold record of
Red-Headed Stranger
and said “This is from that tin-eared, tone-deaf sonofabitch. You were right. Here’s your album.”

With all of this, it was Jessi who had the pop smash.

Working on her first album, with producer Ken Mansfield and myself as co-producer, Jessi cut a song called “I’m Not Lisa.”
It was about a girl who hears her husband call her by another woman’s name. She had written it one day in about ten minutes
while practicing the piano. It was just an eight-bar phrase that she put aside, and she kept coming back to it as she learned
about living in my world, and me in hers.

She had no particular connection with the name Lisa, and took the name Julie from an old song of mine, but she understood
that natural insecurity that comes from a woman coming into the life of a man who has been married, or had a very close relationship
with another woman, and how it takes a while to believe that maybe he didn’t leave his heart behind. Though it came out of
her life, and our circumstances, Jessi didn’t analyze it any more than she needed. She knew she had touched on a universal
feeling, and though it was certainly how she felt, it wasn’t just about her. It was about everyone.

One of the reasons Jessi had married me was because she always knew she’d be in music, and sometimes that takes understanding
from another musician, someone who knows what the making of music means.

Still, Jessi had put her career on the back burner when we got together, trying to understand our rhythms, and be a mother
to our extended family. She wrote the song then, when we were in our first Nashville apartment, amidst life’s uncertainties.
She had six-year-old Jennifer, her child with Duane, who had been cradled and sheltered, and I had my teenage passle, who
had been through hell and back. They didn’t know what to expect, after Lynne. I was happy to see Jessi was soft and gentle
with them, but she also needed to get their attention, to have them respond, so she could help them.