Waylon (34 page)

I’d done a song of Lee Clayton’s titled “Ladies Love Outlaws,” about how women don’t look at a wild man and see someone hard.
Like Jessi when she saw me on television, they think an Outlaw just needs somebody gentle to settle him down. Either they’re
not scared or they’re just as wild as you are; I ran into quite a few like that.

There was a verse about Jessi and me in it—“Jessi liked Cadillacs and diamonds on her hands / Waymore had a reputation as
a ladies’ man,” which was only partly true—but the song’s larger insight was the attraction we all feel for those who move
against society’s grain. Bob Dylan sang “To live outside the law you must be honest” in “John Wesley Harding”; the Shangri-Las
called the Leader of the Pack “good-bad, but not evil.” It’s a common theme, dating back to Robin Hood and forward through
Jesse James to Thelma and Louise.

To us, Outlaw meant standing up for your rights, your own way of doing things. Most lawbreakers are common criminals. Bonnie
and Clyde were nothing but a couple of idiots. So was Billy the Kid; you can look and tell he wasn’t all there. They got attention
by killing people. The ones who shot them, heroes like Wyatt Earp or Bat Masterson, weren’t any better. Those lawmen didn’t
want to walk the same side of the street when Johnny Ringo or Clay Allison came to town. The ones that got killed were those
who couldn’t aim, farmers with rusty guns they used for shooting snakes, innocent bystanders.

If I had an Outlaw hero, someone to set my standard and measure my progress, it was Hank Williams. He had touched me way back
in Littlefield, through the strength of his songs and the soul of his voice. I especially loved his Luke the Drifter recitations,
morality tales like “Pictures from Life’s Other Side” or “Too Many Parties and Too Many Pals,” usually recorded the Morning
After the Night Before. Everything I did in Nashville, anything
anyone
did, was measured against Hank’s long, lanky shadow.

You’d hear all these stories, how he pulled a jukebox that didn’t have his records on it out to the street and shot it full
of holes, or ran around all night dead drunk and pilled out and still gave the greatest show you ever saw. We thought that
was the way to do it. Does your wife cheat on you? Well, I heard Hank’s wife did, if only in all them lonesome blues. Did
Hank miss concerts? We could, too. Did Hank write great songs and read funny books and take pills and swarm?

I wanted to be like him. We all did. Even his contemporaries held Hank in awe. Faron Young brought Billie Jean, Hank’s last
wife, to town for the first time. She was young and beautiful, and Hank liked her immediately. He took a loaded gun and pointed
it to Faron’s temple, cocked it, and said, “Boy, I love that woman. Now you can either give her to me or I’m going to kill
you.”

Faron sat there and thought it over for a minute. “Wouldn’t that be great? To be killed by Hank Williams!”

He wound up driving Hank and Billie Jean around in Hank’s Cadillac, with the two of them loving it up in the back seat. All
of a sudden, it got very quiet in the car. Faron thought he should say something. “Hey, Hank, that left fender got a little
rattle in it.”

“Shut up, boy,” said Hank. “Watch the road and keep driving. I bet you wish you had one that rattled like that.”

Hank loved Audrey, his “main” wife, though life between them was unbearable. The night he married Billie Jean, on stage in
New Orleans, he turned around to his steel player, Don Helms, and said, “Shag, I’m gonna marry Billie Jean tonight. Audrey
be up to get me tomorrow.” He worshipped Audrey, he really did. They both were screwing around, and he was surely a woman
hound, but I think in some of his songs, like “Your Cheating Heart,” Hank was really writing about himself.

After Hank died, it became almost an unwritten law in Nashville to try and put the make on Hank’s Old Lady. Audrey always
liked her boyfriends to have coal-black hair. One night, when Hank Jr. was on the show, I was walking from the bus with her,
and she said, “Darling, have you ever thought about dyeing your hair black?” I told her I liked it fine the way it was, thank
you. I may have laid down in the back seat of the Cadillac Hank died in when Hank Jr. showed it to me, but I wasn’t about
to try any of his other sleeping positions.

Both Hank’s ex-wives said I reminded them of Hank. Billie Jean, who later married Johnny Horton, came to town one time and
wanted to meet me, so Harlan brought her over to the office. Johnny had been killed in an auto accident. She asked me, “What
are you doing later when you get off?”

“Look, lady,” I said, “you killed Hank Williams and you killed Johnny Horton and you stunted Faron Young’s growth. So you
just leave me alone.” We both laughed, me a little nervously.

If we were all walking around trying to fill Hank’s boots, for me, it was literally. Hank Jr. gave me a pair of Hank Sr.’s
cowboy boots, and sometimes, late at night, I’d put them on and stroll around the house. They fit pretty well. I could feel
his presence hovering over me. I wore them to the studio one midnight, and while we were recording, a big lightning storm
blew up. It hit a tree out in the parking lot, which then fell over my brand new El Dorado. We went out to look at it, and
sure enough, the tree was fully covering the car. We raised one branch, and then another, and backed the car out. There wasn’t
a scratch on it.

We went back to the studio and started recording again. While we were out in the room, lightning struck the building, over-loading
the recorder, scoring the black facing off the tape. They made me take the boots off after that.

Another night, I was upstairs in the office with my feet up on the desk. I had the boots on and I was talking about them,
and about Hank. All of a sudden, the pictures on the right-hand side of the wall slid off their hooks, crashing to the floor.
Everybody left in a hurry.

“Are you sure Hank done it this way?” Each time the bus would break down, or you’d get stranded, or drive five hundred miles
to a gig only to find it had been cancelled, we’d compare our troubles to Hank’s. We wanted to be like him, romanticizing
his faults, fantasizing ourselves lying in a hotel room sick and going out to sing, racked with pain, a wild man running loose
even if it meant dying in the back seat of a blue Cadillac on the way to greet the new year in Canton, Ohio. That was part
of being a legend.

Driving to Hillbilly Central one morning during the
Dreaming My Dreams
sessions, I was thinking about Hank’s influence and the example he’d set for us, both good and bad. I grabbed an envelope
from the seat and started writing, one hand on the wheel, the other balancing pencil and paper on my knee. When I got to the
studio, we immediately recorded it—me and Richie managed to turn the beat completely around—and I read it off the envelope.
Two weeks later, our bus driver, Billy, came to me and asked if he could have the envelope with the original lyrics. He’d
found it on my music stand. I looked at it, and I swear I couldn’t read a word. It was just scribbling.

Lord it’s the same old tune, fiddle and guitar

Where do we take it from here?

Rhinestone suits and big shiny cars, Lord

It’s been the same way for years.

We need a change.

Somebody told me, when I came to Nashville

Son, you finally got it made

Old Hank made it here, and we’re all sure that you will

But I don’t think Hank done it this way

I don’t think Hank done it this way

Ten years on the road pickin’ one-night stands

Speeding my young life away.

Tell me one more time just so’s I understand

Are you sure Hank done it this way

Did old Hank really do it this way

Lord I’ve seen the world with a five-piece band

Looking at the back side of me

Singing my songs, one of his now and then

But I don’t think Hank done ’em this way

I don’t think Hank done ’em this way.

With its relentless four-on-the-floor rhythm, phased guitars, and eerie drones, “Hank” didn’t sound like a standard country
record. There was no clear-cut verse and chorus, no fiddle middle break, no bridge, nothing but an endless back-and-forth
seesaw between two chords. Jack mixed the guitars together so they sounded like one huge instrument, matching their equalization
settings so you couldn’t tell where one blended into the other.

It felt like a different music, and Outlaw was as good a description as any. We mostly thought it was funny; Tompall immediately
made up Outlaw Membership certificates and handed them out to select visitors at Hillbilly Central. We did feel like we were
connected, but our musics were very different from each other. The only thing bringing us together was our attitude. We needed
a change.

It wasn’t just us. After the 1974 CMA awards, in which Olivia Newton-John took Female Vocalist of the Year, a more traditional
Association of Country Entertainers (ACE) protested Nashville’s pop swing. Ernest Tubb, George Jones, and Tammy Wynette (the
meeting was held at Tammy’s house) were also being denied their hearing by a wider audience. For Nashville, the door still
swung one way, and Music City was usually ACEd out.

We were trying to break it open from the inside. That didn’t make us any more popular. They thought we were dirty, and hell,
we were. You try staying up for a week straight, or rather, un-straight. Every Outlaw needs a last stand, and we liked pretending
we were at the Alamo. Willie was Jim Bowie; Kris, Davy Crockett; Tompall was Buddy Ebsen; and I was the goddamn cannon fodder.
Open fire!

We had ourselves a handle. CB radio was big then. We could feed our white-line fever as the Silver Eagle bus crisscrossed
the superhighways of America, talking to other mass transports in the same way the media found our catchphrase and ran with
it. It was almost like a hook in a song. We had a hit phrase.

In magazines and newspapers, radio and television, Outlaw music became the byword for a country music underground. A movement
grows because there’s a need out in the wilds of society, asking for a certain type of individual, insight, or emotion. People
liked what we were saying. There was a mood that was craving our message of freedom and a fresh start. It didn’t matter whether
we were Outlaws or not, country-rock or rockin’ country. You are only what your audience thinks you are, anyway. We represented
New.

Helping spread the word was Chet Flippo, who wrote reams of you-are-there copy for
Rolling Stone
and other alternative rock journals, a roving reporter inside Hillbilly Central. He witnessed firsthand the backstages, the
hotel lobbies, and late-night coffee shops a late-night band of “born scrappers” might frequent. On the back of
Wanted: The Outlaws,
he wrote: “Call them outlaws, call them innovators, call them revolutionaries, call them what you will. They’re just some
damned fine people who are also some of the most gifted songwriters and singers anywhere.” Amen.

RCA was delighted. They’d tried to find a description to categorize my music since the days of
Folk-Country,
and now they finally had a Concept. The marketing department breathed a sigh of relief. At last: an image.

Jerry Bradley, RCA’s Nashville chief, heard them down the hall. Jessi’s success, Willie’s success, and my success was impossible
to ignore, as was the constant stream of media attention. He decided to jump on this careening bandwagon, asking me to put
together an Outlaw anthology. I had been doing package shows with Willie and Tompall under the Outlaws concept. RCA had the
rights to Willie’s back catalogue, Jessi and I were lawfully wed, and when Bradley suggested the idea to me, I asked for Tompall
to be included.

I liked Jerry, but he drove me a little nuts. He didn’t have a clue about music, though he always tried to get involved in
it, usually by remote control. I’d bring him a finished song, and he’d say, you need to do this, you’re going to have to change
so-and-so, and I’d go back into the studio and pretend to move the faders, and he’d okay it. He never knew I didn’t fix a
thing.

We’d have fights so loud in his office that secretaries would be grabbing aspirin bottles and running for cover. Jessi was
sitting with Wally Cochran, a promotion man, one afternoon when I was in Bradley’s office. Jerry called me a liar. I lost
my temper, started cussing him up and down, and tried to get him to step outside. You could hear me all over the building.
Wally was picking up the phone when the argument started and he stopped midway, frozen, the receiver inches from his face,
stunned and unsure whether to rush in and save his boss. Jessi just read the paper, never losing her cool.

Jerry was Owen Bradley’s son, who founded one of Nashville’s premier recording studios, Bradley’s Barn, and ran Decca when
it was the home of Webb Pierce, Ernest Tubb, Brenda Lee, and Patsy Cline. He might have had a little something to prove, coming
from a different world than I did. He was in the old style, and it was hard for him to break from his background. “You ain’t
got nothing to say about it,” I’d tell him, but he fought me every step of the way.

He was a good merchandiser, though, and
Wanted: The Outlaws
was his baby. A reporter from
The Tennessean
had once asked him if he would support this so-called “music of the future,” and Jerry said that if I was selling the amount
of records that Charlie Pride did, he’d be a fool not to. Sure enough, Neil did an audit and found I was already selling more
records than Charlie. After that, he jumped in front of the bandwagon and started pulling.

I didn’t like calling us the Outlaws, because there was already a rock band named that; my idea was “Outlaw Music.” If I had
to do it over, I’d argue till I almost got him convinced and his mind changed, and then I’d quit. In hindsight, it did work
out pretty well.