Waylon (36 page)

I
t was dark in the office. I didn’t bother to put the lights on. I knew the dawn would be coming soon.

I was hiding out. Doing cocaine. Trying to write. I’d sit behind my desk with two lines of lyric on the paper in front of
me, sometimes for two, three hours, thinking. Another two lines, these scraped neatly in parallel white rows and chopped with
a razor blade, lay in readiness on the side. I’d have an idea for a song, but my mind would be running and speeding so fast
I’d forget the next phrase before I had a chance to put pen to paper. I had snorted myself into a trance.

What was I hiding from? Not from anything in particular. I had become a prisoner of who I was, the identity I’d helped to
create. Maybe it’s not natural for a country boy to have all that money flowing in from every which way, and people following
along in its wake, coming at him, wanting a piece of his reflected glory. Maybe I felt, down deep inside, I didn’t deserve
it. Maybe it was the cocaine, which had taken on a life of its own.

Jessi had a picture painted of herself next to our bed at home. She’d put it by the desk in my upstairs office to remind me
what I was missing. I’d think about Jessi, alone, waiting, but I couldn’t hold on to the thought.

It’s funny. All your life you thirst for success, to be recognized, to get that number-one record. And once you achieve it,
far beyond your wildest dreams, then you find yourself running from the fame. I shrank back. Withdrew. Mostly, I had wanted
to play my music in my own way. I didn’t give a shit about the rest of it. I remember telling Tony Joe White once that I wished
I could start all over, that winning the war wasn’t proving to be as much fun as fighting the battles.

Everybody had a song for me, even if they wrote it five minutes before. I couldn’t go anywhere. I couldn’t hang out. I didn’t
like that I couldn’t be one of the boys.

I wasn’t the only one who had been cast adrift. Cocaine split up the whole town. At a hundred dollars a gram, I was buying
it for twenty thousand dollars a pop. You can’t keep everybody’s habit up, and my intake was reaching fifteen hundred dollars
a day. Half an ounce. Pills were one thing; people who were struggling couldn’t afford cocaine. There was one guy that had
scraped up enough money and bought some cocaine to impress me and Tompall. He held it out on a mirror, and Tompall—it might
have been the first time he tried it—bent down to sniff it, only he blew out instead. The shit flew all over, across the table
and into the carpet. The kid looked at me and Tompall so mournfully I had to give him a pocketful, or he might’ve killed himself.

I knew what I was doing was not normal. I knew I was a drug addict. I called myself a junkie, as a joke to make people feel
comfortable around me, but I wasn’t a junkie as far as shooting up. I could never use a needle, and I didn’t mix drugs. I
hated downers; if there’s anything I did that was right, it was only going one way. Up. When you start mixing directions,
that’s when those spiders and snakes start coming at you.

With cocaine, they never had a chance to get in the door. I liked to snort cocaine. I would snort half a gram in one side
of my nose and half a gram in the other, shotgunning it. The tops of most people’s heads would have come off if they did that.
I must have had the constitution of ten men.

I was having a great time. I don’t say this to advocate drugs at all. I think drugs are killers; ultimately, they ruin your
life and the lives of the people who love you. You could look at me and see that something wasn’t right. And everybody around
me was doing the same thing. I never tried to hide it.

Maybe that’s why they wanted to get me. I really don’t know. They could’ve had me a lot of times before. They knew it, and
I knew it too. We rode around with our high beams on, three buses and trucks, and we might as well have had a flashing light
on top of the whole convoy letting the entire world know: We do drugs. We take drugs. We’ll buy all the drugs you have. We
don’t sell drugs, but we sure do eat ’em. It was obvious.

I don’t think they wanted to bust me, at least in Nashville. Finally, on August 24, 1977, I guess they decided they had to.

Elvis had died a week and a half before. It hardly affected me any.

I didn’t think, Here was somebody who died from drugs, and I’m going to die, too. I never connected the two. But I still found
it hard to believe he was gone. He was like a force of nature you thought would be there forever.

I knew he was sick. Felton Jarvis had told me one time that he had some real things wrong with him, in his intestines. That’s
why he was gaining all that weight. Supposedly, his stomach was twice as big as anybody else’s. I didn’t know anything else.

We had met formally only a couple of times, mostly in Las Vegas at the tail end of the sixties. RCA invited me to see his
show, and he asked me back to visit him. He knew who I was; he called me Hillbilly.

I had a wristband on my arm because I had slipped on the pavement playing Run Around the Car with one of the Kimberlys’ little
kids, and I had fractured it. They had given me pain pills, but the original cast had turned the wrist in such an odd way
that it still hurt all the time. I was on my way to L.A. when I had the bright idea of getting a leather wristband made that
would hold the arm tight and keep the elbow from moving. I cut the cast off and threw it out the window, and went into the
first leather shop I saw. I’ve been doctoring myself all my life.

To make it look like something, I had a metal peace sign put in the middle of it. Elvis really liked that wristband; I think
he wanted it. He kept admiring it—“You hillbillies sure know how to dress”—and calling attention to it, though I wound up
keeping it. We talked for a while, but I didn’t hang around much.

A couple of months later, I was booked for three weeks in the main room of the Landmark, and he was across at the Hilton.
I was playing blackjack about two in the morning when the hotel security came and got me. They told me Elvis had heard I was
downstairs and wanted me to come up. He was having a party.

That night, I saw a side of him that was really strange. He had not progressed very much from when he was eighteen; he was
still like a little boy, in so many ways. All he did was play, like a kid, and sing. Hidden from the world, he cared more
for touch football than his movies. When he’d talk to you, the things that really seemed to matter to him were his badges,
and his Man of the Year certificates. He showed me his toys and his trophies.

One of them was Priscilla, his wife. She came up while we were talking and sat on the arm of his chair. She put her arm around
him. I was sitting across the coffee table from him. They might have been fighting, but suddenly, he swung around at her and
elbowed her right in the side. Hard. She looked hurt. He turned to me and gave me a crooked grin, like I would really be impressed
with that.

He could be very possessive. We both had been messing around with this girl who was a hairdresser. He didn’t like the idea.
One night, he wanted me to come over and play canasta with him. James Burton, his guitarist and one of my hero guitar players,
told me, “I know what he wants to do. He’s wanting to find out whether you’re screwing that girl, too.”

Everyone around him had to run the gauntlet. He threw darts at one of his friend’s shins, because he was mad at him. Elvis
made him stand there. They talk about him giving away Cadillacs, but I imagine a Cadillac would be earned after a few months
with him.

There was never any mention of drugs between us. He kept that really well hidden. Red West may have been one of the best friends
he ever had, and Sonny West, because they cared about him, watched over him, trying to keep him alive and not letting people
know about his habit.

A lot of people like to say he was secretly sad, but I don’t believe that. If anything, I don’t think he was deep enough inside.
He was having fun until the last minute. He loved being Elvis, the mystique of bodyguards, and girls screaming, and being
adored. Elvis may have been the most beautiful man in the world. His face was carved like a stone, chiseled out of rock; he
was just that good looking, and his voice was unbelievable.

He was a phenomenon, and he arrived fully formed. From the first notes of “That’s Alright Mama,” as otherworldly as they were,
he never improved, or even developed. He hardly changed from start to finish, and Colonel Tom Parker didn’t help. I think
a monkey could’ve managed Elvis, and maybe done a better job. Anybody that takes fifty percent of your income and then lets
Elvis call the IRS and ask how much he owes them isn’t doing his job. Those movies he made were just for money. Colonel Tom
wanted to manage me once but said I was uncontrollable. He was probably right.

Felton, at RCA, really cared about Elvis. He had produced “Suspicious Minds,” which may be the best record Elvis ever cut,
and one time he called me up to see if I could help. “He likes you,” Felton said to me. “Do you think you could get him interested
in music again?” I told him I didn’t know, and that the only way you could find out was by getting all those yes people away
from him and letting him go somewhere and hang out and play music. He might get interested, because I truly believed Elvis
loved to sing.

But it was too easy to get caught up in the parties, the fancy cars, and the girls. I had a little of that in me, too. It’s
not that I was trying to show off, but I did reward myself every once in a while. At the end of the day, though, I cared more
for the guitar I was playing and the song I was writing.

Elvis had changed the world, and now he was gone. Maybe he didn’t have as much impact on me as Hank Williams or George Jones
or Buddy, but most of us marked time Before Elvis and After Elvis.

He did one of my songs once, “Just Because You Asked Me To,” imitating my voice. After he died, RCA wanted to put out a duet
album with artists who had worked with Elvis, and asked me to sing along on his finished track. I couldn’t handle that.

“Call Elvis,” I told them. “If it’s okay with Elvis, it’s okay with me.”

I was going overdrive, feeling invulnerable. If I wasn’t on tour, I’d be in the studio. I went to the office and would stay
there. I couldn’t go home, because Jessi was asleep, like normal people.

I leased the studio next door to the office, American Sound, and I would stay in it all the time, walking back and forth between
the adjoining buildings, all night long. All week long. I would record constantly, until I flopped over in the corner and
went to sleep.

In early August, we had gone to Muscle Shoals Studios in Alabama to lay down rhythm tracks for a Hank Williams Jr. album I
was producing with Richie.

Hank Jr. has always been to me like my little brother. Even then, I felt responsible to him in some way. When I first met
him, Audrey would not let him out of her sight. He was about eighteen, and when I worked opening his shows, along with Merles
like Haggard or Kilgore, she didn’t trust him with anybody but me. She let him ride on my bus.

Audrey didn’t want him messing with girls. Of course, she didn’t know we were getting him women and bringing them back to
the hotel. When he had his accident, falling off the side of a mountain, I didn’t see him for a long time. He almost died,
and when he came around again, I didn’t recognize him. There was somebody smarting off in the corner of the dressing room
one night, and when I told him he was about to get his ass thrown out, he said, “You don’t know me, do you?” It was Hank Jr.

I took him with me on the road and treated him like a king. I think he was feeling a little alone in the world, then, living
in his daddy’s shadow. He would get out there and the crowd would start yelling for him to sing one of his daddy’s songs.
But I told him, “Hank, just do what you want to do. If you feel like singing one of your daddy’s songs, sing it. If you don’t,
sing something else. Don’t give ’em a chance to tell you how to perform.”

Hank Jr. is one of the best blues singers in the world, and on a good night, he can make his daddy look like a sharecropper.
He’s his own man, and I think I helped him come to terms with that. In 1978, we turned on the microphones and recorded “The
Conversation”—“We won’t talk about the habits /Just the music and the man”—which helped us both take a fond look back at the
Hank Sr. who rode that thin line between “crazy” and “a saint,” making him still “the most wanted outlaw in the land.” When
we got through, it said things about his daddy he had never thought about, especially concerning the relationship between
his mom and dad. They loved each other too much, Hank Sr. and Miss Audrey, and basically destroyed each other completely;
but there ain’t a damn thing Hank could have done to change it.

“Don’t let anybody say anything bad about your momma and daddy,” I told him. Hank Jr. never said a word, but I know it sunk
in.

Hank used to call me Watashi, which means “old number one” in Japanese. I called him Bocephus. Hank Jr.’s
New South
album was a testament to our friendship and was going along very well in that late summer of 1977. From Muscle Shoals, we
moved the session up to Nashville and Chips Moman’s American Sound for the overdubs. On Wednesday night, the twenty-fourth,
Hank had just finished his vocal on a song Jessi wrote, “Storms Never Last,” and I was about to add a harmony.

Two girls from my office opened the door to the control room and came in. One of them handed me a package from Neil’s office,
sent via World Courier, Inc.

I had an inkling what it might be. I stuck the package under my arm and walked out into the studio area, setting the package
down on a music stand in front of my microphone. I opened the wrapping. Inside, I found a second package. I cracked that open
and took a quick peek, long enough to assure myself that it contained packs of cocaine. I put it on the music stand and tucked
my headphones back over my ears.