Waylon (39 page)

It lost me a cover of
Rolling Stone.
Chet Flippo had written the article, but when I asked for prior approval, they didn’t give it. I don’t blame them now, and
had I known what
Rolling Stone
stood for, I might have relented. But once I draw a line in the sand, nobody crosses over. Sorry. They weren’t going to get
me no more.

Paranoia was an occupational hazard. I knew they were watching me, and I was watching everyone around me. I installed closed-circuit
television cameras in the halls so I could see who was coming and going. I had a private outside entrance and a buzzer to
open the door from upstairs. I stationed my band manager, John Ullrich, at the window with a pair of binoculars to track a
car circling the block looking for a parking place. I was mostly fooling, but I only laughed every other time. “Chief,” he’d
say after a night on sentry duty, unshaven, black rubber from the binoculars around his eyes like a raccoon. “There’s a Volkswagen
that’s been going around this block all night long, and it’s changed license plates four times.”

I’d found out the hard way you could go to prison for cocaine. You couldn’t be roaming around with a big bunch of it on your
body. Carry pills in your pocket and they wouldn’t even know what they were; you didn’t have to re-up your high every half
hour or face crashing. That didn’t mean I couldn’t do some very stupid things. One time I went all the way to Bucksnort, Tennessee,
about thirty-five miles outside of Nashville, and I gave a check for some cocaine. I was so messed up, I didn’t even know
where I was at when I was out there.

Only my closest friends were allowed in the inner sanctum. I’d sit with other drug guys and do drugs together. I usually furnished
them. We’d talk and listen to tapes. I found some songs on demos that were so bad you couldn’t even tell there was a tune;
or I’d string together songs from different records and make up a tape of my favorite stuff. Tapes of tapes of tapes.

Jessi would come up and spend time with me, staying in the office, not doing anything much. I wrote a song called “Gemini
Twins” with her in the room once, and I got into that drifting-off space thing. I wouldn’t let her talk for about three or
four hours, because I couldn’t get the last two lines right. She just sat there. What a dear heart.

We played games, poker and backgammon and bumper pool and board baseball and spades. We would go from the office right to
the bus and keep playing the entire way to the show. Richie remembers we started a game of spades in Nashville and then set
out for Fort Worth, dealing cards all the while. When we got to Texas, after about twelve hours, we stayed in the bus another
three or four hours snorting and spading. His hand was so gripped up from clenching the cards that he had to soak it in hot
water, because he didn’t think he’d be able to hold the stick for the show.

Gambling. It was a way to pass the time, to keep your nerves on edge as you moved through those long blank spaces between
towns, the twenty-two hours a day spent in limbo waiting for two hours of show to begin.

When we invented Farkle, a dice game with its own inner rhythm, our gambling moved into high gear. Those pots would get pretty
damn big; you could lose a lot of money. We liked to bet; we’d lay odds on the monkey screwing the football. Anything. Jerry
Allison, when the Crickets toured with us, played a lot, and so did Tony Joe White. We never really kept track of who owed
what. It was more for the excitement, like craps, with people standing around hollering and egging each other on.

Farkle was related to a game they play in bars to buy drinks, called Horses. Rance Wasson and Gordon Payne, a pair of my guitar
players, helped me come up with it. You rolled the dice in a cup and it was scored by three of a kind. You used five dice
in all, four of the normal white variety and the fifth black, with my Flying W symbol in the four position as a wild card.

Three 6s equalled 600. Three 5s equalled 500, though three Is equalled 1000. Four of anything was still counted as a three,
though if you got five of a kind, you won right there and then. The object was to build on your score and be the first to
reach 2500. There were all sorts of choices you could make along the way, strategies and subrules about which dice to roll
again and how to add up your point total, though if you rolled and didn’t get any dice in common, you lost the points you
had and were out of the game. That was called Farkling.

Up on the wall of my office is a photo of the Farkle gang. There was Richie and Jerry “Jigger” Bridges, my bass player who
had joined the Waylors in November of 1978 from the Muscle Shoals studio. There was Marylou Hyatt, who ran my office. There
was Lisa Lightning, Randy Bob, Judy, and Crank, which was what we called Gordon. The first time he had gone out on the road
with us, the Hell’s Angels had gotten him all twisted up on crank, a speed derivative. He was trying to light his cigarette
with a motel key, and smelling a fire hydrant, thinking it was a flower.

Deakon Proudfoot and Boomer Baker were also in the photo, on loan to us from the Angels’ Oakland chapter. They were the best
security I ever had. They could slice through a crowd without touching anybody, me following along in their wake, and were
as loyal as they could be, second only to their motorcycle blood-brethren.

I was playing at the Boarding House in San Francisco when I met them. Deakon came up, and the first thing he said was “Waylon,
I don’t know what you’ve heard and I don’t care. I love America and I’m an American. I don’t like a lot of things that are
happening, but I like your music,” and he sat down. From that day on, we were friends.

They appreciated the Outlaw element, and that my give-a-shitter was broke. We were alike in a lot of ways; they knew I was
pretty well strung out, too. They kept trouble from happening. The word went out that you don’t start fights at a Waylon Jennings
concert, or it might be “ball peen hammer time.” Boomer was always smiling, gold teeth and all, though nobody fucked with
him because you didn’t want to get on his bad side. We all contributed pieces of gold to his teeth. He was Jessi’s security,
and he worshipped her. They’re still good friends.

Deakon was the preacher, and he could dance, despite the fact that he’d had some of his toes cut off in a motorcycle accident.
He weighed almost three hundred pounds, and nobody was more nimble on his feet. When a girl rushed the stage once, aiming
straight for me, he grabbed her and started waltzing her around, slowly turning and pirouetting her off to the wings.

He would’ve gone to the wall for me. I knew that because he allowed me to argue with him. Something would happen with the
Farkle, and he’d grab half the dice and I’d grab the other and we’d stare and glare at each other. Deakon would stick his
bottom lip out, like a kid. We’d call each other names. Other people that got in their face like that, the Angels would probably
push it in.

He would stick like glue to me. He didn’t want me to be alone. In those days, Jessi didn’t travel much with me, and if you
didn’t watch closely, I’d be out and gone, in all these strange towns. Deakon would follow me around, and I used to keep him
up for so long he’d be seeing double. When we finally got to a hotel room, he’d sit down in a chair and in two minutes he’d
start snoring. He’d rattle the windows he’d snore so loud. And there was a gentle thing to him as well. He made sure that
when I slept, deep and hard as I did when I was crashing, I knew where I was when I woke up. He’d shake me, and before I’d
have a chance to get curious, he’d tell me the day of the week, the city we were in and at what hotel, and tell me when and
where my show was and how long I had until showtime.

The last time I saw Deakon, he came by the house. He had a girl with him on his V-twin Harley, and he had his colors flying.
He hadn’t worn his patches on the road with me. His beard was bushy and full of gray, and we were sitting out in the back
on rocking chairs, talking after dinner. “I need to figure out how to get from here to Wyoming,” he said, and he took out
his granny glasses and started peering closely at a map. I started laughing. I wished I had a camera handy to take a picture.
“Look at you, Deakon. Ol’ macho’s getting old.” He grrrr’ed at me like a big papa bear.

I asked them one time why they were Hell’s Angels. “It’s the only family I’ve ever known,” answered Boomer. “I can depend
on them.” There’s a lot to be said for that.

It wasn’t all madness. One cold morning in 1978, I heard that Jerry Moss was leaving messages for me all over Nashville. I
went and knocked on his hotel door; I had never forgotten what gentlemen he and Herb were when I needed to get out of my A&M
contract.

Jerry wanted to speak to me about a concept album named
White Mansions
that Paul Kennerley, an Englishman, had written with my voice in mind. Paul had heard “That’s Why the Cowboy Sings the Blues”
on London radio, and it set off his imagination. The object was to tell the story of the Civil War through Southern eyes.
His hero was Matthew J. Fuller, a Confederate captain, who loved Polly Ann Stafford, a belle of the local plantation. Villainy
was provided by the redneck Caleb Stone.

It was a country-and-western opera, ambitious in scope and heavy with superstars. Eric Clapton and the Eagles’ Bernie Leadon
made appearances, John Dillon and Steve Cash (who played Caleb Stone) of the Ozark Mountain Daredevils helped construct the
music, and Jessi took the role of Polly Ann. I was cast as the Drifter, heralding the South’s impending doom through songs
like “Dixie, Now You’re Done” and “They Laid Waste to Our Land.”

We flew to England on the Concorde. I wore these elephant-ear cowboy boots that Larry Mahan, an old bull rider, had given
me. They were pretty sharp, except the right foot seemed tight. By the time we got to England, my toes had swelled up so much
I couldn’t get the boot off at all. Later, I found out that it was a half-size smaller than the other. I walked around Olympic
Studios, where we recorded
White Mansions
with producer Glyn Johns, with one boot on and one boot off.

Glyn only put two or three microphones on a drum kit; he understood the art of mike placement. He introduced me to the Boss
phase shifter for a guitar and guided the week or so that the sessions took. On the night we finished mixing, Glyn brought
over the final album to Paul’s house to listen, and we sat there as the sun came up over the British Isles, till it was time
to head back to America. The only sad note was that, unknown to Jessi, her father had passed away during the last hours of
making the record. She might have been singing “Story to Tell” at the moment of his passage, or “Last Dance,” where she’s
telling her loved one good-bye and saying that she’d do anything to keep that smile alive, to have him come back and have
that last dance together.

The South never had a chance in the Civil War. Toward the end, they didn’t have food or machinery or people. Paul told his
narrative of the War from his Englishman’s perspective, which meant he didn’t have to take sides. He understood the tragedy.
For the South, a cause that is wrong, and built on something that shouldn’t be, like slavery, can’t be noble. The North was
no better, burning their way through Georgia and waging a war based on economics and politics as well as human rights. All
they did was win. My character worked both sides of the conflict, a troubadour, more or less, and a musician who sang songs,
not necessarily good and not necessarily bad.

White Mansions
was a lovely record, and it touched me in a deeply personal way, as a man whose house is built on a Civil War battlefield
and a Southerner. Though it probably went over the heads of its intended audience, making the album was one of my most enjoyable
experiences.

There was no chance that
The Dukes of Hazzard
television show would prove too smart for its target viewers. A moonshine excuse for car chases and watching Catherine Bach’s
ass in her trademark cut-off jeans, that long-legged good-lookin’ thing, it was incredibly popular. Bo and Luke Duke’s ongoing
war with Mayor Boss Hogg and Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane provided about the only plot line needed. I was the narrator, or “The
Balladeer” as they called me, and though I never appeared onscreen, for six years, beginning in January 1979, I got to say
things like “Happy as a pig eatin’ slop” and “Meanwhile, Bo and Luke Duke, not knowing that Uncle Jessie was disguised as
a door, shot his knob off.” Down home. Yee-hah!

The idea for the series grew out of a movie called
The Moon-runners,
which in itself was a sequel to
Thunder Road,
the Robert Mitchum classic about backwoods stills and corn-likker cookin’. His son, Jim, had starred in
The Moonrunners,
and Ralph Mooney and I had done the soundtrack. CBS, looking for a
Beverly Hillbillies
crossed with
Starsky & Hutch,
called to ask if I would provide the voice-overs for
The Dukes.
My disc jockey training was about to come in handy. I learned a lot about the rhythm of words, even though the writers kept
writing things like “wuz” for “was,” as if I wouldn’t get it, and even got to bring it inside sometimes: “As welcome as a
skunk at a picnic or Waylon Jennings at a CMA banquet.”

They liked the way I sounded, so they asked me to write a theme: “Just two good ol’ boys / Never meanin’ no harm.…Been in
trouble with the law / Since the day they were born.” They thought that was good but said all it needed was something about
two modern-day Robin Hoods, fighting the system. So I wrote “Fighting the system, like two modern-day Robin Hoods,” and they
didn’t even know they wrote the damn line. It was my first million-selling single, and one of the easiest records I ever cut.
Even today, every time I look out on my driveway and see General Lee, the orange Dodge Charger they gave me with the rebel
stars and bars painted on its roof and a big 01 bull’s-eyeing the door, it makes me laugh. Great car for eluding a sheriff.