Waylon (40 page)

Live, the more things got insane around us, the more focused was the playing on stage. It was a great band we had then; everybody
took a verse on “The Weight” except Richie and Mooney, who didn’t sing. We’d tape each night with a cassette recorder, and
every evening, as the seventies went through their final spin, the whole band would sit on the bus and listen back to the
show. That’s how different it sounded, how much everybody enjoyed their chance to play music, night after night, and cared
about what they were doing.

The band could do just about anything. It didn’t matter what the tune was. It just seemed like somebody would grab a hold
of it and go. Get it started in one direction, and then change direction, zigging and zagging.

Mooney was at the heart of it. He was a cult legend in his own right, a steel-guitar genius, and he was in his heyday. When
I played in England and introduced the band, Mooney got a bigger hand than me. He could be cantankerous, but he had a touch
on his instrument that went beyond steel decorations. If you weren’t in the pocket for him when he took his ride, you would
be by the time he came out the other side. If it was early in the show, and things hadn’t quite found their groove yet, he
had the unique ability to put it there, pumping the pedals and stroking his bar across the strings.

Mooney was a few years older than the average Waylor, but he’d put the time to good use. He’d been born in Oklahoma and caught
the steel fever from listening to greats like Leon McAuliffe and Noel Boggs. Moving to California, he grew up on nonpedal
steels, shifted to Sho-Bud when they began adding pedals and knee levers, and over the years had backed everybody from Wynn
Stewart to Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. He was probably best known for writing Ray Price’s “Crazy Arms,” which he penned
after Mrs. “Moon” left him in 1950, while they were living in Las Vegas and he was getting “crawling, falling down” drunk.
She came back when she heard the song.

If Ralph was shy when he was sober, he could be a holy terror when he got near the bottle. He knew how much I respected him,
though, and I gave him a lot of room to play around the melody. The whole band had that freedom—Richie and Jigger, Rance on
rhythm and Gordon on lead, Carter and Barney Robertson—and we were tight as a drum and loose at the same time. Richie, with
me almost twenty years at this point, would lean back on his drum stool like Levon Helm from The Band, and Gordon’s guitar
was J.J. Cale swampy. Carter had a beautiful voice, and she sang backup harmonies with me; Barney played rattler piano. The
Robertsons weren’t into the drugs; they tolerated the rest of us, I think.

As the seventies closed, Richie moved formally into producing me. He’d learned his lessons well, and both
What Goes Around Comes Around
and
Music Man
were bookends of my music in overdrive. Virtually identical in cover look and personnel, the two albums revolved around his
resolute bass drum, while the guitars swirled, traded licks, and I rode the rhythm section like a palomino. We all knew we
were skating along the edge. You couldn’t look down or slow up, ’cause you might fall off. You just had to go faster. On Rodney
Crowell’s aptlytitled “I Ain’t Living Long Like This,” we burned through the am-I-baby’s and the wheels-go-round like there
was no tomorrow.

These Waylors could have stood on their own. In fact, whenever I disappeared from a session, Richie cut most of an album on
them. But when one of the members came to me and wondered when he was going to get equal billing, I had to draw the line.
“Sorry, son,” I shrugged. “I’m gonna tell you something you might not realize.

“I’m all you got.” I put my arm around his shoulders. “Tomorrow, if you leave, they’re going to say ’Where’d he go?’ And I’m
gonna say, ’Well, he ain’t here no more,’ and they’ll say ’Damn, we’re going to miss him.’ But they’re still going to be out
there, waiting for me to come around and count off the set. It don’t work the other way. That may sound awful and conceited,
and maybe it ain’t fair, but it’s true.”

It was a great show production-wise, and quite a caravan. We carried our own sound and lights in a Mack truck, and there were
two or three buses. There was even a separate bus for T-shirts, which were sold by another Angel traveling with us from the
Oakland chapter, Rick Talbot. He had several girls that came along to help him sell them, and what have you. Rick could hoot
up a storm when he set his mind to it; he was the funniest guy and could keep you in stitches. One night he was out in a freezing
rain, running all around, drinking from a gallon bottle of Blue Nun. As he went to get on the bus, he missed the door and
fell in the wet. A few minutes later he tried to get up, but he was frozen to the ground, still laughing away. They had to
pry him loose.

The more raunchy I got, the better the crowds liked it. I didn’t talk at all. I didn’t say anything; I didn’t have anything
to say. I just came out and started playing, and when I got through I said “Bye.”

Out and back in, that’s the way I liked it. You form a circle with your audience. Even in my stupor, I was always in tune
with their moods. I could tell you what tempo songs to do next, or how they should feel. I couldn’t tell you which one, but
I knew, if I was in tune, and they were tuned in to me, I could move ’em around. I could pull their chain with “Bob Wills”
or “Hank” anytime. These were country music fans, even though they acted like rock and rollers. Which is why “I’ve Always
Been Crazy” was such a big hit live. On a good night, and it seemed like they just kept getting better, I could take the crowd
with me for a ride. I like to drive.

Our crew had come over from rock and roll stages. They were used to Loud. You could put a match out if you held it next to
Richie’s monitor mix. We were playing auditoriums, arenas, football fields. Deakon formed a production company, Charlie Magoo
Productions, and booked me and Willie together at Spartan Arena in San Jose, California. Delbert McClinton and Jessi opened
the show, and there were as many people backstage as there were out front. The Hell’s Angels had the run of the place. I broke
a tooth before I went on and did my whole show with it cracked straight up. I almost reached in there and pulled that sonofabitch
out. Willie said, “If you decide to do it, be sure and tell the audience.” I have never understood what that meant.

We did it on percentage, splitting the take three ways. It was the first time Willie and I had played together for a while,
and we each took home $150,000, which is still the most money I ever made for one performance.

As much as we were making, though, it seemed like it was costing more and more to keep the show on the road. Even discounting
the six-figure sums I was spending on cocaine, the tours were running well in the red. People were hanging out and getting
paid for it. We had close to fifty bodies on our payroll, and I wasn’t sure what any of them were doing. There were twenty
people more than we needed on the crew. If I saw somebody twice in a week, I’d ask Richie, “Are they working for us?”

My records were selling faster than they could manufacture them. The shows were sold out. We were doing it on our own. Everybody
else just tried to keep up.

Including us.

For every million dollars I was taking in, I was spending double. I was going broke when I was the hottest thing in the country.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but there was a hole somewhere. The money was pouring down.

One day in the spring of 1981, my friend Bill Robinson, Richie, and I sat around at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in L.A. looking
at a pile of papers strewn about the floor. My cash flow had dried up. I owed more than two million dollars. The bank had
stopped my account because I was $860,000 overdrawn.

I always thought that if you make money, money will take care of itself. Willie was a lot like that, too. We didn’t want to
know about the business. All of a sudden, I was broke. This Outlaw “bit” was not only gettin’ out of hand. It was out of pocket.

The first country album to ship gold may have been
I’ve Always Been Crazy;
but I’m not stupid. It was time, once again, to stop and start over.

E
verybody whose wife is going to have a baby, raise their hand,” I asked the crowd from the stage of Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa,
Oklahoma.

I raised mine.

Terry, my eldest son, was working for me, and he just about fell over. The audience cheered. I could hardly start the next
song I was so happy. I had talked over the phone with Jessi before I went on for the show, and the doctor had confirmed what
we had suspected. She was pregnant.

Cain’s is an old western swing honky-tonk graced with pictures of Bob Wills and Spade Cooley on the wall. It’s been there
for decades. My blood was probably racing from the excitement; we had thought about a child of our own for so long.

That night the stage lights seemed even brighter than usual. They had me blinded. I was high. The stage was tilting; I couldn’t
see anything, and I was starting to fall. I looked out at the room, and focused on a long column that stretched up from the
floor to the ceiling, locking it with my eyes, using it to regain my balance.

That was the night I learned about centerposts. You’ve got to have one, something to measure yourself against and grab hold
of whenever you feel life is swinging out of control. If you don’t have one, you’ll fall. Musically, Hank Williams was my
centerpost. It’s always gone back to him, the one who did everything wrong and everything right.

As for living, I realized at that moment that my centerpost was Jessi. I was not complete when I wasn’t around her.

Someone to relate to. That’s part of our being, and what better relation than a child?

Jessi spiritually prepared in her heart that she would be ready when there came time to have a baby. It was part of a commitment
we had made to each other, to be somebody each of us could believe in, no matter what came to pass.

The baby was planned down to the night that we conceived. We both knew we needed to, if we were going to; we heard the clock
ticking. I had just passed forty, and Jessi was close enough. I think she had kept waiting for me to come out of the drugs,
and when she saw I wasn’t nearly ready to give it up, we both knew what the deal was. We took a chance.

That chance took us to Nashville Baptist Hospital in the early morning hours of Saturday, May 19, 1979. June Carter Cash had
come down to keep us company. John was on his way. We were playing spades, laying out the cards on Jessi’s stomach.

I hadn’t been in the delivery room when any of my other kids were born. It wasn’t done that way in West Texas. They didn’t
want any of those big tough cowboys to faint away watching their wives give birth.

It wasn’t any different for me, though times had changed. “You need to go in there,” the doctors said, but the closer the
contractions came, the more I thought I could better occupy myself going out to get some cigarettes.

I looked at Jessi. You could almost feel the energy moving through her, caught in some elemental force of nature. It was like
she had a whole sandstorm boiling up inside her.

“Is there any way I can talk you out of this?” I asked.

She smiled and shook her head no. We were as totally together as man and woman could be.

“I’ll go with you.” I put on the hospital garb and sat there with her in the delivery room, holding her hand.

An intern came in. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen, and he was beside himself. “John’s here,” he blurted. “John wants
you to know he’s here.”

Jessi nodded that was okay.

“Mr. Cash is outside,” he repeated. “Johnny Cash is out there.”

Jessi rolled her what-happened-to blue eyes. She said, “Would somebody give this boy a quarter so he can go call somebody
who gives a shit, ’cause I’m trying to have a baby here.”

Men can never really relate to being pregnant, giving birth. All I could do was listen to the heartbeat and feel the kick.
The baby was attached to her body by the cord, part of her being as well as the child it was becoming. The room took on a
rhythm of its own. All those heartbeats.

We didn’t know what the baby would be, boy or girl; we weren’t sure till the last minute. There had been a little redheaded
boy that Jessi saw in church. He was all over everything, pure boy spirit, and just the cutest kid. His real name was Shooter.

They put the baby on Jessi’s stomach, right where the ace of spades had been dealt not ten hours earlier. He was hollering.

Jessi looked over at him. She was glistening. I felt lightheaded. “We got us a Shooter,” she declared, as Waylon Albright
Jennings promptly peed all over the nurses.

“Do you want to go bankrupt?”

Bill Robinson stood up, shrugged his shoulders, and spread his hands. Richie looked forlorn. There wasn’t much any of us could
do. The figures didn’t lie. I was swimming in red ink and about to go down for the third time.