Waylon (41 page)

Authors: Waylon Jennings,Lenny Kaye

BOOK: Waylon

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“You’re broke,” he said, laying it on the bottom line for me. “Everything you’ve got is in hock: your buildings, your home.
The bank has closed your accounts. You’ve spent your advances.”

The worst thing was that I had been giving it away. So much money was flowing through my office that I never bothered to count
it. And after a while, nobody else did either, except to take out their share. There were a lot of shares.

We had seventeen people in the Nashville office alone. There was a road manager, a band manager, a publicist, a secretary,
a booking agent, a receptionist, gofers, and personal assistants all around. The assistants had assistants, and everyone was
“on staff.” Marylou Hyatt, who came into my organization in April of 1977, answering a want ad for a “Booking Agent Assistant,”
told me one time that I had someone who opened the door and another who closed it.

On the road, we put the
tour
in entourage. It was controlled chaos. There were separate crews for the lights and sound, production managers, roadies for
the musical equipment, and trucks and buses to haul the caravan from town to town. We were pulling huge audiences—11,000 in
Minneapolis, 14,000 in Colorado’s Red Rocks—and the fact that we had a constant cast of characters gave a certain stability
to the crap-shoot conditions we’d find awaiting us at each gig.

Of course, I didn’t know what was out there, because I never got off the bus. Take a shower up in the hotel and then come
back downstairs. Wait for the show. Killing time.

I’d see Bill Robinson backstage on my way from the bus to the microphone, standing in the wings by the curtains, when I’d
work on the West Coast. He was tall and gainly, with a shock of black hair. He never said anything to me, and after a couple
of times, I began to recognize him. Finally, I walked over one night and said, “What do you do? Have you got a job?” Maybe
I’d hired him already.