Waylon (45 page)

It had nothing to do with how well I knew them. I called everybody and said, “If you’re going to be around me, you can’t do
drugs.” That was it. If they had to do drugs, they would have to find somewhere else to do them. It worked the other way,
too. When I quit drugs, the guy who sold them to me stopped dealing. He may have been an angel in disguise, because I could
always rely on him to get me cocaine that was pure and hadn’t been stepped on. He kicked the habit, and I got him a job. He
and his family are doing great now.

I got out right before crack, for which I’ve always been thankful. I’d put cocaine on the end of cigarettes and smoked it,
but my only experience with freebasing made me know it wasn’t for me.

A lawyer friend came to a show one time, about three or four years before I quit, and said he had found the most wonderful
high on earth. He set up the pipe and we smoked the crack. Within a minute I had a feeling come over me that if I jumped out
a window, it would be fine. I could fly. Or if somebody made me mad enough, I could kill them and it would be okay.

I got out of the chair and sat in the corner. I had enough presence of mind to know that I was in trouble, that I was not
in control anymore. I hated that. While I sat there, waiting for the drug to wear off, I had the worst thoughts I ever had
in my life, hateful and spiteful and mean. I wanted to bust everybody’s head in the room.

There was something unholy about it. When the lawyer came up and asked how I liked it, I told him he better get his ass away
from crack. It was poison, pure and simple.

Later on, when Richard Pryor had burned himself freebasing, I remembered that experience. We had known each other for a while,
and our mutual friend, Jennifer Lee, had called me with the news. She was distraught, and I was trying to think of something
comforting to tell her. Finally, I said, “Look, they’re going to have to do a lot of skin grafting. If they need extra skin,
I’ll donate some.”

It wasn’t until I got off the phone that Basil MacDavid turned to me and said, “What do you think they’re going to do? Call
him Spot?”

I was lucky that my drug use only went so far. I knew a beautiful little girl once, and after talking with her for a while,
she excused herself and disappeared into the next room. When she didn’t return I went looking for her. She was sitting at
the kitchen table with a needle in her arm. She had just shot up, and the look on that perfect face was so sickening, I couldn’t
bear to be in the same room. I left. I could never handle that.

Every once in a while, to this day, I’ll run into one of my hidden stashes, a vial tucked in the corner of an old suitcase
or an inch of cocaine buried in the bottom of a boot bag. Even now, my first instinct is to pick up a straw and snort it.
The temptation doesn’t go away.

When it comes, I don’t try to ignore it or get mad at myself for thinking it. I’ll say, “Man, it would be great to get high
just once.” I move across the room. “Damn, I wish I had some cocaine.” Jessi’s heard me say it any number of times. She knows
what I’m doing. It’s on my mind, and I’m spitting it out instead of holding it deep inside, where the craving might have a
chance to take root. It lasts thirty seconds. Then I go on with my life.

I was sitting with Shooter in a restaurant booth. He was on the inside, and he got his coloring book out. He was all of five
years old.

He put his left arm through my right, and we sat there for about an hour while he colored. Shooter hadn’t ever done that before.
I’d never been able to sit so still for so long with him.

I wasn’t about to move my arm.

I
t wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.

It took me eight years to find my way back from drugs, to rediscover the creative tension in my music, the sweet spot balanced
between rhythm and melody where the song generates its own momentum and all you can do is express it.

Eight years, to be able to write a song. Eight years, to be on stage and not feel like I was boring people sick. Eight years,
to figure out who I was again. To get over it.

Eight long years. That’s not to say the work I did during that time didn’t have any value. I made some good, decent records
and always sang from the heart. I hit better notes now that I wasn’t plagued by “laryngitis.” I played on the beat, instead
of ahead of it. Probably only I noticed that instead of pushing myself, I was being pulled along by my own legend and the
skills I’d learned in a lifetime of performing.

Jimmy Bowen did as much for me as anybody, because he knew what I was going through. I had spent two decades on RCA and gone
from being the new kid on the block to a grizzled war vet with a raft of ribbons and medals. My discography needed a book
to keep straight, and I’d outlasted most executive regimes, an array of studios, and a whole generation of pressing plants.

Sometimes history works against you. Carrying the burden of my past into each new release, it seemed like I wasn’t hearing
anything new. Neither was RCA, and they’d been accustomed to larger-than-life success. When my records started selling more
steadily, and less explosively, taking their time in the marketplace, they weren’t willing to look at me the same as they
might a newer artist. We had peaked.

The song “America” was my farewell anthem for RCA. I had found the original version on a Sammy Johns album in 1975 when he
hit with “Chevy Van.” You couldn’t find the melody in it, though I loved what the words said. It was the time of the U.S.
Olympics in 1984. I’ve always thought that Ronald Reagan didn’t do everything right, but he did give some pride back to the
country; we were apologizing for being great. I got inspired by that Olympics and wanted to write a patriotic song.

Everything I had was too corny and didn’t sound right. Then I remembered that song from nine years before. It wasn’t just
flag waving. It was talking about the ideals we had fought for and the blunders committed in their name, and the honor that
lay behind our national character. In the decade since it had been written, we had “let them come home” from Vietnam, where
it had once been “You should let ’em come home.” I always thought those who went to Canada got a really bad rap. I’d have
sent my boy there, too, instead of that uncalled-for place.

“They’re all black and white and yellow too / and the Red man is right, to expect a little from you / A promise and then follow
through.” I found the song again and listened to it with a decade’s distance. I changed the melody, and Jigger produced it.
I even made a video to go with it, a forerunner of the way music would be watched as well as listened to from then on.

When my contract came up for renewal in July of 1985, I didn’t resign with RCA. It was no longer a delivery of masters in
their eyes. The contract had words like “mutual consent,” which translated into more partnership, less money. We were just
too familiar with each other. I passed on it.

Promises work both ways. If I’d thought RCA would have revved their engines in return for having some say-so in my records,
I might never have headed off to non-Nipper pastures. But I knew it was time to try something fresh. I didn’t have the strength
to do it on my own, and if I was going to work with someone, I wanted to have faith in where we were heading and know it would
be a clean start.

And sober. It was a new me, and I was learning to live with him. Bowen, at MCA, offered me the chance to take another run
at it. I signed with him in September. Jimmy never gave anyone creative control or artistic freedom. When the lawyers started
talking, they said he wouldn’t do it, and I wasn’t going to sign without it. Everyone broke the negotiations off.

Bowen finally asked one day how the contracts with Waylon were going, and they said, well, it’s not going to happen. He said,
“Are you kidding? Give him what he wants. He’ll just take it anyway.”

That’s when I knew he was my man. And I gave him all the freedom he wanted. Him and Don Was are two of the most fun, and trusting,
producers I know. And the most trustworthy. You can let them have the reins and rely on where they’ll take you.

I always want control. I want it in writing. And then I’ll give it to who I damn please.

Jimmy Bowen and I traveled back in time together just about as far as we could go. His Rhythm Orchids, who he shared with
Buddy Knox, had come out of Dumas, Texas, about two hundred miles north of Lubbock, in 1956. Jimmy was a disc jockey on K-triple-D
up there, and played bass for the Orchids. They’d recorded “Party Doll” at Norman Petty’s studio, and released it on their
own Jewel label. It became a West Texas hit, and Roulette picked it up for national release. The night before they were to
get on a plane and go up to New York, I booked them in Littlefield. We had a battle of the bands, my band against their band,
and that’s the first time I saw Jimmy. The next thing I knew he was in the Top Ten with “I’m Sticking with You” while Buddy
Knox was riding next to him with “Party Doll.” They were stars before Buddy Holly, and certainly inspired the Crickets to
make the trek to Clovis.

On the tour after Buddy had been killed, we were up in Minneapolis and I saw a guy come through the door with the most beautiful
woman on his arm. I had never seen anything that clean and “purty.” It was Jimmy, and he looked like a matinee idol; he had
a tie on and everything.

He approached country music with the same sense of sharp-creased style, learning everything there was to know about it, sitting
behind the mixing board like it was the cockpit of a 747. By the time he got to Hillbilly Central, ah, Glaser Sound Studios,
working with Hank Williams Jr., Mel Tillis, Jimmie “Honeycomb” Rodgers, and the Glasers themselves, he had some of the smartest
ears in the business. Jimmy wasn’t a welcome sight in Nashville for a long time, but he helped turn that town into a great
recording center. They would’ve stayed in the Stone Age of music if not for Bowen. He said, we’re going to cut records that
compare with what we hear on rock and pop stations, using the latest technology. He knew that if you’re going to be in the
business end of music, you’ve got to compete, and he expected a dollar’s worth of work out of everybody. A lot of people didn’t
like Jimmy, but most were jealous of him.

After I signed with MCA, we gave it our best shot, through a couple of albums. I tried to keep an open mind about Jimmy’s
way of doing things, and for his part, he let me try anything I wanted to. He was very devoted to me and wanted me to succeed.
The thing was, he knew I couldn’t do it right then. He knew I was off balance.

Will the Wolf Survive?
A good question, and not a ready answer.

It was the first time in years I’d recorded without my band, except for Jerry Bridges holding down the bass. I didn’t play
guitar on the sessions; I was “the vocalist.” Nor did I write any of the songs. Jimmy picked most of them, and he had a good
ear, from the Los Lobos title song to Steve Earle’s The Devil’s Right Hand.” We recorded digitally in Nashville, at Sound
Stage; it was a new age of technology, proclaimed on the album’s front, though the record was still released on analog viny1.

Compared with some of my earlier works, it might not have fit people’s expectations of me. That was the point. Bowen kept
talking about the “new Waylon Jennings,” who was off the drugs, who had a new outlook on life. He wanted to get away from
“what I had done,” which was the heavy undercurrent of rhythm and the bad-ass vocal style. Put on a late-seventies track like
“Clyde,” and you could hear the bottom foot thumping away, voice up close and in your face, growling out the lyrics. I had
already done that, and he hoped I could stretch out. I hadn’t progressed any, which was a little bit of laziness on my part.

I look back now and see what he was talking about. He would work with me until the morning came helping me find it. If I wasn’t
happy, he’d stay there through the next day. Jimmy never walk on me, and I appreciated that. But I had lost the thread. I
was trying to sound like what I thought he wanted me to sound like instead of me. I’d think, What the hell, I sang that good,
and in the end, I was imitating myself, trying too hard to satisfy people who thought I had ruined my music by straightening
up. Bowen knew that.

It was all down to me. Jimmy tried his level best, making my recording sessions like an event. Everything was in place—a great
studio and players, excellent songs, people who cared—but I couldn’t rise to the occasion.

On
Will the Wolf Survive?
And its follow-up,
Hangin’ Tough
, it was like I was off in a corner of a separate room, clouded by delay, distanced I wasn’t leading the band. I was trying
to get my feet back on the ground, and that took as much concentration assinging. Though I was off drugs, I was still smoking
heavily, and my voice showed the wear and tear.

You lose all confidence when you come off drugs. It may have been artificial energy, but when I was high, I wasn’t afraid
to try things. I’d get to where I couldn’t be still, on top of the beat, just weavin’ and rockin’, and I would come up with
some of the most outrageous ideas. I was uninhibited.