Waylon (48 page)

I went back out and talked to the crowd. “I really believe in learning,” I said. “Now I’ve got a pretty good job, but I have
never walked into an office where I didn’t feel a bit intimidated because I knew on the other side of that door there was
somebody who was educated. And I’m not.”

When I left the stage, Martha was on me like a duck on a junebug. “You’re going to get your GED,” she said. And I said I would.

I was always telling Shooter how important school was; now I was honor bound to prove it to him. It gave me a chance to really
show him what it meant to me, and in a way, what he meant to me.

“My mind is thirty years from learning mode,” I said to him one day after they sent me the books and tapes to study. My best
thing is to have somebody work with me. “You’ve got to help me.”

He was studying fractions at the time. I hadn’t thought of fractions ever, except how to divide the door at a show or Hank
Williams singing “If you love me half as much as I love you.” So we sat down and worked together. He would be my teacher.
Sometimes I’d be doing good, and he’d be so proud, and other times he watched me struggle. He made up questions to ask me
and gave me tests. We learned together, and he was thrilled to be able to teach his dad something.

By the time I took the equivalency test, I was as ready as I was going to be. I worked on it all one day, and after eight
hours, I got up and was more exhausted than I could ever remember. It wore my brain out and made me believe that anyone who
understands algebra should go to a treatment center.

Still, I passed the exam, and I got my diploma. Littlefield High School sent me a ring, class of ’89, which I’m proud to wear
on my right hand every single day, and means I’ll be attending my twenty-fifth reunion in the year 2014. If my third-grade
teacher could only see me now.

MCA was in turmoil, and they had me for two more albums. I didn’t want to be in the middle of that. Bowen and I had scored
one number-one country record with “Rose in Paradise,” and our work together had been a positive thing, but the upheavals
at the company seemed, insurmountable. That’s when I called Jimmy and asked him for a favor. To let me go.

“There’s only two things in my life,” he said to me. “One of them’s love, and the other is business. And you ain’t never been
business.”

In November of 1989, I moved over to CBS, where Epic said they would give me what I wanted: creative freedom and no “control
compositions,” which in effect penalizes you for writing your own material as an artist. Bob Montgomery was my producer, a
good songman whom I’d known peripherally in Lubbock when he was the middle-man in Buddy, Bob, and Larry.

“I’m not intimidated by you” was Bob’s favorite line to me. It was the most I got out of him. I heard that phrase so many
times I began to wonder why he was being so defensive. He was really hot to team me up with Willie. “I want Willie involved
in this,” he said almost the first day we were in the studio.

“Oh no, you don’t,” I told him. “Not in Nashville. Willie don’t give a shit about this. He’ll bring some songs he likes to
do, but he’s not into that other stuff. He could care less about the arrangements. Think of him as Sinatra. He likes to come
in and sing and leave.”

He kept on about Willie, and so did I. “The minute Willie gets here he’s gonna get on that bus, and here comes some of his
old smoking and drinking buddies and they’re going to have a good time out there. They’re all songwriters, and Willie looks
around and sees that they could be doing a bit better and maybe he should go off a bridge for them, and the next thing you
know here is Willie coming around a corner and there’ll be somebody behind him wailing and Willie will say ‘He wrote this
song and we’re going to do it.’ It’ll be a dumb fuckin’ song, and we’re stuck with it. Don’t put Willie through that and don’t
put me through that. If he wants to be here, he’ll be here. Willie’s got a big heart, and if a guy starts crying in the right
tune, he’ll do it.”

Bob eventually got his way by doing the Waylon and Willie
Clean Shirt
album, which Epic thought had too many Mexican horns. They didn’t do too much with my first album for them,
The Eagle,
either, despite “Wrong” finding its rightful spot on the charts. Jerry Gropp must have smiled down from left-hand Heaven.

One of the reasons I had originally gone with Epic was the presence of Marge Hunt. I’d known her since she was sixteen, and
we had been friends for years. I thought she was one of the people in the A&R department who would be on my side. I reunited
with Richie for the album that would become
Too Dumb for New York City,
looking to find the key to the sound we had created together in the seventies. Richie figured it started with my guitar playing,
and convinced me that Br’er Rabbit’s Hiding Place, the rhythmic thumb I use for strumming, should come out from undercover.
Suddenly, while I was in the studio, a young guy named Doug Johnson started dropping by. I didn’t know it, but he was the
new head of A&R.

He told me how much he loved my work, and I was one of his inspirations. Then he started calling Richie with suggestions.
When Richie told him, well, we’re not finished with it yet, they changed into demands.

One night Reggie Young was in the studio, and Johnson stopped by. “I hear an Eric Clapton guitar on that,” he said.

“Why don’t you put it on?” I said, sitting him down in the seat behind the mixing board and pointing him at Reggie. He sat
there. I looked over his shoulder. The air could be cut with a knife. I didn’t move until he did.

The album was beautiful, he kept assuring me, only he wanted us to keep cutting sides. Change a verse and a chorus. Remix
and remaster. I said, that’s bordering on fucking with me. By the time
Too Dumb
came out, in 1992, we were both pissed off. Epic sat on the record, big-time.

Don Was had wanted to do a record with me. When I talked to the Epic A&R department, they wanted to give me a budget of only
$150,000, just about what a new act gets. At this point, my old friend Marge Hunt said, “He ain’t worth it.”

If you can get a guy under forty years old or Waylon Jennings, you take the guy under forty. That’s what they were telling
me. Oh, yeah: Young Country. I had been Young Country once myself, and maybe Ernest Tubb and Carl Smith and Roy Acuff had
felt me nipping at their heels. But I didn’t do it at their expense. I tried to follow in their tradition and comprehend the
depth and meaning of what they were singing about. The experience.

You always need new blood. I look and listen to Travis Tritt and Leroy Parnell and Beth Nielsen Chapman and Mark Chestnutt,
and I see country’s next generation starting to grow. There ain’t no hats-and-thighs there; just intelligent artists, searching
for their dreams and singing yours.

Country is the only music I know that seems to have no age boundaries. You look out at the audience, whether it’s a boot-heel
saloon or state fair, and there’s everything from babies to grandparents, with a lot of wild folk in between. They appreciate
that you don’t have to be of any one generation to know love, loss, fireworks and playing-with-fire, and that we all need
to share a good time now and again.

Videos mean you have to be good-looking these days. I don’t know how Ernest Tubb or Hank Locklin would fare on the small screen;
they weren’t what you would call pretty. Still, every new generation picks up a little from what’s going on around them. George
Jones and I may have chosen country, while Jerry Lee Lewis, Brenda Lee, and Johnny Cash immigrated to these fair shores; but
the presence of rock and roll in our music was undeniable. Television only enhanced the glitter of Porter Wagoner, not to
mention Crook and Chase.

I didn’t mind a bunch of new mavericks on the scene. But Epic was telling me my time was over with. People don’t want to hear
you sing. Radio don’t want to play you no more.

One day I went up to their office. They asked me to call up radio stations and influence them to play my record. They put
me in a room, gave me a cup of coffee, handed me a couple of pages of phone numbers, and walked out. I sat there. There were
cutouts of everybody but me around. Marylou placed a couple of calls for me. At one, the program director wasn’t there; at
another, they put her on hold.

I thought, boy, there was a time when I wouldn’t do this. Then I thought again. What did I mean, there was a time? I ain’t
doing it now. I told Marylou, “Let’s get in the car.”

You gotta know when it’s time to leave. Don’t look back.

I wasn’t planning to record anymore. I knew I could play live for as long as I wanted; my shows still sold out, and I was
doing more than a hundred dates a year. I couldn’t possibly perform all my songs in a night anyway.

I didn’t have to write any songs, so of course I got extraordinarily prolific. The only difference was these “poems”—they
hadn’t been set to music yet—were all from the perspective of a five-year-old boy.

I had started to watch
Sesame Street
because of Shooter. I missed it the first time around, because my first kids had graduated elementary television about the
era of Captain Kangaroo. I love the way the show talks to children, and the pains that are taken to not mislead children,
and to teach them at the same time. The music is clever as well, and when I appeared on the show to sing “Wrong,” it kind
of fit naturally.

I’m proud to say that I’m a personal friend of Big Bird. Whenever I appear in the New England area, Carroll Spiney and his
wife, Debbie, come visit the show. Nobody believes he’s Big Bird, or Oscar the Grouch, until he opens his mouth. I’ve seen
little kids rooted to the spot when they realize he’s the soul of
Sesame Street.

Carroll and Debbie live in an old house that is just like a fairyland. A model train runs around the rafters, and toys are
spread everywhere. He is transformed when he puts on the yellow Big Bird costume, all eight feet tall, his hand up in the
air making the movements of the mouth and eyes, and the other moving around as the Bird’s wing. There’s a television set monitor
inside the chest, so Carroll can see what’s happening outside, though he has to do everything backward. He’s the only Big
Bird that’s ever been.

He also is the voice of Oscar the Grouch. If both he and Big Bird are onscreen, Debbie’s back there moving Oscar. He takes
great pains to make sure children don’t see him with the top of his Big Bird outfit off. He knows imagination is built on
illusion, and Big Bird isn’t anything more than a Big Kid himself.

I played a turkey farmer in the movie
Follow That Bird.
They dressed me up in overalls and a plaid shirt, put a red bandanna in my pocket and a straw hat on my head. I hate to ruin
your Thanksgiving dinner, but those gobblers are nasty creatures. I smelled like turkey for weeks.

We were sitting in the cab of a truck for one scene. I hadn’t stopped smoking yet, and Carroll hadn’t smoked for ten years,
but sitting next to me in the small truck cab, between takes, surrounded by tobacco haze, he began thinking it wouldn’t be
such a bad idea.

We were covered in flies, up north of Toronto. A square cloud in the sky passed overhead, spitting lightning. It was hot.
Carroll had set the top half of his costume outside the truck. We were sitting there. Suddenly, we smelled something burning.
I looked over and Big Bird was going up in flames! I had set him on fire. That’s a good way to get yourself strung up by an
angry mob of four-year-olds.

I was thinking a lot about children, watching Shooter move toward his teens. I had written a story, with Shooter’s help, about
a racehorse that didn’t grow. He was a miniature pony, who reminded me of when Shooter had been the shortest kid in his class.
He’d worried about it, fretted on it, until one day he came home and said, “Dad, I’m not the littlest kid in my class anymore.
There’s this girl from Texas that just moved here.”

The horse in the story, nicknamed Useless, was the runt of the litter and the pride of the farm. He was so mischievous that
it was thought they were going to sell him to a traveling circus, but a lightning storm allowed Useless to become a hero,
rescuing the bigger horses from the barn when a fire erupted. “The Little Horse That Didn’t Grow” had saved the day.

I wrote a song, “(Some Things Come in) Small Packages,” to go along with it. Then I wrote a poem called “Dirt,” remembering
how I used to put some dirt in my grandpa’s snuff, and how it was the best toy of all. And then I wrote “A Bad Day,” which
was inspired by a five-year-old friend of mine named Charlie, who lives in Tulsa and reminded me of my grandson Josh, who’s
always getting into scrapes; and “When I Get Big,” “I’m Little,” and “Cowboy Movies,” where my Saturday afternoon matinee
idols were seen through the eyes of a Nickelodeon and Muppet fan.

I never liked children’s records; I always thought they talked down to kids. But these poems were different. I was seeing
life through the eyes of a five-year-old boy, and that five-year-old boy was me. I wanted kids to know that everything they’re
going through, the little missteps they get in trouble over, I got in trouble for that, too. That’s okay. That’s part of growing
up.

I was getting back my sense of wonder. Going back to the dreaming days of lying back on the grass, looking up into the sky,
“off to see the world / If I could only fly.”

Shooter read the poems and said, “Dad, they look like songs to me.” I started arranging them into verses and choruses. Jessi
added her encouragement. Epic had just started a children’s label, but they wanted a cast of superstars to do the singing.
That wasn’t what I had in mind. I remembered when I had sung “Mommas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” and “The
Tennessee Waltz” at Shooter’s school; there had been a children’s chorus backing me up. They’d be the only superstars on any
children’s record I envisioned.

Someone at Epic played it for Shelley Duvall, the actress, who passed the word along to Lou Adler, who used to produce the
Mamas and the Papas. He had just had a little girl, which made him more than susceptible to the charms of children, and had
started an offshoot label called Ode 2 Kids. He said, “You’ve got me in your pocket if you want it.” I loved his enthusiasm.