Waylon (49 page)

At the same time, Clifford “Barney” Robertson called me after many years. He and his wife Carter had been Waylors ten years
before, and the last time they’d seen me I was a crazed man. They had started a family, and phoned to say hello. What had
he been doing?

“You’re not going to believe this, but I produce children’s records,” said Barney.

Well, I had something he wouldn’t believe, either. I asked him to produce these songs, and we decided to use only country
instruments. Sonny Curtis came along for the acoustic ride. From my Waylors band, steel guitarist Robby Turner, drummer Jeff
Hale, and Jigger pretended they were back in the sandbox. Even Oscar the Grouch grumbled a little bit from inside his trash
can.

Cowboys, Sisters, Rascals and Dirt
wasn’t a grown man singing children’s songs. I thought it was a big rascal singing about little rascals, and when I got to
my own little rascal, well, “Shooter, you are a friend of mine. … Your life makes my life worthwhile.”

It was like coming face to face with a younger version of myself, walking down a street in Littlefield, bare feet meeting
tooled cowboy boots. Both of us couldn’t know what the future would bring, so it was free to lead anywhere, to anything.

Possibility. Hope. The excitement of the moment of creation. All I knew for sure was that songs and ideas were starting to
pour out of me, sometimes so fast I couldn’t write one down before the next one started growing. I’d found my way back to
me, at last.

A
nd then there’s the road.

For any migrating performer, travel takes on a life all its own. The shows become stopovers; the highway is where you spend
most of your time. In transit. In transition.

You enter a strange space when you get on the bus. You’re not home, and you’re not there yet. You’re on the way.

Mostly, you’re living in the present. Day to day. All you’re really concerned with is getting to the show, wherever it might
be. Everything else is looking around at your surroundings, taking stock of where you’ve been, where you might be headed,
cruise-controlling the speedometer. You have a lot of time to think about what you’re doing, and yet you’re doing it.

It’s a traveling universe, your own private world that consists of whoever is on the road with you, the jokes you share, the
camaraderie and idle chatter and tall tales and slices of life you encounter; and then leave. The Flying W.

Having a bus helps, because it’s like your traveling home. You can eat on it, sleep on it, and like I did for a while, never
get off it except to play. It’s filled up with everyone who was ever in your band, hopped on after a show and stayed for a
few more towns, became family or friends, or joined the crew, who might be the motleyist bunch of them all, and really sees
to it that we all get from one place to another. Ready to move on.

On. That’s as good a description as any. When I’m home at
Southern Comfort,
outskirting Nashville, I’m most definitely off, sitting in my big chair with a remote control and a glass of iced tea by
my side waiting for the boxing matches to start. Dinner at five? You got a deal.

But when I step on board Shooter IV, even if we have a day off to play golf and kick back along the way, I’m
on,
tapping into the energy of whirlwind touring, five cities in seven days, eleven cities in two weeks, twenty-five cities in
two months, one hundred cities in a year. It gets in your blood.

If you do it for thirty years, it becomes your natural rhythm. You might get off the road and feel tired, beat, needing to
sleep in your own bed. All you want to do is lay down and rest. Once you get rested, you get restless. Then you’re back out
there again.

Jessi says we don’t play music for a living. We bounce for a living. The real rhythm of the road is up and down, jostling
and knocking your body around as you navigate the speed bumps. You can get dingy. Silly. It’s really not natural to stay on
a damn bus, all day and all night, going from one place to another. Everyone tries to grab some sleep, but you can’t, at least
not more than an hour or two at a snatch. Cradled in your bunk, drapes drawn, no light, you wake and think it must be morning.
It never is.

When you first start out, you think you have it made. You’re young and ready for anything. You shake your head at those unfortunate
people who have regular jobs, go home every night, eat supper, fall asleep, and start the same old ritual the next morning
when the alarm goes off. The further along you get, the more you realize that maybe they have the best setup of all.

It works in reverse, too. They look at you sailing down the highway and think that must be wonderful. It’s glamorous, no doubt
about that, unless you take into consideration how you itch around the edges because you haven’t had time to wash, and are
bone tired from lack of deep sleep, and haven’t eaten anything more than a ham sandwich from a backstage deli tray.

Yeah, we’ve got the video player and the stereo system, the microwave and games galore. We can stop at any truck stop and
fill up on the hamburgers, T-shirts, and souvenir postcards that are the stock in trade of Roadside America. We know that
the next destination is a show where we’ll play our music and people will let us know how much they appreciate our coming
by to visit them.

But when you’ve traveled three hundred miles on a bus … well, you’ve traveled three hundred miles on a bus.

Shut the door and let’s get rolling.

We’ve got a full house this trip. Every band member that’s ever played with me is along for the ride, scattered around the
inside of a bus that looks like every bus I ever owned, from the Black Maria through a succession of metallic Eagles to my
latest Prevost. This is the Quitter’s Party to end all parties, where we sit around and remember those moments where we lived,
breathed, and played music together. Being a band.

The bass players are sitting over in the corner, talking about whether to go five-string. There’s Jigger, and Duke Goff, and
my brother Tommy, and Sherman Hayes, and Kevin Hogan and Sonny Ray and even Paul Foster. The guitarists take up the whole
back of the bus. Gropp is leading the pack, which is fitting for someone who worked for me five different times. Gary Scruggs
shoots the breeze with Billy Ray Reynolds, while Rance and Gordon play a little Farkle. There’s Jigger, again! He moved over
to the six-of-strings section a couple of years ago, and he ain’t left since.

The drummers are grouped around the kitchen table, beating out calypso rhythms. Richie’s over there, Jack Huffman and Jeff
Hale. The steel section mostly consists of Mooney, Fred Newall, and Robby Turner trading licks; Robby’s mom Berniece and dad
Doyle were in Hank’s original Drifting Cowboys, and when he was twelve, he took guitar lessons from legend Jimmy Bryant. Mooney’s
telling Robby how he wrote his hit song, “Psycho Falanges.” Robby is tying keyboardist Fred Lawrence’s shoes together. They’ll
have so many knots he’ll have to cut ’em off. Sometimes I’d hate to have to travel on the band bus. They’re crazy over there!

Right now, though, they’re all over visiting me. I’m like Ulysses, and Troy is about to fall.

I always wanted a band. I need guys I can depend on, to be my cast of characters, and since I never use a set list, whatever
gang that winds up playing with me has to watch what I’m doing, otherwise I win the game of Stump the Band. There’s only one
time I’m the honcho, and that’s when we’re up on the stage. I don’t want to be any big boss the rest of the time. I never
cared for that star-sideman mentality.

I like looking around and seeing Jigger step on one of his pedals and ride into a solo. I had a blast when Robby would do
his Elvis or Liberace imitation (hint: they were one and the same). I used to love when Richie would step on the beat in back
of me and I’d turn around, and he’d be sticking out his plate with the two upper false teeth on his tongue, waggling it, laughing
while he whacked out the 4/4.

The Waylors are the only constant I have on the road. We are like an Indian tribe; once you join, you’re always a member.
That’s what the Quitter’s Party is about. No matter how you got on board the bus, or the circumstances under which you left,
it’s a way to get together with your fellow road warriors and swap war stories. We’re a very select bunch. When Cheryl Ladd
asked me on her television special how you get to become a Waylor, I told her it was easy. “Walk around and say ‘Hi chief.’”

Road life is harder than it looks, once the initial romance wears off. The only thing that’ll get you through the hard times
is a sense of humor. You make a lot of stupid jokes on the road, and most of them sound pretty suspect if you tell ’em in
mixed company a few weeks later. We never know where road humor comes from, or where it goes when we get off the bus. But
at the time it starts you laughing, finding a good punch line will get you through a lot of bad patches. We broke down one
time, and Duke Goff crossed the road and put one of those orange cones on his head and called himself Captain Diesel. Pretty
soon we had a whole cartoon going, with Diesel, whose real name was Cecil, and a sidekick named Rusty Reflector. His archenemy
was Dirty Old Lowshoulders, and there was Ramp Woman, his gal, who worked in a truck stop. Had a little dog named Bringawrench.

Yeah, it seemed funnier at the time. But it made the hours we sat by the side of the road go fast, and we got to the show.

That’s all the goal you need on the road. When do we go on? How much farther till we get there? Sometimes it’s as much of
a challenge to arrive at the gig as it is playing well. With bizarre weather conditions, missed connections, and garbled directions,
it’s lucky anybody gets anywhere at all. They used to book us eight hundred miles apart. We’d run on the stage, run off the
stage, take off in time to get ready during the last sixty miles of the trip to jump back on the stage, and then do it again.

Sometimes you literally go around in circles. We were seven miles from Philadelphia when we stopped at a diner to eat. The
Lyle brothers were traveling with me, and when Richie started feeling tired, Gene Lyle took over driving. We were playing
poker in the back. About four hours later, he yawned, stretched, and said, “Somebody’s going to have to spell me.” I looked
outside, and there was a sign that said “Philadelphia: 15 miles.”

Flying adds a whole dimension of derring-do, and one I’m not sure I enjoy. I don’t feel in control in the air. The hardest
time I had going anywhere, I was in Dallas, and we were playing in Longview, over by the Louisiana border. I saw I couldn’t
make it by land, so I chartered this little twin-engine airplane. We got in it, took off, and all of a sudden the lights went
out. We landed at another airport and switched to a Cessna single-engine. I wasn’t happy to be there. I remembered Buddy.
I was a little out of it, and I made sure to tell the pilots before going to sleep up in the air that if I woke up and this
airplane was going down, I was going to whip their asses all the way to the ground.

We ran out of gas and had to land in Athens. My grandmother’s mother was buried there. They had about three lights on their
runway. It’s sixty miles from Longview. It’s already nine forty-five, and we’re supposed to start at nine.

A cop gets a work release inmate to drive me to the show. Ninety miles an hour. We get there, and the promoter says, “You
missed it. You’re not going to get paid.” Thanks, pal.

Most of the time we did make it. Duke had never flown before and we had a festival to play in Riverside, California, up in
the hills. There was so much traffic we couldn’t drive. After a turbulent flight from Dallas, we hopped on a two-engine plane
in L.A. and started flying through the canyons to Palm Springs. Duke was pale as a sheet, holding on with white knuckles.
It was a bumpy flight, and every time we’d hit an air pocket, his eyes would cross.

I asked him what was wrong. “I’ve never flown before,” he moaned.

I almost didn’t have the heart to tell him that we were fixin’ to get on a helicopter next. When that took off, he put his
one hand on the seat, his other on the roof, and didn’t move the whole time.

My rule now is three hundred miles between shows, a couple more if you’re not playing the night before. It doesn’t make traveling
through a New England spring snowstorm, or an Oklahoma thunderstorm, or a South Dakota hailstorm any easier. At least, though,
you have a fighting chance.

The one thing the road doesn’t need is prima donnas. Nobody is catered to, and that goes from the lowest member of my crew
to me. We all have a function to fulfill, and it’s a challenge to make sure the shows run right. The one thing that I hate
to hear is “It’s not my job.” If it needs doing, it should be done. People look at and applaud the musicians, but somewhere,
off to the side of the stage, there’s a guy who has outsmarted the room, set up the equipment and made sure it worked, inspired
the band to play their instruments without worrying why they can’t hear them, saw that they’re well-lit so a mood can be created
and sustained, tuned a guitar and soldered a patch chord, setting up and breaking down from early morning to late, late at
night.