Waylon (52 page)

Thanks for stopping by. Be seeing you.

Where do we go to from here?

I
nside the vocal booth. Ocean Way Studios, Hollywood:

“You look like the guy who picked up the check for the Last Supper.”

“One more mistake, and out you go.”

“Willie tuned me out so long ago, he can’t hear what I’m saying. Look, he’s pretending to listen to us.”

“Everybody turned everybody off.”

“Want to do that one all over again?”

“I’ll do it all over you.”

“I don’t give a shit. When you figure out I really don’t give a shit, the world will be better for you.”

“Could you move it over a little bit, so I don’t have to stare at your ass?”

“We’re gonna make a hillbilly out of you yet.”

“Kris, tell them to kiss my ass.”

“I may look like I wasn’t paying attention but I am.”

“You gotta put your headphones on, or should I kick you when you’re supposed to come in?”

“Aren’t you glad you’re you?”

“Make it up if you want to.”

“I’d like to do it in another key.”

“I’d like to slow it down.”

“I got behind and never caught up.”

“This song is getting slaughtered in here; everybody’s got a different idea.”

“There went my one shot for the record.”

“You’re the one starting it out there, Cochise.”

“I’m not singing the line before so it’s never me.”

“I’ll be there to help you when you need it.”

“I ain’t got a word in edgewise for twenty minutes.”

“‘Been waiting’—is that Been Dorsey waiting?”

“Every time I think … fortunately, I don’t do that often.”

“John, we’ll get back there in the repeat, godammit.”

“The truth may set you free. These days you know the truth and the truth will leave you.”

“I couldn’t find my ass with a bull fiddle.”

“I’ve played everything but an extension cord.”

“Are you going to wear the same T-shirt all week?”

“I guess it’s true people get to look like their pets.”

“You hear the one about the dog named Sir Francis Bacon? It was a strange name for a dog, but it was a strange dog. He screwed
pigs.”

“I don’t like anything I can’t pronounce. I hate France.”

“What do you mean, Waylon? They’ve got fine wine, beautiful women, and five hundred kinds of cheese.”

“So’sFort Worth.”

There’s the four of us standing there, grouped around microphones. The Highwaymen. John, Kris, Willie, and me.

I don’t think there are any other four people like us. If we added one more, or replaced another, it would never work. Nobody
else was considered when the idea for a group first starting growing. There was never a fifth wheel.

John says that we came together because we all have a life commitment to the music. We know the same songs, but we sing them
from different perspectives. We can blend the early country of the Carter Family with Texas swing, southern gospel, and rockabilly,
and each of us feels comfortable singing real slices of life. There’s not one of us who hasn’t come face to face with his
own mortality, and many’s the time we’ve gone through our struggles and survivals together. There’s a blues song that talks
about the “key to the highway.” That’s our friendship, unlocking any door that stands between us, and it keeps four very different
individuals together.

It ain’t easy. We love each other, but give-and-take can still get shaky, at least until we lean back and start playing the
music. All of us are used to having our way and doing things our own way. Maybe we should be called the Highway
s
men. If anything, though, our troubles erupt when we worry too much about upstaging the other guys, getting in their way.

When we first took the Highwaymen out live, it looked like four shy rednecks trying to be nice to each other. It almost ruined
it. That didn’t work, for us and the audience, and it was really bothering me, how different we were on stage than when we
were sitting around in the dressing room. We had just come back from Australia, and were set to play a week at the Mirage
in Las Vegas. After the opening night, I was fixin’ to quit. I talked to John about it and he was feeling the same way. “I
get a little nervous,” he said. “I don’t want to look like I’m trying to steal your thunder.”

That was it. We were boring each other and the audience. It may be hard to think of Johnny Cash as intimidated, but that’s
the way we were. You can’t have four big guys tiptoeing around each other on stage. Nobody has a good time.

So we decided to help each other out, whether each of us thought we needed it or not. Don’t ask. Just do it, and don’t worry
what the other one thinks. Make fun of each other, cut up, poke some much-needed fun. Willie would be singing “Crazy,” and
I’d run up to the microphone and add “Stupid …” They may have seemed little things, but they were enough to make us loosen
up and not take ourselves so danged serious. By the end of the week, with Willie dancing across the stage and John and Kris
singing harmony neck-and-neck, we had the wildest show, and it made us a group.

John had brought our four personalities together initially, in Montreaux, Switzerland, in 1984. Every year, he had a television
Christmas special, and that holiday season he wanted us all to come over. We were interviewed one afternoon when we had arrived
in Europe. A nervous journalist came in and asked, “Why Switzerland? Why would you do a Christmas special in Switzerland?”

He stuck the microphone over in front of me. I said, “’Cause that’s where the baby Jesus was born,” and he dutifully wrote
that down.

Actually, it was the Highwaymen who had the immaculate conception. We got along “handsomely,” as John put it. We started trading
songs in the hotel after we worked on the special, and someone said, like they always do, we ought to cut an album. Man, this
is forever.

Usually everyone goes their separate ways after that, but the idea took hold. Chips Moman had come over to Switzerland to
do sound, and when he came back to Nashville, he was working with Willie and John, recording a duet to finish out John’s album.
I stumbled in to visit, and a little later, Kris came by.

We remembered a Jimmy Webb song called “Highwayman” that we had all liked in Switzerland, and since we were in the same place
at the same time, we did a track on it. Then another, and another. The album was underway without us even knowing it. It was
the first of three we’ve done under the collective name of the Highwaymen.

There used to be another group called the Highwaymen, who were best known for the folk tune “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,”
and they sued us over the name. They had long since retired, but we did a charity show with them opening and squared it away.
Highwayman
came out in 1985, containing things like “Desperadoes Waiting for a Train” and Johnny’s “Big River,” which he wrote after
listening to delta-influenced blues singers like Robert Johnson and Pink Anderson. We toured, learning how to unwind with
each other, and returned to the studio in early 1990 for
Highwayman 2.
As an album, it could have used a little more time spent on it. We ran in and out too quick, and we didn’t have that one
great song. It’s hard to find material that goes over with four people, each with strong let-it-all-hang-out opinions.

Our last album,
The Road Goes on Forever,
came out in spring of 1995, and I think it’s our best, so far. Three’s the charm. It was produced by Don Was, who has worked
with me, Willie, and Kris individually, and is one of the nicest, most unassuming guys you’d ever want to meet. Don’t let
him fool you, though. He orchestrates his sessions with the skill of a master conductor, and the week we spent as the Highwaymen
in Ocean Way, choosing songs, working up arrangements, dodging film crews, and getting the tracks down, required some complex
juggling. Through it all, Don was at his ease, moving everything forward, keeping everybody loose and alert, and letting nothing
phase him.

He had helped me a lot when I returned to RCA’s fold at the end of 1993. They had put out a double-CD box set of my career
there,
Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line,
and seeing my work as a whole, and the respect with which I was accorded, I started listening when they asked me to newly
record again. Vice president Thom Schuyler understood what my music was about, and that’s all I’ve ever asked.

I went into the studio with Don in January of 1994 to cut the songs that would go to make up
Waymore’s Blues (Part II).
We clicked from the start of the first take, which was the title cut. Before we began, I had told Don and the band, which
included drummer Kenny Aronoff, guitarist Mark Goldenberg, keyboardist Benmont Tench, and steel player Robby Turner, to forget
about everything they had ever heard me do. “I want you to play what you feel in these songs. I’ll take care of the Waylon
Jennings part.”

Don himself played stand-up bass, with his shoes off, no less. “Don,” I said. “I’m country, but I’m not that country!”

For his part, Don was looking at what he called my essence; he wanted to create an instrumental texture, a pad of colors,
rather than have the usual trading of licks. He didn’t want to lose me in a sea of arrangement. He called it impressionistic,
like a painting, and when we heard “Waymore’s Blues Part II” come over the speakers, I understood what he was getting at.
It had been twenty years since I had cut “Part I,” and you could hear the many changes I’d been through as the atmospheres
swirled. I was still saying the things that every macho you-don’t-mess-around-with-me guy might say, but I probably didn’t
feel the need to live up to them as much now.

There were things like “Wild Ones,” where I remembered the times when me, Willie, and Jessi had come to town and how we had
shaken Nashville’s hierarchy up in our fight to keep the music honest. There was “Endangered Species,” which I wrote with
Tony Joe White, acknowledging some simple virtues that were maybe in danger of becoming extinct. There were more like me at
one time, the song was saying, and though “a man in love is what I want to be,” it was also talking about the way you carry
yourself, and how where once the song and the performance of the song was the thing, now videos have shifted the emphasis
to looks and showmanship. Sometimes the visuals take the romance and fantasy away from the hearing, and “that’s what makes
me / An endangered species.”

“Old Timer” was very dear to my heart, a poignant tale about an old mountain man from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, who loved a woman
from Saint Paul. She came to visit her brother, and they met each other in the wilds. He could never tell her he loved her;
he was too “tough” for that, but he cleaned up and bought some fresh clothes and thought about the new feelings coursing through
his body. “I don’t know about love,” he mused as he trudged through the deep snow to see her, “but I was quite taken in by
it all.” In the end, she went back home, and though he acted like it wasn’t any big deal, he asked to be buried up high in
the hills, where “I bet on a clear day you can see all the way to Saint Paul.” I was proud to tell that story.

And I was proud of the album, because it felt like I was back in command of myself, sure of my creativity, knowing I was reaching
for something I hadn’t done before, and finding it. You can feel very alone in the studio. It’s just you, the microphone,
and your guitar. If you have a friend in the control room, and a band you trust, that’s when the magic happens.

We’re all fans of each other, and that’s what makes watching the Highwaymen such a treat. For us, most of all. Sometimes I’ll
be just sitting back and enjoying the show when it’s my turn to come in. We’re our own appreciative audience.

With the best seat in the house, we get to see each other as we really are, and how we react to the fame that surrounds us.
Me and Kris think John and Willie are like Truman and MacArthur sometimes. They won’t admit it, but there’s a little bit of
competition between them. Willie might be late getting to the stage, and John will say, “Where’s Willie? I’m going back to
my dressing room.” Both of them enjoy their star power. When John went to the Eastern bloc countries, they called him “Your
Majesty,” and he liked that, until he found out it was a guy from the KGB. We try not to take it too seriously, though.

Most of us spent so much time wandering in the wilderness on our way up the ladder that we were able to adjust gradually to
our renown. I always felt that was the best way to do it, to struggle and build a following. If it happens overnight, it’s
likely to leave in the next morning.

Legend. Superstar. Entertainer. To me, that five-pointed badge is there hanging on your dressing room door. When I come to
work, I pick it up, and after I’m done with the show, I leave it hanging there for whenever I return, or the next artist to
use.