Waylon (53 page)

You are whatever the audience thinks you are, whatever they care to call you while you’re in the spotlight. You owe them a
good performance. More than that? The rest of the time you’re a human being, and that’s all you are. If you get past that,
if you think that you’re more special than your talent and your luck, then it comes back to haunt you.

In the Highwaymen, none of us are too big to be picked on, to have their ribs poked and tickled. I never cut anybody any slack.
If I tease you, that means I love you. If I don’t say a word, better watch out: I don’t want you around.

I love to get on Willie about his headband or his guitar playing. There’s no way he could get that busted-up guitar of his
in tune, so that’s why I tell him he uses such wobbly vibrato. He’s trying to keep those strings from banging into each other.

We all wind up taking different roles in the Highwaymen. John is bigger than life. His presence makes us larger, and his compassion
keeps opening us outward; yet there’s a dark menacing side, something that he has no control over, and that gives us an element
of danger and unpredictability. Sometimes he looks like he comes from a different historical era. He could’ve been Jesse James,
or the Apostle Paul. It was Paul who said, “Woe be unto me if I don’t preach the gospel.” He knew that if you share what is
buried deep within your heart, then what is buried deep in your heart saves you; if you don’t bring it out, then what’s hidden
within your heart will kill you. John Cash walks that line.

If he’s Paul, Willie must be Saint Peter. He floats freely, founding his church on whatever rock he cares to perch on. It’s
tough to get him to make a decision, because he never plays favorites. He used to bring the whole show to a standstill with
“Angels Flew Too Close to the Ground,” but to him it was just another song. He’s not there for the money, nor has he ever
forgotten where he came from. I still think Willie will wind up back in the honky-tonks. We were down in Texas not too long
ago, and he had worked all day and night, until two o’clock in the morning, on his sixtieth birthday special. His daughter
was playing at a local club, and he went down there after and played for hours, the club jammed and him jamming. That’s where
he’s the happiest.

Kris taught us how to write great poetry. Politically, he swings us to the left; and I’d hate to think what would happen to
him if Leonard Peltier was guilty. He wants everybody to have a fair shot, even if they’re wrong. He’s great for getting things
simple, and to the point, and he’s probably the only theatrical performer among us, a true actor in every sense of the word.
Kris is probably the most enthusiastic about the music. Willie’s not enthusiastic, but he probably needs the music more than
any of us. John loves the music, pure and simple. When we were rehearsing for a tour, John came in and wanted to do “Ghost
Riders in the Sky.” We had already learned some twenty tunes, and nobody wanted to add another one. Except Willie. He’d be
happy to learn it. We found out why on opening night. Only Willie set up a music stand off to the side of him and played along.
Wish I’d thought of that.

We don’t spend too much time worrying about if it’s got four parts. If it does, great, and a song like “It Is What It Is”
off the third album lets us pass the song around like a hot potato. Part of the fun is guessing who sings where; others rely
on the ensemble effect. We’re making so much noise, it doesn’t matter that one’s starting on a verse while the other is ending
up a chorus.

Don had his hands full in the recording, because we all are stylists, and we got that way by sounding like nobody else. It’s
tough to get us singing in harmony. Kris and I are probably the closest in voice; I can phrase with Willie better, since I’ve
been doing it for so long. I know where he’s going, even if I can’t figure out why.

They depend on me to do the worrying, to advise them on the business, to watch out for all of them. I don’t mind, unless it
makes me responsible for more than I can handle. Which usually brings me to Jack Clement. Sure enough, the Highwaymen were
playing the Fort Worth Livestock Show, preparing to go to Europe, and I started fretting about how the stage might sound in
a strange continent, and how someone speaking a foreign language, who doesn’t know who we are, or what we sound like, could
ground us. Thinking about who might help us out, I remembered someone who had worked with all of us at one time or another,
that “good friend of mine,” Jack Clement.

It seemed like a reasonable idea to bring Jack along to watch over the board. After the first night, however, he called Willie
in the morning. “Come on down to my room, Will,” he said with that lilting melody in his voice. “You’ve got to do something
about your rhythm. You start in last week and wind up next week. You’re not on the beat. You’ve got to sing on the beat.”

“Fuck you, Jack,” retorted Willie, and then came back to me chuckling, and said,“I’ve always wanted to say fuck you to somebody
whose real name is Jack.”

Then he stopped laughing. “What’s with him?” he wondered. I told Willie not to worry and went to Jack and asked him to knock
it off.

Jack was only getting warmed up. He had more suggestions. Why does the band have to make all that noise before the curtain
rises? I said, heck, that’s part of a show. He said, “Why don’t you put a table on the stage? Then you guys could play cards
while one of you was singing.”

I said, “Jack, I want you to listen to me. The soundman you’re working with can’t speak English. He needs you, and we don’t.
Consider the front of the stage out as your domain and leave the rest to us. And especially, stay away from Willie. I’m one
of the few people who can tease him about his singing. As far as rhythm, that’s his style, the back-phrasing and everything.
He spent years figuring out how to do that.”

It went along pretty well until Jack tried out the local schnapps. He got in the elevator with Willie and a bunch of other
people and said, “You’re really fucking ’Good Hearted Woman’ up. You’re doing it twice as fast as you’re supposed to.”

It’s tough to light Willie’s fuse, but he was on the phone with me in seconds. “He’s driving me crazy,” he yelled. I wanted
to sing “Stupid.” Willie wouldn’t slow down. “I want him out of here.” Then he stopped short. “Do I do ’Good Hearted Woman’
too fast?”

I said yeah, but Jack wasn’t the one to tell him.

It was my job to break the news. I took John with me. “Willie don’t want you here,” I said. “I told you not to bother him.”

“I didn’t mean no harm,” said Jack, a little sheepish and hung over. And he didn’t.

Kris came by a few minutes later and John told him what had happened.“Oh, no,” said Kris. He was on his way to smoke a joint
with Willie before we went on.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Why don’t you smoke two joints? When you get about halfway down on that second one, lean over and
say, ‘Maybe you were a little hasty about Jack?’”

Sure enough, Willie comes back, eyes twinkling, and half-smiling. “Aw,” he said. “Let’s give Jack another chance. I’m sure
he meant well.”

That night, Jack was behind the mixing desk, choreographing the show in his mind, slapping the echo and twiddling the eq.
Doing his dance.

Even stars have stars. I’ll be the first one who starts leaving when they begin talking about legends. I’m not comfortable
with that. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have legends of my own that can turn my knees to jelly and my mouth into a silly
grin.

Ernest Tubb always called me Son, which meant he liked me. He took me on his bus one time and chewed me out for smoking. He
was always trying to quit himself, and died from emphysema because of it. In later years, he took to chewing gun, though it
didn’t help.

I sang on an album of his once, though he wasn’t there. They had his voice on the tape, and at the part where I was supposed
to come in, he’d say “Aw, sing it, Waylon.” I melted. I got so taken listening to him say my name that I forgot to open my
mouth. It made me feel just like that kid in the back room of Grandpa’s cafe, squeaking along to the jukebox and holding my
broomstick for dear life.

Ernest was my hero; he wasn’t my role model. He drank pretty good, and probably had his faults, but I don’t think entertainers
are cut out to be role models. I have a hard enough time being a role model for my child; your kid shouldn’t have to look
up to me. They should be looking up at you, their parents. Don’t put the responsibility on me, though I would never do anything
mean or dishonorable in front of a kid. I have a respect for their young minds and open honesty.

A hero is when you feel honored to be in their presence, to have crossed their path. When Hazel Smith brought Bill Monroe
over to the
Honky Tonk Heroes
sessions as a surprise, I tried to be calm, but I felt my hands sweating, and I was shaking. My daddy had Bill Monroe’s picture
on the wall at home. In our house, it was the flag, the Bible, and Bill Monroe. Sometimes Bill Monroe was first.

I think of that whenever I’m asked for an autograph, on my way out of a restaurant or backstage at a show. If you sign one,
you have to sign them all; sometimes, there’s just too many people to do the line justice, to get your picture taken for the
bragging rights, to snap a souvenir of your dream date with Waylon. But people like to know they stood on the same patch of
ground as you, and maybe the last chorus of that song was for them.

You get it back, seeing yourself in other people’s eyes. Tompall and I had set up a booth at Fan Fair one year, the annual
Nashville meet-and-greet for the country hardcore, with a pinball machine and Us. It would’ve been better if we just played
and jawed, and people watched us as if we were in J.J.’s, but instead we decided to sign autographs.

A little blind girl walked up to me. “Is it really you?” she asked.

I said, “Yes, it’s me.”

“Can I touch you?” And she reached up and took hold of my hands. She held them tight. Then, she put her fingers up to my face,
tracing its outline. Her own face was showing me every feeling she was having, the realization and the wonder and the joy
combined.

From her blind eyes, she saw me. Tears came sliding down her cheeks, and mine.

Sometimes meeting your ideals is a little sad. I was having a party in Atlanta at the Albert Pick Motel when I found out Jimmy
Reed, the great “Baby What You Want Me to Do” blues-man, was in town. I sent a car for him and he came over. Johnny Cash had
given me a twelve-string dobro guitar, and one of the strings had broken. Jimmy looked at it and said, “I don’t believe I’ve
ever seen an eleven-string guitar before.”

It was a wild party, with strippers on one side of the room and guitar pulls on the other, but I never got up from sitting
in front of him, watching him play that dobro, all night. He would get to playing, and he would squeal when it started sounding
good. At one point, he looked at a horseshoe ring on my finger that George Jones had given me, with a big diamond in the middle.
“That’s a pretty ring.” He sighed. “I used to have one like that.” He held out his hand to me, and there was a gold-plated
ring with the setting gone. “Old Jimmy, he ain’t doing so good no more.”

That about killed me. I thought, here I am, a cocky little guy, and here’s this great man, and they’ve robbed him of everything.
I’m sure he was a pain in the ass sometimes, and stayed drunk a lot, but he was Jimmy Reed, who sang about the “Bright Lights,
Big City” and “Big Boss Man,” and he deserved better. He had been kicked out of his hotel and had another week to go in Atlanta,
so I got him a room at the Albert Pick for the remainder of his stay. At least I was able to do something for him.

That’s the difference between the white and black blues. Black musicians go to the source, dead on, right to the heart of
it, maybe because they have to fight even harder to make themselves heard.

All you had to do was listen to Miles Davis’s voice to know how much he had screamed in his life for the right to blow his
horn. He’d rasped his throat in a hospital, blowing it out trying to get loose from drugs. It was like he had no vocal cords
left.

“Who’s the whitey?” he asked when Neil, his manager, brought me over to his house. He wouldn’t look at me for a while. “You
know that new roadie you hired for me,” he said to Reshen. “He called me a motherfucker.” Then he glanced over in my direction
and added, “I don’t mind being called a motherfucker, but when he said it, it had an Irish accent and too many r’s.” We laughed,
and I knew he had accepted me.

Sometimes guys whose talent you’ve admired from afar become your close friends. John Cash was like that, and every once in
a while I would step outside our relationship and be a little in awe of him. The same is true of George Jones. He has more
complexes than anybody I ever met—“I can’t sing that low,” he’ll tell me, even though both of us know just how low we can
go, given the wrong opportunity—and to talk with him, you’d never think that here is one of the greatest country singers alive.
But he is.

Singing
is
George. He tries to live, breathe, and eat the song while he’s singing it, and he’s told me that, especially when he’s in
the studio, his mind goes completely blank but for the focus of the story and the melody in his throat. He imagines the man,
or woman, he’s singing about and how they might be reacting to every word.

On the other hand, he doesn’t pay a lot of attention to the world around him. When he played Sacramento, California, recently,
some of his band went up to Donner Pass to see where those pioneers got stranded in a nineteenth-century snowstorm and started
eating one another. When they got back to the hotel, George wanted to know where they’d been. They told him they’d been to
see where the Donner Party had turned cannibal.

“Wouldn’t you know I’d miss something like that,” said George. “I’ve been on the road so long, I ain’t seen a newspaper in
two weeks!”

Nobody could match my state of mindlessness like George when we were in our glory days. We both enjoyed our success and got
a little overwhelmed by it. In George’s case, it was alcohol that was his demon of choice, one beer leading to another, and
not helped by the fact that the only places you play when you’re starting out are honky-tonks, bars, and lounges. There are
more George Jones stories than he could possibly forget, almost as many as Hank Williams, and he likes to claim that his memory
is “blurry.” I’m always happy to help him remember some of his more cantankerous moments. Like the evening he came over to
visit, on a spree, and started flailing about in my living room, yelling at Mary Mann, Shooter’s grand-godmother. When it
looked as if he might go to sleep, I had the bright idea of giving him a big glass of whiskey to help him nod off. Wrong.