Waylon (54 page)

He started tearing everything up. I ran into the room and he threw a metal-framed picture at my head. It just missed me; if
it had landed half a foot to the right, it would have knocked me cold for a week. I tried to get him to calm down, but he
kicked at me. Finally I had to sit on him. He even played possum on me once, which shows you how he got his nickname, pretending
he was choking. When I let go and said “George, y’all right?” he hit me in the face.

I didn’t know how much longer this could go on. I was on drugs myself at the time, and after about thirty minutes, I began
to get tired. Cocaine doesn’t last that long. Jerry Gropp was with me, and he tried to hold down George’s feet. George kicked
him in the thumb and broke it. It seemed like he was getting stronger, or I was getting weaker. I had no choice but to tie
him up, lift him up on the couch, and try to see he was comfortable. I never felt so bad in my life, thinking, Here’s the
greatest country singer that ever lived, and I’m tying his ass up.

“Now you be still,” I told him. “I’m going to call your manager to come pick you up.”

George sneered at me. “I’ll get you, you Conway Twitty—actin’ sonofabitch,” he said.

I couldn’t hold back a laugh. “What do you mean by that? You hit me in the face and kick me in the nuts, you cuss the ladies
in the house, you break my guitar player’s thumb, and now you call me a Conway Twitty—actin’ sonofabitch? I’m the one who’s
gonna do the gettin’.”

When he went in for his heart bypass a while ago, his wife, Nancy, called me in Vicksburg, Mississippi. “George isn’t going
to stay in the hospital unless he talks to you.”

I went in to visit him. I told him what to expect and that there was nothing he could do but lie back and wait for it to be
over. Remembering Bill Robinson’s little joke with me, I couldn’t resist asking him what he intended to do with his DeLorean,
with the batwing doors and six hundred miles on it. “You might write down on a piece of paper that you want me to have it.”
I could hear him swearing and hollering at me down the hall.

After the operation, he wouldn’t go to physical therapy without me. They wanted him to walk on a treadmill, ride a bicycle,
and do some stretches. He said, “I ain’t doing it unless you do too.”

“I don’t need to do that. There’s nothing to it. It’s like spitting over a log.”

He leaned over to me. “I’m depending on you not to let them make me do something that’ll make me look silly.”

I said, “George, after all you’ve been through, there ain’t a thing these doctors in here could do that’d make you look any
sillier than what you’ve done to yourself.”

George and I met back when I was a disc jockey at KLLL. I asked him if he liked bluegrass music and he said, “Hell, no.” We’d
run into each other now and again, though I don’t think he knew I sang until we met up at Sue Brewer’s a few years later in
Nashville. But I’d heard his records, both as a country artist who scored with “Why Baby Why” and some of the more rockabilly-type
things he was cutting for Starday’s H. W. “Pappy” Dailey, out of Houston. Like me, George could’ve probably gone rock if he
chose to, but having spent a lot of time watching Hank Thompson and Bob Wills through the windows of his local honky-tonk,
and listening to the Opry on Saturday nights, he decided he didn’t really like rock and roll. One time, though, I heard him
on the
Louisiana Hayride.
Elvis was taking it away from everybody, and George got pissed. He came on before Elvis and did Little Richard’s “Long Tall
Sally” in that growl voice and just wiped him out.

From the mid-fifties through the seventies, George rode the whirlwind of country music. He had dozens of hits, recorded with
and married Tammy Wynette, and led a life that sounded like an entire country jukebox all rolled into one. By the end of the
1970s, he had bottomed out from drinking and slid into bankruptcy. Sound familiar?

It may have been the blind leading the blind, as George puts it, but John Cash and I came to his rescue. We didn’t ask if
we could help. We just did, helping George keep his home, cars, and buses. We tried to keep it a secret, but he found out
through the bank. I know he’d do the same for me, if I needed it.

His talent is raw, natural, and I don’t think he knows why he’s such a great singer. He just is. It’s not something he’s developed.
He never seemed to progress or lose it; like Elvis or Willie or Jerry Lee Lewis, the first time you heard him, he was just
as good as he is now.

The best thing we ever cut together was a record of “Night Life” that we did on one of his albums for Billy Sherrill. I’m
singing so high you wouldn’t believe it’s me. On another all-night session, we sat on two stools, facing each other across
a Plexiglas baffle and filled up four reels of tape. We were both gone, and I don’t think we ever finished a song. One of
us would start laughing, or we’d take turns passing out. Jigger just sat there holding his bass, watching these two pitiful
people chasing each other’s tail.

Everyone imitates George these days, and yet he can’t get played on the radio. That’s true for a lot of us from an older generation.
It used to worry me, but once you accept that it’s not going to change the way you sing a song, and it’s not going to stop
people from coming out to see you play—in fact, maybe they come out and see you play because they
can’t
hear you on the radio—then you say it’s radio’s loss. George has been making records for forty years. At one time he was
on four different labels. They couldn’t burn him out with a torch. He’s still here.

Connie Smith and I practically came to town at the same time. She arrived in Nashville in June 1964, signed by Chet to RCA
after Bill Anderson discovered her at a talent show in Elkhart, Indiana. From the time she was five, Connie always wanted
to be a country singer on the Opry. Her first song, “Once a Day,” hit number one on the charts, and a year after she arrived
in Nashville, she was asked to become a member of the Opry.

She’s a “feel” performer. Even when she went into the studio, she didn’t overly learn her songs; she’d know part of them and
fill in the gaps as she went along, and was usually just as surprised at what came out of her voice as everyone else.

I had met Connie on the package shows organized by RCA, and kept in touch when she left secular music for a while to follow
her faith and raise her family in the seventies. A few years ago she was going through a divorce, and I called her one morning,
just wanting to check up and see how she was doing. She told me things were rough, and shared some of her troubles. Jessi
makes a good pot of coffee, I let her know, and I was on my way to come bring her over to the house.

I beeped the horn at her front door. She had just gotten out of the shower and had her hair up. I was waiting in the car in
my pajamas and cowboy boots. I thought, wouldn’t it be funny if we got in a wreck. We’d hit the tabloids for sure.

From then on, Connie has been part of our family’s inner circle. You can always find her and Jessi singing at the piano, and
when we went to Israel in 1993, she accompanied us. It’s an amazing country, even if you take the religion out of it. If you
think of our history as lengthy, stretching over a couple of centuries, here’s a piece of land that people have been fighting
over for thousands of years. It kind of puts you in your place.

I saw something there that proves to me how much life doesn’t stand still. We were up in Galilee, at Peter’s house, and came
back through Jericho. As we started the return to Jerusalem, the four of us crammed into a van, I looked out over the desert.
There was the brightest little pin of light I’d ever seen. I asked the Palestinian who was driving us what it was, and he
said he didn’t know.

As we got nearer, it grew brighter. I began looking for three camels on the horizon, bearing gifts. Finally, I saw that it
shone from a Bedouin tent, stark against the wilderness. They’re nomads, and they’ve been moving back and forth since the
beginning of time. It was quiet, and the night had turned cold and clear. At first I thought the light might be a campfire.
Then I took a closer look, and saw it was the glow of a television.

Nothing stays the same. In Calgary, Canada, an old cowboy came into our hotel and started talking to me about these two prize
bulls he had on his ranch. One was named Willie and the other Waylon. He had on a sheepskin coat, a big cowboy hat, his Levis
stuffed into his boots, and a mustache stained and dripping with snuff. While we were talking, I heard a high-pitched sound.
It was his beeper going off.

I thought, don’t that beat all.

I feel the same way about some of the younger guys, and girls, in country music. You can smell the change in the wind, whipping
up the tumbleweeds. There’s surely a new generation out there, and it’s ready for its turn in the follow spot. I don’t intend
to be old and in the way, or let anybody run me off. Sometimes, it’s only natural we’re going to tussle over the same turf.
Country music is a lot like Israel; everybody wants to build a church on its holy shrines. Still, I like to think that we’re
all talking about the same spirit, the one that makes us want to pick and sing, and all the fussing and fighting over who
gets played on the radio or headlines the state fairs don’t amount to much more than a range war.

We need new blood. I once suggested to promoters that they have special nights where they let in kids under fifteen free,
to bring them into the country-music fold. They need their heroes, just like I needed mine.

The best of the new performers remember where they came from, who opened the doors they step their line dance through, and
don’t try to figure they invented a pair of tight jeans and a guitar. Marty Stuart loves the old Opry tradition, and I saw
just how much one night when he and I were sitting around singing with George Jones. George coughed, spit a wad of phlegm
into a handkerchief, and cleared his throat.

“There’s people in this world who would kill to do that with their voice,” I joked to Marty.

“If I thought it would make me sing like him,” answered Marty without missing a beat, “I’d swallow it.”

Sometimes it seems like Marty is everywhere. He’ll jump in and start playing even before he’s asked. “You’re the musician
from hell,” I once told him, but you can see he’s having more fun than anyone in the world. Connie says that watching Marty
and Travis Tritt run around together is a little like catching a glimpse of me and John in the old days. They feed off each
other and go a little further than they would if they were by themselves. If Marty’s around, and he sees Travis, he’s going
to be a little more Marty, and vice versa. Two is better than one, and both of them will push the other a little harder.

Travis is about my favorite new singer. What a talent, and a writer. He hones his songs, cares about them, and he knows how
to work that rock-and-roll hoofbeat so it turns into a stampede. For me, he’s a cross between Hank Williams and Ray Charles,
and when I hear him sing “Old Outlaws Like Us,” I know he’s one of the brightest hopes of country music today.

Of course, the next generation better not believe everything they hear. At this point, I’ve been accused of all manner of
carousing. Mostly, it’s something that I might have done, or would have done, or couldn’t even imagine doing. Pretty soon
it’s etched into stone. If I led the life that people think I did, I’d be a hundred and fifty years old and weigh about forty
pounds.

There’s enough wild nights to go around, though, and I do enjoy letting the newer cow-punkers on the block know about the
rigorous standards of roaring they’re expected to uphold. Joe Galante from RCA once called and said, “Clint Black really likes
you. Can we go to lunch and you can tell him some old Waylon and Willie stories?”

We met up with his manager, Bill Ham, and I started recounting. I told him of all the phones I used to destroy, dialing a
number, putting it to my ear, and walking off. He listened to tales of Hillbilly Central and Dripping Springs, and Joe would
keep encouraging me, saying “Tell this story, Waylon, tell that one.”

After I got through talking, Clint pushed back from the table. “I can let you know one thing I’ve gotta do,” he said. “I’ve
got to get rid of this goody-two-shoes reputation I’ve got.”

Both Bill and Joe looked at him in horror. “No, no! We just wanted you to hear the stories!”

You never do know where the stones you throw will land. One time, I was at an awards show, and I heard a voice behind me saying
“Mr. Jennings, you’re like a god to me.” I turned around and it was Billy Ray Cyrus, offering his hand for me to shake. All
I could think of was, if I’m your god, what does your devil look like?

* * *

The thing is, we’re in this together, the old, the new, the one-hit wonders and the lifetime achievers, the writers and the
session pickers and the guy who sells the T-shirts. The folks that come to the shows, and the ones that stay at home and watch
it on TNN. Those who remember Hank Williams, and those who came on board about the time of Mark Chestnutt, who named his baby
boy after me.

In the spring of 1995, I hosted eight shows of a series for the Nashville Network, called
The Legends of Country Music.
One program featured Jessi and I sitting around with June and John, swapping reminiscences and interrelations. Another found
me alongside Bill Monroe, Little Jimmy Dickens, Porter Wagoner, and Carl Smith alternating verses of “The Great Speckled Bird.”
Beth Nielsen Chapman, Lyle Lovett, Bobby Bare, Guy Clark, Billy Joe Shaver, and Rodney Crowell came to visit. George Jones
cancelled the night before. Kris stopped by, and the father-daughter bluegrass gospel of Jerry and Tammy Sullivan closed each
show. We had a tribute to Roger Miller with Chet and Willie, Mary Miller and Roger’s kids. Travis Tritt, Leroy Parnell, Danny
Dawson, and Kimmie Rhodes represented country future, while a host of young cowboys joined me for “All of My Sisters Are Girls,”
and an equal number of cowgirls backed up Jessi on “All of My Brothers Are Boys.” Country future’s future.