Waylon (8 page)

I usually was on the radio in the afternoons. They tried me on the morning shift, but that didn’t work out too well. I was
still living in Littlefield, and I’d oversleep. I’d have to listen to the
sshhhh
of dead air for thirty-three miles as I raced down 84, late again. Once I was coming along and there was a tornado watch
out. I was driving a ’56 DeSoto convertible, and I had the flap down. Suddenly it got real calm, and I thought, well, I’m
out of it. I kicked into gear and was up to seventy miles an hour when all of a sudden the tail end of the tornado whipped
that car right off the highway into the grader ditch alongside. The suction just pulled me over and off the road.

No matter how successful I was on the air, being a disc jockey for me was still a stepping-stone. All I ever wanted to be
was a singer. I was pretty funny on the air, but I kept writing songs. We had an eight-by-five-foot studio in the station,
with a tape machine that could run fifteen ips. That’s where I learned to overdub and sing harmony with myself. It was a really
good experience for me to get used to recording.

The Cotton Club helped hone my live skills, not to mention my ability to take care of myself. It was a rough joint and earned
its reputation as the Bloody Bucket. On a typical Saturday night it was like an orchestrated fistfight, and they used to have
to put chicken wire up to protect the band. I don’t suppose it was very civilized. Somebody in the crowd would want to hear
“Temptation,” and if you didn’t play it that song or the next, you’d be liable to see a beer bottle sailing through the air.
It was a good place to get your chops right, though. You learned to dodge and sing, and never miss a note.

Artists would usually play the Coliseum, and later that night they’d play a dance at the Cotton Club. It could get really
drunk and mean. One night Hi Pockets Duncan was promoting a show there, and he saw a guy start beating up his wife. Hi Pockets,
being the gentleman that he was, pulled the guy off and hit him, and then the guy and the woman both turned on him. It was
that kind of place. Buddy Holly played there a lot before he signed with Decca, and then after, when he started recording
the demos that would make him a legend.

Buddy’s success gave us all hope. He had traveled the world with his music, appeared at the New York Paramount with Alan Freed
and a “Caravan” of teen idols, and was one of the first rock and rollers to write his own songs. Though he may have been inspired
by Elvis, he knew that there was an Elvis already. Buddy sounded like himself. His experiences in Nashville, where they tried
to change his unique style, had helped to mature him, make him more sure of what he was doing as an artist, and when he took
the Crickets, J.I. and Joe B. Mauldin, over to Norman Petty’s studio in Clovis, New Mexico, he knew pretty much what he wanted
from his music. He was ready for international stardom.

Buddy wrote “That’ll Be the Day” after seeing John Wayne use the phrase all the time in
The Searchers,
and he and Jerry had “Peggy Sue” as “Cindy Lou” for a year or two before he recorded it. Guitarist Niki Sullivan, who was
the fourth Cricket, never really fit in the group, though during the recording of “Peggy Sue,” his essential mission was to
flick Buddy’s electric guitar pickup switch from the bass to the bright spot for the solo and back again for the rhythm. Buddy
couldn’t break stride long enough to do it himself.

Mr. Holley, Buddy’s dad—Buddy had dropped the “e” for his stage name—was the dearest man, and he was so proud of his son.
One day, he came up to the station with Buddy, and we got to renew our acquaintance. I was surprised to see how good Buddy
looked. It was like he’d had himself redone; the way I remembered him, he had acne and bad teeth, but now his skin was smooth
and he had a gleaming smile. He wore heavy black-rimmed glasses that gave his face a certain weight. He hadn’t changed as
a personality, though. Buddy was an upper, just a happy person. He would laugh and cut up all the time.

That was probably why he enjoyed being with us. We were a bunch of funny guys, Sky Corbin, Slim Corbin, his old friend Hi
Pockets, and me. We laughed all the time, and he laughed all the time, and we were country. He liked that.

Every time he’d come to town, he’d head up to see us at K-triple-L. That was his hangout. We’d lay back in the studio and
play guitars, and Buddy would tell us stories. Our eyes would bug out of our heads because he’d been all over the world. He
would talk about people like the Everly Brothers and Jerry Lee and Elvis. After, we’d usually stop at the Night Owl, a drive-in
hamburger joint on Broadway, looking for girls, cruising around town aimlessly. Actually, we didn’t know what we were looking
for, and I don’t guess we found it. But it was a way for him to unwind from the things he was going through at the time with
the Crickets and Norman.

They were falling apart, and it had gotten worse after he married Maria Elena on August 15, 1958. Petty could see Buddy slipping
away, and Maria knew that Norman was ripping Buddy off. After all, she worked in the publishing business. On a song like “Oh
Boy,” the original writers were Bill Tilghman and Sonny West. Buddy cut the song, and after he left, Norman took the singing
group he used for backing vocals, had them go “dum diddy dum dum, oh boy,” and took a piece of the writing credit. He was
really good at that. He took a part of all or Buddy’s songs and hardly paid him any performance royalties. He kept a tight
control on the Crickets’ money.

Buddy had recently moved to New York, which kind of left the Crickets high and dry. Experimenting with strings and newer arrangements,
like he did on “I Guess It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” didn’t help. There’s a big distance between Texas and New York, and Buddy
wanted to be close to his publishing company and record company. J.I. and Joe B. also didn’t like the fact that Buddy was
talking about starting a label of his own, and they didn’t have a share in it. They were used to getting a third of everything.
The new company was to be called Taupe, after the reddish-brown color of the Cadillac that Buddy drove. Its first artist was
going to be Waylon Jennings.

“Help me finish this song,” Buddy said when he visited the station in December of 1958. Slim and I were back in the station’s
studio doing jingles—Buddy had cut a few takeoffs on “Peggy Sue” and “Everyday” for K-triple-L promotions—but this was the
first time we’d worked on any of his music. We didn’t do much, maybe added a line here or there, and we clapped along while
Buddy sang “You’re the One.” It didn’t take more than an hour and a half from start to finish. I’m the one double-timing in
straight eights.

Buddy had decided he wanted to record me that past summer. He could see how much music meant to me, and maybe he related my
yearning desire to himself, growing up in a sun-baked West Texas town with music as an only outlet. On September 10, he’d
taken me out to Clovis to do my first session. It was an unnerving experience. Norman made me feel the most unwelcome I’ve
ever felt in my life. He didn’t like me to start with, and he didn’t want Buddy to get involved in a record company.

“Volare” had been a big hit during the summer for Domenico Modugno, an Italian-language song on top of the American Hit Parade,
and that sparked Buddy thinking. He was having King Curtis, the famous R&B sax player who was on the Coasters’ “Yakety Yak,”
fly down to Clovis to play on a couple of his songs, and he thought it might be a nice idea to use him on the classic “Jole
Blon,” with me singing in Cajun-French.

We didn’t know the lyrics, so I tried to learn them off the Harry Choates original. By the time we finished, you couldn’t
understand a word. I just sang gibberish, really. Buddy strummed rhythm guitar, and King Curtis called-and-responsed around
my fractured French. George Atwood and Bo Clark stepped in on bass and drums, playing a syncopated waltz beat. The Crickets
didn’t want to do it; they were still mad at Buddy. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Buddy and Norman got into
it the night that I was there. They were in another room, and they were arguing bad.

As a producer, Buddy was easy in the studio. He knew what he was doing. He was hardly twenty-two years old, but he sat there
and directed the whole thing. I’m not saying he didn’t need Petty, especially when he was starting out, though Norman himself
has admitted that you can’t manufacture talent. Norman could be a genius, and had the time and patience to allow Buddy to
follow his own vision. He cut some great records, like Buddy Knox’s “Party Doll.” That’s what convinced Buddy to travel one
hundred miles to see him in the first place. If you weren’t in a hurry to get married, there was no other reason to be in
Clovis except for Petty’s studio.

I didn’t like Norman, either. Can you imagine a kid scared to death, cutting his first real record? He wouldn’t even talk
to me. Buddy couldn’t be there when it came time to put my vocals and the background harmonies of the Roses on the B side,
“When Sin Stops Love Begins,” so Norman was the engineer. He treated me like I wasn’t alive. I was so insecure and alone.
He was real curt. He just didn’t want to be doing it. He was still mad about Buddy, and he had me sing the song an octave
lower than I needed to. He said it sounded sexier; I could barely get to the notes. It was his way of making Buddy see I wasn’t
worth shit.

I was musically naive. I had no earthly idea how things were done. I thought you cut a record and you were automatically a
hit. I didn’t know that studios and producers had that much to do with it. All I knew was that Buddy Holly had befriended
me and taken me under his wing.

Still, I couldn’t have been more surprised when Buddy walked into the station one day, pitched me an electric bass guitar,
and told me “You have two weeks to learn to play that thing.” He had taken a three-week tour starting in January 1959, because
Norman had his money all tied up, close to a hundred thousand dollars worth that he’d put in some church trust fund. Petty
had talked the Crickets into staying with him, and they had officially called it quits, though I think both sides felt kind
of bad about it. Buddy was hurt, and mad, but he needed a band. He chose me, guitarist Tommy Allsup, who had come down from
Tulsa with western swing influences he’d learned while playing with Bob Wills, and Odessa drummer Carl “Goose” Bunch.

I had never played bass before. I didn’t even know till about a week after I was on tour that it was the same as the top four
strings of a guitar, only an octave lower. It ruined my whole style of playing when I realized. I had memorized everything
from the records.

We got off the plane at Idlewild. I could see Buddy’s shadow behind the tinted glass of the terminal. We’d flown all night,
and it was just starting to be daylight. He was waiting for us, and I was about to head into New York for the first time.
As dawn broke, Buddy drove us to the city in his car.

It took my breath away. The sight of New York as we drove through Brooklyn along the East River was like nothing I’d ever
glimpsed before. I’d been as far as Houston, but the tallest building I had ever seen was maybe fifteen stories high. I couldn’t
believe there was anything so big, or that there was so much of it.

We arrived around the fifteenth of January. The tour wasn’t scheduled to start until the twenty-third, so there was time for
rehearsal and getting acclimated. Buddy put Tommy and Goose at the Edison Hotel in Times Square, and I stayed at his apartment
with him and Maria Elena. I slept on the couch.

He lived right down by Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. The apartment building was at 11 Fifth Avenue, and it
cost him four hundred dollars a month. That was a lot of money in those days.

Maria Elena was a sweet girl, and you could see that Buddy was very much in love with her. On the first night I was there
she cooked us beans, and burned them. He whispered, “Don’t say a word, just eat ’em.” She was a terrible cook. She couldn’t
boil water, and I’d have to go out and get me something to eat later.

Buddy must have told her all about me. One time she was listening to one of my tapes that was in the apartment, and she said,
“Waylons”—that’s what she called me—“you could be a pop singer.” She didn’t speak very good English. “Every time I listen
to you sing, it gives me goose bumples.” Buddy would crack up laughing when he heard that.

Buddy was the first guy who had confidence in me. Hell, I had as much star quality as an old shoe. But he really liked me
and believed in me. He said, “There’s no doubt you’re going to be a star. I know. The way you sing, there’s no limit. You
can sing pop, you can sing rock, and you can sing country.”

New York looked just like the movies to me. The Reg Owen song “Manhattan Spiritual” was big when I was there, and I could
hear it as I walked around those crowded streets, so different than Lubbock’s broad, empty avenues. I thought there was nothing
but gangsters lurking around, and strange looking people that would as soon jump on you as ignore you if you’d stepped too
close to them. Me and Goose walked around for two days in a row looking for the Empire State Building, and we were standing
right under it. I’d never looked up. And I remember girls that were so beautiful they’d take your breath away.

Buddy liked to make me marvel. We’d be walking down the street, and I’d see a pretty girl, and I’d say “Goddamn, there goes
a good-lookin’ woman,” and he’d say “That ain’t a woman; that’s a man dressed up like one.” He had me to where I almost bought
some blinders because I was afraid to look at any girl, scared she was a boy and I didn’t know it.

I couldn’t figure how to take the New York attitude. In West Texas, people are always asking “How you doing?” when you go
into a store. They seem like they genuinely care about the answer. But New York had me up a tree. I’d go in and buy something,
and they wouldn’t even say thank you. One time Tommy and I bought some shoes, and I’d had a couple of beers. That’s all it
took to get me half-loaded. As we started leaving, I asked the clerk, “Ain’t you gonna tell us to come back?”