Jerry Bradley had a similar view from his office at RCA. “A little bit of drugs was selling records for Waylon in my mind,” he says. “Maybe a rebellious attitude, along with the Outlaw album, didn’t hurt. I’m not trying to be mean when I say that, but the mafia didn’t hurt Sinatra. I never had a discussion with Waylon about drugs. Hell, I was a three-hundred-pound guy. I didn’t want nobody discussing weight with me. I knew it was bad, wasn’t good for your health, but wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do about it at the time.”
Waylon, too, let the bust run down his collar. The evening of his first court appearance, when charges were lodged, he strutted on to Willie Nelson’s show at Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium, “looking decidedly unbowed and seemingly of extreme good cheer,” noted Laura Eipper of the Tennessean. The two outlaws sliced through “Good Hearted Woman” and then “Pick Up the Tempo,” a Willie number that Waylon had included on his This Time album. He smirked and ad-libbed its third line: People are saying that I’m living too fast, and they say that I can’t last much longer / Little they know that I don’t give a damn.
Weeks later, a judge threw out charges against Waylon and his secretary, leaving only Mark Rothbaum, who had dispatched the drugs to Nashville, to face prosecution. In April 1978, he pleaded guilty to one count of distributing cocaine and served a short prison sentence. The plea prevented a trial that might have exposed Waylon’s long drug history, so Rothbaum is widely viewed as having taken a bullet for the singer, leaving the outlaw singer free to revert to his old ways.
Guitarist Gordon Payne, who sat next to Richie Albright at the console that night when the feds invaded, observed a post-bust wariness in Waylon but no change of heart for his darling cocaine. “Everywhere we went we were looking over our shoulder,” he recalls, “looking for cop cars. We were really careful after that. And we literally would have rooms swept for bugs when we went to certain places, where we knew there was a big [police] presence. It changed a lot of things. We just had to be more careful. I mean, none of us were going to quit! That wasn’t the answer! The logical answer did not come up!”
It wasn’t long, though, before Payne observed that the drugs were telling on Waylon. “You’d see Waylon stay up for seven days and he wouldn’t look well. There were conversations about it: ‘He’s partying too hard.’ So there was a bit of a cloud, and it was becoming a problem. Before then, we were doing our job. Nobody missed a call; nobody missed a sound check. But there were little things in the organization that started happening.
“What I noticed was people started getting into Waylon’s inner circle that never should have been. People conning him, making him believe that his best interest was at heart, when they were really just taking advantage of him. People kissing his ass. None of us ever did that. If he was wrong, we’d tell him!
“I come to the bus one day, and he was sitting there with Kristofferson. He smacked me in the balls, and I just knocked the shit out of him! It was just a quick reflex. As soon as I did it, I’m sure my mouth dropped and my eyes went up. I looked at him and said, ‘I’m sorry; it was just a freak accident.’ He said, ‘I don’t blame you; no problem, hoss. I’ll never hit anybody in the balls again as long as I live.’”
Observers say that by 1978 manager Neil Reshen was less and less attentive to business and quickly falling out of favor in Waylon’s and Willie’s camps. Waylon claimed that Reshen was poisoning his relationship with RCA and had gone missing when the singer needed help with finances. On Willie’s side of the house, the singer blamed Reshen for an unpaid tax bill and for Rothbaum’s conviction, believing rightly or wrongly that the manager had let his assistant go to jail, so he rewarded Rothbaum with Reshen’s job once the prison term ended. Waylon never made such a public gesture of gratitude or solidarity, strangely omitting Rothbaum’s name from a detailed accounting of the coke bust in his 1996 autobiography, but soon, he, too, split with Reshen, citing his inattention to business matters. “Neil had helped me and Willie in the beginning, but now it was going nowhere,” complained Waylon. “My damn business was screwed up.”
Waylon discharged Neil in 1980.
But the cocaine proved more resilient, dominating Waylon for another four years.
AS WAYLON’S EXCESSES snagged him deep in the 1970s, the recklessness of Music Row’s real criminal outlaw was fast catching up with him. Lee Emerson emerged from prison in Memphis just in time to catch the wild Hillbilly Central days and sign with Combine Music in hopes of churning out another “Ruby Ann” or “I Thought I Heard You Callin’ My Name.” But son Rodney Bellamy recalls that bad luck soon descended. “[Emerson] was eating a Hostess Twinkie, and he swallowed his dentures. He had to go into the hospital and have his stomach operated on to get them out. He came to live with us right after that, and [my wife] Marilyn made a comment that [his wound] was smelling bad. Well, he took it all wrong and got mad because she was telling him that if it’s smelling bad it might not be healing up right. He stunk. So he up and packed his stuff together and left.”
Later Rodney learned that Lee moved in with a new girlfriend, Darlene Sharpe, who was recovering from a cataclysmic auto accident that had left her disfigured and blind in one eye. Sharpe later claimed that Lee frequently assaulted her. “No one realized that Lee was really doing these things to me,” she said, “until he broke into my apartment and told me and my sister that he was going to kill me. I picked up the telephone to call the police and he jerked the cord out of the wall. . . . Another time he took a piece of firewood and busted my leg muscle, and he told me he was going to poke my other eye out so that I would be blind.” When Emerson and Sharpe finally parted ways, he hounded her for song lyrics he had left at her home while she took up with Barry Sadler, the famous army man whose “Ballad of the Green Berets,” a 1966 hit, briefly made him a national hero.
Sadler had settled in Nashville some years after leaving the army, his patriotic ballad then a past glory. He wrote songs, authored historical fiction, and compiled a sloppy book on the music business, but his biggest audience hung out in the bars of Nashville, where he spun tales about mercenary adventures and his service in the jungles of Vietnam. According to Nashville legend, Sadler once treated a knife wound inflicted by a country-music-playing American Indian with a few shots of whiskey and did a home-stitch job. He liked to be feared, and he could be as mean as Lee Emerson. “I think he was one of those people who really doesn’t care,” said a Nashville woman who knew him.
Barry Sadler, the balladeer of the Green Berets.
Courtesy of Nashville Public Library, The Nashville Room
One night out on the streets of town, Emerson saw Sharpe with her new boyfriend and again demanded his lyrics. “Sadler stepped up to him,” recounts son Bellamy. “Well, Dad flattened him. There was that left hand out of nowhere that could do it and he done it.” Sadler later claimed Emerson began harassing the couple, jeering him about the sissy Green Berets and running her off the road with his van. There was little question that Emerson was unhinged. He’d become disheveled in his appearance and refused to communicate with his son. “He had a side of him that was kind of ingrained in him, to do something when it was wrong when it was easier to do something right,” says his friend Donnie Fritts.
On December 1, 1978, just before midnight, Emerson appeared in the parking lot outside Sharpe’s apartment. Sadler later claimed that Emerson had made threatening phone calls from a local bar earlier in the night and showed up to make good on them, but Bellamy’s son charged that he’d been lured there. What happened next is not disputed. While Emerson sat in his van, Sadler emerged from the darkness with his .32-caliber pistol and shot him between the eyes. The former Green Beret hurried to the van and placed a .38-caliber piece on the floor in front of his victim’s seat; he then called police to report that he’d just shot at a man in self-defense. Emerson would hang on until early the following morning, finally breathing his last at St. Thomas Hospital.
When police arrived at the crime scene, the
y dug through Emerson’s wallet looking for identification but only found four prescriptions for amphetamines. Meanwhile, Sadler stood by spewing a litany of fantastic theories: perhaps Emerson’s own gun had fired a bullet into his head or maybe Sadler’s shot ricocheted off the glass and hit Emerson. “I’m a weapons expert and there’s no way my little .32 could have made the kind of wound they’re talking about,” lied Sadler in conversation with a Banner reporter. “I fired to miss him by two feet and I’m a damn good shot. If I’d been trying to kill him, I could have put a bullet in his ear. But I shot to miss and I’ve never heard of a bullet making a 90 degree turn.” Nor had anybody heard such fanciful storytelling.
Sadler retained one of Nashville’s superstar attorneys, Joe Binkley, who had represented Douglas Brown in the Stringbean killings. He needed him—police detectives in their investigation were learning that the gun in Emerson’s car was registered in the former Green Beret’s name. There had been no shot from Emerson’s car nor had the rough-edged victim even brandished a weapon. In June 1979, the district attorney’s office charged Sadler with second-degree murder. Less than a year later, he pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and received a four-to-five-year prison term.
Strangely, a judge reduced the sentence four months after it was imposed, giving the killer thirty days in the Nashville workhouse and two years’ probation. Today, decades after Sadler’s own death in 1989, the files in the case are missing from the criminal court archives.
TRUE TO JERRY Bradley’s predictions, Waylon’s public cocaine troubles only fueled his record sales. His five solo singles after the arrest rushed to the top five, and his albums sailed just as swiftly. On the surface, his two solo albums released after the bust—I’ve Always Been Crazy and What Goes Around Comes Around—communicated defiance. He appeared scowling on the covers and belted out strutting anthems, such as Crowell’s “Ain’t Living Long Like This” and his own “I’ve Always Been Crazy.” But underneath the bluster, Waylon had mellowed. As the 1970s dwindled, he covered old rock and country songs and unfurled deeply sentimental ballads, including Tony Joe White’s “Billy” and Mickey Newbury’s “If You See Her.” And then he dusted off Bob McDill’s “Amanda,” which he originally recorded in 1974, and watched it shoot to number one in 1979. The volume now turned down on the outlaw bad man narrative, the critics applauded. “Side two consists of ballads the likes of which Jennings hasn’t sung in some time,” observed Martha Hume of 1979’s What Goes Around Comes Around. “In the hands of lesser talent, a few of these songs . . . would sound overly sentimental. But Jennings’ rough baritone can handle a soulful ballad, and his masculine style just makes him seem all the more vulnerable.” Nick Tosches went as far as to suggest that 1978’s I’ve Always Been Crazy tolled Waylon’s “farewell to outlawry.”
If Waylon was trying to cut the stitching in the outlaw label, he still hovered near the Waylon-and-Willie franchise, which lived on the road and in occasional recorded duets. In 1978, RCA released the duo’s eponymous album collaboration, which charged through the country and pop markets like an angry steed.
The way Bradley tells it, Waylon’s nose for ideas had dulled in the wake of the cocaine arrest, so he approached the RCA executive looking for another magical concept like Wanted! The Outlaws. Bradley had promised never to reprise the outlaw packaging, but he had cooked up an album idea pairing the country’s most famous bearded Texans. In the wake of so many concert tours and one-off collaborations in the studio, it was only a matter of time before the two got behind the microphone for an album. “I turned around and I got this small [mock-up] copy of Waylon and Willie, the embossed album,” says Bradley about his meeting with Waylon. “I said, ‘How do you like that?’ He said, ‘I love that. How we gonna do that?’”
Bradley directed Waylon to select a few Willie tracks in the RCA vaults and add his vocals, but the singer ultimately struggled to meld with his friend’s recordings, so with Bradley’s blessing he went to Rick Blackburn, who ran CBS Records in Nashville, and asked to sing real duets with Willie. “So they went and recorded in-the-business, drug songs,” says Bradley, probably referring to “Gold Dust Woman,” written by Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac. “Waylon come to play those for me. He looked at me and said, ‘You don’t really like them?’ I said ‘Well, we’ll do well with them, but I don’t think there’s one as good as what we had with the Outlaws.’ He said, ‘What about this one?’ And that’s when he played ‘Mammas.’”
It was “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” written by Ed and Patsy Bruce. The lilting ode to the cowboy’s destiny was a natural for the two old outlaws and a sure enough winner in a nation that adored the Dallas Cowboys football team and still romanced history’s range riders. Bradley knew from the minute he heard Waylon play the song that it was as good as Elvis rising up from the dead. It shot to number one in March 1978 and stayed there four weeks, longer than any other single released by a country act that year.
The album itself, made up of mostly new recordings, stopped at every depot on their 1970s outlaw journey, featuring two Kristofferson tracks, one by the outlaw writer Lee Clayton, and a cowritten piece by the old Hillbilly Central denizen Shel Silverstein. Reliable Chet Flippo turned in dynamic liner notes as if to summon the fair winds of Wanted! The Outlaws, and Waylon and Willie rounded out the set with a few recordings from their early 1970s sessions at Hillbilly Central. The allure of the outlaw reunion coupled with “Mammas,” which fathers and sons could sing together like Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” prepared the way for a 126-week stay on the country charts; nobody in country music—not Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, or Loretta Lynn—mustered that kind of staying power. “The album is rarely as good as its creators can be, but it’s more than respectable,” noted writer Patrick Carr. “As Willie points out, the mere fact that RCA and CBS were persuaded to let it happen is something close to a miracle. And, as I point out, it beats most everything else on the record racks right now.”
Waylon and Willie even moseyed into Manhattan’s Rainbow Room to promote their new collaboration. It was a high perch atop Rockefeller Center. But greater heights towered in country music’s sight. And Willie Nelson was about to scale them alone.
WILLIE—LIKE WAYLON—WOULD ALWAYS embody the outlaw ethos, but by 1978, he was quickly cresting the outlaw riverbanks. Plainly, he had become more appealing to mass audiences than Waylon Jennings, continuing to ride the wave of hillbilly and hippie acceptance, but now diving into the deep eddy of middle-American suburbia, whose denizens—despite his rowdy picnics—found him as safe to love as Roy Rogers. Unlike Waylon, who snorted that cocaine and appeared as menacing as the guys in Black Oak Arkansas, Willie smiled and shook your hand, sipped at the beers fans handed him outside the bus, and rarely said no. On the other outlaw hand, Waylon frequently said no. “Waylon was a little paranoid, and he didn’t trust people,” says Hazel Smith. “Therefore, I felt like Waylon would have been a much bigger star than he was, [but] he hadn’t been able to trust people. Willie never had no trouble trusting the media, and he always would give an interview to anybody that he had time for.” However, Waylon despised the media, feeling patronized by reporters, and for a time only granted interviews to those who submitted their finished articles for his approval. Waylon was the sullen guy on the corner, undeniably appealing, but not one to invite home for dinner with the family. So it was Willie who became the darling, an American legend.
In 1978, the redheaded stranger consolidated an audience that would fill his concerts for decades to come. The catalyst was the album Stardust, a collection of American pop standards that Willie had recorded with producer Booker T. Jones, the Memphis soul legend who also happened to be married to Rita Coolidge’s sister. “I remember the first night I sang ‘Stardust’ with my band at the Austin Opera House,” wrote Willie. “There was a kind of stunned silence in the crowd for a moment, and then they exploded with cheering and whistling and applauding. The k
ids in the crowd thought ‘Stardust’ was a new song I had written. The older folks remembered the song well and loved it as much as I did.”
When Willie brought the album idea to Rick Blackburn, the executive reacted a lot like Bruce Lundvall when he first heard Red Headed Stranger. Blackburn, who’d proven his mettle as CBS’s man at Monument Records when the company bought Fred Foster’s baby in the mid-1970s, scratched his head and thought wistfully about the chunky duets with Waylon Jennings that sold so well. Blackburn: “He said, ‘I’m going to go [to California] and we’re going to cut this album on these old standards.’ And I said, ‘Hold it! Wait, wait, wait, wait.’ I said, ‘People don’t want that. Give me more of what you’re doing.’ He said, ‘Well, I don’t want to be predictable and these are good songs.’ I said, ‘Booker T.’s an organ player.’ I didn’t know him as a producer, and I didn’t know the project was going to be that simple. I mean it was a very simple project with voice out front. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I’m going to go do it. And you have a nice day.’
“When that album came in, I sat my whole staff down and I said, ‘All right, listen up. This is Willie’s next project.’ And I started playing the roughs on it. They were presentable. They weren’t finely mixed, but enough to tell. My promotion department went nuts. They said, ‘What are you doing? How can you allow this? How can [we] get Stardust played on the radio?’ But I have to defend it. It’s already committed. I mean, the ship has sailed. And it’s not like I didn’t have reservations. There was almost a mutiny in my conference room to throw me overboard. . . . And when it came out, radio was reluctant, too.”
But, like water, Stardust found a channel. The first single, “Georgia on My Mind,” peaked at number one in the spring of 1978 and the follow-up “Blue Skies” fared just as well. “All of a sudden,” says Blackburn, “everybody looked right. I learned that sometimes artists have a better feel about where they are going than record companies or, certainly, corporations.” Just like Waylon & Willie, the album camped for eleven weeks at number one, but then it became a monument that stood for 551 weeks on the album charts. That’s more than ten years in Willie time. Critic John Morthland pointed out that Willie had introduced his “pop tastes to country fans,” but “reintroduce” may be more accurate. In the 1960s, Willie freely dropped pop standards into his album repertory, and then, as on Stardust, performed them with little hint of country inflection. In a way, the smash album freed Willie to liberally indulge his pop leanings, and over the next decade he returned to the standards again and again for album content while also exploring pop music of the 1980s. On his 1984 album City of New Orleans, with Chips Moman producing, he recorded and released “Wind Beneath My Wings,” made popular by Bette Midler, and Michael Jackson’s “She’s Out of My Life.” Call it an extension of Stardust, but many listeners gagged. Rolling Stone gave it two stars.
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