Emerging on the heels of the big outlaw albums, Stardust ushered in an era of unparalleled prosperity in Nashville’s music business. Record companies now figured that every country artist could sell millions, so, as the 1970s petered out, singular artistic vision began to fade in the glare of marketing aspirations. For a time, American country audiences had accepted outlaw artists who looked and sang as if they’d just tumbled out of a Mexican whorehouse, but the courtship of large audiences, particularly in the prepped-out era of Ronald Reagan, refused to suffer such suggestions. Even Rosanne Cash, whose maverick singing and songwriting rebelled against corporate country music, was told by CBS executives that on her album jackets she must always appear ripe for sex, though in a chaste sort of way. The greasy, edgy likes of David Allan Coe and Waylon Jennings would find themselves turned out of the herd by the end of the 1980s, for they were too old and offensive to middle-of-the-road sensibilities. Accordingly, the whole outlaw sales vehicle was dismembered and its pieces appropriated for the time being by the brief and vacuous Urban Cowboy fad, where disco met outlaw fashion.
To his credit, Waylon probably recognized that the industry was turning to a new sales strategy that would soon relegate him to “legend” status. He had always known that even the outlaw bit was nothing more than another way to sell country music and soon it would be replaced by another hook. Indeed, he had delighted in exposing the marketing apparatus and his own participation in it by writing songs like “Bob Wills Is Still the King” and “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?” which cut down outlaw-era pretentions. In 1978, his hit “Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit’s Done Got Out of Hand” chronicled his cocaine bust and detailed his disgust with the media and recording industry’s construction of the outlaw myth. Someone called us outlaws in some ole magazine / New York sent a posse town like I ain’t never seen. If Willie’s Stardust closed the outlaw chapter in country music, “This Outlaw Bit” wrote its epilogue.
The spirit of early 1970s musical progressivism that lived in The Johnny Cash Show and in the characters of the West End limped toward 1980. Long about 1976 Cash had become more concerned with finding hits than pursuing a musical vision, while he reclined comfortably as a patriotic American symbol. National fast-food restaurants and Vanderbilt annexes now dotted the West End, and rents there soared as Music Row prosperity and the university’s expansion drew moneyed young urbanites and drove out bohemian culture.
Until his dying day in 2002, Waylon never stopped grumbling about authority, even while cashing big record company checks, and Willie rarely appeared without blue jeans and a retinue of hippie fans still looking for carefree days at Centennial Park or the Armadillo World Headquarters (which closed in 1980, followed into oblivion a year later by the Exit/In). However, the Littlefield boy and his Abbott brother now seemed far removed from their outlaw days at the Professional Club and Hillbilly Central, where they had dreamed of recording music according to their own rules. Waylon tangled with Tompall Glaser in a lawsuit over publishing, which had ended their friendship and removed Waylon from the curbside madness of Glaser’s recording studios. Meanwhile, Willie hewed toward more music that sounded like the City of New Orleans album and jetted to Hollywood, where he appeared in The Electric Horseman (1979) with Robert Redford and Jane Fonda and Honeysuckle Rose (1980) with Dyan Cannon and Amy Irving. “Film projects immediately began stacking up,” wrote Michael Bane in a friendly early 1980s biography. “He starred in a special CBS presentation of ‘Coming Out of the Ice,’ the story of two Americans imprisoned in Siberia. Journalists on the set in Finland reported there was no sign of Willie the musician.”
There would be one more attempt to revive the outlaw juggernaut, at least as it lived in Waylon and Willie and Kris: when the three men joined Johnny Cash in the studio to record an album titled Highwayman. Together, the quartet embodied the transformational winds that had swept through Nashville in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were outlaws, even Cash, who never appeared on the marketing label but who resolutely pursued his own vision in the studio and on his television show. Remove them from the chapters that cover Nashville in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the city’s music industry would have clung indefinitely to old formulas.
Their first album, released in 1985, birthed the number-one hit “Highwayman,” which portrays four lives cut from the fabric of America and links them in an unending wire. The singers’ pocked voices and the song’s historical patina echoed outlaw, but it was only a revival. Two subsequent albums failed to transcend the men’s weighty legends, and the franchise crumbled in the 1990s when Cash became ill.
THE END OF the 1970s found Kris Kristofferson in a personal and professional tailspin. His latest album, Easter Island, looked back on his prime and engaged his beloved wordplay, particularly in a song called “The Fighter.”
We measured the space between Waylon and Willie
And Waylon and Willie and me
But there wasn’t nothing like Billy Joe Shaver
The way Billy Joe Shaver should be
But despite the outlaw ballad, the critics sneered. Rolling Stone complained that it was “barely a mediocre record, one short step up from the bottom.” When Kristofferson’s new material failed to move critics and fans, Willie Nelson entered the corral to remind them of his friend’s greatness. A year after Stardust shook up Nashville, he released Willie Nelson Sings Kristofferson, which surged on the album charts and boasted arrangements of the songwriter’s hits that were among the best ever. “Kris Kristofferson’s songs were easy; that’s one of the reasons I did it,” he said. “It didn’t require a lot of teaching of the band or anything. We’d known those songs for years.”
But Kris could not capitalize on Willie’s gesture. And from 1981 to 1986, he released no solo work. Even his film career teetered on the cliff’s edge, pushed there by poor scripts and the devastating failure of 1980’s Heaven’s Gate, in which he starred and which rudely shut down the age of the director in Hollywood. An Esquire reporter who visited him at the time wrote that he was carrying the flagging Heaven’s Gate to the Cannes Film Festival “like a reheated enchilada no one wants.” For two years in the early 1980s, he made no films for theatrical release.
At home, there was only more uncertainty. In 1980, Rita Coolidge left him in a house on top of a parched hill in Malibu, where their daughter Casey’s stuffed animals lounged on every sofa and chair. Esquire noted that he was smoking copious amounts of mind-smacking weed and reliving scenes from his collapsed marriage, all while juggling part-time care of Casey and the regimen of staying physically fit for the movies.
Obviously, the magazine correspondent and, indeed, the new decade observed him negotiating something of a midlife crisis, but unbeknownst to the press and many people around him, Kris had already formulated a remedy. The man who landed in Nashville in 1965 to explore his impulse to write woke up to a new impulse, the prickling of his social conscience. In the early 1980s, he rediscovered the flame of promise and possibility that once burned in the West End, applying it exclusively to a host of political aims. Indeed, the spirit of Nashville’s civil rights protestors and antiwar demonstrators had settled into Kristofferson.
With little concern about his failure to conjure another “Me and Bobby McGee” or “For the Good Times,” Kristofferson found satisfaction tramping stages and picket lines in support of the United Farm Workers (UFW), led by Cesar Chavez, who advocated for perennially undercompensated produce workers, particularly those in California. “I think it all probably started in the Rio Grande valley [as a child],” he says. “I identified with Mexicans. And Cesar Chavez . . . I got to meet him several times, and I just had more respect for him than when I first heard about him. He was a great human being.” He told writer Peter Cooper that in the Texas of his childhood light brown was black: “It was Mexicans that there was prejudice against, and my mother made sure we knew that was wrong. One example I remember of it is when a Mexican from Brownsville won the Medal of Honor
and they had a parade for him, and we were the only Anglos at the parade.”
But when Kris arrived in Nashville for the first time in 1965, his political point of view hinged on his army past and upper-middle-class values. He backed the war in Vietnam and only casually followed the civil rights protests that had surged through the city like a summer thunderstorm. The songwriters he ran with were similarly oriented. “I don’t think anybody was pushing any particular political direction,” he says. “A lot of the songs that came out were just the truth [about living] as we perceived it.”
His take on the war shifted as the 1960s spiraled to an end. Fellow oil-rig helicopter pilots and old friends with whom he’d served in Germany had gone to Southeast Asia and returned with a new perspective. “They were telling stories about what was going on in Vietnam that were chilling: taking people up in choppers and interrogating them, then throwing them out,” he told The Progressive in 1991. “One boy told me about kicking the hands of this man who was holding on to the skids, holding on for his life. I got to thinking that if you could make nineteen-year-old kids do that, you could make them do anything.”
Kris’s new skepticism of power delivered him to Chavez, whom he recalls meeting on the set of Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. The UFW faced an uncertain road, he learned from the Arizona-born activist: legislators were chipping away at labor laws, and big growers, mostly in California, were trying to neutralize the UFW, primarily by cozying up to the friendlier Teamsters union. In response, Kris, in his words, “aligned with them,” uncorking a lifelong commitment to the farmworkers’ movement; for years, he played benefit concerts and lent his music and name to other activities.
Kris greets Cesar Chavez.
Ted Sahl collection, courtesy of San Jose State University, Special Collections and Archives
By the early 1980s his political activities—which also included appearing in concert for UNICEF and stridently protesting U.S. policy in Central America—overshadowed his music. And they certainly distinguished him from his outlaw buddies. Waylon’s rabble-rousing remained encased in the lyrics of some songs he sang and mostly bubbled over in interviews when he attacked corporate influence in the music business. And Willie was still a few years from taking up Farm Aid in support of the American family farmer and wading into the murky water of Native American activist Leonard Peltier’s legal defense, a cause that Kristofferson, too, adopted.
At a Grammy Awards show press conference in 1981, the former army captain, without so much as a cue or a provocation, issued one of his first loud condemnations of U.S. involvement in Central America. “Let’s get the hell out of El Salvador,” he blurted as the paparazzi and fellow actors looked on. Throughout the decade, he did not relent. In 1986, his album Repossessed, his first on Mercury Records, took aim at the sitting president as well as his policies on El Salvador. And then he targeted the U.S. government’s support of the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, traveling there in 1988 to show support for peace talks between the Contras and President Daniel Ortega, where he received a dignitary’s welcome. At home, he rarely let an interview or concert pass without speaking out on the issue. “We have such a sorry history in Nicaragua,” he told a reporter. “Most Americans don’t know that for forty-five years we supported the most hated dictatorship in the hemisphere; somehow, they finally threw that son of a bitch [Anastasio] Somoza out despite our support. I can’t believe that most Americans would be comfortable knowing they’re paying to kill children.”
Kristofferson earned the venom of the right and the praise of the left. Somewhere in the middle, a few people remained who still embraced his art. He had paid for his activism. He struggled to find major label support (Mercury promptly dropped him after Repossessed), and one might have been forgiven for assuming that Cash, Nelson, and Jennings, as the Highwaymen, scooped up their friend from the picket line just to keep his career going. On the screen, his film appearances no longer made the A-list, and he appeared more often in TV movies, anyway. Out on the road, some concertgoers lugged placards to his shows deriding his causes and accusing him of being a communist or, worse, the Antichrist. When he turned up the political rhetoric onstage, a certain percentage of the audience could always be counted upon to demand their money back. Not surprisingly, one of the biggest outcries against his politics rose up in Georgia, where his bad language had sparked a near riot in the 1970s. Playing Atlanta during the 1987 Oliver North hearings in Washington, Kristofferson complained that the spectacle in the congressional chamber was little more than an advertisement for the Contras and implored the audience to reevaluate these “freedom fighters” whom North assisted; they were anything but, insisted Kristofferson, and had targeted schools, medical centers, and farmers—not soldiers. When he finished, the stirring in the audience was palatable. Fans, who evidently were fans no longer, dusted off their own First Amendment rights and demanded the singer’s removal. “Get that communist off the stage!” they yelled. Three hundred people marched to the ticket window for a refund.
Today the old outlaw chuckles at the memory of such confrontations. And then he pauses again. “I knew that some of my audience at the time thought I was a communist or something. But I had a thing about the truth, you know. I felt, ever since I had gone to be a songwriter, that I was trying to tell the truth.”
WILLIE NELSON’S MERCURIAL ascent and Waylon Jennings’s deepening cocaine habit coincided with the death of the outlaw movement and ushered to an end the decade of Nashville’s young adulthood. The West End blush of 1970 had faded as drug-dimmed eyes and the hunger for big money replaced the optimism of those who believed the mood of the 1960s would flourish in the 1970s. Jimmy Carter, whom Nashville had entrusted to erase the blemish of its Nixon infatuation, hobbled into the 1980 election, his presidency smoldering in the wreckage of military aircraft in the Iranian desert. Former mayor Beverly Briley, who ruled Metro government in 1970, finally admitted to the alcoholism that many had long suspected, after he drunkenly rammed a car carrying two elderly people. The looming National Life company, five years after trying to tear down the Ryman Auditorium and sparring with Skeeter Davis, still advertised its narrowness, censoring a news director at its WSM-TV subsidiary who tried to report on a multimillion-dollar lawsuit stemming from a child’s injury at Opryland. And in 1980, toxic shock syndrome, the infection that defined American consumer culture, crept into Tennessee, sending a twelve-year-old girl to Vanderbilt University Hospital for a long stay.
But while the outlaw decade gracelessly retreated, Waylon—battling at least three lawsuits over business matters—saw clearly for a moment. In the Spanish Revival manse on Seventeenth Avenue that housed his office, he often lingered when the night was closer to dawn than midnight, phoning friends or employees who’d gone to bed hours earlier. This night somebody called him. The voice on the other end of the line described a cancer-ridden man in Raleigh, North Carolina, whose last wish was to meet him. When the sun came up, Waylon told Richie Albright to arrange it. They’d soon be in Charlotte for a show and afterward could head over to Raleigh before traveling to another gig in Grifton, North Carolina, in the eastern part of the state.
So on May 24, 1980, Waylon’s bus eased down the residential street where the failing Joel Jackson lived. Accompanied by Albright, Ralph Mooney, and Gordon Payne, Waylon—in his usual vest, boots, and gambler’s hat—eased into the living room where Jackson was sleeping on the couch. “I was just standing back,” recalls Albright, “and Waylon was standing next to him. His wife woke him up and said, ‘Waylon’s here.’ And the guy opened his eyes and said, ‘I’ll be God-damned.’”
For a half hour, the visitors popped open beers and chatted about music. And Waylon, like a southern politician, spun around the room, signing albums for friends and family who’d come to visit and gathering up in his arms the dying man’s four-year-old daughter. Says Payne, “The thing I remember is the guy held Waylon’s hand with both of his hands. ‘Can’t believe you’re here!’ He was
real drugged. ‘Can’t believe you’re here!’ And then he would nod off. The guy’s wife, she sat back there with the biggest smile on her face the whole time. It was really something.”
When Joel Jackson finally fell into a deep sleep, Waylon and the boys stepped one by one onto the bus and rolled south to their next show. Seven hours later, the stricken man died.
Acknowledgments
* * *
THE LIST IS always long, the journey filled with friends, family, happy coconspirators, and reluctant accomplices. Thanks to you: Rosanne Cash, Dianne Davidson, Kris Kristofferson, Lisa Kristofferson, John Leventhal, Richie Albright, Billy Ray Reynolds, Jesse Reynolds, Rodney Crowell, Kyle Lehning, Jerry Bradley, Gordon Payne, Hugh Bennett, Jack Clement, Fred Foster, Don Davis, Guy Clark, Carl Knight, Ralph Mooney, Earl Sinks, Rodney Bellamy, Girl George, Donnie Fritts, Billy Swan, Alan Mayor, Hazel Smith, Ray Pennington, Ronny Light, Elroy Kahanek, Dan Beck, Inez Johnson, Chris Leuzinger, Bill Walker, Rick Blackburn, Cowboy Joe Babcock, Steve Shoen, Mike Farrell, Jim Casey, Even Stevens, Jim Malloy, Mary Matthews, Ranger Doug Green, Terry George, Dick Bay, Joe Nick Patoski, Mark Rothbaum, Harry Warner, Paul Worley, Ernie Winfrey, Robert Ogles, Don Boner, Richard Weize and Andy Merck at Bear Family Records, Tommy Wayne Burlett, Rick Trunfio, Carolyn June Lallemand, Rochelle Bilow. The office of the Criminal Court Clerk of Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County. The staff of the Nashville Room at the Nashville Public Library. The office of the Criminal Court Clerk of Shelby County, Tennessee. Steve Andreassi and Cindy Baffa of the IUP Lodge and Convocation Center, Hoboken, New Jersey. Chris Ratliff in Special Collections at the University of Memphis, Deborah O. Cox at the Metropolitan Government Archives of Nashville and Davidson County. Michael McCall and John Rumble at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Archives. My agent, Jim Fitzgerald. Publisher Cal Morgan at It Books, who championed this book from the very start. And editors Jennifer Schuster and Mark Chait, who helped mold Outlaw into a more effective narrative. Thanks also are due to Trina Hunn at HarperCollins. John Jackson, Che Williams, Matt Kelly, Tom Tierney, Rob Santos, Toby Silver, and Jim Parham at Sony Music. Danelle Moon in Special Collections and Archives at San Jose State University. Henry Shipman and other staff members of the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt University. The staff of Ridgetop (Tennessee) City Hall. The staff of the Maryland Room at the University of Maryland. At Le Moyne College: Carrie Carpenter, Linda LeMura, Julie Grossman, Wayne Stevens, Phil Novak, Melissa Short. The Commodores: Darrell Berger, Lewis Shiner, Michael Minzer. Two angels in Nashville: Ruth White and Tamara Saviano. My wife, Leslie, and our children, Emily, Cate, and Will.
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