Dreaming Out Loud

by Bruce Feiler

  “Okay, the song’s in A-flat, the people’s key,” Steve said, scurrying to prepare the room.

  “You got any idea how to split this up?” Waylon asked, holding the lyric sheet at arm’s length to aid his straining eyes.

  “You sing one verse,” Willie answered, “I’ll sing the other. Then we’ll split the chorus.” He too held the sheet at arm’s length, but since he was a full head shorter than Waylon, it rested closer to his eyes. “I’ve got to get me some glasses,” he joked. “My arms aren’t as long as his.” He pulled out a pair of plastic-rimmed glasses as Waylon turned his cap backward. The scene seemed straight out of Grumpy Old Men.

  Finally Earle interrupted their primping. “It’s probably best to split the last verse,” he said. When they agreed, he gave the order to proceed. “Let’s saddle up, everybody!” he said.

  Once they started singing, Willie and Waylon were both fiercely focused, though with vastly different styles. Willie stood still, with his hands clasped together, his head nearly motionless. He moved only at the end of each line, leaning just slightly toward the microphone to let the bass in his voice be heard. Waylon was more fidgety. Whereas Willie sang as if he was telling the microphone a secret, Waylon acted as if he was trying to convert the entire assembly. He crossed his arms, rocked back and forth, and occasionally quivered, revivallike, a gesture that sent his hangers-on into head-nodding ecstasy.

  At the end of the first take, the room burst into applause. Waylon, though, was unsold. “I think you and me got one better in us,” he said to Willie. To which his friend answered, “My phrasing won’t be the same twice.” “Doesn’t matter,” Waylon said. “We’ve kicked the asses of singers and writers who’ve done less than that.” After the second take, Waylon was still frustrated. “We could practice with this track,” Steve said, hopeful. “But we don’t know how to practice,” Waylon said.

  After the third take, he was at least somewhat placated. “You really stretched that out,” he said to his partner. “You Willied it.” “Well don’t expect it to happen again,” Willie cracked. The two men wandered into the control room to hear the playback. Once inside, Willie took off his baseball cap for the benefit of those who had been trying to read the muddled writing on the front. Was it Chinese? Waylon wondered. Grinning, Willie turned the cap sideways where the bright red letters formed the words GO FUCK YOURSELF.

  Following a short break (and a few bites of cheese), Willie and Waylon returned to the studio to overdub the vocals. The television cameras had packed up and left. Most of the hangers-on had trickled out. Three takes on the vocals and Willie declared himself through. He waved good-bye to the crew. “Where’re you headed?” Earle asked. “Austin,” Willie said. “Good place to be headed for,” Earle said. Willie stepped outside the studio and boarded his bus, Honeysuckle Rose II. On the side was a portrait of a Native American; on the back: Willie, Waylon, Kristofferson, and Cash.

  Back in the studio, Waylon was still tinkering. “One thing about Willie,” he said. “He’s consistently out of tune.” Later he would tell me a story: Mark Knopfler, the virtuoso guitarist and leader of Dire Straits, wanted to cut an album with Waylon and Willie. “I want Willie very involved in the tracks,” Knopfler said. “You think you do,” Waylon corrected him, “but you don’t.” “Trust me,” Knopfler said. “No,” Waylon said, “trust me. If you get him in here while we’re doing tracks, he’s going to park a bus right outside the door. He’s going to smoke pot most of the day and drink the rest of the day, and every once in a while he’s going to come in here with about three songwriters trailing behind him with tears rolling down their cheeks. Then he’s going to say, ‘I want to cut this great song.’ And you know what, it ain’t going to be worth a shit.” Willie agreed. “Anything Waylon does in the studio is fine with me,” he told me, chuckling. “He can help me, teach me. Because normally I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  Waylon, meanwhile, grew more intense. Three, four, five times he retried the harmony, never quite satisfied. “Let’s hear that from the top,” he said to Earle after the tenth take. “Top of the chorus or top of the song?” Earle asked the engineer. They discussed it briefly, then opted for the top of the chorus. They opted wrong. “Top of the song!” Waylon barked. “Top of the song.” Then he muttered, “Jesus Christ!” Earle seemed unconcerned by Waylon’s growing irritation. “My uncle’s going to be real impressed that I did this,” he gushed. “Hell, I think everybody’s going to be impressed.”

  After the next run-through, Earle was pleased. “That was a really good take,” he announced.

  “I’d like to do it one more time,” Waylon said.

  “No need to do that,” Earle suggested. “We’ve got everything we need. We can just comp it later.” He was referring to the process of taking the best-sounding word from several different cuts and digitally piecing them together.

  “No,” Waylon said. “I don’t like that comping shit. One word here, one word there. Where’s the feeling in that?”

  “Everyone does it,” Earle replied. “Really, I think you’ve got it. But if you insist…”

  He started to rewind the tape, but just as he did, Waylon ripped off his headset and threw it to the floor. He walked through the doors of the studio, steaming.

  “I think you’ll regret this,” Waylon said. “You just don’t do shit like that! I’ve made a lot of these myself, you know.” He swiveled and stormed out of the control room, past the drying cheese and wilted salmon, and directly out the front doors. The reaction of the two men at the console was nothing short of nuclear paralysis. They sat, stunned. After a moment, Earle stepped into the foyer and lit up a cigarette.

  “Man, we were down to one line. One line,” he said, trying to explain what had happened to the few musicians waiting to touch up their parts. “He just wanted to redo it. We would have comped it, but he doesn’t like comping. He hates this modern stuff. He likes doing things the old-fashioned way.”

  In his autobiography, Waylon Jennings offers the following description of his first trip to Nashville. It was 1965. The native of Littlefield, Texas, was twenty-seven years old. He had already apprenticed as Buddy Holly’s bass player and confidant, then shucked the business in disillusionment following Holly’s death. Six years later, he was lured back to music by songwriter Bobby Bare, who told RCA head Chet Atkins that Waylon Jennings was “the best thing since Elvis.” It was enough for Chet to place a call to Phoenix, where Waylon was living at the time. “I started out for Nashville with a yellow Cadillac and a yellow-haired woman,” Waylon wrote. “We climbed over one hill after another, Memphis aiming east toward Nashville, until finally Music City stuck its head over the horizon like a rising sun. I could hardly believe this was going to be my new home.”

  Almost immediately Waylon found himself in the center of a young group of insurgents—Johnny Cash, Tom T. Hall, and Kris Kristofferson—who were just congealing on lower Broadway and preparing to wreak havoc on the elders of Music Row. They felt estranged from the sweet sounds and gentle strings of the Nashville Sound. “Awash in strings, crooning and mooning and juneing,” Waylon wrote, “the Nashville Sound may have been Nashville’s way of broadening its pop horizons, but it was making for noncontroversial, watered-down, dull music that soothed rather than stirred the emotions.” By contrast, the new wave of singer-songwriters hoped to return the music to its hardscrabble roots—fewer strings, rawer guitar. “We never said that we couldn’t do something because it would sound like a pop record or it would be too rock ‘n’ roll. We weren’t worried that country music would lose its identity because we had faith in its future and its character.”

  In addition to challenging Nashville’s musical conventions, this group of rebels also challenged many of the social conventions of what was still one of the more conservative, uptight cities in the South. Most notably, they did drugs. “Me and John were the world champions of pill-taking,” Waylon wrote of his roommate, Johnny Cash, “but we each didn’t let on to t
he other that we knew it.” The two set up an apartment together (“I was supposed to clean up and John was the one doing the cooking…”) and went to extraordinary lengths to conceal their addictions. “I hid my stash in back of the air conditioner, while John kept his behind the television,” Waylon wrote. “He’d tear the place apart if he ran out. If we had started combining supplies and sources, we probably would’ve bottomed out and killed ourselves, feeding each other’s habits.”

  The drugs, like liquor to the generation before them, gave these shy men the courage to go onstage. Cash, in his autobiography, describes how the pills—mostly Dexedrine, Benzedrine, and Dexamyl—gave him confidence. “I’ve always loved to perform,” he wrote, “but I’ve never gone onstage without experiencing those ‘butterflies.’” With a couple of pills in him, he said, the butterflies disappeared. “My energy was multiplied. My timing was superb. I enjoyed every song in every concert and could perform with a driving, relentless intensity.” Waylon felt those sensations and more. “I never hit the ground for twenty-one years,” he told me. “I had incredible stamina; I prided myself on the fact that I could take more pills, stay up longer, sing more songs, and screw more women than most anybody you ever met in your life. I didn’t know when to stop or see any need to.”

  In time Waylon transferred that confidence to the studio. Though he had some success in the late 1960s, Waylon didn’t thrive until he challenged the reigning bureaucracy of Music Row and took control of his own recordings. Nashville had always been a community where producers made all the decisions: They used the same studios, hired the same musicians, and made every record on the same nickel-and-dime budget. More than custom, this was written into artists’ contracts. “I’m not a brilliant person by any definition,” Waylon recalled, “but I could read them sons of bitches and see one thing: I was getting screwed. They had a wonderful thing going on. They would give it to you up here and take it all away from you down here. I just told them, ‘I’m going to get you. I’m not going to let you do it.’ I guess I was the one who brought the system completely down.”

  In 1972, citing a technicality in his contract, Waylon earned the right to record in the studio of his choosing and to use his own band. Though commonplace in rock, in country it was revolutionary—all the more so when Waylon started producing records that were dramatically different. His 1973 album Honky-Tonk Heroes, recorded in Hillbilly Central, was a breakthrough mixture of dark cowboy ballads and sparse West Texas odes. “I liked things that weren’t perfect,” he told me. “I wanted my music on the edge, with some feeling in the rhythm section.” Waylon took that credo seriously. He hated various techniques that other country musicians used, specifically pickup notes, the one or two notes used to introduce a phrase. “I think it’s like stompin’ your way into a song,” he said, “announcing that you’re going to knock on the door before you actually do. It irritates me to no end, and one day I decided to put a stop to it.” To do so, he took a pistol into the studio. “It was one of those ones that Wyatt Earp used,” he recalled. “When I got in there, I just pulled it out and said, ‘The first son of a bitch that plays a pickup note or that’s still looking at those goddamned charts after the third take, I’m going to blow his hands off.’”

  Having drawn the line so dramatically, Waylon reveled in his freedom. In Hillbilly Central, he finally had a place where he could do whatever he pleased: Come and go at all hours of the night, do drugs, bring women, go around the corner and shoot pinball, or stay up for three days straight to write a song. More than just a band of roughnecks having a good time (imagine the characters from Animal House set loose in the midst of a Baptist seminary), the Outlaws were changing everything about country music, right down to its appearance. Waylon and Willie, who despite their grumbling had actually been as neatly groomed as everyone else in Nashville, even took the shocking step of abandoning their pretty-boy images for blue jeans and beards. “I had grown it just for kicks,” Waylon wrote, “but when I looked in the mirror, it was like I was just starting to look like myself. We were all undergoing transformations. I mean, can you imagine Willie without a beard and those braids?” When Waylon put on a black hat and walked onstage, he was “staking my own piece of land where the buffalo roam. ‘Don’t fuck with me’ was what we were saying.”

  Those strong-minded ideas, coupled with their strong-arm tactics, heralded the return of what had always been a chief tension in country music: the battle between the old and the new. “Revolution and counterrevolution may seem to be the most unlikely topics ever to be associated with country music,” Chet Flippo wrote in an essay on the Outlaws, “but the tendency to rebel is ingrained in humans, and it certainly is imbedded in the persons most likely to be prominent in country music.” If anything youthful turnover is the one constant in Nashville. A study by the Country Music Foundation found that the average age of country artists who charted in 1955 was thirty-three; in 1995, the figure was also thirty-three. The average age of first-time artists in 1955 was twenty-five; in 1995, the figure was the same. The reason for this constant influx: Country music, because it reflects the nation, naturally reflects changes in the nation as well. Indeed, perhaps the central misunderstanding about country music is that it’s about the past. Though older performers may linger in the public’s mind, each decade has given birth to a new musical form—bluegrass in the 1940s, honky-tonk in the 1950s, the Nashville Sound in the 1960s—that brought with it a new crop of stars. Nashville in the 1970s was ripe for such a change. “We didn’t need Nashville,” Waylon said. “Nashville needed us.”

  Ultimately, even the conservative denizens of Music Row realized these new artists were becoming a phenomenon and could sell far beyond the traditional country audience. In 1976, Jerry Bradley, then the head of RCA, decided to capitalize on this trend by rereleasing old tracks by Waylon, as well as Willie and Jessi Colter (Waylon’s future wife), both on other labels. Though Waylon originally disapproved, Bradley insisted. “We had a meeting,” Bradley told me, “and I said, ‘Here’s how it is. What did you make last year? Three, four, five million dollars? I have a job that pays me fifty grand. I enjoy my job. If I put this album out, I might get to keep it another year.’” Waylon agreed, even consenting to the use of the name the Outlaws, even though he, Willie, Colter, and Tompall Glaser were not a formal band.

  The album, though it wasn’t a creative breakthrough in any way (in fact, most of the cuts had appeared on earlier works), revolutionized country music. Like Garth Brooks a decade and a half later, Willie and Waylon had a sound—bleak desert—and a style—grunge cowboy—that perfectly captured the country’s Zeitgeist. “The simple fact is, the Outlaws enabled a lot of other things to happen,” Bradley said. “They brought an acceptance of a broader range of people. They escalated sales. They made it easier for Ronnie Milsap and Dolly Parton and Crystal Gayle.” Chet Flippo was even more generous. “By the time it ran its course, the Outlaw movement had changed the face of country music forever,” he wrote. “The producer as king—that feudal notion was shattered. Country artists gained control over their own record sessions, their own booking, their record production, everything else related to their careers, including the right to make their own mistakes.”

  Inevitably, of course, those mistakes would help bring the Outlaws down. In 1977, at the height of his popularity, Waylon went broke—from all his high living, he says, and from not paying attention to his own affairs. “I figured out one thing,” he told me. “Country boys have to go broke once. Every one of them I’ve ever known has done that. You go broke, get stung real good, and then you learn.” In August of that year, Waylon was arrested for possessing twenty-seven grams of cocaine after federal agents intercepted a package mailed to him from New York (when agents could not prove that Waylon ever actually possessed the package, the charges were dropped). Soon he and Tompall Glaser were suing each other over royalties, and Rolling Stone, once a supporter, groused that Waylon was refusing to do interviews and had started being r
ude to his fans. Willie, meanwhile, was lured to Hollywood.

  By that time, the Zeitgeist had moved on as well. A new crop of more clean-cut artists, led by George Strait and Randy Travis, arose to supplant the bad boys of the seventies, followed by Garth, Clint, and a clan of even cleaner-shaven artists in the nineties, many of whom didn’t even drink, let alone trash hotel rooms. “Joe Galante called me several years ago,” Waylon said, referring to the new head of RCA. “He said, ‘Clint Black loves you and wants to meet you. I’d like you to tell him some of those old Willie and Waylon stories.’” The three men went to lunch. “I told these stories,” Waylon recalled, “about me getting coked up and things like that, and after a while it got a little quiet and Clint Black said, ‘Well, I tell you one thing. I can see right now, I’ve got to get rid of this Goody Two-Shoes reputation.’ And Joe burst in and said, ‘No, wait. You don’t understand.’ Joe was scared to death that Clint would become like me.”

  (Wade was a perfect example of the clean-cut nineties country star. As much as he idolized Waylon, he couldn’t fathom living that lifestyle. Not only did he never indulge in groupies, he told me, but when he read Waylon’s book and learned of his decades-long drug use, Wade was dumbfounded. “I’ve been trying to quit chewing snuff forever,” he said. “I can’t imagine trying to quit cocaine.”)

  Predictably, there was a backlash when the oldtimers were overthrown. COUNTRY GRAYBEARDS GET THE BOOT bemoaned The New York Times in 1994. “George Jones may be the greatest country singer of his time,” the Times said, “but he has a small problem these days. Like Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, and virtually every star from the pre-Garth-Brooks, pre-video, pre-country-hunk era, he can’t get on the radio anymore.” WHY CAN’T YOU HEAR COUNTRY’S GREATEST STARS ON THE RADIO? screamed a 1996 issue of Country Weekly, a cover that featured both Waylon and Willie. Most people on Music Row knew the answer to that question. “It’s like my daddy said,” Jerry Bradley told me. “How much chocolate ice cream can you eat? How much of Webb Pierce can you listen to? How much Waylon Jennings can you listen to? How much Garth Brooks can you listen to?” Moreover, as Bradley knew, that complaint had been around for years. “It’s the thing that Bill Monroe said in 1960,” he noted, “that Hank Snow said in 1970, that Loretta Lynn said in 1980. Hey, guess what, you have that period of productivity and it doesn’t last forever.”