Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville

by Michael Streissguth

  Indeed, the Cash show was merely one scene in Nashville, but nobody could refute its influence. “It made everybody aware of the serious part of country music,” observes Kris. “The part we all believed in.” In effect, Cash and his TV show had joined the civil rights heroes of earlier in the decade in communicating to America that the 1960s lived in Nashville. Yes, visitors would still find a less than sterling nightlife, a local government that enjoyed the status quo, and fundamentalist churches that preached rashly and acted slowly, but Nashville had exported to America the integration of public accommodations . . . and The Johnny Cash Show. And that had to be worth something.

  WHEN THE CASH show debuted in 1969, Kristofferson still carried the dismissive letter from home in his wallet. Its creases turning white from years of folding and unfolding, it must have still sobered him while also sharpening his resolve. Jack Clement had told him to keep the letter in his pocket, that one day they’d run into Johnny Cash, who’d want to see it. “I’ll introduce you to him,” plotted Clement, “and I want you to whip out that letter and show him.”

  The day came when Kris found Cash in Clement’s office, and, as instructed, he solemnly produced the letter. The son of an Arkansas cotton farmer, who knew something about parental rejection, read the mother’s lines, and burst into deep guffaws. “He was laughing his ass off,” says Clement. “It was a very intellectual kind of letter, well-chosen words. But just really putting him down.” Clement reckons the letter bonded the two artists. From that moment, he recalls, Cash paid attention to Kristofferson and his songs.

  Not that Kris wasn’t trying on his own to pull at Cash’s ear. During his stint changing lightbulbs at Columbia, Kristofferson had slipped demo tapes and lyrics sheets to Cash and June Carter. And according to a story that Cash told, and would have to be dismissed as apocryphal if only Kristofferson himself hadn’t confirmed it in later years, the maverick songwriter rented a helicopter, landed it outside Cash’s home in Hendersonville, and delivered more demo tapes. Kristofferson collided with the country music veteran at just the right time. As the 1960s came to an end, the star’s songwriting productivity had plummeted. Now in constant demand on the road and on television, the man who had given the world “I Walk the Line” and “Five Feet High and Rising” could find neither the time nor the focus to repeat the writing glories of the past, and so he pulled Kristofferson deeper into his fold. “It was a beautiful thing Cash was doing,” says songwriter Jim Casey. “It was hopeful especially when he took somebody like Kristofferson under his wing. Kris couldn’t sing that well. Couldn’t play very well but, God, his songs were just incredible. So that gave everybody hope that you didn’t have to be a great singer.”

  In dramatic fashion so characteristic of Cash, he told Kris and another songwriting buddy Vince Matthews that he was taking them to Rhode Island for the Newport Folk Festival. And he wasn’t just taking them; he was giving Kris a spot on his set. It was July 1969, and Roger Miller’s “Me and Bobby McGee” was hitting the country charts.

  The Newport lineup of 1969 was almost any music fan’s dream. Bobby Bland, Muddy Waters, and Big Mama Thornton mingled with Bill Monroe, Mac Wiseman, and Don Reno. The producers even made room for folkies such as Pete Seeger and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, whose prominence at the festival had been reduced over the years to make room for the ticket-selling stars from other genres. The scene was nothing less than bucolic, according to the New York Times. “The breezy twang of country strings mingled with the cries of blues singers as audiences strolled from one group to another sampling musical styles or pausing to ask questions,” wrote John S. Wilson.

  Cash carried a huge revue with him to Newport, including his regulars the Carter Family, Carl Perkins, and Doug Kershaw. Making room for Kristofferson was bound to ruffle feathers among the organizers, but critic Wilson found him magnetic, though his name proved difficult to spell. “The most interesting of Mr. Cash’s associates was Chris Christopherson, a lanky, boyish songwriter with an easy, persuasive vocal style, whose observant use of everyday imagery made ‘Sunday Morning Sidewalk’ a particularly poignant portrait of loneliness.” The correct title was “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” and Cash himself would make it his own in 1970.

  “If there was one thing that got my performing career started, that was it right there,” says Kris. “And Cash was as scared as I was! It was so funny, he wanted me to go out and sing some songs before his set. And they didn’t want me to. They said he just had so many minutes himself, so they didn’t want me to take away from them. But he let me do two songs. He made them let me do two songs. And there was no looking back after that. It went over real well, and they put me on some afternoon shows that had different songwriters, like Joni Mitchell and James Taylor.”

  Matthews never took the stage, but back home in Nashville, Kris and Vince both trembled with excitement, jogging up Broadway to the rooming house where Billy Swan stayed and slept. “It was six o’clock in the morning,” recalls Swan. “And Kris and Vince said, ‘Hey Billy.’ I had the little side [balcony] door open that faced the street. Kris said, ‘John put me on at Newport, and I sang a couple of songs.’”

  “He was going to make it,” says Fred Foster of his new writer-recording artist. “But what Johnny really contributed to Kris was stability. Like, ‘I’ve already been there and done that, son, don’t worry about it. It’s going to work out fine. You got a question, just sing it out and I’ll holler an answer at you.’ That’s the way I saw it. They were very close friends.”

  Some unlikely fare includes the basement of The House, where you can watch people get drunk and take their clothes off to the accompaniment of indifferent, deafening noise. Or walkover to the Red Dog Saloon, re-christened the Mind’s Eye, where Star will fool you into thinking she’s going to take her clothes off.

  —Alice Alexander

  Four

  * * *

  Nothing Left to Lose

  JOHNNY CASH FORCED change on country music. His live albums recorded at Folsom and San Quentin prisons in the late 1960s became cultural statements like none ever heard in country music, while his television show shepherded rock, folk, and country into one place at the Ryman Auditorium. Country music could not help but pay attention. The industry also eyed Bob Dylan’s Nashville session men and welcomed them into every studio around town while acknowledging Kris Kristofferson’s mature and slightly elusive poetry, which defined a new style of songwriting in Nashville. Inevitably, the movement they stirred up reached the RCA studios, where Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson still searched for solid footing.

  Waylon’s sessions featured alumni from Dylan’s recordings and songs by the new writers such as Shel Silverstein (the poet and Playboy illustrator from Chicago), Mickey Newbury, and, yes, Kris Kristofferson. Taking cues from Johnny Cash and Roger Miller, Waylon recorded no fewer than four Kristofferson songs in late 1969 and early 1970, including “To Beat the Devil,” about a man’s jocular encounter with the forces of darkness. Waylon painted the song with authenticity that could only come from a childhood in poverty and ten years of hard living on the road; indeed, it was one of the first times anybody could sit back and say, “Waylon nailed that one.”

  For the time being, Chet Atkins had stepped aside on Waylon’s sessions, bringing in producers Felton Jarvis, who supervised Elvis, and Danny Davis, a New York veteran who had produced Connie Francis and Nina Simone. The association with Davis, who couldn’t ignore the fresh breezes in Nashville, yielded the sterling Kristofferson cuts as well as a flirtatious cover of Chuck Berry’s “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man,” a top-five country hit in 1969, and a murder ballad titled “Cedar-town, Georgia” that wouldn’t be released until 1971. Davis also circled back to Chet’s old folk strategy, piloting the album Country-Folk, which paired Waylon with the Kimberlys, a Las Vegas–based vocal group, on numbers such as Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park,” which even the birds would agree is neither country nor folk. To say the least, it was an unusual outing that sproute
d from Waylon’s romance with Verna Gay Kimberly.

  Waylon recalled that he’d been attracted to “MacArthur Park,” which the Kimberlys regularly performed in their act, and brought it back to Davis. “Danny and I got into it a couple of times over the arrangement,” said Waylon. “I knew exactly what I wanted the strings to do; I had to hum the parts. He probably had his own ideas. But the single got into the country Top Twenty Five that fall, and when the Grammys came around, it won for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group. By then, everybody was more than happy to claim it was their idea.” Nothing recorded before or after in Waylon’s discography sounded like this album. Monstrous orchestral arrangements alternated with a cheery folk sound that echoed the Seekers, Britain’s pop-folk sensation. Think “Georgy Girl.” In fact, Jennings and the Kimberlys wheeled out “A World of Our Own,” the Seekers’ big 1965 hit.

  Despite the Grammy, the album soon receded into country music trivia. Only the head-butting between Davis and Jennings lingered in memory. “Waylon liked Danny but the chemistry wasn’t there,” recalls Billy Ray Reynolds, who was touring with Waylon but not recording with him yet. “He was a good guy but he had a little bit more of a New York attitude than Waylon was accustomed to. They do things differently up there. They don’t pull their punches.” Over the years, Waylon planted a myth over his relatively minor disagreements with Davis, casting the producer as an antagonist in his own anti-establishment outlaw story. He liked to talk about threatening Danny Davis with a firearm, but Reynolds argues that it flat out never happened. Reynolds had been holding a pair of nickel-plated Colt revolvers for Waylon, and after a year or two, Waylon asked him to bring them to the next session, which Davis happened to be producing. “So I brought them in and gave them to him,” says Reynolds. “And all he did was have them out, and he was showing them. That story got so misconstrued, how he pulled the gun.” In his autobiography, Waylon wrote that it was Merle Haggard who had returned the guns. But Reynolds knows better.

  Funny enough, the music never betrayed Waylon’s real or imagined frustrations with Davis. Once they got past the Country-Folk album, their marriage produced a gutsy string of honky-tonk favorites and modern ballads that sounded as if the late 1960s had been permitted to enter the RCA studio. Most important, Waylon appeared to have found his voice. Whether Davis had anything to do with that or not, the Davis-produced tracks showcase deeply riveting vocals amid bold instrumentation on starkly realistic songs, many of which appeared on The Taker/Tulsa and Cedartown, Georgia albums, both released in 1971. Because RCA-Nashville failed to embrace the idea of the concept album, it happily dropped unreleased scraps from earlier sessions into those collections, spoiling any semblance of cohesion that they might have had.

  BY THE LATE 1960s, Willie Nelson’s recordings also exhibited new maturity, although they, too, were not packaged in concept albums, the new trend sweeping popular music. It’s not that RCA was oblivious: Elvis Presley’s recent Memphis albums expressed a clear and unified vibe, for example, as did collections by other RCA artists such as Jefferson Airplane and Jose Feliciano. Closer to home, Chet had okayed Bobby Bare’s memory trip A Bird Named Yesterday (1967) and Porter Wagoner’s Confessions of a Broken Man (1966) and Soul of a Convict (1967), a likely influence on Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison album. But as the 1960s dimmed, the record company neither encouraged nor accepted album-length statements from Waylon and Willie.

  In late 1967, Willie, in his bleating, wistful way, had recorded a set of starkly beautiful ballads, including the classic “Sweet Memories,” written by Mickey Newbury, but RCA appeared flummoxed in response, slotting them in an album called Good Times next to syrupy Nashville Sound material recorded at earlier sessions. Its cover splashed with a comical pose—Willie on a putting green with a cutie in sandals and short skirt—the album hit the stores in late 1968, contrasting sadly with the calculated sophistication of Glen Campbell’s smash albums and the danger of Johnny Cash’s At Folsom. All in all, Willie seemed absurdly out of touch with the market.

  Still, the late 1960s and early 1970s hinted at a coming of age in Willie’s recordings. Danny Davis and Felton Jarvis, while tinkering with Waylon’s recordings, appeared at Willie’s sessions with ideas that Chet never had, inserting a tasteful production that owed more to the irresistible modern sounds of a California session than to the Nashville Sound. Dylan alumni—Charlie McCoy, Wayne Moss, and Pete Drake—came over from Waylon’s sessions and joined other new hot pickers such as Roy Huskey Jr., David Briggs, and Norbert Putnam. And for the first time in years, Willie’s drummer Paul English and steel guitarist Jimmy Day returned to Willie’s sessions.

  Willie’s own songs were as pleasing as ever, at home in a coffeehouse or a honky-tonk, but now they appeared next to his covers of other great songs of the day: Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,” Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’,” and James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain.” His interpretation of Kris Kristofferson and Shel Silverstein’s “Once More with Feeling” on the Both Sides Now album was a perfect alignment of stars in early 1970s Nashville: the seasoned singer and the blossoming songwriters shone brightly.

  The Abbott, Texas, native also got caught up in the wave of station-wagon songs that motored into country music. Narratives that dealt with heartbreak and self-doubt in a suburban setting, they proved to be the unintended consequence of Chris Gantry’s “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife,” not to mention the confessional honesty of Kristofferson’s music. This was the stuff of Frank Sinatra’s Watertown album and Elvis Presley’s “Don’t Cry Daddy.” Even Waylon explored domestic angst with “The House Song,” written by Paul Stookey and Robert Bannard, while Eddy Arnold crooned about visitation rights in “Wait for Sunday,” by Glenn McGuirt. Willie considered the bitter-sweetness of raising kids alone in “Little Things,” and wandered through an empty tract home in “She’s Still Gone,” both cowritten with his then-wife, Shirley. The songs must have given pause to husbands and fathers during their commute to work or to the mothers and wives leaving the house for their first job, as so many women had begun to do in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They announced a curious new maturity in country music, but predicted the tug-at-your-family-feelings drivel that deluged the market thirty years later.

  Just like Waylon, Willie’s vocals nestled into a comfort zone during the Nixon years. They danced with fluidity, unconcerned now with enunciating every edge around the syllables. In 1970, he opened Both Sides Now with freewheeling arrangements of “Crazy Arms” and “Wabash Cannonball,” announcing that the feel of his dance hall days were about to do-si-do into the RCA studios. His newly liberated voice soared on gospel-inspired tracks and classic honky-tonkers “I Gotta Get Drunk” and “Bloody Mary Morning,” and would reverberate through all of his future work. In the short term, though, RCA failed to capitalize.

  IN THE LATE 1960s and early 1970s, Columbia Records plastered Johnny Cash all over the rock-and-roll market while Monument carved out a place for Kristofferson among young buyers in rock and country, but RCA continued to think of Waylon and Willie as fodder for the old-line country audience, ignoring younger music fans who snubbed the Nashville Sound. Paul Worley—who would produce the likes of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Lady Antebellum in later decades—was one of those younger fans who might have embraced Waylon’s and Willie’s cooler tracks had RCA marketed the singers to him. “I didn’t know there was a Music Row,” he says. “I lived all my life in Nashville, all of it. I went to Vanderbilt and never knew, never heard, had no consciousness of Music Row. I remember going downtown and watching The Johnny Cash Show when it was taped down at the Ryman Auditorium, but it was Johnny Cash and he wasn’t country, right? He was Johnny Cash. I still shunned country music as far as what was mainstream country, because mainstream was really hillbilly or nasally, in my view, or it was that country-politan kind of pop, really kind of a throwback to the pop out of New York and L.A. of the previous era. So to me that stuff was pretty square. I wanted to rock,
or I wanted to soul, or I wanted to acoustify, like Richie Havens. I loved him.”

  Cotten Music Center on Twenty-First Avenue South in Hillsboro Village.

  Courtesy of Metropolitan Government Archives of Nashville and Davidson County

  Worley fed his musical hungers in the West End, combing the racks in Sgt. Pepper’s record store and the instruments in Cotten Music Center, both located on Twenty-First Avenue South in Hillsboro Village. The music business he knew there rocked like a blues jam compared with the button-down atmosphere two miles away on Music Row. “I started taking guitar lessons [at Cotten] in ’65,” he recalls. “By ’66 I was working there, and by ’67 I was teaching there, teaching guitar. We would see everybody from the chitlin circuit, artists like Freddie Waters and Jimmy Church. These people would come in once a week, and put their money down for their guitar or their bass or their PA or whatever, and they would hang around and play. Sometimes I would have to get in the car with Tom Malone who worked there and go repo. We would have to go to the South Side Lounge over on Nolensville Road and walk in and at least threaten to repo the PA system unless we got our money. I am scared shitless. You walk into a club with a sign on the door that says, ‘Leave all guns at the door.’ And I am sitting there going, ‘Well, I ain’t got a gun. I am the only fool around here who doesn’t have one. I better bring one so I can leave it at the door.’ So I walk in with Tom, and [the proprietor] opens up his briefcase and I am thinking he is going to pull out a gun. . . . He pulls out a wad of money and gave us our money, and on we go.