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

by Michael Streissguth

  Two years later, Beck stared at his test pressing of Red Headed Stranger and saw more problems than Lundvall’s comments to Chet Flippo revealed. “If you looked at [the album] from an A&R person’s perspective, it was kind of a hodgepodge,” says Beck. “It was completely stripped down at a time when these wall-of-sound country records were on the charts, ruling the charts!

  “The record was delivered. And the one phrase I heard was ‘This sounds like it was recorded in Willie’s kitchen.’ Nick Hunter [whom Neil Reshen had hired to do promotion] called me and said, ‘Dan, you have to help me. Bruce has rejected Willie’s album. You got to call him and tell him it’s all right; you’ve seen the whole Texas thing!’ And Nick proceeded to tell me, ‘I think Bruce feels like Willie just gave up on Nashville, took the advance, cut something for a couple thousand bucks, and pocketed the rest and said, “The hell with my recording career! I’ll just play in Texas.” ’

  “I said, ‘Nick, I wish I could help. If I can think of an idea, I’ll get back in touch with you.’ The next hour I got to thinking about the half a dozen press people in Nashville, and they had all been down to Texas, and they all kind of got it. So I called Nick back and said, ‘Hey Nick, what if we got those people together and got them to listen to it off the record?’ He said, ‘That sounds like a great idea!’ And Bruce said, ‘I’d love to hear that; I’d love to get some feedback like that.’

  CBS executive Bruce Lundvall, Mark Rothbaum, and Willie.

  Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment

  “We hustled this thing up to get everybody to come over to the Exit/In the next afternoon and listen to the record. I remember Ron Bledsoe came, who was VP of operations for CBS in Nashville. Bonnie Garner came, who was in A&R and a friend of Willie’s. There were about a dozen of us. We went in, and it still smelled of stale beer from the night before. It was dark in there. I don’t even think there was a waitress. When the first song finished, there was no comment. Nothing. Every band between songs, dead silence. You couldn’t get a read from what was going on in the room. We put on ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.’ After that song played, Bill Littleton from Performance Magazine stood up very slowly and started very slowly applauding. And within a few seconds, everybody broke in. It was like, ‘Oh my God, they love this record!’

  “So we played the rest of the record, and I went back to the office. I called Bruce and told him what the reaction was. And I think it was the next day, Nick called me and said, ‘Dan, he took it.’ I think Bruce needed something to validate taking the record, because there was every reason not to.”

  RCA-Nashville must have scratched its head as Red Headed Stranger galloped up the charts past Don Williams and Charley Pride and lassoed reams of jubilant reviews. “This album reveals its treasures very slowly,” wrote Ed Ward in Country Music. “As likely as not, you won’t like it the first time through, but stick with it. It’ll stick with you for a long time. Masterpieces are like that.” Rolling Stone’s Paul Nelson saw in the new release a tableau of the archetypal lonely western outlaw, steeped in a new etherealness: “Hemingway, who perfected an art of sharp outlines and clipped phrases, used to say that the full power of his composition was accessible only between the lines; and Nelson, on this LP, ties precise, evocative lyrics to not quite remembered, never really forgotten folk melodies, haunting yet utterly unsentimental. That he did not write much of the material makes his accomplishment no less singular.”

  Nelson had fused the lonely western heroes of his youth—the Gene Autrys and John Waynes—with the complicated, ambiguous sort that novelists and filmmakers painted in the 1960s and 1970s. His redheaded stranger surely clung to the notion of forthright cowboy thinking, but he rode with an outlaw desperation that came right out of Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, or Waylon Jennings’s Honky Tonk Heroes album. After all, the cowboy of golden West would never shoot a woman.

  Red Headed Stranger spent an astonishing 120 weeks on the charts and blazed a new trail for Willie Nelson, while reawakening CBS Records to the blockbuster potential of country music not seen since Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison album of 1968 and Lynn Anderson’s Rose Garden of 1970. And if Waylon’s Honky Tonk Heroes was the outlaw movement’s first album, Willie’s proved to be its first smash. One of the haggard artists on the West End-to-Austin wire finally had broken through, setting the stage for Hazel Smith’s chosen adjective to become a corporate marketing campaign.

  I’ve been called an outlaw, a renegade, and a son of a bitch. But all we’ve been fighting for is artistic control. Freedom is what it all boils down to, having your own way.

  —Waylon Jennings

  Ten

  * * *

  Wanted!

  WHILE WILLIE COLLECTED laurels for Red Headed Stranger, Waylon could proudly point to his two most recent albums, his strongest releases yet: The Ramblin’ Man (1974) and Dreaming My Dreams (1975). The former, which featured cover photos shot at Muhlenbrink’s (formerly the Red Dog Saloon) on Division, uncorked the number-one title track written by RCA producer Ray Pennington and a gutsy cover of Gregg Allman’s “Midnight Rider,” which, but for Ralph Mooney’s steel guitar licks, bled pure southern rock.

  Dreaming My Dreams, too, flirted with southern rock, particularly in the rollicking “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way,” a Waylon composition that meditated on the state of modern country music and predicted the big fuss over the outlaw movement. The song jetted to number one in 1975, another exception to the silky, pop-oriented songs of country music popular that year, much as Willie’s “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain” was.

  One of many hits from the storied country music catalog that cited Hank Williams, Waylon’s inspiration sprang from Ernest Tubb’s band, of all places. The Texas Troubadour’s men used to hang out on the bus during breaks on The Midnight Jamboree, a radio program that followed the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights, and which Ernest hosted from his record store on lower Broadway. According to Billy Ray Reynolds, who befriended Ernest’s bass player Jack Drake, the musicians would emerge drenched from their shop performance, their gleaming suits sticking to their wet skin, and escape to the air-conditioned bus, all the while wondering out loud if “Hank done it this way.” Reynolds brought the expression to Waylon’s bus, where a big star emblazoned with Hank’s name hung on the bathroom door. “Evidently, it became ingrained in Waylon’s mind and that’s where the song basically came from,” says Reynolds.

  Feeling free.

  Courtesy of Maryland Room, University of Maryland

  Jack Clement, who was married to Jessi Colter’s sister Sharon at the time, produced the Hank song and the rest of the album Dreaming My Dreams. They’d met years earlier, recalls Clement, in the RCA studios. “I was kind of a fan of him before I met him. And when I did meet him, he was in the middle of doing a session. He was in the control room and Johnny Cash was out there singing. He was going to go out there and sing with him in a minute or something. But I was kind of looking at Waylon, and that pissed him off! Like, ‘If that guy looks at me again, I’m gonna kick his ass.’”

  The tension eased when Waylon and Jack became brothers-in-law and Jack invited him to stop by his Belmont Boulevard studios on any given Thursday, when he always had musicians booked for routine work, such as demo sessions. “A few weeks later, he did,” explains Clement. “I went down there that Thursday morning and he was waiting out back in his car. We went in, started cutting some stuff with him. We played ‘Dreaming My Dreams,’ and he fell in love with it.”

  Written by Clement protégé Allen Reynolds, “Dreaming My Dreams” was a tender waltz that must have enchanted the dancer in Clement and no doubt speared the “MacArthur Park” ballad lover in Jennings. But it was Waylon’s “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” that soared to number one and defined the album. In the studio, the song came to life when Waylon invited Billy Ray’s electric guitar to join his own for the opening measures, a common collaboration on the road, but rare i
n the studio. “That’s when he pulled the piece of paper out of pocket that he’d written that morning,” says Reynolds. “It was ‘Hank Done It This Way.’ Basically, what he started playing was what we’d do on the road. If he started a song, sometimes he’d do a vamp. He kicked off the vamp and we just started playing.”

  “That was one of the key tracks,” agrees Clement. “We’d worked on it. I played something on it, guitar or something. Then he left, and I started mixing on it. And I mixed it in a whole different way. I brought them guitars way up there, and he came in the next day or whenever we got back there and listened to it and loved it. So if I could prove something to Waylon, we didn’t have to argue about it. A lot of times, I have things in my head I want to hear, but I can’t explain to you how it sounds, until you do it.”

  Waylon, Jessi, and Jack Clement.

  Photograph by Alan Mayor

  Drugs, breakdowns in communication, and innocent misunderstandings often left Clement and Waylon impatiently trying to read each other through the control room glass window. Says Richie Albright, “The thing Waylon figured out was—he said, ‘If Jack is sitting behind the board and we’re running the thing down, then we haven’t got it yet. Once he gets up and starts dancing around the room, that’s it, we’re happening now.’”

  Clement complains that Waylon often misread the control room body language. “We were there one time and Jessi was there, and Sharon was there, and I think maybe another person or two. And they were milling around the studio, and I was ready to get to work. He’s out in the studio, and I was in the control room, kind of swarming around being dramatic or something, saying, ‘Get out!’ He’s kind of looking at me. If he’d have heard what I was saying, he’d have understood it. It looked like I wasn’t paying attention to him or something. He just saw it and just didn’t understand it.” The singer stormed out of the studio and stayed away for two weeks.

  In the end, the uneasy foxtrot of egos sprinkled gold across the dance floor. Along with the title track and “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way,” they tacked on a live recording of “Bob Wills Is Still the King,” which Waylon wrote and performed in Austin on September 27, 1974. It was another delightful example of Waylon’s eagerness to poke fun at the highfalutin music industry, in this case Willie Nelson and the redneck rock thing down in Texas. It don’t matter who’s in Austin / Bob Wills is still the king. Fans gave Waylon his highest placement to date on the pop album charts as well as his longest run ever on the country charts.

  But it was no Red Headed Stranger.

  IF WAYLON’S LATEST albums failed to answer Willie’s surge, then RCA-Nashville boss Jerry Bradley was going to find one. First, he repackaged some of Willie’s old nuggets in an album that sold enough to recoup a few bucks of the company’s seven-year investment in him. And then he got a bigger idea.

  “Waylon was selling, if we were lucky, two hundred and fifty thousand albums,” says Bradley. “Willie comes out with Red Headed Stranger and that took off and sold a million records. Jessi Colter put out ‘I’m Not Lisa’ on Capitol. That damn thing sold half a million, or a million, set our butt on fire. We’re sitting over there, trying to sell two hundred and fifty thousand records, and we’re still struggling. Tompall had a damn record, ‘Put Another Log on the Fire.’ I never was a big Tompall fan, I’ve said this from day one. I never could understand that one. Waylon liked him or liked what he did; they were buddies. ‘Another Log on the Fire’ comes out, and they’re booking out as the ‘Outlaws.’ I never went to one of their concerts, but I can imagine what it looked like, they running up and down the highway doing that.”

  Of course, Bradley had plenty of Willie’s recordings in the vaults and a session or two on Jessi Colter, too. He approached Waylon about compiling an album with their tracks plus his and calling it Wanted! The Outlaws, unaware of the southern rock band out there riding the rods as the Outlaws. Waylon consented, provided that Jerry made room for a few Tompall Glaser tracks. Bradley agreed, saying, “‘Life’s a compromise, and Waylon’s part of it. You got to meet him halfway if you want to do this job.’ So I said, ‘Okay. I’ll do it.’”

  Bradley hired Rolling Stone’s Chet Flippo to pen liner notes, and looked to a Time Life book about the American West as inspiration for the album’s iconic cover, which featured photographs of Colter, Glaser, Jennings, and Nelson on a parched, bullet-riddled wanted poster. Bradley inflated Waylon’s cover picture, but Waylon objected again. “Waylon said, ‘I really don’t want my picture to be bigger.’ I said, ‘Waylon, your picture has to be bigger. This is about you. I’m trying to get you to sell a million records. They’re selling a million, and I have to get your picture just a little bit bigger.’ He said, ‘Well, hell, do what you want to do.’”

  Nonetheless, Bradley still brought the album cover to Hillbilly Central for Waylon’s approval, showing up one afternoon with his son and daughter in tow. “All Waylon’s men were sitting around the room,” he says. “Waylon’s sitting behind the desk. I handed it to Waylon and he said, ‘Shut the door.’ I shut the door. There was an ad from RCA sitting up against the wall, just a Waylon ad. They had been throwing knives at it. I’m sitting there with my kids and—thud!—the knife hit it. He looked at [the cover], and handed it to the next guy, his entourage and hangers-oners. They’d look at it and hand it to the next one, the next one. Captain Midnight was in there. And [Waylon] said, ‘What do y’all think?’ Before they had a chance to answer, he said, ‘Well, hand it back to me.’ They handed it back and he said, ‘It’s your idea. If that’s what you want to do, you run with it.’ [I said,] ‘Thank you Waylon!’ And I walked out the door.”

  The album rolled out in February 1976 and quickly picked up endorsements from Rolling Stone and other publications. “Most of the tracks are from a period when the first seeds of experimentation began to spill in Music City,” noted Joe Nick Patoski in Country Music. “Thus, a constant clash of traditional and innovative influences dominates each artist’s selections, in most instances, finely woven lyrics hiding behind still slick studio concepts.”

  The album showcased Willie’s smart poetry from the RCA years and a few gems from Waylon—“Honky Tonk Heroes (Like Me)” and the tender, newly recorded “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys”—but it was Waylon and Willie’s “live” duet reprise of the warhorse “Good Hearted Woman,” with its applause sounding suspiciously canned, that added up to big sales. On its wings, Wanted! became the first certified million-selling album in country music history and finally gave RCA an answer to Willie’s bell ringer.

  Like Red Headed Stranger, the album tapped into America’s ongoing love affair with the western outlaw as well as each artist’s growing stature in the music community. The glowering expressions of Waylon, Tompall, and Willie on the album cover recalled the outlaw biker on the dust jacket of Hunter S. Thompson’s 1966 book Hell’s Angels, while the rugged vocal delivery and pounding beat of “A Good Hearted Woman,” made it an outlaw anthem and established the duo on top of the country-rock market. Talk of the pair joining Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue of 1976 buzzed around the music industry, while Willie’s Fourth of July picnic that year resembled the chaotic rock convocations played by Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and the Band on their fabled festival train ride across Canada in 1970. Gate crashers swarmed the picnic in Gonzales, Texas, and several rapes, stabbings, and robberies as well as the drowning of a young fan were reported.

  Like a swift, dry wind, the new outlaw cacophony blew into Texas and swept up the redneck rock genre. All of a sudden, outlaw encompassed the whole lot of them—from Waylon, Tompall, and David Allan in Nashville to Willie, Jerry Jeff, and Billy Joe in Texas. It boiled down to this: country artists who chanced to be male and incorporated rock-and-roll ethos into their persona, if not their music, suddenly found themselves labeled “outlaw” by radio stations, record promoters, and journalists. The outlaw became one of country music’s major archetypes, surviving into the next millennium, where it lives i
n artists such as Toby Keith, Jamey Johnson, Travis Tritt, and Hank Williams Jr.

  Make no mistake, the outlaws communicated an image of pure Texas cussedness, but it was all routed through Nashville, “the store,” as Willie Nelson referred to it. From their perches in Music City, marketers and promoters spun a standard narrative about the grizzled artists rebelling against music industry convention, which, though based in fact, quickly reverberated into redundancy. “It’s just a lot of crummy jive,” groused an anonymous observer in a 1976 magazine article. “As people feel more and more trapped in their lives in this country, with their dull lifeless jobs, boring family lives and hopeless inflation, the music industry tantalizes them with these images of fake rebels to look at.” Even Neil Reshen, who had every reason to fuel the outlaw hype, chuckled publicly at the cowboy masquerade: “You couldn’t find two guys who are less like outlaws than Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. . . . It’s all horseshit really. But if the public wants outlaws, we’ll give them outlaws.”

  Rhythm guitarist Gordon Payne, who had joined Waylon’s group in 1974, recalls that Waylon and Willie went from playing smaller ballrooms left over from the western swing era and clubs on the coasts to capacity crowds in stadiums and indoor arenas. “We did gigs with Marshall Tucker and Lynyrd Skynyrd,” adds Richie Albright. “We did shows with the Grateful Dead and New Riders of the Purple Sage. The crowd started getting more youngsters, more long-haired, you might say. Our production was pretty much like a rock show because of those guys coming over from the rock side [on our gigs] and they’d bring that attitude.”