week of  2/27/02
 
 
 

Kicking down doors
 Waylon Jennings tried to lead country — and other genres — back to their musical roots
By Karl Rohr
Few entertainers could cut to the bone with the common sense and direct logic of Waylon Jennings.

Take this exchange years ago between Jennings and a television interviewer. Why, the interviewer asked, did you kick out all the doors in the apartment you had once shared with Johnny Cash in the mid-1960s?

“To get to the other side,” Jennings said. After a pause, he added, “Also, nothing feels better than a good, solid door giving away beneath your foot.”

He was right. Try it sometime. But don’t expect the doors of Nashville to come crashing down the way they did in the 1970s when Jennings and his compadres smashed their cowboy boots into the sacred family jewels of country music.

He always told us that the outlaw bit had gotten out of hand. The media could talk all they wanted to about the leather vests, long hair, beards, black hats, boots and Willie Nelson’s tennis shoes, but for once, hype didn’t overshadow talent.

Jennings sold millions of records, but don’t let it fool you. This was great music and record buyers knew it. He might have been an outlaw, but Jennings never ripped off a listener.

Well, that’s not entirely true. The latter part of his career was tarnished by mediocrity and bad health. Don’t try ol’ Waylon’s lifestyle at home and expect to live as long as he did.

Somehow he made it to 64. Years ago, his cigarette habit had reached as high as seven packs a day, permanently reducing the depth of his famous baritone. He had a quadruple heart bypass in 1988. His diabetes led to a foot amputation weeks ago. He died on Feb. 13.

I just hate like hell that the first thing reporters mentioned about his death was that he had been the narrator of “The Dukes of Hazzard.”

Then they mention his $1,500 a day cocaine habit. One MSNBC anchor asked a Country Music Foundation member, “So did this guy just wander around stoned all the time, or what?” Yeah, for a while he did, which puts him right up there with most every other country music legend who ever lived.

I felt my age when I read the obituaries. I wondered, where were all these reporters in the 1970s? Don’t they remember this guy? He was big, I mean huge. Are the reporters that young? Or were they so conservative in the 1970s that long-haired, dishevelled poets with loud amplifiers and attitudes didn’t do it for them? You mean there are actually people who have never heard, “Good Hearted Woman,” “Lonesone, Ornery and Mean,” “Ladies Love Outlaws” and “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Cowboys”?

Maybe you had to be there. The image of Waylon and Willie onstage together has been burned into many a good music lover’s brain: Willie with his pigtails, earrings and crevassed face, and Waylon, big and bad, clad in boots, blue jeans, white shirt, black leather vest and black riverboat gambler’s hat, picking that custom gold and black Fender Telecaster with the embossed floral designs on the face and gold-rope trim around the body.

But the songs really set them apart. With lyrical help from a rough, raw, plain-spoken bard named Billy Joe Shaver, Jennings and Nelson delivered songs that didn’t mess around. They dealt frankly with sex, drugs, free living, lovable losers and no-account boozers, all rooted in a tradition of Bob Wills, Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, Lefty Frizzell and other honky-tonk heroes.

Jennings sprang from other traditions that shouldn’t be ignored. He was born into poverty on a poor farm near the windswept Texas panhandle town of Littlefield. He became a disc jockey while still a teenager, working on his diction and opening his ears to different music and other places. It speaks volumes that he had been a close friend and bass player for Buddy Holly, whose name seems to recede ever deeper as popular music marches on without a clue about its past. During a tour in 1959, Jennings gave up his plane seat to Holly. The plane crashed and killed everyone on board. Jennings inherited a rock-and-roll spirit that found a soulmate in his country heart.

The results could be staggering, and never so apparent than on a tune from 1975, “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?” The production alone was rebellious. It was just a steady, stomping, heavy rhythm with phased guitars mixed together into one big sound, no chorus, no bridge, no fiddle break and only two chords. It sounded like an amphetamine-fuelled paranoia trip and was most effective when played as loudly as possible.

But listeners would mainly remember the lyrics, a declaration of confusion and dissatisfaction with the Nashville establishment: “Lord, it’s the same old tune, fiddle and guitar/Where do we take it from here?/Rhinestone suits and new shiny cars, Lord/It’s been the same way for years/We need a change.”

That change would come in the form of the “Outlaw Movement,” a term playfully tossed about by Jennings’ management and carried to extremes by the media. Jennings and Nelson would laugh at the label and the pretenders who tried to jump on board it: “Someone called us outlaws in some old magazine/New York sent a posse down like I ain’t never seen/Don’t y’all think this outlaw bit has done got out of hand?/What started out to be a joke the law don’t understand/Was it singing through my nose that got me busted by the man?”

But the outlaw image only told part of the story. The songs of Jennings and his compatriots called for a return to basics, both musically and personally. The press often called them hippies, a description that Jennings never seriously tried to dispute, although he came from a much poorer background and had less formal education and had paid more dues than most of his 1960s counterculture predecessors. His monster hit, “Luckenbach, Texas,” laid it on the line:

“Baby let’s sell your diamond ring/Buy some boots and faded jeans and go away/This coat and tie is choking me/And in your high society you cry all day/We’ve been so busy keeping up with the Joneses/Four-car garage and we’re still building on /Maybe it’s time we got back to the basics of love.”

Fat chance of lyrics like that appearing in today’s country music. If the song had mentioned buying a $40,000 pickup truck or NASCAR tickets instead of boots and faded jeans, then maybe the song would work today. But you’d have to boast about that four-car garage, not condemn it.

The irony is obvious, however, to anyone who knows that the 1976 album, “Wanted: The Outlaws,” featuring Jennings, Jessi Colter (Waylon’s wife), Willie Nelson and Tompall Glaser, crossed into the pop charts and became the first country album to sell one million copies.

This outlaw bit had done got out of hand. And it made for some pretty rich outlaws.

Still, one has to consider what they replaced. In 1974, the Country Music Association had named Olivia Newton-John as Female Vocalist of the Year. No wonder the world was ready for Waylon.

But don’t get the idea that Jennings was immune to no-brainer, grab-the-money-and-run projects that capitalized on a redneck craze. He got a million-selling single out of the theme to “The Dukes of Hazzard” television show, which he also narrated. He saw the whole project as a stupid joke for stupid people, and he laughed about it all the way to the bank.

“There was no chance that ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ television show would prove too smart for its target viewers,” Jennings wrote in his autobiography. “A moonshine excuse for car chases and watching Catherine Bach’s ass in her trademark cut-off jeans, that long-legged good-lookin’ thing, it was incredibly popular.”

Jennings was far more proud of another project depicting southerners, but this one sailed right over the head of Daisy Duke fans. “White Mansions” was a 1978 concept album written by an Englishman named Paul Kennerly. Set in the Civil War, the record examines the personalities and experiences of an arrogant Confederate officer, his wife (Jessi Colter) and an impoverished, illiterate private. Jennings sings and narrates the part of the Drifter, a prophet who sees the South’s impending doom because of its narrow-mindedness about slavery, and the inability of North and South to work out a compromise.

It was an intelligent work, both musically and lyrically. Eric Clapton provided the instrumental highlights with his guitar and dobro, but Jennings’ vocals stole the show. Dramatic but direct, he held pity for the characters and their “cause” while knowing all the time that the price of war would be devastating. On the last fatalistic song, the Drifter sees what he has been predicting and he can’t hold back his sadness. Jennings would recall that “White Mansions” was one of the finest artistic experiences of his career, even if it did flop commercially.

Truth be told, after the 1970s, Jennings didn’t have the artistic staying power of Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash, who continue to record critically acclaimed albums. Jennings’ work would sporadically feature highlights, but he retreated into the very thing he had rebelled against. His songs became inside jokes about his Nashville fiends and his music had become exercises in sleepwalking. His highest profile gigs would be with “The Highwaymen,” featuring Cash, Nelson and for reasons that were no longer valid, Kris Kristofferson. Their recorded output was a mess.

In 1995, he thought he would try the “unplugged” thing. Acoustic sets were becoming cool among rock groups, and they either showcased the bands’ roots or emphasized their artistic limitations. In Jennings case, unplugged became un-Waylon. He would miss that volume, that fancy, cranked-up Telecaster twanging over that backbeat, and here he was sitting on a stool trying to turn on a crowd that came to see by-God Waylon Jennings, not some wimpy folk guy we can’t even hear while all those women are crowding around the stage in halter-tops and cowboy hats and the guys are screaming for “We Still Drink Beer in Texas and Bob Wills is Still the King.”

Waylon’s crowd. I remember those days. The unplugged gigs didn’t work, nor would I have expected them to. Had Jennings opted for mellow way back when, he would have just been the guy who gave up his seat to Buddy Holly. To his fans, he became a musical savior.

“I don’t owe them a change,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I owe them myself, being me, whoever they think I am. They’re the only judge and jury I feel responsible to, and I have enough respect for their good sense to know that they won’t steer me wrong. They won’t change my music, because that’s the basis for my trust in them. They like that I went up against and beat the system, and was an outlaw before the movement had a name. They want me to be a hardass sonofabitch if you get me mad; and they want to know I’ll never be mad at them.”

His fans always thought he was rebelling against something, but they could never really explain what it was. Maybe it was because Jennings’ music, at its prime, had so much purity, honesty, realism and directness, it seemed jarring when set aside any rock or country music you care to name. And the guy who sang it was as real and gritty as the wind that blew across his native Texas panhandle.

Years ago, on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air,” interviewer Terry Gross asked Jennings the story behind his hit, “Good Hearted Woman.” He explained that it had been written during a poker game with a friend named Billy Gray. Gross didn’t hear Jennings correctly and thought he had played poker with “Billy Graham.”

“No, no,” Jennings said. “Billy Graham cheats.”

(Karl Rohr teaches history at Western Carolina University. He can be reached at rohr@wcu.edu)