Waylon (12 page)

Radio was the only thing I knew, besides pulling cotton. Earl offered me a job; the station was called KCKY. That’s where
I met Jim Garshow, who is still one of my dearest and best friends, and a guy I can always depend on. Our big saying was “I’ll
do the thinking around here,” because we remembered all those Western movies where the villain tells that to his henchmen.
That’s me and Jim, only we can never decide which is who.

He was working at the radio station in Coolidge, and we didn’t like each other at all when I went there. Another guy was stirring
it up, telling Jim I was out to grab their jobs, get them fired, and take over. Jim finally walked up to me and said, “I just
don’t like you.”

I said, “Well, I couldn’t care less. Now how about that. I really don’t like your ass either.” So we set there and faced off,
and seeing that we weren’t afraid of each other, after a while we started enjoying being together.

He was hooked up with Tom Haley, who had hired Jim to make a short radio-type show, complete with commercials, to play in
the fifteen to twenty minutes between feature movies at drive-in theaters.
Hello, everyone, this is Jim Garshow and welcome to intermission time at the Dove Creek, Colorado, Drive-In Theater: enjoy
the stars, out under the stars. Intermission time is brought to you by Singin’ Sam’s Diner, where you get beans with everything.
Dove Creek was the pinto bean capital of the world, and Sam always seemed to own some business somewhere. Sam’s Cleaners.
Sam’s Hardware.

When Tom was sober, he was one of the dearest, most giving people. But he was awful when he was drunk. He was mean to everybody.
He was like a Jekyll and Hyde. If he got drunk, and you didn’t do what he liked, he’d call you a star-acting son-ofabitch.
He was the guy who made me hate the word “star.”

Despite this, Tom was wanting to make a star out of me. My record of “Jole Blon” had come out on Brunswick in March of 1959,
but nothing happened with it. I think I heard it one time on a car radio, over some distant station. If Buddy had been alive,
it might probably have had a chance, but that was over and done.

Right before I left Lubbock, I had recorded four songs for a company named Trend. They released only one single, “My Baby
Walks All Over Me,” backed with a song written with Bill Tilgh-man—a recitation, actually—called “The Stage,” which I had
started writing on February 3, 1961, not realizing that was the date till the song was done. It was originally titled “Stars
in Heaven” and described a “show” up there: “The angels stand in silence as Buddy sings / His voice is clear, his guitar rings
…” Pretty corny. It didn’t help that they took the tape and speeded it up to where I would sound younger.

In those days, you needed a teenage sound. I never cared for that. I had no desire to be a teen idol. Frankie Avalon or Fabian—I
couldn’t understand their appeal. I liked clever writing, like Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Sixteen,” but “Venus” or “Turn Me Loose”
never moved me. I was more into “C.C. Rider”; the blues thing.

I listened to rockabilly, the country-edged Sun Records of Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Bill Justis, Johnny Cash. Jerry Lee
Lewis singing “It’ll Be Me” and “Whole Lot of Shaking Going On.” I thought “Whole Lot” was the Judgment Day coming when I
first heard it. Jack Clement, the producer, is still a genius, and I never dreamed in all my dreams that he would produce
me someday. Much less be my brother-in-law.

If I’d tried to be a rock and roll singer, it would never have worked. I was married, for a start, with three kids. I never
felt young. And though I thought it was awful cool for girls to be screaming at us on the stage like that, it also frustrated
me. Even back then, I wanted people to listen to me.

Make no mistake, they were getting their chance now, here in Dove Creek. I’m atop the snack bar, dressed in a blazer with
some kind of emblem on it. Billy Joe is playing lead guitar, I’m strumming rhythm, and behind us is a drummer we’ve hired
for the night from a local strip joint. There we are singing “White Lightning” and I feel like taking my clothes off.

Tom Haley had decided to combine all his schemes into one, booking me and having Jim emcee.
Remember, on July 22, on the top of the snack bar during intermission, you can see Waylon Jennings and his band.
Tom would visit the drive-ins, say “Hi, I’m from the Grand Ole Opry,” though he’d never been to the Opry, and book a show
for intermission. Then he’d tell us to wait in the motel. “I’ll be back in a little bit.”

He’d go into town and come back with five thousand dollars, selling the night’s advertising. They’d pay him in advance. Tom
was a good salesman; you believed every word he said. He was always driving around in a Cadillac. He’d tell the salesman he
wanted to “try one out for a day or two.” He’d drive to Colorado from Arizona and back again and say “Well, I’m not too sure
about that one.”

Jim and I would cut the program for the drive-ins in a garage. They say there’s a hundred days of a hundred degrees in Arizona,
especially in the summer. In July it would get up to 120. It was so hot in there, we’d have to take off our shirts, socks,
shoes, everything. All we had on was our pants. Sweat would be rolling off us, but Jim, in his great radio voice, would be
saying “Hi, this is a wonderful evening under the stars tonight.”

Tom had loaned us his car. It was an old Chrysler, and it wouldn’t turn right. If it was a one-way street in front of the
house where we were headed, you had to go one block past and turn left, go another block and turn left, and go still another
block and turn left again to get where you were going.

I did that for a whole summer, round and round and round. Increasingly, whenever Tom got drunk, he and I would get into it.
At one point he pulled a gun on me. Finally, in Blackfoot, Idaho, I said the hell with this and headed south to Salt Lake
City. Billy Joe went with me. We got a job in a place called the Esquire Lounge. Billy Joe and I walked in and asked to play
there, and the manager hired us, though it was a Dixieland joint. That is, she hired me. Her name was Lynne Mitchell, and
she was to be my second wife.

Maxine didn’t like living in Coolidge. She wanted to go back to Texas. She didn’t want to clean house. I think the only thing
she liked was fighting with me.

Terry had to be about three years old, and I was fixing to go to work at the radio station. As I headed out the door, she
told him “Go with your dad. He wants you to go with him to work.”

I couldn’t take a little kid to the station. Terry knew he couldn’t come, but Maxine kept egging him on. “If he don’t take
you, that means he don’t love you.” Terry thought it was a game, but she kept at me. “You don’t love your son? He wants to
go with you.” I can’t help but guess she might have been drinking then, and I didn’t know it.

I stayed up in Salt Lake City for a couple of months. Lynne was eight years older than me, and I’d never met anybody quite
like her. She had a look of royalty about her, a pretty thing, though she had a nasty mouth. You didn’t expect it out of her.
She could tell you the dirtiest joke in the world, with a preacher standing there, and laugh like there was no tomorrow.

Lynne was married to a guy named Ivan Mitchell, and we didn’t have anything to do with each other for a long time. But soon
the summer was over, and it came time to leave. I moved back to Coolidge and got a job in a place called the Sand and Sage
Bar, until a better gig came along in Phoenix at a steak house named Wild Bill’s. I’d drive back and forth every two or three
nights. The next thing I know, along comes Lynne. She left her husband and followed me down to Arizona.

There was a sensuality about her that I found irresistible. Lynne was thin and dark and very sexy, with medium-length auburn
hair that she wore up, every strand in place. She stood straight and tall, confident, and she carried herself like I imagined
Sophia Loren would, sure of herself and her effect on men. She was great in bed and would be completely into it. Lynne had
gotten past all the complexes, to where she was the one who taught me what to do, if you want to know the truth. She had me
by the yin-yang on a downhill pull.

In my mind, I thought that was love. Maybe it was. She had a spirit to her that I couldn’t see in Maxine. They were night
and day. Lynne liked to mix it up with the boys, outgoing and gone. She’d worked in bars, was older than me by almost a decade,
and gave as good as she got.

I knew that the first time I met her. I went into the club, looking for a job, and after a while my mind went from getting
work to getting her. “What’s your name?” I asked. “What’s your whole name?”

“Pussy,” she said.

She’ll do fine, I thought.

Maxine had had her fill of life in Coolidge. She was going to force my hand: “I don’t like it here, I’m leaving, and I’m taking
the kids and going to Texas.” By then, baby Deana was on the way. She knew I loved them even if I couldn’t stand her. We were
nothing alike. Finally, she moved back to Texas and took the kids and that was the end of it. And her.

Her going just pushed me and Lynne together. Maxine had done pretty much what I wanted her to do, though I hated the kids
to leave. I knew I hadn’t been a good husband to her at all. I can’t tell you in one way we were compatible. We never belonged
together.

Lynne started working at Wild Bill’s, and soon enough I had moved into her apartment. Somehow Maxine got the number from the
club where I was playing and called there. Lynne answered the phone. Now there was no going back to Maxine. It was all over.

I was back to playing music. “Wild Bill” Byrd fired me—he was notorious for giving bands the heave-ho—and I moved over to
Frankie’s, an old bar that could hold about ninety people, over on Thomas Road in the center of town. Billy Joe didn’t seem
to have the drive for it, and I was going broke in Phoenix. I got a starter Fender guitar and a little amplifier and started
performing on my own.

There wasn’t more than twenty people in Frankie’s every show when I began. One night, a guy came up to my corner of the riser
that served as a stage and asked to sit in. He was heavyset and held his guitar left-handed. He wanted so bad to play, though
he worked in a shoe store during the daytime and would be so tired that he’d almost go to sleep on stage, leaning against
the piano. We played four hours, from nine to one.

I didn’t pay Jerry Gropp anything for a time, and then got to paying him fifteen dollars a week. I taught him to do what we
called the ricketty rack, a fast rhythm with straight eights. He was good, and pretty soon he got better than me.

His cousin, Ed Metzendorf, was also left-handed. He had a Danelectro bass, and I think I taught him how to play that as well.
Now I had these two guys, each with their guitars pointing the wrong way so it looked like I was the one out of place, and
I’d taught them both to play in my style. We were a band, or at least the start of one.

Playing every night was good for me, too. We did everything, from rock ’n’ roll to country to pop ballads, and the late-night
bar crowd started to grow each week. As a singer, I have a wide range, even though I don’t have a falsetto. I could sing as
high as Roy Orbison, but he couldn’t go as low as I could.

Pretty soon we were back at Wild Bill’s, which probably held a hundred people. It had high ceilings, sawdust on the floor,
and a western-type atmosphere that brought out the cowboys. Lynne worked there. She’d always have to go to work early and
set up, and I’d be eating a baloney sandwich at home alone. They served dinner till nine, and then I’d go on. They had a huge
dance floor, and I couldn’t play “The Race Is On” enough. It had been written by a guy from Phoenix named Don Rawlins, and
Jimmy Gray, an Indian kid who later played guitar for me, had made the first record of that song on a local label. When they
hollered out for it too much, I’d finally tell them “If you want to hear that damn song so bad, why don’t you go out and hear
Jimmy Gray sing it?”

Wild Bill fired us again, and we got picked up by the Cross Keys, which had been a jazz club, out at the corner of Scottsdale
Road and Camelback. It was a strange place to have a nightclub, a retail area in “exclusive” Fashion Square right across the
street from Goldwater’s Department Store. It was one of a string the family built into a fortune that launched Barry’s political
career. The Cross Keys was smaller and not as well known as Wild Bill’s, but the owner was able to give me a better deal.
My crowd was starting to follow me. I kept the bar-hoppers and the cowboys, and added the up-and-coming professionals, among
whom were baseball players spring-training in the Cactus League, like Tony Conigliaro.

Two building contractors dropped in one Saturday, saw the place was wall-to-wall people, and started coming around. They liked
my music a lot. They were about to build a club for a man named Jimmy D. Musiel, who had a part ownership in another place
crosstown called Magoo’s. He’d had a business falling out, and his ex-partner, Bob Sikora, kept Magoo’s. J.D. hired these
old boys to build him a double-decker club on Rural Road, just over the Tempe line, down by the River Bottom district. There
was to be music both upstairs and downstairs; downstairs capacity would be about three hundred, but upstairs they could fit
more than four times that many. J.D. said if I signed a contract to play regulararlee, regularily, uh, regulee, then he’d
design the club around me.

I chose to play upstairs. I helped design the stage and get the sound system together, though then if you had one microphone
for singing and another for background vocals, you had more than most. There was a beautiful dance floor in front of the bandstand,
and a long bar running the length of the opposite wall, ninety feet from one end to the other. Downstairs, the River Bottom
Room, was rock ’n’ roll, booked by J.D.’s son, Jimmy Jr., and everyone from the Grass Roots to Bill Haley and the Comets played
there, accompanied by shimmying go-go girls.

J.D.’s was automatically a smash. People were trying to get in that club every night of the week. I was the honcho, and it
put me on the map. We were closed on Sunday and had half a house on Monday; but from Tuesday it was packed through the weekend.
J.D.’s gamble paid off like a slot machine.