Waylon (20 page)

“‘The Chokin’ Kind.’”

“We did that yesterday.”

“No, you did that yesterday,” I said. “I’m doing it today.”

Chet cut the best records of my early years. He may have told me once or twice to straighten up, and looked with disapproval
on my drug use, but like Don Gibson, I think he thought of me as a good renegade.

He encouraged my strange harmony singing, even if I would combine tenor and baritone parts in the same overdubbed voice, with
some odd notes besides. He picked up on the fact that I emphasized the 1 and 3 beat of a 4/4 measure. Most musicians will
kick the 2 and 4, but the 1 and 3 is the way the public thinks if you get them clapping in an auditorium. And he liked that
I didn’t sound like anyone else when I sang. He always says he can tell in two notes if it’s me singing.

If anything, Chet was too nice. He would internalize so much that he grew a tumor, and suffered cancer of the intestines.
The business literally made him sick. The stress was too much.

I couldn’t have helped, trying to communicate ideas that I was still trying to explain to myself. There just wasn’t enough
happening musically for me. I would be right at the edge of things, and the way the music unfolded didn’t seem to be pushing
it over the top. They were good, smooth records, and there I was, rougher than a goddamn cob. He’d let me use some of my band,
and then put other people in there, and sometimes those things that he put in there were just enough to keep it from what
it really was supposed to sound like in my imagination. If I wrote those songs and honed them on stage with my band, I had
an idea what they should be. And they weren’t.

Chet was at a point where he was just tired, and he was wanting out of it. He needed to go back and play his guitar. I can’t
fault that. He
is
the Country Gentleman.

We had some great times together, and we cut some wonderful songs. On February 15, 1967, nearing the end of surviving my first
year in Nashville, we did a John Hurley/Ronnie Wilkins composition called “Love of the Common People.” It had it all—the horn
stabs that I loved so much, an insistent piano figure that lodged in your brain, and four (count ’em) key modulations upward,
so that the song never stopped getting you higher. The lyrics were especially meaningful, for a poor country boy who had worked
his way up from “a dream you could cling to” to a spot in the working world of country music.

A song is where it starts. Chet believed that, too. If you don’t have a song, you don’t have anything.

Where it finishes is late some night in Studio A. The musicians have gone home. The track is done. They’ve moved the microphone
from the vocal booth to the floor, so I can have more room to move, though I don’t move much. We’re working on “Only Daddy
That’ll Walk the Line.” I’m going to sing harmony with myself, the moaning
Oh
of “Only.” If you slide into the control room, maybe with Bare or Johnny Darrell, you might catch Chet and the engineer bent
over the board, listening to me in solo with the track shut off, trying to get a fix on the frequency where my voice is wandering.

I’m out in the studio. I’ve got the headphones turned up high. I’m walkin’ the line and talkin’ the line, doing a little dance
to Wayne Moss’s stuttering Tex-Mex guitar solo as it comes blazing through. Chicken-pickin’. Singing along to the chorus.
Oooooohh-nly Daddy
.…

Bobby turns to Chet. “Damn, I believe he’s got something treed.”

Oooooohhh.
…

Howling at the moon.

EXTERIOR. FRONT PORCH. NIGHT.

ARLIN GROVE sits on the porch swing, strumming a guitar.

He wears a white T-shirt; there is a close-up of his face, the light glistening off his slicked-back hair.

MOLLY MORGAN comes out to join him. She is wearing a white shirt, knotted at the waist; her hair is in a flip, held by a white
band.

MOLLY

You sure do take good care of that guitar.

ARLIN

It’s all I got.… That and about five zillion songs in there.

He points to the guitar case. She comes over and sits by him.

MOLLY

Don’t you want anything else?

ARLIN

Yeah. I’d like to make my mark in life with music. You know, anything can be said with a song. I’ve got things I’d like to
say in my own way.

MOLLY

Don’t you want a home?

ARLIN

I’ve got a home. But it’s a long way from here.

He sings a verse of “I’m a Long Way from Home.” She gazes at him with growing affection. He puts his arm around her. They
kiss.

Poor Boy comes to town. Poor Boy meets Pretty Girl. Poor Boy makes good, marries Pretty Girl. Treats her wrong. Poor Boy goes
off the deep end. He comes back. Everything’s okay.

There wasn’t anything about a Nashville Rebel in the movie, as far as I was concerned. They cast the characters after they
had the title, and I never thought it was about me. It was more like a Nashville travelogue, where you could see the inside
of Tootsie’s, the Grand Ole Opry, the Black Poodle, be entertained by stars like Porter Wagoner, Faron Young, Tex Ritter,
Sonny James, and get yourself introduced to newcomer Waylon Jennings, as Arlin Grove, in an American-International motion
picture,
Nashville Rebel.

I had heard about the auditions, but I hadn’t planned to do anything about them. John Cash was out of town, however, and I
was floating around. I went past the building where they were holding the screen tests and decided on the spur of the moment
to give it a shot. I was hours past any appointment. I read for the part, and was terrible. I promptly forgot about it. I
was higher’n a kite.

Chet may have been behind it, but the next day I came to find out they chose me from about twenty other guys. I’m no actor.
I started out filming near 170 pounds, and lost thirty of them before the three weeks of shooting schedule was over. I was
up the whole time, never eating, fighting with Barbara, me on pills and roaring. By the time the movie started reaching its
climax, with a scene where my wife is supposed to tell me she’s pregnant by leaving some baby shoes on my anniversary-dinner
plate, I looked like a gutted snowbird.

“Molly,” my wife in the movie, was played by Mary Frann, later to star in
The Bob Newhart Show.
It was corny shit from the start. Arlin, my character, on his way home out of the army, is beaten up by a gang of toughs
and left by the side of the road. He wakes, staring into her eyes. She works at Morgan Corners, “a one-pump gas station and
grocery store.”

Arlin heads down to the local “hootenanny” (I was folk-country, remember?) to play a number. Before he goes on, Uncle Ed Morgan
(played by Cousin Jody from the Grand Ole Opry) shows off a hokum lap steel guitar instrumental, working out “Mockingbird”
on “the old biscuit board,” as he puts it, a routine that probably hearkens back to vaudeville, complete with bar swipes and
flapping tongue. It gives you an idea where country started. I sing “Nashville Rebel,” picking the opening guitar lick; then
I’m back with my own tongue flapping, kissing Mary Frann some more. She shows me her naked back. She drops her towel. The
camera focuses discreetly on a nearby clock, while her dad sends out shotgun-wedding invitations.

Using my best Roy Orbison voice for “Green River,” Arlin is discovered by a Mr. Wesley Lang, played by Gordon Oas-Heim, the
character actor. He’s an attorney who wants to manage this hot new singer. Cue the lawyer jokes. He comes complete with cigarette
holder, a sure sign of distrust, and we visit him on his estate the next day to watch him mistreat his horses. Good, meet
Evil. He thinks I’m a “walking talking gold mine,” his property to do with as he wishes. For my part, I ask incredulously,
“You mean, all I have to do is sing and my manager will take care of it?” Sign here, thank you. Lang then presents Arlin to
Margo Powell (Ce Ce Whitney), who is instructed to get a suitable image together, teaching him “the facts of life.”

The action heads to Music City. While I explore the city with Molly, interspersed with crowds and performances at the Parthenon
in Centennial Park and the Opry, the movie becomes a souvenir time machine of the Nashville I knew then. Chet makes a cameo
appearance. “Sounds pretty good to me,” he says, and puts in a plug for the Nashville Sound, an “in-built feature of our musicians
and singers.”

Lang looks at him over his cigarette holder. “Just make sure he’s got that Nashville Sound.” There’s even a brief shot of
me recording in Studio B with the Waylors. You can make out Jerry’s left-handed guitar, Tommy’s bass, and guitarist Sheryl
Millet, who was playing with us at the time. Richie is hard to spot, back behind the drums.

The live performances by Tex, Sonny, Porter, Faron, Loretta Lynn, and the Wilburn Brothers are like windows into the past,
home movies of Nashville as it looked in the summer of ’66, when the music was just a little bit younger and more isolated
from the mainstream. When Faron sings Don Gibson’s “Sweet Dreams,” it peels back the years to a moment of star-crossed talents
at the heart of why we sing, and the traditions we hear every time we move from one chord to another.

Both Tex Ritter and the Wilburn Brothers, with help from Loretta Lynn, tip their cowboy hats to the country artists that came
before. Tex invokes the spirits of Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Texas Ruby, Karl Farr of the Sons of the Pioneers, and many
others in his visit to “Hillbilly Heaven”; while the Wilburns, Teddy and Doyle, present a similar salute, helped by Loretta
Lynn, on “Christmas at the Opry.” Both mention country clown Rod Brasfield, and I’d bet there aren’t ten people out of a hundred
who would even know who he is today.
Nashville Rebel
has kept his name alive, and I like that.

Back at the ranch, Tex is giving Arlin some good advice from the inner sanctum of Tootsie’s. “We could use some new blood
in this business,” he says to “me.” “Don’t drive too fast on the road, and don’t go wild.” The camera pans around the walls,
showing some of the signatures. You can glimpse Hank Cochran, Roger Miller, Leo Jackson, “Tubb,” and a huge scrawled Ben Dorsey
III. I should’ve known then Arlin was heading for a fall.

“I’ll make him and I’ll break him,” says Lang, after he catches me rubbing down Margo’s back. I enjoyed the scenes with Margo
the best. At least I was closest to being myself. My character was such a goody two-shoes, I could hardly recognize who I
was supposed to be. There’s one point where I pour Molly some champagne. It takes me a while to get the cork out; it was the
first bottle of champagne I’d ever opened in my life. I wasn’t your biggest drinker. Finally I manage to pop it. “We’re in
business,” I ad-lib. Looking at it some thirty years later, it’s the real me. I still say it the same way.

Wesley sends Arlin to a society club in Chicago, where he predictably bombs. To add insult to injury, he has Henny Youngman
come on after me, zinging Arlin’s act with some of the oldest jokes in the universe. “If that’s harmony, I’ll take grits.”
“He has a lot of talent, only it’s in Elvis Presley’s name.” Take my life, please.

This throws our hero into a fit of depression. “You’re finished,” Lang tells him. “You don’t have what it takes.” Distraught,
Arlin wanders a nighttime Chicago filled with neon signs flashing dance halls and pancake houses. He swigs from a bottle.

Margo finds Arlin sacked out at a fleabag hotel. She bangs on the door. I run my fingers through my hair. “What’s happening?”
I ask dazedly. The line between Arlin and myself was getting less clear, the more pills I took while I was doing the part.
At least I got some sleep in the movie.

She tells me to “be a man” and brings me to a country-western club where I sing “Tennessee,” the camera dollying so close
up it seems to be aiming through the gap between my front teeth. The crowd loves me. I go back to the Opry. Wesley tries to
destroy me one final time by telling me Molly is pregnant and dying before I go on; I speak to her over the radio, arriving
at the hospital to greet Arlin Grove Jr. and renew our love.

Nashville Rebel
was one of those movies that go straight to the drive-in. Depending on how you looked at it, I’d either come a very long
or a very short distance from the top of the snack bar.

Barbara could not bear me kissing another girl on the screen.
Molly, if you can hear me … I love you.
She’d listen to me whispering words of romance to Mary Frann and think I was being untrue. She couldn’t believe I was playing
a role.

She didn’t want me to do the movie, and when I went ahead and took the part, we started to split up, even though we were yet
to be officially married. I think Barbara was just as loyal and true to me as she could be, and though she never believed
it, knowing all those women were out there on the road, not knowing what I was doing, suspecting me of the worst crimes, I
tried to be good by her. Because we’d had such misery through Lynne, I felt that I owed her a straight chance.