Waylon (25 page)

I said, “That’s too bad.”

Jessi said, “Oh well, there’s always the bottle.”

I guess it was that spunkiness that attracted me to her. She never let me off the hook, and loved to pick at me and make me
mad. She called it “getting my temper up.” Finally, I told her that she gave me “more shit than anybody,” and I was starting
not to enjoy her very much.

“I like to see the fire,” she said, pouring a little gasoline on the flames.

Like a fire can hurt you, we both knew right off it was something that could be dangerous. And like a fire can warm you, she
started drawing me closer, bringing me in out of the cold. She lit that fire under me, kept adding fuel, and pretty soon we
began traveling together.

Her momma was an ordained Pentecostal preacher, though she wasn’t judgmental about our relationship. Jessi had been playing
the piano in church and revival meetings since she’d been a little girl, and it gave her an inner strength, even though when
I met her she thought she was in the cavern of her life, where she’d thrown off all that she’d known and gone seeking her
own answers. Jessi had come back to a point where she realized that she needed something more than she could ever know; and
on that rock, she built her faith.

For me, it was the music. For Mirriam Rebecca Joan Johnson Eddy, soon to be Jessi Colter, faith was expressed through the
music. Together, we started learning the eternal melodies and infinite harmonies that has become our song of songs.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch …

Chet had decided finally to leave producing and return to playing music, and he put me with Danny Davis. He couldn’t have
made a worse choice. We were oil and water. I’ve always had a tendency to treat people right, with respect and honor. But
I came pretty close to putting my hands around Danny’s throat on more than one occasion, and I suspect he didn’t like me much
either.

Danny was the leader of the Nashville Brass, a big-band approach to country that was opening up new doors leading to crossover
acceptance. He had known Chet since the 1950s, a former sideman who joined RCA’s A&R staff in 1965. Danny had grown up in
Massachusetts where he’d gotten a classical education, and he brought an “orchestral” feel to country with his
Nashville Sounds
records in 1968 and 1969. Which was fine by me. I loved horns, as I always told Herb Alpert, and was certainly in favor of
going beyond the boundaries of country; but as far as our musical tastes were concerned, we couldn’t have been further apart.

I would go into the studio and do the tracks, and when I came back I wouldn’t recognize it as the same song. He’d overdub
arrangements without asking me, and turn songs down without even playing them for me. He rejected “Abraham, Martin, and John”
when I specifically picked it out. He wanted me to have my parts written out, and I liked to learn the arrangement on the
spot. Danny would get bored, or make fun of me if I was trying to work out a chord change I wanted to hear. One time he was
putting me down while I was overdubbing a guitar on a track, feeling paranoid because I knew he wasn’t on my side, trying
to get comfortable out in the studio. Jessi and Johnny Darrell walked into the control room and overheard him. Jessi gave
him one of her meanest looks. “If I told him what you said, he’d kill you.”

I almost did. Him and all the musicians. I hate pickup notes. Always have. A note or two used to introduce a phrase, I think
it’s like stompin’ your way into a song, announcing that you’re going to knock on the door before you actually do. It’s something
that irritates me no end, and one day I decided to put a stop to it. Merle Haggard had borrowed a gun of mine and brought
it back to Studio A. It was a .22 Magnum pistol, a buntline; a long thing. I walked into the studio and said, “The first sonofabitch
that hits a pickup note, I’m going to blow his fingers off. And as for anybody still looking at his chart after the third
take, your ass is dead.

“And Danny.” I turned to him. “I don’t want to hear any shit out of you.”

It was all over between us from then on. Maybe I was a little hard on him, but the last thing he should have been doing in
this world is producing a country record on me, telling me what I can and can’t do musically. I don’t think Chet foresaw that.
With my independent streak, he probably thought that all I needed was somebody to take down the titles and help me hire the
musicians. Danny was the wrong choice, seeing as he’d just become a successful artist himself with the Nashville Brass, and
had his own reputation to think of. He couldn’t be as self-effacing as producers sometimes have to be.

Chet knew I wanted to make my own records. He opposed that mainly because RCA had several producers, and if he started letting
artists like myself and Bobby Bare produce themselves, he’d lose some people he was very fond of, like Bob Ferguson and Ray
Pennington. He told me in later years that, among other things, he was trying to protect their jobs.

Ironically, I’m a firm believer in producers. I can give someone a hard time when I’m not hearing it the way I think it should
be, but I don’t think any of us knows everything. You need someone to help you do your listening, and I love to see what people
hear out of me. If it doesn’t work, I’ll tell them, but usually, you shouldn’t have to even talk about it. The speakers will
let you know when a song feels right.

I like to see what a producer has in mind; and between me not being able to do what they think I can, and trying to do what
they want me to, a lot of times you come up with something that neither of you might have thought of in the first place. You
have to be prepared to take advantage of the unexpected.

Danny didn’t care what I was about; in his eyes, the producer was there to control the artist. He did want the best for me,
but that was a value judgment he wasn’t allowing me to make. “This guy could be the biggest star in the world,” he told Johnny
Western, who wrote the liner notes for
Waylon,
released in January of 1970, “but he’s his own worst enemy.” That can never work. You have to trust the instincts of the
artists you’re helping to record. I may not know that much about music, but I know what gets me.

One of the stranger things to grab my attention was a song by Richard Harris written by Jimmy Webb. I wore out the eight-track
of “MacArthur Park,” playing it in the limousine traveling between shows. It was one of the first times I ever realized that
performance was the key to music, because here was an actor who could hardly sing, and his vocal mesmerized me. It was a wonderful
song, and there was something country about it, especially that line about the “old men playing checkers in the park.”

I broached the idea of doing it to Chet in early 1969, and I guess that’s when he thought I was too far gone and turned me
over to Danny. But it wasn’t until I met the Kimberlys out in Las Vegas that the concept for the song started coming together.

They were two pairs of siblings married to each other, girl twins hooked up with two brothers, and a cousin playing bass.
It kind of reminded me of my family back in Littlefield. They performed “MacArthur Park” as part of their show, and it got
me thinking. I liked the song’s range and its epic feel, and I liked Verna Gay Kimberly. We had a thing going; she was unhappy
and so was I. It was before I had re-met Jessi. Her and her husband were splitting up, and she and her twin sister didn’t
get along. I didn’t want to see the group dissolve as well, because they were really good.

I helped get them a deal with RCA, though they weren’t really country-oriented, and in the spring of 1969, we recorded an
album together called
Country-Folk.
“MacArthur Park” was the lead-off track, and Danny and I got into it a couple of times over the arrangement. 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.

Years later Robert Duvall introduced me to Richard Harris. “You
bastid,
” Richard said, throwing his napkin playfully on the floor and his arms around me. “Fuck you. You’re the one who stole my
Grammy.”

* * *

I woke up freezing to death. Where was I? Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, I guessed.

I got up and turned the air conditioner off. It was on high. The feeling was mutual. I went to the bathroom, then lit a cigarette
and sat on the side of the bed, trying to think how I got there. In more ways than one.

I had taken Barbara home for the last time, and went from Phoenix to Las Vegas. We were booked in a casino for two weeks,
and I stayed up for nine un-straight days and nights, gambling and taking pills. Going a little out of my mind. I knew it
was over between her and me, and I was still crazy about her.

The last night we played there, before the show, I suddenly felt as if I couldn’t get my breath. I felt like I had an anvil
on my chest. I was weak and dehydrated so bad, running on empty. I went upstairs and started drinking milk and ordering steaks.
It was the afternoon. Verna Gay came over with one of her little girls and tried to get me to rest. I finally got to sleep,
woke up for the show, and then got in a car and took off toward Minnesota somewhere. My next stop.

I was a wreck. I caught some shut-eye by the side of the road, lying down in the car. Somewhere along in there, we pulled
into a motel. It was a tourist court, a bunch of little cabins by the side of Any Road, U.S.A. I ate supper, then went to
sleep again. I knew I might not wake up. I could hardly catch my breath. I was hyperventilating, sweat pouring off me. It
was the last days of summer, 1968. That’s when I turned the air-conditioning on.

Daddy hadn’t been dead very long when me and Barbara split. We went to the funeral together, and maybe two or three weeks
later we’d gone through our final days. When you’re mourning, you reconsider your life. How many more things can you stack
on to make it any worse? I could probably have stopped myself from going off the deep end if I had just lost one of them;
but I was truly adrift in my own misery now.

I put the cigarette out and laid back. As I settled in, I looked up and saw my dad standing at the end of the bed. I know
it was him, and I’ll tell you why. My dad could not wear a necktie, or bear to have his shirt buttoned at the collar. His
neck was real thick. He had a lot of gray hair on his chest, right up to his shoulders. He never had a shirt that fit him.

He had on a pinstriped suit, brown, with little gray stripes in it. That’s how vivid the vision was. I noticed his neck. He
had a Windsor knot in his tie; he was neat and dressed up.

But he had the saddest expression on his face. He never said a word. He just gazed at me, with eyes that said “Don’t do this
to yourself.” Daddy was worried about me. He was really hurt that I would do myself such harm.

I guess I blinked, and suddenly he was gone. Daddy only had to look at me, and I knew.

On the road, we thought we were bullet-proof. We loved the music, but music was secondary to what we were doing. All we did
was party.

We seemed to be in motion all the time. We’d be out there three hundred dates a year. We didn’t work all of them, but we couldn’t
afford to go back. We weren’t making any money.

The only thing left to do was have a good time. We were probably making terrible music, as I look back, but the edge was there.
The edge kept it alive. It may not have been good, but it was rockin’.

The only problem was that we were teetering and toppling ever closer to the precipice. You can only break the law of gravity
for so long. Like Humpty Dumpty, we were overdue for a great fall.

On February 9, 1969, the band was heading to Peoria, Illinois, riding in a pickup that had a sleeper stacked on top of it.
You could rest in the back, and one person could fit crosswise over the top of the truck cab in a specially made bunk. I had
ordered a Bluebird bus from down in Georgia, but it hadn’t been delivered yet. It was to be my first new bus.

Richie was in the front and had just let Jimmy Gray start driving. Outside of Bloomington, along I-150 on the way to Peoria,
they came to an old steel bridge over Kickapoo Creek. It was icy and snowy, and they had to make a sharp right turn. As they
slipped on the black ice, the truck shimmied over and leaned a little bit to the side. Walter “Chuck” Conway, a bass player
who had joined me just eleven days before, was asleep in the back compartment, over the truck cab.

The poor guy never knew what hit him. The pickup made the turn untouched and kept going, but the bridge clipped the sleeper,
shattering it and shearing off the alcove. Chuck fell plumb in the river. Richie ran and jumped in after him, but he was too
late. They said there wasn’t a bone in his head that wasn’t broken, and he died at the scene. Stew “Allen” Punsky, a keyboard
player, was also badly hurt.

I was traveling behind them in the Cadillac, an hour or two after, and when I came on the scene, it scared me to death. The
police found pot in the pickup, but when I went down to the hospital, those cops showed me the bag of marijuana and said “Waylon,
you’ve got enough problems. We’re throwing this away.”

It scared me, made me feel responsible, even though there was nothing I could’ve done. We played the date, using Hank Snow’s
bass player, and I was just wobbling around, on pills and drunk. Merle Haggard and his manager, Fuzzy Owens, got me in a poker
game and cleaned me out. I had four or five thousand dollars on me, and they won everything. They were there to get my money.
That was it. I think Merle is a great singer and songwriter, and probably he was in as bad a shape as I was, but we’ve never
been close since that night. I can still remember their faces. When I was broke, they said their good-byes and left. I never
forgot that.

Richie and Jimmy were in for some more trouble on June 10, when they were arrested for marijuana possession at the Rainbow
Bridge border separating the United States and Canada.