Waylon (38 page)

I even had a preacher send me the word: “Waylon, just because you’re a drug addict don’t mean you can’t go to heaven.”

It was getting caught that made me mad. It brought on a paranoia of getting trapped with my pants down again. I knew they
were tapping my phones; I knew when they had people following me. I had “friends” alerting me to what was happening. I’d get
a call and the voice would say “C’mon, let’s go for a ride,” and when we’d get in the car they’d tell me who was checking
my phone, and on what line. I had a couple of ex-FBI guys periodically inspect my home and office. After a while, finding
out a lot of nothing, they just let me alone.

* * *

One thing the bust didn’t do was slow down my drug use. I thought that I could handle it and not let it handle me. But sometimes
you can get very insulated and isolated in this business. There were weeks I would not get off the tour bus except to take
a shower in the hotel. It was my safe haven. Pretty soon you begin to think you’re above society’s rules, and subconsciously
you’re not one of “them.” It’s a form of ivory tower.

All that mattered to me was having a good stash. If I got down to a quarter of an ounce, I’d start freaking. I’d hide little
security bundles in briefcases around the house, only to come on them years later. With the pills, I was always chasing the
high amphetamines gave me during the first six months. I lost it somewhere along the way, that feeling. And then along came
cocaine, and it’s the same thing, only smoother. And more often.

I kept a constant level of drugs inside me. I’d do a two- or three-inch line every twenty minutes or so; more than that sometimes.
I always made sure to ground it up right, so it wouldn’t eat holes in my nose, but I inhaled it with such force I’d bypass
my sinuses. It just went right down in my lungs. I’d put it in a straw and sniff it so hard it would shoot straight back into
my brain.

Maybe speeding like that was a way I could keep up with all my ideas. I needed a lot of energy to match my own inner momentum.
Once I got in the studio it was hard for me to stop chasing my tail. Sometimes I’d work so long and so hard that I’d be hearing
things. Once I decided to produce, engineer, mix, and master my own album. I was so deep into it, four or five days with hardly
a break, that at one point I thought I was hearing a bass from another track. I was cussing and pulling faders up and down
and looking for that little devil, and finally I found it wasn’t on there at all. I looked around and there was nobody but
me who was hearing it. Whoops.

The only time I felt in tune with myself was playing on stage. That was my norm, under the hot lights and with the band loud
and full in back of me. Nobody knew how I did it some nights. I’d be on the bus, and they’d be trying to get me to wash my
face before I went on. I’d be hyperventilating and it didn’t look like I was going to make it. Then I’d get my hat on and
grab my guitar, walk out there, and everything would settle down. It was like the pulsing in my blood duplicated the rush
of performance adrenaline.

I was on the loose. I didn’t know what I intended to do; I didn’t intend to do anything, which is exactly what it amounted
to. I knew I was going to die if I kept it up, burning the candle at both ends and the middle for a week and more, week after
month after year. I thought, well, I’ll die, but that’ll be all right. The last thing I cared about was that it was wrecking
my health, or that it was illegal. I’d heard about experiments with rats and cocaine. They’d put food in one corner and cocaine
in the other, and the rats would eat that cocaine until they died.

I was chasing the high, but I never could catch it. I’d be recording and I’d tell the band and engineers that I’d be back
in a minute. Everybody would be waiting and I wouldn’t show up until the next day. I’d go out driving, park the car somewhere,
and forget where I left it. I lost four or five cars that way. I’d order a dozen cheeseburgers, take a snort, and pass out
for two days. I guess there’s a little bit of Elvis in all of us.

The first time I knew I had a problem was in the back of a limousine going from the hotel to the gig. Richie was riding with
me. I had only been doing cocaine for a couple of years, but he looked at me with the concern of someone who had spent a dozen
lifetimes on the road bearing witness to my every mood swing and sway.

“You’ve got to get back and lighten up,” he said simply. “You’re really into it too hard.” That’s all he wrote. It kind of
pissed me off, but I did slow down.

For a week or two I didn’t do anything. He knew how to trick me into it. He’d tell me, “You’ll notice that if you’re off for
a couple of weeks you can get that good high again.” I was all for that.

Now if I could only figure out where I put my Cadillac.

* * *

A couple of weeks after the bust, the CMA released its nominations for the year. Despite the fact that I refused to participate
in the proceedings, claiming that artists shouldn’t compete with each other, they went ahead and put me up in six categories,
including Entertainer of the Year, Male Vocalist, Vocal Duo (with Willie), and Album of the Year (for
Wanted: The Outlaws
).

If anything, it proved that maybe the CMA needed me more than they thought.

The CMA wouldn’t agree to withdraw my name. Willie and I decided not to attend. I told him, “I didn’t go when they weren’t
giving me awards, and I’m not going when they do.”

Willie said he wouldn’t either, unless they changed the dress code to where nobody wears a tuxedo. The next thing I know,
he’s running up and down the aisles, dressed in his Sunday best. All the while, they were making jokes about me. Jerry Reed
said I’d rather park cars at Opryland than come inside. Tennessee Ernie Ford added some pretty rough things about people who
didn’t support their industry.

I believed then, and I do now, that the best way you pay tribute to the music you love is by doing good work within it. Not
by picking up a goddamn bowling trophy.

Still, there wasn’t much doubt, CMA or no, that we were Duo of the Year. Waylon and Willie. Willie and Waylon. And we had
“Luckenbach, Texas” to prove it.

Let’s go to Luckenbach, Texas

With Waylon and Willie and the boys

This successful life we’re living’s

Got us feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys

Chips Moman had co-written the song, and when he showed it to me, he used the right approach: “I got a song here and you can’t
do it because your name’s in it.” I knew it was a hit song, even though I didn’t like it, and still don’t. It reminded me
too much of “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues,” and it had a laidback rhythm I kept wanting to rush. I’ve never been to Luckenbach.
Neither had Chips or his co-writer, Bobby Emmons.

An hour’s drive west of Austin, Luckenbach was mostly owned by one Hondo Crouch, who bought it because he wanted to keep the
local honky-tonk post office open. Its population was in the single digits, which matched the song’s chart position throughout
the spring of 1977, including
número uno
on the country charts for six weeks, and even heading into the Top Thirty of the pop charts. Jerry Jeff Walker had recorded
his
Viva Terlingua
in Luckenbach, which had put it on the country map, a simple symbol of goin’ home. Every state has a Luckenbach; a place
to get away from things.

That’s why it succeeded. Our rough brotherhood, especially as we idealized ourselves, was about “the basics of love” and the
finer things in an on-the-road life: “guitars that are tuned good and firm-feeling women.” “Luckenbach” brought us geographically
and spiritually back to Texas. The song was New Country—name checking Mickey Newbury and Jerry Jeff, Willie joining in on
the final chorus to salute our twin W’s—and Old, with Hank Sr.’s “pain songs” our soundtrack as we rolled along the highway
to a life that sidestepped our success, and made us more human.

It was making our own myth, only in a way that touched people who were themselves caught keeping up with the joneses, whether
drug-induced or materially possessed. Certainly success was causing a family feud within the Outlaws; I still wasn’t talking
to Tompall. Even after we settled the lawsuit, we stayed apart. I called him to say that though we’d hurt each other, and
would probably never be friends again, I didn’t want him to think that I hated him. You can’t carry those feelings around
with you. That’s a bigger burden than the original conflict. Tompall wouldn’t listen. I think he thought I was trying to get
something out of him.

Through it all, Willie and Waylon stayed Waylon and Willie. One RCA executive kept mixing up the two. When he came to Nashville,
a bean counter that had worked his way up the corporate ladder, I called him on it. “I heard that you thought Willie and Waylon
were one person.”

“Ah,” he laughed. “But I know better now.”

“All us hillbillies look alike,” I told him. “So what you need to do, when you don’t know their names, is just call ’em Hoss.”

“Oh, Horse?”

I said, “No, not horse. It’s Hoss.”

“Hass?”

No, Hoss, and perhaps you better not come down here no more. I first heard the term from Ferlin Husky when I was real young.
It’s a sign of respect, an affectionate nickname that means somebody who’s great at what they do. A thoroughbred, or a champion.
A trusted friend.

That kind of describes Willie, though he’ll be the first to admit that he actually enjoys getting me in trouble. “It keeps
Waylon alert,” he likes to say. “He could sit over there and get old and weak. I keep him young by sending him problems.”

If that was the case, I’d be a babe in arms now. I write a lot of songs about Willie, because I have never thoroughly understood
him. He’s like a cartoon to me. I’ll be the first to his door when he’s in trouble, but he could screw up a two-car funeral.
He’s so smart, but he never learns a thing from anything that happens to him.

Sometimes I think he likes courting disaster. When he pulled his car off the road recently and took a nap, only to wake up
being arrested for pot possession, I thought he was the only person in the world who could get busted for “sleeping under
the influence.”

But if I’m there for him, he’s there for me. On the night after they booked me for the cocaine they couldn’t find, Willie
was appearing at Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium. I joined him on stage and the crowd gave us a standing ovation. I went
up to the mike and said “I didn’t do it.” The cheers got louder.

We made some good records together. There were more than a couple Waylon and Willie albums, and I’ve got the belt buckle to
prove it. We celebrated the first one by heading up to New York to the Rainbow Room high atop Rockefeller Center for a gold-record
party. I had been partying the night before at a Super Bowl victory bash with the Dallas Cowboys, where we’d wound up singing
Elvis Presley songs till the wee hours.

Willie and I flew up to New York the next morning. I wasn’t in the best shape to do a bunch of interviews. We had started
at ten in the morning and kept going till eight that night. They promised me dinner, and we were sitting off in a corner of
the Rainbow Grill. I was trying to sweet talk/put the make on Jane Pauley from the
Today
show; singer Tracy Nelson was sitting on Willie’s lap. I thought she was his daughter, and I was trying to talk him out of
screwing her.

I had my long coat on, and it was draped over a heater, so I was sweating even more than my usual overheating. There was no
food, and flashbulbs were constantly going off in my face. I pulled out a switchblade comb and the photographers all jostled
forward like I was going to stab someone. I wanted to throw Joe Galante out the window, though he was one of the only executives
that was ever straight with me at RCA. Even the sight of the Empire State Building didn’t phase me. It was so lit up, and
I was so lit up, it looked like a cathouse.

“Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” was mine and Willie’s tip of the cowboy hat to our mustang values. That
there was no other country that could have birthed this country music was proven in mid-1978, when the Outlaw clan was invited
to the White House by President Jimmy Carter. Willie and his wife Connie went, along with Jessi, my son Buddy, and a few Waylors.
I didn’t go. I had been in a room down the hall, doing a snort of cocaine with a local football hero. I had told Willie to
call me, but he acted like he couldn’t find me. Maybe he thought I was too screwed up. When he got to the White House, Willie
talked with the President about “Amazing Grace,” which wasn’t so amazing at that.

There’s some friends you can be away from for a year, and then you get together and it’s as if you pick up the conversation
right where you left off. You’ve never been apart.

And Willie is a part of me.

I kept withdrawing, spending more time at my upstairs office, never going anywhere. I knew, as far as the drugs were concerned,
when I wasn’t fit to be seen, and I kept getting farther and farther into my own world.

They say cocaine is a social drug, but it was the opposite with me. I went within myself more, except of course for calling
up my friends late at night, waking them up and wanting to talk.

I was so addicted, I would get up in the middle of a sound sleep and go to the bathroom at three o’clock in the morning to
do a toot. I was hooked as much on the taste of cocaine, the sting in my nose and throat when I would snort it, as the high.
I’d stay up for a little while, smoke a cigarette, and get back in bed.

The more I hid, the more records I sold, and the bigger the shows got. Neil liked the fact that I was playing hard to get.
“Waylon’s crazy,” he’d tell promoters. “You better give him some money or he’ll blow up your building.” I wouldn’t talk to
the press at all, and when I did, I asked for editorial rights.

People
magazine had pissed me off one time. They had hounded me to do an article on Jessi and I, and finally I said okay. Her mother
had just died, and her heart was broken. They took pictures of her and me, talking about us like we were a couple of hillbillies,
and called her mom a Holy Roller. At the end of it, they said that Jessi wanted me to get a vasectomy, and I said no, in my
“male chauvinist” way, because I might want to have kids someday by another woman. I never trusted the press again.