Outlaw Read online

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  One The Newcomers

  Two Nashville Sounds

  Three Let a Flower Be a Flower

  Four Nothing Left to Lose

  Five With Purpose Down There

  Six The West End Watershed

  Seven Hillbilly Central

  Eight Burger Boy Outlaws

  Nine Between Worlds

  Ten Wanted!

  Eleven Third Coast

  Twelve Ain’t Living Long Like This

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Sources

  About the Author

  Also by Michael Streissguth

  Index

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I just don’t think that any of us thought we would spend ten years banging our heads against walls and not come out in good shape on the other side. If we had, I don’t know if we would have had the spirit for it.

  —Dianne Davidson

  Introduction

  * * *

  THE LAST LIGHT of a November day in Nashville crept out of the room where Kris Kristofferson, in a black coat and scuffed boots, grappled with my questions. Over his shoulder, leaves on an old oak tree pressed against the window, turning from yellow to orange according to the retreating sun’s intensity, until they at last disappeared in the darkness. Meanwhile, Kristofferson frowned and stared at the floor as he searched for names and sensations from the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he was the most talked about man in this country music town. “It was like everybody was in love with music,” he finally offered. “Everybody was in love with the creative part. And that’s the only part I ever had anything to do with. I’ve often felt that I was so lucky that I got here at that time, because there were people like Mickey Newbury and John Hartford. ‘Gentle on My Mind’ was just a revolutionary song to me. It was light-years ahead of the stock, old-time songs. And I don’t think the lines even rhyme in it!”

  Outside, Vanderbilt University football fans ambled down Seventeenth Avenue South after their team’s embarrassing loss to Florida, their guffaws and occasional complaints trailing off toward the neighborhood bars. Kristofferson, his carriage still suggestive of his own days on the college gridiron, gestured toward the neighborhood outside, the West End, which used to be his home, admitting that the town and its music industry seemed more real in his memories. “I wish I could sometimes go back to that time. It was just so creative. All the time. And our hearts and souls were totally committed to the songwriting.”

  KRISTOFFERSON AND HIS friends were outlaws, servants of the songs, who chased the music the way it sounded in their heads. They resisted the music industry’s unwritten rules, which prescribed the length, the meter, and the lyrical content of songs as well as how those songs were recorded in the studio. In time, the music industry bowed to their vision, shedding the old ways and accepting songs with peculiar names, like “Jesus Was a Capricorn” or “Devil in a Sleepin’ Bag” or “The Battle of Laverne and Captain Flint.” Kristofferson’s songs, particularly, explored sensual love and desperate negotiations with personal devils in a rambling ballad style that sharply contrasted with the strictly tempered verse that had dominated country music for decades. He engendered a freedom of expression in Nashville’s music business, and, in his wake, other freedoms emerged.

  Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson became outlaws in country music when they won the right to record with any producer and studio musicians they preferred. For decades the record companies made such decisions, but in the early 1970s Waylon and Willie began crafting a narrative that condemned their first RCA producer, Chet Atkins, the legendary guitarist who ran RCA’s Nashville offices. Few people had contributed more to Nashville’s ascent as a recording center in the 1950s and 1960s than the beloved Atkins, but in the eyes of Waylon and Willie he was the man who dictated their sound and their repertory. In the outlaw story, Chet had to be removed in order to liberate Waylon and Willie.

  One could pin outlaw patches on dozens of men and women who discarded Nashville’s old recipes in the late 1960s and early 1970s—such as recording artists Roger Miller and Bobby Bare and producers Fred Foster and Jack Clement—but Kristofferson, Jennings, and Nelson became Stone Mountain in outlaw lore. Predictably, music executives capitalized on the excitement over the new independence and created a companion marketing label, “the outlaw movement,” which in the minds of concert promoters and label bosses encompassed singers with cussed attitudes who dressed like Jesse James. Any one of them could have passed for a member of the Marshall Tucker Band, the southern rockers whom Waylon toured with and whose gold-record hit “Can’t You See” he covered in 1976. Indeed, their solemn photos cranked up the appeal of RCA’s Wanted! The Outlaws, a 1976 compilation featuring Waylon, Willie, Jessi Colter, and Tompall Glaser that became country music’s first platinum album and introduced the outlaw label to the masses.

  Save for Kristofferson’s activism on behalf of the United Farm Workers and other causes, the scene proved vacuous politically, definitely more of a Jimmy Buffett invitation to hard partying than a call to social responsibility. But amid the hippie girls who stripped off their halter tops at Waylon’s shows and magazine advertisements for Willie’s belt buckles, the independence these men inspired rang through Nashville. As other recording artists took control of their own sessions, staff producers lost their jobs and record companies sold their Nashville studios; RCA, CBS, ABC, and the rest became packagers and marketers of Nashville-based artists, from Eddy Arnold to Tammy Wynette.

  To nobody’s surprise, the music made by the chief outlaws proved just as influential as their dilution of corporate control. Kristofferson inspired a singer-songwriter tide in the 1970s that swept up Rodney Crowell, Rosanne Cash, and Mary Chapin Carpenter, major stars in the 1980s, while the PG overtones of his songs echo still in today’s country music. Kristofferson had arrived in Nashville in 1965 and struggled for years for recognition, working odd jobs while attempting to rein in a songwriting style that owed more to the English poet William Blake, whom he had studied in college, than to the honky-tonk king Hank Williams, whom he idolized. When Blake and Bocephus finally merged in Kristofferson’s verse, song publisher and record company owner Fred Foster stepped forward to sign him. Plenty of observers—including Foster’s business partners—believed Kristofferson belonged back on the Nashville streets, where he had rambled and drank and soaked up songs. But by 1970 he was the talk of Nashville: Johnny Cash, Roger Miller, and Ray Price recorded his songs and hip nightclubs on the coasts embraced him. Songwriters copied his style and explored his themes, and radio stations decided that a little modern maturity sung in a Dylan style could live in the country music format.

  Of course, Waylon Jennings rarely missed a play on the country music airwaves. Ever since his first session with RCA in 1965, his records routinely hit the charts, although they rarely climbed very high. He’d come from West Texas by way of Phoenix, where he and his band, the Waylors, had hammered out a restless union of country and rock inspired by his association with Buddy Holly in the 1950s and the demands of young Beatles-influenced fans who flocked to Phoenix clubs to see him. However, Chet Atkins paid little mind to Waylon’s rock-and-roll orientation: he plied him with songs from Nashville’s songwriting machine and the contemporary folk catalog, all designed to appeal to pop audiences as well as country. Under Chet, Waylon tried Latin sounds, pop crooning, and a jaunty Marty Robbins imitation, until his original country-rock sound disappeared into a thousand discordant notes.

  Finally, with a brash New York manager by his side, Waylon demanded control of his recording sessions in the early 1970s, and those dissonant elements in his music magically reorganized into a long los
t country-rock style that culminated in the records “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” (1975) and “Are You Ready for the Country” (1976), which he borrowed from Neil Young’s Harvest album. Although Waylon remained at RCA, he explored new studios, chose his own producers and songs, and polished an outlaw image that followed him until he died in 2002. His gutsy, throbbing sound (as well as his rebellious attitude) reverberated in Hank Williams Jr. and the supergroup Alabama during the 1980s and still glows today in the careers of Zac Brown, Gretchen Wilson, Toby Keith, Trace Adkins, and Jamey Johnson (who freely covers Waylon and Kris, references Waylon by name in his songs, and recently recorded with Willie).

  While Waylon redefined country-rock, Willie rode his own longneck rocket ship, blasting out of the 1970s and arriving at his own personal subgenre within country music. He may be the most significant musical and spiritual legacy of the outlaw movement. Like Waylon, he weathered a frustrating period at RCA in the 1960s despite his songwriting genius and smart vocal delivery. But then he, too, took up the outlaw truncheon, fleeing RCA for greater independence at Atlantic Records and, later, Columbia. Willie’s outlaw association as well as the multimillion-selling albums Red Headed Stranger (1975) and Stardust (1978) supercharged his career and ensured his top-selling status into the early 1990s. And when his dizzying popularity finally calmed, Willie’s remained the soul of country music, communicating a red-white-and-blue individuality and a back-to-basics ethos. He embodied the original pulse, the link to rural beginnings, to the classics “Crazy” and “Night Life,” which he had penned in the 1960s, and to the rowdy outlaw vibe that invoked the Texas dance halls and honky-tonks where country music had lived for so long. In all the years since the outlaw movement faded, Willie has bridged the gaps between those all-too-few golden moments when country music meshes the present with tradition, like Johnny Cash’s American Recordings of 1994, Marty Stuart’s Badlands of 2005, and Jamey Johnson’s That Lonesome Song of 2008. When country music sinks too deeply into gooey sentiment, rock and rap embellishments, and the cannibalization of teen singers, Willie remains onstage with a smile and a gut string.

  WAYLON, WILLIE, AND Kris lived in an authentic and modern outlaw tradition that settled into Nashville beginning in the early 1960s, when civil rights protestors attacked segregation and led the way for Vanderbilt University students and other socially conscious people who later railed against the Vietnam War. By the late 1960s, young hippies from all over the country—themselves outlaws in the eyes of their parents and their government—streamed into Nashville’s West End, transforming the area into a bohemian enclave, a glint of San Francisco in the buckle of the Bible Belt. Many of the pilgrims were inspired by the southern bluegrass music that had made its way to northern college campuses and the popular rock and folk music featured on the Nashville-based Johnny Cash Show on ABC-TV, and they found a vibrant underground cultural scene that coalesced around clubs such as the Red Dog Saloon, Bishop’s American Pub, and the fabled Exit/In. “The thing about the Exit/In, it mirrored the general atmosphere of creativity in that underground group, that little outlaw group,” says singer-songwriter Dianne Davidson, who came from nearby Camden, Tennessee, in 1970. “We pretty much believed that we were about free-form ideas, about creating what our souls told us to create, so, of course, if several of us got together and came up with an idea that we thought was great, the Exit/In would be the place to perform it.”

  Alive with political activism and musical experimentation, the West End became Nashville’s very own Greenwich Village. It sheltered Kristofferson, who wandered the neighborhood like a goliard, auditioning his songs in taverns and publishing companies, and energized Waylon, who found a creative workshop in the Glaser Brothers Sound Studio, which rejected common business practices, like appointments and closing times.

  Even Willie Nelson, so closely associated with Texas during this era, wiggled freely in Nashville’s West End, clocking late-night hours with Waylon at Glaser Brothers and lapping up adoration in the small bars and private clubs from fans who just knew that Willie’s time would come.

  The very idea of a Greenwich Village vibe in Nashville in the late 1960s and early 1970s clashes with the southern-backwater stereotype that some attach to the city. Certainly, Nashville tried its best to strangle desegregation and thoughtful urban renewal, to name two battlegrounds in the culture wars, but its nature also revealed a tolerance for change and experimentation. Those who agitated for civil rights crafted an outlaw template that Waylon, Willie, and Kris could be heir to, and the city’s funky West End helped mold their careers. When they gained the freedom of navigation from Nashville’s intransigent institutions, they created music that conformed to their own vision and introduced a country-rock chic that helped transform Nashville from merely a recording center to a cultural capital with all of its adjunct creative energy and vulgar excess.

  This book tracks the outlaw paths of Waylon, Willie, and Kris from their arrival in Nashville in the 1960s through the 1970s, the decade of the outlaw movement. But despite their looming presence here, it also paints a broad portrait of the outlaw in Nashville, making room for underground travelers such as Rodney Crowell, Kinky Friedman, and Guy Clark, who also found prosperity without adhering to any particular expectations set forth by the music industry. All of them—Waylon and Willie, Rodney, and Guy—have in common their coming of age against the canvas of Nashville’s wildly clashing notions about race, education, lifestyle, urban renewal, war, gender, corporate influence, and government interference, which sorted the outlaws—musical and otherwise—from the accommodationists.

  Some readers will insist that the outlaw phenomenon in music was strictly Texas-based and that Nashville lacked the spark to ignite musical freedom. Of course, Texas burns wildly in the outlaw story: the lead riders were Texans by birth and nobody tapped that state’s outlaw ethos more vigorously than Willie when he abandoned Nashville in the early 1970s and cantered into Austin’s progressive music scene, where artists such as Jerry Jeff Walker, Michael Martin Murphey, and Doug Sahm fused country, rock, and folk. But Texas is only one part of the story; this book sets up camp in Nashville and considers the outlaw phenomenon as it lived there.

  BACK IN THE West End, only a dim light from a desk lamp framed Kristofferson. The clatter of football fans had disappeared, and long silences punctuated the singer’s responses to my questions. His eyes squinting as they do in the movies nowadays when he has an important line, he once more reached for the Nashville he knew forty years ago. “To me, the best thing about that time and the thing that I have the most gratitude for is that the integrity was there. Of wanting . . . not to be famous, though I’m sure people wanted to be! But belief in the quality of music that was coming out. I don’t listen enough anymore to what’s going on today, but I’m sure that there’s guys out there that have as much respect for the music as we did.”

  How remarkably lucky I was to have been there. I have often thought that for me and my purposes and aspirations, it was the best place in the world. I couldn’t want it to have been any different from what it was.

  —Robert Penn Warren

  One

  * * *

  The Newcomers

  A NEW YORK jazz critic traveled down to Nashville in the 1960s on assignment for a national magazine. He was supposed to focus on the music industry there, but the city so offended his uptown sensibilities that his disgust infected every paragraph. “Nashville is a pallid, tasteless town,” he complained as he took aim at the city’s replica of the Parthenon in Centennial Park, and which to him symbolized hillbilly pretension or, at the very least, a mind-boggling lack of imagination. And then he attacked the quality of Nashville’s food, urging visiting New Yorkers to bring their own canned goods because the city’s restaurant fare soured the stomach.

  Such criticism frequently rained on Nashville. Music executives visiting from New York and Los Angeles groused about its Bible Belt ban on the sale of liquor by the glass. When veeps from RCA
poured in for the funeral of legendary country crooner Jim Reeves in 1964, hometown singer Eddy Arnold had to pay a state trooper to fetch moonshine whiskey for their hotel room parties. Even folks from elsewhere in the South raised an eyebrow at the city: writer Larry L. King, a native Texan, arrived at the Ryman Auditorium (home of the Grand Ole Opry) in 1968 and gasped at the surrounding neighborhood. “It is located in a section of Nashville with much to be modest about: curio shops dealing in Sweetheart Pillows and crockery painted with Kitchen Prayers; lunch counters, garages, a barber college; and a series of beer parlors specializing in rollicking jukeboxes, dried-beef sticks, and thirty-cent suds.”

  While freelance writers snickered, sons and daughters of Nashville, too, bristled from time to time: teens who watched the police’s smothering presence at local rock-and-roll shows; housewives who searched in vain for food products advertised on national television but never available in their local grocery stores; and earnest music fans who groaned about the boxed-in musical formats on daytime AM radio.

  Young people who showed up for classes at the city’s hallowed Vanderbilt University marveled at campus concerts featuring passé artists such as the Platters and local country-pop princess Skeeter Davis, when most of young America was discovering Jefferson Airplane and Sly and the Family Stone. In the 1960s, Vanderbilt saw pro-Vietnam demonstrations and expelled James Lawson, a black divinity student who dared to act against desegregation in the city. “Nashville certainly was no hotbed of liberal or progressive ideas,” says a Vanderbilt alumnus who attended in the 1960s and considered himself part of the counterculture. “In fact, it was the exact opposite. It was a very uptight town and everything was completely kept under wraps. There was a huge influence from the church. The Southern Baptist Convention was based in Nashville. We tried to keep out of sight as much as possible.”