Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville Read online

  Waylon and the young producer’s harmony in song selection notwithstanding, Waylon confessed in his autobiography that he badgered Light to distraction. “Ronny was young, one of the nicest people in the world, and didn’t deserve the misery I put him through. I got more freedom with him as a producer, although I was still using musicians who didn’t know what I was about.”

  Light doesn’t remember Waylon’s concerns about musicians. Such conflict, he says, took root between Waylon and the top guys at RCA-Nashville. “When I produced Waylon, he never once asked to use one of his band members, except for [steel guitarist] Ralph Mooney, and we used Mooney. The issue never came up.” Bradley, who was taking more administrative responsibilities with each new day on the job, claims that he, too, never argued with Waylon about session musicians, that it was Chet who clung to the older ways.

  However, that’s not to say that Bradley and Waylon lived peacefully. To the contrary, they rammed heads almost from the start. “I was in an office with [artist relations director] Wally Cochran and Waylon,” recalls Bradley, “and they were having an argument and they were cussing each other. And Waylon and I started cussing each other. And I said, ‘Hell, I’m not going to stay down here and let you cuss my ass out.’ And I just walked out and walked on up to my office. He was all doped up. He was cussing out Wally and if you knew Wally, he was full of shit anyhow. It was a conversation about nonsense. And I didn’t let him run over me.”

  In the spring of 1971, recalls Billy Ray Reynolds, conflict sparked between Jennings and Bradley over music. Reynolds had written a Civil War concept album, and Waylon was recording a few tracks at RCA. Ronny was producing, but Bradley was teasing Waylon about the project, reminding him that the war was over. Angered, Reynolds urged Waylon to go elsewhere to work on the tracks. The singer only shook his head and pointed out that his contract required he record at RCA. The album died right there.

  Another conflict illustrated not only Waylon’s beef with RCA but the bigger wall between establishment Nashville and the emerging youth movement in country music. In December 1970, Waylon and his band had settled into a residency at the Troubadour in Los Angeles while Kristofferson shot his first scenes for Cisco Pike. Inevitably, Waylon’s people and Kris’s people crossed paths, leading to a wondrous jam session in Billy Ray Reynolds’s hotel room, which included Kris, Joan Baez, Tommy Smothers, Mickey Newbury, Dottie West, Neil Diamond, and comedic actor Larry Storch.

  “Somebody sent out for some hamburgers,” says Reynolds. “But they were cold when they got there. Everybody left and I was about trashed out and laid down on my bed. And Kris was on the other side with his feet on the floor; he laid back on the bed with the cheeseburger in the air. And the last thing I remember him saying was, ‘I got to be on the set at six o’clock.’ It was three-something then. I woke up about nine-thirty or ten the next morning and Kris was still lying there in the same position with the cheeseburger up in the air, just like he’d been when I went to sleep. I woke him up and he went on. He was late for work that day.”

  Waylon missed the hotel party, but he had seen Kristofferson sing “Lovin’ Her Was Easier” during his L.A. stand and immediately wanted to record it. He asked RCA-Nashville to arrange studio time in Los Angeles with Ricky Nelson’s band. “At the time,” wrote Waylon, “he had a good bunch of guys with him, including Sonny Curtis.” Initially, RCA refused, but Waylon persisted, calling Harry Jenkins, who had become Chet’s boss in New York after Steve Sholes’s death, and winning his permission.

  As Waylon later wrote, “It was a great record, up-tempo, with a guitar riff that was like a clarion call to arms every chorus.” Back in Nashville, RCA released the song, but only as album filler. Waylon believed it was a sure hit single and blamed Chet’s old objection to recording anywhere but 806 Seventeenth Avenue South; however, RCA’s promotion head, Elroy Kahanek, disagrees: “It wasn’t the normal Waylon Jennings kick-ass-type song. I just felt like, that’s just not Waylon. To me, it was just such a beautiful love ballad that it just didn’t fit what radio wanted to hear from Waylon.” On August 7, 1971, Roger Miller took “Lovin’ Her Was Easier” to the country charts; two weeks later, Kristofferson himself introduced it to the pop side.

  Even if RCA had released the recording as a single, the company might have struggled to keep up with demand. From producer Ronny Light’s perch in the studio, he could see that it was RCA’s Achilles’ heel. When a record caught fire on radio, he says, the company’s manufacturing plants often lacked the capacity to quickly turn out more copies. “They would press ten thousand on an artist whose last record sold fifty thousand singles,” complains Light. “I went to them and said, ‘Why do we do this? How much do we think we’re going to sell?’ And we knew immediately when we had a good record. All the producers knew, everybody knew. Radio knew immediately. We’re sitting there with ten thousand pressed and I said, ‘If we’re going to sell fifty thousand records let’s press fifty thousand records on the front end and get rid of them.’”

  The fickle pressing habits also popped up on the list of grievances Waylon frequently took to Wally Cochran, Nashville’s head of artist relations. Recalls Kahanek, “Waylon walked into Wally’s office, and he said, ‘Cochran, why in the hell can’t I get my promo copies.’ Wally says, ‘They’re selling so fast we’re pressing them as fast as we can, Waylon.’ He’d do that with the bluegrass acts, which you couldn’t give away back then. He told Lester Flatt one time, ‘It’s hot. It’s selling like crazy.’ I said, ‘Wally, why did you tell him that? You know it’s not true.’ He said, ‘It made him feel good, didn’t it?’” In any case, argues Kahanek, nobody at RCA worried about sales as long as its artists shone on the trade-magazine charts, which reacted to a combination of sales, radio airplay, and good old-fashioned backslapping. “You’d bullshit about sales,” explains Kahanek. “You’d be on the phone talking with the head of Billboard and say, ‘Well, Charley Pride sold twenty-six thousand singles this week.’ We might have sold twenty thousand. You had to keep a record of all this stuff, so it wouldn’t catch you and bite you in the ass.” The dubious sales reports moved Pride up the charts, which pleased RCA brass in New York, who boasted about “chart share” to stockholders.

  Coy about specific methods, Kahanek further claims that he could dictate chart positions. “One day in my office this artist called me from another major label and said, ‘Elroy, good God, will you slack up? I’ve got a record right now that could be our first number one, and we know we’re not going to get there because you’ve got that damn top five sewed up.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s my job.’ He said, ‘Man I tell you what.’ I said, ‘What?’ ‘I’ll give you two thousand dollars if you’ll just back off a little bit.’ I said, ‘Look, you’re a good friend. I’m going to let you go to number one.’ So I called Billboard magazine and I said, ‘Hey, do me a favor. Keep so-and-so at number two. Go ahead and take so-and-so to number one.’ They did. It wasn’t two months later another artist called me and said, ‘Elroy please …’ I did the same thing for them. They were friends. Back then, it wasn’t so cutthroat; you helped other artists even if they were on another label.”

  If Waylon understood that the record companies, not the record buyers, anointed number-one artists, he may have dropped his pressing plant petitions, but with outlaw attitude he railed on about manufacturing and promotion and production and instrumentation. And he was mostly rebuffed. Until an accountant from New York interceded. And then RCA had to listen.

  THE BIG RECORD sales that Chet envisioned for Waylon back in 1965 had obviously failed to materialize, which made him heavily reliant on touring, mostly as part of country music package shows assembled by veteran agent Lucky Moeller. During Moeller’s long career in booking and promotion, he established contacts at every fair and cow palace in the country, assuring that his artists were never at a loss for work. In time, Waylon became one of his most popular offerings, which was a double-edged sword. Indeed, Waylon’s concert circuit was long and pro
fitable, but Moeller often booked shows at dingy and dangerous clubs that country music troubadours called “the skull orchards.”

  “One tour would be a nice chain of hotels,” recalls Billy Ray Reynolds. “But some of them were just pure knife-and-gun-type clubs. We’d even have people shot in front of us, when we’d be on the stage playing. Jealous husbands and people like that fighting. They were just strange places.

  “[One shooting] happened in Kentucky, near Louisville. Waylon was between sets. We’d do four sets a night at that time. This particular night he ordered a salad [during the break] and this lady was loose in the crowd and was flirting, especially with him. She came over to the table and was sitting on his leg. She started reaching over into his salad bowl and pulling the lettuce out of his bowl. He just quit eating and said, ‘Billy, do about three songs and call me up.’ So she kept messing with him. And I did my three songs and introduced him and he came on up. She was dancing with other guys, and this guy just walked up and shot the guy she was dancing with right in front of us. We all started trying to figure out how to get behind the PA speakers. It was some little old joint.”

  As the exhausting dates piled up, Richie Albright took a long sabbatical from Waylon’s band. He was run-down by work and too many pills taken to stay awake on the road. “This town ran on amphetamines,” says Albright. “There were a couple of doctors in town; all you had to do is walk in and tell them, ‘I’m on the road,’ and they’d pull out their prescription book and say, ‘What do you want?’ Everybody walked around with their pockets sounding like a drugstore.” Albright also had a healthy taste for weed, in contrast to Waylon who preferred only his pills. “When we came to town in the sixties,” continues Albright, “I remember I was at a party one night and everybody was drinking, everybody had a handful of pills, and I lit a joint and everybody freaked out and said, ‘What are you trying to do, get us busted?’ Hardly anybody did it.”

  Perhaps Albright should have used more discretion. In 1969, he was busted twice, which may have spooked Waylon and hastened Albright’s departure from the Waylors. For the next three years, his strong hand kept the beat in a variety of bands before he finally returned in April 1972, only to find Waylon sadly diminished. Suffering from hepatitis that he contracted while playing an Indian reservation in New Mexico, Waylon threatened to either go back to Phoenix for good or sharpen his guitar playing for session work. “He was just fed up,” explains Albright. “He was making the same money he was in ’69. Things weren’t really going good. He was just tired and fed up.”

  Waylon’s RCA contract was about to expire when he summoned the drummer to discuss it. “He looked like a chameleon, he was so yellow from the jaundice,” recalls Albright. “He called me in and said RCA had offered him five thousand dollars. That’s the moment when I said, ‘Bullshit. This ain’t going to get it. We got to do something.’ So that’s when I went into action. I didn’t do things before Waylon said to do things, but at that moment, I said, ‘Let me do this and I’ll see.’ I just made a few phone calls.”

  During his hiatus, Albright had played with the country-rock band Goose Creek Symphony, whose manager, George Laibe, introduced him to a character named Neil Reshen. Reshen, who was a business manager at the rock magazine Creem and steered the career of jazz legend Miles Davis, indeed knew how to squeeze the dollars from a record company and could help Waylon deal with RCA. “Neil and I talked and he came down to Nashville,” says Albright. “I told Waylon, ‘There’s a guy that you need to talk to. You’re probably not going to like him but you need to hear what he has to say. Don’t let RCA pull you in.’ So Neil came down and spent a few hours with Waylon that afternoon. We were taking Neil to the airport, and we called Willie, and Willie came and met Neil at the airport. Those two got hooked up in that one little weekend. There was frustration especially when they were getting ready to shaft Waylon, and I couldn’t stand for that.”

  LIKE WAYLON, WILLIE could find neither rhyme nor reason at RCA. But while Waylon’s recent albums showed signs of life on the charts, Willie’s fizzled. In 1971 and 1972, only two of his four album releases dented the charts and then only for a total of six weeks. Nineteen seventy-one’s Yesterday’s Wine showcased two of Willie’s finest songs to date, “Yesterday’s Wine” and “Goin’ Home,” which could make you cry, but the album opened with a strange existential dialogue between Willie and a host of angels who sound like church elders reading aloud a church supper menu. It tried to be a concept album, but it lacked a clear thread, despite Willie’s claims to the contrary. “I think it’s one of my best albums,” he lamented, “but Yesterday’s Wine was regarded by RCA as way too spooky and far out to waste promotion money on.”

  Willie fields autograph seekers.

  Courtesy of Maryland Room, University of Maryland

  One last album on RCA—The Willie Way—enchanted Rolling Stone’s Chet Flippo, who noted that Willie sang “with a freshness drawn from his own blues-tinged country style,” but it arrived in stores packaged in the most unimaginative album sleeve ever to come out of Nashville. To nobody’s surprise, the record faltered, and Willie, his outlaw attitude pricked, continued to blame his dismal sales on RCA’s marketing engine. “Chet liked me,” said Willie in a 2008 biography. “He liked my writing, my singing. He didn’t care much for my guitar playing, but at that point, I didn’t either. But whatever happened in Nashville, no matter how much I liked it, no matter how much Chet liked it, if it got to New York, when it would come time to promote and spend money, if it came out of Nashville, it didn’t get the budget.”

  The RCA men still around who remember Willie’s tenure at the label disagree. Ronny Light argues that the company did everything it could to help Willie sell, while Jerry Bradley blamed a public that hadn’t yet warmed to Willie’s sound. Elroy Kahanek had struggled to sell Willie’s records to radio stations when he started as a regional representative in 1969, and he still struggled when he took over national promotion in Nashville in 1971. “They were just off-the-wall,” he says. “They weren’t mainstream country. Back then country radio wasn’t going to play anything that was different. His music was the same as it always was and he wasn’t going to change it, and country radio wasn’t going to accept it at that time.”

  Evidently, Willie needed the aggressive management that Reshen provided. However, by the time Willie signed with him, RCA-Nashville had already decided to cut loose its resident cosmic cowboy. “I was in sort of the same situation I had been in ten years earlier,” reflected Willie. “My band would fill a Texas dance hall. We were stars in Texas. But in Nashville, I was looked upon as a loser singer. They wouldn’t let me record with my own band. They would cover me up with horns and strings. It was depressing.”

  Nashville’s rejection might have stung a bit more but Willie had already left town, mentally and physically. Billy Ray Reynolds, who as part of Waylon’s band frequently toured with Willie, had seen the frustration building in 1970 while they played dates in Buffalo and Toronto. “Lynn Anderson was on that tour with us,” says Reynolds, “and they loved Lynn Anderson and they hated Waylon and Willie. They called us hippies.” After the tour, says Reynolds, he and Willie tramped across Willie’s farm outside Nashville, where the Texan still had Toronto on his mind. “There were fields back by a little old pond near Willie’s house. Willie said, ‘Let’s sit down here and listen to the orchestra.’ There were thousands of frogs, and we were sitting there on the dirt listening to them. There were just unbelievable sounds.” In the darkness, Willie noted the altos, sopranos, and basses. “It was kind of strange having somebody like Willie Nelson talking about the orchestrations of a frog pond. He and I sat on the embankment, and he started talking about, ‘I just don’t know what I’m going to do. It seems like nothing I do works.’”

  His uncertain commercial prospects weighed on him, but they were briefly overshadowed by the untenable situation at the farm, where his new girlfriend, Connie Koepke, lived under the same roof with Willie’s
first wife, while second wife, Shirley, fumed nearby in Nashville. Something was about to blow. And it did. On December 23, 1970.

  “I was at a Christmas party downtown in Nashville,” said Willie, “and my nephew called and said, ‘Come home, your house is on fire.’ When I got there it was in flames and there were firemen everywhere. So I run and get my stash bag and run out. I had a pound of good Colombian in there and I knew I was gonna need to get high.” According to legend, before Willie left the party, he instructed his nephew to pull a damaged car into the garage, so he could claim it later on his insurance.

  When the smoke cleared, Willie and Connie and his children rolled out of Ridgetop and headed to Bandera, Texas, an old sheep-raising town northwest of San Antonio. He rebuilt the home in Ridgetop and held on to his acreage, but he never returned to live. “I knew I only had a few years left to do what I was going to do, and I had to make a move,” said Willie in 1976. “I wasn’t going down there to quit. I was going down there with purpose.”

  Over the years, he returned to Music City time and time again whenever work demanded it, but Texas was his home, and in 1970 it represented more than just a string of one-nighters. Its music scene, like the Dallas Cowboys of the NFL, was fast gaining a national audience.

  FROM HIS NEW stage in Bandera, Willie Nelson could see the state’s hard-core conservative white working class giving up floor space to the white hippies who poured out of urban centers such as Dallas and Austin. Indeed, the Texas brand of country music traditionally blended honky-tonk, western swing, and the blues, and was now adding rock elements and ethos in a way that recalled favorite son Lyndon B. Johnson’s pragmatic negotiations with black America’s inevitable push for civil rights.