Outlaw Read online

  You walk down the crummy street, where practically nobody is out now, for it is after dark and the pawnshops and groceries and clothing stores are closed, and the dummies wearing the new suits with the big red price markers carrying the slashed price have been carried in off the pavement and only the drugstore and the delicatessen show lights in the block. . . . The wind drives a sheet of newspaper over the cement with a dry, rustling sound which reminds you of leaves rustling at night, when you would be walking along a path in the woods, at night, by yourself.

  —Robert Penn Warren

  Eight

  * * *

  Burger Boy Outlaws

  THE AURA OF the outlaw, in the Old West sense of the word, had followed Waylon around country music since the late 1960s, when the news media began reporting the antics of his band members—drug busts, car crashes, lawsuits, and a shoot-out in Atlanta that left Paul Gray, one of the Waylors, dead. Although most of the public trouble went down out of Waylon’s sight—including the shooting—his name was attached to it. And coupled with whispers about his three divorces, voracious pill-popping, and that session at RCA where he supposedly brandished a gun in front of Danny Davis, it made for the ultimate outlaw recipe. It’s no wonder that the Hells Angels swarmed around him: he was the white Bumpy Jonas, a bad mother battling the John Shaft of his imagination.

  Publicity photographs framed Waylon in leather vests or coats, blue jeans, and a black cowboy hat; and, in deference to the hippies, whimsical embroidery appeared on his shirts and beaded hemp hugged his neck. He dressed as a gunfighter on the cover of 1972’s Ladies Love Outlaws album and by 1974’s This Time his hair and mustache had grown shaggy.

  His folk-country efforts and Carl Smith look of the 1960s a dim memory, Waylon’s recordings of jagged ballads such as Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” Steve Young’s “Lonesome, On’ry & Mean,” and Billy Joe Shaver’s “Ain’t No God in Mexico” only fueled an evolving bad-boy image that the U.S. consumer—raised on the legend of the outlaw—was inclined to gobble up.

  In America, romantic bandits such as Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and Pretty Boy Floyd galloped through the national imagination with a zeal that had faded little since that dirty Robert Ford plugged James in the back of the head at St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1882. Yellow journalists and pulp historians exaggerated their criminal exploits and dubiously assigned them noble intentions until the myths overran the facts. Repeated tellings—in verse, the penny press, and family lore—transformed the rogue characters into Robin Hoods who plundered usurious banks, burning mortgages and spreading the loot among families in need. And always some calamitous event earlier in life justified their deeds. Indeed, they became archetypal outlaws, mostly western, who honored what Thoreau called “the right,” whether it was legal or not. The American citizenry—bold marchers toward frontiers and champions of the little guy—identified with the outlaw ethos and over the decades promoted new men and women to the ranks: Belle Starr, Emmett Dalton, Ma Barker, John Wesley Hardin.

  In the 1960s and 1970s, popular films such as Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid served up an array of sympathetic lawbreakers, while outlaw-colored albums like Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison sold like a getaway car. FM radio, too, echoed the trend, broadcasting the Eagles’ “Outlaw Man,” the Steve Miller Band’s “Take the Money and Run,” and Eric Clapton’s and Bob Marley’s recordings of “I Shot the Sheriff.”

  While popular culture celebrated the outlaw mythos, a new breed of outlaw rooted authentically in social justice emerged. They included Diane Nash and John Lewis of the Nashville integration demonstrations, athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos, whose black power gestures stirred the Mexico City Olympics in 1968, and Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, revealing governmental secrets about the Vietnam War. Indeed, even the workaday college student, as portrayed in weekly magazines and network news programs, communicated outlaw ethos. “They are serious people who take questions of war and peace, wealth and poverty, racism and emancipation personally and passionately,” noted the Washington Post. “They do not agree with the way their universities deal with these questions. As a practical matter, they cannot leave the universities, so they are fighting for a part in the decision-making process.”

  IN 1973, A NORTH CAROLINA disc jockey who was promoting a Waylon-Tompall concert called Glaser Brothers staffer Hazel Smith and asked her how the men described their music. “I reached under my desk,” says Smith, “and pulled out Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, and I started looking up words, like mustang. That wasn’t it. I decided to look up the word outlaw. I don’t know why I did. I’d never looked it up before, and there was a definition there, but the very last line said these words: ‘Living on the outside of the written law.’ And I thought to myself, ‘You can’t say how a song is supposed to be written, nor can you say how a singer is supposed to sing a song.’ But what these guys were doing, the music, was certainly different from what had ever been done in this hillbilly town. And they were just beginning to feel their roots, and they were mature enough that they wanted their [records to sound] the same way it was when they did their concerts. I’m telling you, that’s all they wanted. They wanted their music to be as good as it was when they were doing their live shows.” Over the ensuing years, Hazel’s creation slowly engulfed the various labels for that country music with rock attitude coming out of Nashville and Austin—such as “progressive country” and “redneck rock,” and “redneck hip.”

  “You know, living on the outside of the written law, that is not something that somebody’d been put in jail for,” Smith continues. “That’s somebody that don’t agree with what’s going on. That’s what I felt like it was, and to me it had everything to do with music. Nobody wanted to shoot nobody! It wasn’t that. I just thought that they had something. I mean, you got to have a title.”

  Whenever Waylon, Tompall, Billy Joe, and others appeared together in concerts, the Glaser booking agency—doing business as Nova Productions—packaged them as “outlaws,” and soon journalists, particularly those at Country Music, wielded the term like a salt shaker. In January 1974, Country Music ran a Dave Hickey essay headlined “In Defense of the Telecaster Cowboy Outlaws,” which listed Waylon and Willie atop a roll call of deviants that included Kris Kristofferson, Billy Joe Shaver, Tompall Glaser, Kinky Friedman, Lee Clayton, Mickey Newbury, and Townes Van Zandt.

  Waylon (right) with Willie.

  Photograph by Alan Mayor

  “Just by watching and listening,” wrote Hickey, “I can tell you they’re just about the only folks in Nashville who will walk into a room where there’s a guitar and a Wall Street Journal and pick up the guitar.” He also poked fun at journalists bent on categorizing artists, but, ironically, his article immortalized the core group of outlaws as if they were signers of the Declaration of Independence, effectively establishing a genre, if not a marketing label. He only forgot one name: David Allan Coe, the tattooed guy with the black hearse who had graduated from the Red Dog Saloon and Centennial Park to the Exit/In.

  Only by early 1974 Coe had written Tanya Tucker’s hit “Would You Lay with Me (in a Field of Stone)” and moved up to urban clubs such as Max’s Kansas City in New York. He remained based in Nashville, though, and to most in the West End circle, his behavior screamed “outlaw” a little too loudly. With an eye on Johnny Cash’s prison myths, the thirty-four-year-old told everybody he’d done a stretch on death row for killing a fellow jailbird who tried to rape him. For a while, major publications like the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Penthouse, and Country Music swallowed his dangerous-man story, but then a Texas documentarian discovered the lie: Coe had served time for possessing burglary tools and indecent materials, never for murder.

  After serving out parole in Ohio, Coe had persuaded Shelby Singleton’s Plantation Records to jump on the Cash prison-album juggernaut and record two albums with him, both of which tank
ed. “According to people who knew him then,” wrote Country Music’s Marshall Fallwell in 1974, “he was cocky, maybe a little scary, demanding that people stop what they were doing and listen to his songs at Linebaugh’s or Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge. It was during that period that he developed his flamboyant personal style, sporting sequined suits and wide belts with his name burnt into them.”

  The Tanya Tucker hit inspired Columbia Records to sign Coe in 1974. Dan Beck, who had left behind songwriting and jobs at music trade papers to become Columbia’s first Nashville-based publicist, saw just enough interest in Coe’s persona to think he might make it. “You’d have a beginning-of-the-year convention,” says Beck. “David played one of those and tore the place down with ‘If I Could Climb the Walls of the Bottle.’ I remember that night, that was a smash.” And then the New York Times reviewed Coe on a bill with Orleans and Jimmy Buffett: “Now he seems to be on his way, and on the strength of his performance . . . , it would be impossible to stop him.”

  The praise buoyed Columbia, but its faith in Coe never returned many dividends. He produced a twelve-year string of moderate hits and titillated audiences with an all-girl band that backed him for a time, but Nashville kept its distance, particularly after the death-row lie surfaced. “In a way, we didn’t necessarily take David that seriously,” says Beck. “I remember songwriters used to go see him play someplace, and he’d play somebody else’s songs and say he wrote it! People used to laugh.”

  David Allan Coe.

  Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment

  According to Richie Albright, Coe irritated Waylon, always trying to ride his coattails and frequently misleading him. “A great, great songwriter,” says Albright. “A great singer. But he could not tell the truth if it was better than the lie he’d made up. Waylon didn’t make him comfortable enough to hang around. But Willie [did]. I was around Willie quite a bit and David Allan was with him eighty percent of the time. Willie allowed him to hang around.”

  Coe wrote and recorded a song called “Waylon, Willie and Me,” exploiting his relationship with his fellow outlaws. “Waylon was nice enough to play guitar on [it],” says Albright, “and he walked out of there and said, ‘Shit, I don’t know why I did that.’”

  In the end, the menacing cloud around Coe—the tattoos, mysterious prison past, black sedans, and black tour bus—made some people think that this outlaw bit might be real. “His need to be looked upon as that jail mate to me was a little ridiculous,” observes photographer Alan Mayor. “But he took it seriously and therefore you had to. And he had people around who would be willing to beat you up for him.”

  Those people around Coe were the Outlaws motorcycle gang, who flocked to him as steadfastly as the Hells Angels descended upon Waylon. Hugh Bennett, a bouncer and sound man at the Exit/In, saw up close the gang’s dedication. “We were loading David out at the Exit/In one night, and I bet a guy fifty bucks that he couldn’t get out in a certain amount of time. We were tired of them. We wanted them to go. He’d taped up the thermostats, and it smelled bad. It was just a grunge kind of night. It was not a nice night. The Outlaws were his security. And one of them grabbed me and hit me in the head and the fight was on. I lost. I wound up in the hospital with a broken head and broken ribs.”

  WAYLON NEVER CULTIVATED the ex-prisoner image. He was content to let his clothing, big-boss songs, and battles with RCA define his outlaw persona. Privately, he was more reckless, abusing drugs, chasing women, and staying up all night with his buddies as they roamed the streets like a posse. “He wouldn’t go to bed,” remarks Richie Albright. “Like so many guys back in that time, I think they had to reach that point before their creativity started kicking in, before their mind would let go to write.” Fueled by amphetamines, he was more likely to lope into J.J.’s Market on Broadway or the Burger Boy than to write songs; there he could indulge his childlike obsession with pinball machines, but he would also hold court with Tompall, greet songwriters, discuss business, and select his next romantic conquest.

  “They’d play [pinball] one place a while and then they’d play another. I mean, these places would stay open all night,” declares Hazel Smith. “A lot of times, you’d go in and you’d never know who’d be in there with them. And they’d be playing pinball. It was something they enjoyed doing. I don’t know why in the world anybody would enjoy playing pinball.

  “One night, [the journalist] Martha Hume was in town; she’d come down from New York. We knew they was at the Burger Boy playing pinball. And when we walked in the Burger Boy, Tompall had moved [the machine] through the hall, down into the dining area in the restaurant, [damaging the floor]. I said, ‘What in the world did you move the pinball machine for, Tompall?’ And he said, ‘Because I wanted to play pinball in here with Waylon.’ And that’s what they were doing. They were in there playing pinball. And he had to pay for that. He just wrote them a check. He was making a lot of money back then. A lot of money.”

  In the panorama of country music hobbies, Johnny Cash fished, Willie Nelson golfed, Marty Robbins raced cars, Loretta Lynn tended a vegetable garden, and Bill Monroe raised cattle. Waylon Jennings and Tompall Glaser played pinball but not the pinball wizard’s flippers-and-bells game. It was, as a Vanderbilt Hustler reporter observed, like a slot machine with some skill involved. “They are all-business pinball machines with nothing but numbers and colors, and a player may alter the ball’s direction only by pushing, striking or twisting the machine firmly but gently with his bare hands. If the player can use his eyes and hands well enough to guide the five steel balls into a jackpot combination of colors or numbers, he wins money.” Five hundred winning games paid $125 and on up the line. It was illegal for proprietors to pay out on the wins, but the vice squad ignored it.

  Waylon and Tompall spent thousands watching steel balls scatter across the table, and when they did collect, they pumped the quarters back into the machines. The manager of the Burger Boy, Terry George, once stood by while Waylon spent three thousand dollars in sixteen hours. “It was an addiction,” says George. Waylon chose to call it “mental masturbation,” adds Richie Albright. Whatever it was, Waylon frequently hit up George to keep the balls rolling. “Sometimes he’d get into me for two, three, or four thousand dollars,” claims George. “And I’d go to him and say, ‘Waylon, I need to get a check. This is my operating money.’ One day I went to him and asked for a check and he didn’t have his checkbook, [but] there was a white paper sack for to-go orders and he wrote me a check on a paper sack. Well, I thought, ‘This fool is giving me a white paper bag as a four-thousand-dollar check. I didn’t want to offend him because he was messed up or he appeared to be. I thought, ‘I’ll just wait until he’s in a better frame of mind.’ Well, he didn’t get into a better frame of mind anytime soon, so I went to the bank, and I said, ‘You all are going to think I’m a nut. . . .’ And I handed it to them and they cashed a paper bag. This actually happened.”

  The pinball machines and sticky booths of the Burger Boy attracted stray Vanderbilt students and a nightly parade of drug dealers, pimps, and prostitutes. During the day, Music Row office workers and songwriters stopped for lunch, but students at Belmont College near Hillsboro Village stayed away from the eatery on orders from the dean. “The atmosphere in the restaurant was not bright, not clean,” says George. “It was a greasy-spoon-like atmosphere.”

  George says he ignored the restaurant part of the business as Waylon and his crew spent more and more time filling his six pinball machines and drawing burger-buying curiosity seekers and song pluggers. “You had people who would stay there all night long. I didn’t stay there. I left. I was out doing what I did. But [songwriter] Barbara Cummings, her and her brother Bobby would sit there all night long trying to get Waylon or somebody to notice them, to get a record deal or something. You had certain people who would just stay there like them. It was their life, it’s what they did.”

  George catered to the stars, finally moving three pinball machines into a back room to
which only Waylon and Tompall had access. It became another office or a second home. “Next to the pinball,” says George, “[Waylon] had a leather pouch and he had a hook on the wall where he’d hang [it], and he’d keep his whiskey in his leather pouch. I never saw him take a swallow of that whiskey.” Of course, Waylon preferred pills, which kept him trained on the silver balls all night, until he crashed. “I came in one morning and found them on the floor singing religious songs,” continues George. “They were all messed up. I never knew what to expect when I came in, in the morning.”

  Once, George found the pinball machine near the door where they had tried to take it out of the restaurant, but usually he just found the machine in its place and Waylon standing at it. “One morning I came in and [Waylon] said, ‘You think I’m a damn fool, don’t you?’ I thought to myself, ‘Yeah, I do, putting your money in these machines.’ And he told me he wrote ‘Good Hearted Woman’ playing a pinball machine. I said, ‘You’re no fool then if that makes you write songs, inspires you to do that; it’s kind of like an investment.’

  “He played pinball all day all night, all day all night, all day and the next night [perform] a concert,” explains George. “And he was all messed up, but he walked out on that stage and the man was Waylon Jennings. It was pretty amazing. During these three days and three nights he didn’t as much go home and take a bath or nothing. He just stayed at the restaurant.”

  Like George, Albright routinely saw Waylon parlay three days’ roaring into a credible show. “Amphetamines were a problem,” he observes. “Some of those people have an addictive personality and some don’t. Waylon would just push it to a certain limit. Sometimes it was a problem. He always did his shows. Maybe he wasn’t in the best shape or he had been up too long and lost his voice. That was the biggest problem, just staying up too long. Other than that, he always took care of everything else.”