Waylon (35 page)

There wasn’t anything slick about the album. It was loose-limbed, and true, and that’s what people were looking for. They
couldn’t find it in rock and they damn sure couldn’t find it in country.

We were the only alternative they had.

Some of the things on
Wanted: The Outlaws
were over ten years old. I sweetened and updated some of the vocals, added harmonies, and got Willie in to sing with me on
“Good Hearted Woman.” He was so high when he was doing his part he was dancing a jig out in the studio. Willie’s cuts came
from his
Yesterday’s Wine
collection, with “Me and Paul” being a tale of his road adventures with longtime drummer Paul English, who looked out for
Willie. Jessi and I had done “Suspicious Minds” together back in 1970—we still perform it live in concert, a quarter of a
century later—and she sang her beautiful “I’m Looking for Blue Eyes.” Tompall recorded a new version of Jimmie Rodgers’s “T
For Texas,” and we licensed him doing Shel Silver-stein’s “Put Another Log on the Fire” from MGM. Shel was an honorary Outlaw
in our eyes.

I remixed the album at RCA’s studios, on the sly, going in late at night. “Honky Tonk Heroes” seemed to fit the concept, as
did Willie and I dueting on “Heaven or Hell.” We never did decide which one of us was which.

As an album, our true fans had probably heard most of it before. For the newer people, who needed a sampler of Outlaw Music
to understand what all the fuss was about, it was a perfect introduction. To set the stage, the album opened with “My Heroes
Have Always Been Cowboys,” a new song in which I tried to link up “the cowboy ways” I’d always admired in my “high-ridin’
heroes” with “modern day drifters…sadly in search of / One step in back of / themselves and their slow-movin’ dreams.” It
was an oddly downbeat way to begin the album, but it seemed to sum up the frontier loneliness that often came hand in hand
with our ideals of rugged individualism.

I kept thinking of Hank, passing alone, with no friends or family around him. That was one of my secret fears, to “die from
the cold / In the arms of a nightmare.” It may have been why we didn’t mind being lumped together, though we were all unmistakably
individual. There’s nobody like Willie Nelson. There’s nobody like Kris, or Tompall, or Billy Joe. There’s really nobody like
me, and I know that. There’s a loneliness and a pride there, Outlaws or in-laws, under the same roof that made us a family.

All of a sudden we found ourselves besieged with some long-lost relatives.
Wanted: The Outlaws
moved into the pop charts, and by December had sold over a million copies. It was the first country album to do so. Outlaws
became hip, forecasting the rise of the Urban Cowboy, and pretty soon a lot of people began showing up on the doorstep of
Hillbilly Central, flashing their horseshoe belt buckles and Jack Daniels bottles and proclaiming their enemy status.

David Allen Coe was the most sincere of the bunch, though he wasn’t as rough as he wanted everybody to think. Before he became
the Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy, complete with Lone Ranger mask, he had spent considerable time behind bars, depending on
which story you heard, from reform school to the Ohio State Penitentiary and on to death row, for killing another inmate in
self-defense. Paroled, he headed for Nashville where his songwriting skills brought him more renown than his bad-ass bragging.
He had written “Will You Lay with Me (in a Field of Stone)” for Tanya Tucker, and was on his way to penning the classic “Take
This Job and Shove It” for Johnny Paycheck, who also took to waving the skull-and-crossbones Outlaw banner. “I’m one of youse
now,” said Johnny, calling me up. “I’m an Outlaw.”

I said, “Have you been stealing antiques again?”

The first time I met David, at the Demon’s Den in downtown Nashville, he took me home to see his wife and firstborn baby.
We rode in his custom hearse, and he told me all the things he was fixin’ to do that I wasn’t doing, and why wasn’t I doing
them and how tough he was and how he didn’t take any shit.

His mouth was getting him into trouble. Though he had once belonged to a motorcycle gang, he had gotten on the wrong side
of the California Hell’s Angels. He was afraid if he went to the West Coast they were going to kill him. I said, “David, all
your life you wanted to play the guitar and sing and write songs and make a living. But if you want everybody to know how
tough you are, sooner or later you’ll blow it.”

“I am tough,” he growled.

“You’ve been in prison, David, or at least you say you have, and you know when you stroll down that aisle between the jail
cells, every sonofabitch in there knows whether you’re tough or not, just by the way you walk and carry yourself. If you have
to tell somebody, you ain’t tough enough.”

David didn’t know what to think. He wrote a song called “Waylon, Willie, and Me” at the same time that he started taking potshots
at us in interviews, saying that Willie and Kris had sold out, that I was running around wearing white buck shoes, and none
of us were really an Outlaw. He was the only Outlaw in Nashville, an ex-convict that had killed a man with a mop handle, and
if he ever caught Glen Campbell, who had a hit called “Rhinestone Cowboy” years after David started driving his hearse down
Broadway with his nickname emblazoned on the side, he’d know where to stuff his goddamn rhinestones.

I saw him in Fort Worth and I put my finger right up to his chest. “You gotta knock that shit off,” I told him. “I ain’t never
done anything to you.”

“They just set us up,” he protested. “You know I love you, Waylon.” He showed me his bus. He’d painted it black: the grill,
the bumpers, mirrors, everything. Just like my own Black Maria, with the ghost of Hank Williams inside.

I couldn’t stay mad at him for long. When it came to being Outlaw, the worst thing he ever did was double-parking on Music
Row. He could drive me crazy, but there was something about David that pulled at my heartstrings.

It’s a miracle Tompall and I got along as long as we did.

He was a Jack Daniels boy, and by this time I had switched to cocaine. There’s no room in the middle with either of them.

Richie says that he introduced me to cocaine. To get me off the pills, if you can believe that. With Dr. Snap out of the picture,
prescriptions were harder to find, and there was some bad shit on the market. I wasn’t going to stop, no way, so Richie gave
me some cocaine. “Look, Hoss, try this.” I liked it. For the next ten years, I liked it.

Life could be good at Hillbilly Central. We spent hours in the studio, Richie and I, absorbing recording techniques, layering
and balancing, our producing taking shape. There was no shortage of drugs. When Tompall finally sold the building, whoever
bought it tore up the carpeting and the walls. They found all kinds of dope stashed away. When you’d been up a long time,
you could get paranoid and start hiding shit. A couple of days later, you’d forget where you hid it. The whole place was like
a getting-high time capsule.

You never knew what you might find. For a time, I’d leave the back door of the studio at 4:00
A.M.
, go down the stairs past where Captain Midnight, Donnie Fritts, and Billy Swan were throwing Bowie knives at a target, and
there, sleeping under them like a street person, was a girl we called Crazy Helen, who had followed me from Saint Louis. We
tried to bar her from the building, but occasionally she’d slip through and lock herself in the bathroom. I didn’t know what
to do with her. I tried to give her money to get back home, but after two or three days, she was back. “I sent you home,”
I’d say to her.

“You didn’t tell me to stay,” she replied.

Finally, Jessi came to my rescue. I was recording one day and Helen had gotten inside. Jessi knew exactly how to handle the
situation. She walked over to Helen and said, “You love Waylon, don’t you?”

Helen nodded. “Well, I do too,” said Jessi. “Isn’t he great?” She didn’t go and cuss her out or be mean to her. Soon after
that, Helen stopped coming around.

For Tompall’s and my friendship, success was proving much harder to deal with than adversity. We weren’t overnight sensations
by any means; both of us, even by Nashville standards of longevity, were veterans. We had been recording, touring the country,
and writing songs for more than a decade. We knew our way around the business, and the pleasure.

Still, without a common enemy to unite us, our best-friendship quickly fell apart. We toured together some, him with a new
band that featured a black drummer and guitar player from Bobby “Blue” Bland’s group, but a projected Outlaw Express never
made it out of the starting gate.

Johnny Cash once told me, “You never go into business with your friends.” Once I moved my publishing company over to Tompall’s,
we were asking for trouble. Tompall didn’t trust anybody. I’m probably too trusting, or at least I was then. Somebody has
to give me a reason not to trust them. You have to go back to square one; until you do me wrong, I trust you. If a lot of
time we judge people by the way we ourselves are, I always wondered in the back of my mind about Tompall. If he doesn’t trust
anybody, should anybody trust him? So we became more wary around each other. Trouble answered us.

Neil wanted to look at Tompall’s books. He didn’t have anything to do with my publishing, and he wanted in on that. Neil said
he needed it for the IRS, but I think he was just trying to catch Tompall off guard. I went along with Neil, and Tompall took
it as a personal insult.

Even Captain Midnight couldn’t keep our opposite poles in balance after that. We had made a good triangle, the Big Three,
running around town having a pinball. Captain tried to be the peacemaker, but it was brutal for him. He was caught in the
middle. It started on an Outlaws tour in the West: California. Midnight would go and open up for us with a few jokes. If he
didn’t draw any gunfire, the rest of us would head out on stage. Tompall and I weren’t speaking, and the Captain was getting
tired mediating between the two camps.

When it finally looked to be over between Tompall and I, to the tune of $300,000 in suits and countersuits, I offered Midnight
a place in my organization. He said, “I’d love to, Waylon, but Tompall has probably one friend left in the world, and I think
that’s me.” Tompall was right on the edge, he thought, and after a while, I understood the decision he’d made. Tompall wasn’t
speaking to his own brothers, least of all me. He did need somebody. I wasn’t him.

I’ll always miss Tompall, though. We had a lot of fun, and we found a freedom together; he’s a part of my life. I still think
of him whenever I run into an old pinball machine like the kind we used to play. Richie had a birthday party, about five years
ago, in a bar over in Franklin. They had an ancient pinball machine in the back and I hadn’t seen one for years. We were playing
it, getting it up there, making it move way over to the wall where if you hit it, you hit it big. I must’ve run up a thousand
games on that sucker. I left it with the Captain to finish off.

I should call Tompall and tell him about it. Maybe I could give him a holler and we’d drop in a few quarters. I know he’ll
tell me it’s not where he’s at anymore; he’s not that simple-minded. That part of his life is gone forever, and don’t be calling
him for things like that, he doesn’t want to hear it.

I thought it might be fun, me and him to go over and play that pinball machine once. For old times’ sake.

Here comes cocaine.

It’s the same as pills, but it’s smoother. Lasts shorter. More jolt, more expensive.

“You got any pills?” That used to be the rallying cry of the late-night set. We shared our stashes then. Two or three pills
and you could be up for twelve hours, writing songs, swarming, with enough left over for the next couple of days.

Not with cocaine. Those lines vanished quicker than you could spoon them out and roll up a hundred-dollar bill. After a while,
even the haves couldn’t afford to share with the have-nots. It started breaking up the ol’ gang of mine.

Cocaine doesn’t last. I was looking for that speed jerk. I needed more to do more, and more, and with enough cash flow to
keep the level in my body up so I could stay awake for seven days (“It felt like a week,” joked the Captain), I couldn’t be
still, wobbling around, sure thinking I was having fun. And I guess I was.

I was the happiest druggie you ever saw. Laughing and cutting up all the time. None of that down garbage. I would sometimes
get to draggin’ before I’d crash, but all I had to do was say goodnight and fall out, just like somebody clicked the television
off, recharging until I was ready to go again.

Everybody told me how great I was on drugs. I didn’t realize the ones that were patting me on the back were the ones I was
giving drugs to. I thought I was one in a million.

If they hadn’t been killing me, and killing the people around me, I’d probably still be doing them.

There was the Burger Boy, over on the left. I was at the intersection of Eighteenth Avenue South and Broadway, sitting in
my car. Across the street was J.J.’s, where we spent days and nights on those pinball machines. Right there at the corner.

Can I get you to fill it up? High test. Unleaded.

I was coming right down the next corner when I realized it was all over. I pulled up at this corner, and then that corner,
looking this way and that way, always thinking around the next corner something’s going to be happening.

It had been like that for months. Every time I’d look for something to be going on, everybody’d be gone. There was nobody
around.

I saw Captain Midnight across the street. I pulled the Cadillac over to him.

“Where you going?” asked the Captain.

“I wore this goddamn town out,” I said. “There ain’t nobody doing this shit but me. I’m going home.”

That was the night I quit roaming.