Mike Judge Presents: Tales from the Tour Bus (2017–…): Season 1, Episode 6 - Waylon Jennings (Part One) - full transcript
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The greatest outlaw in country
music has to be Waylon Jennings.
I think that'd be pretty
hard to argue with.
The evidence is overwhelming.
The truth is, there are
really two Waylons.
There's the guy in the black
hat, the honky-tonk hero,
and then there's the kid
with slicked-back hair
who almost broke out with
the birth of rock and roll,
playing bass with Buddy Holly.
And both Waylons cheated death,
more times than any
man has a right to.
Everybody always says,
"Man, when you gonna write
a book about the Waylon years?"
I say, "Not as long
as my mama's alive."
There you go. There you go.
Gordon "Crank" Payne
and Jerry "Jigger" Bridges
spent the better part of their careers
on stage with Waylon Jennings.
Crank played guitar and harmonica.
Jigger played bass.
Both of them got their nicknames
from the man they knew as Hoss.
I remember we had
a Canadian tour with Willie,
and Waylon warned Willie,
he said, "You've got to do
something with this bus.
"There's so much pot that was smoked.
You've got to clean it up."
We were high 24/7.
I don't know how to tell people that,
but, you know, how do you think
you do 200 dates a year?
You can't unless you're on something.
We ran around this
country with a sign on our head.
It said, "Look at us, we're stupid,"
because we were high all the time.
Tom Bourke was the road
manager for Waylon Jennings
from his start as a solo artist
to super stardom as a
country music outlaw.
Willie's bus was in front of Waylon's,
and you could smell the smoke.
So Willie sent it in,
and he had it steam cleaned
and everything that
you could do to the bus,
but it didn't work.
We got to the crossing,
the guards, they came on his bus.
And you know how dogs sniff around?
This dog sat down.
Just sat there and just looked around.
He didn't know where
to bark or where to sniff.
He had no idea what to do.
And they took everything
out of Willie's bus.
They were looking underneath
the bays and everything.
The dogs were going crazy, you know,
and they couldn't find nothing.
Anyway, they let Willie go, and
he gets away with everything.
We thought that after he got through
that it was smooth sailing
for us, you know.
Then when our bus got there,
they took Waylon, they
wanted to do a strip search.
The funny part at that time is...
there was six of us, I think...
we were honorary deputy sheriffs,
so when they took us
into the little room,
we just all threw the badges
on the table.
And the guy said,
"Oh shit. Just go on."
He was a cowboy.
Some people are born that way.
I was scared to death of them
guys, but they were cowboys.
You know, to me
they were real cowboys.
He was actually part Native
American on his mother's side,
Irish and Dutch on his father's side.
Terry Jennings says that his dad
played up both sides of his heritage,
while growing up in a tiny West
Texas town called Littlefield.
My dad and Uncle Tommy
would play Cowboys and Indians.
Well, Dad, when he was
five years old...
...when he was
walking on a split-rail fence,
and they have a thing
they call a sand fighter,
which is basically a bunch of spikes,
and it's dragged through the ground,
turn the dirt over
so the wind don't blow it away.
Well, he fell off that fence
and stuck one of those spikes right
above his ankle in the left leg,
so it stunted the growth in his leg.
A lot of people ask me
how tall Dad is,
and I'll tell 'em, "He's
six-foot-one, six-foot-two,
depending on which foot
he's standing on."
When you watch him play and you
seen him all leaning over to the left,
that's 'cause he's over there
leaning on that short leg.
His disability - didn't stop him
from dreaming with his brother, Tommy,
about playing music
on the greatest stage of all,
the Grand Ole Opry.
Grandpa had a guitar.
Grandma played piano,
taught him the first three chords.
Him and Uncle Tommy,
they would get out there
and get broomsticks and Coke crates,
stand on those, pretending like they
were Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb.
By the time Waylon was 14,
he was performing in public
and working as a DJ
at a local radio station.
By 19, he was married with children,
but his talent caught the attention
of another young singer-songwriter
out of Lubbock, 80 miles away.
Buddy Holly was the first one
to take Dad into the studio.
They were high school friends.
And Mom, she didn't
really like him that much
because Buddy'd pull up to the
front yard...
...honk the horn, and there'd go Waylon.
Buddy Holly
was definitely the match
that kindled the flame for
Waylon Jennings, no question.
And he also showed Waylon
how easy it was
for that to go away.
Singer-songwriter Kinky
Friedman was just a boy
when the Crickets
made Buddy Holly a star.
In 1958, the Crickets quit
Holly in a contract dispute.
Buddy turned to his old pal
Waylon for help.
Buddy'd come by the radio
station Dad was working at
and said, "Hey, you wanna go
out on the road with me?"
Dad said, "Sure," and he goes,
"Well, you're gonna play bass."
And Dad goes, "I don't play bass.
Never played a bass in my life."
Well, Buddy handed him
a bass and says,
"You got two weeks to learn how to
play it and meet me in New York."
The tour was called
the Winter Dance Party,
and it included the biggest names
in rock and roll at the time.
They'd been having a lot
of trouble with the bus.
The heaters weren't working,
and they were, all the time,
getting people to come
over and work on it.
Well, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper
had both had the flu
from being on that cold bus.
Holly chartered a plane
from Mason City, Iowa,
to Fargo, North Dakota,
in order to stay warm
on that leg of the trip.
There were only three seats,
and Waylon had one of them.
Big Bopper is just that...
he's a great big guy,
and he was sick, and he's from Texas,
and us Texas boys try
to look out for each other.
And Dad says, "Man, you know,
you'd be better off on that
plane," and he agreed.
Later on, as they were getting
ready to go to the airplane,
Dad and Buddy are sitting backstage,
and they got these
little cane-back chairs
leaning against the wall,
and they was eating hot dogs.
And Buddy looks at him and says,
"Well, I hear
you're scared of flying."
He goes, "I ain't scared of nothing.
I just gave it to Big Bopper
'cause he's got the flu."
Buddy goes, "Well, all I got to say
is I hope your old bus freezes up."
And Dad goes, "Well, fine,
I hope your plane crashes."
We interrupt this program
for a special news bulletin.
Three young singers who soared
to the heights of show business
on the current rock and roll
craze were killed today
in the crash of a light plane
in an Iowa snow flurry.
For years, he thought
he had done it, you know?
And they was just kids
cutting up with each other.
And but for a little confusion
about who was going to sit
in what seat on the plane...
he would've been the one.
This one time,
we're in Fresno, California,
and just before the show
he hollered at me,
he said, "Come down
to the dressing room."
Drummer Richie Albright
started playing with Waylon in 1961.
Very few people spent more time on
the road with Hoss than Richie.
Went down there in his dressing room,
so he shut the door
and said, "Give me a bump."
So I just gave him
a couple of big bumps,
and I took a couple myself.
Well, I forgot that the evening before
he had given me two small packets,
and he said, "Hold these for me."
And I looked at 'em
and there was two of 'em,
I said, "What's he got two for?"
So I poured 'em together.
Richie come up on stage,
and everything seemed fine.
Then about halfway
through the first song,
I noticed him wobbling.
He was swinging
and not hitting anything.
I run up behind him,
and he's weaving even more,
so I grabbed him,
and I said, "Are you okay?"
I looked down
and I swear to God,
my drumstick was a "Z."
That's the way it looked to me.
He goes, "Don't worry about me.
"Go back there and tell your dad
it's gonna be okay.
It's called Atlanta Dog."
Atlanta Dog. I'm not sure what it was.
It was a mixture
of PCP and heroin.
Thanks to Richie,
the two of them had snorted
a combination of Atlanta Dog
and Peruvian Cocaine.
I went into the dressing room,
the place is full of people,
and Dad's just laid out on the table.
And Deacon goes, uh, "Terry, uh we're
getting ready to call an ambulance.
Your dad thinks
he's having a heart attack."
Deacon was Edward James
"The Deacon" Proudfoot,
a longstanding member
of the Oakland Chapter
of the Hell's Angels motorcycle club,
and head of Waylon's security detail.
And I said, "Get all these
people out of here."
So Deacon ran everybody
out of the room except for me,
and I leaned over to Dad, and I said,
"Dad, Richie told me to come down here
"and tell you that
you're gonna be okay.
Y'all did something
called Atlanta Dog."
He just stood up, and he says,
"Take me to the stage."
By the time I got back up there,
they were actually holding Richie up,
and he was still just
a-swinging the best he could.
So Dad got his guitar
on best he could,
and he started swinging at it,
missing strings.
He was singing out of key.
It was the worst show
I had ever seen in my life,
but for some reason, the
audience didn't seem to mind.
Waylon launched his solo career
in Phoenix with Richie in 1961.
He was the star attraction
at a club called JD's.
The only time I ever got to see
Dad was Monday or Tuesday night,
they would do a family night,
and they'd let the kids come in.
Basically, what it really meant was
everybody had to clean their show up.
They had Mac, the singing bartender.
His songs were dirty.
He did some really, really bad jokes.
And he played a commode lid
with a guitar neck on it
that he called a "shitar."
When I was in the second grade,
I decided I'd sneak downstairs
where they were playing
rock and roll music.
And they had half-naked girls
dancing in cages,
called go-go dancers,
and I was in hog heaven.
I was booked at Phoenix,
and I went by JD's
where Waylon was playing,
and I said, "The guy needs
to be on a major label."
Bobby Bare was on one.
The Country Music Hall
of Famer was instrumental
in getting Waylon
to move to Nashville.
He called legendary songwriter and
producer Chet Atkins personally.
And I was cutting
my own throat doing this,
because he has the same songs I do.
If Chet Atkins calls you
and offers you a deal,
it's like you're getting
a deal from God.
I mean, Chet Atkins was Nashville.
You know, I mean, he was the
inventor of the Nashville Sound,
and that's where Dad wanted to go.
Atkins let him use
some of his own musicians,
but Waylon's
first major studio release
had that Nashville Sound,
clean and polished.
Willie Nelson told Waylon in Arizona,
one of the first times
they met, and he said,
"Waylon, do not go to Nashville.
It'll break your heart."
Folk Country didn't
do much on the charts,
topping out at number nine,
but it established Hoss as a presence
in his new town, Nashville.
Waylon was very charismatic.
Well, you know,
he was probably on pills,
but when he'd walk into the
room, he took all the air out.
When my dad first came to Nashville,
one of the first people he met
was Roger Miller,
and Roger had a suitcase full
of pills that had different...
like, some of 'em would be
half-upper, half-downer,
or some of 'em would be, like,
part barbiturate and part this.
They had all these names for them
that my dad and Roger
would come up with, you know?
And so they'd hang out there,
and party and listen to music
all night, stay up all night.
And then, you know, get up
and do it all over again.
Shooter, Waylon's youngest son,
grew up on stories
set in the Boar's Nest,
the unofficial home of The Outsiders.
The Boar's Nest was a place that
was run by this lady, Sue Brewer.
It was her apartment,
and after her work at night,
she would turn on
this little neon light.
Some of the better writers
back in the day
would go there 'cause it was
kind of an after-hours place.
The story that I was told with that is she
had slept with a famous country star,
and he knocked her up, but he didn't want
anything to do with the kid or something,
and so she said,
"I'm gonna come to Nashville,
and I'm gonna screw every young star
in Nashville to get back at you."
But she ended up coming there
and working as a waitress,
and all these stars kind of
gravitated towards her, not for sex.
Really, she loved country music,
and guys like Harlan Howard,
Roger Miller, Shel Silverstein,
young Hank Williams Jr., my dad,
like, Kris Kristofferson, Willie...
you could go on forever.
It was a hole-in-the-wall
for country songwriters
that didn't quite fit
into the Nashville Sound.
Cleverness used to be
country music's wooden leg.
Nashville didn't get these guys any
better than they got Hank Williams.
We just moved to town,
been in town maybe a few months.
Waylon come back there and
parked in front of the place,
and started walking up the sidewalk.
And this guy walked down
and was standing there on the stoop.
I looked up, and there
was Cowboy Jack Clement.
I was already a big fan of his.
He had produced that Cash
album, Trail of Tears.
I loved that album.
I said, "Jack Clements!
"Hi, I'm Richie Albright,
Waylon's drummer.
Pleased to meet you."
And he grabbed my hand,
started shaking,
turned and went, "Blah!"
Then he kept shaking my hand. "Blah!"
Finally, he said, "Nice to meet you."
And he turned around
and went back upstairs...
and we followed him.
Cowboy Jack Clement
was a producer and engineer
for Sam Phillips at Sun Records.
He'd recorded Elvis
Presley, Carl Perkins,
Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash.
When I was about 10 or 11, that was
the first time I met Johnny Cash.
And him and Dad showed up,
and when they hit that door,
they hit it like pinballs.
They were bouncing off of the walls.
I thought they were just nervous.
Nobody took as many pills as Waylon.
Nobody could,
except maybe Johnny Cash.
Waylon and Johnny Cash
got an apartment together,
and, uh, Johnny would try
to make breakfast
with, uh, that black suit on,
and making biscuits...
...flour all over everything.
They were both taking a lot of pills
and trying to hide it
from one another.
Cash ran out one time,
and Dad had just got enough money
to buy him a new Cadillac.
And Cash just knew that he had
some pills hidden in the glove box
or in behind the whole dashboard,
and he went out there and...
didn't have keys or nothing...
tore into the car.
Tore that side of the
console completely out.
He thought there was pills
in there, but there wasn't.
I told Waylon a
good place to hide 'em,
and that's to take
the light switch out
and drop 'em down in the wall.
So he did that, and he
come back to me later,
and he said, "Well,
how do I get 'em out?" I said,
"Well, you got to knock a hole
in the wall down at the bottom.
When you really want 'em,
you gotta do that."
It was like, um, Van Gogh and
Gauguin when they were roommates,
where Gauguin had a better commercial
eye for what was happening.
That would be Johnny Cash,
and yet he's another one
that couldn't get a record deal in
Nashville. It's incredible, isn't it?
They said of Van Gogh and Gauguin,
that Gauguin loved
the sunshine, for painting,
but Van Gogh loved the sun,
and he got too close to it sometimes.
That's Waylon.
I remember we were
on tour across Canada,
and Waylon was fixing to go on stage.
And I saw him reach in his pocket,
take a whole handful of pills.
I said, "Whoa!" I said,
"How many of those pills
do you think you take
a day? Five, six?"
He said, "Thirty."
I said, "Thirty! Holy shit."
Nashville ran on amphetamines.
I mean, this whole town was just...
Everybody had a bottle of pills.
We got to the point where we had to get
back out on the road to get some rest.
You never slept when you were in town.
Captain Midnight was our go-to guy.
Captain Midnight,
AKA Roger Schutt,
was a country music aficionado and DJ
who played nothing but Waylon Jennings,
nonstop, his last day on the job.
My nephew called me,
and he said, "Turn on KDF.
You ain't gonna believe this shit."
I turned it on, and Captain
Midnight, he's rambling on.
He had wired the door shut
and just started playing
Waylon constantly.
And he said, "This'll probably
be my last show here,
but I just wanna play all the
good music I can," you know?
And he kept playing Waylon.
He landed on his feet
as kind of a barbiturate middleman
and an advisor of sorts
to the outcast songwriters.
Captain Midnight was a
spiritual leader of the time,
the angel on Waylon's shoulder.
And for Waylon to have the
wisdom of surrounding himself
by somebody good like Midnight,
who today we could call
a homeless person,
um, that was real good.
It definitely made it easier
for him to get the drugs.
The thing I remember
mostly about Captain Midnight
is two times a day,
you didn't bother him
'cause he was in there watching
Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons.
- If you wanted pills,
give Midnight a hundred bucks,
he'd go to Dr. Snap
and buy a bunch of speed.
Dr. Snap would
write the prescriptions,
'cause he owned the drugstore
right next to his office.
Saved a lot of lives because of all
the touring we had to do back then.
You'd be tired from driving
all night and all day,
probably didn't get hardly any sleep,
so by the time it'd come showtime,
the band used to get together and say,
"Okay, I'm taking four of these
and three of these.
What are you taking?"
We all wanted to be
on the same level, right?
So that was the ritual.
Every time Waylon
and Richie needed money,
they would go out to New
Mexico to the Navajo Nation
and hang out there for a month.
They had done it for years and years,
and sometimes he'd go twice a year.
They loved him.
I mean, you'd get to town,
and they'd have a parade for Waylon.
If it wasn't for the Navajo and all
those Four Corner Indians up there,
we probably would've starved
to death in the early '70s.
When I went with Waylon
to the Navajo Nation,
we stayed at a great hotel.
It was one of those older hotels.
John Wayne, I guess, and all of them
people used to stay at this hotel.
And Waylon turned around,
and he said to me, he says,
"You know, Bourke, I'm real big here."
"Yeah, well, fuck, Waylon,
you're big everywhere."
He says, "No, I'm like
the Rolling Stones here."
That night at the gig, there had to be
10,000 Navajos out there.
It was in a rodeo ring, and had those
bars that went across, you know.
And the people were jammed up.
They would pack those people
in there like BB's.
I mean, they were in there drinking,
and I can tell you right now,
if they got drunk,
they couldn't pass out and hit
the ground until somebody left,
'cause it was just
that tight in there.
But when Waylon was singing,
all them people were singing in
harmony with Waylon Jennings.
My understanding is "Navajo"
translates into "common people,"
and Dad had that album out,
Love of the Common People,
and they adopted that song as theirs,
'cause, uh, it pretty much...
if you listen to the song...
fits their total situation.
We were playing there for two nights.
And the first night, Dad
didn't make it to the show.
Well, the Indians
didn't like that one little bit,
and they came out,
and they started telling us,
you know, "Waylon play now."
And we said,
"Well, Waylon's not here."
And they said, "Waylon's on the bus."
And we said,
"No, he's not on the bus."
And they took us around
to the back of the bus,
and they said, "Look,
Waylon's name on bus.
Waylon's on the bus."
And we said, "Well, just
'cause his name is on the bus
doesn't mean he's on the bus."
Well, finally, the chief came up,
and we took him on the bus,
and took him all the way through it
to prove to him that Waylon
was not on the bus.
So they were satisfied with that,
and we got out of there unscathed.
The Navajo Nation thought
Waylon Jennings was king.
He always says, "I was always
on your side."
Do you know? It was great.
I remember, really distinctly,
the first time I ever met Waylon,
I was walking in an alley
behind Music Row in Nashville,
and I had all my songs in a...
fucking... some kind
of homemade satchel thing.
And Waylon pulls up in this
big, uh, Mark IV Lincoln,
and he slams on the brakes,
and he says, "Get in, Kink.
Walking's bad for your
image." And he was right.
From the moment Waylon
released Folk Country,
his image and sound had been branded
by the Nashville way
of doing business.
Waylon and Willie were not happy
about the way record companies
controlled things,
and the way they would tell you
which songs you're gonna sing,
and the way they would pick
the musicians for the sessions,
and the good-old-boy
fraternity they had
that they wouldn't let
anybody else into.
And definitely,
drugs were anathema to them.
Willie Nelson couldn't get arrested
because of the way
they made him record.
They wouldn't let him play
guitar on his own records.
They wouldn't let him
use his own band.
And he knew what
he wanted to sound like.
Willie was a great songwriter.
Everybody knew it,
but they didn't think
he was ever going
to amount to anything.
And when he left Nashville
in '71 to go back to Texas,
everybody there said the same thing,
"We'll never hear from that guy again.
That's the end of Willie."
And a lot of that, I think,
was the same problem Waylon had.
A big part of that problem,
in Nashville parlance, was the drugs.
In Texas, Willie was free to
pursue the life he chose to lead,
and he found a new audience
who could appreciate him.
About '73, Willie calls Waylon, said,
"Waylon, you gotta get down here.
"I have found our audience.
"It's about half-ass hippie,
half-ass cowboy,
but Texas is full of 'em."
We went down to play the Armadillo
World Headquarters in Austin, Texas.
It was a bunch of hippies
out there, and he told Willie,
"If I go out there
and them people give me a hard time,
I'm gonna kick your ass!"
Willie had started playing
the little honky-tonks
around Austin, and it took a hold.
The next thing you know, he's
playing for 11, 12, 13,000 people
at a little, small outdoor concert.
And it grew from that, you know.
We had never seen
any reactions like that.
About halfway through the show,
he was playing lead, and we
walked back there by me,
and he said, "Somebody go get that
little redhead son of a bitch.
What's he got me into?"
'Cause we had never seen
cowboys and hippies together
without fighting.
That was kind of the start
of the whole thing.
The whole thing was
known in country music lore
as the outlaw movement,
but for Waylon,
it almost came to an end
before it ever got started.
My dad, he had gotten sick
and, uh... from hepatitis A.
It's like, "Who gets that?"
Everyone gets "B" and "C,"
but I've never heard
of anybody getting "A."
I went to the hospital to see Waylon,
and his liver had given out on him.
He turned yellow, and he
had stopped doing speed
because... couldn't do it no more.
Waylon had to get off the pills.
He needed some money.
He, uh, went to RCA
to ask for an advance,
and they offered him
$5,000 if he'd re-sign.
Well, that... even back
then, that wasn't much.
And that's when Richie
had found Neil Reshen,
the manager that kind of came
in and turned it all around.
"Mad dog on a leash,"
that's what I call him.
He was exactly what Dad needed
at the time when he came along.
He was a coked-up Jewish lawyer.
I don't know.
He had a very thin, kind of
an Abe Lincoln type beard,
was the manager for Miles Davis,
and so "knew where
all the bodies were buried."
I told Waylon, I said, "You're
probably not going to like this guy,
but just listen
to what he has to say."
And so he did, and they hooked up
with a handshake after that meeting.
And I took Neil back to the airport,
and Willie Nelson came down to
the airport, met up with Neil.
And they had a handshake, and by the
time Neil went back to New York,
he was managing the two biggest
acts in country music.
My dad grew his hair out
and his beard out because he was sick.
And the manager was like,
you know, "Leave your beard."
He's like,
"You really look the part now."
And it changed everything,
and then everyone grew
their beards out and their hair out.
That's what started
that whole outlaw shit.
- With his new legal mouthpiece,
the Mad Dog Reshen, in tow,
Hoss went back to Nashville.
Dad and Neil were
over at RCA's offices,
renegotiating Dad's contract.
And it came down to a point
to where there was,
like, a $25,000 stickler in there,
you know, that nobody's
wanting to come off of.
They said their side,
and Dad sold his side,
and then there's that dead
silence, and it's like, you know,
the first one that talks is
gonna be the one that loses.
Well, Dad stood up and just left
the room.
Well, they thought he was pissed,
and, uh, so they caved in
while he was gone.
And then when they were
leaving, Neil said,
"That was the most genius
thing I ever saw anybody do."
He goes, "What? I had to take a piss."
Neil said, "We got 50,000!"
And the outlaw
movement was born.
Yeah!
On stage, Waylon didn't
tell you what songs,
he just started playing.
He didn't tell you what key it was
or what song it was, nothing.
He kicked it, and you went from that.
And if you were
longer than four beats in,
he's looking around, "Where
you at?" With the look.
Waylon used to have a saying.
He said, "Look, I think
everybody in Nashville
"ought to have one time in their
career where they do it their own way.
"If it doesn't work,
don't let 'em do it anymore,
"but at least one time
in their career,
"let 'em record,
let 'em write the songs,
let 'em do it their way."
"Every artist deserves that."
That whole thing
was about, "Look...
are you sure Hank done it this way?"
Because for so long, he wanted to record
his way, and they wouldn't let him.
You know, they wouldn't let him.
And then when he finally did,
blew it out of the water,
and they were pissed about it.
They were pissed he was so successful,
that Willie was so successful,
because what they did
is took country music
from the thousand-seat ballroom
to Shea Stadium.
And it had never been done before.
Waylon was
everybody's country singer.
I mean, he was just a stud.
He's inspired so many more people
than I think he ever realized.
Thank you very much for coming out.
The greatest outlaw in country
music has to be Waylon Jennings.
I think that'd be pretty
hard to argue with.
The evidence is overwhelming.
The truth is, there are
really two Waylons.
There's the guy in the black
hat, the honky-tonk hero,
and then there's the kid
with slicked-back hair
who almost broke out with
the birth of rock and roll,
playing bass with Buddy Holly.
And both Waylons cheated death,
more times than any
man has a right to.
Everybody always says,
"Man, when you gonna write
a book about the Waylon years?"
I say, "Not as long
as my mama's alive."
There you go. There you go.
Gordon "Crank" Payne
and Jerry "Jigger" Bridges
spent the better part of their careers
on stage with Waylon Jennings.
Crank played guitar and harmonica.
Jigger played bass.
Both of them got their nicknames
from the man they knew as Hoss.
I remember we had
a Canadian tour with Willie,
and Waylon warned Willie,
he said, "You've got to do
something with this bus.
"There's so much pot that was smoked.
You've got to clean it up."
We were high 24/7.
I don't know how to tell people that,
but, you know, how do you think
you do 200 dates a year?
You can't unless you're on something.
We ran around this
country with a sign on our head.
It said, "Look at us, we're stupid,"
because we were high all the time.
Tom Bourke was the road
manager for Waylon Jennings
from his start as a solo artist
to super stardom as a
country music outlaw.
Willie's bus was in front of Waylon's,
and you could smell the smoke.
So Willie sent it in,
and he had it steam cleaned
and everything that
you could do to the bus,
but it didn't work.
We got to the crossing,
the guards, they came on his bus.
And you know how dogs sniff around?
This dog sat down.
Just sat there and just looked around.
He didn't know where
to bark or where to sniff.
He had no idea what to do.
And they took everything
out of Willie's bus.
They were looking underneath
the bays and everything.
The dogs were going crazy, you know,
and they couldn't find nothing.
Anyway, they let Willie go, and
he gets away with everything.
We thought that after he got through
that it was smooth sailing
for us, you know.
Then when our bus got there,
they took Waylon, they
wanted to do a strip search.
The funny part at that time is...
there was six of us, I think...
we were honorary deputy sheriffs,
so when they took us
into the little room,
we just all threw the badges
on the table.
And the guy said,
"Oh shit. Just go on."
He was a cowboy.
Some people are born that way.
I was scared to death of them
guys, but they were cowboys.
You know, to me
they were real cowboys.
He was actually part Native
American on his mother's side,
Irish and Dutch on his father's side.
Terry Jennings says that his dad
played up both sides of his heritage,
while growing up in a tiny West
Texas town called Littlefield.
My dad and Uncle Tommy
would play Cowboys and Indians.
Well, Dad, when he was
five years old...
...when he was
walking on a split-rail fence,
and they have a thing
they call a sand fighter,
which is basically a bunch of spikes,
and it's dragged through the ground,
turn the dirt over
so the wind don't blow it away.
Well, he fell off that fence
and stuck one of those spikes right
above his ankle in the left leg,
so it stunted the growth in his leg.
A lot of people ask me
how tall Dad is,
and I'll tell 'em, "He's
six-foot-one, six-foot-two,
depending on which foot
he's standing on."
When you watch him play and you
seen him all leaning over to the left,
that's 'cause he's over there
leaning on that short leg.
His disability - didn't stop him
from dreaming with his brother, Tommy,
about playing music
on the greatest stage of all,
the Grand Ole Opry.
Grandpa had a guitar.
Grandma played piano,
taught him the first three chords.
Him and Uncle Tommy,
they would get out there
and get broomsticks and Coke crates,
stand on those, pretending like they
were Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb.
By the time Waylon was 14,
he was performing in public
and working as a DJ
at a local radio station.
By 19, he was married with children,
but his talent caught the attention
of another young singer-songwriter
out of Lubbock, 80 miles away.
Buddy Holly was the first one
to take Dad into the studio.
They were high school friends.
And Mom, she didn't
really like him that much
because Buddy'd pull up to the
front yard...
...honk the horn, and there'd go Waylon.
Buddy Holly
was definitely the match
that kindled the flame for
Waylon Jennings, no question.
And he also showed Waylon
how easy it was
for that to go away.
Singer-songwriter Kinky
Friedman was just a boy
when the Crickets
made Buddy Holly a star.
In 1958, the Crickets quit
Holly in a contract dispute.
Buddy turned to his old pal
Waylon for help.
Buddy'd come by the radio
station Dad was working at
and said, "Hey, you wanna go
out on the road with me?"
Dad said, "Sure," and he goes,
"Well, you're gonna play bass."
And Dad goes, "I don't play bass.
Never played a bass in my life."
Well, Buddy handed him
a bass and says,
"You got two weeks to learn how to
play it and meet me in New York."
The tour was called
the Winter Dance Party,
and it included the biggest names
in rock and roll at the time.
They'd been having a lot
of trouble with the bus.
The heaters weren't working,
and they were, all the time,
getting people to come
over and work on it.
Well, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper
had both had the flu
from being on that cold bus.
Holly chartered a plane
from Mason City, Iowa,
to Fargo, North Dakota,
in order to stay warm
on that leg of the trip.
There were only three seats,
and Waylon had one of them.
Big Bopper is just that...
he's a great big guy,
and he was sick, and he's from Texas,
and us Texas boys try
to look out for each other.
And Dad says, "Man, you know,
you'd be better off on that
plane," and he agreed.
Later on, as they were getting
ready to go to the airplane,
Dad and Buddy are sitting backstage,
and they got these
little cane-back chairs
leaning against the wall,
and they was eating hot dogs.
And Buddy looks at him and says,
"Well, I hear
you're scared of flying."
He goes, "I ain't scared of nothing.
I just gave it to Big Bopper
'cause he's got the flu."
Buddy goes, "Well, all I got to say
is I hope your old bus freezes up."
And Dad goes, "Well, fine,
I hope your plane crashes."
We interrupt this program
for a special news bulletin.
Three young singers who soared
to the heights of show business
on the current rock and roll
craze were killed today
in the crash of a light plane
in an Iowa snow flurry.
For years, he thought
he had done it, you know?
And they was just kids
cutting up with each other.
And but for a little confusion
about who was going to sit
in what seat on the plane...
he would've been the one.
This one time,
we're in Fresno, California,
and just before the show
he hollered at me,
he said, "Come down
to the dressing room."
Drummer Richie Albright
started playing with Waylon in 1961.
Very few people spent more time on
the road with Hoss than Richie.
Went down there in his dressing room,
so he shut the door
and said, "Give me a bump."
So I just gave him
a couple of big bumps,
and I took a couple myself.
Well, I forgot that the evening before
he had given me two small packets,
and he said, "Hold these for me."
And I looked at 'em
and there was two of 'em,
I said, "What's he got two for?"
So I poured 'em together.
Richie come up on stage,
and everything seemed fine.
Then about halfway
through the first song,
I noticed him wobbling.
He was swinging
and not hitting anything.
I run up behind him,
and he's weaving even more,
so I grabbed him,
and I said, "Are you okay?"
I looked down
and I swear to God,
my drumstick was a "Z."
That's the way it looked to me.
He goes, "Don't worry about me.
"Go back there and tell your dad
it's gonna be okay.
It's called Atlanta Dog."
Atlanta Dog. I'm not sure what it was.
It was a mixture
of PCP and heroin.
Thanks to Richie,
the two of them had snorted
a combination of Atlanta Dog
and Peruvian Cocaine.
I went into the dressing room,
the place is full of people,
and Dad's just laid out on the table.
And Deacon goes, uh, "Terry, uh we're
getting ready to call an ambulance.
Your dad thinks
he's having a heart attack."
Deacon was Edward James
"The Deacon" Proudfoot,
a longstanding member
of the Oakland Chapter
of the Hell's Angels motorcycle club,
and head of Waylon's security detail.
And I said, "Get all these
people out of here."
So Deacon ran everybody
out of the room except for me,
and I leaned over to Dad, and I said,
"Dad, Richie told me to come down here
"and tell you that
you're gonna be okay.
Y'all did something
called Atlanta Dog."
He just stood up, and he says,
"Take me to the stage."
By the time I got back up there,
they were actually holding Richie up,
and he was still just
a-swinging the best he could.
So Dad got his guitar
on best he could,
and he started swinging at it,
missing strings.
He was singing out of key.
It was the worst show
I had ever seen in my life,
but for some reason, the
audience didn't seem to mind.
Waylon launched his solo career
in Phoenix with Richie in 1961.
He was the star attraction
at a club called JD's.
The only time I ever got to see
Dad was Monday or Tuesday night,
they would do a family night,
and they'd let the kids come in.
Basically, what it really meant was
everybody had to clean their show up.
They had Mac, the singing bartender.
His songs were dirty.
He did some really, really bad jokes.
And he played a commode lid
with a guitar neck on it
that he called a "shitar."
When I was in the second grade,
I decided I'd sneak downstairs
where they were playing
rock and roll music.
And they had half-naked girls
dancing in cages,
called go-go dancers,
and I was in hog heaven.
I was booked at Phoenix,
and I went by JD's
where Waylon was playing,
and I said, "The guy needs
to be on a major label."
Bobby Bare was on one.
The Country Music Hall
of Famer was instrumental
in getting Waylon
to move to Nashville.
He called legendary songwriter and
producer Chet Atkins personally.
And I was cutting
my own throat doing this,
because he has the same songs I do.
If Chet Atkins calls you
and offers you a deal,
it's like you're getting
a deal from God.
I mean, Chet Atkins was Nashville.
You know, I mean, he was the
inventor of the Nashville Sound,
and that's where Dad wanted to go.
Atkins let him use
some of his own musicians,
but Waylon's
first major studio release
had that Nashville Sound,
clean and polished.
Willie Nelson told Waylon in Arizona,
one of the first times
they met, and he said,
"Waylon, do not go to Nashville.
It'll break your heart."
Folk Country didn't
do much on the charts,
topping out at number nine,
but it established Hoss as a presence
in his new town, Nashville.
Waylon was very charismatic.
Well, you know,
he was probably on pills,
but when he'd walk into the
room, he took all the air out.
When my dad first came to Nashville,
one of the first people he met
was Roger Miller,
and Roger had a suitcase full
of pills that had different...
like, some of 'em would be
half-upper, half-downer,
or some of 'em would be, like,
part barbiturate and part this.
They had all these names for them
that my dad and Roger
would come up with, you know?
And so they'd hang out there,
and party and listen to music
all night, stay up all night.
And then, you know, get up
and do it all over again.
Shooter, Waylon's youngest son,
grew up on stories
set in the Boar's Nest,
the unofficial home of The Outsiders.
The Boar's Nest was a place that
was run by this lady, Sue Brewer.
It was her apartment,
and after her work at night,
she would turn on
this little neon light.
Some of the better writers
back in the day
would go there 'cause it was
kind of an after-hours place.
The story that I was told with that is she
had slept with a famous country star,
and he knocked her up, but he didn't want
anything to do with the kid or something,
and so she said,
"I'm gonna come to Nashville,
and I'm gonna screw every young star
in Nashville to get back at you."
But she ended up coming there
and working as a waitress,
and all these stars kind of
gravitated towards her, not for sex.
Really, she loved country music,
and guys like Harlan Howard,
Roger Miller, Shel Silverstein,
young Hank Williams Jr., my dad,
like, Kris Kristofferson, Willie...
you could go on forever.
It was a hole-in-the-wall
for country songwriters
that didn't quite fit
into the Nashville Sound.
Cleverness used to be
country music's wooden leg.
Nashville didn't get these guys any
better than they got Hank Williams.
We just moved to town,
been in town maybe a few months.
Waylon come back there and
parked in front of the place,
and started walking up the sidewalk.
And this guy walked down
and was standing there on the stoop.
I looked up, and there
was Cowboy Jack Clement.
I was already a big fan of his.
He had produced that Cash
album, Trail of Tears.
I loved that album.
I said, "Jack Clements!
"Hi, I'm Richie Albright,
Waylon's drummer.
Pleased to meet you."
And he grabbed my hand,
started shaking,
turned and went, "Blah!"
Then he kept shaking my hand. "Blah!"
Finally, he said, "Nice to meet you."
And he turned around
and went back upstairs...
and we followed him.
Cowboy Jack Clement
was a producer and engineer
for Sam Phillips at Sun Records.
He'd recorded Elvis
Presley, Carl Perkins,
Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash.
When I was about 10 or 11, that was
the first time I met Johnny Cash.
And him and Dad showed up,
and when they hit that door,
they hit it like pinballs.
They were bouncing off of the walls.
I thought they were just nervous.
Nobody took as many pills as Waylon.
Nobody could,
except maybe Johnny Cash.
Waylon and Johnny Cash
got an apartment together,
and, uh, Johnny would try
to make breakfast
with, uh, that black suit on,
and making biscuits...
...flour all over everything.
They were both taking a lot of pills
and trying to hide it
from one another.
Cash ran out one time,
and Dad had just got enough money
to buy him a new Cadillac.
And Cash just knew that he had
some pills hidden in the glove box
or in behind the whole dashboard,
and he went out there and...
didn't have keys or nothing...
tore into the car.
Tore that side of the
console completely out.
He thought there was pills
in there, but there wasn't.
I told Waylon a
good place to hide 'em,
and that's to take
the light switch out
and drop 'em down in the wall.
So he did that, and he
come back to me later,
and he said, "Well,
how do I get 'em out?" I said,
"Well, you got to knock a hole
in the wall down at the bottom.
When you really want 'em,
you gotta do that."
It was like, um, Van Gogh and
Gauguin when they were roommates,
where Gauguin had a better commercial
eye for what was happening.
That would be Johnny Cash,
and yet he's another one
that couldn't get a record deal in
Nashville. It's incredible, isn't it?
They said of Van Gogh and Gauguin,
that Gauguin loved
the sunshine, for painting,
but Van Gogh loved the sun,
and he got too close to it sometimes.
That's Waylon.
I remember we were
on tour across Canada,
and Waylon was fixing to go on stage.
And I saw him reach in his pocket,
take a whole handful of pills.
I said, "Whoa!" I said,
"How many of those pills
do you think you take
a day? Five, six?"
He said, "Thirty."
I said, "Thirty! Holy shit."
Nashville ran on amphetamines.
I mean, this whole town was just...
Everybody had a bottle of pills.
We got to the point where we had to get
back out on the road to get some rest.
You never slept when you were in town.
Captain Midnight was our go-to guy.
Captain Midnight,
AKA Roger Schutt,
was a country music aficionado and DJ
who played nothing but Waylon Jennings,
nonstop, his last day on the job.
My nephew called me,
and he said, "Turn on KDF.
You ain't gonna believe this shit."
I turned it on, and Captain
Midnight, he's rambling on.
He had wired the door shut
and just started playing
Waylon constantly.
And he said, "This'll probably
be my last show here,
but I just wanna play all the
good music I can," you know?
And he kept playing Waylon.
He landed on his feet
as kind of a barbiturate middleman
and an advisor of sorts
to the outcast songwriters.
Captain Midnight was a
spiritual leader of the time,
the angel on Waylon's shoulder.
And for Waylon to have the
wisdom of surrounding himself
by somebody good like Midnight,
who today we could call
a homeless person,
um, that was real good.
It definitely made it easier
for him to get the drugs.
The thing I remember
mostly about Captain Midnight
is two times a day,
you didn't bother him
'cause he was in there watching
Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons.
- If you wanted pills,
give Midnight a hundred bucks,
he'd go to Dr. Snap
and buy a bunch of speed.
Dr. Snap would
write the prescriptions,
'cause he owned the drugstore
right next to his office.
Saved a lot of lives because of all
the touring we had to do back then.
You'd be tired from driving
all night and all day,
probably didn't get hardly any sleep,
so by the time it'd come showtime,
the band used to get together and say,
"Okay, I'm taking four of these
and three of these.
What are you taking?"
We all wanted to be
on the same level, right?
So that was the ritual.
Every time Waylon
and Richie needed money,
they would go out to New
Mexico to the Navajo Nation
and hang out there for a month.
They had done it for years and years,
and sometimes he'd go twice a year.
They loved him.
I mean, you'd get to town,
and they'd have a parade for Waylon.
If it wasn't for the Navajo and all
those Four Corner Indians up there,
we probably would've starved
to death in the early '70s.
When I went with Waylon
to the Navajo Nation,
we stayed at a great hotel.
It was one of those older hotels.
John Wayne, I guess, and all of them
people used to stay at this hotel.
And Waylon turned around,
and he said to me, he says,
"You know, Bourke, I'm real big here."
"Yeah, well, fuck, Waylon,
you're big everywhere."
He says, "No, I'm like
the Rolling Stones here."
That night at the gig, there had to be
10,000 Navajos out there.
It was in a rodeo ring, and had those
bars that went across, you know.
And the people were jammed up.
They would pack those people
in there like BB's.
I mean, they were in there drinking,
and I can tell you right now,
if they got drunk,
they couldn't pass out and hit
the ground until somebody left,
'cause it was just
that tight in there.
But when Waylon was singing,
all them people were singing in
harmony with Waylon Jennings.
My understanding is "Navajo"
translates into "common people,"
and Dad had that album out,
Love of the Common People,
and they adopted that song as theirs,
'cause, uh, it pretty much...
if you listen to the song...
fits their total situation.
We were playing there for two nights.
And the first night, Dad
didn't make it to the show.
Well, the Indians
didn't like that one little bit,
and they came out,
and they started telling us,
you know, "Waylon play now."
And we said,
"Well, Waylon's not here."
And they said, "Waylon's on the bus."
And we said,
"No, he's not on the bus."
And they took us around
to the back of the bus,
and they said, "Look,
Waylon's name on bus.
Waylon's on the bus."
And we said, "Well, just
'cause his name is on the bus
doesn't mean he's on the bus."
Well, finally, the chief came up,
and we took him on the bus,
and took him all the way through it
to prove to him that Waylon
was not on the bus.
So they were satisfied with that,
and we got out of there unscathed.
The Navajo Nation thought
Waylon Jennings was king.
He always says, "I was always
on your side."
Do you know? It was great.
I remember, really distinctly,
the first time I ever met Waylon,
I was walking in an alley
behind Music Row in Nashville,
and I had all my songs in a...
fucking... some kind
of homemade satchel thing.
And Waylon pulls up in this
big, uh, Mark IV Lincoln,
and he slams on the brakes,
and he says, "Get in, Kink.
Walking's bad for your
image." And he was right.
From the moment Waylon
released Folk Country,
his image and sound had been branded
by the Nashville way
of doing business.
Waylon and Willie were not happy
about the way record companies
controlled things,
and the way they would tell you
which songs you're gonna sing,
and the way they would pick
the musicians for the sessions,
and the good-old-boy
fraternity they had
that they wouldn't let
anybody else into.
And definitely,
drugs were anathema to them.
Willie Nelson couldn't get arrested
because of the way
they made him record.
They wouldn't let him play
guitar on his own records.
They wouldn't let him
use his own band.
And he knew what
he wanted to sound like.
Willie was a great songwriter.
Everybody knew it,
but they didn't think
he was ever going
to amount to anything.
And when he left Nashville
in '71 to go back to Texas,
everybody there said the same thing,
"We'll never hear from that guy again.
That's the end of Willie."
And a lot of that, I think,
was the same problem Waylon had.
A big part of that problem,
in Nashville parlance, was the drugs.
In Texas, Willie was free to
pursue the life he chose to lead,
and he found a new audience
who could appreciate him.
About '73, Willie calls Waylon, said,
"Waylon, you gotta get down here.
"I have found our audience.
"It's about half-ass hippie,
half-ass cowboy,
but Texas is full of 'em."
We went down to play the Armadillo
World Headquarters in Austin, Texas.
It was a bunch of hippies
out there, and he told Willie,
"If I go out there
and them people give me a hard time,
I'm gonna kick your ass!"
Willie had started playing
the little honky-tonks
around Austin, and it took a hold.
The next thing you know, he's
playing for 11, 12, 13,000 people
at a little, small outdoor concert.
And it grew from that, you know.
We had never seen
any reactions like that.
About halfway through the show,
he was playing lead, and we
walked back there by me,
and he said, "Somebody go get that
little redhead son of a bitch.
What's he got me into?"
'Cause we had never seen
cowboys and hippies together
without fighting.
That was kind of the start
of the whole thing.
The whole thing was
known in country music lore
as the outlaw movement,
but for Waylon,
it almost came to an end
before it ever got started.
My dad, he had gotten sick
and, uh... from hepatitis A.
It's like, "Who gets that?"
Everyone gets "B" and "C,"
but I've never heard
of anybody getting "A."
I went to the hospital to see Waylon,
and his liver had given out on him.
He turned yellow, and he
had stopped doing speed
because... couldn't do it no more.
Waylon had to get off the pills.
He needed some money.
He, uh, went to RCA
to ask for an advance,
and they offered him
$5,000 if he'd re-sign.
Well, that... even back
then, that wasn't much.
And that's when Richie
had found Neil Reshen,
the manager that kind of came
in and turned it all around.
"Mad dog on a leash,"
that's what I call him.
He was exactly what Dad needed
at the time when he came along.
He was a coked-up Jewish lawyer.
I don't know.
He had a very thin, kind of
an Abe Lincoln type beard,
was the manager for Miles Davis,
and so "knew where
all the bodies were buried."
I told Waylon, I said, "You're
probably not going to like this guy,
but just listen
to what he has to say."
And so he did, and they hooked up
with a handshake after that meeting.
And I took Neil back to the airport,
and Willie Nelson came down to
the airport, met up with Neil.
And they had a handshake, and by the
time Neil went back to New York,
he was managing the two biggest
acts in country music.
My dad grew his hair out
and his beard out because he was sick.
And the manager was like,
you know, "Leave your beard."
He's like,
"You really look the part now."
And it changed everything,
and then everyone grew
their beards out and their hair out.
That's what started
that whole outlaw shit.
- With his new legal mouthpiece,
the Mad Dog Reshen, in tow,
Hoss went back to Nashville.
Dad and Neil were
over at RCA's offices,
renegotiating Dad's contract.
And it came down to a point
to where there was,
like, a $25,000 stickler in there,
you know, that nobody's
wanting to come off of.
They said their side,
and Dad sold his side,
and then there's that dead
silence, and it's like, you know,
the first one that talks is
gonna be the one that loses.
Well, Dad stood up and just left
the room.
Well, they thought he was pissed,
and, uh, so they caved in
while he was gone.
And then when they were
leaving, Neil said,
"That was the most genius
thing I ever saw anybody do."
He goes, "What? I had to take a piss."
Neil said, "We got 50,000!"
And the outlaw
movement was born.
Yeah!
On stage, Waylon didn't
tell you what songs,
he just started playing.
He didn't tell you what key it was
or what song it was, nothing.
He kicked it, and you went from that.
And if you were
longer than four beats in,
he's looking around, "Where
you at?" With the look.
Waylon used to have a saying.
He said, "Look, I think
everybody in Nashville
"ought to have one time in their
career where they do it their own way.
"If it doesn't work,
don't let 'em do it anymore,
"but at least one time
in their career,
"let 'em record,
let 'em write the songs,
let 'em do it their way."
"Every artist deserves that."
That whole thing
was about, "Look...
are you sure Hank done it this way?"
Because for so long, he wanted to record
his way, and they wouldn't let him.
You know, they wouldn't let him.
And then when he finally did,
blew it out of the water,
and they were pissed about it.
They were pissed he was so successful,
that Willie was so successful,
because what they did
is took country music
from the thousand-seat ballroom
to Shea Stadium.
And it had never been done before.
Waylon was
everybody's country singer.
I mean, he was just a stud.
He's inspired so many more people
than I think he ever realized.
Thank you very much for coming out.