Nashville rebel emeritus Waylon Jennings was a wild kid fresh from Littlefield (pop. not much), Texas, when he got his first glimpse of the skyscrapers of New York City.
More than three decades have passed since, but he hasn’t forgotten.
“We went up there working with Buddy Holly, me and a guy named Carl Bunch that was called Goose,” Jennings recalls. “We hit that place like a couple of gooses.
“We went downtown and bought us a couple of trench coats and gangster hats — because we had seen on TV what people in New York really looked like, you know. Then we went out looking for the Empire State Building. Two days in a row we were standing right under it, and nobody would tell us where it was.
“I been there a lot since then, but, even today, every time I go I just know everybody who looks at me can see the hayseed hanging out of my hair. Those people almost ate me alive.”
The memory of the Big Apple’s initial bite is relived in the title song of Jennings’ topical new album, Too Dumb for New York City, Too Ugly for L.A. Perhaps the best Jennings collection in a decade, it is both a throwback to, and a reflection on, the tumultuous glory years of one of Nashville music history’s epic figures.
There is the New York/Los Angeles song, about America’s capitals of overt and underhanded greed. There is Just Talkin’, offering Jennings’ irreverent passing opinions on heavy subjects such as politics and marriage.
There is rhythmic sizzle in Armed and Dangerous and Smokey on Your Front Door, aching emotional retrospection in Didn’t We Shine, and an especially unflinching self-look in The Hank Williams Syndrome.
“The Hank Williams Syndrome,” Jennings explains, “was: Come to Nashville, write some good songs, cut some hit records, make money, take all the drugs you can and drink all you can, become a wild man and all of a sudden die.
“Jessi (his wife, singer-songwriter Jessi Colter) says I killed the Hank Williams syndrome when I didn’t just go ahead and die like most people who do that. I quit the drugs and survived.”
Country music’s present, mammoth national boom couldn’t have occurred without the breaking of the Williams syndrome.
Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, Clint Black, etc., are all — as Jennings approvingly notes — manageable people who are “squeaky clean” in the area of substance abuse.
The man who initially personified and then destroyed Nashville’s live hard/die young ideal, and some of its others, says that in The Hank Williams Syndrome he’s proudest of a line that looks reality in the face.
It notes that Montgomery, Ala., Williams’ hometown, is “still hot” while Jennings himself is “not.”
“I felt good saying that, because there was a time I was as hot as you can get,” Jennings reflects. “But you don’t stay that way. I have no illusions about things. If I never have another hit record, I’m at peace with myself. I’m having fun with it now, because I’m under no pressure. I don’t have to have a hit record.”
In The Hank Williams Syndrome, Jennings visits the grave of Williams and tells it that Nashville’s thundering new herd of neo-traditionalists is “not like me and you.”
He also spells out his own differences from Williams, who had hit country music’s pinnacle and was on its skids by the time he died of a drug/alcohol overdose at age 29. Jennings says he resembled Williams in all the wrong ways.
“The older I got the more I wanted to know about him, and I studied him,” he recalls. “What I saw was a madman, basically. He was out of control, and that was the part I picked up, the bad part. I think a lot of people did that, because it looked really romantic to be crazy and wild and die young.”
Jennings was arguably Nashville’s most courageous big-timer in a business sense, the professional personification of the image with which he became identified: outlaw.
Becoming a legend inside the Nashville establishment long before achieving any renown outside it, he sought an alternative road to stardom and, in so doing, broke the autocratic control of country record executives over the artistic creation of the music.
First, he signed with a New York rock ‘n’ roll manager named Neil Reshen who got him a contract permitting him to produce his own records — and thus get not only control of how they sounded but a lot more money for recording them.
Then, he recalls, he recorded in a Nashville studio of his own choosing, rather than in one assigned to him, and when the corporate executives said they couldn’t release the resultant album, he told them they could take it or leave it. They took it.
“That was the first No. 1 record I had,” he recalls. “It was This Time, that album. Me and Willie (Nelson) produced it together, and it’s still one of my favorites.”
