Waylon Jennings – Tall Tales, Tiny Towns, And Texans
Waylon: Well, we’re out on the runway, fixin’ to take off in this big plane, 747. Take off down the runway, and Montovani’s playing. And they pull down there and then stopped. Just shut that sumbitch down. And they backed up, turned it around this way and come back up there, and then they turned it around like they was goin’ go up again, and Buddy Holly started singing “Peggy Sue”. And so Kris Kristofferson, and John Cash, and all of ’em looked at me. And I says, “We ain’t goin’ on this sumbitch.” So we made ’em take us back to the gate and got us another airplane.
Billy Joe: That’s smart.
Waylon: It’s crazy, go from Montovani to Buddy Holly. Not a chance. I still don’t like airplanes.
Billy Joe: Yeah, it does put you plumb out of control.
Waylon: And I’m a control freak, really, about my family, and the people around me.
Billy Joe: You know what you get to do? You get to say “Tha-tha-tha that’s all, folks.” (laughter) That’s on your new album.
Waylon: Oh that’s that new one, yeah.
Billy Joe: I love that. Of course I still love that song about the guy who said, “If I’d’a killed her I’d be out by now.”
Waylon: “I coulda killed her and I’d’a been out of jail by now.” You know what? That was about a guy, he was playing golf, really. But Tony Joe White, Tony come home and told me about it.
Billy Joe: You mean that’s for real, then?
Waylon: Yeah. And then I got thinkin’ about it, and he’s right, man. (laughter) Kill somebody and in eight years your butt’s free.
Billy Joe: Yeah, yeah.
ND: You’ve both made, to my ear, comparatively peaceful records.
Billy Joe: (reluctantly) Yeah.
Waylon: (puzzled) What…
Billy Joe: This last record I made, I made one just recently, it’s pretty peaceful, yeah. His is, too. Yours is laid back, pretty much. A lot of acoustic stuff. Mine is, too.
ND: Well, I meant more that you sounded more peaceful as people.
Waylon: If you really believe that, it’s your first mistake. (laughs) I think we are, hell.
Billy Joe: Yeah, I do, too.
Waylon: ‘Cause, you know … we had little reasons to not be very peaceful. Record companies…
Billy Joe: Yeah, that’s true.
ND: Has that changed that much over the years? The mythology to my generation is that you two changed not just country music, but the whole business in some ways, by taking things under your control.
Billy Joe: I didn’t do anything. I just met this man and he did the songs I wrote, and then that did it for me. I wrote some songs, that’s it. Waylon’s the man. I remember when RCA and them guys would come down there, just giving you hell. Saying “This ain’t goin’ sell, this ain’t goin’ sell,” and going through all that crap. I remember that. Jeez, I stayed out of the way but it was a tough time.
Waylon: It was, you know. But you know what happened to ’em, is they actually beat themselves. They tried to destroy what we were doing, and that music was the big part. There wasn’t no way they could destroy it, and they didn’t know that. When we came to town, you had to use their studios, you had to use their songs, you had to record four songs in three hours, and, if you had a great song and it wasn’t happening, you didn’t say, “Well, let’s just do three.” No, whatever you got in that little length of time was what you had to live with. And that was no good. That was like cuttin’ cookies. Me singing with the Nashville sound was like putting honey on chocolate cake. It was just syrupy, it just didn’t work. And I didn’t want to cause no trouble, because when you get there you think they ain’t goin’ let you sing.
Billy Joe: That’s true. That is true.
Waylon: They did. The thing about it, it was people who had gone to college and got a four-year degree in marketing, and they wanted to come and tell you they knew more about your music than you did. Now the bad part is, we didn’t know what the hell we were doing! (laughs) And they thought they knew more about it. They really did.
Billy Joe: They honestly did.
Waylon: And you know what? And I never realized what they was up to. Even when I started selling millions of records, they would still stop my album somewhere and say, “We don’t like it.” And of course I would say “Blow it out your … somethin’ and I don’t care, I don’t have to please you.” But what they did is, it became a matter of record that they had something to do with that album by stopping it. That’s job security. “What albums was he involved in?” you know? We had a big meeting one time in New York, and I said, “You know what your problem is? I know your problems. You know what you can’t do, but you ain’t got a clue about what you can do.” And that’s the way it was. I got the best story on Billy Joe.