His Mickey Mouse Ways
An appreciation of Waylon Jennings.
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One night on the highway, in his new shiny bus, on the teetering brink of his pop success, I asked him how he liked his new audiences. “Well, it ain’t exactly living in the love of the common people,” he said dryly. He went on to explain that when you start performing, you play for people who are just like you, and that’s not really performing. Then you perform for people who just like you, and that’s really fun. Then, “if you’re lucky,” you end up performing for people who want to be you, and that’s really not as much fun because these people who want to be you always hate you a little because they’re not you. They secretly want you to fail so you can know how it feels to be them. “Actually,” he said, “it’s not that complicated. There’s a lot of people in a room. One guy’s got the microphone. Everybody else’s got the beer. They’re all having about the same amount of fun.”
I sat there and thought that knowing this much about yourself and your audience was probably not much of a benison for a performer. It does, however, account for some of Waylon’s special virtues. In “Good Hearted Woman,” for instance, there is a line that goes “She loves him in spite of his wicked ways she don’t understand.” Waylon never sang it that way onstage. He always sang “She loves him in spite of his Mickey Mouse ways that she don’t understand.” Because, I think, Waylon knew what wickedness was. He knew he wasn’t it, and his comic vision of Mickey Mouse machismo let everyone in on the joke. He could characterize himself—in a phrase at once self-deprecating and deftly cosmopolitan—as “too dumb for New York City, too ugly for L.A.,” and no other singer in Nashville would even dare.
He could stand in the wings, watching himself onstage, and write, “I’ve seen the world with a five-piece band looking at the backside of me.” I can’t imagine another country performer confident enough in his own masculinity to acknowledge that he knows the band is looking at his butt. And what other leather-clad, asphalt cowboy could walk up to a fellow who’s bitching about somebody being “a goddam queer,” drape his arm around the fellow’s shoulder, snuggle up close to him, and say, sotto voce, “Aw, come on, Hoss. We all just grab onto something warm and worry ’bout the details later.” If you were familiar with the pathological caginess of most Nashville singers, this cowboy hipster candor was scary at first. Then you realized how profoundly Waylon did not care, and ultimately, I think, the magic cloak of this not caring kept him alive for more than six decades. Because the truth was that if Waylon wasn’t on the stage, in the studio, on the bus, or having dinner with his wife, Jessi, he was in trouble or about to be.
His gift to us, of course, had nothing to do with being in trouble, although it got him into some. He made strong music. He sang great songs that said things beautifully and spoke with some precision to the times for which they provided the soundtrack. More than that, of all the artists with whom he is associated, Waylon Jennings had the most passionate sense of how you put things together and what things you leave on the bus. He was an artist, in other words, and an artist of his time. At the exact moment that American painters and sculptors were cutting away the obfuscation and expressive nonsense that had accrued around American art during the post-war period, at the very instant that the kids at CBGB’s were beginning to jettison the pretentious theater that was drowning rock and roll, Waylon was taking country music back where it never had been.
He stripped away the decorative bric-a-brac that had plagued Nashville product for decades and created contemporary roots music in the minimalist tradition—a music that was not really simpler, just stronger, better organized, and more totally focused than anything that came before it. Dispensing with virtually everything but the rhythm track and the vocal, he changed the focus of the sound from the orchestral grandeur of the setting to the sinuous muscularity of the music’s forward drive. Abandoning the pop-hillbilly flummery of contemporary country songs, he embraced the poetic license and compression of lyrics like Billy Joe Shaver’s. In the end, he made a new music that, like the singer of Billy Joe’s song, “left a long string of friends, some sheets in the wind, and some satisfied women behind.”
The trick was in the bass and drums, and Waylon’s producer, Jack Clement, helped with this. As Richie’s drums got sharper and cleaner and the bass got louder, the tempo could get slower and the vocals softer, so everything fell into balance. The songs rode on the bong-bong of this “Cajun march” that Richie and Waylon invented—it sounded like an old four-four but bounced like a bluesy twelve-eight, with hidden triplets flowing through the drum track, accentuated by Waylon’s Telecaster. To Nashville ears, it sounded like nothing or, even worse, like rock and roll, but it moved like a new wheel on an empty highway and still does, although there are no more empty highways and no more hipster cowboys at the Dairy Queen. Even so, history keeps a special place for artists like Waylon who scrape off the paint and carry out the trash, who bet their whole heart on the unadorned shape of the music. You have to be crazy to do it, of course. You know that soon enough the vehicle will be repainted, that stripes, chrome, and all manner of gewgaws will ultimately accrue, but what you have done doesn’t go away. It survives at the heart of the music.
AND WAYLON SURVIVES AS WELL, on his records, of course, but most profoundly in the memory of fading gypsies like those who gathered in Lubbock, who never saw bad done so well. This is the picture of Waylon that I carry with me today: We are milling around the crowded greenroom after a show in Atlanta. Waylon is flopped down in the middle of a leather couch, flanked by two exquisitely coiffed, extremely plump white ladies. The ladies are attired in pastel pantsuits, and the three of them make a nice tableau—the gaunt King of Darkness bracketed by two painted and powdered Easter eggs. Waylon sits forward with his elbows on his knees, grinning and soaked with sweat. His hair hangs in wet, greasy ropes, some of it plastered across his forehead. His shirt is stuck to his body, and his wristband is stained with dark blotches. He sinks heavily into the pillows of the couch while the fat ladies seem to float weightlessly. I am imagining the strain the ladies are putting on their knees, trying not to look heavy, when I realize that, at that moment, they are not heavy at all. They are in heaven.
I sit down on the arm of the couch and find the three of them in a deep discussion about the almost insurmountable difficulty of running a beauty salon in Atlanta, Georgia, what with taxes, zoning, sorry help, and the burgeoning complexities of interracial hairstyling. Waylon is contributing what he can, which is more than I would have expected. His limited experience of beauty salons, I surmise, has been considerably enhanced by his wide experience with beauticians. Also, Waylon is a small businessman himself. As he points out, he started off as a very small businessman, picking Texas cotton and getting paid by the pound. The ladies chatter away, giddy but perfectly at ease. They are telling this dangerous outlaw things they have never told anyone, but they are not complaining, as they are wont to do, because Waylon is not a complainer and he is contagious.
Whatever they expected as they tiptoed backstage, it was never this! They are having a conversation with Waylon Jennings! It’s better than the sex they fantasized about and thought they wanted but didn’t really. Waylon knows this. He knows that, as a culture, beauty-salon ladies are incurably romantic and less worldly than they like to pretend. They are not prudes, exactly. They will have sex with you if they must, but what they want is Scarlett and Ashley. They want the rituals of courtly flirtation, and Waylon, with his devil smile and attentive gaze, is giving them that. It occurs to me, as I blatantly eavesdrop, that Waylon is selling a hell of a lot of records with this little gesture. Then I feel bad for having thought it, because Waylon Jennings, in that moment, is clearly happy as hell to be chatting with the fat ladies, behaving like the perfect young cowboy, being thoughtful and curious and whimsically generous, living in the love of the common people.
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