Willie & Waylon Walk Into a Room

All They Did Was Change Country Music Forever: 1978

It seems like half the people I know, at least on social media, have been in Austin at South by Southwest (SXSW). I was only there once, about 30 years ago, when people were already complaining that it was too big, too corporate. I was invited to appear on a critics panel. I remember two things, well, a few things. After the panel, the owner of a small local label asked if I liked basketball. Sure, I said. He gave me a pair of tickets to that afternoon’s games at the Frank Erwin Center on the University of Texas campus in Austin, one of the cities where the March Madness Sweet 16 round was being held, leading to the Final Four. I ran into my pal Lonesome Bob Chaney, a basketball-tall singer-songwriter, and we went to see two of the greatest games of college hoops ever played, overtime thrillers that made the rest of the SXSW music dull by comparison. That is, until the closing night party, held in a vast hotel ballroom, where the Joe Ely Band played for at least four or five hours, an experience of such sustained excitement that I don’t think it ended until the spaceship came to take us home.

In 1978, I interviewed Waylon and Willie together, and the story is very different from my memory of the experience. But maybe it was our second time around. I remember the first one taking place in 1976, at the Algonquin Hotel, promoting the Wanted! The Outlaws album. Waylon was more than cranky because I hadn’t done my homework, Willie having to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. This time, it was the Waylon and Willie album, and clearly, I was more tuned to the Texas music vibe, though I was never as expert as the dozens of past and present colleagues who emigrated from other parts of the USA and made Austin the sun around which other parts of the Solar System revolved, Earth included. This story is adapted from a feature originally written for Newsday.

IF YOU think the Super Bowl was rough on the Denver Broncos, you should have seen Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson the next afternoon. The two Texas-born singers had attended the game in New Orleans, and performed at the Dallas Cowboys' victory party that night. A few hours after the party ended, the sleepless duo was being interviewed in the Plaza Hotel in New York.

Jennings and Nelson were in New York to promote the just-released Waylon & Willie album. Both have maintained and continue to pursue independent careers (Jennings records for RCA; Nelson for Columbia). But the last time Jennings and Nelson teamed up, for an album called Wanted! The Outlaws (which also featured Tompall Glaser and Jessi Colter), they found the massive success that had eluded each for at least a decade.

The Outlaws became the first country album to be certified platinum, for sales of more than a million copies. It also lent its name to the burgeoning "progressive country" music and culture scene, and "outlaw" became the name for any country-oriented artist who felt inclined to rebel against the way things were usually done in Nashville.

"Five, six or seven years ago, this interview would have been done in the back seat of a VW somewhere," Jennings said. "They [the record companies] didn't understand us. We couldn't cut records the way we want."

Nelson, red-bearded and soft-spoken, picked up the tale from the impetuous, moody Jennings. "It just wasn't an accepted thing to make records with members of your own band," Nelson said. "If you asked to bring in your own musicians to a session, you got some disapproval."

"They had a system of doing things," Jennings said. "An assembly line. Instead of reading chords, the musicians played by numbers — in some cases, they never even knew what the music was. The system worked for Skeeter [Davis] and Porter [Wagoner]. But if we played our own guitars on records, we'd be out of sync with the tracks they wanted. Our thoughts and talents got in the way."

Despite his discomfort with the Nashville system, Jennings, who doesn't look his 40 years, had been moderately successful as a mainstream country singer. He began recording for RCA in 1965, and had top 10 country hits such as 'Only Daddy That'll Walk the Line', 'Cedartown, Georgia', and 'Good Hearted Woman'.

Nelson had been more successful than Jennings as a songwriter, but didn't do as well with his own records until Outlaws. Composer Nelson has written standards like 'Funny (How Time Slips Away)', 'Crazy' and 'Hello Walls'. But recording artist Nelson had his troubles getting sales and airplay for himself.

"My music was not exactly what you'd call country music," he said.

"The arrangements were not considered country arrangements. We didn't dress the way audiences expected country singers to dress. We were just doing too many new things for the country audiences to accept right away."

Nelson spent years trying to get his music across to country audiences without much success. It was an experience with frustrations that were expressed poignantly in 'Me and Paul', a song on the Outlaws album. He and "Paul" (Tompall Glaser) toured with mainstream artists like Charley Pride and Kitty Wells. They drank too much and faced audiences so unresponsive that there were times when they didn't remember whether or not they even played.

In 1971, Nelson finally left Nashville and went back home to Texas. "I left as soon as I realized it just wasn't working for me the way it was being done," Nelson said. "I didn't have anything to lose."

Nelson, then approaching 40 (he is now 44), virtually started his career over. He began playing a circuit of small clubs, and found a spiritual home at Austin's Armadillo World Headquarters, which became the psychic center of the "outlaw" movement.

"I discovered a new audience of young people," Nelson said of the revival. "So I started playing to and for that audience. But I didn't do anything to offend my old audience, so I didn't lose any of the fans I'd had for awhile."

The merging of hippie and redneck cultures resulted in some near-Woodstock-sized events, the Willie Nelson July 4th picnics that are now a southwest institution. The picnics draw more than 100,000 fans to pastures and fairgrounds where the passing of joints is as prevalent as the quaffing of Lone Star Beer.

"There had been a very real separation (between the longhairs and rednecks)," Nelson said. "But young people and old people wanted to hear what we were doing. When they all got together, that's when I started to sell some records."

Nelson is now a bankable artist, selling more than half a million copies of his Red Headed Stranger album, for example. But his new coalition will be tested with a record he has just finished called Stardust. The album features Nelson's renditions of pop standards like the title song, 'Sunny Side of the Street' and 'Moonlight in Vermont'. The album is produced by Booker T. Jones, former leader of the soul instrumental group Booker T. and the MG's. Jones Supplements Nelson's band with horn and string arrangements.

That may sound blasphemous to some Nelson fans, but Nelson is taking that possibility in stride. "Those songs deserve that sort of treatment," he said of the string arrangements. "'Blue Eyes Cryin' in the Rain' [a recent Nelson hit] didn't require it. I don't think anybody'd mind hearing strings on Stardust." [Nelson was right; Stardust, also released in 1978, sold more than four million copies and spent more than two years on the Billboard album chart. He became the eternal American musical performer].

You won't hear violin strings on Waylon & Willie, the new Nelson and Jennings collaboration. The two sing together on five of the 11 songs. Each solos on three of the six other tunes. The musicianship is spare and subtle, the songs providing plenty of room for Jennings and Nelson to do what they do best: pick their guitars and sing.

Jennings, with his steady, reassuring baritone, sings Stevie Nicks' 'Gold Dust Woman' with a worldly soulfulness. Despite his rowdy exterior, Jennings shows he is very much the tender sentimentalist on 'The Wurlitzer Prize (I Don't Want to Get Over You)' referring, of course, to punching the same old songs on the same old jukeboxes.

Kris Kristofferson contributes two songs to the album. One, 'Don't Cuss the Fiddle', is a delightful song-within-a-song that takes its melody from Nelson and Jennings' 'Good Hearted Woman'. At the end of the song, the singer admits the steal and Waylon and Willie segue effortlessly into ‘Good Hearted Woman.’ 'The Year 2003 Minus 25' is a bit stranger, a pessimistic state of the union address with some muddled social commentary.

Both singers are much more at home with 'Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys'. They may not be real outlaws — "I don't go for that bank robbing connotation," Nelson said — but they do identify with the mythic heroes of the West. "Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys," the song goes, "don't let 'em pick guitars and drive them old trucks/let 'em be doctors and lawyers and such."

The song provoked a discussion about child-rearing between Jennings and Nelson. Nelson has five children, ranging in age from 4 to 21; Jennings has four children, ranging from 13 to 21. Jennings, overtired and generally shy around strangers, was at his most lucid when talking about his children. He talked about a discussion that his 13-year-old daughter, a budding songwriter, had with him that proved she understood Jennings philosophy of composition in a way he'd never been able to articulate.

"She had written a real sad song, so I asked her if she was troubled," Jennings said. "And she said, 'Now look dad. Sometimes you write songs about things that really happen to you. And other times, you get a thought, and you just have to write it down.' I just said 'shut up, kid.' She got me fair and square."

© Wayne Robins 2023, 2024. Thanks for Rock’s Back Pages of London for preserving and digitizing many of my articles in its archives.