Waylon Jennings died a few years ago. We’re about the same age.
As I write I am listening to the best — one of the best — albums I have ever owned. The one on which the song Precious Memories appears. Along with I’ve Got A Couple of Years On You Babe, And That’s All.
Are You Ready for The Country — one thing that makes using the new Napster a winning strategy versus other ways of listening to music while you work. (Note Napster of late seems to be having a war with my firewall, but we’ll get by it.)
Waylon lives. A voice that still stands out just fine among the stamped and sealed and imitative “product” we tend to get these days. (Reminds me a bit of the 70s when all you could get was … well, I won’t name him … before Waylon and Willie kicked Nashville’s butt.)
I am not one of these Past-Is-Best folks. But some past is precious, some memories are precious.
I have two shots of Waylon. One is on the Chattanooga Choo Choo Motel.
It is sometime around the early 80s.
I’ve driven my Merc Diesel down to Chattanooga to join the Waylon tour in no capacity at all — just being a friend of Will Campbell who has been asked to BE on the tour to help fulfill a request of Waylon’s wife, Jessie Coulter, a singer in her own right and author of the simple and poetic duet Storms Never Last.
This first shot is Waylon, clothed in black, lying back to the door, full back, on something like a daybed, all of him visible — entirely still.
Conveying every indication of a person deep in the throes of a serious drug habit.
I looked for no more than ten seconds and marveled when he made the stage that night.
Jessie and he did Storms Never Last.
You see, Jessie had invited Will to maybe have some effect on Waylon and get him clean. The tour kept on through Mississippi and was a success.
The next snapshot is in a recording studio on Music Row in the late 1980s. I am with Will.
Not unusual as Will and Brenda Campbell live in Mt. Juliet, a few miles west of Nashville, and I have known him since 1961 when I was serving as Kelly Miller Smith’s assistant at the First Baptist Church, now the Capitol Hill Baptist Church.
Waylon was still dressed in black, or close to it, as I recall.
He walked into a small room where several of us were standing and Will introduced us. It was entirely pleasant and he was clean.
We shook hands and traded a few remarks about our respective weights and our respective good intentions.
I was writing country music professionally then and I had been told if I tried to get Waylon to do one of my songs, he would no doubt say fine and that might well be the end. He was too nice to suggest there might be other factors involved.
Even after all these years, the secrets of becoming a successful Nashville writer elude me. Though I have a pretty good Idea of what doesn’t work!
Waylon died of the effects of diabetes. It is good that he got clean or he would not have lived into his sixties.
Now Sheryl Crowe (bless her, and a good recovery!) is on my Napster playlist to be followed by Gram Parsons — another who left us too early because of drugs — someday I’ll tell my Joshua Tree Motel story — and I am being reminded by Sheryl’s lyric that these are the days (now) when anything goes.
Oh really?
We are still cruising for drugged destruction. There are millions out there who could use a Will Campbell hanging out to maybe offer some clean-up-your-act vibrations.
If the monitor you are looking at could pass the vibe to you, and you are having that problem, be my guest.
And Waylon, wherever you are, you are a precious memory to me.
