THE BEST COUNTRY SINGER
COOK, BRUCE
On Music THE BEST COUNTRY SINGER BY BRUCE COOK Here I sit in a country nightclub, the Stardust, somewhere in Charles County, Maryland. It's not much. The decor is early-middle formica; the...
...Staid and powerful, it has demanded a certain conformity from those on the outside trying to get in, and until recently it was able to see that fame was withheld from those who would not go along...
...That's what he's been doing for years...
...With even the best country performers-the Merle Haggards and Loretta Lynns-anywhere from a quarter to a third of what they sing will be execrable junk...
...He just stood up there, played his set and then walked off the stage...
...None are throwaways...
...he didn't introduce his band, and he didn't announce the numbers...
...Jennings, for his part, performed with a cold efficiency, doing each number at about the length of its recorded version...
...A Waylon Jennings set is different-his material is always chosen with taste...
...Practically the only time he fully devoted himself to music during the early stages of his career was when Buddy Holly invited him to become a member of his group, the Crickets...
...He is bearded and has long hair...
...It is a voice with yards and yards of character, an immense sense of dignity...
...Holly and the Crickets were on tour and were joined along the way by two other top rock acts, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens...
...Yet even then, success, real success of the sort he is beginning to enjoy only at present, was a long time coming...
...The place to hear any performer is where he feels most at home...
...In fact, he hadn't been in Nashville all that long when, thrice-married and thrice-divorced, he got a reputation as a dissolute character...
...Then the Waylors begin to play-"Good Hearted Woman," an old hit-and Jennings starts to sing...
...The first plane crashed, killing everybody on it...
...He is also, for my money, the best country singer in Nashville-or maybe anywhere else...
...I knew he was better than that, and somebody told me afterward that if I really wanted to catch him at his best I owed it to myself to hear him in a country milieu-with his people...
...Still, all this time his music kept getting better, and his audience (despite Nashville) kept getting bigger and bigger...
...Nobody took a solo or an extra chorus...
...all of them count...
...This is indeed the place to catch Jennings...
...He did, following on another flight...
...He just goes his own way...
...His popularity thrust out beyond the country music ghetto and took him places the music had rarely been before-Max's Kansas City (r.i.p...
...The quality of his voice, rich and worn around the edges, is as distinctive as it is difficult to describe...
...Practically every number is extended by at least a chorus...
...I had heard him once before-last September at the American Song Festival in Saratoga Springs, New York...
...The music that ultimately became known as rock n' roll was in its infancy then, but Jennings has never given much thought to whether the songs he is singing at any given moment are rock or country...
...Jennings was snubbed and shown the door so often by the potentates of official Nashville, he must have begun to feel like an encyclopedia salesman...
...They give him the type of welcome that says they think he's one of them, though he is nobody's idea of what a country singer should look like...
...Others, like Kris Kristofferson, are winning fans for country music in the colleges and universities...
...Nobody bothers him much...
...He is pushing 40 now, and looks every day of it...
...One, a haunting, troubling number called "The Hunger," has to do with a nymphomaniac...
...He doesn't waste words...
...He seems to draw strength from his audience, pressing on the up-tempo songs, digging in on the soulful slow ones...
...Born in 1937 in Littlefield, Texas, Jennings had a live country music program on the local radio station when he was only 13...
...He never took his hat off to Roy Acuff and called him "sir...
...The total effect once led Country Music magazine's Dave Hickey, a fan of Jennings, to grumble, "I do not understand why Waylon chooses to dress like a full-time cattle rustler and part-time turquoise thief...
...The impression it gets across is of a man who has had his share and more of bitter experiences, but who hangs in there...
...The words come out in a deep voice that shuts the drunk up and returns him to his table...
...There is an economy to his movements...
...Waylon Jennings may have felt that he had been saved for something, yet his career was so slow in starting he probably wondered for five or six years what that something was...
...When a drunk comes over to the bandstand and calls out a whole program of requests, Jennings simply nods, saying, "You tell 'em hoss...
...Much is flat-out rock, like Gregg Allman's "Midnight Rider...
...Waylon Jennings is the oldest of the young-timers, the leader of a rebel horde that includes some of the most interesting performers of the music today, from Kristofferson to Alex Harvey and Willie Nelson to Kinky Friedman and his Texas Jewboys...
...He fills his long set with others, too-Red Lane's "Mississippi Woman," Will Cook's "You Can Have Her," and a whole medley by Kris Kristofferson...
...The few bits of jewelry he sports are the kind popular in his native Southwest...
...Jennings did not go along...
...Altogether, the setting is not the sort normally considered conducive to the appreciation of music...
...and the Bottom Line in New York, the Palamino in North Hollywood-although in this, Jennings is not unique...
...That whole episode lasted only a couple of months, but a lot of people know about it because of the spectacular way it ended...
...Out of that experience, he got interested in radio and disc jockeyed around West Texas for a few years, performing on the side at whatever local barbecue or Saturday night shuffle would hire him...
...That was 1959...
...More significantly, Jennings didn't say a word to the crowd...
...He never ran errands for the Country Music Association...
...The hell with them...
...That night he was burdened with a young and restive audience, come to hear the top-40 pair Loggins and Messina...
...His band, the Waylors, deviated not a note from their set arrangements...
...The youngsters made it plain that anyone else on the program was an intruder, and they gave him sparse applause...
...The image is macho-but it's not just an image...
...Moreover, some of the songs are mature, in a way the usual rib-nudging, titillating country tunes never are...
...the waitresses are so overworked it takes half an hour to get a drink...
...He not only selects with a sure sense of what will suit that distinctive voice of his, but also, it seems, with an eye toward expanding the limits of what is acceptable as "country...
...In a field where most of the men deck themselves out in rhinestone-studded, silver-threaded splendor, Jennings wears jeans and cowboy shirts...
...Jennings saunters off the stand to terrific applause, pausing only a few times to sign autographs...
...His right hand is tucked flat into the pocket of his jeans, his left draped around the neck of his Fender Telecaster guitar...
...To make room for them, Jennings was asked to give up his seat in the small plane used for traveling...
...They don't know quite what to make of that one in Charles County...
...the crowd has been raucous all evening...
...He looks relaxed...
...and now, as Jennings steps out before this group of border state rednecks at the Stardust, there can be no doubt that he is comfortable here...
...Ralph Mooney, the fine steel guitarist who travels and records with Jennings, gets off some good solos, and the leader himself performs admirably on a long version of his most recent hit, "Ramblin' Man," which ends the set...
...Actually, a revealing generational split has taken place in Nashville, one that has blurred the lines between country and rock, threatening such hallowed institutions as the Grand Ole Opry...
...He fell in with Johnny Cash, but Cash got married to June Carter, of the very religious Carter family, and gave Jennings up as a bad influence...
...But, as it turns out, the Stardust is sure the place to listen to Waylon Jennings...
...One reason is Nashville's country music establishment...
...Eventually he signed a recording contract with RCA...
...You get a sense of the man as he slouches around the stage, his gut thrust out, waiting for the Waylors to set up...
Vol. 58 • March 1975 • No. 5
