Road warriors

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/05/2016 (3658 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As Waylon Jennings once sang, “I’ve always been crazy, but it’s kept me from going insane.”

In Waylon: Tales of My Outlaw Dad, Terry Jennings and David Thomas lay out a boatload of crazy stories and anecdotes about the iconic country music outlaw. If you’re looking for a deep, critical evaluation or detailed biography of Waylon Jennings, this is probably not the place to start. But the memoir sure is a lot of fun, and provides unique insight into Waylon’s life at the peak of his fame and artistic output.

Terry Jennings was born when Waylon was 19, just starting out on the dusty road to country stardom. As such, Terry fills in Waylon’s early years through recollections his father and his Grandma Jennings shared with him, while borrowing a tale or two from Waylon’s 1996 autobiography Waylon: An Autobiography (written with Lenny Kaye).

Apart from being the superstar’s first-born son, Terry’s relationship with his father was an interesting one. After dropping out of school in Grade 9, Terry went on the road with his dad. As a member of Waylon’s crew — first selling merchandise, before working his way up to drum tech and eventually managing many of his operations — the young Jennings came to be more like a younger brother to his father than a son, for good or ill. The two shared the highs and lows of a big-time, hard-working and harder-partying touring outfit for more than a decade, and Terry somehow lived to tell about it.

The bulk of the stories follow Terry and Waylon on the road, with regular stops in Nashville, Waylon’s home for most of his career. In those years, Waylon’s outlaw crew was a non-stop party. “Drugs, guns, and girls became three constants on the road,” Terry writes. While the Hells Angels provided “security,” Waylon and company out-partied rock ’n’ roll bands such as Lynyrd Skynyrd and ZZ Top, getting themselves in and out of all kinds of trouble along the way. Ol’ Waylon himself was going through upwards of $1,500 worth of cocaine daily during the late 1970s, not to mention the vast quantities of booze and pot he abstained from, but that the crew went through like soda pop and candy.

Naturally, the younger Jennings met and made friends with many of his father’s friends and collaborators over those years, and he peppers his memoir with anecdotes about many members of country music’s royalty. It should come as no surprise Willie Nelson gets his own chapter (On the Road with Willie), considering the close relationship Willie and Waylon maintained while the latter was still alive. Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Jr., George Jones and Kris Kristofferson all make colourful appearances, and Terry also provides humorous and touching portraits of the many members of Waylon’s band and road crew throughout. For those who have picked up on Waylon’s youngest son Shooter’s career over the past 10 years, Terry shines a light on the current country music rabble-rouser’s diaper years as only an older brother can.

But the fast times weren’t all good times. Terry doesn’t shy away from talking about some of the jams he found himself in, nor the ups and downs of his relationship with Waylon over the years. On more than one occasion, the two were not on speaking terms. But as the years went on, the two always reconciled, forming an even closer bond as Ol’ Waylon grew into the role of Grandpa.

Throughout, Terry is open about his own drug and alcohol abuse, as well as the addiction to cocaine and pills his father dealt with daily until 1984, when he got clean. While Terry has been sober for years now, he looks back on the decadent years on the road without condescension or regret. For both the senior and junior Jennings, that wild ride was just part of the road they travelled — a road that brought them closer together.

“Ain’t it great,” Terry recalls his father, who died in 2002, saying in his older years. “We can talk about those days and the police won’t come here and arrest us. We’re lucky we got sober when we did.”

With this memoir, Terry shares those stories with the reader.

If you’re a fan of Waylon’s music or country music in general, you’ll most likely enjoy spending some time with this book.

Sheldon Birnie is a Winnipeg writer and the host of Boots & Saddle, a weekly country music show Tuesdays from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on CKUW 95.9 FM.