[WanderingSoul]

Check out The Highwaymen. Outlaw country super band basically. Did some good stuff.

Kristofferson, Cash, Nelson and Jennings.

[Roustabout]

Check out Billy Joe Shaver, authentic outlaw country.

[DChambers]

Wow, I've heard of Billy Joe but never listened to him before, that's is some damn good music. This song really got to me:

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[jdreise]

While we're on it, try out some Sturgill Simpson. He might be positioned to really break out, having recently played Letterman and Conan. He's got that classic 70s sound and plenty of references to harder living.

He recently did a Joe Rogan podcast but sounded too drugged out to make any sense.

[Seamus]

I love Townes Van Zandt. About once a month I'll just sit down with a glass of bourbon and listen to Live at the Old Quarter all the way through.

This is another great song of his, powerful video too.

[Blobert]

Also check out this Ep of Married With Children, with Waylon in it:

It's terrible quality on youtube but it's cut to the part with him appearing there. Fitting enough Al's trekked up to the mountains to ask for a plan of action from him, to fight PC'ness of modern civilization.

[komatiite]

It seems like that word 'Cuckold' is spreading like wildfire across the Internet these days. Between 'Cuckservatives' and that NY Mag piece "What Open Marriage Taught One Man About Feminism" I have just about had it up to here with all that bullshit. So at times like this, I turn to Waylon:

By the time she thought you'd probably got to Phoenix
She'd arranged for your shoes to be filled
Well, you've got your pride and a blue-steel '45
Waited for the other shoe to fall

This song is actually by a Dallas alt-country band named the Old 97's, but they caught an aging Waylon's eye in the mid 90s at a show, and he wanted to record a couple songs with them. So they met up and had Jennings sing a couple of their own songs. How cool would that be if you were just a young band trying to get more attention? Here's the backstory.

Quote:

In 1996, five Texans met in Nashville to record two songs together. At the time, the four members of the Dallas band Old 97’s were awaiting the release of their major-label debut for Elektra Records, “Too Far To Care.” But already they were considered too loud for country, too country for rock. It was a struggle that the fifth Texan in the room, Waylon Jennings, knew all too well.

Jennings, who had gotten his start playing with the Lubbock native Buddy Holly and was a father of the Outlaw Country movement, was one of the band’s musical heroes, and they jumped at the chance to work with him. Yet for 17 years the songs — frontman Rhett Miller’s “The Other Shoe” and bassist Murry Hammond’s “The Iron Road” — sat on the shelves, largely unheard. What Miller calls the band’s “holy grail” finally saw light as a limited edition vinyl single in April, and promptly sold out.

On Oct. 1, Omnivore Recordings, a Los Angeles label dedicated to reissues and “lost” recordings, will, for the first time, release both songs on CD and online, along with four Old 97’s demos, as “Old 97’s and Waylon Jennings.” To mark the occasion, Mr. Miller, Mr. Hammond, and bandmates Ken Bethea and Philip Peeples recounted the time they spent with Mr. Jennings, whose health began to seriously decline soon after the sessions. He died in 2002.

RHETT MILLER: In 1996, we were playing a radio convention in Atlanta, and Waylon was in the front row, making me super nervous. He was pretty much the coolest guy and best singer in the world, maybe in a tie with Willie Nelson. That he was there and seemed into us was totally mind-blowing.

MURRY HAMMOND: Our song “Big Brown Eyes” includes the line, “It takes a worried man to sing a worried song,” a nod to the Carter Family’s take on “Worried Man Blues.” When Rhett sang that line, Waylon kind of sat up in his chair a little and started clapping. That relaxed me. He’s a Carter Family fan. And we are. It was a little shared moment.

KEN BETHEA: Not long after the radio convention, we heard Waylon raved about us to The Austin Chronicle. What’s more amazing than to be young guys finding your way, sleeping on floors, and have Waylon Jennings talk you up to the press?

MILLER: Our representative at Elektra thought we should write him a letter. I sat down and wrote five or six drafts. I tried not to sound too pandering or too cool. I thanked him for the kind things he said and if he ever wanted to work together we’d go anywhere and do anything he asked. He replied that he’d like to cut a couple of tracks in Nashville. I think we were auditioning to do a full Waylon album where we’d be his band.

BETHEA: We heard Waylon wanted to load into the studio at 8:30 a.m. We were young and didn’t get up that early. We compromised for a 10 a.m. start, and when we showed up, he’d already been there 15 minutes, waiting on us. He was ready to work.

HAMMOND: I wrote “The Iron Road,” this tragic number about a wanderer who was going to kill himself, specifically with Waylon’s voice in my head. And then there he was, actually singing it.

PHILIP PEEPLES: In the downtime, he was so easygoing, so gracious, like an uncle at a family reunion. And we were all Texans. There was that bond. And we had this Buddy Holly-looking frontman.

MILLER: Yeah, I was a Buddy Holly cookie-cutter clone. Guilty. But I think he saw how much I idolized his old best friend. And then at lunch, he told the Buddy Holly story. That story he must have told a million times about his last words to Buddy — “I hope your ol’ plane crashes” — still choked him up.

HAMMOND: It was so obvious he still felt guilty about it. It was so sad. It’s easy to forget there are real people behind those legendary stories.

MILLER: After lunch, he cut the vocals for “The Other Shoe.” He got to the second verse, where the cuckolded husband is under the bed and imagining the murders he’s about to commit. There’s a line, “You’ll try to find a doctor that will prescribe an elixir that’ll make everything better.” He kept saying “excelsior.” It got tense in the control room because he’d keep getting through the whole song and mess up that word. Eventually, I had an idea. I told him to just use the phrase “Annie licks her.” He started laughing. “I like you, you’re sick,” he told me. And he nailed it on the next take.

HAMMOND: Afterwards, we heard he loved the mixes, and got a nice note from him. But it was kind of perfect that we never saw him again. It’s neat that it’s just two songs. An album gets judged differently than a 45. I’m a record collector, so I love unique 45s and EPs that happened and never happen again. It was that.

MILLER: For me, the buzz of hearing him sing our songs will never go away. That thrill — that my hero thought enough of them to sing them — will never get old.

Here's the other song they pumped out, also awesome as hell:

Old 97's are pretty solid too, here's my favorite song:

[RexImperator]

I have not yet seen the movie "Moonrunners" which inspired the show but I'd like to. It's of that whole "outlaw" era. Waylon is also the narrator or "balladeer".

[Gustavus Adolphus]

(11-04-2014 08:15 PM)DChambers Wrote:  

My favorite Townes song

Thanks for the bump on this, komatiite. There are some Waylon vids that I hadn't seen before. I mainly listen to him on LP these days, but it's fun to watch how he sings his tracks, too.

By the way, this Townes Van Zandt footage is on a DVD I own called, "Be Here To Love Me". If you like Townes, there are some fucking awesome stories shared throughout by those closest to him (Steve Earle, Guy Clark, etc.), and of course by Townes himself.

I really like the interview with Townes when he's living in this trailer and they are talking to him and he's got a fifth of Jack Daniels in one hand and can of Coke in the other. I believe this clip was shot inside that trailer and appears a few minutes later in the film.

Edit:

And I think all these Outlaw guys would have been solid wings...

[Captain Gh]

Heard about him on a O&A show when Patrice was on and they had this Groupie of the 60's named Pamela Debar and she was saying about how Waylon was pumping her on the regular and how he was Outlaw and masculine as fuck! When you got a Groupie remembering how you pumped her some 30 years ago, then I salute you for sure!!

[Grodin]

Waylon Jennings was one of the greats. The best thing about his music is he'd take a song and interpret it just right. Billy Joe Shaver said (paraphrasing) that he'd write the song but didn't know how it should be sung until Waylon sang it. Jennings could really pick a song too, and he recorded songs written by some of the greatest songwriters in country: Kristopherson, Shaver, Lee Clayton, Bob McGill, Steve Young, etc.

Waylon's idols were Roger Miller and Jimmie Rodgers. The song in the OP, where he's singing to Jessi, is a tribute to Jimmie Rodgers.

The song Leather and Lace by Stevie Nix was written for Waylon and Jessi.

Waylon and Muhammad Ali were good friends, and Ali attended the christening of his son.

Waylon and Mick Jagger worked together on a film named Ned Kelly, the soundtrack to the film is one of the more unusual Jennings albums.

Waylon toured with Buddy Holly and played bass guitar for him for one winter, and he was supposed to be on the plane that Buddy and the Big Bopper died on.

He was discovered by Willie Nelson. Nelson saw him performing at a honky tonk bar in Phoenix and called Chet Atkins, said you gotta sign this guy.

His autobiography is a great read and I learned a lot about the history of country music from it.

[puckerman]

(07-31-2015 08:40 PM)RexImperator Wrote:  

I have not yet seen the movie "Moonrunners" which inspired the show but I'd like to. It's of that whole "outlaw" era. Waylon is also the narrator or "balladeer".

It's definitely worth watching. Men here will like it.