Billy Ray Reynolds – Remembering Waylon

Billy Ray shares his memories of Waylon.

Remembering Waylon

Billy Ray Reynolds met Waylon Jennings in 1966. Immediately he knew he’d stumbled across a country singer, unlike any other. Already fascinated by, and equipped with a well developed love and respect for history of all kinds, Billy Ray was intrigued by the man and his music. “The first songs I heard him sing were Norwegian Wood and Scarborough Fair and it just knocked me out to hear a country singer not afraid to sing these songs that country music wasn’t touching.”

“He was a genius. The great thing about Waylon is that he was such a teacher, and he didn’t even know it himself. Here was a guy with a telecaster guitar playing ‘Yesterday.’ I had never been a big fan of the Beatles until I heard Waylon doing ‘Yesterday.’ I had never been a big a fan of Roy Orbison like everyone else until I heard him do the Pretty Woman and Crying, and Neil Diamond’s Kentucky Woman.”

“I think Waylon stepped across that boundary and kind of merged it all. Johnny Cash has an awesome tendency to pull people together, Waylon kind of welded the vast differences in music together. When he did McArthur’s Park kind of an orchestra type situation he brought something to country music that added a lot of class to it. I just got lucky by being there.”

His admiration for Waylon Jennings is deep and sincere. He recalls the the moments fondly, pulling them easily from the recesses of his memory. He understands the very essence of what made Waylon Jennings a legend. He was a man who lived for the moment, lived for his music, compromising it for no one. He knew the rules and he knew how to find his way around them.

The history making moments spent with the country music legend were overlooked in the day to day life of surviving in a business where very few rise to the top of the heap. “We didn’t know that we were making history then, we were just trying to figure out how to get into the business. The trials and the tribulations that went with that were the things that I remember now, more than the good times. There was a definite purpose because we had to be there and we were always conscious, one of the things Waylon was always great about, he would never let the people down.”

“I remember us playing Calgary once and we had to go over to Victoria and Vancouver, we got up in Banff and we had to turn around and go back to Calgary and catch a plane because of the avalanches.  We flew across and the driver had to bring the bus back down into seems like Montana so he could go around the mountains and meet us on the other side.”

As awed as he was by the creative genius that was Waylon Jennings, it’s Waylon, the man and friend that has the strongest hold on Billy Ray’s memory. Underneath the gruff, rugged exterior was a man with a wicked sense of humor and a compassionate heart that always succeeded, and somehow defied anything that was thrown his way.

Billy recalls a gig in Calgary, Alberta at the Royal Jubilee Theatre. The band entire band had quit on him and Waylon had talked Billy Ray into flying up to Canada with him and then into performing with him that night. “He got me this 12 string guitar which was the worst piece of junk you ever saw. He always insisted we attend to his tuner. We weren’t great musicians but we were always in tune. I was tuning this one key and it sounded great. I would try to play another chord and it would sound awful. I was real nervous. The theatre was packed and the announcer was in front of the curtains, announcing that we were coming on. He said “Now ladies and gentlemen, Waylon Jennings’, and the curtains started to open up. Waylon was walking around on stage and he knows how nervous I get, he walked over to me and said ‘Your pants are unzipped’ and I almost fell through the stage! I said ‘Oh no, I’m concentrating on tuning this doggone guitar!’ It took me about five minutes to check and it wasn’t. He’d lied to me, but he just died laughing at me. He was always a great practical joker and his timing was impeccable about things like that. He was a joy to work with, and to just be around.”

“He loved people.” he continues “You would not believe how much he loved people. There was only one rule. I don’t think he ever had another other than ‘be nice to the people.’ I never saw him when he wouldn’t sign an autograph.”

“We were in Hollywood at a place called the Troubadour once. We had just finished a set and he was up in a little small room. It must have been 100 degrees there, sweat was pouring off of him. He was in a chair, autographing for kids. Two people he would drop everything for was kids first and foremost, and handicapped persons. This guy came in on  hand crutches and I could tell he was really intent on getting to see Waylon. I spoke to him. He said I’d sure like to see Waylon. I said he’d sure love to see you too. We worked through the people and I got him upstairs, took five minutes to get up there. Got through the crowd and I got to the door and I said Waylon, when you get through this man would here would like to talk to you a second, to say hello to you. He reached his hand through the other people and kind of got the guy by the hand and pulled him on through. When he got him through he reached into his shirt and pulled out a subpoena. He was from the sheriff’s department. From then on I was really cautious about who I took back. It just floored me and it just floored him. He said to me, you don’t have to feel guilty about it, it wasn’t your fault. It was for late child support. There were times the IRS would be there and take the bus and everything and we’d come out and talk them into letting us take the instruments so we could play the club and come out and give them the money, and then try to figure out how to get to the next town.”

Despite the difficulties life on the road presented, it also became the place Waylon and the band would find the greatest inspiration for their music. “We knew that what we felt out there on the road, in front of the people was not what we were getting to hear on the records in town, and it was really frustrating when they would be telling us what we needed to be doing. We were out there and the people were telling us every night what they liked. We would try to bring that back in here and they would laugh at us. The people were telling us what they wanted to hear, they didn’t hear anything but what we were. What we really were. They never failed to tell us when we were good and they also never failed to tell us when we were not good.”

“At that time the whole culture was changing our hair was long and we were called outlaws. Later it became the outlaw movement, but actually we thought we were outcasts. We weren’t from wealthy backgrounds, we were all from working class people. I think that’s what we brought to it, was the working class music that we’d grown up with. Hank Williams, Marty Robbins, Lefty Frizzell, and Bob Wills. How could we be wrong when they were so right? We were trying to grow from maybe what we had grown up with.”

In the end it was the label of outlaw that ultimately prevailed. Coming along with it was a place in country music history and an image of long haired, rebellious, hard living musicians. After listening to the stories that come from a front row vantage point, it becomes clearly evident that the outlaw movement was more about creative freedom than it was about the image and all it’s trappings. “We never rebelled on purpose, what we rebelled against was being told what to do.”

He recalls the very moments when the history was made. “We were in the studio and Waylon was recording ‘Atlanta’s Burning Down’ and they came into the studio and told us we were cutting bigoted music. It made Waylon and the whole band mad. It made me mad, of course because it was my song, and Waylon loved the song. I never wrote it with any ill intentions towards anybody, it was just a love ballad to me. They said nobody wants to hear more about that dang war.”

“I said ‘Waylon let’s go somewhere else and record this.’

‘I can’t Billy’.

I said Why?’ and he said ‘Because it’s in my contract. I have to record my records at RCA’.

“Does it say anything about doing demos?”

He said ‘What are you talkin’ about?”

I said, ‘Does it say in your contract you can’t write a song and go demo it wherever you want to?’

He said, ‘No it doesn’t say that.’

So I said ‘Let’s go cut some demos. That’s when we went to see Tompall.”

“Tompall Glaser had started what was called Hillbilly Central which was one of the better studio’s in town, as good as RCA. Probably beside Bradley’s Barn it was the only other good studio here at the time. We went to London and played the Wimbledon Festival and we got to talking about what needed to be done and I said Tompall has got one of the greatest studio’s in the country, you should talk to him about going over there. I was kind of partying and rambling around and so they sat on the couch in the lobby of the hotel and I rambled around for a couple of hours and I came back a couple or three hours later. I had never seen Waylon sit still that long. He had always busy moving, and kind of hyper and they were still sitting on the couch talking.” On return to Nashville Waylon and the band went in and recorded Dreamin’ My Dreams, a landmark album that easily still stands as one of the most definitive country music records of all time.

The rest, as they say, is history.

The life of an intricate part of the history of country music came to end February 13th, 2002. Waylon Jennings passed away quietly in his sleep at home in Arizona. The news of his passing, although in retrospect seemingly inevitable, came as a shock.

“I was out at John Hartford’s house.” he says, recalling the day as if it were yesterday. “John had passed away six months before and his wife had passed away six months later. Marie who was John’s wife was like my sister.  I was helping the kids do some things out there and we were going to eat. He loved Sherry, that was Marie’s daughter. She had just come from a week or so of taking care of him. She loved him, we all did and he loved her almost like a little sister. He had called and we were just heading out the door to eat and they said ‘Waylon called, will you call him back.’ She said, okay we’re going to eat right now but I’ll call him as soon as I get back. We went to eat and we were gone not more than an hour. When we got back and we walked into the house and the phone call came. Needless to say it floored us all.”

He hesitates a moment and then shares the memory of the last moments spent with his friend. “I wound up carrying him to his grave. His manager and a friend of mine had flown out there with me and we were going out to check on the gravesite. I was looking for breakfast and told him so. He said ‘come ride out to the cemetery with me to check on a few things and then we’ll go get some breakfast’. Well, we got almost to the cemetery when he realized he didn’t have enough cars to bring everyone from the hotel to the site.  I suggested to Tom, ‘why don’t you leave Wes with me at the cemetery. It’s only an hour and that will make two more seats.’ He said ‘if you do that, that’ll make it work out.’ So Wes and I stayed at the cemetery. About that time the National Enquirer helicopter was circling, and there were girls behind tombstones with long-neck telescopic lenses on cameras. The police started circling telling them to get the cameras out. We were about 100 yards from where the hearse was sitting with the body in it. I saw the funeral director coming across the cemetery toward us. I thought he’s probably going to ask us to leave. He came up and he said ‘Are you guys family?’ And I said no, I used to play in the band for a long time and he said they getting ready to bring the body over to the gravesite and there were only four of them, and Jesse wanted him at the site before she and the family gets here and I was wondering if you would like to help bring the body over. I said, I know this doesn’t sound right but nothing would please me more.”

“We wound up carrying him across the gravesite and I flash back, and I’m going to tell you something I don’t tell everybody, but I imagined he spoke to me and it was almost like I could hear him and he said “Now Billy don’t you drop me, you son of a bitch.” It was almost like I heard him and it was the only thing that kind of relieved me a little bit but that was the hardest couple of hundred feet I’ve ever carried.”

“It was like the hand of fate had something to do with it. It was not planned. I didn’t go out to do that and Jessi didn’t know it was going to happen. Nobody knew it was going to happen. I understand that she was pleased when she heard it later because she knew how much he meant to me, to all of us.” he says quietly.

Waylon himself could have probably predicted the industry’s reaction to his passing. A man and his music that mainstream radio had long forgotten was suddenly in vogue, but alas only for a short period of time. “Radio wouldn’t even play his music a month before he died. And then they jumped all over him and talked about what a great man he was,” Billy Ray recalls “and he didn’t even hear a note of it.”

The stats can be almost recited rotely: His 1976 album, “Wanted: The Outlaws”  was the first country album to be certified platinum. He had 16 No.1 country singles in a career that spanned five decades. He won two Grammys and was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001.  But now, as the tributes fade and the dusty record sleeves are returned to the backroom shelves, the true legacy of Waylon Jennings life is what remains. His family, his friends and his music.

“He gave us a lot. He did what he intended to do. It maybe kind of corny, but he really did what he intended to do and that was to leave us something for us to remember him by. And when I hear his music I just think how could he have been so right. How can one man know that far ahead or have that much instinct about what he’s doing? He was good boy.” he pauses and then adds, “He’s okay. Let me tell you his soul is alright. In my heart I know that, beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

Laurie Joulie Take Country Back

Retro Interview: Billy Ray Reynolds – Whole Lot of Memories

Billy Ray was one of my favorite TCB interviews.Full length Audio Clips

1. Saratoga
2. Number One Thrill
3. It’ll Be Her
4. Atlanta’s Burning Down

Whole Lot Of Memories

Billy Ray Reynolds is a consummate storyteller. Whether  the words are spoken, written or set to music, he’s able to recall and share life and it’s history in intricate detail. Life gives us all an infinite amount of experiences to turn into treasured memories, unfortunately the opportunities to do so are often overlooked. Billy Ray is a man who cherishes each one.

A renaissance man of sorts, Billy Ray has been mesmerized by history since a young age. “I grew up on a small farm in Mississippi pickin’ cotton and you have a lot of time to fantasize, working in that type of work. I love history, especially American history. You cannot be born in the south and not be interested in the civil war and early pioneer history. The first frontier was the south and loved the west, and cowboys. I was a typical southern boy who liked horses.” But there was a twist to this typical childhood fascination. “I used to love to watch movies where they’d circle the wagons, and try to figure where the cameras more than I did watching the stories.”

Most of Billy Ray’s life work is seemingly eclectic, but solidly connected. As an actor, a musician, a songwriter, a screenplay writer he used every means available to record and conserve a balance of historic, natural and personal history. When he looks back at everything he’s done, he clearly sees the simple connections. “I think it’s all one. I love to do film. You can’t do film without music and you can’t do music without seeing pictures. When I hear a song, I see a story. Every line shows you, tells you, almost like a script.”

A legendary songwriter, Billy Ray has had his work recorded by some of country music’s finest including Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Tanya Tucker, and John Conlee. His own songwriting resonates with the appreciation he has for the purpose and intent of a country song. “I  think that’s just what country music is. It’s about the heritage. It’s about the common man, the working man what built our countries. I was always intrigued by the people like Johnny Horton and Johnny Cash who’s music could always entertain me with a song, and at the same time teach me something. Like the Battle of New Orleans or North to Alaska or Ira Hayes by Johnny Cash. There’s something about it that makes the hair get up on the back of my neck. It’s engrained, I don’t know from when. I’m not a big proponent of reincarnation of any type of cult like things, but I just felt like it sometimes come from before you’re born. It’s not an acquired taste, just something that you’re born with. It kind of haunts me a little bit.”

While always fostering this passion, Billy Ray was unknowingly in the midst of many history making moments as a long time member of Waylon Jennings band. Depending on your perspective, they were either unlikely outlaws or the very definition of one. The outlaw movement seems to have come to mean something entirely different than what actually transpired. Somehow it ended up as a moniker for behavior seen as rebellious and un-wielding instead of defining a creativeness that was unleash-able and respectfully nurtured.

After talking to Billy Ray one of the most compelling things that you come away with is a first hand perspective of the outlaw movement, which actually is responsible for erasing more musical boundaries than it defined. The outlaws of the 70’s didn’t fight to exclude people from the designation of country, but rather worked hard to be included on their own merits, and not by someone else’s narrow, political or economic based definitions.

Being labeled an outlaw gives you a reputation to live up to or down depending on the circumstances, with the word conjuring up a montage of concrete and abstract images of a rebellious, defiant independent soul. Billy Ray’s debut album Whole Lot of Memories has been a lifetime in the making. Waiting for someone to call has taken years. “I’ve been trying to get into the music business for a long time. The whole time I was with Waylon, the reason I was working for him was to try and figure out where the door was and when I came back here, I don’t want to blame this on anybody, but it was almost like I was too loyal to Waylon. I must be an outlaw too.”

“I work in film a little bit, and the parts I usually get are bad guy parts, or some guy who does something really evil. People will say why don’t you ever get the good guy parts. Well, all the pretty boys get the good guy parts, I always get killed on page two. That’s what the film business is about. There’s an old saying in the business: ‘the greater the villain, the greater the hero.’ They just cast me in those parts because I grew up and had that look I guess.”

He instinctively knew that what he needed was someone to see past the outlaw/renegade image and all of it’s preconceptions and listen to his music and understand where it comes from. He found that person in Dan Tyler. “Dan’s probably as good a friend as I’ve ever had. He’s one of the people that saw through everything.” From there one door opened led to another.

Dan Tyler was also instrumental in finding a label that would fit perfectly with what they wanted to do. The small but mighty Compadre Records is that perfect fit. Up until a short while ago, under the ownership of young entrepreneur Brad Turcotte, it was the home of a couple of solid compilation discs of Texas music. The Texas based label has built itself a small but impressive roster. “Dan found Brad Turcotte. He’s just a firecracker. He’s the gentlest person in the world but he really loves the music. He’s his own person, and he’s an example of someone that’s out there wishing there was some decent roots, ground based music going on.”

“He’s a class act. That’s another thing that’s been missing. People like myself have sat around for years waiting for a major label to see us, and we just would go from day to day. I came here to be a singer, I never came here to be a writer. I had to be a writer in order to survive, and that in essence made me be an actor because I had to make a living. The real truth is that it’s always been wishing to be an artist. It’s not anything egotistical, it’s just what I think I need to be doing. I can’t tell my stories unless I have a record label and you can’t book or work unless you have a record label and I’d really wanted something with dignity to it. “

When Dan came to him with the suggestion of a co-producer, Billy couldn’t have been more pleased. “When he said Lou Bradley I was just thrilled because he worked with Billy Sherrill, George Jones and all those people.” With Lou on board things continued to fall smoothly into place. Pulling the band together was almost as easy as making a list — in fact that’s what Billy did. “I wrote the names on a piece of paper. If I was going to have a dream band this is who I’d want to be in it. Believe it or not, they went and put it together.”  

The band had an impressive background of credits, spanning many genres of music. Billy and the his producers had only one request when the band asked them how they’d like them to play. “I’m not qualified to tell you how to play,” he told them “but let me say this, when we walk out of here, please let me walk out of here with a country record.”

What they asked for is exactly what they got. Every nook and cranny, corner and crevice of this album is country.

If you’ve got the right connections, a casual mention of thinking Merle Haggard would do a great job on a verse in a song, can turn into a pretty impressive debut single. “Two Step Me Back To Texas” is a solid country/western swing ala Bob Wills tune that Billy Ray co-penned with a friend. “When we were in the studio I just kind of off-handedly made the comment I’d kill just to hear Merle Haggard sing that verse about Bob Wills.” he shares “I went on about my business. A couple of months later Lou called me and said I want you to come out to the studio to listen to something. What he had done is he had gone out to California and taken the tape and in the middle of the night had put Merle on that first side. When Merle Haggard came on the speaker I thought I was going to fall through the floor. A few days later Merle called Lou and said ‘Do they like the song?’ and Lou said ‘He cried.’ I told him he could have coughed it all and I would have still liked it. It’s Merle Haggard. I’ve got to tell you this, I could get out of the business right now and it wouldn’t hurt as much as it would have if I had never heard that. It was like one of the highlights of my life.”

Dan Tyler not only contributes his production skills to the project but also his songwriting talent. One of the most poignant songs on the album is The River, a song that speaks to the kind of history we all leave behind ecologically. It’s a song and an issue that means a lot to Billy Ray. “Since I work on the river I am very much into ecology and keeping the water clean. I have a story I tell on the boat: I was standing up looking off the edge of the boat, and looking how beautiful and pristine it is and looking at a miracle like it’s 200 years ago, no houses, no power lines or anything and he comes a milk jug floating by. It just destroys what we need to be. There’s no reason for a milk jug to be floating in the Mississippi River, and no telling where it came from.”

Dan also contributes a song that was originally planned as another duet, before fate intervened. “Waylon was going to do the song Old Pro just a few days before he passed. He said I meant to do that the last time I was in, but I just didn’t have the energy. If I get my energy back and I come back in I’m going to do it. I will always regret that he’s not on there but just the fact of knowing that he was going to do it means a lot. I was going to let him do the verse about the lady sitting in the corner.”

Billy Ray has a distinct conversational style to his songwriting and one of the outstanding tracks on the album showcases the style superbly. Whatever Turns You On, co-written with Dan Tyler got it’s humble beginnings from a simple question he asked Dan as they sat down in his apartment to begin a songwriting session. “Would you like some cream in your coffee or do you want it black?”

One of, if not the definitive song he’s written is Atlanta’s Burning Down. While on the on the road with The Allman Brothers Band, Billy Ray penned the song, which ended up as the title track on Dickey Betts’ third solo effort. The song while has it’s own place in country music history, but Billy hopes it does something else as well. “I didn’t start out doing this, but if the song could inspire one child to pick up a book…A lot of people were never interested in that history until they heard that song. Really it’s not a historic song, it’s a love song, a love ballad. It’s about a guy was ready to go AWOL, he’s ready to go home and not fight the war and even though our country is the greatest thing we have, there’s something more personal, somebody that he cares about more than anything. Just the tribulations of him having to travel across country to get to where she was, 6 or 700 miles to get back to this person he has a definite purpose in his mind.”

He continues to follow where his passions take him. He continues to write screenplays. He has completed one on the life of Jimmie Rodgers, and is currently working on another. The association with Compadre Records has him heading to Austin in mid-October to put together a band and do some touring of the Lone Star state with label mate, and songwriting legend himself, Billy Joe Shaver

We end the phone call making a promise that someday if the opportunity arises we’ll spend a few more hours over the stories. In the meantime, Billy Ray Reynolds has a whole lot of memories stored up and if we’re fortunate enough he’ll keep discovering creative ways to share them.

Not many artists make their debut album this late in the game but what Billy Ray Reynolds brings to the table after a lifetime of learning, making and living history, only enhances the lustre of this release. One listen may leave thinking that it should be a requirement of every artist to have lived a little of their songs before writing them. The effect of doing so definitely adds a golden hue.