Waylon Jennings, Solo and Happy : In Out of the Cold, Country Music Star to Sing a Life Story of Sorts at the Crazy Horse

Waylon Jennings woke up and faced the music one cold night last summer. He was performing his usual set of songs, backed by his full band.

And he realized that he was bored.

“You know, not every show I play bores me,” said Jennings, who was on the phone from Nashville. “But a lot of my gigs are at fairgrounds, and they’re outside, and its cold. . . . One night I was playing one of those fairs, and out of the blue I came up with this idea.”

The idea was to play solo, and in small halls. And that’s just what he’s doing. Jennings will be up on the bandstand at the Crazy Horse in Santa Ana next Monday and Tuesday nights, all by himself.

Solo gigs are hardly unique. Struggling young artists such as Peter Case play them all the time. But if you’re Waylon Jennings, country music superstar just turned 50, the idea of playing intimate settings alone, of really opening yourself up to an audience, becomes something of an act of courage.

Jennings, who once played in a Buddy Holly band, kicked around country music for nearly 20 years before achieving mass recognition in the ‘70s for his own anti-Establishment blend of country and rock styles. Since then, Jennings (who has recorded 54 albums in 23 years) has charted hit after hit.

His private life, however, has had its downside: “I spent 21 years of my life on drugs,” he said, “and I have no excuse for that. I would have been a lot more successful sooner if I had never touched them.”

Jennings’ drug addiction, his boozing and brawling around with Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson and other hard-core country music mavericks--his “rough and rowdy days,” as he calls them--are just some of the topics he’ll touch on in his one-man show as it focuses on songs from “A Man Called Hoss,” his latest album. It’s an autobiography of sorts.

Jennings said he had been approached to do a more standard autobiography, in book form, but a record project seemed more realistic to him. He holed up with co-writer Roger Murrah and started with the present day, the last chapter of the story, a song called “Where Do We Go From Here?” He and Murrah went backward; the last song they wrote is the first on the album, “Littlefield,” about growing up in West Texas.

In his solo shows, Jennings sings all the songs from “Hoss,” playing electric guitar against prerecorded backing tracks. And he tells what he calls his “war stories. I can tell a good tale, and I’ve just been talking off the top of my head every night.

“At first, I got real confused, because every night I’d say something that afterwards my people would say, ‘You’ve got to tell that story tomorrow night too!’ But then I got so hung up on trying to remember all the right stories to tell; I couldn’t remember any of ‘em. So now I’m just talking, saying whatever comes up, you know?”

The reaction, he says, has been excellent: “Only problem is, Willie and I have trained people to jump and hoot and holler at our shows, and now I got to retrain ‘em to hush up a bit while I’m talking!”

Waylon Jennings will be at the Crazy Horse, 1580 Brookhollow Road, Santa Ana, Monday and Tuesday nights. Show times: 7 and 10 p.m. Admission: $25. Information: (714) 549-8233. Sold out.