‘Back and Beyond Full Steam’ : Jennings to Return to Santa Ana, Where Heart Pain Started

Some people feel their hearts seizing up in their chests, and their life passes before their eyes. Others are struck by terror. Some have sudden, life-changing realizations.

But when Waylon Jennings’ heart turned on him--first sending him to the hospital in October after he had chest pains between shows at the Crazy Horse in Santa Ana, then heralding triple-bypass surgery when they struck again in December--the 52-year-old singer had his own response: “When it happened, it didn’t scare me or anything, it . . . me off, because I knew I had it coming, and I had no one to blame but myself.”

Jennings might be a little hard on himself. The poor diet and cigarette habit of four to six packs a day, while appalling by most standards, were relatively tame vices in contrast with the 21 years of drug and alcohol abuse that he had abandoned four years earlier.

“If I’d always eaten right and lived right,” he calculated, “I probably could have been a great athlete, because my constitution was like 10 men.”

If the path of excess leads to wisdom, Jennings has gone the distance, and accrued some bonus miles on top of that. Well before he and Willie Nelson fronted country music’s outlaw movement in the early ‘70s, Jennings was a legendary hell-raiser, living at a bent where “you still want more, and you’ve done it all,” as he describes it on his autobiographical “A Man Called Hoss” album in 1987.

But more recently he has parlayed that experience into an honest, introspective artistry with few equals in country music. In conversation now, his soft-spoken Texas baritone seems the very voice of reason, unless you get him going on such subjects as the government, the still-self-righteous Nashville music clique or a couple of other topics where his tone lets you know he could still bite the head off a snake if occasioned.

Jennings will return to the Crazy Horse tonight and Saturday. Reached in Nashville earlier this week, he said his cardiac traumas had been halted before they could turn into full-blown heart attacks, and his heart muscle came through undamaged. He has recently returned from a European tour, has a summer on the road ahead and is preparing to record an album that he says will be a major, but still secret, departure from anything he has previously done.

As his schedule suggests, he is not feeling too poorly at all.

“I’m back and beyond full steam,” he enthused. “I feel better than I felt in 20 years. It (arterial clogging) is a thing that creeps up on you, every day closing up a little bit more, and consequently, you get to feeling worse and worse. It takes maybe 10 or 15 years to accumulate through cholesterol and smoking, and smoking just made mine collapse.

“But I haven’t had a cigarette in over 8 months, after 41 years of it, and it’s amazing how fast your lungs can heal up.”

The experience prompted him to choose a healthier life style, including regular exercise and dietary changes. But he did not particularly change his approach to life; that had already happened when he quit drugs.

“The whole thing is,” he said, “I was already into my family and my children, and living that way. It just made me get that much more into that. I still enjoy singing and everything. but my first priority is Jessi (his wife, singer Jessi Colter) and my children.”

That’s certainly a change from Jennings’ “crazy days” recounted on “A Man Called Hoss”: “I was never mean to Jessi--I just never was there.”

He did walk away with one realization: “There was lot of pain, but I never thought about coming close to death or anything until after the operation. And then for the first time in my life I realized that someday I probably, maybe, might die. Maybe not very soon, but I probably will someday, which is going to be all right too.”

While Jennings’ whimsical tone suggested he had not seriously considered himself immortal, he is scoring a fair record for cheating death. Along with surviving his ingestive excesses of the ‘60s and ‘70s, it was he who gave up his seat to J.P. (The Big Bopper) Richardson for the ill-fated flight that took Richardson, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens to their deaths.

Jennings grew up in West Texas, where he got a job as a disc jockey at age 12 and started his own band at 13. Like his friend and sometime bandleader, Holly, Jennings grew up mixing country with the other music he heard on the radio, particularly the blues and rhythm-and-blues music he heard on late-night Louisiana stations.

He recorded some minor classics in the ‘60s but did not hit his stride until the early ‘70s, when his insistence on recording his hard-edged music his own way bucked the assembly-line Nashville music establishment and kicked off the “outlaw” movement.

Assessing the present state of country music, Jennings said: “I think it’s healthy, but it’s in a limbo period right now. A lot of them (country artists) are trying to cut pop records now, trying to cross over to it. I think the best way to do that is stay where you’re at, and let them come over to where you’re at. A lot of them don’t realize that.

“It was sort of like this right before Willie and I hit in the ‘70s, where all the music sounded alike, and they had a formula, and they were all writing the same songs. There’s a lot of that right now, and it’s tending towards ‘If you dance real good you can sell a lot of records.’ ”

If he does not take any particular notice of the current “new traditionalist” movement, it is because “I don’t think it really exists, because it’s always been there, you know. You’re either country or you’re not. There have always been people with the soul of it.

“Some of the new traditionalists are great. I like some of the songs Dwight (Yoakam) did. But Dwight seems awful bitter about something, and I can’t figure out what it is. Maybe we can get him some new jeans.” (Yoakam’s frayed knees are practically a trademark.)

“I’ll tell you something I heard backstage a couple of days ago that I thought was funny. I won’t tell you who it was, but it was a couple of new artists. One said (Jennings’ voice turned petulant here), ‘If I have to play two shows again, I’m going to make them pay me.’ And then one of them was complaining about where his limousine was.

“And I wondered, ‘If you don’t pay dues, how long are you going to last?’ When you go directly from oblivion to a $300,000 bus, that’s not very many dues. I don’t want everybody to have a rough time, but when they start saying things like that. . . . You have to be dedicated, and you have to get some dirt on your hands if you’re going to have any staying power at all, especially in the blues and country music, because that’s where the roots are--and the rough, hard times.”

Though American life seems to be growing more complex and further from the soil every day, Jennings believes there is a growing appeal for the direct, unadorned music he and some other country artists offer.

“We’re still (making) honest music,” he said, “and people still have respect for honesty. I’ve always believed that. I’m not trying to set the world on fire anymore, and therefore I’m not going to get into something that’s not honest--and there’s a lot of that out there--but there’s still a lot of the good honest music too.”

Waylon Jennings sings at 7 and 10 p.m. tonight and Saturday at the Crazy Horse Steak House, 1580 Brookhollow Drive, Santa Ana. Tickets: $29.50. Also Tuesday. Information: (714) 549-1512.