Highwaymen : On the Road Again : Cash, Nelson, Jennings and Kristofferson--the last of the Nashville legends?--tour with hard-edged brand of country music

This is the last cowboy song

The end of a hundred year waltz

The voices sound sad as they’re singing along

Another piece of America’s lost.

--”The Last Cowboy Song” by Ed Bruce and Ron Peterson

Standing next to each other on stage at the Rosemont Horizon Arena, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson look like--and represent--a living Mt. Rushmore of country music.

Survivors of a collective 12 marriages, more than 115 years on the road and untold bottles of whiskey and pills, these legendary veterans of America’s honky-tonks and highways have put their wild times behind them and now call themselves the Highwaymen--after a Jimmy Webb song that was the title of their million-selling joint album in 1985.

For years, however, they were known in Nashville as “outlaws” because of their renegade lifestyles and artistic independence--their refusal to tailor their music to bland, crossover-pop guidelines that rob country music of its tradition and soul.

Rather than dance to Nashville’s tune, each of the four introduced his own beat. They wore their hair long, had as much of an ear for Bob Dylan as for Hank Williams, courted young rock audiences as well as older country ones and put together ambitious concept albums rather than just three-minute jukebox singles.

So, it was no surprise that the nearly 10,000 people in the Rosemont Horizon audience--teen-agers to grandparents--responded wildly at the first notes of their songs about restless idealism and troubled times.

But there was a melancholy edge to the first-ever tour by the four veteran singer-songwriters. While celebrating the great country-music tradition, the shows also raised questions about the tradition’s future.

Country music continues to develop best-sellers, but it hasn’t produced a male artist of Mt. Rushmore stature since Nelson, Jennings, Kristofferson and Merle Haggard arrived in the late ‘60s. (Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton are two female greats from the late ‘60s and ‘70s).

Instead of strong individuals singing meaningful songs, the top of the charts is generally filled now with creditable vocalists who either imitate the old country greats or bury all traces of emotion under lush arrangements in hopes of another “Urban Cowboy” crossover to the pop market.

Is another piece of America being lost?

“I wonder about that,” Cash said shortly after the Rosemont Horizon concert. “There hasn’t been a new Kristofferson in 20 years, or a new Nelson or Jennings . . . someone who made a difference in the business . . . someone who came along stepping out where no man has gone before in our business.

“I think it is the ‘Urban Cowboy’ syndrome, Nashville (record executives) still trying to sell country records to the people who are buying cowboy boots in New York City. I worry about it a lot, but don’t like to think of this tour as a last round-up. I’d like to believe it’s an inspiration, a new beginning.”

It’s a measure of people who don’t understand

The pleasures of being in a hillbilly band.

I got my first guitar when I was 14

Now I’m over 30 and I’m still wearing jeans.

--”Amanda” by Bob McDill

Jennings, a Buddy Holly protege who became arguably the most dynamic country singer of his generation, was in his late 30s when he recorded “Amanda” in 1974, and he’s proud that the lyrics still apply. He’s over 50 now, but still wearing jeans.

“The pleasures of being in a hillbilly band?” he said, repeating the reporter’s question as he waited outside a Chicago hotel in his shiny Silver Eagle bus for the ride to Detroit, where the Highwaymen were to perform next.

You’d think that Jennings would have an answer ready after singing the song some 2,000 times. But he paused.

“I think it’s the freedom,” he said tentatively, as if he’s never been able to adequately define what being a country music star means to him.

“Being in a cowboy band is a way of getting through life without having to give in--and the jeans is part of it. People used to tell us to dress differently, sing differently, make records differently because that was the way to get ahead in Nashville,” Jennings continued.

“But we weren’t interested in just getting ahead. I didn’t see why a country singer couldn’t do a Beatles song as well as a Hank Williams song, or why we had to wear sequins on our pants. Johnny and Willie and Kris all felt the same way and that made us outsiders. But we fought and we won.”

Like Cash, however, Jennings worries about some of the trends in country music these days.

“It’s getting to sound like rock ‘n’ roll did in the ‘70s, when everything seemed mass production--no more personality or character,” he said. “Every record is starting to sound alike.”

In separate interviews, Kristofferson and Nelson also complained about country music’s tradition and spirit being endangered by record company executives and radio programmers who want safe, easily digested records rather than challenging or adventurous ones.

Not everyone in country music agrees.

A few country music executives say privately that they suspect an element of sour grapes in the Highwaymen’s complaints about the state of country music today.

“No one can ever take away what Willie and Waylon and Johnny and Kris did for country music,” said one record man who asked not to be quoted because he considers himself a friend of the musicians. “But times change. New favorites emerge and that’s what happened with them.

“Their tour is an example,” he said. “They used to be able to headline arenas by themselves, but they have to join together to sell that many tickets. They’ll still have hit records, but they won’t be the force anymore that they once were. Nobody stays on top forever.”

Lon Helton, country editor of the trade magazine Radio & Records, thinks many of the Highwaymen’s complaints about the slick “Urban Cowboy” syndrome are out of date.

“No question about it, the ‘Urban Cowboy’ days (of the early ‘80s) gave us a lot of overproduced music, but things have changed greatly. There’s an emphasis again on traditional artists and I feel the envelope of country music is wider and deeper than it has ever been.”

Helton and others interviewed nominated numerous artists when asked about people who might eventually be considered the equal of a Cash or a Nelson. Among those named: Randy Travis, Clint Black, Kathy Mattea, Dwight Yoakam, Garth Brooks, Ricky Van Shelton, the O’Kanes.

Ironically, Lyle Lovett and k. d. lang, who won Grammys this year for best male and female country vocalists, were also cited (see box on Page 77), but several experts questioned whether the two artists are really committed to country.

No one, however, came even close to suggesting that any contemporary artist yet approaches the influence or talent of any of the Highwaymen.

Larry Daniels, general program manager of award-winning KNIX-FM/KCW-AM radio in Phoenix, declared, “I have great expectations for the future of country music, however, today’s breed of artists are sound-alikes.

“When you look at Johnny Cash, Kristofferson, Willie and Waylon, each has such an individuality. There’s no way you could mistake them. They all helped reshape country music. No one since can really make that claim.”

The teaming of those four singers on the tour--which coincided with the release of the “Highwayman 2” album--was especially touching for Cash’s wife, June Carter, a descendent of the original Carter Family--the first group to be elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Carter has seen all the greats of the music since the ‘40s--sharing a stage with everyone from Williams to Presley, but this tour has special meaning for her.

“There’s something just warm and good about this show,” she said during a sound check for the Chicago show. “You can tell they’re friends and that they are having fun. I also see survivors and it it almost makes me cry. I want to say, ‘Thank you God,’ . . . They’ve all been through hell and fire water.

“But I always knew they’d all be all right because I think God touches certain people . . . that He gives them the talent and the experience so that they can help other people with their music . . . help heal the heartbreaks and lift the spirit.”

He’s a poet, he’s a prophet

He’s a pusher, he’s a pilgrim

And a preacher and a problem when he’s stoned.

He’s a walkin’ contradiction

Partly truth and partly fiction

Takin’ every wrong direction

on his lonely way back home.

--”The Pilgrim: Chapter 33” by Kris Kristofferson

Kristofferson sometimes seems the “baby” of the Highwaymen because he takes such good care of himself physically, running and working out with weights. Yet at 53, Kristofferson, who is as well known as an actor as a musician because of roles in such films as “A Star is Born” and “Heaven’s Gate,” is a year older than Jennings and only slightly younger than Nelson (56) and Cash (58).

Another reason Kristofferson appears part of a different generation is that he was the last of the four to arrive in Nashville. He’s also separated from the others by background. Nelson, Jennings and Cash grew up in small towns in Texas (Nelson and Jennings) or Arkansas (Cash), dreaming about following the mournful wail of the passing trains to the big city.

Kristofferson, on the other hand, didn’t grow up in rural isolation--or poverty. He was the quintessential All-American boy: the son of an Air Force general, a Golden Gloves boxer, a Rhodes Scholar, a teaching post at West Point.

But he turned his back on it all in the mid-’60s and went to Nashville to write songs. To support himself and to be close to the singers he wanted to pitch, Kristofferson worked as a janitor at Columbia Records’ recording studio.

Bill Ivey, executive director of the Country Music Foundation, says one of Kristofferson’s greatest contributions to country music was his infusion of the urban perspective into what had been chiefly a rural tradition.

“Kris wrote about the everyday concerns of adults living in a kind of urban society and dealing with problems of relationships in really tough, hard-edged songs. As a writer, he probably had as great an impact on Nashville as Hank Williams did.

“That’s the quality most needed in Nashville today--that hard-hitting kind of against-the-grain, never-say-die spirit that Kristofferson and Cash and the others had.”

Cash, Jennings and Nelson were already heroes to Kristofferson by the time he settled in Nashville. He not only tried to write some songs tailored for their styles, but also used them as subject matter for songs.

In songs such as “The Pilgrim: Chapter 33” and “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” he wrote about the self-destructiveness and idealism of the Nashville music scene in the late ‘60s

Recalling that period, Kristofferson said: “I fell in with a group of writers in Nashville that you might call the underground, . . . people who thought songs were something meant to be taken seriously.

“I can remember we would stay up for days after days at a time, take whatever you needed to keep going. You had a tradition of crazy poets and artists. To think that Hank Williams did everything he did and then he died when he wasn’t even 30 doesn’t tell you to sit back and pace yourself.”

If the Outlaws once flirted with danger, times have changed. They are healthy now. Jennings, who underwent triple bypass surgery in 1988, carries an exercise bike with him on the bus. Cash, who underwent double coronary artery bypass the same year, praises the virtues of a fruit-protein drink he enjoys each morning for breakfast.

One of the joys of Nelson’s day is holding his 15-month-old son, Luke. Kristofferson jogs every morning. The tour too is a real family affair, with children and all the wives--or, in Nelson’s case, his steady companion and Luke’s mother, makeup artist Angie D’Angelo.

Enthused about the response on the brief Highwaymen swing, the four singers are now thinking about a West Coast tour, possibly in the fall.

Amanda, light of my life

Fate should have made you

A gentleman’s wife.

--”Amanda” by Bob McDill

Jennings’ bus driver is named Steve Miller, but everyone calls him Dog, a nickname he inherited from his father. “I started out as Pup for years,” he said with a touch of pride.

It was just after 1 a.m. and Dog was waiting for the signal from the drivers in Nelson’s and Kristofferson’s buses that they were ready to roll to the next city. Cash prefers to sleep in the hotel, then travel by bus to the next city in the morning. The others, however, like the road late at night when everything’s dark and mysterious and a bit more romantic.

“What’s holding us up?” Jennings asked the driver, who explained that the crew was still loading some equipment on another bus.

The customized buses--which cost between $300,000 and $500,000 and get about five miles per gallon--travel together, out of a spirit of kinship and so that help is available in case of trouble.

Jennings is a ruggedly handsome man with a surprisingly quick humor and a playful, puppy-dog disposition--now that he has bid farewell to the demons that possessed him during his pill days, a time when even his friends sometimes stepped back and gave him room when he approached.

The road late at night is a good time for reminiscing, and Jennings talked easily about the old times as the bus moved down the highway. He talked about the time when he first came to Nashville in the mid-’60s in a new yellow Cadillac. He put 300,000 miles on the car touring before stepping up to an old Dodge motor home.

But he mainly talked about people--how he roomed briefly with Cash, a teaming that generated tales of wild times that are legendary in country music. Often high on pills, both men, the story goes, would kick down the apartment door as often as unlock it because they’d lose their keys.

Jessi Colter, Jennings’ wife for just over 20 years and a singer-songwriter who had a Top 10 pop-country hit in 1975 with “I’m Not Lisa,” sat next to her husband on one of the padded seats near the front of the bus.

Almost an hour after discussing the line in “Amanda” about the joys of being in a hillbilly band, Jennings returned to the song. “You know what other line hits me every time I sing it? The one about a gentleman’s wife. I think of Jessi.

“She was what made me finally quit (drugs). I looked at her face one day and I could see what I was doing to her, the pain I was causing. Nothing else had been enough. . . . The fact that I almost ruined my voice, that I couldn’t even see straight some nights on stage.”

None of the Highwaymen likes to talk about leaving the road, but Jennings seems the one who might be able to live easiest without it. He says he usually gets restless after a few weeks at home, but he also misses his 10-year-old son, Shooter. He hopes to concentrate on summer tours so that he can bring Shooter along, he says.

“It’s funny how your dreams and goals change over the years,” he said. “You know what my ambition is now? I want to live to see what he becomes. All of my other children are grown now and doing well, but there is something special about him. I guess it’s the fact that I had him so late in life that I realized I have to give him a lot real quick.”

On the road again

Just can’t wait to get on the road again

The life I love is making music with my friends

And I can’t wait to get on the road again

--”On the Road Again” by Willie Nelson

Gates Moore--”Gator” to his friends--didn’t like the way ice was forming on the side mirrors the next night as he steered Nelson’s bus, the “Honeysuckle Rose,” from Detroit to Minneapolis.

If the temperature on this chilly, late-night run dropped even another degree or two, Gator--who has driven Nelson’s tour bus for almost 10 years--feared the roads would become so treacherous that he’d have to reduce his speed to 20 m.p.h. or less, which could add four to five hours to the more than 12-hour journey.

Back in the lounge area, Nelson, who spends more than 200 days a year on the road, didn’t care if the trip took a few more hours. He’s more comfortable on the bus than he is in hotel rooms. In fact, he often stays out in the bus in the parking lot rather than go into the hotel with his band members, most of whom travel on a separate bus.

He pulled a videocassette from a shelf and slipped it into the VCR. “This is a promotional tape that explains the Cowboy Channel that we’re hoping to put on the air this fall,” he said.

Against a fanfare of music, the narrator’s voice declared: “The Cowboy Channel is for the free spirit in all of us . . . from the back roads to the board rooms, Americans are celebrating their heritage.”

The proposed cable channel’s lineup will include old Western TV shows, including “The Rifleman” and “Bonanza,” as well as original music programming.

Cowboys were Nelson’s first heroes--symbols during his childhood almost 50 years ago in Abbott, Tex. of an independence and freedom that exempted adults from the routine of regular, 9-to-5 jobs.

But cowboys had largely disappeared from the American scene by the time Nelson was old enough to strap on spurs, so he turned in the late ‘50s to what looked like the next best thing. He became a country-music singer.

Nelson had some early success, writing such hits as “Crazy” for Patsy Cline and “Night Life” for Ray Price, but he found that the hard-core emotion of early heroes like Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell was no longer in vogue in Nashville by the time he arrived there in the early ‘60s.

The pop-country Nashville sound, with its lush strings and soothing, anonymous background vocals, was prized on record because it had the best chance of crossing over into the pop market.

But Nelson helped country regain its passion and emotion. He gave up on Nashville in the late ‘60s, returning to Texas where he built a redneck-longhair coalition that was the core of the “Outlaw” movement. His long hair, jeans and red bandanna on stage still reflect the cross-cultural mix of those days.

Nelson has enjoyed the best record sales in recent years of any of the Highwaymen, but even his are well below what they were for much of the ‘70s and early ‘80s, when concept albums such as “The Red Headed Stranger” and “Stardust” were multimillion-sellers.

In an effort to rebuild his momentum, Nelson has gone along with Columbia Records’ desires to make his music sound a bit more polished. He in effect turned creative control of his next scheduled album over to an old pal, veteran producer Fred Foster, and simply went in and did the vocals.

Bob Montgomery, a Columbia Records executive in Nashville, is delighted with the results. He thinks there may be five hit singles in the collection.

Nelson, however, seemed a bit uncertain as he listened to the record on the bus. He wondered if some of the character of his music hadn’t been sacrificed. When the album ended, he replaced it in the tape deck with another album--a collection of old country standards that he shelved, he said, because he didn’t sense any interest in it by Columbia. He seemed more moved by the second tape and spoke about someday releasing it, perhaps on his own label.

When that tape ended, Nelson stared through the window, into the darkness.

Does he ever get tired of all the bus trips and all the nights on the road?

“No way,” he said quietly. “It’s like that Billy Joe Shaver line, ‘Movin’s the closest thing to being free.’ I think there’s some truth in that. I’ve never stayed in one place for long. I worked a lot of sit-down jobs in the early days out of necessity, but I was always wishing that Hank Thompson or one of those big bands would hire me so I could step onto the bus with them. . . . and I’ve never wanted to get off since.”

But if this world keeps on a turnin’

For the better or the worse

And all he ever gets is older and around

From the rockin’ of the cradle

To the rollin’ of the hearse

The goin’ up was worth the comin’ down.

--”The Pilgrim: Chapter 33” by Kris Kristofferson

Johnny Cash is known in country music as the Man in Black because he favors black shirts and pants on stage to underscore his support for the underdog. But he was wearing a green shirt as he sat in his Minneapolis hotel room just before noon the day of a show at the Met Center.

A portable word processor was by his side, rather than a guitar. His jaw was severely swollen, the aftermath of some dental work done before the show.

“I’m writing a book,” he said in that deep, distinctive Southern drawl. “Got about 120 pages done on that word processor. I love that thing. I wrote my other two books by hand and it was like carving in stone.

Though Cash came out of Memphis’ Sun Records in the late ‘50s with Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins, he stayed with country rather than move into rock because he had grown up idolizing country singers Hank Williams and the late Jimmie Rodgers.

But he took country music in new directions, mixing elements of folk and blues as he tried to capture in song elements of the working man’s life in this country.

“I wonder what would happen if I were starting out today in the music business,” he said. “I think the only job I’d be able to get would be singing in a coffee house somewhere because that’s where I could sing songs that mattered to me. I sure couldn’t get into singing most of the things you hear on the radio.”

Cash paused as his wife, June Carter, handed him a glass of his favorite protein drink.

“I hope this tour is going to make a difference in our business,” he said, finally. “Sometimes I feel the people in charge of this business today are looking for someone who looks good in a video when they should be looking for someone who has something real to say.

“You’ve got 33 songs on the show and I think they are all important. The reviewer in Detroit said something about it being a nostalgia thing, but it really isn’t. The songs are just as now and as alive as they ever were because a good song is about real life and real emotions and those things don’t get out of date.”