Waylon Jennings – Phase One: The Early Years 1958-1964

Release of this glance at the formative years of Waylon Jennings’ career was slated well before anyone knew the disc would arrive just after the sad news of his passing. The timing only makes hearing these sides, recorded for a variety of labels long before the Outlaw years, all the more poignant.

We’ve all had time to consider Waylon’s singular contributions, to read the remembrances and career summations and to hoist one over his hits one more time, so we figure we have a pretty good idea now who he was. The man was a rebel and a traditionalist, an edgy performer with heart and soul, the proprietor of one of the great booming and delicate voices in American popular singing, and a master picker — of songs, and of Telecasters. And he brought a new, irresistibly propulsive rhythm to country music that was his own.

His explosion onto the world scene in the ’70s has understandably left many with the impression that after a brief tug-of-war with label traditionalists, he arrived ready to rip, pure-Waylon, all-Outlaw, right then. This disc documents a very different story, one that has Waylon himself, and a variety of labels and producers, foraging for material that best suited him, that best worked for him, that might identify him and become his own — for these first seven years.

Even then, these experiments would take him only to the door of a “Phase Two” at RCA that produced relatively few permanently memorable records for eight more years beyond that, until 1972, and mass recognition.

Which is not to say that a lot of these cuts aren’t terrific, because they are. Virtually all of them work elements that would become “Waylon Jennings style” later, which makes them fascinating, to boot. He’d later say of this first period, “I was hanging in limbo. I was somewhere between folk, Dylan, rockabilly, and Flatt & Scruggs. I didn’t know where to go.”

With the exception of a downplayed role for bluegrass, all those sounds and more made it to these records — documenting a young Texan who often sang higher than we’d now expect, who was sleek and tougher-than-Elvis handsome, and being pushed toward movies and some sort of stardom.

There was first that rockabilly side, which meant, for this West Texan, his Buddy Holly story. He was a local DJ in Buddy’s Lubbock hometown, the guy who did the handclaps on “You’re The One”, the fill-in band member who, he’d be reminded too often, gave up the seat on the final tour.

The CD starts off with the two fairly well-known cuts Holly produced for Waylon — the Holly-penned R&B number “When Sin Stops”, with King Curtis on sax, and the ragged-but-fun faux-French cover of “Jole Blon”. The Holly connection does not stop there. The grief-stricken Waylon recorded one of the many maudlin salutes to the dead rockers, “The Stage (Stars In Heaven)”, as forgettable as others in that genre.

But he scores very nicely with Holly songs. A 1963 version of “Rave On” not only rocks out, with Waylon on some Buddy-style guitar, but adds Mariachi trumpet from Herb Alpert that either slightly predated Johnny Cash’s “Ring Of Fire” arrangement or was influenced by it. (“Ring Of Fire” was recorded March 25, 1963; Waylon’s version of “Rave On” dates either to January 28, 1963, or to October 2. The first session was in Phoenix; the second was in Hollywood, where Alpert plied his trade.)

In any case, it adds a new flavor to that original rave-up. A 1964 version of Holly’s “It’s So Easy” shows he had a band wicked enough to match his guitar leads and simulate Jerry Allison’s rolling drumming. (For the curious, this band’s live sound is captured on the Bear Family Waylon disc Live At JD’s.) For a time he would be a post-rockabilly pop singer — with one really big voice — and the obvious models, by the sound of the cuts here, were Roy Orbison and early “It’s Only Make Believe”-era Conway Twitty. A number of sessions capture him in this mode.

Whether it’s outright covers of Orbison’s “Crying” and “Dream Baby”, the Roy-like “I’m Coming Home,” or the Twitty-inflected “Love Denied”, the sheer power of this emerging voice is put well on display. More interesting is the growing understanding that the way Waylon would use his vocal power best was to restrain it; he’d never really be one for semi-operatic melodramatics, and these are not the sort of numbers he’d make his own.

Then there was that folk-influenced “Bob Dylan” angle. This aspect made for some good — and ahead of their time — folk-rock and country-rock records. He’s very comfortable with this material, and walked a folk/country line that his friends Bobby Bare and Anita Carter would also travel in the same 1963-65 period. (In fact, Waylon’s later “Anita, You’re Dreaming”, dedicated to his sometime singing partner, is a note-for-note turn on Dylan’s “To Ramona”.)

Jennings delivers a very lively “Don’t Think Twice”, a double-tracked vocal and whistling version of Ian Tyson’s “Four Strong Winds” that shows the Canadian’s country side well before he seemed to recognize it himself, and, for the big surprise, a riveting, 12-string electric guitar version of “House Of The Rising Sun”, finished before the Animals’ hit emerged — and a clear early folk-rock example.

All of which is intriguing, and good. But the lasting impact on Waylon was probably the Dylan-influenced search for pointed, challenging lyrics from new songwriters, and for unconventional material for country records. Those would definitely stick.

It occurred to somebody, eventually, that maybe Waylon Jennings should take a crack at honky-tonk. From this we get better-than-competent, deeper-voiced versions of Buck Owens’ “Love’s Gonna Live Here” and George Jones’ “White Lightnin'” (both evidencing some bluegrass influence while they’re at it), as well as Ray Price’s “Burning Memories”.

The most surprising cuts here, amidst all of these near-Waylon variations, are a handful of sides that already simply sound like him — freed from genre, and seemingly an almost unnoticed precursor of just where he’d wind up. In “My Baby Walks All Over Me”, from as early as 1960, in a turn on Harlan Howard’s “Sally Was A Good Old Girl” (1964), and especially on the head-turning “Just To Satisfy You” (also ’64), the voice dips and hits the meanings just the way we’d hear it do a dozen years later. Near-Waylon rhythms set in, whether faster or slower modes, and everything just falls into place. Go figure.

Nobody yet said “Stop right there, kid!” But after a considerable journey, he’d get back there. With a vengeance.