Cowboy Jack Clement – Singers are a pain in the ass if you want to know the truth about it. Most of ’em. Well, all of ’em: A conversation with Cowboy Jack Clement

ND: You worked with him on the Bird Named Yesterday album. [Cowboy conceived of the 1967 album, produced it, and wrote most of the songs.] Was Bird Named Yesterday the first country concept album?

JC: It was very early, but I don’t know if it was the first. “The Air Conditioner Song” from that album, that’s one of my favorites that I’ve written, ’cause it’s true. It was me when I was a kid. My mother used to drag me to Newport, Arkansas, several times a year to visit my grandparents. I’d like it once I got there. You could walk to the movie theaters, watch the trains coming in, and you had the levee to play on and slide down on cardboard. I got to experience that small town, Tom Sawyer life, so that was good.

Well, I must have been eight or nine, and “You Are My Sunshine” was a big hit at that time. This must have been about 1939, something like that. I’d be laying in my little bed with the window open, and out the window I could hear girls singing “You Are My Sunshine”. They sang other things, but they sang that several times a night. They sang it so pretty, and I envisioned them as being beautiful. But I never saw them.

That’s what “The Air Conditioning Song” is about. It’s great to be in a sealed place and not have to sweat, but you miss something when you don’t have those windows open. I mean, you can miss something good.

III. RULES WERE MADE TO BE BROKEN

ND: How long was it after you moved back to Nashville before you began propping up new artists?

JC: I got here in ’65, and it was that year when I cut Charley Pride’s first record. I met him through this guy Jack Johnson. One night we were at a place called the Professional Club. The building’s gone now, but it was a real hangout for songwriters. Tom T. Hall would be there, and Kristofferson. I took Kristofferson there the first night he came to town, and he got so caught up in it that he resigned his Army commission and moved here to be a music bum. But the Professional Club was a great place. I’d be there, go home to write a song about 8 o’clock in the evening, drive back down there and sing it to the boys, you know?

We’re in there one night and having a few cocktails, and Jack keeps telling me about Charley Pride. He talked me into going across the street to his office and listen to it. So we went over there, and listened, and it sounded pretty good. I could tell the guy could sing and that he was for real, and that he was really country. So we went back over there and had a few more cocktails and I said, “Get him in here, I’ll cut a song on him.”

Five or six days later, Charley came back from seeing his father in Mississippi, and I had a session set up at RCA Studio B and we went in and did it. I paid for it, and…well, then I had the only Charley Pride record in town. I had this office with these big speakers, and I’d get people in there and play Charley’s record. Loud, man. Like, really loud. I’d play that record and then I’d show ’em his picture. That was fun.

ND: Was he nervous going into those first sessions?

JC: He was born nervous. But somehow nervousness made him go, and he liked to have an audience in the control room. That first session, word had got out that Cowboy was going to produce a black guy. So there were a bunch of people in the control room, including Connie B. Gay, who later told Chet about Charley and helped get him a record deal. So I found out then that Charley liked having an audience. After that, his sessions were more open than normally my sessions would be.

ND: That’s one of your rules of recording, as posted in Johnny Cash’s cabin out in Hendersonville: “Don’t bring or invite anyone.”

JC: Well, rules were made to be broken.

ND: Plenty of people showed up to watch the Dreamin’ My Dreams sessions that you produced on Waylon Jennings. I’ve heard it could be a real party in there, and that you and Waylon didn’t always get along famously during the recording.

JC: There was one time I remember that Jessi [Colter] was there, and by then I’m married to her sister, and some other people were in the control room, and I wanted them out. I was being sort of dramatic. Waylon’s looking through the glass, seeing me moving around, and he thinks I’m in there having a party or something. That’s when I got to thinking more and more about not having a control room window. Something about you can see through a wall, but you can’t hear: Fakes people out.

Waylon was on a lot of cocaine during that time. That had a lot to do with it. But we didn’t argue all the time. We had some great times. We had some arguments about he thought he was spending too much money on a piano player, Charles Cochran. He thought he was paying too much for a piano player who didn’t play all that much. Fact is, Charles was doing some very creative laying out on some things.

It worked out, though. Dreaming My Dreams is one of the albums I’m most proud of. Maybe the one I’m proudest of, I don’t know.