“That song had also been recorded quite a few times before,” Watson says. “Waylon Jennings did it. That was the first version I ever heard. I liked the song but hated the march time on the chorus. Everybody else thought it was too sad, too morbid. People said, ‘Gene, if you ever have a hit, that won’t be it.'”
And it never would have been, save for Watson’s interpretation and the stately arrangement — understated until the final note, one of the longest and greatest in popular music, the sound of a singer reaching for an unpredicted, decadent triumph.
“We had about twenty minutes left on a session,” Watson remembers, “and I said, ‘I’d like to record this song. Jim Williams, the engineer, didn’t care for the song. Nobody did. So I got an acoustic guitar, sang it on the floor of the studio, let the musicians make their charts. We went through it once to make sure they had the chord progressions right, and we rolled tape. What you hear is a scratch track, one cut. We did it in fifteen minutes.”
Those musicians — Lloyd Green, Buddy Harmon, Pig Robbins, and Harold Bradley, the guitarist and session leader — didn’t know how Watson would sing it or what he would find at the end. Watson, likely, didn’t either.
“When I reached and held that last note, Harold turned around and looked at me. We were doing the background vocals at the same time. Harold saw what I was doing and the band just flowed with me. The only thing is, I didn’t know I’d have to end my shows with it from then on. Otherwise I wouldn’t have hit that high note!
“Those things happen once in a career,” he says of that session in Nashville. “That was the one time for me.”
“Farewell Party” began a string of hits through the ’80s that established Watson as one of the archetypal voices of the decade. On songs such as “Nothing Sure Looked Good On You”, “Any Way You Want Me”, “I Get Lucky And Forget”, and his first #1, “Fourteen Carat Mind”, you can hear the singer’s influence on every new traditionalist after him.
But by the close of the decade, the big hits stopped coming, and Watson, who was touring relentlessly, was ready to call off the party. “I’ve had to learn from my own mistakes,” he explains. “If there was a rock in the path, I stubbed my toe on it. But I worked hard to be consistent. I didn’t want to be a one-hit wonder. I’ve gone through all the fads and phases — outlaw, rhinestone cowboy, urban cowboy, hat acts. I figured, I can’t handle this anymore.
“It was the fans who really changed my mind. They never turned their back on me. I figured it wouldn’t be fair to walk away from the people who made me who I am.”
Watson signed with Warner Bros. in 1988 and had one more top-10 hit, “Don’t Waste It On The Blues”. Though he toured with Randy Travis, had his praises sung by George Strait, Doug Stone and Alan Jackson, and continued to record through the ’90s, Watson never quite had the material or the financial support for a full return to form.
In 2000, he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Given his family history, it should have killed him. “You would think this strange, but I wasn’t surprised at all,” he says. “I lost my mom to cancer, my dad to cancer, my oldest brother and my oldest sister.” He didn’t have insurance, but he also had too much money to qualify for assistance, and not enough to be sure he could save his life. To pay his hospital bills, he toured on off-treatment weekends. “My mouth was raw inside from the chemotherapy,” he says. “I kept touring, for my own well-being. It was a mental thing, like if you don’t go to sleep you ain’t going to die. I had to keep working to know that I could still work.”
From 2000 to 2005, Watson recorded three albums for small labels, each one folding shortly after release. Watson’s new album provides no blueprint for revival, though he has found a stable label in Shanachie Records, and a producer, Brent Rowan, with a substantial track record and a killer rolodex. Watson doesn’t try to outsing Rhonda Vincent or Mark Chesnutt or Joe Nichols; he just embraces the songs, five of which were written by Tim Mensy, including the elegiac title track.
“He just opened up his catalogue to me,” Watson says of Mensy. “I didn’t realize it, but I had another album with a song by Tim called ‘In Other Words’. I knew about him as a writer and an artist. But I have to be careful. Tim Mensy could probably sell me a bad song — he sings so good. He doesn’t, per se, use the catch phrases. He writes a movie part. You don’t even have to do a video to see them.
“And I have to look at a song as a movie role,” he adds. “I have to get over in this guy’s shoes and live that part.”
In A Perfect World reconnects with and updates the sound of Watson’s classic ’70s and ’80s recordings, with Pig Robbins again on piano, and a restrained lushness that finds the fullest space in greatest intimacy. Watson also draws on a few vintage numbers: Hank Cochran’s “Don’t You Ever Get Tired Of Hurting Me”, Harlan Howard’s “Let Me Be The First To Go”, and Merle Haggard & Bonnie Owens’ “Today I Started Loving You Again”, a song Watson has been singing in concert for decades but had never dared to record.
“We’d always done it the way Hag did it, but we talked about putting a different spin on it on the album,” Watson explains. “I’m old-school: I want to do everything live, record with the musicians in the studio. And I’ve always studied songs, the way singers sing them. I think Merle Haggard was the best at milking a phrase. There are so many ways you can say ‘I love you.’ In a certain song, you need to phrase it where you get the most out of it, just milk it for all it’s worth.”
Now 64, Watson still makes his home in Houston and still hangs out at his auto body shop. He’s the consummate singer’s singer, but sometimes he’d just as soon straighten your fender and make your paint seem new again. No surprise, since he’s been doing that with the stories in songs all his life.
“When I step off my bus, I get in my pickup, and music is the last thing I want to think about,” he says. “I’ve been doing this out here 32 years. Can you imagine how many times I’ve sung those songs? You need relief. So I’ve got my shop in Houston. If someone wants to talk about music, I’ll get in my truck and leave. I’ve got to get away from music once and a while.”
ND contributing editor Roy Kasten lives and writes in St. Louis, where he used to be the proud owner of a 1966 VW Beetle. If he ever gets another one, he’s driving it to Houston.
