I’m upstairs, just about to go down and start dinner, when I catch a few bars of a melody, picked out on a guitar, and in an instant, it takes me back about a half century. I’m trying to place the song when the vocals begin.
Low down leavin’ sun / Done did everything that needs done / Woe is me, why can’t I see / I’d best be leavin’ well enough alone?
The music is coming through the wall from the apartment we rent out in the front half of our house, and the voice is unmistakably that of Waylon Jennings. The song is “Honky Tonk Heroes,” from his album by the same name, released in 1973, when I was fourteen years old.
I never bought that album. But I did buy “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean,” released the same year, and “The Ramblin’ Man,” which came out a year later. It was a short walk downtown from my high school in Milford, Connecticut, to Fladd’s Music Store, where I bought albums—vinyl, of course—by the likes of Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, and Kris Kristofferson.
Kris was my hands-down favorite, and I’d been madly in love with him ever since my brother Andy had given me his first album for my thirteenth birthday. It may have been a one-sided love affair, but that didn’t make it any less intense. And it would last for the rest of his life, more than fifty years.
There were over a thousand kids at Milford High, and if I had to guess, I’d say that, out of all of them, I might well have been the only one who listened to country music. In general, suburban teenagers of the 1970s were heavy consumers of disco and pop music, which were in their heyday. You could buy a 45 rpm single for around a buck, or you could hang out at the local pizza joint and play your favorite pop songs on the jukebox, three plays for a quarter.
Albums, on the other hand, cost real money, seven or eight dollars, but buying them was the only way to listen to the songs I wanted to hear—not just the country hits I could hear on the radio, but the lesser-known work of the artists I loved. It took a lot of seventy-five-cent-an-hour babysitting jobs to be able to buy a new album, but the hours I spent sitting on the floor of my bedroom, hunched over the liner notes and lyrics, memorizing every word, made it all worthwhile.
When I did listen to the radio, it was to the local AM radio station, WFIF, which played country music almost exclusively. I created my own scratchy mix tapes of my favorite songs by calling in a request, waiting for what seemed like forever for it to be played, and recording it with my cassette tape recorder.
(On Saturday mornings, though, when WFIF played three hours of polka music, I tuned in to WTIC, from Hartford, instead. I didn’t mind being considered eccentric for my taste in music, but even I had my limits.)
My friend Maria, who for a few years wore all black and listened to bands like T.Rex, Alice Cooper, and Pink Floyd, was nevertheless willing to indulge my quirky musical preferences. Her mom was a country music fan, and she took us to a couple of concerts by little-known country bands who came to Bridgeport.
No one anyone had ever actually heard of came to Bridgeport, but we had fun, and, undeterred by our own complete lack of musical talent or education, we were, briefly, inspired to form a country duo. I had a harmonica and what was known as a Jew’s harp (a term that I hope is not now considered offensive), both purchased at Fladd’s Music Store, neither of which I knew how to play, and Maria had a razor-sharp wit and what seemed to me a remarkable talent for songwriting. The Country Hicks rehearsed in my bedroom and recorded our songs with the same cassette tape recorder with which I created my mix tapes. Fortunately, no evidence survives.
For my sixteenth birthday, my brother Greg took Maria and me to see Johnny Cash at the Hartford Civic Center, my first “big” country concert, and the last one I’d attend for about 30 years. June Carter Cash was part of the show, too, along with their then five-year-old son, John; I can still remember them all singing “Look at Them Beans” together on the stage.
During the 1980s and ’90s, when I was kept busy mostly with working, getting married, divorced, remarried, and raising kids, I didn’t go to concerts, or even buy new music. At some point, probably in college, I had recorded all of my favorite 1970s albums onto cassette tapes, which I continued to listen to in the car, and occasionally on a Sony Walkman borrowed from one of my kids.
I somehow managed to completely miss the fact that four of my biggest country heroes had formed a supergroup in 1985 and performed together for ten years as The Highwaymen. By the time I noticed, thanks to the country music videos I discovered on TV around 2005, back when we still had cable, Johnny and Waylon were already gone.
I was running a little bakery at the time and playing music pretty much all day for the first time in a long time. I bought The Highwaymen’s albums on CD, and put them into heavy rotation, along with solo albums by Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings, and just about every album Kris Kristofferson had ever made, prompting one of my daughters, who preferred modern country music, to observe, “Mom only listens to old guys and dead guys.”
I was too late for Waylon Jennings; I never got to see him in concert, but I’m so glad to learn that, more than two decades after his death, he’s still being listened to—and, apparently, he has fans, like my tenant, who are too young to even remember him when he walked the earth.
About three decades after I’d seen Johnny Cash, I went with Tony and Will to see Willie Nelson in concert at the Augusta Civic Center—a big, glitzy, sold-out show with an audience that featured more red bandanas and long braids than I’d ever seen in one place before.
And Kris Kristofferson…I saw Kris in concert five times, and if it could have been fifty, it wouldn’t have been enough. I have a rule about not leaving Oxford County, and certainly not the state of Maine, without a damn good reason, but once, when my daughter Annie was working for an airline, Tony and I flew—standby!—to Salt Lake City and drove from the airport to Park City in a snowstorm, arriving just in time to catch the last half of his concert there…which should tell you something about the depth of my devotion.
I don’t listen to music of any kind much anymore. Nowadays, it’s usually NPR, an audiobook, or, more often than not, welcome silence. Sometimes I tune in to the Maine Public classical music stream, but usually only when I want something akin to white noise in the background.
But tonight, when I hear Waylon Jennings’ voice coming through the apartment wall, it tugs hard on something I thought was lost to memory. Suddenly I’m sixteen, sitting on my bedroom floor, studying the lyrics as I listen, and, somehow, I remember them all.
Piano roll blues, danced holes in my shoes / There weren’t another other way to be / For lovable losers and no account boozers / And honky tonk heroes like me.
Only saw Willie Nelson in person of those famous singers. Would have loved to see Cash.
"Love my Cows" was our triumph.