FATHER, SON AND THE GHOST OF WAYLON JENNINGS
- Bernard Zuel
- 6 hours ago
- 5 min read
SOME PEOPLE HAVE DADDY ISSUES and you wonder why; some people don’t and you can’t understand why not.
Shooter Jennings’ real name is Waylon, like his dad, who sang a bit, played a bit, generally did the legend of country music thing a (fair) bit. You might know Waylon from his long hair, straight talking, I’m from Texas and you’re not days as a pillar of what in the 1970s was called outlaw country – with his wife, Jessi Colter, a redhead from Texas called Willie Nelson and a bunch of others who’d been knocking about in mainstream country for a decade or more and feeling out of place, like Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson and Jerry Jeff Walker.
Or maybe you know him from his time in the ‘80s big-selling update of the outlaw scene, The Highwaymen, with Cash, Kristofferson and Nelson. In any case, Waylon Jennings, who died in 2002, was and is a name to reckon with, to cast a shadow.
Shooter is a singer/songwriter too with quite a few albums under his belt, pretty good country/country rock, sometimes straight out rock, a hip hop blend and even a tribute to electronic music pioneer Giorgio Moroder. And he’s got a whole lot more albums out there as producer. The kind of producer who has been nominated for five Grammys and won three, for albums with Tanya Tucker and Brandi Carlile.
So, would Shooter Jennings producer, have liked working with Waylon Jennings, singer/songwriter?
“Oh my God, of course. Yes, of course,” says Shooter today, talking from his kid’s room (they’ve got visitors and this is a rare quiet corner). “I would love to have worked with almost anyone from that era, but gosh, no one has ever asked me that which makes me think what would I say if I didn’t know him. Man, I don’t know, I would just be in awe of his journey and what he’s been through and encourage him to do what he is doing. Keep going!”
Fate has made this almost real now as Shooter, having dived into the vast vault of his father’s independent recordings from the mid-70s to the mid-‘80s – a time when Waylon, now owning his work after breaking from the major labels, recorded non-stop – has found enough unreleased songs that, with a bit of a finessing by him, are about to come out as a three-album release beginning in October.
“I did not expect to find what I did in there: I expected to find a couple of things like copies of the albums that he had done, maybe some alternate versions of songs, not a plethora of stuff he recorded, was never released but was finished,” Shooter says. “It was really awesome: it was like getting a window in this period of discovery when he found his freedom in music and he was surrounded by people he loved.
"There was so much heart and effort put into it and beauty in it, I just felt like it would bring so many people joy.”
(It’s not just father business here, by the way. Shooter is putting out these albums on the label SonOfJessi, named after his mother, Jessi Colter. “My mum is like a force of nature too. In all this Waylon stuff that I found, there is a bunch of Jessi stuff in there: she is just so important in all of it,” he says. “She is not in the country music Hall of Fame and I’m on a quest for that.”)
Back to the songs he discovered, it's not always songs you might expect either, as the first song released for the project, a cover of Songbird by Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie that will be the title track of the first volume, shows.
“There is a song that I think will end up on the third [album in the series] that is so basic but it has Richie and him and it’s a cover of a song that no one would ever think in a million years that he did, and he crushes it. It’s the one that is kind of like the Excalibur of this project: I wonder whether it will come out. But it’s one of those moments when you think, wow, he was really listening to some wild stuff. He was paying attention to other artists in other genres.”
He is obviously not going to tell us, but hell, why not Waylon Jennings covering Kraftwerk?
“Nailed it,” Shooter laughs. “God, it was Devo, but close.”
Maybe not Kraftwerk or Devo, but whatever the source, some of the songs Shooter found were ready to go, others had the principal parts down from Waylon and his core band, including now-giants of country like steel guitarist Ralph Mooney and drummer Richie Albright, and maybe needed a piano part or an extra guitar. Trawling through session notes, a comprehensive discography by music historian John L. Smith, and the memories of the surviving members of Waylon’s band, Shooter would suss out the original plans and where possible call on some of the original musicians to overdub their parts.
The results were mixed through period-specific equipment at the famous Sunset Sounds studio in LA, but Shooter insists this was never about some perfect replication but treating the songs right.
“The only changes that I made, well, not changes, the only steps that I took was used less reverb on his voice than they used to back then because I wanted it to feel like he walked in off the street right now, just like Charley Crockett or anyone I’ve worked with, and did his thing right there,” he says. “The other one was I beefed up the low-end of the kick drum to meet what I feel is like the kind of modern standard, which is lower bottom end than they were allowed to really do. That’s the only adjustments from the original recordings.”
And hopefully he was sipping from a period-appropriate glass of something dark and potent sitting on the console while he worked. For atmosphere and authenticity only, of course.
“Man, you know, sometimes I’d pull out a Jack and Coke when mixing,” chuckles Shooter. “The greatest part about mixing those songs is it starts at noon, and you’re great, then you get it to a place where you are so excited about how it sounds that you save that, and then you drink and you just listen to that over and over and over again, making little adjustments, then you come back the next day and listen again.
"I will say that spending all the time mixing those songs, being in the studio alone doing it, being alone with the music in the moment and all that, it was such a beautiful experience."
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Songbird will be released on October 3
A version of this story was first published in The Sydney Morning Herald.