Hernon on Waylon Jennings

I hate February. Here, where I live in Ohio, it is the coldest month. The temperature doesn’t necessarily agree with me, but February is dimly bleak and ghastly cold - it is the month of winter’s death sleep. Last night was particularly frigid; the kind of eternal chill that crawls up under your veins, freezes your bones, and embraces no optimism for remaining warmth.

“It’s twenty-one degrees at 10:30 in the evening and you’re listening to Ohio’s only country music giant” said a swinging radio voice - secreting the kind of insincerity that is the hallmark of radio anymore. I huddled over the steering column of my ratty station wagon and sighed in relief as the engine turned over. I glanced contemptuously at the radio, sneered at my intrusive host, and wheeled my hulk of a vehicle out of the beverage store parking lot with every intention of discharging this radio drivel as soon as I’d steadied the rig on the highway, removed my right hand from the warmth of its glove, popped the top of the beer between my thighs, and took a good - what I was hoping would be warming - swig of beer. Fuck, it was cold.

I was fumbling with my glove through a cloud of my own breath and wanting desperately to pour that damn beer into my soul when I caught wind of something odd coming from that damn radio - a recognizably familiar song. Which, considering that the station was a country one of the modern variety, was in itself a very weird feeling. Unsettling in fact. The kind of feeling that immediately goes from pleasant surprise to sudden dread. This horrible station, this wretched entity that calls itself country yet continuously plays song after endless song from the never-ending stream of porno-pop wannabe video candy artists that pass off as “country” these days, was playing Waylon. Waylon Jennings. “I’ve Always Been Crazy” as a matter of fact. And then “Amanda”. And then a loose, live version of “Luckenbach, Texas”. And then the phony radio voice told me what I’d probably suspected but never thought - that Waylon Jennings was dead at age 64 of complications from diabetes. I sat in the silence of my own head while this despicable, disingenuous voice returned to the airwaves announcing - to me and whoever else was shivering in their February car - notice of the death of an utterly genuine American musician.

“Good ‘Ol Boy Waylon Jennings, man we’re gonna miss him, aren’t we?”

“You don’t even know who the fuck he was, asshole,” I muttered at the radio voice. The station retreated from its brief moment of significance and swooned back over into the comfort of one of those conventional modern pop ballads that try to declare they’re country with the intermittent, faint groans of a steel guitar. I nearly puked up the beer I’d drunk and pushed ‘play’ on my CD player. It was getting colder. I had heard enough.

A fiddle mourned, an acoustic guitar carried it along for the procession.

“When I am buried don’t visit my grave.”

Two voices, Caitlin Cary and Ryan Adams - the soul of what once was one of the more true and fine country music bands of today, Whiskeytown - sang out from the four song EP extra in Caitlin’s pretty new record, and they were singing for Waylon.

“God cannot save me for the sins I’ve embraced / Pay your respects to the old liquor store / Where he won the battle / and I lost the war”

“The Battle” - a song as cold as this rotten fucking night, but not nearly as cold as I was feeling.

“They always told me when death came my sins would be / cast out forgotten / laid to rest with my body / Pay your respects to the old church aisle store / where I won the battle and I lost the war”

My dad listened to Waylon, on eight tracks, with yellow labels, in an old VW Camper, while we drove around the country during the summers of my youth. That’s how I first heard him. That’s when I first came to love him. And that is the only way I want to remember him now. He’s gone, and February just got colder…and now I hate this goddamn month more than ever.

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