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March 23, 2002
Saeed Vaseghi
The US and Iran's Quest
for Democracy
Brian
J. Foley
Does
Pedophilia Scandal Spell an Opportunity for Catholics?
Sheperd Bliss
American Soul and Empire
James
Packard Winkler
Occupation
and Terror:
Politics from a Gun Barrel
M. Shahid Alam
A New International Division
of Labor
T.W. Croft
Enron's
Attack on Our
Economic Security
March 22, 2002
Robert Jensen
Corporate Power is a
Threat to Democracy
Tommy
Ates
The
Future of Black Academia
Rep. Ron Paul
Why are We in Ukraine?
March 21, 2002
McQuinn,
Munson, & Wheeler
Stars
and Stripes:
Killing for the Flag?
John Chuckman
How Change is Wrought
David
Vest
Hail
to the Chaff
March 20, 2002
Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire
Robert
Jensen
The
Politics of Pain
and Pleasure
Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise
Rick Giambetti
Prozac
and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy
Philip Farruggio
Bullies
Lori Allen
Live
from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation
March
19, 2002
Tariq
Ali
Nuke
Iraq?
Phyllis
Pollack
Roger
Daltrey's LA Surprise
Amir Ahmadi
War-Mongering
Academics:
The New Tartuffe
Ben White
Bomber
Blair
Fran Shor
Child-Murderers
and Madmen
March
18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Crazy
is Cool
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
What's Playing At My House
Armen
Khanbabyan
The
Pentagon in the Caucasus:
Georgia Is Only the Beginning
Gabriel
Ash
Abdullah
v. Osama
Bernard
Weiner
Middle
East for Dummies
Alexander
Cockburn
Tipping
in America
March
17, 2002
David
Vest
The
Politics of Packaging
Tariq
Ali
The
Left's New Empire Loyalists
March
16, 2002
Chris
Floyd
Ashcroft's
Secret Snatches
March 15, 2002
Doron Rosenblum
Israel's Settler Warlords
Alex Lynch
Rhetorical
Attacks On Iraq
Norman Madarasz
Neo-Con Propaganda
and the National Review
Paul-Marie
de La Gorce
Making
Enemies
March
14, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
RIP
Danny Pearl
Francis
Boyle
Bush
Nuke Plan Violates International Law, Again
Wayne
Saunders
Memo
to Paul McCartney:
There Are Two Kinds
of Freedom, Sir
H.P. Albarelli
Anthrax
Cover-up?
March
13, 2002
Amira
Hass
Are
the Occupied Protecting the Occupier?
CounterPunch
Wire
National
Review Editors Suggest Nuking Mecca
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Personal
Responsibility
for Corporate Elites?
Robert
Fisk
Arabs
Don't Want US
to Strike Iraq
Alexander
Cockburn
When
Billy Graham Wanted
to Kill One Million People
March
12, 2002
Kay Lee
Dangerous
Changes in
California's Prisons
John Patrick
Leary
The
Return of Otto Reich
Wole Akande
US
is Being Discredited
in the Eyes of Africa
March
11, 2002
Hani Shukrallah
This
is the Way the World Ends
Tommy
Ates
Bush's
New Nuke Policy:
Target Allies and Enemies
Lidia Andrusenko
The Great
Chicken War:
Bush v. Putin
Dave Marsh
10
CDs Playing On My Desk
John Chuckman
Footprints
in the Dust
Norman
Madarasz
Max
Steel in a Time of Chaos
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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Five
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By Alexander
Cockburn
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
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and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
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March 24 - March
30, 2002
Waylon Jennings:
An Honest Outlaw
By Jeffrey St. Clair
"To
live outside the law you must be honest," sings Bob Dylan in Absolutely Sweet Marie, a
tune that has always struck me as kind of comic rejoinder to
Leadbelly's great prison song Midnight Special. But those lines
could also be an epitaph for the life and career of Waylon Jennings.
Jennings was an outlaw in all the right
respects, not least as an outlaw to a corrupt industry that was
exploiting him and his cohorts. At great professional risk, Jennings
defied the pious and rigid lords of Nashville, the country purists
of the Opry, who sneared at pop sounding songs and banned full
drum sets from their stage. He fought as fiercely as Chuck D
or Pearl Jam against the bosses of the record biz, who rip off
songwriters, defile the sound and content of recordings, and
treat performers as chattle.
When you look back on Jennings' life
and music you're struck by his honesty, his courage and, as Dave
Marsh points out his "humor."
Jennings was born in Littlefield, Texas
in 1937 and moved to Lubbock in 1954, where he worked as DJ and
played in rocakbilly bands. He was to develop an inimitable rough-edged
and rumbling sound, a voice as arid and tough as a west Texas
wind. But he got his start working for one of the smoothest voices
in rock history, Buddy Holly. From 1958 to 1959, Jennings toured
as Holly's bassplayer in Holly's band, the Crickets.
In his book Country, Nick Tosches writes
that of all the great rockabilly artists Holly was the only one
never to top the Country charts. It's a savage indictment of
Nashville and it was message that certainly wasn't lost on Jennings.
"[Buddy] had a dose of Nashville where they wouldn't let
him sing it the way he heard it and wouldn't let him play his
own guitar parts," Jennings wrote in his autobiography.
"Can't do this, can't do that. 'Don't ever let people tell
you you can't do something,' he'd say, 'and never put limits
on yourself.'
There is of course a star-crossed aspect
to Jenning's life, that lends to his career the hint of myth,
as if he were as close as country would ever come to a kind of
Robert Johnson legend. Jennings didn't sell his soul to the devil
at the crossroads in return for blazing guitar licks, but he
did at the last possible moment offer his seat on a plane on
frigid night in Clear Lake, Iowa to J.P. Richardson, the Big
Bopper.
Shortly after midnight on February 3,
1959 that small plane took a nosedive into the frozen badlands
outside Mason City, Iowa. Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper
were gone and Jennings was left behind to pick up the pieces
and roll on.
"I remember the last time I saw
Buddy," Jennings said last year. "He had me go get
us some hot dogs. He was leaning back against the wall in a cane-bottom
chair and he was laughing at me. He said, 'So you're not going
with us tonight on the plane, huh? Well, I hope your ol' bus
freezes up. It's 40-below out there and you're gonna get awful
cold. So I said, 'Well, I hope your ol' plane crashes.'
"I was so afraid for many years
that somebody was going to find out I said that. Somehow I blamed
myself. Compounding that was the guilty feeling that I was still
alive. I hadn't contributed anything to the world at that time
compared to Buddy. Why would he die and not me? It took a long
time to figure that out, and it brought about some big changes
in my life -- the way I thought about things."
In the 70s Jennings came into his own
with songs like Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love),
I've Always Been Crazy, I Don't Want to Get Over You and Waymore's
Blues. His music (and his collaborations with Willie Nelson,
who was also breaking loose from the shackles of Nashville) gave
grit and substance to American music at a time when rock had
flatlined into the likes of Journey and REO Speedwagon. The elemental
spirit of rocknroll thrived in Jennings' country music, the sound
was at once old and new. The Outlaws (which included featured
Jennings, Nelson, Tompall Glaser and Jennings' fourth and last
wife, Jessi Colter) made the so-called country-rock being offered
up by groups such as The Eagles sound processed and purile by
comparison. Next to Waylon Jennings the perfectionist posings
of Don Henley seem like Donny Osmond.
Jennings embodied that strange alchemy
of American music, a music that was both popular and uncompromising.
A sound that paid allegiance to Hank Williams, Son House and
Buddy Holly and yet was unmistakeably original. "I've always
felt that blues, rock 'n' roll and country are just about a beat
apart," Jennings said. In his music, at times, they blended
into one.
I had the undeserved fortune to meet
Waylon Jennings in the summer of 1978, when he came to Indianapolis
to play at a fundraiser for Senator Birch Bayh, the perennially
embattled Democrat. I was working as gopher for the Bayh campaign,
shuttling bigwigs around in a rented big black Lincoln. God knows
how he got hooked into doing a gig for Bayh, one of the more
unappetizing politicians of his time. Most likely it was as a
favor to Bayh's charismatic and brilliant wife, Marvella, who
was to die of breast cancer a few years later.
I was supposed to drive Jennings from
the concert to his hotel, about a mile away. But he wasn't quite
ready to endure an entire night in a downtown Indianapolis. He
wanted to drive around. After a while, he turned to me, grinned
and said, "Man, what are you doing working for these assholes?"
"Huh? We don't want the Republicans
to take over the country again, do we?"
"Not a dime's worth of dime's worth
of difference between them." He was right of course. But
I'm a slow learner and it took me another decade to figure that
out on my own.
Jennings pulled a cassette from the pocket
of his black vest. "Stick this in that machine," he
said.
It was a country blues, featuring a guitar
as clear as a bell and a voice as ragged as a crosscut saw. "Oh
the Rocky Mountains, they's a mean and terrible place."
At that time, it was my misfortune to
know less about music than I did about politics. "Who is
that?"
He shook his head in amazement, convinced
he was talking with an imbecile. "That's Sam Hopkins, son.
Now just kick this damn Lincoln into to gear and drive."
As we rolled through the night, Jennings
sat next to me, tapping his booted foot to the beat, working
his way through a fifth of George Dickle, Tennessee's finest
sipping bourbon.
We drove 30 miles west of the city on
Route 40, the old National Road, into the heart of the heartland.
"This'll be fine," he said. "Pull down that gravel
road there."
I stopped the car in what was little
more than a tractor lane, hemmed in by 12-foot-tall walls of
sweet corn.
"What are we doing?"
"Come on out here and join me, Hoss,"
Jennings growled. "Let's take a piss in this cornfield and
watch those damn meteors. Now don't they look just like the rebel
angels falling down from the heavens."
Overhead the Perseied meteor shower was
in full bloom--one meteor after another slashed across the August
night.
To this day I've rarely missed a chance
to escape from the city lights in August and watch those rebel
angels fall from the sky, with my favorite bluesman, Lightnin'
Hopkins, providing the soundtrack. Thanks for that Waylon and
for everything else.
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