Music City's Defining Decade: Stories, Stars, Songwriters & Scoundrels of the 1970'S

By Dennis Glaser

With an eye for the events, an ear for the music, and a background in journalism which had included owning and operating a group of Illinois newspapers, Glaser kept pen in hand to record this unique history of the way it was and some of the people who made it that way in Nashville during the defining decade of the 1970s which ended with the industrys first platinum record: Wanted: The Outlaws.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462825073

Dennis Glaser

During Nashville’s seminal ’seventies--but not all at the same time--Dennis Glaser was an artist’s professional manager, music magazine journalist, record company vice-president of public relations, owner of a record-pressing plant, and mid-level advertising executive in Nashville. And managed a Music Row tavern in his spare time. A cousin of award-winning Tompall & the Glaser Brothers, Glaser had a first row seat to the origin of the Outlaws, the influx of the “street writers,” and the eventual evolution from “hillbilly” to today’s corporate culture

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Music City’s Defining Decade

Stories, Stars, Songwriters & Scoundrels of the 1970s

Dennis Glaser

Copyright © 2011 by Dennis Glaser.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Preface

The ‘70s: Decade of Change in Nashville

Music, Marijuana, and Many Memories

A Short Course in Free Enterprise Show Biz Economics

Shel Silverstein

Shel Silverstein: A Book Review

Captain Midnite

Johnny Darrell

Jack Ruth

Maggie Cavender

Cowboy Jack Clement

It All Starts With the Song

Odds & Ends

Billy Joe Shaver

Charlie Louvin

Hazel Smith

How They Got Their Start

Jody Miller

John Hartford

Johnny Duncan

JC Black

Kris Kristofferson

Bill Littleton

Kyle Lehning

Larry Gatlin

Lee Emerson

Life’s Like Poetry

Red Sovine: He Kept on Truckin’

I Recall a Gypsy Woman

Kinky Friedman

Mae Boren Axton

How I Love Them Old Songs

The Outlaws: Present at the Baptism

Rodney King

Roy Drusky

Vince Matthews

Silk Purses & Sows Ears

Waylon Jennings: A Good Man

THE WAYLON JENNINGS’ CHRONOLOGY

Jennings’ thoughts about his road to success in country music

What Others Had to Say About Waylon

Willie Nelson

Billy Walker

Bobby Bare

Dave Hickey

Still Wanted: The Outlaws

Tavern Tales

Dr. Hook and Ron Hafíkine

Billy Large

Barry Sadler

Hoover

Harlan Howard

Independent Record Labels

Alabama

Al Risen, Disk Jockey

Jessi Colter

Hank Williams Sr.

Forester Sisters

End of an Era

Earl Scruggs

Louise Scruggs

More About Songwriting

Country Music Hall of Fame

Music Business Rip-Offs

Why ‘Outlaw’ Music?

Mel Brown

The Charleston Trio

Tompall, Chuck & Jim; the Glaser Brothers

Tompall Glaser

Chuck Glaser

Jim Glaser

Memo From Tompall

Recording Sessions & Records

OTHER BOOKS BY DENNIS GLASER

A Geezer’s Guide to the Universe

Seeing Europe As a Traveler, Not a Tourist

For Better or Verse

Preface

"Since a musician cannot move unless he himself is moved, he must be able to experience all the emotions he wishes to awaken in his audience. He lets them know his feelings and thus arouses them to sympathy. "

—Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1753)

The Iroquois Indians, I once read, believed that whoever invented a song was then its owner, and no one else was permitted to sing it after his death. Our copyright system, on the other hand, allows others to reprint what another has written, to perform music that someone else has composed, and the right to mechanically reproduce that music. But royalties, established by law and based on profits earned, must be paid to the copyright owner.

But there’s no restriction on memories! And, although I hung out on Nashville’s Music Row for less than a decade, it seems as if I have a lifetime of memories of those years. Of things that happened, of people I met, of stories I heard. All in all, the 1970s were some of the more interesting and exciting years of my life. Thus far, at least!

And so this is NOT a history of country music—but a snapshot of how it seemed to a newcomer during the 1970s—the seminal decade that transformed country music from Opry hillbilly to today’s modern country sounds. It was my pleasure and good fortune to be there when it all was happening.

Mostly, it is about music people I met, interviewed, wrote about, or just hung out with during those years. The Music Row I knew then is not the Music City that Nashville has now become. And more’s the pity.

The ‘70s: Decade of Change in Nashville

Johnny Gimble, a fantastic fiddler from Texas, began spending more time hanging out in Austin—a city somewhat like Nashville, except in many respects, Austin does it better.

So someone asked Gimble why he wasn’t up in Nashville, earning big money as a session musician.

I served my time in Nashville. Now it’s someone else’s turn.

In my case, my time served in Nashville was much more brief, and less financially and artistically rewarding. But it was, well, fun. And it took place in the 1970s—which is now seen as the seminal decade of country music . . . When the Nashville music business changed from the Grand Ole Opry style to today’s more popular styles. And to me, the development of the songwriting craft during the ‘70s was a key element in that change.

While in the newspaper publishing business in Central Illinois, I made several visits to Nashville. I had cousins there—Tompall, Chuck and Jim—the Glaser Brothers. And I was a fan of the Now Country that was beginning to explode on the country music scene. It was the late 60s and early 70s—and everything was changing. Music especially. Country music for sure.

So when I got divorced, and handed over my newspaper group and publishing interests to my ex-wife, I needed a new location, and a new challenge. And I needed a new career to pay my bills.

For a while, I hung out at the Glaser Sound Studios on 19th Avenue, soaking up the manners and mores of the music business. Soon Tompall’s solo career began to take off, and he introduced me to some record company executives as his personal manager, without bothering to ask me if I wanted the job. I don’t think either of us actually knew what a personal manager was supposed to do, so I just made it up as I went along.

After Tompall, my next gig was as Nashville editor for Country Rambler, a new country music fan magazine published in Chicago. It didn’t pay much, but I did have an expense account. During this same period, I wound up with the beer license for an historic tavern on Music Row—mostly because the two owners couldn’t get a beer license because of various past problems with the law. In its earlier life, the Kountry Korner was first known as the Tallyho Tavern, thus immortalized in song by Kris Kristofferson, who lived just down the street before he struck it rich and moved to LA. And now, on to Hawaii.

The magazine went broke after a few months, and the tavern owners sold the tavern. So once more I was unemployed. But about that time I met two guys from Myrtle Beach who had started a record company—and hired me on as vice president of public relations—a title that was longer than the survival of their enterprise.

But another fellow-employee decided to buy a small manufacturer of custom phonograph records in Nashville. I helped to negotiate the deal and, at the last minute, he decided he wouldn’t do it unless I would agree to take a partnership interest, though I had no money to put into the deal. A few months later, his wife decided she didn’t like Nashville, so I exercised a buy-out agreement and became sole owner.

Of course, I lacked the capital to totally exploit the company, and sold it after a few months. And for a time, again was unemployed. Then one day, in search of freelance writing assignments, I visited the United Methodist Publishing House, and was hired on as an advertising copywriter at a very low beginner salary. I took early retirement from there 13 years later as a mid-level management executive and with a small pension.

I’d bought a 50-acre farm about an hour out of Nashville and moved there, and after a few years, sold it and moved to France where I lived for a few years—traveling and writing my first book. When I returned to the States after 9/11, I settled in Northwest Georgia, near Chattanooga, where I live today.

But the most fun, and the best memories, came during that decade I spent in Nashville as part of the music business. And it those memories that I’ve tried to include in this book.

—Dennis Glaser, 2011

Music, Marijuana, and Many Memories

Nothing impresses the mind with a deeper feeling of loneliness then to tread the silent and deserted scene of former flow and pageant.

—Washington Irving

It was never my intention to get involved in Nashville’s country music business. It just sort of happened to me.

When I went to Nashville after my divorce from my first wife, I had no car, less than a thousand dollars in cash, and a weekly income of about $50 from my unemployment insurance. Plus $50 a month from the sale of one of my newspapers, which I later turned over to my ex—so she could draw it as salary and thus stay on that company’s health insurance program.

So the first thing I needed was a job. Which would of course influence where I’d live next. I knew there was a web offset printing center in Clarksville, a medium sized city just north of Nashville. So I went there first, didn’t like the looks of the place, and continued on to Nashville. My cousin, Chuck Glaser, had a booking agency and loaned me the use of an empty office. Tompall occupied the studio building, but Waylon Jennings had his offices there also, and there was no extra space available.

My initial thought was to open a public relations agency, specializing in distributing preprinted feature articles about various music stars through a couple of syndicates which I’d become acquainted with while I was a newspaper publisher. These agencies would mail your story and photo to a large list of newspapers . . . for a not small fee, but much less than it would cost to do it yourself.

Didn’t take me long to realize that the No. 1 rule in Nashville was to never pay for publicity if you could possibly get it free. (In fact, don’t pay for anything, even if you weren’t supposed to get it free!) So, after I began to get acquainted a bit with some of the people who hung out at the studio, and the people who worked there and those on Chuck’s payroll, I tossed that idea on the junk heap.

Since I’d written some songs a couple of years ago and had managed to have three of them accepted by what turned out to be a less-than-mainstream music publisher, I filled up my time writing more songs. I rented a studio apartment (actually more like a former hallway leading to a large closet!). It was located a couple of blocks off of West End Avenue, about a mile away from Music Row. And I went back to Lewistown, bought a badly used 1966 Ford station wagon, loaded up my belongings that I’d stored in my brother’s barn, returned to Nashville through a snowstorm in Kentucky, and settled in.

Just in time for Christmas, when every office on the Row closed for a couple of weeks. It was a very lonely two weeks for me because none of the few people I knew were anywhere to be found. Anyway, I didn’t even know where to look for them!

But things picked up in January when Tompall’s new album of songs written by Shel Silverstein came out. I moved my headquarters to Tompall’s suite of offices then, hanging out with Captain Midnight and Hazel Smith, the latter who functioned as Tom’s connection to the Music Row grapevine. I learned a lot from Midnight, however, although later I realized that not everything I learned was actually true.

Midnight, whose real name was Roger Schutt, was a one-time night-time disk jockey, drinker, and pill-popper. He was a writer, and was the first editor of what became the Music City News, a monthly tabloid marketed mainly to hard-core fans. He was a legend (in his own mind, as we’d say) and a dedicated hanger-on. Tompall gave him office space at the studio building (in which Midnight also slept, mostly in the daytime.)

And he knew everyone, more or less, and became my guru until one day I finally realized that I had given him more respect than he actually was entitled to receive. Mostly, in those days, he watched a lot of television and caught a gig now and then ghost-writing a bio for some show biz Nashville wanna-be type. And practiced his knife throwing in the parking lot behind the studio building—a structure that Midnight described as a low-budget Alamo. It did have a fortress-like look, despite the brown stucco walls.

I started kicking around promotional ideas for Tompall’s new album. For one thing, Tompall didn’t have a press kit—a folder containing a biography, copies of print articles about him, and so on. So he gave me the okay to produce one, which I did. Among the things already mentioned, it also included as complete a listing of previous recordings by Tompall and the Glaser Brothers, and also a list of the songs he’d written. I had a Tompall logo designed for him. He didn’t like the swash effect of the crossbar on the capital T, so I changed it to a straight horizontal line to match his actual signature.

Some of the ideas that I proposed he liked; others he apparently didn’t, as he never mentioned them again. For example, one night I heard on the radio that the California county of Mendocino was threatening to form a separate state. Well, I knew one of the songs on the album that was written for him by Shel Silverstein was called something like Come With Me to Mendocino, so I proposed that he offer to run as a candidate for governor of the new state if it came into being. Wasn’t a bad idea, but I guess it didn’t suit him. After he became a fan of Richard Nixon, I think politics scared Tompall a bit.

Shel Silverstein was the definition of a nice guy. We even hung out together! He had already accomplished a lot before he turned his attention to writing songs. I’d seen his funny cartoons in Playboy. He also wrote, and illustrated, full-size bound books for children which remained on best seller lists. He is dead now but all of those books still are in print.

I worked with Shel during the promotion of Tompall’s Shel album and the hit single, Put Another Log on the Fire, and also with a professional promotion man. From Billboard, I managed to secure a list of the record stores they called as a sampling of record sales. I called the stores also, and if they didn’t have the record in stock, I’d pass on word to the record company. After a record broke into the top 30 songs, sales were a bigger indication to Billboard of the record’s ranking than were radio station reports, which were the key to getting the record headed up the charts when it was first released.

Sometime in January, Tompall was booked for a couple of shows in California which regenerated some coverage in Billboard and other trade magazines so I added the clippings to his press kit. Then and in months to follow, I spent a lot of time hanging out with him while he played pinball—a gambling version of the machines which were then more or less legal in the state. It was while he was playing pinball, and as he was dropping a hundred dollars or more in the process, that Tompall reached most of his decisions.

I’d seen Waylon around the building now and then, and finally one day I was introduced to him in Tom’s office. Waylon left by the front door, and I went out the back way to my car in the parking lot. He saw me, waved, and stumbled over an uneven place in the sidewalk. Waylon, offstage, was shy and a bit clumsy. On stage, however, he became a totally different person. It was a thrill for me to be able to know him as he’d been one of my favorite singers for years, and I’d been to every concert he gave in Central Illinois. Including one in Peoria where he took the stage, late, because he and the band had been in a car accident.

One night, Waylon asked me if I could drive him to his car, which had run out of gas somewhere out near where he lived south of the city. At one point, Tompall told me that Waylon had been asking about me, and I suspect it was his interest in me that led Tom into appointing me as his personal manager.

I never applied for the job. I didn’t even know there was such a thing until one day, in Tom’s office, he introduced me to some record label executives he was meeting with as my new personal manager. I continued to draw my unemployment check, and he paid me $500 a month off the books. Plus, on the road, he paid for rooms and meals.

About that time, Waylon’s wife, Jessi Colter, had a big hit with a song she’d written and recorded with her husband in the producer’s chair: I’m Not Lisa. Like other songwriting efforts by Waylon and Tompall, it was published by their jointly owned Baron Music Co. Soon, Famous Music wanted to publish her album’s songs in a songbook, a project for which I served as the contact person. One day, she thanked me for holding a door open for her, and I said, Oh, it’s nothing in comparison with the pleasure you’ve given me with your music. A silver-tongued devil was I in those days.

My first trip on the road was to Atlanta, where TP and his band were to perform on an outdoor stage at a shopping mall for a promotion sponsored by the local country radio station. The station would pay for our hotel rooms and meals, and it was my job to get MGM, then TP’s record label, to pony up airline tickets. Well, they thought we could just rent two or three cars instead. But, I pointed out, what kind of an image is that for your recording star to take to his first time out with his own band? So they finally bought it.

We were booked to leave at, oh, about 10 a.m. Well, lucky there are so many flights from Nashville to Atlanta. Everyone was there but Tompall. He arrived after I’d cancelled the flight, but then left again to buy a new pair of boots. I think we had to cancel the second reservation also, but finally got out of town sometime after noon.

We rented cars and went to the show site where the crowd was small, as was their interest in the show. Next, to one of the city’s big hotels. Tompall had a couple of female fans in Atlanta, sisters I think, who joined him at the hotel. He called me into his room—to take one of the girls off his hands, I figured. Wrong. He wanted me to call Nashville to tell the office that he was going on to Evansville, Indiana the next day to make a guest appearance with Waylon Jennings, who was booked at the Executive Inn there for the weekend. Of course I knew the office number—but I had to look up the area code. Which sent him into one of his tirades—his personal manager didn’t even know Nashville’s area code! Etc. Etc. Well, hell, I’d called FROM Nashville, but not TO the city. So how should I know?

Next morning, Tompall and I flew to Evansville, and had rooms at the motel. About mid-afternoon, I was sitting at the bar in the lounge trying to make time with this cute cocktail waitress when Waylon came in, saw me, and came over to ask if I knew where Tom was. In his room, I think. So off he went.

But immediately, the young woman’s interest in me magnified. Was that Waylon who was just talking to me? Yes. And so on and on. I invited her to be my guest at the show that night, but she said she couldn’t date (or be seen with) any hotel guest in the building, so we arranged that she’d pick me up in her car out front.

She did (I cleared it with Tompall first, of course) and off we went on a round of various night spots in the city. Wherever we went, everyone knew Kathy. She apparently was the local party girl. I spent the night at her apartment (she made her female roommate sleep on the couch), and when I got back to the hotel the next afternoon, there was a note for me at the desk. Tom said he’d gone on to L.A. with Waylon, but left a ticket at the airport for my flight back to Nashville.

Kathy had other ideas. She drove me to the airport, and I got a refund on the ticket. Then, the next day, she picked up her ex-husband’s Oldsmobile from his apartment parking lot (without bothering to tell him, she mentioned later, giving rise to my fear that he’d report the car as stolen), and off we went to Nashville. Her girl friend came along.

At the studio, Midnight was in no mood for the party I’d planned. Instead he was deep into writing something for Jessi and Waylon to say during their appearance that night on the Dean Martin TV Show. So, I took the girls to Mack’s Country Cooking for dinner, and they left for Indiana. At the studio, I came across Waylon’s bodyguard/ driver, and persuaded him to drive me to my house.

Weeks later, on an airplane bound for Texas, Tompall turned to me and asked if I’d checked in the rental car before I left Evansville. Rental car? I said. Turned out he’d left the car at the hotel for me to drive to the airport. So, when we landed, I called Evansville and, yes, the hotel had called the rental company to come pick up the car.

I think our next trip was to Texas, a multi-city tour that taught me more about my responsibilities as a personal manager. The opening gig was for several nights at a little club out in the boondocks—booked so that Tompall and his newly formed Outlaw Band would have a chance to tighten up their act. The members of the band were a unique group. Two of them were Black, stolen from blues singer Bobby Blue Bland. Charles was the drummer—the essence of cool. The lead guitarist—Mel,—claimed to be part Hawaiian. Whatever he was, he could pick up three women just walking from one airport gate to the next.

A young guy of Italian descent, who claimed mob associations, played bass and I think we started out with a guy named Bill or something as rhythm guitarist. Somewhere along the line a big burly steel player joined the group—he had the same name as a famous rassler of the times and enjoyed being mistaken for him on occasion. He also doubled as bus driver, but on this tour we were traveling by air, and using some borrowed sound equipment that Captain Midnite (who was along) had helped me haul to the airport from Waylon’s basement garage.

As I remember, we were supposed to be paid like $500 or $1000 a night at this little club. However, the owner each night claimed to have failed to clear enough to pay us, and asked that part or maybe all be postponed until the weekend’s final big night. Tom, who was involved in a relationship with the guy’s wife—apparently with his permission—readily agreed.

Chuck Glaser’s Nova booking agency had lined up our dates, and had gotten the club to put an ad in the local daily. Which announced that Tomball would be appearing there. (Tomball is the name of a town in Texas, and since Tom was booking under his first name only, I doubt that any of his former Glaser Brothers fans made the connection.)

Anyway, on the last night, I went down to the basement to the owner’s office where he and another very rough looking character sat, sawed-off shotguns across their knees, counting the evening’s take. The guy said he wouldn’t be able to pay, and would send a check later. I went back upstairs to relay the advice to Tompall—and he and everyone was gone! As I recall, I had a devil of a time getting a taxi to come and get me, and certainly didn’t think I stood a chance of arguing with those shotguns.

Tompall was not happy. But Waylon was also booked for the same club in a couple of weeks. Chuck told the guy he could forget about Waylon if he didn’t pay up, and a certified check was in the mail. Meanwhile, we rented a pair of station wagons and took off across country for Austin, where we were booked at the famed Armadillo Ballroom, the location of the PBS TV show, Austin City Limits. (In fact, I rented the cars with my credit card—for which Tompall never repaid me.)

We had a couple of days until the show, so I called some radio stations and made arrangements for Tompall to be interviewed. At one of the stations, I met a young woman who was interested in booking shows, and she asked if she could stop by the Holiday Inn where we were staying to pick my brains. Tompall had called Mae Axton, a well-connected PR operative and mother of Hoyt Axton and co-writer of Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel. She came to Austin in hopes of getting Tom named an honorary Texas Ranger—you know, country music outlaw/Texas Ranger. She couldn’t manage that trick, but did get him appointed as an honorary citizen of Texas.

The radio station woman’s girl friend and roommate (and lover, according to Mae) also showed up, as did Mae herself. We decided to go to a pool hall run by Willie Nelson’s father—so Mae rode with the other woman in her car, while the radio station gal rode with me, so we’d each have someone in the car with us to show us the way. It took us some time to find a parking place, and Mae told me later that the other woman was becoming very very concerned when we didn’t show up immediately. Miss radio station invited me to her apartment later, to continue our discussion. We were talking away and suddenly I heard someone behind me. I turned, and it was the roommate with a big butcher knife in her fist. Oh, she said, I heard someone and thought there was a burglar.

It’s only me, I said, getting to my feet, and I was just leaving.

Townsend Miller was the local Austin country music columnist, and he had a young daughter who wanted to come to Nashville, so she took up with Tom and returned to Music City with us. And went to work for Chuck at his booking agency. Back in Austin, Cowboy

Jack Clement, who had produced an album or two for the Glaser Brothers, had married the sister of Mrs. Waylon Jennings (Jessi Colter) and was leasing a ranch house not far out of Austin. So we all went out there one afternoon.

Finally, the concert night arrived. We were working for a share of the admission charge, so I stood by the ticket seller to make sure that the money went into the till. There was to be a free dance after the show, so I noticed that there was a big crowd waiting out front, but not that big a crowd in the hall. I figured Tom needed all the encouragement possible, so I sorted out some of the better-looking people standing out-front and escorted them into the hall, and directed them to the vacant seats upfront. It is one of those things I didn’t mention to the star. Years later, Tompall came to Norfolk, Nebraska, to do a show for my nephew, B. J. Glaser Jr., who was running for state attorney general. I noticed the motel where we all were staying had one of those signboards out front used to welcome convention groups, etc. So I persuaded the desk clerk to post a sign saying Welcome Tompall Glaser, etc. Tompall remarked about the sign when he arrived and, again, I didn’t spoil the effect by telling him of my role in it.

Our next gig after Austin was in Houston, at the then-famed Gilley’s Club. We turned in the rental cars, and flew back to Houston, then rented cars again for transportation around the city. Another radio interview, following which the DJ invited us to be his guests at a local strip club.