Name: Johnny Cash & Waylon Jennings Collection on Letterman, 1983-1995
Uploaded: 2019-12-21T17:38:32.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Johnny Cash & Waylon Jennings Collection on Letterman, 1983-1995' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-12-21. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Johnny Cash & Waylon Jennings Collection on Letterman, 1983-1995' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-12-21. Transcript available.

Johnny Cash & Waylon Jennings Collection on Letterman, 1983-1995

Welcome back to the show.
We've got a good show.
Look at this.
There's ammunition laying all over the floor here in the studio.
That was our little viewer mail.
Funny, too, wasn't it?
You just can't beat blatant gunplay for good, solid laughs.
So we'll flip those away.
All right, we have a fine program.
I've mentioned that before, so why don't we just get on with it, shall we?
My first guest tonight, this man, a fascinating career and a fascinating
individual.
He became a disc jockey when he was 14 years of age, and he has been in show
business ever since.
He is one of the most influential and respected writers and performers in
American music today,
and this is his latest album right here.
Please welcome Waylon Jennings, folks.
Nice to meet you.
Thank you very much for being here.
All right.
Let's do that again.
Nice to see you.
Thanks for being here.
Let me ask you about that joke.
Do you hear that joke a lot?
People say, well, Waylon Jennings, did you bring Madam the puppet?
Do you ever hear that?
No, I'm going to start a new act.
I'm going to use Paul for my puppet.
Well, he may be available, as it turns out.
I imagine he's heard the...
No, I like that act, though, Madam.
Oh, yeah, they're terrific.
Let me ask you about the album here.
I was looking back here.
Waylon and Company, vocal side men include...
You've got some guys on here who have worked before.
Jerry Reed, Hank Williams, Jr., Ernest Tubb.
I wish my name was Ernest Tubb, but that's another story.
Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson, Tony Joe White, Waylon, Jesse Coulter, James Garner.
He sounds like Maverick singing, you know that?
That is the James Garner from...
Now, how does he happen to appear on your album?
Well, James, you know, we're good friends.
We've been friends for a long time.
And once in a while, he's in his house out in L.A.
He'll have, you know, some people over and some musicians and have what we call
guitar pulling, you know, like everybody's singing.
And he just walks around, and I'd hear him singing harmony, you know, like, and
he loves music.
And so, one time I said, let's cut a record on you.
And he said, oh, okay.
Kind of had to wrestle him into it, huh?
Really, it was funny, like, because he had never heard himself, you know, on
tape before singing.
And he got a little nervous, you know, but I went in and did the track, you
know,
like with the band.
I went out to the bus and stayed out there for a little while.
Well, here comes James.
He'd gotten in there.
He couldn't wait, you know.
Got his headphones on and started, you know, like, and tried to record on it.
After a while, he came out there and said, we're friends.
We've been friends a long time, and I'm still your friend, and I'm fixing to
show it to you.
I'm fixing to let you out of this deal.
He said, I sounded terrible out there.
I said, no, actually.
I said, you had never done it before.
I said, we'll do it.
He said, no, really.
He says, no, you've got to let me out of this.
Of course, he said, I never could do it.
And I said, well, just trust me.
And he says, now that means you in Hollywood.
That's good how you did that.
That's nice.
You just edited your...
I knew he was going to put a deep in it anyway.
Yeah.
It saved us a little trouble there.
You want me to go back and do it again?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Take two.
No.
Now, in the introduction, you mentioned you were working as a disc jockey when
you were 14.
You're the only ones that ever got that right.
Did you know that?
No, I didn't know that.
Because everybody says I was 12.
Well, how does a 14-year-old kid get a job doing anything, let alone a disc jockey?
Well, I knew all this stuff on this guy that owned that station.
I had a radio program and I was singing on there.
This man that owned the station.
Where was this?
This is in Littlefield, Texas.
That's the suburbs of a cotton patch.
And there's either that or pull cotton, you know, or do that.
He said, you know, what do we do some programs, a program of country music?
And so I said, all right.
And then the other announcers, you know, they did all the commercials.
And we had a Wilcox Gay and a Webcord tape recorder.
And you had to kick both of them to make them start.
So my big job was kicking the tape recorder and saying, here's the next record.
Now, but this wasn't your first job in show business, was it?
You actually started performing earlier, huh?
Yeah, I was in a talent contest and I actually had a program when I was like
about 13, you
know, me and a guy named Bill Pogue.
He played lead guitar and I sang and that almost stunned my growth.
Now, when you finally went to Nashville, when you were much older, sometime in
your late
teens or your early 20s, and you had been there for a while, you had kind of an
interesting
way at one point in your career of working with the Nashville studio musicians.
I think you're talking about this, Merle Haggard, who's a country singer, and
he had borrowed
my gun.
I had a .22-bunt line.
Well, he brought it back to me at the studio.
Is that a big gun, by the way, a bunt line?
It was a long-nosed gun.
Yeah.
But you can't hit nothing with it.
Anyway, he brought it back to me there at the studio and the holster and
everything.
So I thought I'd be clever, you know?
And I went in and I said, okay, anybody that plays, the first guy that plays a
pickup note
or they have a number system where they write it down instead of the chords,
which I still
don't know what to do.
And if I see a guy looking at them numbers after we've done it two times, I'm
going to blow
your fingers off.
Yeah.
Everybody was looking up and no pickups.
You didn't want them reading the music.
Yeah.
Well, I don't think that's music.
You know what I mean?
Like, if you look at it a third time, that means they ain't been listening.
Yeah.
Same stuff.
No, they're great.
That's a good way of doing it.
Waylon, we've got to go away for a commercial now.
The guitar is out here.
Are you going to play and sing for us tonight?
Who?
What is that?
We'll take him out back and rough him up.
Don't worry, folks.
We'll be back.
It's Waylon James.
Thank you so much.
Waylon Jennings is here.
And it turns out he did bring the puppet.
Boy, we got a...
Waylon, this is a great picture.
We talked about your early career.
You said you got started playing and performing about 12.
Later, you're a DJ at 14.
Tell us about this early gig, as we say.
Well, I played bass for a while.
What's happening?
All right.
Played bass for Buddy Holly.
Yeah.
I played Chase.
Now, were you in the original Crickets?
No.
Part of the Crickets?
A side guy or what?
I was like the Crickets and Norman Petty had caused, you know, kind of a rip
between the Crickets
and Buddy Holly.
I've got to say that.
It's the truth, though.
Anyway, they had split for a while.
They were going back together there at the last.
Anyway, I played bass until they were to be back, you know.
And he gave me the...
He bought the bass here in New York.
Gave it to me and said, I'll learn to play it.
All right.
I'll memorize it.
Yeah, this is...
This is you right...
I'm going backwards.
No, there.
Right there.
Yeah.
How old a guy are you supposed to be there?
I was two.
No, I was 28 years old.
I think I was 20, yeah.
That's a great photo of...
That was just a few years ago.
All right.
Now, where were we...
Oh, now, you and Johnny Cash for a while were roommates, weren't you?
Yeah, Johnny's sick right now.
I sure hope he's feeling better.
Yeah, I hope so, too.
Does it look like everything going to be all right?
I think so.
You know, he's strong.
He's a beast.
You know, we can't do it without him.
How old were you guys when you were roommates and...
I don't remember how old I was.
I don't remember a lot of things about that.
Anyway.
John wrote a book and there's a lot of blank places in that, too.
But I think I was about 26, 27 years old.
This was in Nashville?
Yeah.
Did you guys do a lot of entertaining?
A lot of dinner parties?
Sure we did.
John was a cook.
You should see him with that black suit on, you know, with bacon powder all
over it.
Yeah.
And I don't know what I did, except I kicked the doors down a lot, you know?
Now, how, what would be, why would a person need to kick doors down?
To get in the other side of the door.
What we did is, like, you know, go in, and John, we were going in there, and,
like, I'd be coming in, and he'd put the latch on, and, like, and when we'd go
to sleep, sometimes, like, me and him, we'd go to sleep.
We went to sleep, boys.
And so I had to kick it down to get in.
Another thing, too, there ain't nothing feels better than that door given under
your foot.
I'll tell you, I'll tell you, when I figured, when I figured out that maybe I
was slowing down a little bit, it's like, I think it's down in Alabama one time,
I went around to one of the guy's rooms, and I thought, man, this is great.
I'll just, I'll scare him to death.
And I just, holiday in.
I reared back and kicked that door, and it was one of them metal doors.
Oh, yeah.
And I went, but, the thing was, is there's a plate glass window right beside it
to him.
All the big blue windows?
Yeah.
And it shattered.
Well, that's so you got a little something out of it.
Yeah, I did.
Yeah.
I also found out, too, that maybe I was a little bit scared of it anymore.
Well, when a guy came around and said, what happened?
I said, some kids over there throw blocks away.
So, you know, what we ought to do some night is we'll just, we'll set up some
doors, and anybody who would like to come on, yourself included, certainly, and
we'll just, we'll kick them in.
If it's, if it's, if it's that big a thrill.
Well, there's no graphic guy in the back, back there, you know what, he almost
pushed me through one while ago.
Is that right?
Yeah.
No, no.
Are you going to, we're going to sing here now?
Okay, we've got to go away for, what, Station Identification?
All right, you can hang around long enough to sing one song, can't you?
Yeah.
All right, all right, good enough.
We've got to pause for Station Identification.
William and William.
Thank you.
Thank you, Paul.
Coming up in the next half hour of this show, Marv Albert will be here, also
Rita Rudner.
Monday, we've got another great show.
Actor Dennis Quaid, did you see the right stuff, Waylon?
Yeah, that's great.
Yeah, he's terrific in there.
He plays Gordon Cooper.
He will be here.
Also, comedian Sandra Bernhardt.
And we have kid inventors Curtis Lawson and Lewis Barton.
That'll be Monday.
And also, it's key night, so anybody in the studio audience who needs duplicates
of their keys made, this will be the place to be on Monday night.
Always too early or too late.
Yeah.
What are you going to sing for us tonight?
This song about Nashville, to see if them hillbillies have any sense of humor
about themselves.
All right.
We're honored to have you here.
Waylon Jennings, folks.
Here's the latest news from Nashville.
Some of it a little bit rough.
Like Charlie Daniels' new day job, he's on TV selling snuff.
George Jones quit drinking, and the CMA made him number one on their TV show.
Funny thing is, he always was.
But they only discovered him about a year ago.
Living legends are a dying breed.
There ain't too many of them left.
Tell you the truth, I ain't been feeling real hot lately myself.
Well, old Willie's out in California.
Well, old Willie's out in California.
I ain't sure he's coming back.
Him and Chris are out in Hollyweird, and they're trying to figure out how to
act.
Me and old Johnny Cash wrote a movie.
Gonna put all the rest of them to shame.
Gonna be starring Dolly Parton.
We call it the hunched front of Notre Dame.
Living lovers are a dying breed.
You gotta love the ones you got left.
Especially me, because I ain't been making out no whole lot lately myself.
Living legend in my own spare time.
I wrote this song myself.
If I'd have known if it was going to turn out this bad, I might have gotten
myself a little bit of help.
That's all, folks.
Lord and Jennings.
Lord and Jennings.
Thank you.
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