Still an Original : Trends Come and Go, but Waylon Jennings Continues to Travel His Own Country Road

Waylon Jennings may no longer be “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean,” as one of his old album titles had it, but age hasn’t completely mellowed the grizzled country music legend. He doesn’t suffer music biz Philistinism gladly, and he doesn’t mind telling you all about it--although his tone is more exasperated and bemused than bitter.

Jennings, who plays Monday and Tuesday at the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana, was instrumental in blowing the countrypolitan conventions out of country music in the ‘70s via the much-ballyhooed “outlaw” movement, but the forces of greed and commercialism have come full circle.

Where Jennings’ fierce determination and down-home talent saw to it that he wouldn’t--couldn’t--be denied a generation ago, he is once again seen as a pariah among the Nashville suits who have turned the music back into simple commerce in the ‘90s.

Jennings is the real thing amid a sea of ludicrous, ornate hats, hairdos and vacant showmanship. The funky veteran’s soon-to-be-released “Right for the Time”--his first for the Texas independent Justice Records label after three decades with the big boys (25 years of that with RCA)--is a musical return to his glory days, and an amusing personal statement about the woeful conditions currently plaguing country music.

He names names, mocking such pretty-boy sensations as Billy Ray Cyrus in the farcical talking blues “Living Legends, Pt. II,” and appears to savor every moment of it. The songs are tough, no-nonsense, old-fashioned country; it’s just the sort of record he would never have been allowed to make for a major label, and Jennings is in his element.

“Who wants [a major label contract] anyway?” he posed during a recent phone interview, his sense of liberation palpable. “Let me tell you something: You can’t play music on those labels. They tell you they love your ideas and everything, but somehow, they always end up wanting you to do this regurgitated stuff.

“They say, ‘We have to get a radio record,’ and I say, ‘What the hell is a radio record?’ That’s their thing, and that’s all right, let ‘em have it. I have no reason to be bitter about anything. But the thing is, you can do the things you always wanted to do on other labels. I just can’t believe I worked so hard to break the system down, then these guys come along and get ahold of it again. It’s ridiculous.”

But if Jennings is resentful of the way things have turned out, he’s not consumed by it. He seemed upbeat, energized and excited about “Right for the Time”--which will be released the day he opens at the Crazy Horse.

“I reached about as far back as [1973’s] ‘Honky Tonk Heroes’ sound-wise for this,” he said. “That was such a stripped-down album, and some of the things on here have only two or three instruments, and I like that. In fact, one song [‘Living Legends, Pt. II’] is just me and a guitar.”

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Jennings, 59, grew up in Littlefield, Texas, and as a young man loved the music of Hank Williams, Carl Smith and George Jones.

“Everybody would have loved to have sounded like George,” Jennings said. “I wish I could have. He was just-a-popping it out there, and he still does. Isn’t that something?”

Jennings’ first professional gig was playing bass with Buddy Holly (Jennings gave up his seat on the ill-fated flight that took the lives of Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens in 1959). He still has a tremendous amount of admiration for Holly and enjoys reminiscing about the old days with one of rock ‘n’ roll’s founding fathers.

“I learned the rockabilly thing from him. He was one of the first people who ever had any confidence in me. If he had lived, he probably would have owned studios because he loved creating. He really did, and he was really good at it.

“He always understood what he was doing and what he wanted to do. He was almost like a teacher. I’d hear him talking with Dion & the Belmonts and everything; he had some great ideas. He was going to do an album of blues-type stuff that he was writing. He loved Ray Charles, and he was gonna do the kind of riffs that Ray Charles did at the piano on his guitar.

“He was very, very smart--that’s the only way to describe him. He was always thinking, and he didn’t compromise in any way when it came to his music.”

Jennings recorded on his own for a number of labels in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, performing in a softer, folkier style than what would become his rough-hewn trademark sound. Signed by Chet Atkins to RCA in 1965, he had a hit with “MacArthur Park” in 1969 and won a Grammy for it.

By the early ‘70s, a rockier, more rebellious sound and attitude began to creep into Jennings’ music--the so-called outlaw style that gained popular favor and seemed, at the time at least, to forever change the parameters and perceptions about what country music was.

“I’ll tell you what did it,” Jennings said. “I did an album for them, and they wanted me to go back and cut it again. I said, ‘Nope, that’s all you get.’ So they had to sell it. After that, it got to the point where we’d just turn in a record and that was that.”

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Throughout the ‘70s, Jennings hit with such songs as “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean,” “Honky Tonk Heroes,” “I’m a Ramblin’ Man,” “Amanda,” “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?” and duets with fellow outlaw Willie Nelson on “Good Hearted Woman,” “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” and the mega-smash “Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”

Many of these records crossed over to the pop charts, gaining Jennings a rock following to complement his legion of devoted country fans. Jennings’ growling baritone, chicken-pickin’ Telecaster guitar sound and blue-collar sensibility was all the rage for a decade.

The ‘80s found Jennings joining forces with Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash in the Highwaymen, who released a number of albums. He had another hit of his own in 1985 with a cover of Los Lobos’ “Will the Wolf Survive?” But by the end of the decade, the new legion of vacuous, underwear model look-alikes had begun to take the play away from Jennings and his ilk, and today, the country hit-makers of the ‘70s are treated as lepers by country radio.

“With country radio, it’s a discrimination thing with people who are over 40,” Jennings said. “I’m not gonna worry about any of that, though. There’s an audience out there now, and it’s a college audience.

“I was part of a Gavin Report panel down in Atlanta, de-mystifying the ‘C’ word, which is country. There were all these college kids and these college radio people, and I thought, ‘What the hell have I gotten myself into now?’ But I went out, did a few songs on the acoustic guitar, and hell, they were yelling for things like ‘Jole Blon’ and ‘Black Rose’ that go so far back I didn’t even remember all the words.”

Jennings has been around the block enough times now to have seen a lot of ebb and flow in the country music scene, and he is convinced that current sorry state is bound to dissipate.

“Radio and them are afraid. They think they’ve got something going that’s forever, and it isn’t--all of it changes.

“We all came in at the right time, and we helped country music. What they’re doing is not helping country music. I’ll tell you who I really feel sorry for is the young artists. You walk into someone’s office now, you’ve got four years and then you’re out of there. You’d better make the best of it. It’s like being a boxer or something. Man, I couldn’t deal with it.

“See, if I never sell another record or get played on the radio again, that’s OK. Some of these new artists only draw 300 people to a show, because they gave it all away with videos. That’s called overexposure. Well, we still sell out everywhere we play.”

* Waylon Jennings plays Monday and Tuesday at the Crazy Horse Steak House, 1580 Brookhollow Drive, Santa Ana. 7 and 10 nightly. $33.50. (714) 549-1512.