Why did Waylon Jennings hate his own hit song?
To all the musicians out there, be careful what you wish for. Sure, everyone wants a hit song, that’s the dream, right? Most musicians want to write a global chart-topper that makes their name, takes them around the world, grants them a long career and earns them a place in history. But be careful, because that dream can turn into a kind of hell. Waylon Jennings would have told you that.
Let’s take a look at some statistics for context. By now, The Rolling Stones have played ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ over 1200 times. All in all, Bob Dylan has spent the equivalent of nine days of his life playing ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. All of music’s greatest icons are racking up the numbers on their biggest tracks, still having to get up on stage and sing them to hungry crowds wanting to hear the hit.
Some people don’t mind that, while others start to passionately hate it and resent the track that granted them everything they got. Radiohead are a prime example, as the band said of their song ‘Creep’: “We seemed to be living out the same four and a half minutes of our lives over and over again. It was incredibly stultifying.” By the time a tour ends, fatigue must set in from playing the same material. But then imagine repeating that over and over for actual decades.
That would already be a form of torture, even if you liked the song. But for Waylon Jennings, he never really did. Even on the day he recorded ‘Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)’ in 1977, he already hated it.
“I knew it was a hit song, even though I didn’t like it, and still don’t,” Jennings wrote in his autobiography, summing up the dilemma that so often surrounds tracks like this. He knew it would work. He knew this catchy country song would bring him success, and in the decision between that and his own opinion or his own boredom, the mission for a hit won. The song was released, and it was picked as the single for his 24th album. It utterly revitalised his career, giving him his best-selling record, but also cursed him.
It felt like a curse because, from then on, ‘Luckenbach, Texas’ was all anyone wanted to hear. Yet any time he sang it, it felt like nails on a chalkboard.
Part of that was because he hated having his own name in the song and having to sing it out. “Let’s go to Luckenbach, Texas / With Waylon and Willie and the boys,” he sang on the track, oddly talking about himself in third person. But that’s the fault of the songwriters, as Bobby Emmons and Chips Moman wrote Jennings in but didn’t consider the long-term cringeworthy nature of the addition.
Cringe is perhaps the right word for it. For decades after, Jennings shuddered each and every time he had to sing this song, featuring his own name, based on a bust-up between friends and about a town he had actually never been to. This advice to all aspiring musicians was simple after that: “Just remind me when I’m picking singles from now on that I got to sing that motherfucker every night.”
