Waylon Jennings and John Lennon might seem like they couldn’t be more opposite, but the two musicians shared quite a bit in common—namely, their monumental music careers and the equally sizable misconceptions the public had about them. If not for a chance encounter at a Grammy Award ceremony, the two men might have never realized how similar they were.
Fortunately, they did, and their brief encounter marked the beginning of a sincere, if not unlikely, friendship.
Waylon Jenning and John Lennon’s First Meeting
The Grammy Awards would be one of the likeliest places for an American outlaw country star and British rock and roller to meet, and such was the case for Waylon Jennings and John Lennon. In a 1996 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Jennings shared a memory of getting to know Lennon at the star-studded ceremony.
“We were cutting up and everything at one of the Grammy things, and I said, ‘Man, you’re funny. I didn’t know you were funny.’ I said, ‘I thought you were some kind of mad guy or something like that,’” Jennings recalled. “He said, ‘Me?’ He said, ‘Listen, people in England think you shoot folks.’”
Jennings explained that Lennon was referring to the time that the country star brought a pistol into the recording studio and threatened to shoot the fingers off the next guitarist who played a pickup note in his session. He said pickup notes were the “easy” way to transition into a new key. “Why not just keep it rolling and rolling and having a good time, and then come in where you’re supposed to?” Jennings argued to Fresh Air host Terry Gross.
A Relic of an Unlikely Friendship
Waylon Jennings and John Lennon might not be the most obvious musical pairing, but their artistic worlds were not totally separate. Jennings started his career playing bass for Buddy Holly’s band, the Crickets, which was a massive inspiration to John Lennon. (Lennon even wanted to use “The Crickets” as a band name in his early years, but Paul McCartney rejected the idea.)
Jennings also covered two of Lennon’s compositions. The first was “Norwegian Wood” in 1966, and the second was “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” a year later. Lennon was clearly fond of Jennings’ covers, because he presented another potential song for Jennings in a letter he wrote to the country singer shortly after meeting him in the winter of 1975.
“Dear Wayland,” the letter began (Lennon went back and added the correct spelling in pen with a note, “Sorry about that”). “Twas good ta meetya!! Try these on for size. (Tight a$) is the HIT! I should have released it as a single myself, but I left it to late. But it ain’t for someone else. All the best to you. Saw you on TV last week. V.G. [Very good] (Nice band).” The song Lennon was presenting to Jennings was presumably “Tight A$,” which the former Beatle included on his 1973 album Mind Games.
Although Jennings would never go on to record “Tight A$,” he did keep the intimate letter from Lennon until his death in 2002. During a 2014 liquidation of Jennings’ estate, Guernsey’s Auctions sold Lennon’s 1975 correspondence for $7,500.
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