Crazy to think that what Waylon Jennings had to say back in 1995 about Nashville still rings true in the modern age of country music.
Thanks to a YouTube channel called “Video Stock Archives,” old interviews from the 1980s and 1990s are once again seeing the light of day. Fortunately, one of the more recent interviews that they unearthed and posted was a sit down in 1995 with the late, great Waylon Jennings.
Jennings was interviewed by what sounds like a German reporter, and for whatever reason, Waylon was very open and frank answering the man’s questions. The “I’ve Always Been Crazy” singer rarely ever shied away from speaking his mind, it’s why we all love him, but this sit down cultivated some very thoughtful and drawn out answers.
When the topic of Nashville and it’s record companies came up, Waylon didn’t hold back. He had no issue ripping into the Nashville machine, and calling out the executives who swore by a certain way of doing things and cared little about the music itself. As he put it, Nashville didn’t want artists to come in with their own ideas, and Waylon Jennings was overflowing with them. It’s at that point that Jennings gave a scathing comparison for how Music City was churning out country music:
“They would rush you. It was kind of like assembly line music. Where they just did it like a car, no matter what, when it got past you, the other guy was working on something else. If you weren’t happy, that’s too bad. You had to record in their studios, you had to use their producers…I couldn’t understand how a guy could go to college and get a four-year degree in marketing and he’d come and tell me he knew more about my music than I did.
They didn’t want you to have ideas. They wanted you to come in and do it in a thing called the ‘Nashville sound.’ Me and the Nashville sound was like oil and water: it just didn’t mix. There was no edge to that music. It was one thing, and everybody recorded it, and it all sounded the same.”
If you are familiar with Waylon Jennings in even the slightest capacity, you know that his outlaw nature despised the repetitive, cookie-cutter way of doing things in Nashville. He constantly butted heads with the Nashville machine, and at one, he even threatened to quit when the label he was with at the time said that no one was interested in what he had to say:
“I decided to quit once because Epic Records had told me that nobody wanted to hear me sing anymore, and that radio wasn’t going to play my records anymore and they couldn’t do anything. I said, ‘Well that’s alright. I don’t have to work anymore if I don’t want to.’ I kind of had a pity party, then I realized I’ve never let anyone run me off from nothing. I will be standing when all of this is faded out.”
What a BAR. Waylon Jennings really has me ready to run through a brick wall on a Monday afternoon.
That little tangent resulted in Jennings really breaking down – and taking shots at – the way things were done in Nashville. He suggested that prioritizing record sales over building fanbases was ridiculous, and that it wasn’t sustainable in any way:
“Record companies and executives, they have a little thing now that doesn’t carry over to drawing people. They have people who sell a lot of records, but that’s all. They go out to do a show and nobody shows up. You think that they are really big, and they draw two or three thousand people, and then give the tickets away to make the big coliseums full… and I didn’t know that.”
Turns out this 1995 interview was prophetic in a way, considering that very issue still applies in 2025.
Jennings went on to say that when fans don’t show up to concerts, the ridiculous blame game ensues. He strongly believed that record executives were asking the wrong questions when it came to making music, and that because he chose to do things differently, Waylon never ran into the issues that many other short-lived artists did:
“The record company blames it on the radio, radio blames it on everything else, (says) it’s not a hit record. How do they know it’s not a hit record if they’re not going to play it? When you go in with a song, they listen to it and say, ‘Well, can you dance to it? Will it make a good video?’ All the way down at the bottom (of the list), they ask, ‘Is it a good song?’ It used to be the first thing that people asked a record…
The record companies don’t care. The radio don’t care. They say that’s not their problem. They sell two or three million records, and draw 300 people. We’ve kept our drawing power up, and radio… it doesn’t matter. If they never play me again, I’m still going to draw five or six thousands people no matter where I’m at.”
Hell yeah Waylon.
You can hear the country music legend rip into Nashville, the record companies and music executives in both Part 1 and Part 2 of the 1995 interview:
Part 1
Part 2
