These days, you can't get away with bringing a rifle into the studio and threatening your musicians. Well, while times were still cool, Waylon Jennings did just that.
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The "Good Hearted Woman" singer once sat down with David Letterman on Late Night in 1983. There, he brought up the time he brought a rifle into the studio and had plenty of fun with it.
Letterman brought up that Jennings had an "interesting way" of working with other Nashville musicians early in his career. And an anecdote immediately came to his mind.
After a small laugh, Waylon Jennings answered, "I think you're talking about Merle Haggard."
Without specifying details, such as dates or locations, Jennings jumped straight into the story. "He had borrowed my gun ... and he brought it back to me in the studio."
It was a long-nosed gun, "you can't hit nothin' with it."
We don't know why Haggard had Jennings' gun, but he thought the studio would be a great time and place to return the firearm. With "the holster, and everything."
"So I thought I'd be clever," he continued. I don't imagine he'd ever been in the studio with such a gun before, so he thought he'd have some fun with it.
Waylon Jennings Threatened To Shoot Bad Musicians
Gun in hand, Waylon entered the studio, and said, "Okay everybody, first guy who plays a pickup note, or they have the numbers system where they write it down instead of the chords ... if I see a guy looking at numbers after we were done it two times — I'm gonna blow your fingers off."
Apparently, it worked a charm.
Letterman probed around Jennings not wanting people to read their music. "Well, I don't think that's music. If you look at it a third time, that means he ain't even listening."
I mean, if you're working with Waylon Jennings, you're gonna want to make sure you're on the top of your game. And that's even without him staring at you down the barrel of a rifle.
Of course, he was joking, but I wonder if anyone took him seriously.
