home listen a- z back next

Tony Joe at Waterloo


A Conversation with Tony Joe White (continued)

PPM: And on top of being great cuts, I mean, on top of the J.J. co-write, a couple of the others were co-writes, too, the Waylon tune and the Michael McDonald tune.

TJW: The Michael McDonald, yes, the Waylon, no. The Waylon was a thing--he come out to my house about eight years ago, and he had just gotten out of the hospital with that heart thing, or the stroke or something. And Jessi was just riding him around. [Jessi Colter, Waylon's wife] And he wanted to know what I'd been doing. I says, "You know, just"--I had a couple of reel-to-reels, old ones in my bedroom back here, and a mic. And he said, "Man, I wrote this song in the hospital, and I don't know if I can play guitar or sing anymore." I said, "Well, let's go back here and turn everything on, and I'll shut the door, and you stay in there by yourself and check it out. Just hit the red button."

PM: Wow.

TJW: So he hollered at me about twenty minutes later. He said, "Come in here and check this, man." It was absolutely perfect.

PM: Whoa.

TJW: And so that song went on a reel-to-reel that already had about eight or ten of some of my old demos on it. And so it sat there and sat there, and got moved around, the studio got moved over to the old house. In the meantime, Waylon had passed away and this and that. And that's all we could even think about. We didn't think about the song. And Jody was going through some of the old stuff and found that thing, it was like an Indiana Jones archive or something.

PM: No kidding.

TJW: I said, "Where did you get that song?" He says, "This is the one you all did in the bedroom."

PM: Holy jeez.

TJW: I went "Goodnight! It was meant to be."

PM: Wow, what a beautiful story.

TJW: And what's really rough about that story is Jessi told me later after he had passed away, she said, "Before he passed away he said, 'The only I ever didn't like about Tony Joe White was he never recorded one of my songs.'"

PM: [laughs]

TJW: And now here we got it.

PM: Oh, my Lord.

TJW: So there's a lot of little inside happenings on this whole thing that's just unreal, almost magical or mystical like happenings. Like Doctor Gloom, man--Carson Whitsett--

PM: Yeah.

TJW: --our B3 player, I mean, on the front of "Did Somebody Make a Fool Out of You?" you'll hear that eerie organ.

PM: Yeah.

TJW: He had already unplugged his organ into my machine. But when Jody dropped it onto Protools, later on, it shows up as the little color response.

PM: Wow!

TJW: So Jody says, "Come in and listen to what Carson did on the end of "Did Somebody Make a Fool Out of You?" I said, "Well, he didn't do nothing." He had done it unplugged. And Jody said, "No, he was sitting over there just real quietly hitting the keys."

PM: Holy shit.

TJW: And so we got to listen. Man, it give us chill bumps because of not only the way it sounded, but the circumstances that it happened under. Doc, when he came into the studio that night, was not feeling well, but he wanted to try one song. And he got Jody to take him home right after that song. And the next morning, he calls and they had found out what was happening to him was there was a big old tumor in his head.

PM: Wow.

TJW: And so he was off into some kind of world right there. He didn't even know we'd quit playing the song or whatever. So Jody put it in the front of the Clapton tune, which makes it even more eerie sounding. But you'll be glad to know that Doc has went through all the treatments, and it shrunk everything down, and now he's back playing his organ. And me and him wrote a song three weeks ago.

PM: Wow!

TJW: So that's the good news part of that. But, gol, how freaky can it get?

PM: Oh, man. There's a lot of spooky beautiful love stories connected with those tracks.

TJW: I know it, because who can say where that thing had taken him off to at the end of that song?

PM: Right.

TJW: He was totally alone. We called his name two or three times, that we was finished with it. He didn't ever even look up.

PM: Wow. Oh, that's amazing, Tony.    continue

print (pdf)     listen to clips      puremusic home