Waylon Jennings learned to hate popular songs
This week in 1977: a hijacked Malaysian airliner crashed, killing 100 people, the State Department pro
posed the emergency admission to the United States of 10,000 more Vietnamese refugees, Indonesia announced it would free 10,000 political prisoners arrested in 1975, and a singer from Littlefield, Texas, had his 42nd hit record.
According to Waylon Jennings, lack of patience was one of his bad habits.
“My lack of patience has got me into trouble in the past and probably will in the future,” said Jennings while commenting on his 1977 No. 1 hit, “The Wurlitzer Prize,”
Waylon says he loved the song when he first heard it, but quickly learned to hate it.
“That song taught me a lesson,” says Waylon, “every time I sang it, I’d tell the band to remind me each time I went into the studio to record—that whatever song I recorded, I’m gonna have to sing that “so and so” every day of my life!
So from then on, I always ask myself over and over if this is a song that I really want to sing every night for the rest of my life.”
Jennings was never really satisfied with the recording of “The Wurlitzer Prize.”
“We had the thing recorded and mixed and ready to go, but I just didn’t like it—so we stripped everything off the tape—except the drums—and completely rebuilt the song all over again. And I still didn’t get it down just the way I wanted it,” says Waylon.
It made the charts Oct. 7, 1977, made it to No. 1 on Nov. 19 and was there for two weeks. It was on the charts for 16 weeks.
Waylon Jennings placed 96 songs on the country music charts between 1965 and 1991. He died in 2002 at age 64.