Truthfully, Jennings and his producer clashed from the get-go. After their initial session, Jennings returned to listen to mixes, only to discover someone had waylaid his tape—surely, this wasn’t what he recorded the other day. He claimed he didn’t recognize Danny Davis’s work, a criticism not without some validity. “He’d overdub arrangements without asking me, and turn songs down without even playing them for me.” Jennings had been approached to record Dick Holley’s “Abraham, Martin and John” and agreed to do it; Davis went behind his back and told Holley to take his tune elsewhere. The topical yet uncontroversial lament to assassinated American icons became a million-seller in the hands of Dion, a fellow Winter Dance Party “survivor.” Aggravating Waylon further, one executive asked: “When are you going to cut a country record?”
“You don’t know what that is,” the singer deadpanned.
Worse, Davis’s recording philosophy couldn’t have been more antiquated. He used a patented system devised as a big band member in the ’50s that began with asking artists to have each part written out for the musicians ahead of time. Jennings crafted melodies on the fly, with players expected to wing it for a looser, more lively sound. Davis would make wisecracks, roll his eyes in boredom, or even leave the studio if Jennings didn’t start the first take immediately. During an overdub session, with Jennings laying a second guitar line on the original track, Davis, thinking he was alone in the booth, muttered under his breath about Waylon’s professionalism just as Jessi entered.
“If I told him what you said,” she seethed, “he’d kill you.”
Jennings returned for the next session armed with a .22 handgun on loan from felonious country phenom Merle Haggard. When Davis tried to get the musicians to carefully follow their charts, Jennings warned them: “Anybody still looking at his chart after the third take, your ass is dead.” He whirled toward the control room and glared through the glass. “And, Danny,” he said, “I don’t want to hear any shit out of you.”
Atkins finally admitted he had made a mistake in pairing an anti-authoritarian “rebel” and a studio hardliner. When Atkins told Waylon he would be changing producers, Jennings was ready. Why, he asked, don’t you let me produce my records? He had, after all, landed a few Top 10 country hits. “MacArthur Park” won him a Grammy, but that was the recording Atkins had panicked over, leading him to bring in Davis to wrangle it into a proper, clean, Music Row-ready tune. Recalled Waylon: “I knew exactly what I wanted the strings to do; I had to hum the parts. He probably had his own ideas.” When asked why he opposed Waylon’s independence, Atkins claimed he feared RCA’s top guys would feel underused and defect to rival companies. “I feel sorry for the old men in Nashville,” Waylon told a reporter. “They can’t see things are changin’ and they won’t be able to change. They’re the same ones who ruined Hank Williams.”