Lonesome, On'ry and Mean
| Lonesome, On'ry and Mean | ||||
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| Studio album by Waylon Jennings | ||||
| Released | March 1973 | |||
| Recorded | 1972 | |||
| Genre | Country, outlaw country, country rock | |||
| Label | RCA Victor | |||
| Producer | Ronny Light, Waylon Jennings | |||
| Waylon Jennings chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |
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Lonesome, On'ry and Mean is an album by Waylon Jennings, released on RCA Victor in 1973. It was, after Good Hearted Woman and Ladies Love Outlaws, the third in a series of albums which were to establish Jennings as one of the most prominent representatives of the outlaw country movement. Famous photographer Mick Rock shot the album's cover.
By the spring of 1972, Jennings was burned out. Suffering from hepatitis that he contracted while playing an Indian reservation in New Mexico, he took stock of where he was at in his life and career and seriously considered retiring. Although Jennings had enjoyed a respectable run on the country charts, he felt hemmed in creatively and fumed when RCA told him where and how to record. In the audio version of his autobiography Waylon, he reflected:
In the authorized video biography Renegade Outlaw Legend, Jennings recalled that he approached RCA and asked for an advance on royalties, which they agreed to initially, but later came back with a lesser offer of $5,000 on the condition that Jennings sign with the label for another five years. Around this time, Jennings was visited by his long-time drummer Richie Albright, who was surprised at how depressed Jennings was and incensed at what he saw as a lack of respect from RCA. It was Albright who arranged a meeting with Neil Reshen, a business manager at the rock magazine Creem who handled the careers of jazz legend Miles Davis and rock iconoclast Frank Zappa. Reshen, who would also sign with Willie Nelson at Waylon's recommendation, was unimpressed by Nashville's tight inner circle and brought his no-nonsense approach to the negotiations with RCA bosses Jerry Bradley and Chet Atkins. In his memoir, Jennings wrote that the final meeting between the two parties in Chet Atkins' office hit a stalemate over $25,000 and nobody uttered a word for several minutes. Jennings, who needed to go to the bathroom, got up and left the office. On his way back from the bathroom Reshen met him in the hall. "You're a friggin' genius," Reshen exclaimed, "walking out like that! That sewed it up. Where'd you go?" "I had to take a piss," Jennings replied. "Well," said Reshen, "that was a $25,000 piss." As author Joe Nick Patoski observes in his book Willie Nelson, Reshen "stayed in Bradley's face and in Chet Atkins's face. His real aim was to get Waylon off RCA and onto Columbia Records, where he had a relationship with label chief Clive Davis, but RCA let Waylon and his fourth wife, Jessi Colter, have their own custom label, WGJ." According to the 2013 book Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville, Jennings wound up with a deal that was unprecedented for a Nashville a recording artist, including the freedom to produce his own records wherever he wanted, an advance that hovered around seventy-five thousand dollars, and an 8 percent royalty rate. With the artistic freedom he had been pining for, Jennings began recording Lonesome, On'ry and Mean in late 1972.
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