Waylon Jennings – Waylon Forever

I grew up on country music. Outside of The Beatles, my dad loathed rock n’ roll, so my siblings and I were reared with the likes of Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and yes, Waylon Jennings. While our forced musical choices were unappreciated at the time, I can say that all these years later I am greatly indebted to my dad for opening that certain avenue to me. Waylon Forever, often touted as Waylon’s final recordings, was a project that began in 1995 when Waylon proposed a collaboration with his son Shooter Jennings. It wasn’t until several years after his dad’s death that Shooter Jennings finished the recordings with his backing band The .357‘s. With a combined total of eight tracks, including one cover and just one new tune, Waylon Forever begs the question - was it really worth the wait?Posthumously released albums always seem to be hit-or-miss affairs. With a lauded career spanning four decades, it would seem that Waylon Jennings deserves a better tribute than Waylon Forever manages to muster. It’s a shame that there’s not more new material here, and the one track that is new, ‘I Found The Body’, smacks of 1970’s glam rock, which doesn’t suit Waylon well at all. Oddly enough, the one track that I find myself enjoying the most is a cover of Cream’s ‘White Room’, in which Waylon and Shooter manage to make the 1970‘s rock thing work. The remaining six tracks are simply “reworks” of classic Waylon Jennings tunes, and the pieced-together production is sadly quite obvious: the band is tight enough, but feels tacked on to the vocals, rather than meshing into a cohesive musical unit.Waylon Jennings never seemed to garner quite as much critical attention as his contemporaries, but to me he was always a bit of a legend. I was obsessed with Buddy Holly for a spell many a year ago, and ever since I discovered that it was Waylon Jennings who eerily survived on the day the music died, I was frankly mystified by the man. While I appreciate Shooter Jennings’ good intentions for a tribute to his father, I’ll have to stick with the Waylon Jennings of my youth. 59%Waylon Jennings on MySpace