This Time

About

This Time is the 20th studio album by country music artist Waylon Jenning, released on RCA Victor in 1974, at the peak of the outlaw country movement. It was produced by Jennings and Willie Nelson. Although Jennings had won artistic autonomy from RCA in 1972, giving him the freedom to produce his own record, he was still irritated by RCA executive, who kept a close eye on his recording sessions at RCA Victor Studios and had even delayed the release of his 1973 album Honky Tonk Heroe. In his autobiography, Jennings wrote that although he had agreed to record in their studio, the RCA engineers were constantly calling upstairs to executive Jerry Bradley, keeping him aware of everything Jennings did. Fed up with the aggravation, Jennings decided to record his next album at Tompall Glaser's Glaser Sound recording studio at 916 Nineteenth Avenue South, nicknamed "Hillbilly Central," with Willie Nelson co-producing. Glaser, a Nashville veteran who had achieved fame with the Glaser Brother, had co-produced Honky Tonk Heroe, a touchstone of the outlaw country movement. In his book Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kri, and the Renegades of Nashville, author Michael Striessguth describes the atmosphere at the studio, which contrasted sharply with RCA's strict recording traditions: "Its doors propped open to let in the young breezes sweeping through the West End, the so-called Hillbilly Central offices became an outlaw safe haven. Former employees recalled Willie Nelson lazing on the front lawn, and Waylon haunting the offices at three in the morning... The studio hosted a fraternity of singer, songwriters and Nashville dropouts living the verse of a strumming and bumming honky tonk song... Sessions burned into the small hours until Tompall and his entourage peeled out into the streets in search of pinball machine, drink, and greasy food." According to Streissguth, the first song Jennings recorded at Glaser's studio in October 1973 was J.J. Cale's "Louisiana Women" with Kyle Lehning engineering. Lehning, who would achieve fame in the 1980s producing albums for Randy Travi, contributed Wurlitzer electric piano to the Cale song and the trumpet part to "Heaven and Hell." "You just can't believe how different everything sounded when he moved from RCA," Glaser explained in the 2003 documentary Beyond Nashville. "The bottom was fat and big again...You could hear the drum, it wasn't a little tick in the back. It was marvellou." Jennings agreed, stating, "There was a freedom there that I didn't have any place else. Both of us could experiment...It was a fraternity, and Nashville was our college town." .

via Last.fm

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