Waylon Jennings once famously said he "couldn't go pop with a mouthful of firecrackers," yet with an album of previously released material, he did help country music reach a milestone heretofore reserved for pop and rock albums. On this day in 1976, Wanted! The Outlaws, an LP on which Jennings was featured alongside his wife Jessi Colter, Willie Nelson and Tompall Glaser, became country music's first platinum-certified LP, signifying sales of one million.
Although Jennings had begun the transformation from slick Countrypolitan to renegade with the 1972 album Ladies Love Outlaws, this compilation, released on RCA, gave an official name to a country-music movement reserved for artists outside the mainstream. Raucous, rebellious and decidedly uninterested in the blend of pop and country that was storming the charts at the time (and continues to do so today), the Outlaw Movement was also spurred on by such landmark events as the 1976 debut of the long-running PBS series Austin City Limits.
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The outlaw movement lives on, as does Waylon's Music and his influence can still be felt in country music.
"Their music didn't conform to the country norm of songs of divorce and alcohol and life's other miseries," wrote Chet Flippo in the Wanted! liner notes. At the time, Flippo was New York bureau chief for Rolling Stone. He would become senior editor a year later.
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