About The Song

Once the “outlaw” label was affixed to Waylon Jennings, he spent a great deal of time and energy trying to fight the association. Though pleased with the attention to his music, Jennings didn’t want to be stereotyped. At the end of 1978 he put his feelings into a top five single, “Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit’s Done Got Out of Hand.”
Nevertheless, “I Ain’t Living Long Like This” actually helped to promote the outlaw image. Rifles, lawmen and the jailhouse were all mentioned in the song, which had appeared earlier on Gary Stewart’s “Your Place or Mine” album, Emmylou Harris’ “Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town” package, and as the title track of Rodney Crowell’s first solo LP in 1978.
Jennings’ recording, released as a single, faded out after three-and-a-half minutes, but the album cut lasted nearly five minutes. Waylon recorded it in one take, and although he attempted to go back in and fix a couple of the vocal parts that bothered him a little, he never could lay it in there again like he did that first time. So they left it as it was.

Rodney Crowell called on part of his youth in the composing of “I Ain’t Living Long Like This.” Raised in Houston, Texas, he mentions “Wayside Drive” in the song, a street at the end of a 50-mile channel that stretches from Galveston into Houston. It was there that Crowell spent a good deal of his childhood tagging along with his grandfather, a night watchman at the ship channel where the old sailors and merchant marines would get off the boat. He remembers many a day sitting in an old bar down there watching his grandad playing shuffleboard with those old sailors with patches over their eyes.
Crowell wrote “I Ain’t Living Long Like This” in Hermosa Beach, California in 1976. Rodney had disobeyed the city’s leash laws with his dog “Banjo,” and in the middle of writing the song, the authorities incarcerated him briefly for nonpayment of fines. When he returned to the song, he felt even closer to the jailhouse imagery in the lyrics.

“I Ain’t Living Long Like This” was Crowell’s second #1 single as a writer, coming just three weeks after his first, “Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight” by the Oak Ridge Boys. Jennings was still riding high after logging his two mega-hits – “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” in ’77 and “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” the following year, so he had no trouble cruising into the #1 position with “I Ain’t Living Long Like This” on March 1, 1980, marking the 11th of his sixteen Billboard chart-toppers.

Video

Lyric

I look for trouble and I found it son
Straight down the barrel of a law man’s gun
I tried to run but I don’t think I can
You make one move and you’re a dead man friend
Ain’t living long like this
Can’t live at all like this, can I baby?
He slipped the handcuffs on behind my back
And left me reeling on a steel reel rack
They got ’em all in the jailhouse baby
Ain’t living long like this
Can’t live at all like this, can I baby?
Grew up in Houston off the wayside drives
Son of a car-hop and some all night dives
Dad drove a stock car to an early death
All I remember was a drunk man’s breath
Ain’t living long like this
Can’t live at all like this, can I baby?
You know the story how the wheel goes ’round?
Don’t let them take you to the man downtown
Can’t sleep at all in a jailhouse baby
Ain’t living long like this
Can’t live at all like this, can I baby?
I live with angel she’s a roadhouse queen
Makes Texas Ruby look like Sandra Dee
I want to love her but I don’t know how
I’m at the bottom in the jailhouse now
Ain’t living long like this
Can’t live at all like this, can I baby?
You know the story about the jailhouse rock?
Don’t want to do it but just don’t get caught
They got ’em all in the jailhouse baby
Ain’t living long like this

Can’t live at all like this, can I baby?