Wanted! The Outlaws

Wanted! The Outlaws is a compilation album by Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter, and Tompall Glaser, released by RCA Records in 1976. The album consists of previously released material with four new songs. Released to capitalize on the new outlaw country movement, Wanted! The Outlaws earned its place in music history by becoming the first country album to be platinum-certified, reaching sales of one million.

The album quickly reached No. 1 on the country charts and peaked at No. 10 on the pop charts, with two hit singles released, "Suspicious Minds" and "Good Hearted Woman." The two peaked at No. 2 and No. 1, respectively, both featuring Jennings. In 1984, this album was among the first to be reissued on compact disc by RCA Records, catalog number PCD1-1321.

By 1973, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson had asserted creative control over their music, which they both felt had been hampered for years by the conservative approach taken to their recordings at the Nashville division of RCA Records. In 1972, Nelson left the label for Atlantic Records and recorded a pair of critically acclaimed albums, Shotgun Willie (1973) and the concept album Phases and Stages (1974). With Nelson's popularity increasing, RCA did not want to lose Jennings as well, and granted him the authority to produce his records however he wanted. Jennings released the seminal Honky Tonk Heroes album in 1973, widely considered the first "outlaw" album, and This Time in 1974, which was recorded at Glaser Sound Studios, an independent studio in Nashville owned by brothers Chuck, Jim and Tompall Glaser. By 1975, after the explosive success of Nelson's Red Headed Stranger album, a whole new subgenre of country music had emerged called outlaw country. This new movement featured a more "progressive" sound, typified by the music of Jennings and Nelson but also inspired by songwriters like Kris Kristofferson, Billy Joe Shaver, Mickey Newbury, Lee Clayton, David Allan Coe and Townes Van Zandt.

In the wake of Red Headed Stranger and the general media attention the outlaw country movement was generating, producer Jerry Bradley at the RCA studios in Nashville was determined to capitalize on the wealth of Jennings and Nelson recordings that RCA had at their disposal:

Waylon was selling, if we were lucky, two hundred and fifty thousand albums. Willie comes out with Red Headed Stranger and that took off and sold a million records. Jessi Colter put out "I'm Not Lisa" on Capitol. That damn thing sold half a million, or a million, set our butt on fire. We're sitting over there, trying to sell two hundred and fifty thousand records, and we're still struggling. Tompall had a damn record...I never went to one of their concerts, but I can imagine what it looked like, them running up and down the highway doing that.

Bradley approached Jennings about compiling some of his recordings with some old Nelson songs and calling it Wanted! The Outlaws. Jennings okayed the project on the condition that a couple of Glaser tracks be included. Jennings later remarked, "I liked Jerry, but he drove me a little nuts. He didn't have a clue about music, though he always tried to get involved in it, usually by remote control...He was a good merchandiser, though..." Once he got the green light, Bradley went "all in" on the outlaw concept. As author Michael Streissguth observes, "Bradley hired Rolling Stone's Chet Flippo (who would write Jerry Bradley's entry in The Encyclopedia of Country Music in 1998) to pen liner notes, and looked to a Time Life book about the American West as inspiration for the album's iconic album cover, which featured photographs of Colter, Glaser, Jennings, and Nelson on a parched, bullet-riddled wanted poster. In the 2003 documentary Beyond Nashville, Chet Flippo recalled, "The appearance and the marketing of the album were extremely important in making a Nashville album look hip for the first time." In the same film Tompall Glaser stated, "People were so hungry for something different than what was on the radio that they just ate it up. And it sold a million in the first two weeks and it went on up to five million." Jennings, who always viewed the outlaw image with a degree of cynicism, conceded in the audio version of his autobiography Waylon that the movement was rooted in musical integrity:

The cover was pure Old West—Dodge City and Tombstone. Now, we weren't just playing bad guys; we took our stand outside the country music rules, its set ways, locking the door on its own jail cell. We looked like tramps..."Don't fuck with me," was what we were tryin' to say...We loved the energy of rock and roll, but rock had self destructed. Country had gone syrupy. For us, "outlaw" meant standing up for your rights, your own way of doing things. It felt like a different music, and outlaw was as good a description as any. We mostly thought it was funny; Tompall immediately made up outlaw membership certificates...RCA was delighted...At last, an image!

In Nelson's 1988 autobiography Willie, Glaser stated, "Everybody rushed out to buy the Outlaws album: rock and rollers, kids, lockjaw types from the East, people who'd never bought a country album in their whole lives bought that album...Ultimately, I think the outlaw movement or publicity or gimmick or whatever you want to call it did a great thing for country music as a whole, because it opened the way for different styles."