Shooter Jennings Says Story Of Waylon Owning “Cocaine Bear” Is The Wildest Thing He’s Ever Heard: “My Biggest Beef Is When People Misrepresent My Dad”

Setting the record straight… again.

Out of ALL the wild stories that have been embellished about Waylon Jennings over the years, this has to be the craziest. I’m sure many of you have heard the insane story about the “Cocaine Bear,” which was a black bear in northern Georgia that died in 1985 after eating a ton of cocaine dumped from a plane by a drug smuggler.

Long story short, the bear was stuffed and eventually found by the owners of Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall, and it’s on display at their store in Lexington. It’s been disputed that the stuffed “Cocaine Bear” is even the real bear that died in Georgia, but the rumor was that Waylon once owned the bear, and it was in his house in Las Vegas before it made its way to Kentucky.

Well, there are a lot of problems with that tale, the first one being that Waylon never owned a house in Vegas, and he never owned the bear. But the story still caught like wildfire, and many typically well-respected news organizations reported it as true. Eventually, Shooter J had to go on record and tell the world it was a totally made up story, and eventually, the owners of Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall admitted they had embellished it for entertainment and to obviously get people to their attraction.

They had first said they acquired the bear in 2015, saying it had been stolen from a storage unit after a fire and sold to a pawn shop. They claimed Waylon bought it without knowing the full background, then gifted it to someone in Vegas or something like that. I think there were rumors Waylon had a place in Vegas he kept it at too…

Either way, Shooter remains bewildered by the entire thing, because it became a huge national news story especially because there was a major motion picture coming out at that time about the Cocaine Bear, titled simply Cocaine Bear, which came out in 2023 and had public interest in the story at an all-time high, which probably only helped perpetuate the rumors.

But during a podcast appearance on The Drifting Cowboy podcast this week, Shooter called it “wildest thing I’d ever heard in my whole life,” adding that people still didn’t believe him once he came out with his statement and explained it was impossible, saying the Kentucky For Kentucky museum made up the story for publicity (and it clearly worked, probably better than they ever would’ve imagined):

“No, no. That was never true. Those people made that up, or someone made that up and told those people that. There was a whole story about how he had this cocaine bear in this house that he had in Vegas. And I go, we didn’t have a house in Vegas… what are you talking about? Like, what is anyone talking about? And it was the weirdest thing, because no matter what I said.

Like, there’s a kid at my son’s school that’s his age, he’s 14 now but whenever this happened he was about 12, whenever that became the news of the century. This kid was arguing with my son at his school that Waylon did have the cocaine bear, and that his dad knew. He’s like, ‘My dad knows. He had the cocaine bear.’ And my son’s like, ‘My dad grew up, he was his dad, you know that, right? He was there.’ So that was such a wild thing.

And I think that little Kentucky for Kentucky place had that thing in there, and had this story whether they made it up or not, but they were using it for a touristy thing and somehow sold it to this movie. It was the wildest thing I’d ever heard in my whole life. I guess they debunked the entire story, because originally they found the actual cocaine bear, when they did, it was heavily decomposed because it had died in the middle of the woods and ate this cocaine or whatever.

But that didn’t keep a good story down, I guess.”

How does that old saying go? A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes, or something like that…

Shooter added that it’s stories like this which upset him the most when it comes to his father, and that’s why it’s so important for him to make sure the public knows the truth about these types of things, especially considering how much his dad’s persona has shifted the longer he has been dead:

“It’s pretty funny, I think they actually boiled down who did it, who came up with the story. There was some guy who had something to do with a drug dealer or something. There was somebody who concocted this whole thing. But I can’t remember.

But that was such a bizarre situation, and I just couldn’t… my biggest beef is, or I guess the thing that bothers me the most, is when people misrepresent my dad. Because when somebody’s dead a long time, it happens that way. People spread these stories, and their persona shifts overtime. So when somebody tells some bull*** like that, everybody else is like, why don’t you just say ‘Yes?’ It would’ve been a lot faster.

But I was just like, I can’t do that. I can’t them just say this s*** and it not be true. Like, we didn’t have a house in Vegas. What is everybody talking about? It was the craziest thing ever. To have a bunch of people push back was ever crazier.”

He added that a huge part of the story was that Waylon collected taxidermy, and Shooter says they didn’t have one single thing that was taxidermied in their house.

It’s completely understandable that he would want to protect Waylon’s legacy, and, you know… this thing called the truth. He’s done an incredibly job with it and continues to honor his father by doing podcasts like this and making sure people know about the real Waylon, the husband, the father, and the friend, not just the outlaw musician they heard on their radios or saw on TV.

I can only imagine how much money Kentucky For Kentucky made off of this whole tall tale, though…

The full podcast is available below.

Speaking of Shooter carrying on his dad’s legacy, he announced earlier this year that he had discovered a treasure trove of unreleased Waylon music, which he managed to turn into three separate albums that are slated for release.

The first one, Songbird, will be out on October 3rd, and features songs he recorded decades ago, during the height of his career, but for whatever reason never made it to an album or got completely finished. Shooter sad they didn’t need too much work, but he did add some background vocals and other instrumentation just to polish it up and make it ready to be put on a professional album in the modern world of 2025.

It’s obviously very unfortunate that Waylon isn’t around to be part of it, but Shooter has done an incredible job of carrying on his father’s legacy in so many ways, and is a highly sought-after and successful producer himself. Probably the best in the business right now.

I can’t wait to hear it all, and so far, they’ve released two songs, including the title track and “The Cowboy (Small Town Texas).”

“Songbird”

“The Cowboy (Small Town Texas)”

The post Shooter Jennings Says Story Of Waylon Owning “Cocaine Bear” Is The Wildest Thing He’s Ever Heard: “My Biggest Beef Is When People Misrepresent My Dad” first appeared on Whiskey Riff.