Willie (19 page)

Some of my best writing, I think, is done when I'm driving down the highway by myself. My mind is clear and open and receptive. Then something will happen. Could be it's something I hear on the radio for real, or something I pick up through the radio waves that fill the universe. A song will start. The good ones come quickly, and in a few minutes it's over. I almost never write them down when they first come to me. One test I use is if I forget the song, it wasn't worth remembering.

If the song sticks in my mind, I will write it down days or months later. I'll add a second verse, add a bridge. Once I pick up my guitar, the songs may change some more. I might put it in a key that calls for a different melody than the first one I hear. But usually when I come to the point where I write down the lyrics, the song is basically done.

I seldom used to have the leisure to write this way. As a young man I made being broke and desperate into a life-style. I guess I could have retired modestly at the age of thirty off of royalties from songs like “Crazy.” I might have had to live on a houseboat, but I would have had enough money coming in to provide me with potted meat sandwiches for the rest of my life. But I enjoyed playing music too much to consider just retiring to the life of a writer. If I had quit playing professionally I would have been out every night sitting in with somebody anyhow. Working the road kept me organized. If I have to be somewhere tomorrow, I won't fuck up too bad today. It's when I have too much time on my hands that I really get in trouble.

I chose not to live off my royalties but to keep myself in a condition of being close to broke and desperate—not as much as when I was in
my twenties, which I think is the most difficult age for most people to grow through because you feel like you'll be trapped in your twenties forever—but close enough that the old feeling of need was a fairly constant companion.

I remember one night in 1973, when I was forty years old, I felt almost as desperate as I had felt back in the early Nashville period. I got so drunk and discouraged that I laid down in the street in the snow late at night in front of Tootsie's and waited for a car to come along and run over me. Luckily no cars came, or else they missed me, and eventually I began to feel stupid and got up and went and bought another round of drinks.

At the age of forty I had come a long way and was successful by most any standard. So why did I do that? Because I knew I could become broke and desperate again in the time it takes to snap your fingers. Anybody who went through childhood during the Great Depression—when broke and desperate described nearly the whole country and certainly the farm folks of Central Texas—grew up knowing financial security is an illusion. No matter how high you stack up money in the stock market or a bank vault, they can take it all away from you in an instant. Of all the low points I hit in Nashville, laying down in the snow and wanting a car to run over me had to be lowest.

One night I was in a studio in New York City recording my first album for Atlantic Records under my new deal with Jerry Wexler. I had never recorded in New York before. I had my own band with me, which was a good thing. The labels I had worked for previously would never let me use my own band. I would go to the studio and have three hours to record four songs with studio musicians that maybe I had met before and maybe I hadn't. They were excellent musicians, but some of them had already done three sessions that day and were tired, and none of them had played with me enough to know what I felt and how to follow me.

But Atlantic was letting me use my own band at last. We did have a lot of good musicians sitting in—Doug Sahm, Leon Russell, Jimmy Day, David Bromberg, and others—so that the big guys at Atlantic felt more comfortable. Still, things were not clicking like they should.

I walked out of the studio and back to the hotel. In my room I paced from corner to corner, listening to the radio waves, the old sensation of need surging through me. Then I went into the bathroom and sat down. I saw a sanitary napkin envelope on the sink. I picked up the envelope and started writing:

Shotgun Willie sits around in his underwear
,

biting on a bullet, pulling out all his hair
.

Shotgun Willie's got all his family there
 . . .

Kris Kristofferson told me later the song “Shotgun Willie” was “mind farts.” Maybe so, but I thought of it more as clearing my throat.

I went back to the studio session with the sanitary napkin envelope in my hand, we cut the song, it became the title song of the album, and Atlantic sold enough of them to put out announcements that
Shotgun Willie
was my “breakthrough album.”

In fact, my breakthrough album,
Red Headed Stranger
, was two years in the future on CBS. Atlantic went out of the country music business right after they released my
Phases and Stages
album, and didn't spend any money trying to promote or sell it. But
Shotgun Willie
had assured me once again that when I was under pressure to write songs in a hurry, I could still do it. I wrote, and we recorded, that whole album in about a week.

When I went to Nashville in 1960 as a young songwriter with ambition to be a singer, it was because Nashville was where the store was. If I had anything to sell, it must be taken to the store. Nashville, New York, and L.A. were the big stores. There was hardly any demand for me or my music outside of Texas, and I knew if I was going to be recognized widely I would have to make it in Nashville.

I didn't try to change my lifestyle when I hit Nashville. I enjoyed fooling around with the phrasing, but it made my sound noncommercial for all those Nashville ears who were listening for the same old stuff and misunderstood anything original. They didn't know what to do with me. I wasn't country like Roy Acuff was country.

If a song had more than three chords in it there was a good chance it wouldn't ever be called country, and there was no way you could make a record that wasn't called country in Nashville at that time. I had problems immediately with my song “Crazy” because it had four or five chords in it. Not that “Crazy” is real complicated, it just wasn't your basic three-chord country hillbilly song.

“Crazy Arms” by Ralph Mooney was a three-chord country classic. A song like “Stardust” has a lot of chords. My songs are somewhere between them. For a while my songwriting career became a matter of arguing that I wasn't this and I wasn't that—so what the hell was I? They couldn't define the songs I was writing, and I was too stubborn to tailor my stuff for the country music market.

Even though I was writing a country song, I wasn't singing it in the traditional way. Not that I couldn't. I just wanted to phrase it the
way I felt like phrasing it. I could sing on the beat if I wanted to, but I could put more emotion in my lyrics if I phrased in a more conversational, relaxed way. I found I could get ahead of the beat or fall behind the beat and still make it all work out in the end without breaking meter. People who really didn't know much about music lost their beat in their own minds, so they thought I was breaking meter.

Sometimes I did break meter, but I knew when it happened. It would be a mistake caused by taking chances. Maybe I would wind up with more words than I had time to sing in a particular measure, so I either dropped the words over or added a measure. If you add a measure, you break meter. I never intentionally broke meter, but I did intentionally phrase dangerously close to it.

The nitric acid test for a songwriter—where the inferior materials dissolve and leave the gold—is what we call guitar pulling.

A guitar pulling is where songwriters gather in somebody's room and fight it out for attention and approval. You might say it's like a bunch of Old West gunfighters coming together to see who is best—only instead of slapping their holsters and coming up with six-guns blazing, they unsnap their guitar cases and come up singing.

This would be a room full of real piranhas, too. Picture a dozen novelists getting together in one room, and each in turn reads his latest chapter out loud to the others, who are all competing for the same publishers and audience. That would be a novel pulling. You can imagine the tension in the room, scornful glances, the caustic remarks—but you can also imagine the tremendous feeling of pleasure when the other writers couldn't help but break into murmurs of respect.

There's a certain openness and honesty between songwriters, I think. There should be. There was with us. Anyone was fair game. We were trying to prove we were writers and get our songs recorded. There was a gang of us living in Nashville together. It was very competitive. Whoever had a recording session that week had better watch out, because he was going to get swarmed by a lot of songwriters. We'd find out who his A&R man was, who is publisher was, where his house was. You could try any way you wanted to get your song to him.

Hank Cochran, Kris Kristofferson, Harlan Howard, Roger Miller, a bunch of guys like that, would gather at guitar pullings to see what the other writers were writing as well as to show off their own stuff. You had better have a lot of stamina, because guitar pullings turned into long nights. And even if you had the best song, you might not
get it recorded. Plugging songs and pitching songs is an art in itself. Besides being a hell of a writer, Hank Cochran is one of the greatest song pluggers who ever lived. I mean, Hank could sell 'em. You could be the guitar-pulling champion of the month, and just because your peers liked you was no guarantee that the big boys at the record companies would even hear you.

“Go home and live with the guy until he publishes your song,” is what Hank Cochran used to say. That theory worked for Hank many times. Let's say Burl Ives was coming to Nashville to hear some new songs and asked Hank to get six or seven writers together for a guitar pulling.

Hank wanted Burl to record Hank's songs. Hank didn't care anything about Burl recording my songs or Kris's songs. But being a good song plugger and a professional, Hank would call a few of his writer friends together and say, “Burl wants to hear your songs.” He'd get me and Roger and Mel Tillis and whoever in a room with Burl Ives. We'd pick our best songs and start singing them to him. Burl would sit there and listen to all of us sing. Hank would wait. After we had sung every song we knew, they would all be running together in Burl's mind. About the time the songs all sounded the same and Burl was thoroughly confused and we had run out of songs anyway, Hank would sing his own songs. Hanks' songs would be the last ones Burl remembered when he went into the studio.

There are songwriters like Billy Joe Shaver or Lee Clayton who can knock the room on its ass at a guitar pulling but have never been able to keep steady employment with the record companies. They'll write fine songs like Billy Joe's “Honkytonk Heroes” or “Black Rose” or “Old Five and Dimers” or like Lee's “Ladies Love Outlaws,” but it's usually somebody else who cuts the record and makes the money.

It's always been fashionable for the record companies to find a good songwriter and sign him to a contract for his songs. That ain't a bad deal for a guy who only wants to be a songwriter. But I wanted to cut my own songs, as well. So they grudgingly allowed me to sing as long as they could cover up my voice with horns and strings and hope the songs were strong enough to carry the album. They didn't bother trying to promote me. They figured, hey, when we need a good song for one of our twenty other singers we'll just go pick one off of Willie's latest album and people will think it is new work.

There wasn't much other choice. Other than signing with a publishing house or recording label, you could sign with a middleman who usually called himself a producer or a manager. The middleman
would sign the artist for everything—management, publishing, and booking. Then he'd sign the artist to a record company and pay him three or four percent out of the ten percent the label paid the middleman.

They'd give the artist a small amount to sign and tell him his three or four percent came out of royalties. They'd promise the artist all kinds of things, put out his record, and send him a statement at the end of six months.

The statement was always an incredible document that was impossible to read. The record company would take a reserve of fifty to seventy percent of the records shipped and say that the artist owed the company for the reserve. They held back money from the artist to cover “breakage.” That arrangement started when records were 78s made out of glass and sometimes actually broke, but it stayed the same old shitty deal even when everybody switched to LP albums that were made out of vinyl. You could drop a vinyl LP out of a ten-story window and not hurt it. There ain't been a broken album in thirty years, but they still try to hold out ninety percent of the “breakage” reserve. The statement charged the artist for everything in sight. Stuff you thought you were getting free—telephone calls, a bar tab, room service, postage stamps—they charged you for all of it.

You'd get your statement and be excited and open it to see how much money you had made—and find out you owed the record company $50,000. Instead of being semi-rich, you'd suddenly have to scramble for money to pay your income tax.

What you'd do then is go to the middleman or the record company for an advance on the next album which you needed because they hadn't paid you any royalties on the last one. They knew you wouldn't be there asking them unless you were broke.

So before they'd give you money in advance they'd try to renegotiate your contract, sign you up an extra two years at a worse deal. For years we didn't know how to read our statements and we didn't know enough to hire our own lawyers to negotiate our contracts. The record companies and the middlemen would tell us, “You don't need a lawyer. You're a good old country boy, and I'm a good old country boy. We're just good, plain, honest folks. Be nice to us. You know we wouldn't screw you, hell, we're a big happy family here. Sign this contract and let's go have a beer, pal.”