Willie (27 page)

A case in point. In 1978 he called me and said he had an idea for his next album. “I'm going to record ten of my all-time favorite songs,” he said. “Songs like ‘Stardust,' ‘Moonlight in Vermont,' ‘Sunny Side of the Street' . . . What do you think?”

I said, “I think you're crazy.” I gave him typical record executive answers. “You're a great writer. Go write. Do a ‘Luckenbach, Texas' or some damn thing. Stay with the mood that's hot.”

Willie said, “Great songs are great songs no matter when they're written. The other thing is, my audience right now is young, college age, and mid-twenties. They'll think these are new songs, and at the same time we'll get the sentiment of the older audience who grew up with these songs but don't necessarily know me as an artist. We will bridge that gap.”

I heard him out and said, “I still think you're crazy.”

People around the company said, “What the hell are we going to do with ‘Sunny Side of the Street'?”

Of course, it turned out to be like shooting fish in a barrel.
Stardust
couldn't have been a better project if we had drawn it on the blackboard, which we didn't. Willie had figured it out. That was a pivotal album for country music. It opened up a whole new audience.

Willie has always been a prophet, slightly on the edge. But he manages to keep it in perspective. He takes things right down to zero base.

The night he won Entertainer of the Year at the Country Music Awards, we all rushed backstage and embraced him and smothered him with accolades: “Willie, congratulations! Terrific! You're our guy!”

He looked me dead square in the eye and said, “Rick, I don't know what all this means. Does this mean I'm a better singer than Kenny Rogers?”

He put it in perspective for himself and then turned the page.

We do marketing tests that ask the consumer to associate one word or phrase with various stars. When we hold up a picture of Johnny Cash, they say “Black.” Kenny Rogers is usually “the Gambler.” You know what they say about Willie? The consumer says, “Free spirit.”

It was summer in Brownsville, down on the Gulf of Mexico, and it was hotter than hell when the Devil turns the blowers on. Brownsville is the southernmost town in the United States. Willie had a membership at this country club in Brownsville and had asked me to be his partner in a member-guest golf tournament. He had been hanging out at the Kerrville Folk Festival in the Hill Country, where I was going to pick him up in a plane. But Willie said he wanted to drive his Mercedes to Brownsville. So he showed up that morning for golf, having been up at least one night if not two or three, and we teed off with two strangers on a course where the fairways were cut out of a big grapefruit orchard.

I mean it was so hot and sweaty you didn't dare pick your nose for fear you'd slip and put your eye out. Not a breeze stirring, no air at all, no water except for these muddy irrigation ditches they call
resacas
.

We had played about nine or ten holes when Willie hooked his ball into a
resaca
that was pretty wide, almost like a little lake full of
muddy, gooey brown water. I turned my back to hit my own shot and heard a tremendous splash behind me.

I saw the little white tennis hat Willie had been wearing. It was floating on the mud in the
resaca
. After a minute, here came Willie rising up out of the muddy water, splashing around fully clothed, throwing the water on himself like he was taking a bath.

He waded out and came back to the cart. He pulled his billfold out of his jeans and tossed it in the cart to dry. Willie took his shoes off. That old mud was oozing between his toes and dripping out of his hair and beard. I didn't snap, you know, didn't act like there was anything different about him. He just said, “Hi,” which is typical. I said, “How you doing?” He said, “Just fine, thank you.”

He walked onto the green to putt. There was a puddle of gook around his feet. With mud and crap all over him, he looked like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. These strangers we were paired with, they couldn't believe their eyes.

Willie pushed his ball to the right off the next tee, which he is prone to do. I sat in the cart while he went and found his ball among the grapefruit.

“What club do you need?” I called.

“Throw me a two-iron,” he said.

He was kind of hunkered down on his heels in the old cowboy squat, his elbows on his knees. I took out his two-iron and threw it like a boomerang.

The club went whistling over the trees and hit Willie smack in the head and knocked his ass right over.

I thought: God Almighty, I have killed Willie.

But he rolled around and stood up with the club in his hand and yelled, “Thanks, Coach, I got it.”

When he came back to the cart, I said, “Lord, Willie—are you hurt?”

He said, “Am I bleeding out the ears?”

I said, “Naw.”

“I guess I'm not hurt, then,” he said.

I was taking a lot of heat from the bluebloods for running around with this dope-smoking hippie. My answer to them was, “Willie doesn't fault me for my sins, and I don't fault him for his.” And I'd drop it right there. A friend is somebody who's willing to overlook your faults, because we all have faults. Willie doesn't put on airs for anybody. He doesn't try to change to suit a crowd. If he doesn't suit the crowd, he'll just vanish and be gone.

Willie has threatened someday to put his guitar case in the trunk of his car and take off down the highway, just him and his guitar. He
said he might start on I-35 and play all the way up the right side. When he gets as far north as it goes, he'll turn around and still be playing the right side on the way back to Texas.

His wardrobe is certainly no problem to him. If I go somewhere, I match up ties and match up socks and plan it so I can change from one rigging to another rigging. But Willie's rigging is all the same. He doesn't try to match his T-shirt to his tennis shoes. He just puts on something clean and goes on down the road. He could pack one duffel bag and stay gone two years and be happy as a lark.

In about 1970, I'm coming through San Antonio one day and Crash Stewart tells me Willie has moved from Nashville to the Happy Valley Dude Ranch in Bandera.

Boy, it was bleak. No work for anybody. We were sort of burnt out. Willie couldn't get dates, RCA wasn't treating him right. I started booking gigs out of the dude ranch. Willie would work weekends for enough money to pay some of the bills. Paul English, Bee Spears, Larry Trader, myself, Willie and Connie, and some others lived at the dude ranch. We wasn't hippies, but we lived like hippies.

Willie came to me and said, “We ought to put on a picnic on this bankrupt golf course.” I thought it was a good idea whose time had not yet come. The guy who could make it happen financially didn't like the idea, at all. But while I was negotiating, Willie's band played a date back East. Driving home, they picked up a hippie girl hitchhiker. We've still got the clean cut look, right? They brought the girl to Bandera for a while and she said she wanted to go to the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin. We didn't know what the hell it was all about, but we drove her there on the bus. Armadillo World Headquarters was an old National Guard Armory that had been turned into a hippie dance hall by Eddie Wilson, Spencer Perskin and Shiva's Head Band, Mike Tolleson, a group called Mad Dog and a bunch of people who worked their asses off for less than no money. Jim Franklin, the artist, painted beautiful murals all over the building. It was a shameful day for the city of Austin when they tore down the Armadillo World Headquarters and replaced it with just another office building.

The Armadillo was a real eye-opener for us. Willie saw crowds of young people who would be natural prospects for an outdoor music festival. Like a country Woodstock.

Willie borrowed $5,000 from a Houston lawyer, Joe Jamail, the guy who fifteen years later represented Pennzoil in the huge judgment against Texaco. We bought and bagged 20,000 tickets. Larry Trader, Billy Cooper, Gino McCoslin, Eddie Wilson, and I set out to sell the tickets. About that time the
Shotgun Willie
album came out and sold more in Austin alone than most of his previous albums had sold nationwide. You could sense something was about to happen.

The first Picnic in 1973 was a go-for-broke deal. None of us had earned a quarter or had any hope for the future unless the Picnic worked.

Willie wore cutoff blue jeans, sandals, let his hair grow long, grew a beard. He said in effect, “Kids, I'm one of you, and you can be one of me.” He didn't lead them, he followed them. And they responded. Here was somebody older, a character, part of another world from the rock and roll world the kids knew. Suddenly the Woodstock kids became the Austin kids. Willie came out of the Picnic a charismatic figure with an enormous audience.

We didn't make much money on the Picnic. Two days after it was over, I took my collection to Bobbie's house and we cut it up. Willie gave me a small part of it—enough to get my car back that had been repossessed.

But the Picnic was a catalytic thing.

Inside Willie's personality is a child, and yet he's an alleycat. He's been bruised, and you can see it in his face, his scars. But the childlike thing in Willie is his optimism, a kind of childlike faith in hisself and the people around him.

When Willie really started taking off and hiring big time managers, they wanted Willie to leave us old-timers in the dust. I never argued that the new management couldn't get bigger, richer shows for Willie than I could. Hell, they had power and money I never had. Willie became very profitable to them. For three or four years I had to fight like a tiger just to hang on to the bones they threw me.

But Willie wouldn't let them leave me. I stayed in his face, kept pushing. I wasn't a big-league player like the new guys, but Willie never put a security guard at the door and said don't let Gresham in. I can go any fucking place I want to if Willie is there. I have held on to my territory, but it has been a struggle.

I don't give a shit what he says, he's getting tired of the road. It's extremely hard to live in the world of Hollywood and Madison Avenue and Broadway and Billy Bob's and the Little Wheel all at the
same time. I think Willie might circle back to a life-style he's had before. He's a very spiritual person. He sees his life as a series of circles. That is, he's reincarnated many times in his own life. Once he's experienced all the other life-styles, he'll probably come back to something he's already done before. Exactly what that may be is not for me to guess. I just hope I recognize it when I see it.

One of Willie's first Austin business ventures was the Willie Nelson Pool Hall at 2317 South Lamar. His daughter Lana did the books for the pool hall, I ran errands when I wasn't starring onstage or on the radio. Zeke Varnon was the mastermind. Willie let Zeke drive the Mercedes to the bank, and Zeke told them it was his car, so he had a good line of credit for a while. Willie is a genius at knowing when to hang out places. Like before a show, he knows exactly where to go and when. Same at the pool hall. He knew just how often to come by to keep the rumors going. “Hey, Willie's coming in . . . Willie was here.”

The year we went and played the “World's Biggest Show” in Terlingua, Texas, the promoter furnished Winnebagos for all the acts. Waylon was there, and Leon Russell, a huge lineup of talent. Except there was a lot more of us than there was audience. We had thought the “World's Biggest Show” would be held at the “World's Champion Chili Cook Off.” But the chili deal was three miles away, and the miles in Terlingua are longer than they are anywhere else.

The next day and night we drove 980 miles from Terlingua to the Homecoming Concert in Abbott, where Willie was going to play an outdoor concert for all his old neighbors.

Paul was driving Willie's Winnebago. He came so close to having a head-on collision that it ripped the rearview mirror off the side. We arrived in Abbott about daylight. In those days the neighbors, you know, were afraid of outdoor festivals. They thought Willie and the rest of us was a bunch of hippies. They didn't want crazy-looking people like us threatening their neighborhood.

A guy came up to our Winnebago and said, “I'm from the sheriff's department. I'd like to speak to Willie Nelson.”

Paul said, “Willie ain't here right now, but I can take care of it for you.”

“We need you to sign this paper,” the deputy sheriff said.

“What is it?”

“This paper says anybody that sets foot on any property that ain't leased for the Abbott Homecoming Concert, it's okay if we shoot them.”

There were pickups pulling horse trailers, going in and out. All along the line you could see more pickups with guys sitting on the hoods holding shotguns in their laps.

Willie wrote out a list of the acts that were supposed to perform at the Homecoming and asked me to be the master of ceremonies.

Billy Cooper's dad—the Reverend George W. Cooper—said a prayer to open the Homecoming Concert. Then they sang hymns. Willie slipped me a piece of paper. “Here's the list of every act that's here,” he said. “Anybody can play anytime they want to for as long as they want.”

“What'll you be doing?” I said.

“I gotta leave for a while,” he said.

So Willie disappeared. I went around to the acts and asked how long they wanted to play, and I introduced them. Things were going great until either Kinky Friedman or Kenneth Threadgill let a couple get married onstage during their set. That kind of threw things out of kilter. Plus at that time I tended to drink a little myself, and I kept getting Asleep at the Wheel mixed up with Greezy Wheels.

People were real congenial for about the first eleven hours before they started turning hostile.