Willie (30 page)

The honky-tonk environment is definitely to be avoided if you intend to make a living while staying away from beer and whiskey and dope. Don Cherry has supported himself and all his wives in style for forty years by singing in nightclubs and has never smoked a cigarette, tasted whiskey, or touched dope—but this is rarer than a singing turtle.

The toughest cowboys in the world come to honky-tonks to cry in their beer. They'll request “Please Release Me, Let Me Go” or “Your Cheatin' Heart.” They sit and they listen, and their emotions are very visible. They may not admit their feelings to their wives or girlfriends, but they will pay money to hear a band play these songs. If there's not a band onstage, they shove quarters in the jukebox all night long to hear the same songs the women are listening to and sympathizing with. Women have the same emotions as men when they hear those songs. Chances are if you're listening to a love song in a saloon and you catch eyes with a woman and think you'd like to take her to bed, she is thinking the same thing about you.

Drunks like sad songs, heartbreak songs, cheating songs. I love those songs myself. I've written hundreds of them. The trouble with them is they can put you into a self-perpetuating mood of negative thinking. The sadder the song, the sadder you feel. The sadder you feel, and the more you want to buy another round and stick another quarter in the jukebox, the sadder you become in a downward spiral.

It can really get to a musician performing sad songs night after night. You sing those heartbroken, look-what-a-fool-I-am lyrics over
and over, year after year, you can find yourself believing life is truly like that and always will be.

A lot of people aren't happy unless they're miserable. I went though that. I thought misery was the way life was supposed to be. I thought we were all supposed to sit down and write how terribly sad and rejected we were.

In my twenties and thirties I started getting deeply into self-destruction. I was taking myself to the bottom. What changed me first was, I realized I just flat wasn't ready to die.

If I was going to die, I wanted to blame somebody else. But there was nobody to blame. It was pretty obvious that I was the culprit. Once I saw it in black and white, a bell went off deep inside. It was the lowest period in my life, I think, but once I realized I had nobody to blame but me, I found myself enjoying sitting there and smiling about it all, knowing that eventually it was all going to be okay. It was sort of funny that I could sit there, believing I had just learned that however you want things to be, create them in your mind and they'll be that way. I started laughing at the situation, knowing how bad it was now, and how good it was going to be later. It became funny that I had let it get so fucked up.

But it wasn't that easy, and it's still not that easy to live positively around people who think negative. I had to turn myself around, and then I didn't want to be around anybody negative. That rubbed off on the people near me, so they knew that if they were going to hang out with me, they had to be positive. I'd made up my mind that I would refuse to have anything negative going on anywhere in my sight. If there's a fight over there, I'll go break it up, regardless of the consequences, because I don't want to see it. Pretty soon the word got around—don't be negative or don't be spreading any negative thoughts around Willie, he don't like them. There's a lot of people, I'm sure, who shied away from me, because they were and still are negative thinkers.

I became aware that I wasn't meant to go out of this life drunk and rejected. I started thinking, well, maybe a guy don't have to die, he don't have to be a miserable son of a bitch all the time to write good songs.

For whatever reason—my spiritual growth or outlook or God or whatever you want to call it—my attitude changed. I haven't written that many songs since the change, but the ones I have written are of better quality. More positive. If I get an idea for a negative song now, I reject it. I don't want to go through what it would require of me to write a sad, negative song. I just don't want to re-live it in my heart
and mind. To move into a positive future, you must let go of negative things of the past.

My change in attitude is also partly due to the fact that when I started smoking marijuana, I quit drinking so much. When I quit drinking so much, I felt better physically and mentally. Remember what Coach Bear Bryant said after he quit drinking? He said, “For thirty-five years I walked around pissed off all day, and now I find out it was a hangover.”

I started smoking weed regularly as a substitute for smoking cigarettes. Tobacco was a horrible habit. I smoked three to five packs a day. When I was really enjoying smoking, there was nothing like having a cup of coffee and a cigarette in the morning after a meal. Then I started smoking so much I couldn't enjoy a cigarette with my meal because I'd already smoked a pack beforehand. My throat burned and my lungs were sore. I smoked for years after I had stopped enjoying it. I quit smoking a hundred times before the day I finally took a deep inhale and it hurt my lungs so bad I knew at that instant I would never smoke a cigarette again.

I couldn't stand the pain in my lungs. I had been deteriorating daily, and I could feel it. I had no energy. I was trying to sing, but I had no lung power. Deep inside of me this little voice said,
Willie, you've got to stop this right now this instant. You're supposed to be a singer and all you're doing is fucking up. Why are you putting all this shit in your lungs? Don't you understand you're cauterizing your lungs and throat with whiskey so you won't feel what the cigarettes are doing to you? The whistling sound coming from your lungs sounds like shit in harmony
.

Once I finally listened to this inner voice, I stopped cigarettes forever.

Instead of having a cigarette in my hand, I started carrying a rolled-up joint in my hat or someplace. Maybe I'd just smoke a toke of it when I got the craving to smoke. Of course, a person can get to where he smokes forty joints a day instead of forty cigarettes. But if you do that, you will get nothing much done except a lot of gazing. Too much marijuana destroys your motivation to get up and go on with important things in life. That's one reason I am not in favor of kids smoking marijuana when they're still in school. You learn how much is enough for you. It's different for everybody. Children are healthy, growing tissue. They will find out about marijuana later if they need it.

I would be in favor of legalizing marijuana entirely, but I don't like to think of a government having the power to legalize something like
an herb. An herb belongs to us people to use as we need, and it is no government's business.

If it came to me standing up in a case like that, I would come out in favor of de-legalizing cigarettes.

My mother and my dad and my stepmother and my stepdad have all died of cancer and emphysema from heavy smoking. I don't need a truck to hit me to know those fucking cigarettes will kill you. Why do we sell them? Why can a kid go in a store and buy them? Why do they send people to prison for smoking marijuana when they are legally selling shit that is a proven killer.

After I quit smoking cigarettes I took up running and working with weights and playing a lot more golf. I was getting healthy again, I thought. But the cigarettes had done serious damage to my lungs.

My left lung was like a balloon that had some weak places in it. I made this discovery in Hawaii in the summer of 1981. I had just got through running and I was real hot and sweaty. The surf was pounding, the ocean looked good and cold. I went plunging into the waves. I was about 200 yards out in the ocean when a sudden terrible pain hit me. I knew something bad had happened. I thought it was a heart attack, but then I somehow knew that it was my left lung that had collapsed. The pain was a sharp, sick feeling, like I had partly caved in. Holding my left side together, the waves knocking me down and just about washing me under, I made it back to the shore and fell down in the sand. They came and got me in an ambulance. I remember the sound of the siren as we sped past the palm trees.

In the hospital they stuck a tube through my back, up through my rib cage and into my lung. This was to drain the fluid out so the lung would inflate itself again. They don't give you anything for the pain. The doctors have got it figured out that when you scream at a certain pitch they've hit the right place. The next morning they had to do it again.

The lung will heal itself quicker than any other part of the body, but still I was laid up for three or four weeks in the hospital, resting and thinking. I was straight and I found my mind standing naked staring at itself. It was time to write something. Laying in the hospital, I wrote the
Tougher than Leather
album. It's a story album about a reincarnated cowboy. He was a gunfighter in the 1800s, killed several people. He died in the electric chair.

Was it something I did, Lord, a lifetime ago?

Am I just now repaying a debt that I owe?

Justice, sweet justice, you travel so slow
.

But you can't change my love for the rose
.

I think it's my fate to go in and out of these scrapes and then write about them. It's almost like I can't wait to get out of one to get into another.

Half a dozen years before my lung collapsed, after I had moved to Austin back in the early seventies, I got into a nightmare that I haven't wanted to write a song about, much less an album.

Ever since the purely honky-tonk nights, there have been a few shows when I've accidentally gotten a little too wrecked from weed and tequila to know exactly what town I was in when I hit the stage and couldn't have told you in advance what all was about to happen. I don't make a regular practice of it, naturally, and it is nothing to worry about. There is a tape recorder in my mind that I can turn on. It starts with “Whiskey River” and plays for two hours and twenty minutes. Somewhere before the tape runs out, my brain will catch up with what is going on and join my spirit that has been doing the singing and playing.

Except once it didn't work.

Back in Austin in the seventies, a bunch of us got into hallucinogenics. I'm an experimental sort of fellow. I ate peyote, swallowed mescaline, had some fairly astounding adventures and revelations. There was plenty of acid around in those days. Pure Sunshine acid that was easy to get from a chemist in San Francisco. Another good brand was called Purple Jesus. It made you radiate. I understand why acid and the psychedelics were popular in the sixties and seventies. It was a step in awakening our consciousness to prepare people for the spiritual evolution of the Age of Aquarius. The young hippies who were high on acid, some of them are in important places today with their understanding expanded by their acid experiences.

In the fairly short period of time that I used it, acid taught me several profound things. One was that I must not take acid and try to play a show. I knew better than to do it, but I'd had a few drinks, and when somebody handed me a tab of Sunshine I thought, well, why not? Without asking how big a dose it was, I washed the Sunshine down with a beer.

It was still a couple of hours before I was due on stage.

“This ought to be a real interesting show,” I said.

“Yeah, man, far fucking out,” my friend said. “Wow, you took 1500 mikes.”

A dose of 500 micrograms of good LSD is enough to put you into a state where people look like walking skeletons, and the road can turn into chocolate pudding. I had taken three times that.

Acid comes on in about an hour with a golden rush of euphoria and energy. This will last about an hour. Then it starts getting tricky. You can go on a spiritual trip and feel a blissful oneness with the universe. Or you can become a terrified, raving nut. Much of it has to do with your surroundings. You have a cleaner shot at bliss if you are sitting on a rock by a creek alone in the woods than you do if you are climbing onto the stage in a honky-tonk packed with thousands of screaming people.

I opened my mouth and sang, but all I heard was some distant voice imitating mine. Great roars came from the crowd, unlike any human sound I'd ever heard. The lights glowed like fiery embers. The whole room started pulsing with a low, ominous jungle beat. I seemed to be standing in chocolate pudding.

“Please, Lord, get me out of this, and I promise I'll never do it again,” I tried to say.

But the secret to a successful acid trip is not to try to control the things that are happening to you. Don't try to be in charge. How do you totally surrender your ego, and sing at the same time? The more you try to put your ego first, the more fucked up and paranoid you get. An indisputable fact about acid is once you swallow that tab, it will be about eighteen hours before the experience is over. Acid doesn't quit fucking with you just because you get tired of fucking with it. My fingers began turning into claws on the guitar. I felt like I looked like a werewolf.

My fingers and my throat performed the songs, but I was out of control up there on a stage in front of a big wild crowd turning bright colors and growing giant mouths with huge lips. My hand came off the guitar and flew out into the crowd, then my arm stretched out like a gauzy hose to connect again with my hand. What an ordeal!

Somehow I got through the set and was driven away where I could finish freaking out in relative peace. I decided then and there that I didn't need to do acid ever again. I went as far as I could go with it that night.

I'm in better shape now than I've ever been in my life. I can do a lot of things physically and mentally that I couldn't when I was twenty years old. I can run ten miles. I couldn't run a hundred yards when I was twenty because I was smoking cigarettes and drinking booze. A young professional athlete may think his body is his temple. For me as a young man my temple was the Nite Owl or Big G's, where I spent years neglecting my body. But now I would challenge any ex-professional football player anywhere near my age to a foot race.