Willie (36 page)

The producer shook his head. No.

But Willie went right on making music, cutting tracks all over the place, music just flooding out. It was called outlaw music: music that didn't get played on country stations because it didn't fit the format.

Hazel Smith worked for me at the time, doing promotion and publicity, and she picked up on this “outlaw” angle and really started hitting it hard. The publicity was pushed to extremes that I found a little embarrassing, but at least it got recognition for our kind of music.

Jerry Bradley got the idea to put us “outlaws” together on an album. We chased Willie down and got him in on the project. Waylon was much easier to find. Waylon's idea of being low-key is to drive an orange Cadillac convertible with a white top and a Continental kit on the back. We always say, if you want to find Waylon, hire a helicopter and go up and fly around, and you'll see him.

Waylon wouldn't do it unless Jessi Colter, his wife, was on the album. I don't think Jessi was really an “outlaw” but there was an awful lot of talk about Waylon and Willie and me being outlaws. They made it sound like we were the Three Musketeers.

We took a bunch of old tracks and combined them with some new songs written for the album, added a guitar here, some harmony there—and suddenly we had an album called
Wanted: The Outlaws
. It was released by RCA in 1976 and immediately went platinum—sold more than a million albums.

It was named Album of the Year by the Country Music Association.
“Good Hearted Woman” won best single record, and Waylon and Willie were selected for the Vocal Duo of the Year Award. “Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” was on that album.

Everybody rushed 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. All of a sudden we were a big hit and we had to deal with it. So we put together the Outlaw Tour. We did eighteen dates in California, Texas, Oklahoma. We didn't go East.

Waylon and I traded off nights closing. The nights Willie would close, me and my boys would go back to the hotel early, change our clothes, change our attitudes—and on our way out of town we could hear Willie still on stage picking. They'd have to pull the plug on him if they wanted him to stop. He'd just keep playing and playing until his fingers would bleed. He really loves to play, and the crowds love him for it.

People came out to hear our outlaw shows like they were rock concerts. All at once we were in coliseums and stadiums, we had tractor-trailer trucks and a huge overhead.

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. There are much broader opportunities now than there were ten or twelve years ago. I hope people remember that it all started with Willie, who always insisted on doing his own kind of music regardless of what the record companies wanted and regardless of the popular styles. All he ever wanted was to do his music and do it right.

When I was hired to do a rewrite of the
Honeysuckle Rose
script, I phoned Willie and said I'd love to come out to his ranch on Fitzhugh Road in Dripping Springs and jawbone with him about life on the road. I knew Willie pretty well by then because we had already been working on making the
Red Headed Stranger
album into a movie—which was to take another six or seven years to happen, though we didn't imagine it would be so long at the time.

Reading the script of
Honeysuckle Rose
, I thought it lacked a sense of what it meant to be a country musician on the road. I asked Willie, “Do you ever get vulnerable when you're on the road?”

Willie looked at me like I was from Mars.

I said, “When the concert is over and the parties are over, don't you get lonely?”

Willie said, “There's always a woman.”

“Don't you need more than a woman? Don't you ever pick up the phone and call Connie and say, ‘Why don't you fly down and join me for a couple of days'?”

Willie looked at me funny, like my questions weren't registering.

“Do you know where wives come from?” he said. “Wives come from the fourth row. You see, when you're on the stage singing, you make eye contact about the fourth row. There'll be some pretty lady there and you sing to her. After the show you have somebody invite her backstage. All the guys are enormously friendly to her, light her cigarettes, open the doors for her, say yes ma'am.

“So you invite her on the bus and she thinks this is the most romantic thing in her whole life. This goes on for about three months—or until you marry her, whichever comes first. Suddenly nobody lights her cigarette or opens her door or pays her the slightest damn bit of attention any more.

“She starts thinking, God, I've got to get off the road, this is horrible, I want a house and a place to sit. You buy her a house and a chair. She's so damn happy to have a roof over her head and a place to sit that for a while she doesn't care what you do. You're gone on the bus, but it's okay with her.

“This lasts about three more months. Then it all turns to shit. She's sitting there thinking, isn't this wonderful, I've got this lovely roof over my head, this comfortable chair to sit in. It would be really perfect if that sorry no-good son of a bitch out on the road was sitting here with me.”

We stayed up all night talking.

I had a date with Willie for the next morning. When I called, Billy Cooper told me, “Willie ain't here. What the hell did you all talk about last night? The minute you left, he grabbed his bag and took off for Colorado to see Connie.”

I got fired from
Honeysuckle Rose
because the producer and director had different notions from mine about what a musician's life was like.

Willie phoned and said, “Do you have any other scripts in your trunk?”

I took him the script of
Barbarosa
. I told him it was about a blood
feud between this old cowboy and a family of Mexicans who cut his ears off. Willie opened the script and read two pages.

He shut it and said, “I want to be this guy.”

Honeysuckle Rose
hadn't come out yet and Willie was a hot actor. We made a deal to co-produce
Barbarosa
. I could see that Willie wanted desperately to learn to be a movie actor, but he wasn't getting much constructive help from his directors so far. They mainly told him where to stand and where to walk and left the emotional content and the techniques up to him.

When we finally decided to do
Red Headed Stranger
as a low-budget independent film—after years of chasing around with the studios who claimed we needed Robert Redford and a $14 million budget (about seven times more than we eventually shot it for)—I signed on as the director, and Willie and I went to work.

It was exciting. We learned together. I had a TV camera in my office, and Willie and I would read scenes, record them, and study them. I found if you told Willie what you wanted in a scene, by God he'd give it to you and illuminate it.

Willie has always had a fixation with
Red Headed Stranger
. The album turned him into a national figure. It is a very religious tract. Take Willie's history with wives and women. If one believes in reincarnation, there was probably a lifetime where he killed a wife. Willie's relationships with women don't work out well. He has a fear that to be a husband is to be owned—and Willie certainly does not want to be owned. I think this is why Willie has such a fascination for outlaws—this determination to go ahead with his own ideas despite advice to the contrary by people who are supposed to be experts.

It would not at all surprise me if Willie becomes a more private person in the near future, in the sense that he'll actually spend time by himself writing songs again. For the last ten years or so, his need has been to be a singer and an actor more than a writer. But Willie is primarily a poet. When he reaches deep into the well of his soul, he comes up with a bucket of pure water.

At three o'clock on a Thursday afternoon in February 1978, I found myself walking along the deck toward Willie Nelson's condo
on the water in Malibu. I didn't know Willie. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. After managing John Tunney's Senate campaign and losing a tough one, I had gotten out of politics and gone into show business as an agent. I had been an agent for exactly two years and three months, didn't know shit about the movies. But I had been bugging Jan Michael Vincent and Gary Busey to introduce me to Willie, because I loved the
Red Headed Stranger
album and thought it would make a terrific film.

I remember realizing I was wearing a white three-piece suit as I walked toward Willie's door. Well, maybe the color was closer to beige, but it was definitely a three-piece suit. I could imagine Willie with his beard and earring squinting at me and saying, “Who the fuck is this guy in the ice cream suit?”

When I was in college at USC, I had long hair and wore beads and they called me Indian Jim.

But now I was a guy in a three-piece suit on his way to meet Willie Nelson, and I had no idea what to expect. I was nervous.

Jan and Gary opened the door and ushered me inside the condo. The place was a cloud of smoke. I saw Willie sitting in a chair at the dining table near the windows with a view of the ocean. He was looking me over.

“Hello, Willie, I'm the man from Prudential,” I said. “How are you fixed for life insurance?”

Willie laughed. He said, “I hear you want to talk to me about
Red Headed Stranger.”

“Yeah, I love it. I think I can put it together as a movie,” I said.

He said, “Fine. Consider yourself my agent.”

We shook hands. I had my first major client.

This was at a time when Willie's career was starting to explode. A lot of people in Hollywood didn't know who he was yet, but they were just about to find out. From a professional standpoint, for Willie to let me represent him was monumental to me. It certainly got me instant attention. Very soon people were saying, “Who is this guy Wiatt to be able to represent this Willie Nelson who is turning up on all the magazine covers?” So for me from our first handshake—an agreement that still holds good ten years later—Willie has been a pillar of strength and a friend.

Willie hired me during a transition period. He was breaking up with his manager, Neil Reshen. I became a focal point for his activities for a few months while he was without a manager. My own boundaries with Willie were never formally set. We never sat down and had a business conversation where he said, “Okay, Jim, this is what I want you to do.” I just felt my way along.

I was certainly walking on eggshells in my early dealings with Willie's band. Most of them looked at me like, “Who is this guy?” I remember setting up a deal for Willie to play for a private party given by HBO. They were paying him $70,000 for one night, just to play a party for like 800 people.

I certainly did not yet have a relationship with Paul English. In fact I actually stayed away from him, because Paul is a very scary guy if you aren't his friend, and I hadn't reached that place with Paul. But the HBO party concert was about to start, and Willie hadn't showed up. I was waiting around, not knowing what to do. The HBO people were getting very anxious and kept asking me where is Willie, and I was looking for answers but I wouldn't ask Paul.

Finally Willie arrived. The anxious HBO people said, “Great. You go on in fifteen minutes.”

Paul stepped out and said, “No, we ain't playing. We don't play until we get paid.”

I said, “Paul, they've got a check right here.”

I tried to hand Paul the check.

“We don't take checks,” Paul said.

“Paul! This is HBO! Time-Life! A billion dollar company. And it's eight o'clock at night in Anaheim!”

“I don't give a shit. We don't play unless we are paid cash up front.”

Willie and Paul were used to the old days, when they couldn't take anybody's word or their checks.

The HBO guys ran out and scrambled around and somehow came up with a bag filled with $70,000 cash. The show went on.

The same thing happened later when Willie did a Showtime special up in Tahoe. The band was about to go on, the cameras were ready to roll—and suddenly Paul and Willie insisted they have the money in cash. But by that time they trusted me to tell them the check was good.

Another night in Tahoe, I gave Willie a check for $50,000. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and he kind of rolled up the check and put it in his pocket. Years later Price Waterhouse—his accountants at the time—called me and said there was $50,000 unaccounted for. Obviously, Willie put his jeans in the laundry, or even washed them himself, with the check still in the pocket. We never found the check. That's pure Willie.

We made a deal at Universal for
Red Headed Stranger
. Willie was given a suite of offices as co-producer. I don't know if Willie ever even visited his offices. He put a Hell's Angel biker friend, Peter
Sheridan, into Universal as his representative. We called him King Peter—big, powerful guy with a deep voice and overwhelming, intimidating vibes but really down deep a sweet person who wanted to write songs. Most people never thought of “sweet” when they encountered Peter. They were terrified of him at Universal. When Peter came to see me at ICM, he rode his Harley up the curb on Wilshire Boulevard and then up the ramp and right on through the double glass doors into the lobby of the ICM building. He had long hair, a scarf around his neck, his gloves on. He put down his kick stand and told the receptionist, “Say, bitch, take good care of this Harley. I'm going up to see my man.”

Willie is incredibly easy to work with, except that he has the propensity to say yes to everybody that walks through the door with something. Then when the calls come to me, I have to investigate, finding out what it's about, asking questions like, “Where is the money in escrow?” Or Willie will just tell me to get him out of something that he has second thoughts about, and it's up to me to do the dirty work. Willie has a very difficult time saying no to anybody. A big part of my job is cleaning up these situations. Sometimes I hang up the phone after an unpleasant discussion with Willie—about stuff that is negative or isn't going the way Willie thinks it should go—and am literally sick at my stomach because I am trying so hard to please him but also to protect him.