Willie (40 page)

In the limousine it's me and Daddy and Connie and Aunt Bobbie and Jack and Mark and the limo driver. There was snow everywhere, and we saw a golden light way off in the distance and Mark said well, I'm gonna go for that light. He walked through the snow, through fields, over fences, having no idea where he was going. He finally got there and called the police. We had a police escort into the town where the airport was. We stopped and had breakfast with the officer in the patrol car and he had already called several of his friends to come meet him at the Denny's and so it was like this big party in the town as we were leaving the airport. And we had a good laugh about how Grandma Harvey had probably staged the whole thing and how funny she thought it was for us to get stranded in the middle of the mountains in Washington in a snowstorm on the day of her funeral.

Lana is Willie's oldest daughter and longtime business associate
.

PART SEVEN

On the road again

I just can't wait to get on the road again

The life I love is makin' music with my friends

And I can't wait to get on the road again.

On the road again

Goin' places that I've never been

Seein' things that I may never see again

I can't wait to get on the road again.

On the road again

Like a band of gypsies

We go down the highway

We're the best of friends

Insisting that the world keep turnin' our way

And our way

Is on the road again

I just can't wait to get on the road again

The life I love is makin' music with my friends

And I can't wait to get on the road again.

We were rolling along the highway on
Honeysuckle Rose
aiming for Salt Lake City in the very early morning for a show at the Salt Palace. Out the window I could see patches of blue snow in the fields. Crowns of snow on the mountains looked like starched white nurse caps—like most musicians, I owe my life to nurses and waitresses—and the jagged rocks turned purple in the rising sun, like you might see in a Zane Grey novel or a good Western movie.

From my mound of coats and blankets on the floor at the foot of my king-size bed in the rear of the bus, I could see Gator Moore sitting up straight at the wheel. Gator had been driving all night, since we left our last show at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles. It would be another six hours before we reached the Holiday Inn on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. I pulled the blankets closer around me in the cold. I could hear Kimo Alo, the Kahuna I had met in Maui, breathing in a deep sleep in my bed. My back was hurting. I had been to Kimo's people in the mountains in Maui to treat my chronic ailing back, and what they did to me worked for a while. But on the road, my back started hurting again. I couldn't get comfortable in my bed, so the Kahuna medicine man slept in my bed and I shifted around on the floor, as usual, aching and sore. It might
sound like some kind of metaphor for show business that the doctor was in the bed and the patient was on the floor. But I had suggested Kimo sleep on the bed, told him I'd be happier on the floor. Hell, maybe it
is
a metaphor for show business.

I had been up half the night prowling around
Honeysuckle Rose
, listening to a tape of our last show, playing computer golf, cleaning up. I was tired, but I was pumped up from the show. We had played our music with a lot of power and the crowd gave us their energy and love in return. That feeling really jacks me up. Friends like Dennis Hopper—so clean and straight these days he looks like a mad scientist preppie—joined us onstage for “Amazing Grace.” When Larry Gorham hustled me to the bus, I found out he and Gator had hidden it to avoid the after-show visitors. I didn't really want to avoid anybody, but L. G. and Gator must have seen I was tired and hurting.

My old friend Jan-Michael Vincent found me, anyhow, and we sat at the table on the bus and talked movie bullshit for a while. Jan and I are always just about to make a movie together, and I guess one day we will. Meanwhile, we swap a lot of good bullshit, and in honor of Jan's visit and my aching back, we drank a few swigs out of a brown bottle of rare Sauza tequila and burned a joint that smelled like a cave where skunks went to die.

So I was feeling mellow by the time Jan bailed out in his dark glasses and his limo, and our convoy got loaded—five buses of people and two semi-trucks of equipment. Gator drove
Honeysuckle Rose
down the winding hill through the lights of Burbank, and all seven vehicles took off rolling toward Salt Lake City.

In the early morning now, after maybe two hours of sleep, I could hear the tires humming on the highway and feel
Honeysuckle Rose
singing with energy. I went up front to drink a cup of coffee and watch miles and miles of Utah roll past the window.

It makes me feel good to gaze out the windows of the bus at the towns and signs and landscape going past. It's like the other side of the feeling I got when I was a little kid and heard a railroad train whistling and rumbling into the distance in the middle of the night. This is what might have happened if you had ever really caught that mysterious midnight train.

Most people have that fantasy of catching the train that whistles in the night. It's a hunger for freedom, I guess, that holds in the heart. The last time I was on David Letterman's TV show, the first thing he said was, “Willie, can I ride on your bus?” I told him sure he could, and I meant it, but he wouldn't really do it, which probably is why he brought it up so fast.

A couple of days ago, taping the Johnny Carson show in Burbank, we'd parked our bus convoy in the middle of the NBC lot at Universal, causing much comment. Johnny Carson had to work his way through the buses to slip his sports car into his own parking spot, which is right by the front door to the NBC studio.

So on the show, the first thing Johnny talked about was the buses. The day before, one of his producers had phoned me at L'Ermitage in Beverly Hills and drilled me on the questions Johnny would ask. I remember one question was how did I handle female groupies. The producer said, “I guess you just get rid of them, huh?”

I said, “Sure. I can do that.”

But on the show, Johnny kept talking about the buses being the center of attention in Burbank that day, and how he could barely squeeze his car into the lot, and what a wild, free, glamorous kind of life it must be out there on the road rolling on the bus.

He said, “How do you handle the groupies?”

I said, “Well, I try to give them whatever I can.”

That broke up Johnny, because he was expecting the answer about getting rid of them. It got a real big laugh everywhere, in fact. But, shit, it's the answer I was going to give the producer, because it's the truth.

Whatever I can don't mean what it used to.

As I stood in the aisle, pouring a cup of coffee, my sister Bobbie was in the lower berth with her curtains shut.
Honeysuckle Rose
has two Pullman-type berths, except they're big enough for a guy like Ray Benson, who's 6′6″, to stretch out in. There are color TVs at the foot of the mattresses and reading lights at the head. It is the bunk you should have had on the old midnight mystery train, for sure.

With her curtains shut, I couldn't tell if Bobbie was asleep. She might be looking out the window at miles and miles of Utah. Or possibly she was fingering chords on a practice keyboard she carries, working on a piece by Beethoven or Mozart, hearing it in her mind while her fingers touched the board. Bobbie is pure music. In her soul she is a spiritual Indian who vibrates music. My sister has put in about as many miles on the road as I have, playing her music.

Traveling was always one of the things I was supposed to do in conjunction with music. The fact that my family sort of disintegrated when I was a youngster made it easy to become a gypsy whose home is wherever he finds his hat. The home that was Abbott faded away in my teens. I had a home wherever my mother was, or wherever my dad was, but they were the traveling kind, too. All of us in the family were constantly moving up and down the highway. Even my great-grandfather,
Mama Nelson's daddy, was a circuit preacher who rode the hills of Arkansas in a buggy and horse.

I think everybody is looking for a home. It's one of the strongest motivations in life. The movie
Songwriter
was about artists struggling for freedom against bankers and greed and the sometimes crooked rules of the music business establishment. But at bottom the character of Doc Jenkins that I played was looking for a home. Bud Shrake used to say he thought of Doc Jenkins as a boll weevil. Remember the
Boll Weevil
song? It was a big hit for Tex Ritter.

“
First time I see de boll weevil

he's settin' on de chair
;

Next time I see de boll weevil

he's got alia his family dere
 . . .

Jus' lookin' for a home, Boss
,

Jus' lookin' fora home
.”

This is a universal truth. It's just as true for the old as the young. Chinese, Russians, Republicans, Mexicans, cowboys, university presidents, preachers, you name it, under the skin they're all just like us country singers on the road—their hearts break, they know loneliness, they want love, they're looking for a home.

One of my homes is
Honeysuckle Rose
, my bus.

Could be that's the fascination people feel about life on the bus—you've got a home, but you don't have to stay too long in one place.

If you get tired of Texas or California, you can move your home to Florida or Maine with no problem.

My bus is like a cocoon, too, that I can seal myself up in if I need to be alone.

I've always enjoyed being alone. I've never had a problem with talking to myself, because some of my best conversations are between me and just my own self cruising down the highway. There are plenty of times I like to have people around me. But if I need privacy, my bus gives it to me. I can be close enough to the so-called real world that I could reach out and touch it from inside
Honeysuckle Rose
, yet I can be as quiet and alone as I wish.

There is a telephone on the wall beside my seat at the booth on the bus to use when I need to check in with Mark Rothbaum or somebody, and we put a TV satellite dish on the bus so I can watch Cable News Network no matter where I am.

Despite how people fantasize what is going on inside
Honeysuckle Rose
on the road, most of the time these days it is like this run from
Los Angeles to Salt Lake City—just Gator and me and Bobbie and probably somebody I might never have dreamed would be there, like Kimo the Kahuna.

Kimo woke up in my bed and came down the aisle rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, wearing jeans and sandals. He's a tall, ropy-thin young fellow who took me into the mountains on Maui and got his Kahuna relatives to work on my back and my sinuses. I believe in the Kahunas. Then Kimo followed me to the country club in Austin and later got on my bus for this tour. The crew and the guys in the band were still checking Kimo out. A newcomer doesn't just walk into our gypsy family without arousing distrust and suspicion. We're too close for a secret agent to penetrate our circle. It's not like the old days of the Outlaw Tour when we had roadies out the ass and every third guy wearing a Waylon or Willie T-shirt was a narc.