Willie (41 page)

There was a lot of well-deserved paranoia on our buses in those days. I remember when one of Waylon's guys proudly told him he had rigged a trap to catch the narcs on Waylon's bus.

Waylon asked what did he use for narc bait?

“Simple,” the guy said. “I planted transmitters all over the bus—under the table, in the bunks, in the bathroom—everywhere but your bedroom. Now you can go in your room alone, shut the door, and tune in to any conversation on the bus. You can hear what everybody is saying.”

Waylon shouted, “You're fired, you dumb son of a bitch.”

“Fired? I did this for your own good.”

Waylon said, “Don't you understand one fucking thing? If I heard what the guys in the band are saying about me, I'd have to fight every one of them assholes every day. I don't want to know all that shit. Get your ass out of my sight.”

But now the paranoia level has justifiably gone way down, and so have the numbers on my bus. Once I hit Austin or Los Angeles or some other big town where I know a lot of people, the bus gets crowded before and after the shows. I see folks I'm glad I got to see. But when we reach Salt Lake City, it's a totally different scene. Fans will gather around the bus, but there's not a lot of old friends to come on board.

I went through a period of leasing a Learjet in 1983 and flying to a lot of my shows to meet the buses. It was not economically a sound practice to be spending $400,000 a year leasing a jet, but it made sense to me to shell out $1,700,000 to buy one. So I did. Paul said, “Same old Willie. Spends more money than he makes.”

Marty Morris had been my pilot while I was leasing the Lear 25—a
seven-passenger model built in 1979—and Marty stayed at the controls when I bought the plane. Our most frequent trip in the Lear was from Austin to Denver. Marty was bringing us into the lights of Denver one night when our co-pilot, Ken Miller, handed me a set of earphones and said, “You've gotta hear this.”

Marty had just finished telling the tower we were ready to land. An air traffic controller was talking on the radio. “You other guys shut up. This is my big chance,” he said.

Over the earphones I heard the air traffic controller sing
On the Road Again
. He sang it all the way through. He wasn't half bad.

The Lear has a small refrigerator and a good sound system and those big soft, sweet-smelling leather seats like you used to get in a good Cadillac in the 50's. Connie had notepads and matchbooks printed up with the logo
Air Willie
and a cartoon of me sitting in a running shoe with wings on it.

I've sold the Lear back to the company again—somewhere I heard the chorus of voices that kept telling me I had no business buying a jet—but I still lease it all the time.

Here's an example of the way I use the jet now. In September of 1987 I was in Los Angeles playing in a CBS-TV Western movie called
The Last Texas Train
. The director worked us all day until after dark shooting a dancing scene in the ballroom at the Wilshire Temple. The company finally wrapped—and the next shot was to be the following afternoon at the Old Tucson movie town outside Tucson, Arizona.

Gator drove me overnight to Tucson in
Honeysuckle Rose
, which was my home during the filming. We shot until late Thursday night at Old Tucson.

On Friday at noon Gator drove me to the location at Mezcal, about forty miles on the other side of Tucson. Mezcal is where Steve McQueen shot his last Western,
Tom Horn
. The scenery there is so big, the distances so vast with the mountains rising close around but also very far away, that it makes you want to sit around a campfire and be close to people.

I like Burt Kennedy's style of directing. He knows what he wants, works fast, and shoots with two or three cameras at the same time for coverage. Burt is an old pro, so he didn't panic when Gator cranked up
Honeysuckle Rose
at 9:30 Friday night and drove me to the Tucson airport.

The Lear was waiting for me at midnight. We took off and flew from Tucson to Lincoln, Nebraska.

At the airport in Lincoln, Johnny Sizemore picked me up in one
of our tour buses. Johnny drove the bus to the University of Nebraska football stadium, underneath the stands. It was about 5
A.M
. by now. I slept on the floor a couple of hours.

Out the windows I could see people already walking around in large numbers. In about three more hours, there would be 75,000 people in the Nebraska stadium for one of the strongest concerts I've ever taken part in, both musically and in response from the audience and the whole state.

You might have seen it on television. It was Farm Aid III. Although this was the final Farm Aid concert—I think—I'm happy that we have been able to raise the national consciousness to confront an intolerable farm situation. Everybody from the White House through Congress should have been in the Nebraska stadium for Farm Aid III to feel the heartbeat of the country.

The minute the concert ended, Johnny Sizemore drove the
On the Road Again
bus back to the Lincoln airport. At about 1
A.M
.—roughly twenty-four hours since we had set out for Lincoln—I was again in Tucson, ready to go back to work on
The Last Texas Train
again.

I lived on
Honeysuckle Rose
, when I wasn't in my motel suite, for the next seven days while the movie was shooting. On Saturday afternoon the movie company broke the Tucson location to return to Los Angeles and resume shooting the following Monday.

But I had gigs to play Saturday night in Waterloo, Iowa, and Sunday night in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Gator dropped me at the Tucson airport and headed
Honeysuckle Rose
toward Los Angeles. Marty Morris, my longtime pilot, picked me up in the Lear and flew me to Waterloo, where the band and crew were waiting. After the Waterloo show I rode in Paul's bus to Grand Forks. We rang down the flag at midnight in Grand Forks, and Marty picked me up in the Lear again and flew me to Los Angeles in time to be on the movie set Monday morning.

And that's just a routine schedule. I really couldn't make it without the Lear. It's practical. But I do admit that when I owned the jet, it was like a new toy I wanted to show off. Roger Miller had a jet years before I did and used to fly me around in it some. Now it was my turn. Roger was living in Santa Fe, and we flew in to pick him up just to run him to Los Angeles. We took off and circled the Sangre de Christo Mountains and headed west.

Roger tapped me on the shoulder.

“Willie, I got to piss.”

“I believe we can arrange that,” I said.

“Listen, I ain't gonna piss in one of these Lears. I know all about these sons of bitches. I want to piss on the ground.”

“Would a regular size bathroom do?”

“Yeah. But I don't see one up here.”

I told Marty to put the jet down at the next opportunity. Turned out, it was Palm Springs. Marty landed and Roger got out and went to the bathroom.

But how can you put a price on a good piss?

Another time we landed at the strip in Santa Fe to pick up Roger, and he wasn't there. I went walking along the road toward town, hoping Roger would show up and I could jump his ass about making me wait.

Here came what looked like a taxi with a driver in the front seat wearing a cabbie's cap. Roger was slumped in the back. I jumped in bedside Roger and said something like, “Airport, buddy, step on it.”

We roared off in the taxi, showering sand and rocks. I grabbed for something to hang on to and was about to shout at the driver when I noticed he looked sort of familiar under that cap. He turned around to me and said, “How about all them royalties you owe me for making you famous? I'm here to collect.”

Then I got a good look at his face and realized it was Don Meredith.

For several seasons, at the peak of the show's popularity, Meredith had been singing “turn out the lights . . . the party's over . . .” on ABC-TV Monday Night Football as his way of telling the viewers the game was about wrapped up. Meredith, Frank Gifford, and Howard Cosell were the hottest thing on sports TV with their Monday Night Football for a decade or so. I had known Don since back in the sixties when he was a great quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. Most people don't realize he came within four feet of winning two National Football League Championships in a row, and he retired from the game at age twenty-eight. I used to watch Don play football, and he'd come to my shows and get onstage. Don had career ideas as a country singer—he cut a couple of records, in fact.

As I recall, I had sent Don a bouquet of roses the first night he sang “turn out the lights . . .” on Monday Night Football. Then as he kept using the song, year after year, I was thoroughly enjoying it, of course, but I thought I would kid him about it. I had my office put together a thick stack of royalty statements and sent them to him with a letter that said, “Look, Don, I know how badly you need material, but my family has got to eat.”

A couple of weeks later, Meredith sent me an accounting of the royalty statements I had unloaded on him. “Turn Out the Lights” had shown a sharp increase in sales in the years Meredith had been singing it on Monday Night Football, he said, and by rights, I owed him a percentage.

This was the first time I had seen him since.

Don said, “No shit, now, Willie, I want my royalties. I've made you so famous you've got a jet plane, and I'm reduced to driving bums around in a taxi. Give me my money.”

I said, “Well, first I'll have my people take lunch with your people. I think the truth is, you owe
me
money.”

Don was kidding, of course, about him needing money. He got richer than a honeybee cave from TV commercials and endorsements and speaking engagements. He lives back and forth between Santa Fe and a huge apartment that overlooks Central Park in Manhattan. He can sink down in a giant bathtub full of bubble bath and look through a plate-glass window at the kids playing touch football in the park. Don needs money about as bad as I need fleas.

Maybe if he turns his apartment over to me on demand, I will call my mean lawyer off his case.

In my early frequent-flier period on the jet, I used to figure I might as well use the plane all I could before somebody took it away from me. Any of my old beer joint fans who might resent the thought of me flying around in a Learjet wouldn't be upset for long, is the way I looked at it, because the plane was bound to be repossessed.

But the money was stacking up so fast for a while it was hard to get rid of. We tried our best though. I do believe money is not to be hoarded—it is to be spread around. That is what true capitalism is about, using money for energy instead of fat. Look at all the people whose lives were made better by the fact that I didn't care how fast I spent money.

When I was in my twenties I used to say I hoped I owed $50,000 at my funeral. Twenty years later, I changed the number to $1,000,000. Now even $10,000,000 don't look like half enough to have seeded the planet with by the time I shuck off this body and start the process of choosing a new one.

With the jet I could wake up in the morning in my own bed in Austin, play golf at my country club, leave the last hole about four or five in the afternoon, and fly to Kansas City for a show that night. After the gig, I'd fly back to Austin, sleep in my own bed again, play some more golf at my club, then fly to a show that night in Omaha or someplace.

It was definitely a luxury. I was high rolling. At first I told myself I'd get some writing done in the quiet hours on the plane cuddled in those soft leather seats, but instead I got more sleep than I had counted on.

Having your own jet is a stage you reach if you are successful enough in show business—exactly like getting your own bus is your symbol of success when you put together a band. If you were still riding in a station wagon with the fiddle sticking in your ear, you needed a bus. So you bought the first bus that came along that you could get into financially.

However they'd let you have it, wherever you could sign your name, you took the deal. The first bus I bought was Marty Robbins's old bus that Hollywood people had used in a movie. I made the deal in front of a motel in San Antonio. I told the guy, “Okay, I'll take it.” Ten minutes later we started up the motor and the bus died right there in the driveway. We named it the
Open Road
.

The
Open Road
broke down in Louisiana, in Arkansas, in a lot of strange places. Johnny Bush or Paul or me, whoever was sober enough to climb behind the wheel, was the driver. But we needed a mechanic as often as a driver, and none of us could put together a Christmas toy.

The last time I spent the night on the
Open Road
bus, the wood had rotted through above my bunk and I could see the stars and feel the wind and rain blowing on my face.

The next bus I bought was Porter Waggoner's when Dolly Parton was working with him. You could smell her perfume inside. I used to sort of fantasize about it.

The
Honeysuckle Rose
bus that was taking me toward Salt Lake City was built by the Florida Coach Company. My bus must have cost $500,000 to put together, with all the hand-carved woodwork and a bedroom bigger than some of the joints I've played in. There's a plaque on the wall inside that says, “This coach built for Willie Nelson and family, Connie, Paula and Amy by Florida Coach Company.” But Connie and the girls never rode
Honeysuckle Rose
much.

Kimo poured a cup of Gator's power coffee, lit a cigarette and slid into the booth. I don't like to see a healer or a doctor smoke cigarettes. I've had guys walk up to me in bars with a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other and say, “Willie, I am Dr. so-and-so, the eminent brain surgeon.” It makes me shudder.

But Kimo is an important step in the evolution of things. He's a very logical, bottom-line thinker. The bottom line is
love thy neighbor
and
do unto others as you would have them do unto you
.