Willie (48 page)

All through 1986, Saturn squared his marriage house so there were definitely problems then. If there is a discussion about their marriage, it would come up again this summer. By September it would be either resolved, or there could be a divorce.

There would be another woman in his life and there would be conflict with his wife and he would have a pressure on him now to make a choice on what he is going to do with his life. There are other pressures on him because of his business. He has to make big decisions about what he is going to do, that he could change his way of working. Basically his best aspects right now are professional. His personal relationships for his love, his family, are stretched. When he was younger he would make a commitment and he would believe it and he would fool himself. As he has gotten older it's like it is harder for him to lie to himself. He is getting more and more honest with what he willl say that really comes from his heart. His earlier upbringing and his behavior start integrating. He always said don't do what I do, do what I say. But he would now be at a place where he would be going to live in peace with himself, where he wouldn't have inner conflict. His Aquarius rising says he is so abstract and eccentric and unusual and doesn't like to be ruled by the rules. He flirts with taboos and wants to be on the edge. The fuel freak side of him runs him a lot. That is the child part of the personality. He has aspects now that he would be able to fit those together.

Jupiter moved in his money house and will stay there through the spring of 1988. A group of people come to him and give him an opportunity to do a business that would make him a lot of money. This could already be going on right now. If it goes into the workaholic personality, he shouldn't do it, the money wouldn't be worth it. Money doesn't mean anything to him in one way and it does in another. But his conflicts with love and money are the same. He is in a place of power where he has many choices and yet he is in a transition period emotionally. It is really hard for him to make some of these decisions. He would be somewhat pulled apart.

Pluto opposes his Sun and brings out the opportunity for purposeful
action. It focuses in a place where he has to make an important decision. It would bring up any negative aspects in his personality that he didn't like about himself. Psychologically, he would face his own shadow. He wouldn't have any secrets anyway. Everybody would know them.

By the time it is finished with him, he will have had to let go of old ways of doing things. This is like a subconscious pattern. When Pluto is in aspect to your Sun, you feet it emotionally. It is a purge. This period requires maximum self-evaluation of passions and attachments, goals and personal realities, and your own integrity of direction because if you don't go through and redefine your values and goals in this period, you won't go into the happy period that you can go into. If you hold on to the past, fears and negative patterns, and self-undermining habits, whatever they are, you turn left instead of right, you don't go along with your destiny. This pattern would make him think about his life, about his relationship of himself to himself, his family, to his upbringing. He might have to let go of old family patterns that have limited him. It would be a time when he could leave all that.

He is going to go through a spiritual psychological change of values, of how he lives his life. It is a little bit against his will. He doesn't want these issues to come up and this is not an easy aspect to have. Always when Pluto comes in it is like the IRS or something you can't do anything about. It is also a Mafia. Pluto is anything that is subversive, seemingly, that seems to work against you and you can't do anything about it. There is a chance in the next two years to move into a different stage of his life. It is not going to be easy because he hides in a world of fantasy. You can't be real half the time and in fantasy half the time. That's what leads him into getting in with people that might be dishonest, but it looks like it has already happened. Or he faces something and he has to make a decision that he doesn't want to make.

There will be a lineup of planets in Capricorn. It has to do with being very conservative, whereby people in the arts become more conservative. This is a trend that is going to last about fifteen years. This is going to be very meaningful in Willie's chart. It is a subtle pressure of choice. But after that is over and he moves into a more centered position with himself, then all the major planets are sitting in a beautiful aspect for him. This is one of the most creative periods he has ever had in his life.

It looks like he will have his love life straightened out about 1989.
In 1988, Jupiter goes into his fourth house which is his home. He gets his homes straightened out. This is going to be another aspect of change that is very favorable.

He is going to go through a religious experience. Not the old-fashioned type, but it is pretty close. It is almost like letting go of control, in the areas he can't do anything about, and that's a major initiation step. He is ready for it. It seems like it is working on him now. After this is finished and he lets go, he has more than he has ever had and it isn't the same. It doesn't pressure him all the time. His health, by the way, is good. He had some health aspects back in the early 1980s that slowed him down a little bit.

To look at him just as a soul, he is connected to the universe as far as creativity. He just channels it. But in early life, Taurus wants what they want and they are very self-gratifying. Being spiritual all his life, he would have said I don't want to worry with that. He would go looking for love in all the wrong places. He will start really understanding what love is now. Love is really a vibration and we are all connected and so he is beginning to move into the place where he will live by that spiritual truth. He may have to let go of some things. It has to be his choice. He may not know right now because he has got to go through these pressures. His success was a pressure, and he likes it.

He is very mystical. If Pluto stays in his house of mystery, after it gets off the sign of Venus, which is love, he goes through a love change, and he might go into politics.

But it may just be in spiritual energy that his transformation transforms others. This pattern of deep transformation goes on the rest of his life and he is a man that will live to be very old and he will be creative all of his life. His music grows with him but his music will go to another dimension. It will be more symbolic in deeper meanings so that it will almost be religious.

My life today seems pretty quiet to me, although you might not think a quiet life is playing 150 concerts a year on the road, touring Europe with the band, starring in a movie, cutting a few record albums, and hugging Dolly Parton on national television.

But I feel I am gathering my strength to do something, though I don't know exactly what.

It ain't at all unusual for a guy to start thinking about becoming a hermit when he hits his middle fifties, when he's been hard at work for thirty-five or forty years. He starts to yearn for a little solitude so he can ponder the question of what it has all been about and what it is going to be as he rounds the turn and heads down the home stretch. Geronimo's great-grandson lives outside Tucson in an adobe house with a wire fence around it and a sign that says
GERONIMO III LIVES HERE BUT KEEP OUT
! Sometimes I think I'd like to live like Geronimo III. But that is not what I am going to do.

I've been hanging out in Abbott a lot with my old friends from childhood. It is important to me to maintain those feelings and sounds and smells that I grew up on.

But two things keep drawing me back to Austin when I come in off the road. One is golf. The other is my recording studio. Don't ask
me which is more important. Let me just say that when we're making a record we go into the studio at “golf-thirty.” In other words, we play golf until it is too dark to see the ball, and thirty minutes later we start hitting licks in the studio.

My studio, I have to admit, is one of the best in the country. The great producer Chips Moman came over from Nashville and designed it for me in 1981. He brought with him a kid named Larry Greenhill, who is a genius at putting electrical things together. Larry installed every mile of wire in the studio. He runs it for me now. Bobby Arnold is our studio sound technician. Bobby sees sound as colors—red at the high cycles on down to blue at the low cycles—and he thinks of making a record as painting with sound.

When I make a rough cut of a record, I take a tape of it with me in my golf cart and listen to it all day while I keep trying to learn how to play this confounding game. I then give the rough cut back to Larry and Bobby with suggestions for changes in the sound. At our forty-eight-track control board with its state-of-the-art digital equipment, they can take a song recorded in a big dance hall and make it sound like it was cut on a tile floor. Larry and Bobby go into the control room and turn out all the lights, get it totally black in there except for the glow from the board and the meters. They'll listen and mix all night in the darkness. Then they take the tape to Larry's house and listen to it on a sound system like an average person might have. They go listen to the tape in Bobby's car. Finally they put it in their Walkman sets and stroll around the pool listening to it. They go back in the studio and turn off the lights and mix it some more to get the sound exactly right.

The next day I ask them to do it again.

This isn't as uneventful as it sounds. There's always something going on. Not long ago the heavy metal band Aerosmith dropped in to cut a record with me, which is kind of a bizarre collaboration. Ray Charles, who, as you know, is blind, came in to record “Seven Spanish Angels” and astonished us by picking up a computer chip and explaining exactly what it was used for just by feeling it. Ray runs his own board at home, does his own soldering, even drives his car around his farm.

When Julio Iglesias came to the studio to sing “To All the Girls I've Loved Before” with me, he brought five limos and a considerable entourage that included video cameras. The word had got out and thirty or forty people from around the hill came to see Julio. Julio smiled, and the ladies clutched their hearts. Julio told them, “I am a professional love-aire,” and a couple of them fainted.

Meanwhile in the control room Larry and Bobby had been working all day with nothing to eat. Julio's manager came in and the boys noticed he was carrying a can of Planters peanuts. They couldn't speak Spanish, but the manager got it across to them that one of his major duties was to have a can of Planters peanuts always ready for Julio. He took out one can of the several in his briefcase and gave it to Larry and Bobby, who ate the peanuts for lunch.

Later in the afternoon, Lana brought in a can of peanuts that when you opened it a rubber snake popped out. Larry and Bobby coiled the spring-snake into their empty Planters can. They sealed the lid back on. Then they sneaked the Planters can back into Julio's manager's briefcase.

He was still carrying the briefcase at Julio's side when we all hugged and waved adios and they got into their limos and the parade went off down the hill, heading toward Julio's private jet.

We got a chuckle out of thinking that somewhere in midair Julio nudged his manager, who reached into his briefcase and opened a fresh can of Planters peanuts.

At one end of the studio is a kitchen where somebody is always cooking big pots of pasta or chili for whoever drops in. Past the kitchen is a big room with a card table and folding chairs. Most everything we do on the hill, we use the verb “play.” We play music, play golf, play pool, play poker, play chess, play dominoes. Everybody likes the sound of the word “play.” It helps keep us smooth and calm.

Along one wall of the big room is a long bench where Larry and Bobby fix the equipment. It is covered with tools and meters and the necessities of the trade. When the movie
Songwriter
was being shot, there were a lot of scenes around the studio. They built a wall and made the studio look different. The set decorator walked into the big room with Bobby and peered carefully all around.

“I want to see what a real studio sound technician's workshop really looks like,” she said.

“Well, this is it,” Bobby said.

The set decorator shook her head.

“No. No, this is not at all what it would really look like.”

They rebuilt the workbench and changed everything. But it's back as messy as ever today.

We don't operate like most studios. Our records aren't cut by the clock, like they are in the big commercial studios. When I'm doing an album at my studio, I pick ten songs and then record only those ten songs, some of them on the first take. I don't believe in recording
forty songs to pick out ten. I also don't believe in overproducing. Some producers will keep saying, “Do it again,” until they have gone past the freshness and the peak of the performance. You can chew the juice out of the music if you push it too far.

I can't even conceive of how some of the famous bands can stay in a studio for an entire year and spend two million dollars to cut one album. I think that practice came along about the same time drugs did. If you have plenty of money, time, and drugs, there's a tendency to kick back and say, “We'll cut this sucker all year until we get it right.” But if you go in there with a handful of musicians and a good singer, chances are you'll get it right on the first take. I learned to record in a commercial studio atmosphere in Nashville, with musicians working three eight-hour shifts a day, and you had to cut your tunes and get out of the studio to make way for the next bunch. I don't stick to the clock any more, but I like to get the music done while it is ripe.

We cut the
Red Headed Stranger
album at Autumn Sound in Garland, Texas, in three days for $20,000 with Phil York as the engineer. I mean mixed and fixed and ready to release in three days.