Willie Nelson (10 page)
“No Place for Me” was a sad, almost prophetic Willie original, given his residence in the Pacific Northwest. Leon Payne’s “Lumberjack” was the easier local sell, opening and closing the song with the sound of a timber saw, while Payne’s lyrics were loaded with logger references and the Saturday-night promise of going to Eugene. “Lumberjack” was not among Payne’s finest pieces, but it reflected Willie’s sense of place as much as the other song did.
Audiotapes of the recordings were mailed to Starday Records, the country label in Houston run by H. W. “Pappy” Daily and Jack Starnes, which pressed five hundred 45 rpm records. As part of their custom-record-pressing contract, Starday reserved the right to release the record on the Starday label or act as publisher of any songs, but Willie’s single did not move the label to exercise either option.
It was a straight-up cash deal. Willie bought the records and sold them on the air and any other way he could. Issued in February 1957 on the Willie Nelson label, the little record with the big hole was offered to KVAN listeners for the low price of $1 with a free autographed 8 x 10 glossy photo of twenty-four-year-old Willie Nelson, country disc jockey and singing star and movie star–handsome with dark, wavy hair, soulful puppy-dog eyes, and pursed Sal Mineo lips, suitable for framing. Three thousand copies of the 45 sold.
Not everyone who ordered a record received a copy, though. As one musician who worked with Willie delicately put it, “Times were tight and sometimes you had to do things just to make ends meet.” Willie had already written checks that bounced to steel player Wes Bakken and to Merle Tofte, the guitarist for the Powder River Ramblers for playing gigs with him.
W
ILLIE
Nelson might have found contentment in the Northwest if Mae Boren Axton hadn’t dropped by KVAN. Axton was helping publicize a Hank Snow tour on behalf of Snow’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, even though the Colonel was in the process of dropping Snow to focus full-time on his new act, Elvis Presley. Elvis’s career, oddly enough, had been boosted by Mae Boren Axton, who’d cowritten a song called “Heartbreak Hotel” that Elvis released in January of 1956.
Willie cornered Axton on her meet-and-greet tour and tried to pick her brain in the most polite way he knew how. He put her on the air and interviewed her. She sized him up: “Very shy, very clean shaven, very clean overalls, although his outfit was pretty worn and patched.” And very up to speed on Mae Boren Axton’s talents, telling her, “I play every record of yours that comes to the station and I read every magazine I can find with stories that you’ve written.”
He was an aspiring songwriter himself, he told her, and had some songs published, but he didn’t know if he had the right stuff to be a top songwriter. He’d sure like her to listen to his songs.
Mae looked in his eyes and saw a young man poor from hunger but exuding sweetness. She could tell he was shy but she could also tell he was looking right at her.
“Son, I’ll take the time,” she said, cracking a smile.
He brought out his small Japanese reel-to-reel tape recorder and turned on the machine. Axton was sold four bars into the first song. When it ended, he turned off the machine.
“You have any more?” she asked.
He played her a song he was working on called “Family Bible,” telling her at the end of the song, he’d been inspired by his grandmother and how she used to sing “Rock of Ages” and read from the Bible after supper.
“Son, I’ve got a plane to catch,” Mae Axton said. “But I have to tell you two things. Number one, if I could write half as well as you, I would be the happiest woman in the world. And two, I don’t know a thing about you or your situation, but I suggest you quit and either come to Nashville or go home to Texas if you want to make it as a songwriter. Write me. I don’t have a lot of money, but I can always raise a couple hundred dollars.”
A few weeks later, KVAN switched formats, abandoning hillbilly music for rock and roll, the sound Elvis and Mae Boren Axton helped make famous. Shorty the Hired Hand and Cactus Ken DuBord moved over to KKEY, the “Number One Town and Country Western Station” and the only western music station serving the Greater Portland/Vancouver area. And Willie went east.
As he was getting ready to leave town, he sought out Max Hall, the gas station attendant across the street from the station, to sell his horse to Max’s uncle. Max thought Willie was leaving because he was splitting up with Martha, much as they fought with each other. But it wasn’t about chasing skirts. It was about finding a bigger pond. It was time to expand his horizons.
H
IS EYES WERE
on Nashville as the Northwest grew smaller in the rearview mirror. He stopped in Denver and worked a club called Hearts’ Corner for six weeks before moving on to Springfield, Missouri, where he looked up Billy Walker. He knew the smooth tenor from back when Walker was a disc jockey on KWTX in Waco and a member of Hank Thompson’s band and he played the Hadacol Caravan radio shows with Hank Williams. Billy had cut records for Capitol and Columbia under his own name up in Dallas at Jim Beck’s, where Lefty Frizzell and Ray Price were also making records. Willie kept in touch as Billy bounced between the Big D Jamboree, the Ozark Jubilee, and the Louisiana Hayride while achieving fame for playing on the bill of Elvis Presley’s first show in Memphis and Hank Williams’s last show anywhere.
Springfield was vaguely familiar territory, ninety miles north of Searcy County, where Willie’s parents and grandparents hailed from. But even as he tried to stay put by taking a job washing dishes while Martha waited tables, it didn’t take long to determine Springfield wasn’t his kind of place. Willie auditioned for Sy Simon, the manager of the Ozark Jubilee, but Simon passed on hiring Willie. Billy Walker was still a believer. A little more than a year later, he would become the first recording artist to cover a Willie Nelson composition, “The Storm Within My Heart,” during a recording session for Columbia Records on April 28, 1959. This reworked version of “The Storm Has Just Begun,” which Willie wrote as a child, was released as a single and generated some radio airplay in Texas.
Unfazed by rejection, Willie hightailed it back to Fort Worth and plugged back into his family, friends, and a few dependable gigs between Cowtown and Waco. Nashville could wait.
Family life was as stable as it could be for a husband and wife bent on out-drinking, out-partying, and out-hell-raising each other. In 1958, Martha gave birth to their first son, Willie Hugh Nelson Jr., better known as Billy, in Fort Worth.
Like Willie, his sister, Bobbie Lee, was playing music for a living, using the gift their grandparents gave them. She was still raising her sons by teaching and playing the Hammond electric organ, learning and utilizing the rich-sounding instrument with rhythm and bass pedals.
Her life too was beginning to settle down. She married a gas station owner named Paul Tracy. Nancy Nelson, Mamma Nelson, was helping raise her great-grandchildren.
If the chips were down for Willie, Martha and the kids could stay with Willie’s father, Ira, and his wife, Lorraine, or with Aunt Rosa and Uncle Ernest, or with Bobbie and Paul and Mamma Nelson. Willie wanted to give his wife and children a good home, but it all depended on where he could play, what he was writing, and the luck of being discovered.
He gravitated back to the honky-tonks, beer joints, and roadhouses around Fort Worth. One reliable touch for a booking was Inez Mortenson, a tough, sometimes mean barkeep, whose clubs, including Inez’s 50/50 on the Jacksboro Highway out by Robert’s Cutoff, seemed to relocate as often as Inez took a new husband (she had eleven in all). Husband number two, Bill Jenkins, a local underworld character, taught her the bar business in the 1940s and put the club’s beer license in her name. After divorcing him, Inez figured there was more money in beer joints than in burger joints and stuck with what she’d learned, earning a reputation for running reputable operations, as she related to the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
forty years later: “First, you serve full drinks and you give honest change every time. Second, you greet your customers and make them feel at home and you get to know their names. You thank them for coming by and you make them want to come back and see you. And you keep control of the place so that you run it and it doesn’t run you.”
Inez had movie-star good looks but was unafraid to fight like a man. She had a big heart, yet she didn’t back down from anybody, though she almost met her match in the smiling young man from Abbott. She did not hesitate telling Willie what she thought of his music. “Dammit, Willie, quit singing all those tear-jerking songs and play something that will get these people on the dance floor,” she advised more than once. “Make them work up a thirst.” As for his own thirst, Inez knew Willie drank too much whenever he could run a tab. Whenever he got drunk, Inez would 86 him. “Go on down the road and play somewhere else,” she’d holler, kicking him out the door. And he would, only to come back again that night or some other night. All was forgiven until the next time.
Margie Lundy at the Nite Owl on the county line between Abbott and West booked him because she had loved Willie since he was a boy and would do anything to boost his career. He picked up work twenty miles south of the Nite Owl on Highway 81 at a new venue in Waco called the Terrace Club, a cinder-block building at 1509 Old Dallas Highway with all the essential ingredients—a stage, a bar, and a dance floor.
Johnny Gimble, the Western Swing fiddler who’d returned to his hometown of Waco after an extended run with the Texas Playboys, discovered him there. “I’d never heard of Willie, but I needed a bass player for the Saturday Night Dance up near Clifton at Lake Whitney,” Johnny said. “I called ol’ Bill Mounce, the drummer who used to book a lot of bands and knew every musician in the country. He called me back and said all the bass men were busy but there’s a kid up in Abbott who plays guitar and is a songwriter. Willie came and played the TV show [the Bluebonnet Barn Dance on KCEN-TV, starring Clyde “Barefoot” Chesser] and the dance that night.” Gimble could tell the redheaded guitarist knew his music, and what Johnny wanted was neither dense nor complicated. “I just told him to bear down on the rhythm because you’re replacing the bass,” he said. Willie made a fan out of the fiddler, beginning a long musical and personal friendship.
While physics engineer Jack Kilby was inventing the integrated circuit at Texas Instruments in Richardson, near Dallas, Willie was doing his own research, developing a distinctive Texas sound with his voice and instruments by playing live wherever and whenever he could, which often meant seven days a week.
Billy Todd, a booking agent for Bob Wills, and a musician, hired Willie to play for a few weeks in 1958 at his bar, Todd’s Western Lounge, on Exchange Avenue just off North Main near the Fort Worth Stockyards, which catered to real cowboys. Todd’s was a rough place, prone to fights and violence, but it wasn’t anything Willie Hugh hadn’t seen before.
“After the Nite Owl, there wasn’t anything too much more exciting than that,” Willie explained. “I expected it all. It wasn’t a big deal when somebody got into a fight. When there was a fight, you played louder. Some people came in looking for trouble. Some people came in and found trouble. Some people drank too much. Some people danced too close to somebody’s girlfriend. That shit was always going on. Usually, dancing had a lot to do with the problems. We’d play from eight to twelve and take a couple breaks along the way. You could make a living if you were making fifteen bucks a night for five or six nights a week.”
Todd’s turned into a reliable booking, and Willie hustled up players to work with him as the house band. One musician he shared the stage with at Todd’s was a bright, young songwriter signed to a Nashville publishing house, named Roger Miller. Miller was in and out of Fort Worth, visiting his mother, and found plenty of common ground with Willie. They were both hillbillies and wrote songs and liked to play music. They drank too much, smoked too many cigarettes, and popped too many pills, as was the custom for musicians of their kind. Willie brought Roger over to sister Bobbie’s home. Their impromptu appearances left Willie’s nephews wide-eyed and amazed that grown people could be so crazy.
Bobbie’s son Freddy Fletcher said, “They were kind of a mess. It was really my first time going, wow, these are some wild folks, these people are nuts, but I liked it. They were having fun, they were making music, and somehow making it work. I thought that was cool as hell.”
Playing bars had its advantages; win over that wild bunch and you’re on your way. The bad part about it was, there wasn’t much money to be made. In a matter of weeks after returning to Fort Worth from Vancouver, Washington, Willie traded in the red Cadillac for cheaper transportation and some running change.
When he wasn’t gigging, Willie was sitting in. “He used to sit in whenever he was in town,” said Charlie Owens, the steel player in the house band at Jimmy’s Westland Club on Highway 80 West, the only after-hours country venue in the county. “We got the overflow from all these other clubs. It went all night long. We played from midnight to four-thirty in the morning. It was dance music, a lot of Hank Thompson songs. Bob Wills, Ray Price, whatever was hot on the radio, we’d do.”
Jam sessions broke out frequently, though they were hardly tolerated by club management. “The pedal steel was real popular then,” said Owens, who played one. “Jimmy Day was playing with Ray Price, Buddy Emmons was with Ernest Tubb—they’d all come to the Westland Club and set up and kill the club. They’d get to playing jam music, and no one would get on the dance floor.”
Willie was another sit-in, though he was no Day or Emmons. “To tell you the truth, he didn’t impress me all that much,” Charlie Owens said. “His phrasing was real odd. It was hard to work with him with that offbeat phrasing. He’d drop fifteen words in there real quick, but he was staying in meter, he wasn’t breaking time. He was let go around here three or four times because people didn’t enjoy dancing to his music.”
Freddy Powers remembered trying to keep up with him the first time they played together. “He’d play so far behind the beat, it’d mess me and my bass player up. You had to really concentrate and look at each other, not listen to Willie.”
Willie also sat in at the Tracer Club, a new-concept nightclub where each table had its own telephone, so a guy could ring up a good-looking chick at the next table or buy her a drink. The house band at the Tracer was the Ron-Dels, a white-boy blues, rock, and country band led by a soulful singer named Delbert McClinton and his buddies Ronnie Kelly and Billy Ray Sanders.
Willie picked up day jobs wherever he could. Shortly after he returned to Fort Worth from Vancouver, Willie’s father found him temp work at Bailey Grain on the North Side following a fire at the grain warehouse. The burned grain had to be removed from the grain elevators. Willie filled out a W-4 form, listing his address as 1512 Sharondale on the south side of Fort Worth. One of his first tasks was to drive a cat whose fur was singed to the veterinarian and then pick it up. The rest of the time, he was down in the fifty-six-foot elevators, shoveling out the burned material. One morning, owner Frank Bailey climbed to the top of one elevator and found Willie sleeping, obviously worn out from working a gig the night before. Bailey was so frightened by what he saw—if Willie had rolled six inches in his sleep, he would have fallen into the elevator and surely died—that he fired him on the spot.
Willie hired out as a carpet installer’s helper but was fired for spending too much time writing lyrics instead of rolling carpet, and he sold encyclopedias on the telephone, then followed up on prospects with in-person visits.
For a few weeks, he found steady work at the Premier service station at Main and Berry, owned by Paul Tracy, Bobbie’s husband. The low-maintenance job freed him to roam the clubs at nights, and if he fell asleep at work, it was unlikely he’d get fired. Plus, if there were mechanical problems with the used car Bobbie and Paul bought him, he could get it fixed and get away with owing his brother-in-law for a while.
The pump jockeys at the Premier quickly surmised Willie had other things on his mind than rising up the ranks in the service station business. “When cars would pull into the station, it was me and Leonard Sanders filling the tank, checking the oil, and wiping the windows,” said Richard Davis, who also wore the red Premier badge. “Willie was always slow getting out of his chair.” Richard knew where he fit in. “Willie could come and go as he pleased, since he was kin to the owner. He never showed up on time. He used to take a car over to the grease rack, which was in a separate building from the rest of the station, and it would take forever for him to change the oil or wash the car. One day I went over there and on the sides of these Amalie oil boxes were verses that he’d written. Up in the office there’d be scraps of paper with verses written on it. If you said something he thought was lyrical, he’d write it down. He always said he was going to be a songwriter and a country music singer. You knew he was special. You just didn’t know what kind of special.”
Richard and his pal Leonard used Willie’s talents to their advantage. “Willie said he could take any girl’s name and make a song out of it,” Richard said. “I was dating this girl Sharon, she was a pretty good looker, and I told him I was going to bring her up there. He came out and made up the prettiest verse you ever heard. He looked at her and put her characteristics into the line,” flattering her eyes, her hair, and her smile.
Willie’s way with words was a chick magnet as far as Richard was concerned. “He wasn’t a handsome fellow. His hair was kinda curly, his teeth were rotten, and his complexion was terrible. But he could always attract a woman. He talks in poetry. To me, poetry makes you think about the words.”
That sort of response kept Willie on the path. It was an exciting time for country music, which was on the verge of becoming America’s music. Willie was part of the Texas wing of country, an amalgam of Western Swing and honky-tonk music held together by twin fiddles and a beat you could dance to. Sophisticates may have derided hillbilly as low-class white-trash fare, but it was ringing cash registers like no other music. Webb Pierce demonstrated country’s commercial clout by constructing a swimming pool at his Nashville home in the shape of a guitar, built on proceeds of such hits as “Slowly,” “There Stands the Glass,” “More and More,” “Even Tho,” “In the Jailhouse Now,” and, with the Wilburn Brothers, “Sparkling Brown Eyes.”
The Grand Ole Opry in Nashville was the grandest of country’s numerous barn dances, whose reach was amplified by the radio stations that broadcast them. Every part of Texas sported a smaller version of the bigger dances, such as the Opry and Shreveport’s Louisiana Hayride. Central Texas briefly had the Blue Bonnet Barn Dance in Temple, on KCEN-TV. Paris had the Red River Jamboree, which aired throughout East Texas on KFTV-TV. Tyler boasted the Saturday Night Shindig, a little cousin to Houston’s Home Town Jamboree at the City Auditorium, which morphed into the Grand Prize Jamboree, sponsored by the beer company of the same name, and aired on KNUZ-TV and KNUZ radio before switching to KPRC. The Home Town Jamboree’s star was Arlie Duff, whose “Y’all Come” became the show’s trademark. A slew of regional talent, including George Jones, Tex Cherry, Tommy Collins, and Hank Locklin, shared the stage with aspiring amateurs.