Willie Nelson (13 page)

“I hear y’all are pretty good, the Cochran Brothers,” Elvis told Hank and Eddie.

“Well, we think we are, but we ain’t doin’ nothing like you’re doin’,” Hank said. “In fact, we’re thinking about goin’ back to California where we’re from and trying to get [rock and roll] started out there.”

“That’s a hell of an idear,” Elvis reckoned.

The Cochrans returned to California but soon split up. Eddie Cochran went solo and recorded “Summertime Blues,” one of the first genuine rock and roll hits in the wake of Elvis. Hank rejoined the California Hayride, starring Cottonseed Clark and Eddie Kirk, working as a solo country act. He teamed up with songwriter Harlan Howard and followed him to Nashville in 1959, where he was hired to write songs for Pamper Music, with a $50 weekly advance. Hank’s engaging over-the-top personality and his ability to engage bigwigs as well as plain folks paid off in his other skill, song plugging, pitching tunes to artists and producers. He knew great songs even if they weren’t his.

Hank’s buddy Darrell McCall, who played bass in Patsy Cline’s road band, introduced him to Patsy, who took a shine to Hank and, after much resistance, recorded a song of Hank’s called “I Fall to Pieces,” which reached number 1 on country and pop charts.

H
ANK
and Willie really got to know each other at a “guitar pulling” (song swap) at Tootsie’s, where songwriters showed their peers their best stuff. Willie was hardly intimidated. “I figured mine were as good as theirs,” he said.

After several go-rounds, Hank asked Willie a question: “Who wrote them songs?”

“I did,” Willie replied.

“Who plays them?” Hank asked.

“Nobody,” Willie said, grinning. “Nobody wants ’em.”

“Can you get out to my office at Pamper Music out in Goodlettsville tomorrow?” Hank asked, knowing full well what Willie’s answer would be.

Willie drove twenty miles north of Nashville to Goodlettsville the next day in his puke-green Buick. “I thought I’d had some bad-looking cars, but that one beat it all,” Hank marveled. Willie sang the songs to Hank that he’d sung the night before and sang a few more. “What do you have to have?” Hank asked Willie. “Not what do you need, but what do you have to have?” Hank was making $50 a week and he had a wife and three kids, just like Willie did. “Fifty bucks,” Willie said.

Hank went in to talk to Hal Smith, Ray Price’s business partner, who was running the publishing house. “If we give him the fifty dollars, then we can’t give you that raise,” Hal protested.

“Give it to Willie,” Hank said.

Hank had two dollars in his pocket. He gave Willie one dollar for gas so he could drive back to Nashville, and Hank followed there. When they arrived at Louie Dunn’s Trailer Court, where Willie had rented a trailer for his family, Hank let out a loud belly laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Willie asked.

“What’s so funny is that me, my wife, and three kids lived in that same damn trailer when I first got here,” Hank told him. It was also the very same trailer home that Roger Miller and his wife and three children had lived in when they moved from Amarillo a few years before, providing Roger with all the inspiration he needed for the lyrics of what would become his most enduring song, “King of the Road,” with the simple line, “trailers for sale or rent, rooms to let fifty cents.”

Martha and the children treated Hank like the Music Man. Finally there was hope, even though getting by was still a struggle. For the first three months of Martha’s job at the Wagon Wheel, all she could afford to protect herself from the winter elements were a raincoat and plastic sandals.

In exchange for the weekly draw, Willie and Hank showed up every day at Pamper’s office on Two Mile Pike in Goodlettsville. Hank arrived early to work the telephone, doing song-plugging research. “I’d just sit down there and call and find out who was recording and what was going on in town, and call Owen’s [Bradley] office. I learned very young that the people who run the damn town is the secretaries, so I got in with all the secretaries. They’d say, ‘Well, you ain’t supposed to know this, but...,’ and I’d say, ‘I don’t know it.’ So she’d tell me who was cutting and what they were looking for.”

After plugging, Hank would meet Willie out back in the writers’ house, half of the clapboard garage behind the big house, which Willie and Hank refurbished by putting up plasterboard and bringing in two desks, two chairs, and a portable tape recorder. A light bulb was installed outside on the porch to signify “Writers at Work” whenever it was lit. Susie Nelson and her sister and brother would come and play at Pamper while Daddy was at work, and when the red lightbulb was on, they would sit patiently on the porch, drinking soda until the light went off.

“Me and Willie’d meet out here and write. Just me and him, you know. That’s all it takes.”

Every day they’d strum guitars, sing songs, throw out lines, write lyrics, record on the reel-to-reel tape machine, and listen to songs on the recorder. Willie Hugh had been preparing all his life for a job like this, having written lyrics on scraps of paper, in notebooks, on boxes, on walls since he was a boy. Getting paid for that was a dream come true.

Pamper Music bought three hours of studio time at producer Fred Foster’s studio in the Mason building next to the Clarkston Hotel downtown so they could record demo tapes of what they’d written to pitch to artists and producers. Taking turns singing and strumming their compositions, they were accompanied by a cast of musicians that included Hargus “Pig” Robbins on piano, Ray Price’s steel guitarist Jimmy Day, guitarist Pete Wade, bassist Bob Moore, rhythm guitarist Ray Edenton, and pedal steel player Buddy Emmons. Hank or Willie would run through a song so the musicians could write it down on a chart before recording the demo, no do-overs.

“Musicians would cost you around ten dollars an hour,” Hank said. “It depended on who you got and how hot they were. I could do a demo session for a third of what you could, because I could call certain guys and say, ‘Hey, I need a little favor here. I wanna do three or four songs,’ and they’d just charge me so much a song.”

Hank and Willie tried collaborating, which was the way many Nashville hits were written. But Hank realized the hard way that Willie worked better alone. One morning in the writer’s house in the back of Pamper, a secretary buzzed Hank. He was needed on the phone to consult a singer who was doing one of his songs in a studio. Hank stepped outside. Willie made the best of the pause by looking at the walls around him and jotting down on a piece of cardboard lyrics that became “Hello Walls.”

They were getting it done, Hank said proudly. “For days I wouldn’t go home because I was sleepin’ on couches, hitting all the studios in town, running like a sumbitch to sessions at Starday, one at RCA, and one over at Decca. I would say, ‘Man, that Willie’s got a damn song you will not believe,’ and they’d say, ‘Well, let me hear it,’ and I’d say, ‘Well, Dale, I don’t know, I think I...,’ and they’d say, ‘Give me that sumbitch, and cut it.’ I never would tell anybody I thought a song was good unless it was.”

Willie’s wife, Martha, was doing her part, telling Faron Young her husband had a song that was meant for him when the Sheriff (Faron’s nickname) came into the Wagon Wheel on Broadway, where she was working. Faron was “wilder than a guinea, just like always,” Hank said when he and Willie ran into him, hanging out with Webb Pierce and some musicians at Tootsie’s. In the midst of some lightweight bullshitting accompanied by guitar strumming, Faron looked at Willie and asked him to sing him a song.

Willie sang “Hello Walls.” Faron asked him to sing another one. Willie sang him “Congratulations,” a sweetly acerbic putdown of a vindictive lover.

“Can I cut those?” Faron asked. “Hell, yeah!” Hank blurted before Willie had a chance to reply.

“Bring me a dub tomorrow,” Faron instructed.

Faron had already taken a shine to the Texas kid, as had most of his posse. “Willie was down to earth and humble, Faron was loud,” said Frank Oakley, a paint company representative who ran with Faron and hung at Tootsie’s. “Roger Miller said Faron had a mouth as big as his heart.”

Before Faron Young’s version of “Hello Walls” was released, Willie tried to sell him the song for $500. Faron, knowing full well what Willie had coming to him once the recording came out, did him a favor. He loaned him $500 instead, on the condition he not sell the song to anyone else.

The latest Faron Young single, “Hello Walls” b/w “Congratulations,” was released on Capitol Records in the spring of 1961. Done as an uptempo shuffle, the song resonated. It was about a guy so sad and lonely, he starts talking to the walls and the walls talk back—pure-D honky-tonk subject matter—with a weird harmonic “hello, hello” chorus echoing off the canyons of listeners’ minds. “Hello Walls” reached number 1 on the country singles chart the first week of May 1961 and stayed there for nine weeks. It remained a standard on jukeboxes for years. The song had such wide appeal that Faron’s single crossed over to Top 40 radio, reaching number 12 on
Billboard
’s Hot 100 singles chart. The song would be covered by pop crooners Perry Como and Vic Dana, rockabilly Johnny Burnette, orchestra leader Lawrence Welk, and Ernest Tubb, one of Willie’s first heroes. Faron’s original interpretation was recognized by the music trade papers as the country and western record of the year. Willie celebrated the song’s success by French-kissing Faron at Tootsie’s after he received his first royalty check for the sum of $14,000. It was huge money, considering composers earned two cents a record for sales—one penny to the writer and one penny to the song publisher.

Willie was sitting in high cotton. Songwriters like him were redefining country music, covering the subjects of drinking, sleeping around, and lust—the stuff of real people, real emotions, real problems—in creative tellings. Billy Walker recorded Willie’s “Funny How Time Slips Away” on April 21, 1961, and another Willie original, “Mr. Record Man,” just as Faron Young’s “Hello Walls” was zooming up the charts. Walker’s version of “Funny” edged onto the country singles chart, reaching number 23 that summer. The song had staying power on jukeboxes, though, and eventually was certified for selling a million copies.

Meanwhile, Hank Cochran used the same strategy for another song Willie had written, called “Crazy,” as he’d used for his own composition “Walking After Midnight” by playing it for Owen Bradley, Patsy Cline’s producer. The words, the melody, and whole song structure were music to Owen’s ears. Patsy should record the song, Owen told Hank. Despite her reputation as the queen of sophisticated country female vocalists, she could use a hit. It had been a while since “Walking After Midnight” and “I Fall to Pieces.”

Charlie Dick, Patsy’s husband and manager, already knew about Willie. He’d heard “Night Life” by Paul Buskirk and His Little Men featuring Hugh Nelson on the jukebox at Tootsie’s but couldn’t find the single in record stores. So when he met Willie Hugh Nelson, Willie gave him a copy. Charlie went home and played the song over and over, marveling at the slow, languid rhythm and the soulful texture of the song and its jazz-influenced use of minor seventh and major seventh chords.

Patsy wasn’t quite as taken with the song. “She didn’t want to hear Willie Nelson’s name mentioned,” Charlie Dick said. Patsy didn’t much cotton to songs that made her sound so wounded. So when Hank Cochran went over to Patsy’s house to play “Crazy” for her, Willie waited in Hank’s car. Charlie Dick had told Willie of Patsy’s initial reaction to “Night Life,” and Willie didn’t want to ruin his chances.

“I took it in and said, ‘Patsy, I think I got a hit,’” Hank related. “Whose is this?” Patsy asked. “It’s Willie’s,” Hank said. “Where’s Willie?” she asked. “He’s settin’ out there in the car, he’s too embarrassed to come in,” Hank told her. “Well, I’m going to get that little son of a bitch,” Patsy declared. “She went out there and drug his ass in and had him sing it to her until she learned it,” Hank said.

Patsy still wasn’t convinced, living up to her reputation as hard to please. But Owen Bradley liked it enough to propose a compromise, like he always did: “You choose one song, and I’ll choose one song, but I get the first pick,” Owen told her. He was going to cut Patsy Cline singing “Crazy,” and that was that.

“Look, Hoss, there ain’t no way I can sing it like he’s singing it on the demo,” Patsy protested to Owen. But she did more than a credible effort of adopting Willie’s unique phrasing, singing slightly behind the beat, waiting to sing until the chord hit, lingering on key words a little longer before cutting the phrase off cold while singing about the instability unrequited love brought on. The way she wrapped her voice around the opening line, “Crazy,” was just like Willie had heard Floyd Tillman intone “Baby” at the beginning of “I Gotta Have My Baby Back.” It wasn’t that long ago that Paul Buskirk had told Willie, “Write me something like Floyd Tillman.” With “Crazy” he had done that.

The instrumental part of the song was rehearsed and recorded over the course of one session. Pianist Floyd Cramer, a veteran of the Louisiana Hayride, played the signature piano notes that seemed to be walking alone in a dark alley on a rainy night. Gordon Stoker played a jazzy tick-tack bass tuned on octave lower than a normal guitar and an octave higher than a normal bass. Harold Bradley, Owen’s brother, picked a subdued guitar. Owen focused on slowing Patsy down to sing the song as more of a blues than a dance tune. She was mad at Owen for making her do that, but that emotion somehow translated into hurt on the record.

Patsy did her vocal in one take. Owen Bradley invested another three-hour session on background singers and music, bringing in the Jordanaires, Elvis Presley’s backing singers, to add a reassuring vocal chorus.

“I don’t want four male voices covering mine up,” Patsy protested to Owen.

“You just leave that to me, Patsy,” he reassured her. “You’ll be all right.”

There was still one stumbling block. Billy Walker had placed a “hold” on the song, meaning he had first dibs on recording it, according to song publishing protocol. Hank Cochran panicked. Hank went to see Billy Walker. “Please, please, release your hold on the song,” he begged. “I’ll get you a hit song, I promise.” Billy Walker relented for Willie’s sake.