Willie Nelson (15 page)
Willie became an important Cherokee Cowboy. He was a competent musician and fun to run with after the show. His generosity, fueled by publishing checks when they arrived, was unlike any other sideman’s. He bought Ray Price’s ’59 Cadillac. He booked the nicest suites and would treat the other Cherokee Cowboys to booze and cigarettes. He rented a nice house for Martha, Lana, Susie, and Billy in Goodlettsville near Pamper Music. “Daddy got me a nanny,” Lana recalled sweetly. “She was a woman known as Suckin’ Sue who used to hang at Tootsie’s. She was trying to go straight. She was nice to me.”
He recruited Paul Buskirk from Houston to play with Price for a spell while trying to get his old friend Johnny Bush, from San Antonio, hired as drummer. He was being paid to write songs, but playing behind Price was a bigger thrill. Faron Young introduced Willie to friends as the composer of “Hello Walls.” One night at Tootsie’s, Faron cornered Willie. “Why don’t you just stay here and write songs for me?” Willie said thanks but no thanks. “It won’t be too many more years on the road until I’m hotter than you are,” he told Faron with a wink. Faron shot back that Willie was an acquired taste like Floyd Tillman because he was so different. “Willie, you gotta make up your mind whether you’re going to sing or talk,” he ribbed.
As Ray Price’s front man, Willie got to sing a song or three to warm up the crowd before the star of the show took the stage each night. But he wanted to
be
Ray Price, not just his sideman or his songwriter.
O
FF
the road, Willie and Roger Miller, another sometimes Cherokee Cowboy, were among the few songwriters who hung with the pickers as much as with other songwriters or the recording artists who could move their careers. “We’d have these jam sessions when we’d get off the road,” said Darrell McCall. They were all about Ray Charles, Miles Davis, or some other jazz cat. “That’s where the licks came from for Buddy [Emmons] and Jimmy [Day] both. Go back in the old Hank Williams stuff. Sammy Pruett and Don Helms, they were playing jazz. You’d have three or four steel players, two or three bass players, four guitar pickers, feeding off each other. One steel player would play till he got tired and he’d go sit down for a while, drink a beer. This would go on for days at a time.”
Road work scratched Willie’s girl itch. Fidelity was not among Ray Price’s rules and regulations. Women showed up at gigs and clustered around their favorite Cherokee Cowboy, not just the star. Martha, no dummy, got wise to Willie’s ways. “He was always messing around with somebody and come home and tell me he hadn’t done doodly shit,” she said. “He’d have lipstick smeared from one end to the other.” Willie always had a good excuse, but Martha knew better. She was so determined to catch him in the act that she hid in the car trunk once to spy on him. She caught him red-handed by following Ray Price and His Cherokee Cowboys to a show in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Drinking herself into a rage, she barged into his motel room and caught him fooling around with a backdoor woman. Without a second thought, she coldcocked Willie over the head with the whiskey bottle she had emptied, unleashing a torrent of epithets. She was so enraged and so drunk that when the police showed up, she went to jail. Her husband bailed her out.
Something had to give.
L
OS ANGELES, THE
third-largest city in the United States, wasn’t in Willie Nelson’s plans when he set out to be a hit songwriter. But L.A. pulled him in anyway in the summer of 1961, when he signed a recording contract with Liberty Records. The label was based in Los Angeles, the new center of the recording industry, where the California sound, celebrating cars, blonde girls, surfing, and teenage hedonism, was beginning to take shape. Liberty Records had started a country division, aiming to challenge Capitol Records as the dominant country record label on the West Coast.
Ken Nelson, the head of Capitol’s country division, had developed a warm, close-to-the-microphone sound for country singers signed to the label, effectively smoothing out the Bakersfield Sound popularized by Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. Ken Nelson’s recording of Ferlin Husky’s “Gone” in Nashville in 1956 was said to be the inspiration for the Nashville Sound.
Liberty’s country division chief, Joe Allison, was determined to follow in Ken Nelson’s footsteps. A good ol’ boy from Texas with an ear for hits, Allison was one of Hank Cochran’s favorite people to pitch songs to. Hank was on the verge of wrangling a recording contract of his own, when he played Willie’s demos to Allison. Allison flipped. Signing Willie would give Liberty the inside track to one of Nashville’s best writers. But as great as his songs were, Allison thought Willie’s singing style was almost as intriguing, beginning with his sophisticated sense of phrasing. Joe Allison understood Willie from the get-go.
Liberty’s roster was nothing if not eclectic, ranging from the Ventures, the kings of instrumental surf music, surf music vocal duo Jan and Dean, balladeer Timi Yuro, the sexy and sultry “Fever” gal, Julie London, composer and singer Jackie DeShannon, to the Johnny Mann Singers, Si Zentner, “Quiet Village” composer Martin Denny, Nancy Ames, Texas-Mexican singing star Vikki Carr, the novelty act the Chipmunks, and pop vocalists Gene McDaniels and Bobby Vee. Among the country acts already on the label were Bob Wills, California swing leader Tex Williams, whose “Smoke, Smoke, Smoke (That Cigarette)” was Capitol Records’ first million-seller, Little Joe Carson, Tommy Allsup, Walter Brennan, and the Crickets. Twenty-two Liberty songs reached the Top 10 on pop charts in 1961, and they had put the personnel in place to do the same with country records.
Willie’s first recording session for Liberty was in Nashville on August 22, 1961, in the Quonset Hut studio built by Owen and Harold Bradley. Four guitarists were booked for the recording, including Ray Edenton, who doubled on fiddle and worked many of Chet Atkins’s sessions, Texas Playboy Kelso Herston, session leader Grady Martin, the dean of session pickers, and Harold Bradley. Pig Robbins played piano, Buddy Harman drummed, Joe Zinkan played bass, and the Anita Kerr Singers sweetened up the proceedings with soothing choruses emulating the Nashville Sound.
Tracks for two Willie originals, “The Part Where I Cry” and “Touch Me,” were finished.
Not satisfied with the results, Allison took Willie to Radio Recorders in West Los Angeles, near the Liberty headquarters, for a second session a month later. This time Willie joined three other stellar guitarists—session leader Billy Strange, Roy Nichols from the Maddox Brothers, and Johnny Western, who had worked with Johnny Cash and sang the “Paladin” theme to
Have Gun—Will Travel,
one of the most popular western series on television. Jim Pierce played piano, and Red Wootten and Ray Pohlman split bass duties. Roy Harte, a jazz player who founded Pacific Jazz Records and worked with hillbilly Cliffie Stone on his weekly Hometown Jamboree, handled drums. B. J. Baker led the vocal chorus that attempted to replicate the Anita Kerr Singers. The singers got lost trying to follow Willie’s lead vocals until Joe Allison put up baffles between Willie and the singers so they couldn’t hear one another. To stay on the beat, the singers followed Johnny Western’s direction. A session player who went by the name of Russell Bridges (real name: Leon Russell) added some piano while another guitarist, named Glen Campbell, threw in some riffs.
Fourteen tracks were finished in two days: “Mr. Record Man,” “Go Away,” “The Waiting Time,” “Three Days,” “Darkness on the Face of the Earth,” “Undo the Right,” “Where My House Lives,” “Country Willie,” “How Long Is Forever,” “One Step Beyond,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Wake Me When It’s Over,” “Hello Walls,” and “Night Life”—more than enough to make an album, several singles, and B-sides.
A third session was scheduled for Nashville in November. Liberty was still trying to figure out where Willie Nelson fit as a performer. Joe Allison gathered fiddler and guitarist Ray Edenton, pianist Pig Robbins, and drummer Buddy Harman from the earlier sessions, along with bassist Bob Moore and steel guitarist Jimmy Day at Bradley’s Barn. Jimmy Day and Willie had become drinking and picking buddies as Cherokee Cowboys long enough for Willie to develop a great deal of respect for Jimmy’s music and his talents on pedal steel and rhythm guitar. His ability to bend chords to cry and weep was to the pedal steel what John Coltrane’s styling was to the saxophone. His steel was the hook on Ray Price’s breakthrough “Crazy Arms,” which prompted folks like Webb Pierce, Red Sovine, Hank Williams, Jim Reeves, Lefty Frizzell, Elvis Presley, Ray Price, Ernest Tubb, Ferlin Husky, and George Jones to seek him out for their recordings. On this recording, though, Jimmy Day’s primary task was instructing the Anita Kerr Singers how to sing the steel parts so they could define the up-and-coming singer-songwriter sound as Liberty’s sweeter version of the Nashville Sound.
Joe Allison also brought in a young singer from the West Coast named Shirley Collie, who was recording for Liberty, to see how she and Willie would match up. Willie already knew about Shirley and supposedly offered Joe a piece of a song if Joe would get her on his record. One thing was clear: He’d never sung with a woman with a voice like hers before, or with someone quite as pretty. Shirley was a star in her own right, a featured regular on the television shows
Country America
and CBS’s
Town Hall Party,
which were taped in Los Angeles, and she’d appeared on
Divorce Court
and
The Groucho Marx Show
.
Shirley and Willie first met through Hank Cochran, who was pitching Shirley some of Willie’s demos over lunch and brought her over to Radio Recorders when he was recording “Mr. Record Man.” Ever the hustler, Willie told her, “I’ve got a song you should record.” As their eyes locked, Shirley didn’t hear a word. It was instant love. “I saw things in him that even give me goose bumps now,” she later recalled. She also heard quite a songwriter.
Shirley and her husband, Biff, went to see Ray Price and the Cherokee Cowboys at the Harmony Park Ballroom and invited Willie over to dinner at their house the following night, an off night for the band. While there, Biff enticed Willie to record some promotional spots for KFOX in Biff’s home studio. Willie liked Biff and Biff liked Willie. They were fellow Texans with plenty in common. Before Biff married Shirley, he’d been married to the ex-wife of Floyd Tillman, one of Willie’s heroes.
The two couples socialized in Nashville whenever Biff came to town. But on one visit, Shirley stayed after Biff returned to the coast. Not coincidentally, Willie didn’t come home for two days. He had taken a motel room at the Downtowner Motor Inn next to Shirley’s room, right under Martha’s nose.
Nashville’s music community being smaller than a small town, word spread fast of an affair and eventually reached Martha. Shirley and Willie weren’t even trying to pretend anymore. The engaging red-haired singer with the expansive smile and Patsy Cline tough-gal moves had stolen Willie’s heart. She wasn’t just good-looking, she could sing, she could yodel, and she could entertain. She could play bass. She was the first singer to not only grasp his vocal styling but match him note for note, keeping up with his notorious phrasing, singing harmony that fit hand in glove with his leads. They were so in sync, both could switch from lead to harmony at the nod of the head or a wink of an eye. She wrote songs too. She brought out the best in Willie Nelson, the performer.
Shirley thought he had all the right ingredients to be a star. Everyone else had yet to get the message. The first Willie Nelson single on Liberty, “The Part Where I Cry,” recorded in Nashville, b/w “Mr. Record Man,” recorded in Los Angeles, was released late in 1961 to little fanfare.
“It did get airplay, which is all I wanted, really, because I knew I wasn’t going to make a bunch of money,” Willie said. “I didn’t know anybody who was making money off of selling records.”
About the only place the single made a splash was Texas, where it ginned up spins on Texas radio stations and on jukeboxes across the state, mainly for the B-side. Linking heartbreak to record retailers with poetic lines, and putting the words to a Ray Price shuffle was two-stepping dance-floor bliss. Bass, snare, and brushes pushed the beat, and Jim Pierce’s earthy honky-tonk piano licks provided the sad counterpoint.
Mr. Record Man I’m looking for a song I heard today
There was someone blue singing ’bout someone who went away
Just like me his heart was yearning for a love that used to be
It’s a lonely song about a lonely man like me
There was something ’bout a love that didn’t treat him right
And he’d wake from troubled sleep and cry her name at night
Mr. Record Man get this record for me won’t you please
It’s a lonely song about a lonely man like me
I was driving down the highway with the radio turned on
And a man that I heard singing sound so blue and all alone
As I listen to his lonely song I wonder could it be
Could there somewhere be another lonely man like me
“The first time I heard Willie on the radio singing ‘Mr. Record Man,’ I flipped out,” said his nephew Freddy Fletcher. “‘Wow, that’s Uncle Willie on the radio!’ I couldn’t believe it. When he came and stayed at our house in Fort Worth and he took my bedroom, I thought he really was a big deal, so I went and started charging all the neighborhood kids to come and watch him sleep. When he woke up, he’s got a roomful of kids there, staring at him. We thought this guy is one of the biggest things ever.”
Despite only four thousand copies sold, the single became Willie’s calling card. “The only way you could make any money was by personal appearances,” he said. “I used the record to get gigs. You had a record, you went to the radio stations, you got them to play it, and you go to a beer joint and say, ‘Hey, I got a record over here, I’ll draw you a crowd,’ and you put it together.”
The second Willie Nelson single fared considerably better, mainly because Shirley Collie was singing on it. Their duet, “Willingly,” issued as a Willie Nelson record, rose into the country Top 10 when it was released in March 1962 with “Our Chain of Love” on the flip side. Their harmonies were as sweet as the Everly Brothers’, with Willie sticking to an artificially high tenor to blend in with Shirley’s richer voice, which carried the song. Willie’s vocal served mainly as a complementary echo. Whoever was singing the lead didn’t really matter. The formula worked.
A third single, “Touch Me,” sung without Shirley, was released in May 1962 and broke into the Top 10 country singles chart, rising to number 7. A sad blues done in a slow drag with the rough edges smoothed out by harmony singers and a cool instrumental arrangement, the song earned Willie a place on jukeboxes throughout the United States.
A second duet with Shirley, “You Dream About Me” b/w “Is This My Destiny?” didn’t do much chartwise. But by then, Willie didn’t much care, nor did Shirley. Their passionate affair was aflame. Her marriage, her home, her TV bookings, her audition for the role of Cousin Pearl Bodine in a new TV comedy called
The Beverly Hillbillies
—none of that mattered anymore. She left a good-bye note to Biff before sneaking onto Ray Price’s bus while the Cherokee Cowboys headed north to Canada for an extended tour. She was chucking it all for the bass player.
She rented a car, using Biff’s American Express card, and ran around with Willie for weeks, leaving Biff with a $2,000 bill. When Willie got a booking opening for Roy Orbison along with comedian Allen Kaye at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, where the poster for the September 19, 1962, concert hyped Willie with the endorsement “Elvis Presley says he is the Greatest Singer of All Time,” he and Shirley spent three days in the Georgia city, acting like kids. “We’d run around the streets and look in the windows and laugh and go back to the motel and eat pizza or Chinese food and tell each other what we wanted to do,” she said.
Ray Price auditioned Shirley as a singer, but she had other ideas. She wanted to work with Willie, and as far as she was concerned, he had the potential to be bigger than Price. She was aware of Willie’s reputation in Nashville as someone who didn’t keep appointments and seemed to be in a daze most of the time. She wanted to straighten him out, get him a driver’s license, and file his taxes, so they could write songs and play and tour together. She went back to L.A. to get a divorce, only to discover Biff was going to try to commit her to a hospital.
Willie was in love. “He came to Mom and told her that he met a woman and he loved her and that she was going to die,” Lana, Willie’s oldest daughter, said. “She had a life-threatening illness and she didn’t have long to live. He was only repeating what he was told. Martha took boyfriends when Willie took girlfriends, partly because she was lonely, partly to get back at him. I was old enough to know. They were fighting so much, I used to pray that they would get a divorce. I thought they’d be happier because they wouldn’t be fighting and screaming all the time. But that made Mom real depressed. She had a nervous breakdown. She became alcoholic. And Shirley’s still got her life-threatening illness.
“She just wanted to be together and be happy and not struggle,” Lana said of Martha. “Being a musician, he was struggling a lot.” When success came, the marriage fell apart. “He took lovers. She took a boyfriend,” Lana said. “He always had lovers. He’d come home and she’d beat the hell out of him, he’d beat the hell out of her. It was fire and water. I don’t know who was right and wrong. The mother’s trying to raise three kids. The husband’s a good person and really sweet and will give you the shirt off his back, although maybe he’s not being as faithful as he could be, and maybe not bringing home the money, although he’s really trying, he’s really always trying. We always had to move when the rent came due. They were always turning the lights off.”