Willie Nelson (17 page)
Tommy Allsup produced twenty-six sides on Willie between December 1962 and November 1963, including another Nashville session at RCA Studios, where Ray Price’s pedal steel guitarist Tommy Jackson replaced Jimmy Day, and two final sessions back at Bradley’s Barn in Nashville with Fred Carter Jr., Jerry Kennedy, and Wayne Moss handling the guitar chores. Some of those tracks found their way onto his second album,
Here’s Willie Nelson,
on which Willie’s voice was complemented by a pronounced country and swing sound, although the tracks arranged by Ernie Freeman blatantly pushed him in a pop or jazz crooner direction. “Nobody could get a handle on what he was doing,” said Tommy with a shrug.
The liner notes to
Here’s Willie Nelson
were written by none other than Bob Wills, who observed that Willie’s style was “just right for his material,” suggesting he did his songs as well as the big stars like Patsy Cline, Faron Young, and Ray Price. Willie returned the favor by opening the album with “Roly Poly,” written by Fred Rose, and “Right or Wrong,” both from the Texas Playboys repertoire. The pop chestnut “Am I Blue?” followed, then “The Last Letter,” a sadder-than-sad song written by Rex Griffin in 1937. He did other covers—Jimmy Day’s “The Way You See Me,” “The Things I Might Have Been,” a song popularized by his fiddling pal Wade Ray, Roger Miller’s “Second Fiddle,” “Let Me Talk to You,” by Nashville songwriters Don Dill and Danny Davis, “Feed It a Memory,” written by Hank Cochran and Justin Tubb, ET’s son. The strongest songs were the four he wrote—“Half a Man,” “Lonely Little Mansion,” “Take My Word,” and “Home Motel.”
The first single, “Am I Blue?” came out of the chute fast. “Man, that was busting out of Cleveland on the radio,” Tommy Allsup said. “Then the Beatles came out.”
The British Invasion that began in early 1964 didn’t scare Tommy Allsup, but the impact of the British rock groups caused Liberty to reassess their commitment to country while prompting Willie to assess the songwriting game, country music, the music business, and all the new sounds he was hearing. He would soon be covering the Beatles’ “Yesterday” in his shows.
The sessions produced two more Liberty singles, with “Half a Man” and “You Took My Happy Away” on the A-sides. “Half a Man,” a very personal, cry-in-your-beer blues peaked at number 25. “Half the country stations wouldn’t play ‘Half a Man’ because they thought it was morbid,” Tommy said.
A similar fate awaited Little Joe Carson, another Liberty artist Allsup produced, who had recorded Willie’s “I Gotta Get Drunk” backed by guitarists James Burton and Glen Campbell. “That record sold a hundred thousand copies off jukebox play—five times what ‘Heart to Heart Talk’ sold, and that was number one,” Allsup said. “But Joe Carson barely made it into the charts, no higher than number thirty-five. There was a thing about Nashville at that time. They didn’t use electric bass on their recordings. Disc jockeys wouldn’t play a record with an electric bass. Figure that out.”
Willie was having to settle for word-of-mouth buzz and for being a musician’s musician, a well-kept secret only insiders were hip to. The Liberty sessions made a fan of labelmate Timi Yuro, a soulful pop balladeer who covered Willie’s “Permanently Lonely” and “Are You Sure?” and recorded duets with him on “Did I Ever Love You?” and “There’s a Way.” “She dug the shit out of him,” Tommy Allsup said. Except to her and a few others, Willie Nelson was hardly a household name.
E
VEN
with royalty checks coming in, he was spending money faster than he was taking it in, paying for two wives while trying to satisfy his musical habit. Whenever he and Shirley were staying in Fort Worth, he’d make regular stops at places like the Star Lite Club out on Highway 114 on the northwestern fringe of Dallas, a ballroom known for swing dancing and frequent visits from Bob Wills. Nice as the club was, the players and the management didn’t get him like Joe Allison did. “He used to come out all the time and try to sit in, and basically they didn’t take him seriously; they were laughing at him,” said Mark Fields, son of Sandy Lee Fields, who co-owned the club. “They thought he sang funny.” But as a genuine Nashville recording artist promoting his hits “Touch Me” and “Half a Man,” he fetched a cool $300 guarantee at the two-hundred-seat room, working with the house band, Lynn Echols and the Losers.
“He had on a lime-green suit and a turtleneck sweater, and his hair was combed back. He looked really nice,” Echols recalled. The Losers were a swing band with a sax player, equally schooled in Bob Wills music in “Misty,” “Honky-tonk,” and “Stardust,” and in Jimmy Reed songs you could dirty dance the North Texas Push to. They were bluesy enough to work “nigger nights,” as Echols described Sundays at the Longhorn, when colored acts played for colored audiences and, according to Echols, “there were so many blacks in there you couldn’t see nothin’ but white teeth.” Echols and his boys saw Willie as a writer first “because he wrote all those great songs for Patsy Cline and Faron Young. I wasn’t as impressed with his singing talent.”
Dewey Groom booked Willie at the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, the dance hall formerly known as Bob Wills’ Ranch House. If Willie didn’t draw huge crowds, Dewey liked him well enough to never short Willie on his money. He also played the Remington and the Trianon in Oklahoma City and Cain’s Academy in Tulsa, storied ballrooms from the Western Swing era, and too many small joints, dives, and lounges to count.
He worked as a solo at the Southern Club in Lawton, Oklahoma, where the house band, the Southernaires, were the stars on the bandstand on weeknights. On weekends, they backed touring acts such as Lefty Frizzell, Ray Price, Ferlin Husky, and Bob Wills.
Willie arrived with the reputation of having written “Hello Walls” and “Crazy,” which usually meant he was no great shakes as a singer, a guitarist, or an entertainer. That’s why they called songwriters songwriters.
“Willie, he come loping out there when it come his time to come on,” Carl Cooper, the steel player in the Southernaires, said. “He came out in a suit, white shirt, tie, carrying a little acoustic guitar, and we all looked and groaned, ‘Oh boy, it’s gonna be a long night, here comes a strummer.’ First tune he calls was ‘San Antonio Rose.’ Every musician has always done ‘San Antonio Rose’ ten thousand times. That’s home ground. But not the way that Willie did it. Of course, he does his own phrasing. And when he’s fired up...we tried to follow his phrasing and everything was all messed up. Bobby Day saw that and said, ‘Boys, just hold the row. This guy knows what he’s doing.’ We muddled through until we got used to him. After a while it was a pretty enjoyable job because he wasn’t a great singer, but he certainly was an excellent phraser.”
Hard to understand, hard to keep up with, and not selling records made road work a struggle. But the Internal Revenue Service had already recognized his success. Willie owed several thousand dollars in 1963, according to the tax man, which Willie did not deny. He had never paid taxes because he’d never had the money to pay them. But whenever he was hit with a bill, he paid it. The IRS found the most efficient way to collect from Willie was to lean on the venues he played and garnish his wages, even the Nite Owl near West.
He continued gigging, playing Vegas as a single, where he developed a friendship with Curtis Potter, the former teenage singing star who fronted Hank Thompson’s Brazos Valley Boys, Willie’s backup band for two weeks at the Golden Nugget.
He auditioned a young band from Paris, in East Texas, who called themselves the Sundowners, at an agent’s office on Haskell Street in Dallas. The players already covered “Touch Me” and a few other Willie songs, but when he ran them through “Columbus Stockade Blues,” the kids from Paris folded their tent. “He was at a level way above where we were,” said the group’s guitarist Jerry Case. “They didn’t have to say anything. It was obvious we couldn’t cut it.”
The Sundowners went back to Paris with their tails between their legs. But Jerry Case got a second chance to play with Willie several months later. He’d nailed down a seat in the house band at the Cavalier Club in Wichita Falls, which backed up Little Joe Carson, the singer signed to Liberty who did Willie’s “I Gotta Get Drunk.”
When Willie played a date at the Cavalier, backed by the house band, Jerry Case was prepared. “This time I was ready for him,” Jerry said. “We backed him really nice. He was really impressed that I knew his songs. A lot of his songs were off-the-wall and he could throw a basic player pretty easy with his phrasing. Some had more than two or three chords.” Willie acknowledged Jerry’s talent by asking for his phone number.
“I
CAN’T
afford a band yet,” he told Case, “but when I do get enough money, would you be interested in joining?”
Willie never called, but Case was still flattered. “Just him asking was a real compliment.”
Willie opened a date in Dallas for Roger Miller at the Sportatorium, where he met promoter Gene McCoslin. Geno, as McCoslin was known, was a hustler who knew entertainment, knew the street, and knew this Willie guy was worth booking. Willie took an instant liking to Geno because he immediately recognized he wasn’t just a promoter but a real character who knew how to make money. The date was the first of hundreds Willie would do for Geno.
Willie’s show posters read “Liberty Recording Artist” long after Liberty Records was bought by an electronics company called Avnet and the country division was folded by the new owners. Willie had an untitled album scheduled for release in November 1963, but the record was never released due to the reorganization at Liberty.
The album in the can included his deepest, most tortured ballad yet, “Opportunity to Cry,” in which love lost leads to murder and suicide, “At the Bottom,” a miserable, depressing blues Willie had written, and “River Boy,” a whimsical song that reflected the popularity of Mike Fink, the King of the Keelboaters, popularized by the
Disneyland
television series in the 1950s. “I Hope So,” which was credited to Shirley, sounded like something Willie could have written. Covers comprised the rest of the album—Floyd Tillman’s “Cold War with You”; “Seasons of My Heart,” and “Blue Must Be the Color of the Blues,” both early hits for George Jones; Hank Williams’s “There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight”; “Take Me As I Am (or Let Me Go),” written by Boudleaux Bryant; Hank Thompson’s “Tomorrow Night”; and Sammy Cahn and Jules Styne’s “I’ll Walk Alone,” popularized by Dinah Shore.
Liberty had turned into a hard life lesson. The sessions in Los Angeles had introduced him to his second wife and a whole new group of musician friends. Being a recording artist had made him some kind of celebrity back in Fort Worth. But neither place, he concluded, was where he needed to be. “It just wasn’t time,” Willie said. If he was going to be a country music star, his destiny was in Nashville.
After finishing what would be his final sessions for Liberty, Willie signed a contract on November 22, 1963, to buy a red-brick ranch-style home on seventeen acres in Ridgetop, Tennessee, a rural community north of Goodlettsville, twenty-five miles from Music Row. That very same day, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, putting Texas in a different light in the eyes of the rest of the world.
R
UNNING ON THE ROAD
with Shirley had been fun, but the newness had worn off for him and for her within a year of their marriage in Vegas. Mailbox money from writing songs, especially from “Crazy,” which was much covered and much played, was what paid the bills, and Shirley convinced Willie to focus on that. Getting off the road to write songs made sense. And Shirley was ready to settle down after an extended run of one-nighters in a station wagon. “I was brought up to be a homemaker and a housewife. I didn’t have any problems adjusting.”
Hank Cochran and Hal Smith of Pamper Music agreed with Shirley. If Willie holed up and focused on writing songs, he’d be more in demand. “We kept him in Ridgetop up there and wouldn’t let him work dates and wouldn’t let him see nobody for many months to build up a damn mystique about him, by keeping him away from everyone,” Hank Cochran reasoned. “He wore overalls, slopped hogs, and just done everything up there, but he kept writing songs.”
Faron Young swore he’d cover everything Willie handed him. And Willie had given in. “Nashville is the store,” he concluded. “If you have something to sell, you go to the store.”
Shirley threw him the first birthday party he’d had since Abbott a few months after their move to the country. “I fried chicken and made potato salad and we cleaned the basement and had over Fred Foster and Haze Jones and Hal Smith and his wife, Velma, and just scads of people,” she said.
The Ridgetop farm, purchased with royalties from “Crazy” and “Hello Walls,” was far enough from Nashville to qualify as a hideout. Just as the name implied, Ridgetop was a high, densely wooded ridge with thickets of hickory, oak, pine, sycamore, weeping willow, and cedar. Wherever the woodland had been cleared, the exposed red clay and sandy loam produced abundant crops of corn, tobacco, squash, apples, pears, okra, peppers, and tomatoes.
The ridge with its hollows, springs, and creeks could have been confused with Uncle Peck and Prilla’s homestead on Pindall Ridge, in Arkansas, the land where Willie’s people came from. Here, Willie would live the life of a gentleman farmer who happened to be a very talented songwriter, raising hogs and chickens and horses, picking and singing and writing songs.
Over the next three years, one by one, Martha sent Billy, then Susie, and finally Lana to Ridgetop to live with their father. The itinerant country music songwriter offered more stability than their mother, the itinerant waitress. For Willie, it was a second chance to raise his kids. Billy, the youngest, was the first to arrive at the Nelson farm. He was a shy boy who thought that all parents screamed at each other when they were together, that daddies were usually gone, and that families always struggled. Willie may have been an absentee father to Billy, but at least with Shirley around, the boy would have someone to look after him.
“We were sitting on the porch right after he moved in,” Shirley recalled. “He was six years old. He told me he didn’t want to grow up and do anything dangerous. He was a sweet little boy. We all got along good.” Willie tried his best to make up for lost time. “He was a good dad and spent lots of time with the kids,” Shirley said. “They played out in the yard, rode horses, ate together. He would tell us, ‘This is the way a family should be.’ And we were a family.”
The thirteen-year-old Lana and her stepmother hit it off particularly well. “We were pals. My mom hated her so much, I got along with her,” she said.
It was a new role for Shirley. She had performed since she was a teenager, always onstage, in the band, always playing. Now she was a homemaker and a mom, raising three kids who were the offspring of the man she loved. Shirley instinctively kept her guitar within reach and continued writing songs and working on music, but though she didn’t realize it, she was effectively retired. It was a new role for Willie too. He wanted to do his part to ensure domestic tranquillity by swearing off the road. But when a booking came along, he’d do it.
The Mullins family down Greer Road became Billy’s surrogate parents. Joel Mullins was a hardworking welder who had a great love for Woody Guthrie songs and other folk music from an earlier time. His wife, Nancy, was a tireless homemaker. They both recognized Shirley was not Supermom and that Billy Nelson needed special attention. “They took Billy in,” Lana said of the Mullinses. “Billy was rebelling. He was having trouble being away from Dad. Shirley tried real hard and had good intentions,” Lana said. “But there was a little boy who wanted his mother or his father and he wasn’t getting either one of them. He was stuck with this person he didn’t even know. The Mullinses stepped up to the plate. Mrs. Mullins coddled him, hugged him, doted over him.” Billy wanted attention, and when he wasn’t getting it, he would make sure he was noticed by doing things like playing with matches in the closet. His daddy was concerned but rarely there to do anything about it.
Shirley tried to run the house, best she could. “She was patient,” Lana said. “She didn’t lose her temper like a lot of people had.” But she was human. “She wasn’t on the road, singing and playing. She became this instant mother. She always wanted to have kids and never could have kids,” Lana said. Now Shirley had a full-blown family, but she didn’t have the man she’d run away with. Ridgetop was supposed to keep Willie home.
Other country stars put down roots in Ridgetop. Opry stars Grandpa Jones, famous for his anthem “Turn Your Radio On,” and the country comedian String Bean lived nearby and would entertain residents at the local nursing home with Sunday gospel sing-ins. Sheb Wooly lived in Ridgetop. Fiddler Wade Ray was Willie’s next-door neighbor. Willie’s kids picked blackberries at the Rays’ in the summer. Hank Cochran and Pamper Music were a few miles below the ridge in Goodlettsville.
Willie grew a beard trimmed around the edges, enhancing his country-boy image, and put on weight from Shirley’s home cooking. “He liked to eat cornbread and beans and a big onion—all that heavy stuff,” Shirley said. The farmer guise was genuine, Willie swore. “It was just a replay of what I wore growing up. There’s nothing more comfortable than a pair of overalls.”
He took kung fu classes at a martial arts studio in Goodlettsville. Kung fu helped him practice “mind over matter.” He learned to break a two-inch board or a brick with his hand, which Willie said “was a good thing to know if you’re ever attacked by a brick or a board.” He showed Shirley enough moves for her to put the hurt on him worse than Martha had.
One night, after Shirley tried all day to get Willie on the phone, he showed up at the front door so drunk he didn’t recognize her in curlers and thought he was at the wrong house. Shirley thought he wanted to go back to town and he was so drunk, she wasn’t going to let him drive. When he turned to walk away, she grabbed him and threw him headfirst through the storm door, cutting his forehead deep enough to leave a scar. “He was laying there, bleeding and all, and I thought I’d killed him,” Shirley said.
Willie ran off into a pasture, where he passed out. The next morning, he woke up bug-bit in the tall grass, with a crust of blood on his head. He vowed then and there he would not teach Shirley any more moves. Shirley didn’t mind. She knew enough moves. “I stood my ground with him,” she said. “It worked. After I threw him through the door, he stayed home a lot more.”
He tried to be a better husband and a better father, chasing Mickey Newbury off the property with a gun when the young Nashville songwriter from Texas asked Willie for the hand of his teenage daughter Lana in marriage. And he tried to be in better touch with his neighbors, flagging down one of the Greer boys, Ronald, when he saw him driving a tractor hauling wood. With winter coming on, he needed firewood and introduced himself to the twelve-year-old boy. “I’m a country singer and I’m going to be famous.” He went inside and fetched a copy of
Here’s Willie Nelson
to give to the boy. Ronald, more attuned to rock and roll than to country, quoted him twice the usual price for a cord of wood, figuring if he really was a country music star, he could afford the higher price, although Ronald did pick out “the best wood we had.” Ronald took the record Willie gave him and put it on the turntable when he got home. He let one side play through, then tossed the record into his closet. “I felt sorry for him,” Ronald said.
Ronald was clueless about the growing cadre of believers and converts in the small circle of rowdy songwriters Willie ran with in Nashville. A half hour from his country retreat were hangouts where making up rhymes, telling lies, passing around a guitar and a bottle, swapping songs, and swapping pills was called work.
The guitar pullings at the Downtowner Motor Inn were particularly serious affairs. Joe Allison told Tommy Allsup a surefire way to hear songs was to rent two rooms, one to sleep in and the other for picking, and stock the second room with a hundred bucks’ worth of booze. “You’ll get every songwriter in Nashville to come and hear songs before the song publisher does,” Allison said.
“I remember they did an extended guitar pulling that lasted five days and five nights and Roger Miller never went to bed,” Tommy Allsup said. “Willie to me was the big dog writer in Nashville. He was the guy all the songwriters would come out to see. If we was in the Downtowner, you could be sure five to ten songwriters would be in there. I never saw a reaction to another writer like there was with Willie.”
Willie bought another hundred acres of pasture down the road for his cattle and pigs, some of which he named Lester Earle and the Foggy Mountain Hogs. He’d invite Hank Cochran up to the house to sit by the fireplace and read the Bible to Hank for hours. Home was great. But it wasn’t the same as playing for people.
“He had to have his little kingdom on the road,” Shirley eventually figured out. “That’s what made him happy.” Shirley Nelson had tried to adjust and ended up blaming herself. “I loved him so much that my understanding really left,” she said. “I would get calls when he was out on the road and I never did think he did anything wrong. I thought it was me. Maybe I wasn’t a good enough mother because I’d never had any kids and didn’t know anything about raising kids and here I was, raising three kids. I didn’t know anything about running a home.”
After a while, Willie’s absences didn’t make Shirley’s heart grow fonder. Instead, she grew jealous, knowing he was prone to mess around on the road whenever a pretty young thing showed up after a gig. In her loneliness, missing the stage and the attention that came with it, Shirley became involved with men other than her husband. “That was her way with dealing with Willie being gone,” Lana said. “She didn’t hide having lovers, because we were friends. She felt like I would never tell. I didn’t. Susie told.” Finding comfort in other partners was a repeat of the Willie and Martha saga, done partly out of need, partly to get back at their spouse.
D
ESPITE
his initial efforts, family took a backseat to career again. After Liberty Records’ country division folded in 1964, Willie talked to Chet Atkins about signing a recording contract with RCA, the top country label in Nashville. But at the last minute, he convinced himself he’d found a more willing ear in Fred Foster, a native of the mountains of western North Carolina who’d come of age in Washington, DC, hustling songs and promoting records. Foster came to Nashville to record a song with Billy Grammer, the guitarist from
The Jimmy Dean Show
with whom he’d reworked a traditional folk song in the public domain into “Gotta Travel On.” Subsequent success with the made-in-Nashville recordings of “The Shag (Is Totally Cool),” by Billy Graves, and Grammer’s “Bonaparte’s Retreat” prompted Foster to move his small label, Monument Records, to Nashville in 1959.
A fan of eclectic artists and enduring songs, Foster struck gold as the guiding light behind Roy Orbison’s biggest hit records, which burnished his reputation as a Nashville outsider, tight with neither Owen Bradley and the Decca crew nor Chet Atkins at RCA. Wesley Rose, who’d dropped Roy Orbison from RCA before Foster signed him, ambushed Foster at a luncheon once, asking, “We want to know why you’re trying to destroy Nashville. What have you got against Nashville? You’re cutting all that nigger music. We had a great thing going until you showed up and messed it up. We’re the country music capital of the world, and you’re cutting all that crap.”
Fred Foster did not have an office along Music Row but in suburban Hendersonville in a building owned by songwriter Boudleaux Bryant. His free lunches for music people, known as Foster’s Follies, attracted Harlan Howard, Hank Cochran, Willie Nelson, and others from nearby Pamper Music. Willie liked to sing his latest songs for Fred, and Fred liked hearing them.
In the early summer of 1964, Fred Foster signed Willie to a three-year recording contract with the promise he could make records on his own terms and Fred would promote the product. A recording session at the Monument studio next to the Clarkston Hotel was promptly scheduled in July to figure out how to get this cool cat in a cardigan a hit. Three Willie originals were recorded—“(There’ll Be) Someone Waiting for You,” “King of a Lonely Castle,” and “To Make a Long Story Short.” Willie sang and played guitar. Bill Justis, who had had his own hit with the instrumental “Raunchy,” led the session, which included old familiars Harold Bradley, Ray Edenton, Bob Moore, harmonica player Charlie McCoy, and Buddy Harman, and a pianist named Bill Pursell, who’d had his own Top 10 hit with “Our Winter Love” and also played in the Nashville Symphony and taught at Vanderbilt. The recordings were garnished with a xylophone, vibes, French horn, and trumpets.
A second session with a smaller combo of David Parker, a classical guitarist from Georgia, on guitar, Bob Moore on bass, Jack Greubel on drums, and Boots Randolph on sax, produced five more songs. One Willie composition called “I Never Cared for You” became the A-side of the single issued on Monument b/w “You Left a Long, Long Time Ago,” despite a complaint from Bob Moore to Foster that Willie was singing so out of meter he was impossible to follow. “If you can’t play with him, just lay out,” Foster advised. “I’ll overdub it.” Moore had played Willie sessions before, and Foster knew the basis of the complaint was an old story in country music. “Fred Rose told me Hank Williams had the same tendency,” Foster said. “During the recording of ‘Cold, Cold Heart’ he held the vocal two beats too long to be in meter, or cut it off two beats too quick to be in meter. If you’re dancing, your foot’s in the air. Rose said, ‘Hank, it’s not in meter. There’s a two-four bar in here on “heart.” On “apart” I suggest you hold it two more beats.’ Hank said, ‘Mr. Rose, I don’t know nothing about no meter. I thought that was something on the wall to tell you how much electricity you’re using. I tell you what I do know. When I get to a note I like, I’m going to hold it till I get ready to turn it loose. You’ll just have to watch me.’”