Willie Nelson (18 page)

David Parker’s flamenco guitar lead on “I Never Cared for You” suggested a Marty Robbins gunfighter ballad, but the words were far more complex than the Anglicized corridos Marty sang. The dark love song cut straight to the bone, painting a portrait of passion, rejection, and desperation, seething and sizzling under the surface:

The sun is filled with ice and gives no warmth at all

the skies were never blue

the stars are raindrops searching for a place to fall

and I never cared for you

The single flopped nationally. Those lyrics were way too dense for mainstream country and western. Country radio programmers shared Chet Atkins’s assessment of the song as “weird.” If anything, the lyrical imagery he conjured was as deep as the folk-rock of Bob Dylan, the nasally singer-songwriter who’d found his voice with profound pieces of poetic commentary such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Country music harbored only a few free spirits whose words compelled the listener to pay attention, notably Johnny Cash, whose compositions reflected the blue-collar, working-man foundation of America and established him as the king of folk-country music.

But the single of “I Never Cared for You” got enough airplay back home to tour Texas behind the record, which kept Willie on the road chasing guarantees. Houston was the only big city in America where the single was a radio hit. KIKK, the big country station in what was growing into the top country music market in the United States, gave the single enough spins for KILT, the powerhouse pop music station of Houston, to add the single too, crossing the record over from country. KILT was one of three Texas radio stations owned by Gordon McLendon, the Dallas radio innovator who helped invent the Top 40 format in the 1950s that became a critical component in the global explosion of rock and roll.

O
NE
faithful KILT listener was a statuesque blonde two years out of Galena Park High School named Connie Koepke. She considered herself a rock and roll and soul gal, partial to Elvis, Jimmy Reed, and James Brown, as were the majority of white teenagers in urban Texas and the South. But “I Never Cared for You” was different. She liked it so much she switched over to KIKK, the country station, to hear the song more often. Connie was working the night shift in a glass factory in Houston when she heard that the singer of the song would be appearing at the 21 Club in Conroe, in the Piney Woods just north of Houston. She traded out her regular night shift to go hear him with her girlfriend Jackie.

Bassist Eddie Rager couldn’t help but notice the two pretty young women seated behind a girder in the back of the club. Why didn’t they come sit up front by the stage at the band’s table? Connie Koepke got a close enough view of Willie Nelson to be smitten. She checked his ring finger for a wedding band but saw none. (Willie, like many musicians, knew well enough to remove his ring when he was onstage so as not to disappoint female fans and to keep his options open.) She flipped when he sang “I Never Cared for You,” letting the lyrics do all the talking. He sang the song in person with even more passion than he did on the record, she thought.

During a set break, Jimmy Day asked Willie, “Anything I can get for you, boss?”

“That tall blonde over there,” Willie replied.

Jimmy fetched Connie and seated her next to his boss so they could talk during set breaks.

The band made $784 for the night, not bad considering the cover charge was $2.

After the gig Connie and Jackie went to the motel and met the band and the owners of the 21 Club, Larry and Pat Butler. Somewhere toward daybreak, Willie asked Connie for her phone number. He came through Houston frequently, he told her, and he’d like to see her again. Willie may have been married to Shirley, but his eye couldn’t help wandering, especially when he was rambling on the road. In this case, it confirmed he wasn’t blind to beauty. She gave him her number but wasn’t fooling herself. He was a musician. She’d never see him again. He gave Connie Crash Stewart’s phone number. His Texas booking agent would know when Willie was coming through before anyone else did, himself included.

T
OWARD
the end of October 1964, Willie came to Fred Foster’s office to pitch a Christmas song he’d written. “I know it’s too late for anybody to do this year,” Willie told Fred, “but listen anyway. Maybe someone can do it next year.” The song was inspired by a legless man who got around on rollers and sold pencils and “pretty paper, pretty ribbons” on the sidewalks of Leonard’s Department Store in downtown Fort Worth when Willie walked its red-brick streets.

“Good God!” Foster exclaimed at the end of the recitation. “It’s not too late.” He picked up the phone and called London, England, where Monument’s biggest act, Roy Orbison, was living. He told Orbison he’d just heard a smash hit and was sending the tape of the song special delivery. “If you love it like I do, call me back with your key [to sing in]. I’ll take care of the rest.”

Willie’s eyes widened when he heard what Foster was doing.

Two days later, Orbison called back. It was a go.

Less than a week later, Roy Orbison lay on a sofa in the Decca studios in London, fighting off a fever of 102 while Fred Foster and Bill Justis finished the orchestral arrangement with the symphony they’d hired. Each violinist wore experimental custom microphones around their neck that Decca engineers had designed for amplification of the strings. Once the symphony was set, Roy rose from the sofa, feverish and flu-ridden, and sang “Pretty Paper.” He nailed his vocal in one take.

But by the time “Pretty Paper” was released in late November, Willie was no longer with Monument. The excitement that “I Never Cared for You” stirred up in Houston had already been forgotten. The split was over the full-page color advertisement in all the music trade publications that Fred Foster had promised Willie when he signed him. The label had planned a dual release of Willie’s single “I Never Cared for You,” aimed at the country market, and a single by Lloyd Price that was aimed at the rhythm and blues audience. Foster was gambling both would cross into the mainstream. Lloyd Price’s ad looked fine, Willie’s not so much. The colors ran and bled, rendering the lettering illegible.

“Willie got upset when he saw it and in a huff went to RCA,” Fred Foster said. “Willie says he intended to sign with RCA all along, but if he did, why did he sign a three-year contract with me? I think he got drunk when he was so upset and went and signed with RCA. We only got one record out. I could have caused him problems because I had a signed contract. But rather than lose Willie as a friend, I let it go. I wanted to keep him as a friend if I couldn’t keep him as an artist.”

Two weeks later RCA released its first single on Willie Nelson. Even if he was no match for Roy Orbison, Willie and the label wanted to show up Fred Foster. It was his version of “Pretty Paper.”

R
IGHT
before Thanksgiving, Willie raised his profile another notch when Ott Devine, the stage manager of the Opry responsible for extending membership invitations, issued a press release that was announced from the stage of the Ryman: Willie Nelson was joining the Grand Ole Opry. He was a solid choice, still riding the reputation of “Crazy,” “Hello Walls,” and “Family Bible,” and now he was an RCA recording artist. He made his debut on the stage of the Ryman four nights later.

The Opry crowd was not like audiences back in Texas. “If you’re playing a dance place [like in Texas],” Willie said, “you want them to hit the floor every time and dance.” The Opry was a sit-down affair, restricting shows of appreciation to clapping, cheering, standing up, or dancing in place.

“I would do different songs when I played the Opera,” as Willie called it, “and I would do different rhythms because I knew up-tempo things were good. Anything to get the old people tapping their feet and clapping their hands was good, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. These folks, it was good for them, spiritually, physically, mentally, to start clapping their hands and moving. That’s one of the things I learned early: Get some audience participation.”

“The Grand Ole Opry was the first time I’d seen Daddy play,” Lana Nelson said. “It was bigger than life. I was on the fourth row. He was there with the Glaser Brothers. He always played honky-tonks, and they wouldn’t let a girl like me in. I never got to see him play till the Opry.”

Joining the Opry was a smart move politically and careerwise, exposing his music to a national radio audience. He needed the exposure, even though early on, the Opry announcer once introduced him as Woody Nelson.

In spite of stars such as Flatt & Scruggs, Roy Acuff, Minnie Pearl, Hank Snow, Bill Monroe, Jean Shepard, and Porter Wagoner, the Opry cast was in sore need of new blood in 1964. Other barn dances like the Louisiana Hayride and Big D Jamboree were fading and the road was decimating the Opry’s ranks. Willie’s biggest song benefactor, Patsy Cline, and two other Opry cast regulars, Hawkshaw Hawkins and Cowboy Copas, died in an airplane crash ninety miles from Nashville on March 5, 1963. Singer Jack Anglin was killed in a car wreck on the way to Patsy’s funeral. On March 29 that same year, another Opry cast member, whom Willie had worked with in Houston, Texas Ruby, perished in a house fire. On the last day of July of 1964, another plane crash, ten miles south of Nashville, took the lives of Gentleman Jim Reeves, one of the Opry’s most popular stars, and his pianist and manager, Dean Manuel. On December 6, two weeks after Willie joined country music’s most prestigious family, twelve members were kicked out.

“Opry Drops 12 Top Stars” screamed the front-page headline of the
Nashville Tennessean
on December 6, 1964. George Morgan, Don Gibson, Johnny Wright, the Jordanaires, Faron Young, Ferlin Husky, Chet Atkins, Kitty Wells, Stonewall Jackson, Ray Price, and Justin Tubb had not fulfilled their obligation to play twenty-six dates a year, as their contracts stipulated. Minnie Pearl, saint that she was, took a leave of absence. They were all denied the use of the Grand Ole Opry on their showbills and advertising as well as exposure on the radio show and on the syndicated television series that had just started up.

It didn’t take long for Willie to join the exiles. Doing the math, he realized the Opry was holding him back. Less than a year after he joined, Willie left, allegedly after asking Ott Devine if he could play with his own band on the show and Devine demurred. “Willie, a lot of the members would like that too,” he said condescendingly.

“Okay,” Willie said, walking away without saying anything. He just didn’t come back.

“I quit the Opry because I couldn’t afford it,” he said. “You had to play Texas to make any money—at least I did. I’d go down there and work Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but I couldn’t work down there on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and work the Opry too. You had to be there twenty-six weeks of the year, and if I did that, I’d miss half of the weekends in Texas, and I just couldn’t do that. The prestige of working the Grand Ole Opry was nice. I loved saying I was on the Opera. But as great as it was, just because you were a member didn’t mean you were going to run out there and set the woods on fire. You might have to get with three or four other members of the Opry and get on a package show and open for Grandpa Jones and several others. I didn’t mind doing that, and did that. I already knew I could do pretty good in the nightclubs.”

Willie liked to tell about being so miserable in Nashville that he lay down on Broadway, trying to get someone to run him over late one night but nobody would—though it sounded more like a drunken dare than attempted suicide. Nashville was actually treating him pretty good. He could swim in Webb Pierce’s guitar-shaped swimming pool or putter around Old Hickory Lake on Hank Cochran’s boat, listen to jazz musician Gary Burton play vibes at Boots Randolph’s club in Printer’s Alley, or watch fellow Texan Candy Barr do a striptease at the Rainbow. Being in Nashville meant easy access to recording studios, booking agents, song publishers, television studios, and shows like
Country Music Time,
a radio program sponsored by the United States Air Force and broadcast around the world on the Armed Forces Radio Network.

Willie’s official base of operations was the house he’d bought from Bobbie and Paul Tracy in Fort Worth, which he still owned. His checks read “WN Enterprises, 2921 Morrell, WA 3-7659, Ft. Worth, 15, Texas,” including one for $150 that bounced, made out to Johnny Bush for playing some road dates. The business was in Texas because that’s where his audience was. “Whenever I’d run into him,” Johnny Gimble said, “he’d say, ‘Let’s go to Texas and play some dances.’”

Performing in a bar with a bandstand brought more satisfaction than singing two tunes at the Ryman, where whiskey-drinking, pussy-chasing, backroom gambling, and carousing were officially frowned upon. Hidebound tradition couldn’t match the pay or pleasure of a one-nighter, no matter how tight the space was in the station wagon pulling a trailer. Staying in motels and being able to leave behind whatever mess you made, night after night, day after day, made you feel like you were at least going somewhere as the fading memory of the last town and the last performance shrank into a vanishing point in the rearview mirror.

But to work the road successfully, Willie had to be a recording star. Now Chet Atkins, the player’s player who’d risen up the ranks under Steve Soles to take the reins of the Nashville division of RCA, was his guide. Chet was the champion of the Nashville Sound, which aimed to reach a larger audience. Willie wanted to reach a bigger audience too. But in order to do so, he would have to mesh with the efficient system Chet had built.

Chet Atkins brought in the cream of session players for the November 1964 session for “Pretty Paper” and the Harlan Howard/Hank Cochran collaboration “What a Merry Christmas This Could Be.” Pig Robbins played piano, Pete Drake pedal steel, and Henry Strzelecki bass, while Kenny Buttrey drummed and Jerry Reed Hubbard and Velma Smith, Hal Smith’s wife, split guitar duties. The vocal chorus included Velma and Ray Stevens. Willie was leader, playing lead guitar and singing vocals. He squeezed in two of his own tunes, “Talk to Me,” a plaintive midtempo ballad with echoing choruses that recalled “Hello Walls,” and “Healing Hands of Time,” a lush ballad with violins and viola adding to the stirring spirituality of the lyrics.