Willie Nelson (19 page)
Willie returned to the studio in December with Harold Bradley, Ray Edenton, Henry Strzelecki, Buddy Harman, Floyd Cramer, Pig Robbins, and the Anita Kerr Singers to cut two tracks in phonetic German for Chet and coproducer Wolf Kabitzsky, “Whisky Walzer” and “Little Darling,” which was “Pretty Paper”
in deutsch,
as well as his version of “Don’t Fence Me In,” the Cole Porter cowboy song written from a poem by an engineer named Bob Fletcher. RCA wanted to tap into Germany, the third-largest record market in the world, which bought a disproportionately large amount of country music made in the USA. The single would help pave the way for a place on a package show tour of Germany starring Hank Snow with
der Country-Boy aus Texas.
Most of the same cast returned for sessions in January and April 1965, accumulating enough tracks to make an album. Willie’s debut LP for RCA,
Country Willie: His Own Songs,
was a countrypolitan effort that resurrected “Mr. Record Man,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Hello Walls,” and “Night Life.” The album also introduced originals, such as the spiritual-on-the-surface, creepy-and-dark-when-you-think-about-it “Healing Hands of Time,” along with “Darkness on the Face of the Earth” and two numbers that spoke of Willie’s evolving personal philosophy, “My Own Peculiar Way” and “One Day at a Time.” The songs were wrapped in overwrought semi-orchestral arrangements not unlike what Ernie Freeman did for his Liberty recordings.
The content was fairly sophisticated stuff aimed at the not-so-sophisticated guy in the corner of the local beer joint, alone and lonely, pouring nickels and quarters into the jukebox to hear songs that were sadder and more miserable than he was.
Sales were puny, the one exception again being Texas, where the album solidified Willie’s standing as a genuine Nashville star, one sure way to sell tickets to a show.
H
ITCHING
up with Ernest Tubb’s syndicated television show, where Willie would make some 150 appearances over the course of six years from 1965 to 1971, spoke of country music’s growing clout as well as his own potential as a TV personality. ET was a Nashville institution, a one-man empire who was a touring entertainer, recording artist, Grand Ole Opry star, owner of a world-famous record shop on Broadway, and host of the live midnight jamboree that followed the Grand Ole Opry Saturday-night broadcasts on WSM 650. No matter what people thought of his froggy voice or simpler-than-simple approach to music, Tubb was a role model in how to be a country star, always reminding viewers to “be better to your neighbors and you’ll have better neighbors” and thanking the crowd after the last song of the dance by flipping over his guitar to reveal the message “Thanks A Lot” on the back of his instrument.
Ernest Tubb’s show, “thirty minutes of the finest TV entertainment,” was produced by Hal Smith, Ray Price’s partner at Pamper Music and Willie’s sometimes manager. Pamper’s booking agency worked Tubb as well as Willie and other acts, so the exposure on the tube benefited all parties involved. Though its clout could not compare with radio’s clout in the mid-1960s, TV was seen as another vehicle to sell records and tickets, largely through broadcasts of live-music variety shows such as the Big D Jamboree, and syndicated programs such as the one hosted by Porter Wagoner, with the Pretty Miss Norma Jean and, later, his new partner, Dolly Parton. Buck Owens, the Bakersfield, California, country singer, taped his program in Oklahoma City, where he learned the business and technology of television from the ground up. Perhaps the greatest sign of TV’s embrace of country was Johnny Cash hosting his own network variety show during prime time.
Willie was
The Ernest Tubb Show
’s face of modern country, his cardigan wool sweaters and turtlenecks a cosmopolitan contrast to the beehive hairdos of the women singers and the cartoonish sartorial splendor of the Texas Troubadours in their sparkly western suits and western hats with the brim riding higher than the crown. They were descendants of hillbillies. Willie looked like a member of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack. He was there for his musical talents, and his smooth, sad ballads and hit reprisals fit in with the cast of Ernest, Cal Smith, Jack Greene, Buddy Charlton, and the other Texas Troubadours, who could play as hot as any swing band or play it straight and tight like a honky-tonk band.
Willie revealed brief flashes of his developing finger-picking style on several models of acoustic Gibson guitars he played, but mostly it was the timbre of Willie’s voice that left an impression. He reminded viewers at home of Ernest with his unapologetic twang of an accent, though his timbre more closely resembled Lefty Frizzell’s and Leon Payne’s. In that respect, he sang like no one else on TV except maybe Wade Ray, the featured fiddler on the show who also liked to move his voice in front of and behind the beat. Even when he joined the Johnson Sisters on “Crazy” and “One Day at a Time” or flirted with edgy by doing “I Never Cared for You” as if he were a folk-rocker, he used his voice like an improvised instrument, redeeming himself during the Sacred Song segment of the program when he sang songs of praise, including his own “Family Bible” and “Kneel at the Foot of Jesus.”
Willie played his songs, smiled for the camera, but offered precious little banter. Like Bob Wills, Willie preferred letting the music do his talking, which may have been why there was no
Willie Nelson Show
on television.
“Hal Smith produced [Ernest Tubb on TV],” Willie said. “Personally, I loved Ernest and all the guys in the band. I had a crush on one of the Johnson Sisters, so that helped a lot. He had a great band. But then I was watching everybody else [who had a show, like Roger Miller, Glen Campbell, and Mel Tillis] crash and burn and I knew why. Roger didn’t make it because they wouldn’t let him be Roger. Glen Campbell was the same thing. Once the corporate people got in there, they took over their deal. It made me not want to do TV.”
His ET association influenced his second RCA album,
Country Favorites: Willie Nelson Style.
Like his second Liberty album, the recording made in mid-December 1965 had a strong Western Swing flavor. At Willie’s request, he was backed up by the Texas Troubadours (Buddy Charlton, Jack Greene, Jack Drake, Cal Smith, and Leon Rhodes) along with his buddy Wade Ray, pianist Pig Robbins, and bassist James Wilkerson. The pairing made musical and commercial sense, since the Troubadours knew Willie’s work from the television show and tours and were regarded as an ensemble with enough appeal to make their own records for Decca sans Ernest. With Chet Atkins once again at the controls, Willie’s performing talents were showcased on covers of Lawton Williams’s Texas dance-hall classic “Fraulein,” Harlan Howard’s “Heartaches by the Number,” two Hank Cochran tunes, the Fred Rose swing number “Home in San Antone,” a reprisal of “Columbus Stockade Blues” that would better have been left off compared with the fiery earlier versions he’d recorded with Shirley Collie for Liberty Records, a spirited interpretation of “My Window Faces the South,” first popularized by Bob Wills, and an exquisite interpretation of Wills’s trademark “San Antonio Rose.” No Willie originals were included.
The counterintuitive approach paid off. Although singles were still the engine of the business, albums were beginning to sell on their own almost as well as they did in the pop and rock fields, where they were no longer just two singles with a bunch of filler material in between. When
Country Favorites
was released in early 1966, it stayed on the country albums chart for seventeen weeks, peaking at number 9. Trend spotters could make much of the photograph of Willie on the album cover, wearing a powder-blue fuzzy wool pullover with matching pink and white diamonds on the chest, looking very uncountry.
The way he had dressed since leaving Ray Price said a lot about where his head was at. “I had to wear those Nudie suits [with Ray],” Willie said, referring to the rhinestone suits favored by country stars. “I had a pink one with rhinestones and a blue one with rhinestones. Ray was doing that, Porter was doing that, Webb was doing that, everybody had on the Nudie suits.”
He was not like them. “I personally liked to dress up, wear [business] suits,” he said. His heroes had been cowboys, but
Playboy
provided the fashion cues. When The House of Lords [a Nashville clothier] came up with a bunch of clothes they wanted him to wear, he was game. “I said, ‘Fuck, yeah! Free clothes! What else you got?’ I enjoyed dressing up.” And dressing down.
According to the official Willie Nelson souvenir program sold at Willie Nelson shows, Willie Nelson was really a farmer and a rancher who happened to dabble in entertainment. He was pictured in the program wearing dark shades and doing a variety of farm chores. One photograph showed him sitting astride his Ford 3000 tractor. “Farming is my business and songwriting is my hobby,” the program quotes Willie saying. “I can make a good living working the farm, and it would bug me if I thought I had to make it writing. The pressure would get to me. Yet it is sure nice and I’m fortunate to have a hobby that is financially profitable.”
He’d accumulated more land and more animals by 1966, including a four-hundred-acre produce farm where twenty-five brood sows produced eight hundred Duroc and Poland China hogs a year, along with two acres of cultivated tobacco and a two-hundred-acre ranch where his Black Angus cattle grazed on clover, fescue, and lespedeza grasses alongside a stable of horses that included three Tennessee Walkers and two palominos and a three-year-old quarterhorse named Preacher. The operation was overseen by his right-hand man, George Hughes.
In 1966, Willie repaid his long ago $500 debt to Faron Young, who’d loaned him the money rather than buy his rights to “Hello Walls,” by delivering a $50,000 bull to Faron’s ranch with a sign hanging around its neck that read “No Bull. Paid In Full.” Faron pawned the bull to Jimmy C. Newman, another country singer and gentleman farmer who lived nearby. “It was show livestock, a Simmental bull bred in Switzerland that he bought at an auction,” Jimmy C. Newman said. “It weighed three thousand pounds. I started wondering what I’d gotten myself into. I took care of that bull for a year or two, but it was so big, I wouldn’t let my cows breed with him. I used him for AI [artificial insemination].”
Ridgetop also led to an extended estrangement from Ray Price over a chicken. “I had a game rooster,” Ray said. “Willie said I could bring him out there to be cock of the walk with Willie’s hens. The rooster didn’t like the hens and he tried to kill ’em. So Shirley got upset at Willie and said, ‘If you don’t kill it, I’m going to kill it.’ Willie called me, so I told a worker to go get him, and he didn’t, so Willie killed it.” Ray was pissed at Willie for years, although he eventually conceded, “The boy should have went and got it.” Was Willie a good farmer? “No,” Ray said. “But I ain’t either, and I was raised by one. Willie tried raising hogs for a while, and they almost ate him out of house and home. Willie’s a country boy. If you gotta go broke, go broke doing what you like to do.”
With his bib overalls and straw hat, he was the walking embodiment of his grandfather Daddy Nelson. Bobby Bruce, the former Texas Playboy who played with Willie on his Liberty Records sessions, got a taste of Willie as Country Boy when he dropped by Ridgetop after playing Nashville on tour with pop orchestra leader Lawrence Welk. Willie picked him up and took him home and invited neighbor Wade Ray to come over with his fiddle for a jam session in the living room, aided by frequent sips of white lightning. “Willie brought out some of the most delicious homemade corn liquor I’d ever tasted,” Bobby said. “Where’d you get this?” he asked Willie.
“The town sheriff,” Willie beamed.
Willie showed Bobby around his house, opening the door to the bedroom he shared with Shirley, then opening the next door, where a sheep rested on a blanket piled with hay.
“That was Pamper,” Willie’s daughter Lana said. “Shirley raised her with a bottle and she was always trying to get into the house. One day she jumped through the plate-glass door. So after that, we let her in.” Pamper wasn’t the only head of livestock being treated like a pet. Shirley had given all the chickens names. One of the horses adopted a calf named Flower. “The horse tried to cut the calf off from Dad and Mr. Hughes when they were trying to load it up to go sell it in Springfield,” Lana said. “We were all bawling in the truck on the way to Springfield. When we got there, Dad said, ‘Forget it.’ We brought her back and kept her.”
W
ILLIE WAS REALLY
all about picking. Proof was the souvenir program sold at his shows; if he’d really been a farmer first and foremost, like the program implied, there would have been no need for a program. Even Willie wasn’t buying into his own hype. “I didn’t want to sit there and raise hogs and write songs,” he said. “I wanted to be out there playing, going from town to town and playing my music.”
When there were gigs, he’d take Wade Ray with him to Texas and elsewhere and work with house bands or pickup bands. After they had performed for several months as a duo, Willie enlisted Johnny Bush to join him again. Johnny had been barely surviving as a Cherokee Cowboy, making $25 a night to play drums behind stars making $350 a night. Tommy Hill at Starday would throw him some spare change whenever Johnny was off the road, with demo session work at $10 a pop, but Johnny wanted some of that front-man money, so he quit the Cowboys.
He went by Ridgetop to store some stuff at Willie’s.
“Why did you leave Ray Price?” Willie asked Johnny.
Johnny sucked in a deep breath and unloaded. “I want to record. I want to get something going with me. I don’t want to be dependent on someone else anymore.”
“Would you go with me for ten days back to Texas at thirty-five bucks a night?” Willie asked him.
Johnny knew that Texas was solid ground. Willie Nelson might be a minor celebrity in Nashville but he could pull in a thousand people at the Cotton Club in Lubbock, Big G’s in Round Rock, or the Reo Palm Isle in Longview on a good night just by showing up. Johnny took the bait. It was ten bucks more than Ray Price was paying him. Texas was home for Johnny too. Between the drive from Nashville to Memphis they’d done enough catching up for Willie to make Johnny an offer. “Stay with me a year and I’ll produce a session on you. You find your own musicians. You find the songs. I’ll pick up the tab. I’ll turn that red light on for you. Then it’s up to you.”
Johnny turned down George Jones’s offer of $50 a day to go on the road as one of the Jones Boys to cast his lot with Willie, which meant memorizing every gas stop and all-night café along the almost seven-hundred-mile drive from Nashville to Fort Worth along Highways 70, 67, and 80—a drive they would be making several times a month.
Johnny arrived just in time to join Wade Ray on Willie’s four-song recording session in June 1966, accompanying studio pros Jerry Reed and Velma Smith on guitar, Buddy Emmons on steel, Pig Robbins on piano, Junior Huskey on bass, and a full complement of strings and backup singers. Two originals—“One in a Row,” a phrase borrowed from Crash Stewart, Willie’s Texas booking agent, and “The Party’s Over,” which Claude Gray had recorded seven years earlier in Houston as “My Party’s Over”—would be the A-sides of his next two singles.
I
N
July, Johnny Bush and Wade Ray backed Willie on the album
Live Country Music Concert,
recorded over two nights at Panther Hall, Willie’s home away from home in Fort Worth. Chet Atkins was fine with a live album because the cost was considerably less than a studio recording and it could be easily marketed to Willie’s hard-core fans. To be on the safe side, Chet let Felton Jarvis—Elvis’s producer—produce and Chip Young overdub guitar parts and add some steel guitar fills back in RCA’s Nashville studio.
Willie was a Panther Hall regular, stopping in every four to six weeks to play the big room on Fort Worth’s east side or the Annex across Collard Avenue, Panther Hall’s own little honky-tonk that was kept darker than dark, no matter what time of day it was.
From the night Panther Hall had opened in June 1963, the building with the futuristic, eight-sided exterior that resembled a flying saucer was the country music showcase in Fort Worth and Dallas. No chicken wire was necessary to separate the bandstand from the audience. The dance floor was huge, the air-conditioning cold, and the surroundings nice, with long tables for seating. Waitresses dressed in western outfits. Even though pop tops had already been developed for beer cans in 1962, the waitresses or bartenders could still open cans quicker with a can opener (popularly known as a church key) as long as the cans were opened on the bottom, which explained why beers were served upside down.
Panther Hall was also Willie’s second television home. He played Panther Hall so often, he was a semiregular on the Cowtown Jamboree, broadcast live from Panther Hall from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. every Saturday to viewers in the Fort Worth–Dallas area to hype the show later the same night. The televised portion of Jamboree was hosted at various times by popular Fort Worth disc jockeys Bill Mack, Bo Powell, and Dale Wood. The primitive production was so notoriously horrible that “Buck Owens always seemed to take sick just before the broadcasts, only to recover in time to play the show later that night,” Bill Mack noted. Hank Thompson flat out refused to appear.
But KTVT was the first nonnetwork independent channel in North Texas and an early adapter of an emerging technology called cable television. In isolated pockets all over the United States where cable was available, KTVT was often part of the channel lineup, which meant the Cowtown Jamboree Live from Panther Hall had a nationwide, albeit limited, audience. Front and center was Willie Nelson, dapper in outfits that ranged from bow ties to a brown suit with a turtleneck sweater—a marked contrast to typical country music couture.
Willie’s relationship with Panther Hall had been cemented by Bo Powell, a disc jockey at KCUL, who started at Fort Worth’s country music station in November 1963. “I always looked on the record to see who wrote the song,” he explained. “It seems like every good song I was hearing was written by Willie Nelson.” The singles and albums that Willie put out under his own name impressed him too, which is why Bo was surprised to hear Panther Hall’s co-owner Corky Kuykendall complain one night, “I really like Willie Nelson, but he doesn’t draw worth a shit as a headline act, and he’s getting too expensive to bring in to open for somebody else.”
“Tell you what,” Bo Powell offered Corky. “Bring him in as a single act and give me thirty days advance. I’ll bet you a pair of cowboy boots I can fill this place.”
Bo had a 50,000-watt radio station to cover his bet. “It got kind of embarrassing,” he said. “After a while, everything I’d play on the air would either be a Willie Nelson song or Willie Nelson singing.”
By eight p.m. the night of the show, there was a line snaking outside the building all the way to Collard Avenue. Corky Kuykendall was more than happy buying Bo Powell a pair of cowboy boots. He told Willie about the bet and suggested he drop in on Bo at the station. “He’s really a fan of yours and he plays the hell out of your songs.” Willie showed up at KCUL with a demo of a new song. He and Bo went to the production room at KCUL and listened to “The Party’s Over.”
“What do you think?” Willie asked. Bo reckoned it was a hit.
Willie had found another friendly ear in radio, which in his line of work was as important as finding a record label to put out your records. KCUL and especially Bo Powell showcased Willie Nelson with as many as three singles charting simultaneously on the station’s Top 30 survey. When Jack Clement at RCA called Bo to inform him the record label was going to record a live album on Willie at Panther Hall, he said Willie wanted Bo to be master of ceremonies.
“I’ll do it on a stretcher if I have to,” Bo said.
Bo Powell’s booming voice introduced Willie Nelson with all the flair of a wrestling announcer. The live music concert recording that followed validated Willie Nelson as a songwriter and a performer as he covered his own songs and songs of other composers. The material suggested he had eclipsed his earlier goals of being the next Ray Price or Ernest Tubb and was striving to be an even more distinctive voice.
The recording replicated the heart of the Willie Nelson Show. “Wade Ray was a ripping swing fiddle player and with the house band would just destroy the audience,” Johnny said. “Wade would call me up and I’d sing for a while so the audience would dance their ass off. Then we’d get the house band off the stage, Wade would go to bass and I would go to drums, and we’d call Willie up.”
Johnny would invite the audience to move in closer. Most of Willie’s songs were too blue or circumspect for a Ray Price shuffle. Instead of two-stepping, the crowd stood and watched as if he were a folk singer or sat at the long tables, drinking whiskey out of brown bags. Either way, Willie made them listen.
“It had a lot to do with me singing my own songs and performing as a songwriter,” Willie said. “I felt it was important that they understood what I was saying. A loud band behind me would interfere with what I was trying to say. If they can’t understand my lyrics, which were a little different to begin with, or some of the chord progressions which were different, too much production would be confusing.”
The stripped-down ensemble with Willie playing guitar covered the Beatles’“Yesterday” with its “weird changes” that the three had rehearsed back in Ridgetop. Willie’s fealty to Bob Wills’s philosophy of presentation by never giving the audience time to catch their breath was underscored by three medleys of originals. The first strung together “Mr. Record Man,” “Hello Walls,” and “One Day at a Time.” The second medley of “The Last Letter” and “Half a Man” emphasized sad themes. The third medley of “Opportunity to Cry” and “Permanently Lonely” was even sadder.
Unlike Wills’s music, most of the album’s material was not dance tunes but songs that told a story. One in particular, “I Just Can’t Let You Say Goodbye,” bordered on psycho-creepy. Willie had read about a crime of passion in the newspaper and used his imagination to take it one step further. Delivered in an up-tempo Latin rhythm, it was told from the perspective of a man so distraught over his breakup and so upset by the bad things his lover is saying to him that he gets pissed off and strangles her to death. Country music was a hotbed of twisted tales. Next to songs such as “I’m Gonna Kill You” (“...and forever shut your cheatin’ bedroom eyes /...and cut you up in a box half your size”), a collaboration between Jimmy Velvet and Wynn Stewart, or the ditty by Willie’s old D Records labelmate from Houston, Eddie Noack, “You Think I’m Psycho, Don’t You, Mama?” Willie’s happy downers were rather tame by comparison.
The cover of
Live Country Music Concert
depicted a clean-cut, clear-eyed, confident young man in a dark suit, white shirt, and skinny tie, hair slicked back, face beaming as he sang while playing a Fender Jazzmaster electric guitar, with the banner “Cowtown Jamboree, Panther Hall, Fort Worth, Texas” hanging behind him. A deep thinker hunkered beneath his urbane, country-club-sophisticate exterior, someone who was in fact the polar opposite of the image he was projecting. On the back of the album cover was another photograph of Willie as a sharp-dressed man in a suit and tie, with the words “None To Compare To Willie Nelson” imposed over the picture.
The album enjoyed decent sales in Texas and lousy sales almost everywhere else. What the bean counters couldn’t see was a very small number of younger fans more attuned to rock than country who were getting hip to Willie’s trip. And the live album was validation for Willie because it showcased his work with his own band. “I wanted to record with my band so I could reproduce every night what I was doing in the studio, but no one would let me do that,” he said. “I recorded with studio musicians and made really good records, but there was no fucking chance of doing them on the road because those guys didn’t travel.”
That’s what people came to hear—the sound that they bought on the record. But using your road band in the studio was a foreign concept in Nashville. Precious few artists got away with making records with the band they played with on tour, the notable exceptions being Hank Williams, Little Jimmy Dickens, and Bob Wills. Except for the live album, Willie would have to learn to live within the system and “just play the song and forget it.”
R
ATHER
than chafe against the system, he was trying to be more accepting of it for what it was. His attitude was informed by a growing interest in personal fulfillment. Wade Ray, Willie’s Ridgetop neighbor and his steadiest road companion, turned Willie on to a spiritual organization known as Astara. The group embraced a lot of the ideas and thinking that Johnny Bush and Willie had read in Kahlil Gilbran’s
The Prophet
and in the writings of the psychic Edgar Cayce. Concepts such as reincarnation, an afterlife, and astral traveling were nothing new to them. “
The Prophet
made sense to us,” Johnny Bush said. “If you’re going to do anything, like be a baker, make that bread as if you’re making it for the person you love the most.”
Astara took that kind of thinking one step beyond. Wade and his wife, Grace, were avid followers of the discipline that Willie later described as a “mystery school,” leading him to spend time in libraries reading about religion in general and specific religions around the world. He became as well versed in the concept of reincarnation as he was in the Bible. Going through this world and getting it right the first time was a tough go, he concluded. He arrived at this way of thinking by taking note of the millions of people who suffered, starved to death, or were massacred. “You wonder why a just and loving God would let things like that happen. I figured that there was more to it than what we see. I knew there was something else at work, calling the shots. Then I learned about the law of karma, that you live more than one time until you get it right, and if you want to come back one more time and show off, that’s okay too. I started thinking and believing that, and the more I saw, the more I knew it made sense. It was like going to school: Pass your lessons in the first grade and you advance to the second grade. If you don’t, you repeat first grade again to learn what you missed the first time.”
Johnny began to look at Willie as more than a friend and a benevolent bandleader. He was a teacher and a spiritual guide who gave good advice, but always with caveat “Take it or leave it. It worked for me. It may not work for you.”