Willie Nelson (23 page)

The single was first issued on the New Star label owned by Pamper Music. After doing enough tracks to release an album, Willie and investors Paul English and Jack Fletcher, another Fort Worth character, sold Johnny Bush’s recordings to Pete Drake, the steel player who co-owned a small label, Stop Records, with Texan Tommy Hill. “I was charting higher than Willie was charting,” Johnny said. “Willie was proud. His thing was, ‘Anybody in my show who can do something that people like is only going to help my show.’”

Willie bumped up Johnny to $50 a day plus a $10 per diem. But after a show in Longview, a few days later, he knocked on Johnny’s motel room door and sat down on the bed. “What do you think?” he asked Johnny.

“What do you mean?” Johnny asked back.

“Are you ready to go out on your own?”

“No, not yet,” Johnny said. “I like it where I am.”

“Want to stay another year?” Willie asked. “I’ll give you a hundred a day if you stay another year. We’re drawing good crowds. You’re doing a good job and I’m proud of what you’re doing.” Willie did not hide his pride in Johnny’s success. One night, after introducing him onstage, he heard a fan yell out, “Aw, to hell with Johnny Bush.” Willie shifted his gaze in the direction of where the voice had come from, his eyes narrowing. “No. Not to hell with Johnny Bush,” he growled to the fan.

W
ILLIE
made two recording sessions in August 1967. The first session produced the A-side of his next single, “Truth Number One,” a spacy, philosophical tune written by Aaron Allan, the disc jockey Willie had replaced at KBOP some thirteen years before. Willie liked the song because it fit in with his interest in Astara and metaphysics. True to form, hardly anyone else understood what he was singing about except maybe the hippies out in San Francisco, who were dropping out of society to take drugs and grow their hair long and listen to weird rock music, and they weren’t country fans. The single went nowhere.

The second session was for a concept album Chet was producing on Willie that played to his identity and fan base—an album of songs all about Texas. The cover of
Texas in My Soul
featured the drawn likeness of a smiling Willie in front of the Alamo, and the futuristic Tower of the Americas, the symbol of the HemisFair ’68 world’s fair, staged in San Antonio.

The tunes were topically to the point. “Dallas,” a honky-tonk tune coauthored by Dewey Groom of the Longhorn Ballroom, was the first song since “Big D” to make that city sound appealing, with references to Love Field airport, the North Central Expressway, and some of the prettiest women in the world, at a time when the city was still regarded negatively as the city where President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Jerry Blanton’s “San Antonio” featured the first use of the term “homeboy” in a country song. “Streets of Laredo” was his version of the western gunfighter ballad made famous by his occasional touring pal Marty Robbins. “Who Put All My Ex’s in Texas” was a catchy tune coauthored by a young country talent named Eddie Rabbitt. Willie put his vocals on the gloriously overwrought Cindy Walker–Glenn Paxton composition “Hill Country Theme,” more popularly known as a symphony-suitable instrumental. Redos of Ernest Tubb’s classics “Waltz Across Texas” and “There’s a Little Bit of Everything in Texas,” and “Texas in My Soul,” cowritten by ET and popularized by Hank Penny and Tex Williams, were payback for all the good ET did for Willie. “Beautiful Texas” was a composition attributed to W. Lee (“Pass the Biscuits, Pappy”) O’Daniel, the Fort Worth showman who took over the Light Crust Doughboys Western Swing band after running off Bob Wills and Milton Brown, and used another band, the Hillbilly Boys, and a platform of the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule to become governor of Texas. Respects were also paid to the epitome of Texas patriotism with a reading of “The Travis Letter” that segued into “Remember the Alamo.”

Grady Martin picked his nylon strings in a way that rubbed off on Willie, with Chet Atkins’s electric and Jimmy Day’s glistening steel chiming in. Funnyman songwriter-performer Ray Stevens, who had already worked several Willie sessions, added vibes and organ. Johnny Bush drummed. Chet informed Willie after the sessions that he didn’t want Johnny Bush or Jimmy Day back in the studio. They may have been Willie’s guys but they were road pickers, not studio musicians or Chet’s guys, and Chet was producer, CEO, and had the last word.

Johnny Bush didn’t give a shit what Chet Atkins wanted, because he was doing better as a recording artist for Stop One, hitting number 4 on the country charts with the Nelson-Cochran composition “Undo the Right” in November, then Willie’s releases of “In My Own Peculiar Way,” “Permanently Lonely,” “I’m Still Not Over You,” and “San Antonio.” It was time to fly on his own. On Johnny’s last night with the Record Men in December 1968 at Panther Hall, Willie gave Johnny a plaque of gratitude during the Cowtown Jamboree TV show on Channel 11. What the audience at home did not see was the inscription on the back: “No matter how big you are, you’ll always be Willie Mac Big Shit John to us.”

Willie’s gamble (and Paul English’s and Jack Fletcher’s) on Johnny Bush paid off. But Chet Atkins wasn’t willing to gamble on Willie the same way. For the next album, he kept the studio arrangement intentionally spare, limiting the recording to Willie, Grady Martin, and his own acoustic guitar, with Junior Huskey on bass. Violas, violins, and the Anita Kerr Singers were added afterwards, effectively burying Willie’s vocals in the mix.

The ballad-heavy
Good Times
included “Little Things,” cowritten with Shirley Nelson, which was released as the first single and reached number 22 on
Billboard
’s country singles chart. Shirley shared writing credits on two other tunes on the album, “Pages” and “She’s Still Gone.” The second single, “Good Times,” barely charted, reaching number 44.

The album cover, which had absolutely nothing to do with the songs inside, pictured Willie in golf clothes on a putting green, his arms around a pretty girl, showing her how to putt. If the Nashville Sound defined modern country music, golf was the new horseshoes. Consumers didn’t follow the logic. The record stalled at number 29 on the country albums chart. “She’s Still Gone” wound up as the B-side to “Johnny One Time,” a pensive ballad written by Dallas Frazier and A. L. Owens that nudged onto the country singles chart, reaching number 36, only to become Brenda Lee’s first country hit in a decade when she covered the song several months later.

The next single, “Bring Me Sunshine,” a swinging upbeat number written by Sylvia Dee and Arthur Kent, featured Willie doing an impressive imitation of a Vegas lounge singer. Unexpectedly, the single generated enough radio airplay and sales to chart at number 13 on the
Billboard
country singles chart, Willie’s best showing yet for RCA, even though that translated into sales well under fifty thousand copies. Its relative success once again validated Chet Atkins’s Nashville Sound method of recording.

But chart action took a backseat to friends in need, as far as Willie was concerned. He wanted to save everyone around him. He was so upset about David Zettner getting drafted that he felt compelled to write an antiwar song called “Jimmy’s Road.” “I never thought he needed to be in a war,” Willie said of David. “He was far removed from a soldier who wanted to go out and kill somebody or hurt somebody. Being out there wasn’t right.” Paul English agreed. “David had never held a gun before,” he said. “He was a pacifist.”

Willie’s altruism prompted him to hire Paul English’s big brother Oliver, his guitarist on KCNC radio in Fort Worth back in 1955. Oliver had lost the index finger of his left hand in a gun accident, and Jimmy Day was off with the Cherokee Cowboys again, so Willie offered Oliver the pedal steel guitar chair on the Willie Nelson Show. “I thought I could hang on to that steel bar,” Oliver said. “I’d shot off my finger and the doctors had put it back on, but it was all messed up when they put it back on. I couldn’t use it at all. I couldn’t hang on to that bar. I couldn’t hit a lick. I’d just sit up there onstage.” Oliver stuck with the Record Men for nine months before quitting out of frustration. “Willie knew I couldn’t play when he offered me the job,” he said.

Willie didn’t care. The friendships he formed on the highway were deeper than his other relationships, with his family and his wife. The road was his chosen path, and it was more fun traveling it with spiritual brothers. One town, one night, another town, the next, always leaving them wanting more. And if you left a mess, it didn’t matter because you were already gone. “We didn’t know any better,” Paul English said. “We were having fun.”

Coast-to-Coast, Border-to-Border, 1967

T
EXAS WAS THE SWEET SPOT,
where there was money to be made, and Fort Worth and Dallas offered the most dependable paydays. “They’d come in a lot to where I played, the Stagecoach Inn, because we played Western Swing music,” said Charlie Owens, the Fort Worth steel guitarist. Paul had played behind Ray Chaney, the owner of the Stagecoach in the early 1960s. Once he joined up with Willie, whenever they were gigging around North Texas, Paul would persuade Chaney to let Willie and him play a Sunday matinee as a two-piece for the door. “That was Paul’s idea,” Charlie Owens said. “But they’d make ends meet. Paul’s a pretty good promoter. He kept telling Willie, ‘You got it. You’re going to make it.’ He just had to get known. And playing free is a good way to get known. We all knew he could write songs after ‘Crazy’ and ‘Hello Walls,’” Charlie said.

Willie was a known entity in the Metroplex, as civic leaders identified the growing sprawl of the Dallas–Fort Worth area. His reputation swelled considerably through his budding friendship with Don Meredith, the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys, the biggest celebrities in all of Texas. Don was a handsome good ol’ boy from Mount Vernon in northeast Texas who had played college football at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, graduating the same year that the National Football League franchise came to town. He was a local hero first, then a national hero as the Cowboys became known as America’s Team. Off the field, Dandy Don burnished his partying credentials in area clubs and demonstrated his affection for country music in public by jumping up on the stage of the Sportatorium and singing along with Willie, Wade Ray, Thumbs Carlisle from Ernest Tubb’s Texas Troubadours, Roger Miller, David Houston, Tillman Franks, the Cedar Grove Three, and the Big D Jamboree Band, even though Don couldn’t sing worth a hoot.

Before the Cowboys’ National Football League Championship game against the Green Bay Packers in the dramatic Ice Bowl of January 1967, the quarterback demonstrated better vocals in the locker room by singing Willie’s “One Day at a Time” to demonstrate how he approached every game. If Willie Nelson wasn’t a household name in Nashville circles, his friendship with Dandy Don elevated him to celebrity status back home in Texas.

Willie’s frequent appearances in Texas were still largely subsidized by his publishing royalties. The checks that arrived in the mailbox quarterly were enough for Willie and Hank Cochran to buy out Ray Price’s share of Pamper Music in 1967. But within months, Willie turned around and sold his piece of Pamper to Hank, telling him, “I don’t want to be a song publisher.” Two years later, Hank and Hal Smith flipped Pamper to Tree International for $1.6 million, but Willie didn’t lose any sleep. Money was almost beside the point as far as he was concerned.

On the larger stage, Johnny Cash had been elevated to American legend status, thanks to his television show and his association with folk poet Bob Dylan, who’d recorded his 1966 album
Blonde on Blonde
in Nashville, using many of the same players Willie used on his debut sessions for RCA, including Henry Strzelecki, Charlie McCoy, Jerry Kennedy, and Pig Robbins. Pete Drake, Kenny Buttrey, and Charlie McCoy played on Dylan’s follow-up album,
John Wesley Hardin,
released in 1968, with many of the same musicians appearing on 1969’s
Nashville Skyline,
which included Dylan’s duet with Johnny Cash on “Girl from the North Country,” despite the fact that neither voice was particularly suited for harmonizing.

Nashville’s response was to promote a slew of smooth singing vocalists such as Don Gibson, whose “Sweet Dreams” fit the invented folk-country genre, Roger Miller, George Hamilton IV, who covered New York folkie Tom Rush’s “She Got the Urge for Going,” the iconoclast’s iconoclast, Bobby Bare, the Glaser Brothers, and a new singer-songwriter, who’d started out as a studio janitor, named Kris Kristofferson. Even Willie’s friend and labelmate Waylon Jennings got in on the act, covering the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” and Jimmy Webb’s ambitiously overwrought song suite “MacArthur Park.”

Both Willie and Waylon were coming to the realization that they were fellow travelers and partners in crime. Though their music was decidedly different, they had more in common than just being country boys from Texas who thought outside the box. “They thought I was rock and roll,” Waylon explained about the suits’ impression of his artistry. “They thought [Willie] was on another planet.”

W
ILLIE
took advantage of his status as an RCA recording artist to road test different guitars. If a musician had a record deal and worked dates, manufacturers would loan or give instruments to him. For a long time Willie played Fender Telecasters, Jaguars, and Jazzmasters, along with an occasional Gibson and a custom double-neck guitar. His guitar of choice changed for good after the Baldwin company sent a representative to a gig at the Pan American Ballroom in El Campo, southeast of Houston, to give Willie and Johnny Bush its new Model 801CP Electric Classical Guitar with a Prismatone stereo pickup and a Baldwin amplifier. The Baldwin was a big axe similar to a Gibson, and the first gut-string electric. Willie took it out on a run and liked the way it played in a big room. But the neck was so poorly constructed, it eventually fell apart. David Zettner and Jimmy Day took it to Shot Jackson in Nashville to get it fixed. The luthier was unable to salvage the guitar, but he had another instrument that might interest Willie—a new Martin N-20 made of Brazilian rosewood with a blond top. Shot told Willie he’d sell him the Martin for $750, which was little more than what it cost Shot. Willie told Shot he’d buy it, but only if Shot could install the ceramic pickup from the Baldwin into the Martin. Shot salvaged the pickup and put it into the body of the Martin acoustic, effectively electrifying the instrument. The jury-rigged instrument fit Willie like a glove. It had the tone of a wooden instrument but with the pickup could project its sound in the biggest dance hall. Willie named the guitar Trigger.

The Martin guitar changed Willie Nelson’s sound, giving it an earthy folk texture. But you couldn’t tell by the records he was making. Vibes, trumpets, violins, a cello, saxophones, and a trombone embellished
My Own Peculiar Way
to the point of once again drowning out Willie’s voice and the sound of his guitar. Worse, the production did little to change the public’s perception of Willie Nelson as a recording artist. The recent success of the single “Bring Me Sunshine” was an anomaly. Chet Atkins brought in Danny Davis, a producer, arranger, trumpet player, and leader of his own instrumental group, the Nashville Brass, to fluff up four tracks.

Willie had already recorded the title song on his debut album for Liberty seven years earlier, on his Panther Hall concert recording, and it had been covered by pop crooner Perry Como. Five other tracks—“I Let My Mind Wander,” “I Just Don’t Understand,” “The Local Memory,” “I Just Dropped By,” and “The Message”—were Willie originals, along with a Hank Cochran collaboration, “Any Old Arms Won’t Do.” He did five covers—John Hartford’s “Natural to Be Gone,” Marty Robbins’s “I Walk Alone,” by the esteemed thumb picker Merle Travis, Don Baird’s “It Will Come to Pass,” and Dallas Frazier’s “Love Has a Mind of Its Own”—but to no avail. The album reached number 39 on the country album charts. The single of “Natural to Be Gone” b/w “Jimmy’s Road,” the protest song Willie wrote for David Zettner, didn’t even chart.

Chet Atkins and RCA were losing faith. A year passed before the November 1969 sessions for
Both Sides Now.
Producer Felton Jarvis let Willie record on his own terms and bring along Billy English, Paul’s nineteen-year-old brother, on drums, young David Zettner on guitar and bass, Shirley Nelson on vocals (her last collaboration with her husband), and Jimmy Day on bass and steel.

Billy English joined Willie by drumming for Billy Stack, a Fort Worth singer with a Roy Orbison voice whom Willie, Paul, and Jack Fletcher were backing to launch as a solo act like they had with Johnny Bush. Session player Norbert Putnam led one session and added his bass. James Isbell, the brother of Dave Isbell, who’d fronted the Mission City Playboys that Willie played with thirteen years earlier, played bongos to convey the folkie vibe Willie was going after. He covered Joni Mitchell on the title track, New York folk singer Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’,” made popular by the film
Midnight Cowboy,
Shirley Nelson’s “Once More with Feeling,” and the old folk-country chestnuts “Crazy Arms” (if Ray Price’s classic was old enough to be classified as folk), “Pins and Needles (in My Heart),” a Fred Rose original written under his Floyd Jenkins pseudonym, “Wabash Cannonball,” and the honky-tonk standard “One Has My Name.” He also introduced a new original—a slice of the wild side of life on the road called “Bloody Merry Morning”—and threw in his underappreciated original “I Gotta Get Drunk” and another Hank Cochran collaboration, “Who Do I Know in Dallas?” that had nothing whatsoever to do with folk music. The cover featured a photograph of Willie standing in the woods on his land, dressed in a double-breasted suit, a cigarette in his hand, looking pensive. “Once More with Feeling” was released as a single, reaching number 42 on the country singles chart.

The “Billy Stack as the Next Johnny Bush” promotion cratered when Stack returned to Fort Worth due to marital troubles. But Billy English stuck around. “I’d been coming out playing guitar and David would switch off to trumpet, but Willie couldn’t afford the bigger band,” Billy English said. But he stayed with Willie long enough to play the Palomino in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and more than a hundred other cities. “I know we played New York,” Billy said, “because the electric windows on the Mercury Marquis got stuck and it was wintertime.” On one run in the Mercury Marquis, Willie Nelson and the Record Men covered fifteen thousand miles in eighteen days, playing nine gigs, including one in Stamford, Connecticut, after playing Los Angeles, making the thirty-two-hundred-mile drive in sixty-nine hours.

The long drives left plenty of time to contemplate the grind, smoke cigarettes, drink beer or whiskey, pop pills, listen to the radio, shoot the shit, tell jokes, cuss the electric windows when they got stuck, or do whatever it took to get on down the road.

Late one evening in that darkest time between midnight and dawn, on the way from one show to the next, Willie and Paul were going over gigs past and gigs to come. Willie was lying down in the back of the station wagon. Paul was in the backseat. At one point, Willie propped himself up on his elbows until his eyes made contact with Paul’s eyes, illuminated by the flickering lights of passing cars.

“One of these days,” he said to Paul in a soft voice, “I’m going to make it up to you.”

W
ILLIE’S
promise to Paul reflected his growing feeling that recordwise, he was spinning his wheels and going nowhere. His next two albums,
Laying My Burdens Down
and
Willie Nelson and Family,
were familiar stories: a new cast of studio players (guitarists Pete Wade and Chip Young, Norbert Putnam on bass, David Briggs on piano, and Jerry Carrigan on drums); good cover songs (solid versions of “Sunday Morning Coming Down” by Kris Kristofferson, Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” Merle Haggard’s “Today I Started Loving You Again,” and folk-rocker James Taylor’s hit “Fire and Rain”); good originals (a stirring gospel tune, “Kneel at the Feet of Jesus,” and the weeper “I’m a Memory,” which reached number 28 on the country singles chart); interesting concepts (a collection of downer blues and the Ridgetop gang posing for an album cover); and lousy sales.

Willie had become a problem to the suits at RCA. Waylon was enough of a pain in the ass. In addition to doing more and more of the songs he wanted to do rather than what the producer chose, Waylon wanted to produce himself and was demanding control of where the records were made, the song selection, and the artwork that decorated the album cover. Waylon gave RCA plenty of reasons to compromise, namely impressive record sales and box-office receipts. Handling Willie was like selling fine art that no one wanted to buy. “Honestly, I always thought I could sing pretty good, and it bothered me that nobody else thought so,” Willie told Carleton Stowers. “The more I thought about it, the more negative I got. I got into fights with the recording company and all kind of bad things.” It was a delicate balancing act. He knew in his head what he wanted his music to sound like, but it never came out that way on record. And yet he needed to have a record so he could sell himself. Chet Atkins and Felton Jarvis were supposed to know what record buyers wanted—that’s why they were producers, or so Willie thought. So if they were so smart, why couldn’t they get him a hit?

His unconventional manner of singing, his painfully sad songs, and his preference to play songs for a listening audience rather than a dancing crowd, not only made it hard for the RCA boys to understand him, but it sometimes cost him bookings. Management at Cain’s Academy in Tulsa sent him a letter informing him, “We no longer need your services.” But other venues rarely frequented by Nashville recording artists, such as Hillbilly Heaven in Upstate New York, at the dead end of a lonely road in the woods by the Canadian border, and the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto, where Canada’s biggest country star, Stompin’ Tom Connors, would open the show, welcomed him with open arms.

The relentless road work made his brief stops at home almost pleasurable, despite the fact that his once-fiery romance with Shirley seemed cooler and cooler each time he came back. By 1969, Ridgetop had grown into one big happy family—some by birth, others through friendship. The lettering on the mailbox identified the tenants as “Willie Nelson and Many Others.” It might have been called Nashville’s first hippie commune, only hippies didn’t exist in Tennessee and no one knew what a commune was.

Once he had discovered how easy it was to accumulate things whenever he was flush with cash, Willie began developing contempt for material goods. He’d go out of his way to break something just to show he didn’t care, his don’t-give-a-damn attitude usually expressed when he was shit-faced. Fans offered drinks so often, he started carrying a collapsible cup in his back pocket. And when he got real loaded, he turned mean.