Willie Nelson (24 page)

“Willie was a bad drunk,” Paul English stated flatly. “When he got really liquored-up, he’d want to drive. I’d have to take the keys from him. He didn’t know what he was doing, he was so drunk.”

No small part of it was the friends he kept. He was wild, all right, but Hank Cochran, Roger Miller, and Zeke Varnon were wilder. He could pop pills, drink whiskey, and pick for a few days straight, but he could never keep up with Jimmy Day, who could stay up for weeks. Compared with them, Willie was kind of straight-laced.

“Ridgetop was wild as hell,” Bee Spears said. “People in rural Tennessee—as long as you mind your business, they’ll leave you alone. Willie showed me this house to live in, but I’m not sure if anyone knew who owned it. It didn’t have any electricity. The shower was a piece of garden hose that ran into a big can that had holes punched in it. It was a mess. It was Peyton Place. That’s what happens with whiskey and amphetamines.”

Whatever problems were caused by liquor and pills, women, friends, or family, or any combination thereof, they tended to disappear on the lost highway in the land of one-nighters. If Shirley was harping too much, the bills were piling up, or someone was bugging him, there was always the road. The moving landscape allowed him to reinvent himself nightly.

Playing a package show in Dallas, he was buttonholed by Morgan Choat, a North Texas disc jockey. “Willie went onstage in pink pants,” observed Choat, an avowed country traditionalist. “Everyone else was wearing western clothes. After the show, I asked, ‘Willie, what in the world’s going on?’”

Willie leaned into his ear and whispered confidentially, “Morgan, I’m changing my style.”

Crash Stewart, the San Antonio hustler with a car lot and finance company on General McMullen Road who booked Willie’s Texas dates, worked up a promotional flyer for the band that hyped Willie Nelson and the Record Men as “The Singin’est, The Playin’est, The Sellin’est Band from Nashville, Tennessee.” In Texas, they were from Tennessee. In Tennessee, they were from Texas.

For every choice booking, such as sharing the bill with Hank Thompson at the University of Texas in Austin or headlining the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, where he was advertised as “writer-singer Willie Nelson,” or being one of the four featured performers of the annual Texas Prison Rodeo in Huntsville in October (Jerry Lee Lewis, Conway Twitty, and Faron Young headlined the other shows), there were an equal number of shit-hole gigs quickly forgotten.

The cost of barnstorming may have sometimes required four grown men to share a single motel room, but you couldn’t help feeling like a millionaire, standing behind a microphone and hearing the applause and cheers of people who paid money to come see you. Willie had seen too many friends, like Roger Miller, Johnny Cash, and now Waylon Jennings, pull down the big bucks and live the high life. For a few weeks, Willie was so convinced he was destined for the same success, he tried flying to gigs in an Aero Commander. Then the bills for operating the plane arrived in the mail.

The preferred mode of transportation became an Open Road camper. He may have owed Paul English $5,250 in back pay, and more than once Paul and Carlene English had to cover his utility bills, but he was a country music singing star in the eyes of those around him. Jimmy Day was semipermanently passed out in the back of the camper until Willie ran him off again, opening the door for the return of Bee Spears, the teenage bass player and pot dealer who’d gone back to San Antonio to play in a Mexican jazz ensemble. With Bee’s return, David Zettner moved over to steel. The band had a history, a cool sharp-dressed look, and a sound that was out of the mainstream but clearly with a depth worth paying attention to.

I
N
July of 1969, Willie’s daughters, Lana and Susie, their cousins Freddy and Mike Fletcher, and Willie’s steel player David Zettner experienced their first rock festival. The delegation from Ridgetop drove to Atlanta to join 150,000 people like them at the Atlanta Pop Festival at the Atlanta International Raceway. The hippie phenomenon going on in California, which they had heard on records, seen on TV, and read about, was right there in front of their faces.

Atlanta Pop featured several new acts ushering in a new post-Beatles era for rock. A four-piece group from England called Led Zeppelin would sell tens of millions of albums and concert tickets by doing a revved-up version of American blues music. Two growling soul shouters, an Englishman named Joe Cocker and a sassy woman from Port Arthur, Texas, by way of Austin and San Francisco named Janis Joplin, reinterpreted rhythm and blues for young white audiences. Creedence Clearwater Revival, a band from the suburbs of northern California, rode a string of swampy Southern-sounding hit singles to displace the Beatles as the most popular band in the world. Two big band ensembles, Blood, Sweat & Tears and the Chicago Transit Authority, were in the process of creating a new genre known as jazz-rock. Also on the bill at Atlanta Pop were influential jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, the Los Angeles boogie band Canned Heat, Chuck Berry, the father of modern rock and roll, the pioneering power trio Grand Funk Railroad, Bob Dylan’s organist Al Kooper, a gypsy rock-and-soul ensemble known as Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, and a blues-rocking albino kid who grew up just down the road from Janis Joplin named Johnny Winter.

Lana came back from the trip to Georgia blown away by the coolness of the entire event. “I wished all these people could hear Dad’s music,” she said. “If they liked Blood, Sweat, and Tears, I knew they’d like him.” The way Willie thought, the way he approached life, and the community of family and friends he’d created at Ridgetop would have fit right in at Atlanta Pop or at Woodstock, the rock festival in Upstate New York staged six weeks after Atlanta Pop.

O
NE
morning in late November 1969, Shirley Nelson was sorting through the mail in the kitchen when Lana heard a piercing scream. “There’s a hospital bill and a baby!” Shirley shrieked. She had opened an envelope and pulled out a bill from a Houston hospital for the birth of Paula Carlene, daughter of Connie Koepke and Willie Nelson, delivered on Halloween.

Shirley flipped out and started throwing things, but Willie wasn’t there to hit. She shrieked again and reached for a bottle of pills, gobbling them down impulsively. Lana realized what she had done and dragged her into her car so she could drive Shirley to the hospital to get her stomach pumped, even though Lana didn’t have a driver’s license. “I felt so sorry for her,” Lana said. “I wanted to help her but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. All I could do is support her and be there for her.”

When Willie returned from his tour, Shirley cornered him in the backyard with a gun in her hand. After he tried talking to her, she decided not to use it, although she did fire several shots later while they were riding in the car.

The knot between Willie and Shirley had unraveled. In reality, it had been loosening ever since she’d settled at Ridgetop to raise Willie’s kids. Shirley was bored and jealous, knowing he was catting around away from home, just like he’d done with her when they fell in love behind Martha’s and Biff’s backs. She’d taken lovers out of need and out of spite, knowing he was taking lovers. He was taking lovers on the road because he could.

Whenever he was headed for a gig in the eastern half of Texas, he’d give Connie Koepke a call. Once Connie had discovered he was married, she put the relationship on ice for almost two years before the flame was rekindled. It was some kind of crazy love, and the affair intensified until Connie discovered she was pregnant. She told Willie she wanted to keep the baby and raise the child herself. Willie offered to help out financially, as if he were sitting on a bundle of cash. Connie rented an apartment in Houston for herself and the baby she was expecting, with her parents’ support.

Shirley and Willie tried to patch things up. Willie promised he’d stay out of Houston. Shirley promised she’d take the straight-and-narrow path and quit pilling and seeing other men. The promises didn’t hold. Willie tracked Shirley to the apartment of her backdoor man in Nashville and confronted him. Shirley continued finding lipstick on Willie’s collars and smelling perfume on his clothes.

“At one point he bugged a phone to find out who it was,” recalled Lana. “He came home once and she was gone. He asked where she was. I said I didn’t know. Susie said she was over at Larry’s house. After dad got the taped phone conversation, he told her she had to leave.”

Willie and the kids moved into an apartment. When Shirley finally departed, going back to her family in Missouri, Willie and the kids moved back into the house, along with a stripper Willie knew named Helen and her kids. Two weeks of another new family led Lana to run off and get married at the age of sixteen, the same age as Martha when she married Willie, the same age as his mom and dad when they married, and the same age as Bobbie when she married Bud Fletcher.

Susie, now a precocious thirteen-year-old, called and talked to Connie and asked if she could come to visit her and the new baby, Paula Carlene. Connie welcomed Susie and they all got along fine. A few weeks later, Willie called Connie before he played Houston and ended up staying overnight with Connie and Paula Carlene. The next morning, he asked Connie to come with him to Ridgetop. Shirley was gone. So was Helen the stripper, who had been marched away by Carlene English, Paul’s wife.

The band helped her load her belongings into the Open Road camper, and Connie and Paula Carlene arrived at Ridgetop in the summer of 1970. The next day, Willie kissed her good-bye and hit the road again.

Lana took an immediate liking to Connie. “She was about ten years older than me, so I could relate,” Lana said. “She was pretty and she loved my dad. She wasn’t a musician, she didn’t have her own career etched out, and she brought us a baby, my little sister—she was real cute.”

Connie bonded with the kids’ aunt Bobbie, who had moved from Austin with her boys, Mike, Freddy, and Randy. Bobbie felt like the sister Connie never had. Willie’s mother, Myrle, and her husband, Ken “Kilowatt” Harvey, an electrician from Washington state, moved in on the other side of Willie from his father, Ira, and his wife, Lorraine, who tended the seven-hundred-acre plot west of the house. Daughter Susie moved into a trailer by Pop and Lorraine’s place. Wade Ray and Jimmy Day lived close enough to borrow a cup of sugar or a guitar pick. David Zettner resided in the basement of the Nelson house, where Willie went to write when he needed to get away from everyone and record songs on a two-track tape machine. Bee Spears stayed in a rickety house and later a trailer. Paul and Carlene English had moved up from Fort Worth in 1968, followed by Jack Fletcher, who was working with Paul and helping drive the band. Lana moved into another trailer nearby with her husband, Steve Warren, and their new baby boy, Nelson Ray. Even Martha Nelson, Willie’s first wife, came back, moving in with Lana and Steve to look after baby Nelson.

Myrle was happy to demonstrate where Willie’s wild streak came from. “She was a tough woman,” Freddy Fletcher, her grandson, said. “I was in high school at Ridgetop, and she called me and said, ‘I think somebody’s trying to break in the house and I’m about to blow his fucking brains out.’ I went to her place and she’s got some vodka and a pistol on the table, just waiting. I saw a lot of Willie in Mother Harvey—Myrle. She was no bullshit. She had been down the road. She knew I was knee-deep in music and we were probably smoking a little pot here and there, but she didn’t put up with anything that was out of bounds.”

Myrle and Lorraine didn’t get along much. Everyone else was more or less on the same wavelength, with one exception. Shortly after Nelson was born, Lana and Steve had a hellacious fight. Lana called Willie and Connie, crying. Steve had hit her. Willie went ballistic and drove down the road, where he confronted Steve and punched him out, advising him never to lay a hand on his daughter again or he’d kill him.

“Don’t hit me, Willie, don’t hit me,” Steve begged while lying on the floor. “I got anxiety, I got anxiety.”

Willie went home. Lana called to say Steve had left and that Martha, the baby, and she would come over directly.

An hour later, Steve returned to Willie’s house accompanied by his brothers, who were armed with rifles. They started shooting at the house, just as Lana, baby Nelson, and Martha walked in the back door, unaware they were in the middle of a shoot-out. Connie and the kids lay low on the living room floor. As Steve and his brothers made a second pass, Martha stood up and started yelling about kicking Steve’s sorry ass, until Connie pulled her down to the floor again. She introduced herself to Martha, whom she’d never met.

Willie jumped up from where he was hiding in the yard, returning fire with a single shotgun blast, joined by Paul firing his M-1 rifle from the side of the house, aiming under the bumper as Steve’s car peeled away.

Steve returned a few minutes later, just as Paul predicted, because “his pride was hurt.” This time Willie used Paul’s M-1 rifle, while Paul produced his snub nose .38 pistol and they both returned fire. Steve stopped the car and yelled out his surrender.

“Whatever I’ve done, let me cool it out,” he said with his hands held up.

Steve came back the next day and apologized, promising not to hit Lana again. Paul told him he was glad he kept driving after his tire was shot out; otherwise he would have had to aim to kill rather than shoot to miss. Steve told Paul he was glad he’d missed, too.

The incident brought the family closer, much to Lana’s amazement and embarrassment. “There was Myrle and Ken and Pop and Lorraine and Connie and Martha all under one roof, along with Jack Fletcher and his ex-wife. It was quite a tribe. I almost got my father killed and caused quite a bit of trouble,” Lana said.

Fussing and feuding was one thing, but no one messed with family.

Connie tried hard to be an accommodating partner, considering what she’d walked into. One night, Willie brought home songwriters Hank Cochran and Red Lane, along with two women she did not know or care to know. They all were roaring drunk and itching to play music. Connie cooked them dinner and cleaned up the dishes, but she was perplexed when the party didn’t end but rather continued into the next day.