Willie Nelson (25 page)
Susie came into the bedroom in the morning to tell Connie that Red Lane and his girlfriend had kicked Susie out of her room because they wanted the bed. Connie dutifully got up and cooked everyone breakfast, again without the girlfriends so much as offering to help. When she went out on the porch and asked Hank how he wanted his eggs and he said, “Who said I wanted eggs?” in a gruff tone, she blew her top.
“That was the trigger,” Connie said. “That and Red Lane and his girlfriend kicking Susie out of her room.” Connie let loose a string of expletives and went around the house, telling everyone to get out and get out now. Willie pulled her aside and told her, “You can’t do that, we can’t do that, it’ll hurt their feelings.” He had a better plan. He told her to get Paula and Susie and Billy in the car and leave. Once the visitors figured out they weren’t there, they’d leave, too. “That was Willie’s way of dealing with it—we’ll get out, and then they’ll have to get out,” Connie said. “And that’s what we did.”
The ruse worked. Connie had a healthy dislike of Hank from that time on but tolerated him.
Usually she enjoyed the friends Willie brought home for picking sessions. “That was the fun stuff. You never knew who would show up.” But Willie would just as likely be holed up in one of the suites at the Spence Manor across the street from BMI in Nashville, where the “store” was and where the other songwriters were hanging, and play until he couldn’t.
“W
HEN
I came to Nashville, the people I hung out with were serious songwriters, none of whom were successful yet,” said Kris Kristofferson. “Willie was the hero of the soulful set—the people who were in the business because they loved the soul of country music. They loved Willie, John [Cash], and Roger Miller, the singer-songwriters. The closest I got to Willie was Jimmy Day. He used to hang out with us. We’d sit around at these jam sessions, sing Willie songs. I went out to his place in Ridgetop, hung out with Jimmy Day, but I never did meet Willie.”
Still, Kris was a fan.
“When Johnny Cash had his TV show, Mickey Newbury and I were talking to Linda Ronstadt’s manager, telling him about Willie, how he was like a jazz singer. ‘You’re really missing a bet if you don’t pick up on him,’” Kris told the manager. Kris knew Willie had it, for all the wrong reasons as far as the Nashville establishment was concerned. “Ray Price came out to talk to me on the road once. He said performing was going to ruin my songwriting like it did Willie.”
In November of 1970, Willie recorded a new song he and Hank Cochran had written called “What Can You Do to Me Now?” The lyrics were prophetic. Two weeks before Christmas, Willie bought Connie a new Mercury Cougar, the first new car she’d ever had. On her way back from the grocery, one of the first trips she’d taken in her new ride, she stopped at the mailbox to fetch the mail. As soon as she stepped out of the car, the vehicle started rolling down the hill. She tried jumping back in but couldn’t engage the brake. The car headed into the woods and rolled over, stopping just before a steep drop-off. Connie’s arm was cut from broken glass, but otherwise she was fine.
When the wrecker arrived to tow the car out, the front seats were missing. Someone had stolen them, someone, evidently, who knew that a brand-new car had crashed in the middle of nowhere.
Then, two days before Christmas, as a light snow dusted the Cumberland Valley, Willie was in Nashville at a pre-Christmas party at Lucky Moeller’s, when he got a phone call.
“Hey, Willie, your house is on fire. The house is melting.” It was Randy Fletcher, one of his nephews.
“Well, pull the car in the garage, let them have it,” Willie said calmly. If his possessions were going up in flames, he could at least collect more insurance money.
Connie had been alone in the house that night with Paula Carlene when Randy stopped by, waking her from a nap. She went to check on Paula Carlene so she could show her off to Randy when she saw smoke scaling up the wall by Paula’s bed. The wiring that Willie’s stepfather, Ken “Kilowatt” Harvey, had rigged in the basement had caught fire. “He had wired the whole house,” Lana said. “When you’d sit on the toilet, you’d get shocked. When you swam too close to the underwater light in the swimming pool you’d feel little shock waves.”
Connie grabbed Paula Carlene and ran out of the house. Randy called the fire department and Willie. Willie was on the scene in less than thirty minutes. While he’d meant what he said about driving the car into the garage, he forgot about some other valuables that needed fetching. While the volunteer fire department was dousing the flames, Willie leapt over the fire hoses and dashed into the house, ignoring repeated warnings. He emerged from the smoldering ruins with his guitar, Trigger, and a plastic trash bag containing his stash of fine Colombian Gold marijuana. A few days later, Pop Nelson—his father, Ira—found in the debris a footlocker containing the first demos Willie had recorded in Nashville in 1961 and files of song lyrics and memorabilia.
The night of the fire, the family moved into the two-bedroom trailer Willie kept at Pop’s place, where Susie was living. Susie fashioned a Christmas tree out of one of Willie’s boots with an evergreen limb stuck in it. They spent Christmas Eve at musician and songwriter Dottie West’s home, where Dottie took Connie aside for some woman-to-woman advice. It could’ve been worse, she told her: “You’ve got everything,” Dottie said. “You didn’t lose anything but stuff. I’ve been through a fire. I’m older than you and lived longer and I’ve come to realize what’s really important. You’ve got your family, everybody’s healthy. That was just stuff. And you get to get new stuff!” The way Dottie put it made Connie think starting over wouldn’t be so hard.
“I had so much respect for her as a person,” Connie said. “Forget the singer part—she got me through a really hard time.”
After Christmas, with their house burned to cinders and the wrecked Cougar in the body shop, Willie and Connie took Lana, Susie, and Billy to Austin to visit Willie’s sister. Bobbie Nelson had moved back from Ridgetop a few months earlier to work the piano bar circuit there. Bobbie had made a lot of friends in Austin after she moved there from Fort Worth in 1965 to play the Hammond organ at the El Chico Mexican restaurant at Hancock Center, Austin’s first shopping mall. This time around, she was working places like the 40 Acres Club, the Stephen F. Austin Hotel, the Scotch Mist Lounge by Seton Hospital, the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge at I-35 and 183, and Norman Eaton’s Polonaise Room private club next to the state capitol, making fans of prominent doctors, lawyers, politicians, and lobbyists, a budding young pianist named Marcia Ball, and perhaps the most popular person in all Texas—University of Texas football coach Darrell K Royal. By extension, Willie was already wired in.
N
OTHING LIKE A FIRE
to cleanse the soul. Texas felt better than ever, especially after Crash Stewart called with an offer Willie couldn’t pass up. Crash had found temporary shelter for Willie and Many Others at the Lost Valley Dude Ranch in the Hill Country near the town of Bandera, west of San Antonio. The property was in bankruptcy, and Crash arranged it so they could stay through the summer while the house in Ridgetop was being rebuilt.
Willie was game. “I was already working most of my dates in Texas,” he reasoned. “Going back and forth was wearing me out.”
The improvised family moved in, putting the Olympic pool, the guest cabanas, and golf course to good use. Willie, Connie, Susie, Billy, Paula Carlene, Aunt Bobbie’s son Freddy, and David Zettner lived in the ranch foreman’s house. For a while singer Johnny Darnell and his wife, Sam, joined them. Paul and Carlene English and their son, Darrell Wayne, moved into the house across the way. Bee Spears and his wife had the house on the other side of them. Since they were living on the cheap, they cooked communally and were happiest whenever Connie prepared her Hungarian stew.
It was at Lost Valley that Willie really became one with the game about which he used to razz Paul and Bee for “chasing that little white ball around a cow pasture.” He played seventy-two holes of golf the first day, with chemical and herbal inspiration. Before the week was over, Paul knew his buddy was hooked when rain started pouring down in the middle of a round and Willie told Paul to go on, he was going to finish his round.
They approached the game creatively, such as the time everyone on the course was high on psychedelics and played golf backwards, from the putting green to the teebox. Bee had brought up some LSD he’d scored in San Antonio called Goofy Grape. Almost everyone at Lost Valley dropped a hit. The next morning, Willie was at Bee’s door, asking, “You got any more of that Purple Jesus?”
“LSD, THC, STP, NAACP, we were doing the whole alphabet,” said Billy Cooper, a recent addition to the Many Others. “We’d go, Let’s try two of these or this and see what happens.”
When they weren’t doing dope, playing golf, playing cards, or playing chess, a pursuit that Paul English picked up as a teenager in jail, they were playing music. One dependable gig was down the road at John T. Floore’s Country Store in Helotes, where Bee Spears and David Zettner had come of age and where country music and Western Swing ruled. The store was actually a bar and indoor dance floor with a giant outside patio for big dances. Mr. Floore was a cantankerous cuss known for his tamales and his old-fashioned ways—men removed their hats inside his place or faced expulsion.
Willie Nelson and band played for the door at Floore’s, gradually increasing their earnings from $500 to $1,500 a night as attendance grew from 100 to 150 to 300. The uncertainty of their income was tempered by the satisfaction in knowing they controlled the deal. “I’m tired of hearing the club owners bitch about losing money,” Willie said. “If I take the door, they can’t bitch.”
Larry Trader and Billy Ray Cooper were among the first to show up at Floore’s and hang at Lost Valley. B.C., as Cooper was called, and Trader were veterans of the same kind of off-the-books, under-the-table rackets in San Antonio as the “businesses” Paul English used to run in Fort Worth and in Houston.
Larry Trader was one tough hombre. Over the ten years B.C. had known him, he figured he’d seen Larry get seriously cut or shot up at least five times. And Larry was Willie Nelson’s friend for life. They’d met in the mid-1960s when Larry was Ray Price’s bagman, collecting the performance fee after shows. After doing a show in Denton, Texas, opening for Price, Willie sensed he was about to get stiffed by the club owner and complained to Ray. “We gotta leave town tonight and I think this guy’s screwing with us. Do you know anybody we can send in to count money for us so we don’t get screwed?” Price told him he did. A black Cadillac rolled up to the venue and out stepped an imposing gentleman wearing a suit and tie and carrying a violin case. “He didn’t look like no fiddle player, either,” observed Willie. After introducing himself, Larry stayed after the show long enough to make sure Willie Nelson got paid in full.
When Trader took B.C. to Lost Valley to meet Willie, B.C. saw him in a different light. “He was this great little guy who didn’t say anything,” B.C. marveled, as if he’d met a mystic. Trader ended up taking Willie to a string of honky-tonks in the Alamo City so he could show off the country music star to his pals. B.C. went back to his place out on Babcock Road on the northern edge of San Antonio, where his daddy, Brother George W. Cooper, had a broadcasting studio in the back of their home.
Brother Cooper was a radio preacher. His sermons were broadcast on XEG, XERF, XELO, and other radio stations in Mexico whose powerful signals reaching across North America helped build a profitable mail-order business selling Bibles, sermons, religious tracts, and greeting cards for all occasions to millions of listeners at home.
Billy ran an ambulance business after a brief stint as a used-car salesman. He prided himself on his driving skills. In all his years of racing ambulance services to wrecks, he’d never had an accident. He was not so proud of his salesmanship, which he claimed was so persuasive, “people would practically beg you to sell them a piece of shit.”
Willie took a shine to Billy Ray in no small part out of admiration for his daddy, the radio preacher. Brother Cooper reminded Willie of his own experiences as a pitchman on XEG back when he was at the Cowtown Hoedown in Fort Worth.
Whenever Willie Nelson and his Lost Valley Boys worked John T. Floore’s, which was just about every week, Willie would go over to B.C.’s after the show with a few band members and friends, where they’d sit on the floor, drink beer, do dope, and listen to Willie Nelson sing and play guitar until the sun came up.
One morning after an all-nighter at his place, B.C. pointed Willie toward the Austin Highway so he could drive home. “Instead, he took Fredericksburg Road, picked up an Indian hitchhiker who had a joint, and ended up at his house,” Billy said. In the spirit of wanting to help out Willie, the owner of Cooper’s Ambulance Service offered his services. “Anytime you need a driver, I’m there for you.”
T
EXAS
was solid ground; anywhere else, not so much. Bookings were hard to come by once he crossed the Sabine River into Louisiana or crossed the Red River toward Oklahoma. Whenever the band was out on the road and money was tight, Connie Nelson and Carlene English would gather pennies and put them in rolls so they could buy groceries.
Willie’s musician friend Darrell McCall followed him to Texas at the behest of Crash Stewart, who had worldwide
and
outer space rights to book McCall. Darrell was sick of Nashville and longed for the crowds he remembered playing in front of in Texas. “They were into fiddles and steel,” he said. “That’s why I wanted to go to Texas, to play in those dance halls, the same places I played with Faron and Ray. I always said you’ll never get rich working ’em, but you’ll work all your life till you’re ninety years old. I had enough of a name that Crash Stewart had a market for me.”
Another of Willie’s protégés, Johnny Bush, had signed with RCA Records. At the annual Disc Jockey Convention, Johnny met Jerry Bradley, the label’s A&R chief and second in command to Chet Atkins. Jerry told Johnny, “All you gotta do now is write that hit song.” With Harlan Howard, Hank Cochran, Willie Nelson, Dallas Frazier, Red Lane, and loads of other writers knocking at his door, Jerry Bradley hardly needed Johnny Bush to write a hit. But Johnny took up the challenge. While he was driving to a date in Texarkana, a phrase stuck in his head: “Bathing my memory’d mind in the wetness of its soul.” Johnny thought it sounded like a Willie Nelson song. By the time he returned from the date, he’d finished the words to “Whiskey River.”
Johnny called Willie at Lost Valley and sang it to him over the phone. “What do you think?” he asked.
“Sounds like you got something there,” Willie told him.
“Good, I’ll put it with your publishing company,” Johnny told him. “But I’ve only got one verse and a chorus.”
“Well, you’ve already said everything you need to say,” Willie reassured him. “Sing it all the way through and sing it again.”
That’s what Johnny did.
When it was finally issued by RCA in 1972, “Whiskey River” by Johnny Bush reached number 14 on the
Billboard
country singles chart. But it stayed at number 1 across Texas for weeks and then years, eventually working its way into Willie Nelson’s repertoire.
Willie’s history of helping others brought rewards that transcended money. By bringing his personal and musical family to Lost Valley, he got to experience the soft bloom of springtime in the Texas Hill Country. The sight of bluebonnets painting hillsides laced with creeks and rivers and of armadillos rooting in the caliche soil, the soothing sensation of soft Gulf breezes warming the skin, accompanied by cold bottles of Lone Star and Pearl to slake thirsts, and the sweet, stinky smell of burning marijuana flower tops did a number on his head. From his temporary perch among the scrub oaks and the live oaks and the artesian springs and clear-running streams flanked by limestone banks came revelations. Willie’s Texas network hadn’t failed him. His audience hadn’t forgotten him. The fire had been a good thing.
“I was raised in Texas beer joints, so I went back to my old beer joints,” he later said. “I was home again. I knew all the club owners. I met a lot of my old waitresses that took care of me. I was back in my element.”
He worked with promoters such as Buddy Western of Milano, who was gifted in the art of promoting concerts that were known in the business as “phone deals.” A promoter would go into a town with three or four helpers, rent motel rooms, and start working the phones, calling every business in town in search of a concert sponsor, ideally an organization, like a volunteer fire department. The deal Buddy Western offered to such organizations was simple: “I’m going to raise money for you with a music benefit and I’ll give you twenty percent of the total take.” The organization took care of ticket sales (in most cases, ending up giving tickets away and absorbing the loss), and Western would hire acts like Ernest Tubb for a $1,000 guarantee or thereabouts and pad the bill with local talent willing to play for cheap or free.
One phone deal for Houston firefighters at the Music Hall downtown was headlined by Conway Twitty, but Conway was a no-show, the MC informed the full house, much to their disappointment. Filling in was one of the undercard acts, Willie Nelson and the Record Men. The crowd was clearly restless, especially once a smiling Willie took the stage with his band. The sight of Paul English dressed in black, mustache and goatee and cape draped around his shoulders telegraphing the Devil, prompted a few fans to start booing, according to one fan. “Willie was unruffled by the response. He kept smiling, didn’t say a word, and started singing his best-known compositions—‘Funny How Time Slips Away,’ ‘Hello Walls,’ and ‘Night Life.’ By the time he got to ‘Crazy,’ the audience was eating out of the palm of his hand.”
Whenever Johnny Bush found himself on the same show with Willie and being billed as the headliner, he made sure Willie went on last out of respect. “Willie’s the man,” Johnny would say. “He knows it, I know it. What you see today, he’s not going to stay like this.” Bush talked like he was some kind of psychic.
Instead of searching for ways to please Chet Atkins and RCA, Willie was prompted by the respite in Texas to embark on his most ambitious writing project ever. His composing skills had long ago transcended the simplicity of Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” and other popular country hits of the day. Willie was writing deep and writing prolifically. Bee Spears said that whenever he was cleaning up the bus or the camper they traveled in, some of the pieces of paper he picked up had lyrics on them. “When he wants to write, he wants it right now and writes on whatever he’s got to write on,” Bee said.
All the playing and touring and recording mixed with the new drugs he was experimenting with were pushing new ideas and new concepts to the surface. That much became clear to David Zettner the afternoon he returned to the Holiday Inn in Nashville, where he was sharing a room with Willie on a trip back to Nashville for a recording session. David had gone out catting around the day before when Willie nicely asked him to get lost because he had some writing to do. David returned the next day to a darkened room with Willie passed out under a pile of notebook paper and more paper scattered over both beds and the floor. Zettner picked up a page and squinted. The pages were covered with scribbled lyrics. Willie had been in a writing frenzy. Seven songs in one night.
Willie shrugged it off. He was due in the studio the next day and needed to finish the album that had been kicking around in his head. “In my mind, it was one big picture anyway, one long song,” he said. “The creative juices were flowing. I was open, writing a lot of good stuff.”
Yesterday’s Wine
was a whole concept, a concept far bolder (and riskier) than Chet Atkins’s idea of a concept, an album of songs all about Texas. Willie’s concept was about “imperfect man” contemplating his own mortality.
It was such a far-out idea that when it came time to record in early May of 1971, Felton Jarvis had no choice but to let the tapes roll. Willie and David Zettner were joined by guitarist Dave Kirby, who’d toured with Willie back in the early 1960s, Pete Wade, another fellow traveler from the Ray Price days, and Chip Young, the ghost guitarist on
Live Country Music Concert
. Weldon Myrick played steel, Junior Huskey bass, Pig Robbins piano, Jerry Carrigan drums, Bobby Thompson banjo, Charlie McCoy harmonica, and Norman Keith and Buddy Spicher fiddle. Hillbillies were scratching their heads before the music even began.
A god-like voice from on high opens the album, asking the question: “You do know why you’re here?”
“Yes,” replies a human voice. “There is great confusion on earth, and the power that is has concluded the following: Perfect man has visited earth already, and his voice was heard; the voice of imperfect man must now be manifest. And I have been selected as the most likely candidate.”