Willie Nelson (26 page)
“Yes,” God agrees. “The time is April, and therefore you, a Taurus, must go. To be born under the same sign twice adds strength, and this strength, combined with wisdom and love, is the key.”
Yesterday’s Wine
revealed Willie as a deep thinker who put his philosophy on the table in three-minute melodic chunks for all to ponder:
Explain to me again, O Lord, why I’m here
I don’t know, I don’t know
The setting for the stage is still not done
Where’s the show? Where’s the show?
“It scared a lot of people,” admitted Willie. “RCA’s reaction was ‘Who’s gonna play this?’ They started thinking about AM radio. My whole idea was playing the album all the way through. It was a spiritual album.” And definitely too strange for
Hee Haw.
Yesterday’s Wine
marked the beginning of the end of Willie’s relationship with RCA. The label pressed up the standard ten thousand copies and let nature take its course. Promotion behind Willie Nelson’s albums had historically been nonexistent. Nothing had changed and the situation would remain the same for the three RCA albums that followed,
Willie Nelson and Family
(featuring a photograph of the extended family at Ridgetop on the cover),
The Willie Way,
and
The Words Don’t Fit the Picture.
He’d made fourteen albums for RCA with not much to show. Chet Atkins tried but never sold Willie as a recording artist, other than reissuing his version of “Pretty Paper” as a Christmas single every year. Chet may have been a picker’s picker. But as a producer and label chief, he stuck to formula.
It wasn’t just that
Yesterday’s Wine
was too weird for RCA. “Willie was way too weird for Chet,” observed Cowboy Jack Clement, who came from Memphis to Nashville as Chet’s first assistant about the same time as Willie arrived in Nashville. Chet Atkins had kept country music alive when rock and roll took over the sales bins. The Nashville Sound he helped create kept churning out product with enough hits to justify his position. But there was no way he was going to have hits on all the acts he produced, and Willie was proof. (Then again, Chet likened Dolly Parton’s vocal talents to those of a “screech owl.”)
“The thing with Willie is he had to go and show them what he was gonna do, and he didn’t know what he was gonna do when he got in the studio,” Hank Cochran said in his defense.
Once the house in Ridgetop was rebuilt and ready to be reoccupied, Willie and Connie and the kids spent three months back in Tennessee, long enough for Willie to record and release his final album for RCA,
The Words Don’t Fit the Picture,
notable for the first recorded version of “Good Hearted Woman,” a song Willie had written with Waylon Jennings.
The song came out of a late-night poker game at the Fort Worther Motel on Jacksboro Highway in Fort Worth. Billy Gray, Willie, and Waylon had been playing poker all night. Toward the end of the game, Waylon said, “Willie, I’ve got this song I want you to help me write.” Connie Nelson was a witness. “Willie had been drinking and Waylon was doing his thing [making trips to the bathroom to snort cocaine],” she said. “The only part Willie came up with was ‘Through teardrops and laughter we’re gonna walk through this world hand in hand.’ Waylon said, ‘That’s it! That’s what’s missing’ and gave Willie half the song.” Waylon asked Connie to write down the lyrics because they were so out of it, “none of us is going to remember this tomorrow,” he told her.
The album cover of
The Words Don’t Fit the Picture
was meant to be a joke. A photograph depicted Willie wearing bubble aviator shades with his hair hanging over his ears, holding a guitar case covered with bumper stickers while standing in front of producer Felton Jarvis’s Rolls-Royce, flanked by Connie in a black gown and white fur hat and Felton dressed as the chauffeur.
It didn’t matter if record buyers got the joke or not. The record didn’t matter anymore. Neither did Ridgetop. Willie and Connie had been back just long enough to realize that nothing about Nashville and the music business felt right anymore. Willie Nelson and Many Others were GTT—Gone to Texas.
By leaving, Willie was doing what dozens of Texans in Tennessee wished they could do but never did. Losing the immediate connection to the business of music was career suicide, in the eyes of many. No one left and succeeded. Bakersfield was its own scene, thanks to Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, and Jim Halsey was doing all right building a small management/recording empire in Tulsa. A smattering of country records were being made in Memphis, Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Los Angeles, and Houston. But Willie was crazy to think he could move to Central Texas and stay in the game. Still, everyone was secretly rooting for him.
He had put down a deposit on an apartment lease in Houston, but a festival near Austin and some friendly persuasion changed his plans.
Staged over a three-day weekend on March 17, 18, and 19, in 1972 on a seven-thousand-acre ranch thirty miles west of Austin, the Dripping Springs Reunion attempted to replicate the festive spirit of Woodstock, only with country acts. Governor Preston Smith and former senator Ralph Yarborough showed up, along with a few thousand fans, for the Friday bluegrass lineup of Jimmy Martin, Earl Scruggs, Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, Jim and Jessie, Charlie Rich, Buck Owens, and the Light Crust Doughboys. Around ten thousand fans attended on Saturday, March 18, to hear the stars and legends, such as Tex Ritter, Roy Acuff and his Smokey Mountain Boys, Hank Snow, Charlie Walker, Roger Miller, Sonny James, Dottie West, and Austin yodeler Kenneth Threadgill, whose first venture into the recording studio was bankrolled by Kris Kristofferson.
The crowd count was lower for the Sunday concert, which starred Merle Haggard and Bonnie Owens, Tom T. Hall, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and Willie. What few fans there were glommed onto Willie, Waylon, and Kris—they represented a new kind of country that didn’t make them sound like old fart rednecks. Willie responded by playing his songwriting hits and some rocked-up country and joining Waylon to sing “Good Hearted Woman.” Promoters who had predicted a turnout of sixty thousand fans were claiming losses in excess of $140,000. Bob Woltering, the executive editor of
Music City News,
the Nashville trade paper owned by Faron Young, which printed programs for the event, reported fewer than three thousand copies sold. A county fair drew bigger crowds.
The payoff came after the show. The picking session at the home of Darrell K Royal following the close of the Dripping Springs Reunion made up for it all, at least for those who wrangled an invite from Coach. “Coach” was the name everyone used when referring to Royal, the University of Texas football coach who loved homespun music almost as much as he loved football, maybe even more. Willie, Kris, Rita, Red Lane, Red Steagall, Kenneth Threadgill, and Charlie Rich passed the guitar around Royal’s living room while Coach, supported by his wife, Edith, kept a tight rein on the gathering, whistling loudly to warn talkers who weren’t paying attention to the music to either cool it or cut out. Waylon and Willie sang “Good Hearted Woman.” Rita Coolidge joined Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Rich on “Life Has Its Little Ups and Downs.” Mr. Threadgill yodeled.
Shortly after the Reunion, Paul, Willie, and Bee went back to Nashville to RCA’s studios to record their final sessions, laying down tracks late at night for another concept album. The songs—“Phases, Stages, Circles, Cycles, and Scenes,” “Pretend I Never Happened,” “Sister’s Coming Home,” “Down at the Corner Beerjoint,” “I’m Falling in Love Again,” “Who’ll Buy My Memories?,” “No Love Around,” “Come On Home,” and a cover of the old hillbilly stomper “Mountain Dew”—were all part of a story floating around Willie’s mind.
“Willie was into that Astara thing,” Bee Spears said. “He was really expanding his way of thinking.” The pot and the acid and whatever else came along helped.
“Mountain Dew” b/w “Phases, Stages, Circles, Cycles, and Scenes,” the last single for RCA, did not chart. The last album for RCA,
The Willie Way,
stalled at number 34.
S
HIRLEY
Collie Nelson finally agreed to a divorce. With her real and imaginary illnesses, her depression aggravated by leaving her career behind, and her being totally pissed at Willie for shacking up with other women and having a child with Connie, she concluded their marriage was done.
Connie dropped Paula Carlene with her parents in Houston and she and Willie flew to Las Vegas and got married at the Chapel of the Bells, with the minister’s wife as witness. Steve Wynn, the owner of the Golden Nugget, where Willie frequently played, provided the hospitality.
The Dripping Springs Reunion had strengthened the bond between Willie and Kris Kristofferson. A few months earlier, Willie and Paul English had showed up at Kris’s Philharmonic Hall concert in New York, and Kris had put Willie onstage. “I had to introduce him to the crowd; they didn’t know who he was,” Kris said. “He stole the show.”
After Dripping Springs and getting married, Willie rounded up a carload of pals to drive to Durango, Mexico, to watch Kris make a movie with Bob Dylan for filmmaker Sam Peckinpah called
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
Willie ended up serenading the cast and crew all day long at Peckinpah’s house, gladly accommodating Dylan’s requests to hear more and more. “Dylan was a little shy, scared to death,” observed Willie. “They had him jumpin’ and runnin’ on them horses, and he ain’t no cowboy.” “Willie was so much fun to be around,” Kris said. “We were close friends and we were both bucking the system.” It wasn’t just them, either. Willie’s wife, Connie, and Kris’s girlfriend and duet partner, Rita Coolidge, shared a wild streak and became running buddies too.
T
HE HIPPIE CHICK
didn’t hesitate when the Open Road camper pulled over to offer her a ride just outside of Kerrville. The woman looked old enough to vote, but barely. She was certainly not the down-and-out variety of hitchhiker who once populated the sides of highways. She was a genuine Texas hippie chick—straight, long hair below her shoulders, no makeup, tight tank top, no bra, denim cut-off shorts, sandals, stash bag, macramé belt, redolent of patchouli oil, the whole package sunbaked and radiating an I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude. She just wanted a ride to Austin.
The men in the camper required no discussion among themselves before pulling over to fetch the young woman with her thumb pointing east.
To the hippie chick, the men in the Open Road camper appeared to be older guys in their thirties and forties who looked sorta like bikers but sorta not, a rough bunch showing signs of wear and tear maybe, but with a modicum of cool, although they sure weren’t hippies like she was. And yet, the aroma of righteous weed wafting from inside the camper got her attention before she even stepped inside.
A high time was had by all on the ride through the Hill Country. The country singer and his band and the hippie chick got along just fine. She was dropped off in the caliche dirt parking lot of a body shop near the corner of South First Street and Barton Springs in South Austin, just across the Colorado River from downtown, at the Armadillo World Headquarters, an old National Guard Armory that had been transformed into a hippie concert hall, beer garden, and cultural center.
Like the Avalon and the Fillmore in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Armadillo was all about the music and a shared tolerance for marijuana and psychedelic drugs. But unlike San Franciscans and hippies just about anywhere else, Texas hippies also embraced Lone Star and Pearl Beer and country music as a part of their twisted heritage. The Armadillo had already brought in a parade of talent that would otherwise have bypassed Texas, including Ry Cooder, Little Feat, Captain Beefheart, Taj Mahal, Dr. John the Night Tripper, and Frank Zappa. But there was a definite twang to many of the touring acts, such as the Flying Burrito Brothers, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, Bill Monroe, and especially Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. They were younger musicians raised on rock and roll but inspired by the country music their parents grew up with, a movement defined by the seminal 1968 album
Sweetheart of the Rodeo
by the California folk-rock band the Byrds. This version of country was considered safe by hippies rather than the antithesis of the counterculture, which is how most mainstream country was regarded by the young hipsters.
The Armadillo and a smaller club in West Lake Hills, west of town, called the Soap Creek Saloon, where Doug Sahm ruled the roost, were the touchstones of the Austin version of the country-rock culture, where long hair, blue jeans, cowboy hats, boots, good pot, cold beer, and cheap tequila fit together naturally. If a line had been drawn in the sand, hippies and cowboys in Austin were hopping over it.
Willie had been noticing a few longhairs showing up whenever he played Big G’s in Round Rock, some of them asking to hear chestnuts like “Night Life,” “Fraulein,” and “San Antonio Rose.” He’d been touring all over the world trying to find his audience, and here they were, looking for him. When he started hanging out in the clubs in Austin, he realized hippies who dug cool music were everywhere. He also noticed a style, or lack thereof.
“It became apparent the audiences were dressing down,” he said. “At the [Grand Ole] Opry, everybody dressed up, wore suits and ties. At the Armadillo and places like that, nobody dressed up. I felt out of place being dressed up.”
He adapted quickly, letting his hair grow long, growing a beard, dressing onstage in blue jeans, tennis shoes, and T-shirts, with a bandanna around his neck or head. It was no big deal to Willie. “I’d already done that,” he said, pointing out that jeans, casual shoes, T-shirts, and bandannas had been standard issue in Abbott, like they were everywhere else in Texas when he was growing up. Hippies were the new adapters.
In the summer of 1972, Willie and Connie found an apartment on Riverside Drive between Congress Avenue and Interstate 35 for Paula Carlene, Billy, Susie, and Shasta, the German shepherd they brought from Ridgetop. There was a nice view of Town Lake, which ran through the center of Austin and was in the process of being beautified per the wishes of Ladybird Johnson, the former First Lady and wife of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who’d returned to Austin and his nearby LBJ Ranch, west of Johnson City, following the end of his presidency in 1969.
After Connie became pregnant again in the fall, with daughter Amy Lee, they moved to Lake Austin Estates off Cuernavaca Drive in the hills west of the city. Willie’s family lived in a duplex, and Paul and Carlene English and their son, Darrell Wayne, lived in another nearby. The Lost Valley Country Club in Bandera was being re-created in suburban west Austin.
A
S
the 1960s faded into the 1970s, the 251,808 residents of the capital city of Texas led a wonderfully simple, sheltered, semi-idyllic existence. Set on the banks of a river that had been dammed into a string of narrow lakes where the Hill Country descended into the coastal plains and prairies, Austin was easily the most beautiful city in a state often dismissed by out-of-staters as plug ugly. Its older neighborhoods were lush with oak and pecan trees. A natural spring less than a mile from downtown functioned as the city’s main public pool. Several lakes were within a thirty-minute drive of Congress Avenue.
Education and government were Austin’s economic engines. Culture was pretty much limited to football, politics, and music, along with whatever the University of Texas brought in. The population was 10 percent African American and 12 percent Mexican American and included fifty thousand college students. Local cuisine boiled down to the three basic food groups of Texas cooking: Southern-style, westernized comfort food, such as chicken-fried steak, fried potatoes, fried okra, and fried everything else; barbecue smoked meats cooked and prepared all kinds of ways—most of them exceptional—by the local Anglo, Mexican, and African American populations; and Mexican, or Tex-Mex, food rooted in the Mexican American east side of Austin at institutions like Cisco’s and Carmen’s on East 6th, El Mat on the brown-white borderline of the Interregional (Interstate 35) Expressway, and Matt’s El Rancho on East 1st Street, two blocks from Congress Avenue and home of the Bob Armstrong Dip, named for the Texas land commissioner, who was a frequent customer. Former president Lyndon Johnson’s family preferred El Patio, north of the University of Texas campus on Guadalupe, one of several Mexican eateries established in Texas by Lebanese Mexicans, where instead of the usual complimentary basket of tortilla chips, saltine crackers were served with the salsa.
The nightlife was refreshingly provincial. Scholz Garten, the city’s oldest bar, established by August Scholz in 1866 and still the home of the Saengerrunde German singing club, defined the local style. Scholz’s attracted politicos from the capitol two blocks away, thirsty for a beer. (Liquor by the drink in Texas was restricted to private clubs, although you could bring in your own bottle as long as it was in a brown bag.) On hot summer nights, college students, attorneys, blue-collar folks, kids, and dogs gathered at the picnic tables out back under a string of yellow light bulbs beneath ancient oak trees to drink pitchers of Lone Star or Pearl and bullshit the evening away until midnight (one a.m. on Saturday nights), when all bars were required to shut down.
Austin didn’t have the deep musical past of Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth, or San Antonio, since its population was historically smaller than even Waco’s. There were some local stars among the country bands that worked the area during the forties and fifties, among them Cotton Collins, who wrote and performed an elegant fiddle-dance instrumental “Westphalia Waltz,” which paid tribute to Central Texas’s German heritage. Collins fiddled with perhaps the best-known musician in Austin, Kenneth Threadgill, a disciple of Jimmie Rodgers, the Blue Yodeler. Mr. Threadgill hosted folk music hootenannies at his North Lamar gas station beer joint in the mid-1960s, which were popular with a cabal of University of Texas students, including a future rock and blues singer named Janis Joplin and her friends Powell St. John and Travis Rivers—all three would enjoy careers in music in San Francisco during that city’s hippie heyday in the late 1960s.
Two Austin acts made it onto the national charts in the 1950s—Ray Campi, a young rockabilly crooner and bassist, and the Slades, a doo-wop group that included the blind pianist Bobby Doyle. By the mid-1960s, a small but very hip rock and roll scene spawned the 13th Floor Elevators, a pioneering psychedelic band led by a screaming Travis High School dropout named Roky Erickson that had a national Top 40 hit, “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” distinguished by an electric jug, long before psychedelic became part of the music vocabulary. The Elevators and like-minded rock bands worked rooms such as the Old New Orleans, the Jade Room, and Mother Earth around the UT campus.
Austin was also a steady payday for the Top 40 and soul cover bands tapping into the lucrative fraternity and sorority party circuit around the University of Texas, a scene controlled by booking agent Charlie Hatchett that included young players such as Don Henley, who would later be the linchpin of a popular band known as the Eagles, and country rocker Rusty Weir.
The hippest venue in Austin during the 1960s had been the Vulcan Gas Company on Congress Avenue, a local smaller version of San Francisco’s Fillmore Ballroom, run by a hippie collective headed by Houston White. Famous for its posters, most created by Gilbert Shelton, who also drew underground comics, including the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, the Vulcan featured local bands such as Shiva’s Headband, while occasionally bringing in touring blues, rock, and folk acts that otherwise would not have passed through Texas, including the Velvet Underground from New York, the California country-rock group Poco, and Chicago urban blues giant Muddy Waters.
A small clutch of white kids enamored of the blues were drawn to East 11th and East 12th, the main streets of what was left of Austin’s tiny version of Harlem before segregation laws were lifted. They frequented juke joints like the Victory Lounge, the IL, Charlie’s Playhouse, Ernie’s Chicken Shack, and Marie’s Tea Room Number 2, to soak up the music of Erbie Bowser, Hosea Hargrove, Blues Boy Hubbard, T. D. Bell, and barrelhouse pianist Robert Shaw. The white blues kids had their own playhouse, the One Knite, a self-declared dive that permanently reeked of vomit with a coffin for an entrance, a half block from the police station and one block west of I-35—the racial border of the city. Mexicans lived east of I-35 and south of 7th Street to the river; blacks lived east of I-35 and north of 7th to Airport Boulevard and Highway 183.
Mexican Americans had their own music clubs along East 6th Street and ballrooms on the edge of town, where conjunto and Tejano were the preferred sounds and Johnny Degollado (El Montopolis Kid) and Ruben Ramos and the Mexican Revolution were the local stars.
The so-called folk music clubs in Austin, such as the Saxon Club on 34th Street at I-35 and the Chequered Flag on Guadalupe Street, south of campus, were not as tradition bound as the scene at Threadgill’s. These rooms featured sincere singer-songwriters playing acoustic guitars, many of whom had taken to wearing cowboy hats and boots and jeans, a look adopted by newcomers like Jerry Jeff Walker (né Ron Crosby), a New York folkie who’d played in the band Circus Maximus and had written a hit song about a New Orleans street dancer called “Mr. Bojangles,” another singer-songwriter from Houston, Guy Clark, who’d been covered by Walker, and a lanky Fort Worth kid with high cheekbones and a taste for liquor named Townes Van Zandt, considered by his peers the purest songwriter of all.
Four Austin performers were capable of drawing a thousand crazed hippies and college students at the drop of a cowboy hat: Michael Murphey, a flaxen-haired singer-songwriter from Dallas, who had the two best-selling albums in Austin,
Geronimo’s Cadillac
and
Cosmic Cowboy Souvenir;
B. W. Stevenson, another Dallas folkie, whose husky voice powered several national hits, notably “My Maria,” which reached number 1 on
Billboard
’s adult contemporary chart; Willis Alan Ramsey, a singer-songwriter-guitarist who also came out of Dallas, whose debut album showcasing exquisite ballads informed by country music was released on Leon Russell’s Shelter Records, gaining him instant cachet with a hip audience; and Jerry Jeff Walker and the Lost Gonzo Band, whose live recording
Viva Terlingua!
made in the old dance hall in the Hill Country hamlet of Luckenbach (pop. 3) with hay bales for baffles, set the standard for Texas-style country-rock. Jerry Jeff himself was the culture’s icon, the out-of-control Gonzo “Scamp,” prone to extended bouts of extreme drunkenness, especially when under the additional influence of a new drug on the scene called cocaine. He became something of a role model for throwing televisions into swimming pools and wrecking hotel rooms with more vigor than a British rock band. “With Murphey I generally knew where he was coming from,” said Herb Steiner, the pedal steel guitarist who played with both stars. “Jerry Jeff was an unguided missile.”
Shortly after meeting Walker, Willie Nelson experienced that unpredictability firsthand at a guitar pulling late one night in Bastrop, east of Austin. A very loaded Jerry Jeff kept trying to grab Willie’s guitar Trigger and play it, which irritated Willie to no end, finally prompting him to grab it from Jerry Jeff and pound him with his fists until Jerry Jeff was crumpled on the floor. As he picked himself up, he looked up at Willie and slurred, “I remember now. You’re the same son of a bitch that knocked me down last night for the same reason.”
Whenever Jerry Jeff wanted audiences to hear his lyrics, he worked Castle Creek, the former Chequered Flag, a listening room one block from the state capitol that booked singer-songwriters such as Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Rusty Weir, and B. W. Stevenson. At Walker’s request, a friend from Florida named Jimmy Buffett started sitting in between sets in the three-hundred-seat room until he earned his own gig. Castle Creek provided inspiration for a song he wrote called “(Wasting Away in) Margaritaville,” which would be his calling card when he played in stadiums to tens of thousands of wannabe islanders in floral-print shirts.