Willie Nelson (27 page)

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the home of the University of Texas, Austin experienced its share of student unrest in the 1960s and sported a flourishing hippie culture associated with the folk, rock, blues, and psychedelic scenes. No matter how many hippies started dressing cowboy, they were still regarded with suspicion, if not hostility, in most country music establishments. But at least Austin was a whole lot looser and more tolerant than the rest of Texas, where kicking a hippie’s ass was considered entertainment. Austin had more places than the rest of Texas combined that welcomed or at least tolerated hippies, which embellished the city’s reputation as an oasis of peace and love in a desert of angry assholes spoiling for a fight. That image was enhanced by Travis County sheriff Raymond Frank, who openly declared he wouldn’t bust folks for personal use of marijuana.

One of the few hippies able to cross the cultural divide and venture into the country bars and get away with it was a San Angelo native named Bobby Earl Smith, a Law School student and semi-longhair who played bass in Freda and the Firedogs, a band of like-minded college students who might not have been real country people but dug country anyhow.

Freda was a dark-haired Cajun pianist named Marcia Ball who sang lead and played piano. Her instrumental foil was John X. Reed, a lean Panhandle towhead who played lead guitar with a pronounced rockabilly twang and echo. The Firedogs attracted a mélange of students, bikers, Mexican families, hippies, and rednecks, who jammed into Split Rail, a no-cover bar and drive-in on Lamar Boulevard, just south of Town Lake, every Sunday night to hear a repertoire that mixed Loretta’s “Don’t Come Home Drinking,” Tammy’s “Stand by Your Man,” and Merle’s “Today I Started Loving You Again” with Texas-style rock and roll (Buddy’s “Peggy Sue”) and a few credible originals. But the Firedogs were regarded as too hippie to be booked into Austin’s country joints such as Big G’s in Round Rock, Big Gil’s on South Congress, where the nightly pay for bands was $45 and a case of beer, or the Broken Spoke on South Lamar.

Townsend Miller, a skinny stockbroker by day who wrote the country music column in the
Austin American-Statesman,
had taken note. He frequently wrote that his two favorite singers were Waylon Jennings and Marcia Ball (aka Freda). More than once he urged the owners of the Broken Spoke to take a chance and book the Firedogs or a band called Greezy Wheels.

The Firedogs got their chance at a benefit at the Broken Spoke for UT Law School grad Lloyd Doggett in his bid to be elected to the Texas House of Representatives. The Broken Spoke was so packed that owner James White asked the band to come back and play his place on a regular Friday night.

Townsend Miller’s mention of Greezy Wheels referred to one of the house bands at the Armadillo World Headquarters that were engaged in a similar musical experiment, borrowing bits and pieces of country and gospel and playing it like it was something brandnew for the hippie crowd. Greezy Wheels was led by Reverend Cleve Hattersley, another New York refugee with a bombastic stage presence that was part preacher man and part hippie Godfather, and featured Sweet Mary Egan, an enigmatic fiddler who could whip both the crowd and herself into a dervish on her signature rendition of “Orange Blossom Special.” Their song list included an extended jam version of the traditional spiritual “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and their big crowd pleaser “Country Music and Friends,” with the sing-along refrain celebrating “cocaine, country music, and good ol’ Lone Star Beer.”

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Willie called Waylon to tell him “something is going on down here,” he was referring to bands like Greezy Wheels and Freda and the Firedogs. Something told Willie that he could tap into their audiences. They might be a little younger than he was and they might be a little crazier about drugs than he was. But they were Texas kids like he was who loved music almost as much as he did.

Willie tested those waters by asking Sweet Mary Egan to sit in with him, Bee Spears, and Paul English at a benefit concert for Sissy Farenthold, the liberal Democratic candidate for governor at Woolridge Park, between the library and the Travis County Courthouse. Greezy Wheels was on the bill, as was the Conqueroo, the eclectic folk-rock-blues-jazz de facto house band of the recently defunct Vulcan Gas Company; the Storm, one of the white blues bands from the One Knite, featuring Jimmie Vaughan on guitar and Lewis Cowdrey on harmonica; an organic and splendidly sloppy blues-and-rock bar band called Lee Ann and the Bizarros; and, incongruously, the New York folk musician Phil Ochs, who was just passing through.

Sweet Mary played with Willie, Paul, and Bee like she’d worked with them for years, her presence warming the crowd of long-haired groovers and Democratic Party officials to the “straight” country musician. The ensemble showcased Willie playing his best compositions back-to-back as “Crazy” melted into “Hello Walls,” then “Me and Paul,” before he grabbed the crowd with “Night Life,” a blues everyone could recognize and relate to. The small crowd signaled their approval with applause. When Greezy Wheels and the Conqueroo played, they resumed their free-form hippie dancing.

A few days later, Willie and Paul went to the Armadillo World Headquarters, the place where the band had dropped off the hippie chick from Kerrville, looking for Eddie Wilson. A gregarious exMarine and ex–beer lobbyist, Eddie was the Armadillo’s head honcho, the closest thing to a leader of the stridently leaderless collective. The Armadillo technically functioned as a business, but those who worked there sure weren’t in it for the money. They were in it for the music, the beer, the dope, the camaraderie, and whatever else the counterculture movement symbolized.

Two years earlier, Eddie had crossed over from beer-drinking yahoo to manager of Shiva’s Headband, a homegrown hippie band that had a contract with Capitol Records. Shiva’s performed psychedelic music driven by electric fiddle and guitar and was prone to play twenty-minute versions of every song. After the Vulcan closed, they needed a new place to play. Eddie Wilson found the Armadillo for them and rounded up some friends to help open the place in August of 1970.

Unlike most of his Armadillo brethren, Eddie was hip to Willie Nelson. He had gone on a dope run to San Francisco, to where many Austin hippies migrated, trying to make contact with the Grateful Dead and move a few pounds of Mexican weed in order to help pay the Armadillo’s rent. He was staying with a homesick Texan who was playing over and over Willie’s
Live Country Music Concert
album recorded at Panther Hall in Fort Worth. When the friend mentioned Willie had moved from Nashville to Austin, Eddie was determined to find him. A week after his return, Wilson was standing in the cabaret in the back of the club, when he turned around saw Willie and Paul in front of him.

“I’ve been looking for you,” Eddie said to Willie, introducing himself.

“You just found me,” Willie said, grinning.

“I want you to play here.”

“I want to play here.”

A handshake sealed the deal.

Willie had met some unusual folks in the nightclub business. This group might have been the most unusual of all. They made him feel right at home. Several customers at other tables left their pitchers of beer to come and say hello. As Willie and Paul graciously accepted the welcomes, Eddie Wilson noticed a trait he hadn’t seen in other music people who’d played the ’Dillo: As long as someone was speaking to him, Willie didn’t break eye contact. “It’s a quality I’d seen in only two other people—[former Texas governor] Ann Richards when being talked to by children, and Muhammad Ali when he’s talking to girls,” Eddie said.

A date and terms were agreed upon. Willie would get half the door, no guarantee. It was the same deal the Armadillo worked with Dallas bluesman Freddie King and he was packing fifteen hundred hippie fans into the building every few months while he continued to work the chicken-shack circuit in the rest of Texas.

Micael Priest, one of the Armadillo’s in-house poster artists, whipped up a poster depicting an old cowboy crying into his mug of beer, with a jukebox playing “Hello Walls” in the background and a small picture of Willie hanging on the wall up in the corner.

The Armadillo had booked some weird stuff in its two years of existence. Willie Nelson might be the weirdest booking yet. Eddie Wilson hedged his bet by asking Greezy Wheels to open for Willie and accept a $100 fee even though the band had played to a full house as headliners a few weeks before. After some debate over whether the regular crowd would pay a higher price, Eddie and Bobby Hedderman set the cover charge at the increased price of $2.

Willie helped promote the booking a few nights before by dropping by Mother Earth, the rock and roll club on North Lamar at 9th Street, where Michael Murphey, Austin’s cosmic cowboy, was holding forth.

On the evening of August 12, 1972, the day the last U.S. troops departed Vietnam, Willie Nelson took the stage of the Armadillo World Headquarters in front of 450 paying customers. Although the air temperature outside had peaked at ninety-six degrees a few hours earlier, the ’Dillo felt hotter than Laredo, since it lacked air-conditioning. At least half the crowd had come for Greezy Wheels, but there were at least a hundred hard-core Willie Nelson fans who’d never stepped inside the big building with its murals of strange characters, like Big Rikki, the Guacamole Queen, Shiva’s Headband, and Freddie King playing guitar while an armadillo popped out of his heart. Pantsuits mixed with bell-bottoms. Beehive hairdos contrasted with long and stringy hairdon’ts. Beer flowed from the taps. A cloud of smoke hung under the ceiling.

Backstage, Willie posed calmly for photographer Burton Wilson, who was archiving the musicians and staff of the Armadillo before Willie took the stage with Bee and Paul. He was thirty-nine years old. He’d been a scrapper for ten years, a Nashville recording star for ten years after that, and he still felt like he was getting his first wind. He was clean-shaven and his hair barely covered his ears. But as he scanned the audience, making eye contact, the expression on his face telegraphed to the crowd that he might look like an old redneck shit-kicker, but deep inside, he was one of them.

Bassman Bee Spears stood to one side. “Willie passed me off as an Indian,” Bee said. “I had a headband and moccasins if we were going into a place where we knew we’d get some shit. I wasn’t making a fuckin’ statement; I’m a redneck too.” Paul English, Willie’s Man in Black, sat on a drum stool on a riser behind them, sticks in hand, black cape with red lining draped over his shoulders.

Willie rolled out the medley of hits like he did at Woolridge Park—“Crazy,” “Hello Walls,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” and “Night Life.” Applause greeted recognition of each song. Sticking to the Bob Wills formula of presentation, he played one song after another without pause, keeping the songs short and sweet, save for a couple of solos to show the audience he could play some serious guitar.

Paul, who was now up to seven capes in his wardrobe, was in ecstasy. He drummed so hard that at one point, he fell back off his stool. “The cape I was wearing was velvet, and it was around my throat, and I got up and all of a sudden fell back because it was choking me to death,” he explained. “I was sweating profusely and didn’t have much oxygen, and I just went down.”

After the show, the band, fans, family, and friends retreated across Town Lake to the Crest Hotel, where writers Edwin “Bud” Shrake and Gary “Jap” Cartwright had rented a suite. A guitar pulling ensued, starring Willie Hugh Nelson with UT football coach Darrell K Royal as producer. Even though he’d rented the suite, Cartwright was threatened with expulsion by Coach when he continued talking while Willie played. “Leave or listen,” Royal ordered curtly. Jap shut up and stayed, paying attention to Willie and his songs. “I don’t remember having to quiet Bud Shrake,” Coach said. “He was an educated listener. Gary was not as informed as Bud.”

Willie might have taken a leap of faith by abandoning the Nashville establishment for the fringes of a counterculture in the making, but on that hot night in August, he knew it was the right call.

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all the great music being made, Willie was the only one who could work both sides of the aisle—the Armadillo one week, Big G’s the next—and be completely at home in both environments, although each side had a very different reaction to Willie’s new shaggy look.

Lana Nelson noticed the change when she left Ridgetop and her husband, Steve, and brought her two children to join the rest of the family in Austin late in the fall of 1972. “Dad picked me up at the airport,” she said. “He was wearing shorts and sandals and had real long hair and a beard and an earring. He didn’t look anything like he looked when he left. He looked like everybody that I had seen at the Atlanta Pop Festival. This was a total different look but I thought it was cool. Everyone in Austin was that way.”

Hippies hurled insults at Merle Haggard for his composition celebrating middle American values, “Okie from Muskogee,” not knowing the song was actually a parody and that Merle was a political liberal who enjoyed smoking pot as much as they did. In Austin, folks like Merle didn’t have to hide it. Willie sure didn’t. He signaled to the hippies he belonged by the clothes he wore, the facial hair he grew, and his open embrace of illicit drugs.

Lana saw what was happening. “I kept thinking, ‘They’re catching up. This is it. Get ready.’”

In November 1972, Townsend Miller reported in the
Austin American-Statesman
that Willie was enjoying chart success as the songwriter of Waylon’s hit single “Pretend I Never Happened” and as the performer of the single “Mountain Dew” b/w “Phases and Stages.” He was the toast of the town, the new hot act at the Armadillo and enough of an insider to play a private gig for UT football coach Royal, Coach’s pal Ford dealer Bill McMorris, and the entire University of Texas Longhorn football team. Willie and Coach had become best friends, playing golf, pitching washers, and eating Mexican food together at least three times a week.