Willie Nelson (28 page)

The exotic, very local blend of music and culture taking shape was growing sufficiently significant for an Austin radio station to switch to a progressive country music format. Willie had accompanied Eddie Wilson and a local radio announcer named Joe Gracey to urge the owners of KOKE-FM in Austin to devote at least a portion of their broadcast day to a mix of country and rock and roll recording artists, including Willie, Waylon, and Johnny Cash, local stars like Doug Sahm, Jerry Jeff Walker, Michael Murphey, Willis Alan Ramsey, and B. W. Stevenson, along with the Rolling Stones, Creedence Clear-water Revival, the Band, the Byrds, Bob Dylan, and the Allman Brothers. “I was all over the concept of Texas artists on a radio station, and I’d loved the Byrds’
Sweetheart of the Rodeo,
” Joe Gracey said. “So the idea was very obvious to me, to do country music in a new Texas, young, hip way. And Willie was the greatest Texas country artist there was.”

The owners initially resisted, but they eventually came around, allotting nine a.m. to midnight for the format, following the Spanish-language morning show hosted by José Jaime Garcia. It was like Willie had his own station. Joe Gracey, who also wrote the weekly rock music column for the
Austin American-Statesman,
did his part by describing Willie in one of his columns as “the Dylan of country music” and wearing out the grooves of
Shotgun Willie
on KRMH-FM, the local album rock station he worked for before joining the KOKE-FM staff as Ol’ Blue Eyes.

“Willie did a lot for KOKE,” Joe Gracey said, citing the jingle he recorded for the station to the tune of “Mr. Record Man” (“I was driving down the highway with KOKE-FM turned on”). “He was always up at the station,” Gracey said. “He’d play the New Year’s Eve shows that were done live in the studio and drop in or call in on a whim. You could tell he was a radio guy. He realized that some DJs do it for the love of music and the love of performers. He really paid us back for anything we did for him.”

Radio was one means of shoring up support. Beer was another.

“After I got to Austin in 1973 to work for Lone Star Beer, Willie called me,” said Jerry Retzloff, a native of San Antonio, where Lone Star Beer was brewed. “You’ve got a problem with your beer because the kids won’t drink what their father drinks,” Willie told him. “That’s what’s happening with me with the music. They’re not listening to my music because I’m country and their mothers and fathers listened to country. So I’m doing a little crossover deal. They won’t drink your beer because Mom and Pop drink your beer and they won’t listen to my music for the same reason.”

It made sense to Jerry. “Willie wanted to be associated with beer because he wanted his audience to be beer,” he said. “He didn’t want his crowd to get drunk, and that’s why he liked the Armadillo so much, because when you smoke dope and you drink beer and you reach that moderate level, you pass out if you do too much. You were really the best customer.”

Jerry and Willie worked out a handshake deal. “Lone Star wouldn’t pay him for anything, but I would buy ads to help promote concerts—make posters and do stuff for him like that,” Jerry said. “He’d drink Lone Star, which he already did anyway. Heineken had started giving the New Riders of the Purple Sage free beer backstage and they started carrying it onstage, and Heineken started getting a movement going. I convinced the people at Lone Star to do the music thing as well.”

Sales of Lone Star Beer in Austin increased 46 percent in one year. The brass in San Antonio listened when a few folks at the Armadillo, including Eddie Wilson and Woody Roberts, spun off an ad agency called TYNA-TACI (shorthand for Thought You’d Never Ask, The Austin Consultants Inc.) and pitched an ad campaign to Lone Star revolving around their traditional longneck bottles, which were losing favor among consumers, who preferred throwaway cans and throwaway bottles.

As a beer man, Jerry Retzloff understood the difference drinking beer out of longnecks made. “There was a taste factor,” he said. “When you put a lid on a can, you shoot CO2 across it and then you put the lid on, and what that does is put excess CO2 in the can. The bottle is just the opposite. It lets CO2 impure air out. I learned this from real beer people.”

The “Long Live Longnecks” campaign began with Kinky Friedman and the Lost Gonzo Band singing the praises of Lone Star in radio commercials. The Armadillo’s chief poster artist, Jim Franklin, developed a series of posters incorporating Armadillos and Lone Star longnecks. T-shirts bearing the Lone Star Beer logo were more sought after than those with the Zig-Zag rolling papers logo. Within a year, more Lone Star was being sold at the Armadillo World Headquarters than in any other retail outlet except the Astrodome in Houston.

Meanwhile, Austin-style progressive country developed its own sense of fashion—T-shirts, blue jeans, and cutoff blue jeans shorts in the summer, duck-billed gimme caps (as in “Gimme a cap”) for men, and scarves and bandannas for women. Manny Gammage, the famous Austin hatter whose Texas Hatters shop was on South Lamar Boulevard, got into the act by developing an upscale cosmic cowboy look with his High Roller hat worn by Willie Nelson, disc jockey Sammy Allred, and Ronnie Van Zant, the lead singer for the southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. Fancy-ass, pointy-toed cowboy boots became the favored manly footwear among hippies who could afford it. Charlie Dunn, the boot maker for Capitol Saddlery near the state capitol, became “the man to see” for handmade custom cowboy boots after Jerry Jeff Walker lionized him in a song.

A
USTIN
was meant to be. Willie didn’t need to consult Astara or reread Gibran to feel the vibes. Sister Bobbie was finding steady work at Lakeway, a posh country club community on the shores of Lake Travis, and several of her old piano bar haunts. For the first time since Fort Worth, Bobbie and Hughty were both enjoying careers in music in the same town.

Even if he failed—and he didn’t think like that or put up with those who believed failing was an option—he could at least afford to. The living was easy in Austin. It didn’t take much to get by. Garage apartments in Hyde Park and Old West Austin rented for well under $100 a month. A six-pack of Texas Pride went for ninety-nine cents. An ounce of good commercial marijuana sold for $10. LSD and peyote were plentiful (it was a UT-Austin student who first synthesized mescaline from peyote). The weather was warm, the winters mild, and good times were no farther than Barton Springs, Lake Austin, and Lake Travis.

The new culture welded the hedonistic attributes of the hippie lifestyle (drugs and sex, especially) onto the body of a Texas redneck. Real rednecks and hippie rednecks both loved pickups and both liked to drive while drinking, a longneck held between their legs (totally legal in the eyes of Texas law as long they weren’t drunk). Both liked hanging in clubs and hearing music, and both liked getting high and howling at the moon just for the hell of it.

With Paul watching his back, Bee at his side, Jimmy Day reentering the picture, and friends and family all around him, Willie was sitting in the catbird’s seat.

Billy Ray Cooper—B.C.—came up from San Antonio and moved in with Willie and Connie and their brood to split shifts driving the band’s Open Road camper with Jack Fletcher. B.C. quickly discovered that his former career driving ambulances might be a safer line of work.

Jack was behind the wheel of the Open Road on their way back to Lost Valley after a show in Llano in the Hill Country. The road was full of twists and tight curves and the camper had clearly seen better days (“You could stick your finger through the plywood,” B.C. said). Willie and Paul were in the back, playing poker, when Jack suddenly shouted, “Will, the brakes are going! What are we going to do?”

“Deal the cards,” Willie shouted back. Somehow the Open Road limped back home.

B.C. became Willie’s personal driver when Willie bought an old Mercedes sedan from Bill McMorris, the Austin car dealer he met through Darrell K Royal. McMorris also got the band a Blazer to haul their gear, which Bee Spears drove.

“If we could pay expenses and everybody got a hundred bucks after a gig, everything was fine,” B.C. said.

Tim O’Connor signed on shortly after he met Willie one night at the door of Castle Creek, the Austin club he was comanaging. “He walked in and asked for me and introduced himself. I said, ‘Sir, I know who you are.’ He said he wanted to play my joint, so I asked him what he was drinking,” Tim said. They went back to a little office couch, where there was a cooler with some beer “and we became friends right there.” Over the course of a few weeks, Tim informed his partner, Doug Moyes, “You can have the club. I’m going with Willie.”

Tim knew enough about the club and concert business to think he could help Willie upgrade his show. He began to travel with the band and demand better sound and better treatment wherever Willie was booked. At Gilley’s in Pasadena near Houston, a regular stop for Willie for years, Tim got crosswise with Sherwood Cryer, who owned the massive honky-tonk, when he informed Sherwood that Willie was canceling unless a decent sound system was brought in to accommodate Willie’s new and improved show, and better security was provided to protect the band from the often rowdy crowd. “That was not something you said to Sherwood, especially not at Gilley’s, and you sure as hell didn’t do it when they didn’t know who the hell you are and had never seen you before,” explained Tim. “Plus, Willie wanted the gig.” Sherwood provided better sound but security was nonexistent. “Cowboys kept walking up on the stage while Willie was playing, which didn’t bother Willie but really bothered me,” said Tim, who bitched about it loudly to anyone within range of his voice. It was raining as Willie and Tim walked out to Willie’s red Mercedes for the drive home. Tim was carrying Willie’s guitar and still complaining about the sound and the cowboys climbing onstage. “Goddamnit, what do you want me to be?” he fumed to Willie after Willie treated it like no big deal. “Willie turned around and his eyes turned black, the way they do when he is angry,” Tim recalled. “He said, ‘I’ll tell you three things I never want you to be—cold, wet, or hungry.’”

There was dead silence on the drive back to Austin. As they got out of the vehicle, Tim told Willie, “I’ll follow you to hell. I’ll carry your guitar case to wherever.”

Willie called Tim the next day. “You did a really good job,” he told him, “but I think you are a little bit ahead of us. Why don’t you lay back a little until we get caught up?” It was a polite firing, but Tim never went away.

L
EON
Russell entered Willie’s life after Connie Nelson had gone to the town of Big Spring, in West Texas to pick up a brand-new Pontiac Grand Prix that a car dealer loaned Willie. The dearth of radio stations in West Texas led her to The Record Shop, a storied music retailer in Big Spring, to buy some music for the drive back to Austin. Leon’s third solo album,
Carney,
was playing on the sound system when she walked in. She bought an eight-track tape of the album and played it over and over during the six-hour drive, and played it again for Willie. He knew who Leon Russell was. Daughter Susie had turned him on to
Mad Dogs and Englishmen,
the album and film documentary of the music revue that starred Joe Cocker and featured Leon, who used the revue as the launching pad for his own rock stardom.

Willie and Connie drove to Houston to see him in concert and Willie was blown away. Leon’s songs, his voice, his musicianship, and most of all his presence were unlike anyone he’d heard. Leon was an Okie through and through with a pronounced drawl and a definite twang to his sound; he had more than a little Southern gospel preacher man in his presentation. But he was a rocker, not a hillbilly. Leon’s piano had been a signature on such classics as Jan and Dean’s “Surf City,” Bobby Boris Pickett’s “Monster Mash,” and the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” and “Pet Sounds.” As Russell Bridges, he helped arrange some of Willie’s first tracks for Liberty Records in the early 1960s and later played behind Frank Sinatra and the Rolling Stones. Now he was electrifying crowds and selling records under his own name.

Willie could relate. Leon had been run through the business wringer like Willie had, only in Los Angeles instead of Nashville, and had returned to Tulsa, Oklahoma, just like Willie had come back to Texas. But Leon had already created his own musical universe back home with his own musicians, his own recording studios in an old church and at his house, his own custom record label, Shelter Records, the Sheltervision video production company, and his own distinctive sound, all on his terms. Leon had no reason to leave Tulsa except to tour. But he was curious enough about what was going down four hundred miles south in Austin to check it out. People there were buying huge numbers of Shelter Records albums by Freddie King, Willis Alan Ramsey, and Leon Russell.

Willie was introduced to Leon by Jim Franklin, the artist at the Armadillo World Headquarters who elevated the armadillo into a Texas hippie icon. (Both hippies and armadillos were maligned and picked on, as trail boss Eddie Wilson pointed out to Chet Flippo of
Rolling Stone,
the influential rock music magazine published in San Francisco. “Armadillos like to sleep all day and roam at night. They share their homes with others. People think they’re smelly and ugly and they keep their noses in the grass. They’re paranoid. But they’ve got one characteristic that nobody can knock; they survive like a sonuvabitch.”)

Franklin was in Tulsa, painting a mural in Leon’s swimming pool when he heard Willie was booked at the Armadillo. He asked Leon if he’d heard of Willie. “The only thing I know of Willie Nelson is ‘The sun is filled with ice and gives no warmth at all and the sky was never blue and I never cared for you,’” said Leon, quoting from “I Never Cared for You.” “That’s a strange lyric for a country song,” he reckoned.

Leon couldn’t make Willie’s Armadillo debut, but Franklin did go, and Willie told him, “I’d sure like to meet Leon.” Franklin gave him Leon’s private phone number and Willie flew to Albuquerque the next day to watch him perform.

They hit it off. Two weeks later at four a.m., Leon woke up Franklin in Tulsa. “Let’s drive to Austin,” Leon said. “The Grateful Dead are playing there and I’ve never seen them.” After seeing the San Francisco band, the standard-bearers of extended improvisations fueled by psychedelic drugs, perform at the Municipal Auditorium, Jim took Leon across the street to the Armadillo World Headquarters. “I got him settled in with some of the ladies there to spend at least one night on our side of the world,” Franklin said. “The next day we went over to Willie’s apartment on Riverside Drive. Doug Sahm came by and we all sat in Willie’s living room, Doug, Willie, and Leon playing songs for each other. Paul English sat on the couch, which inspired Leon to write ‘You Look Like the Devil.’”