Willie Nelson (29 page)

That evening, the Armadillo World Headquarters staff hastily put together a Thanksgiving jam with Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh from the Grateful Dead, Leon Russell, and Doug Sahm. The jam turned out to be mostly semicountry noodling, as Jerry Garcia stuck to pedal steel guitar and let Doug Sahm play guitar and lead the ensemble, but it marked another watershed of bringing together music people from different realms. And Willie was paying attention.

L
EON
invited Willie and Connie to Tulsa for a long weekend, where they stayed in his home and hung out in Leon’s tricked-out recording studio.

Waylon had taught Willie how to fight for what he wanted. Leon showed Willie how to build his own music empire. Willie was clearly in awe. Leon had tapped into the kind of audience that frequented the Armadillo World Headquarters long before Willie had, and he knew how to rock the crowd. Other than covering the Beatles back in the 1960s, Willie had paid little attention to rock and roll. Leon changed his way of thinking. Okies, for all practical purposes, were like Texans, only they lived on the north side of the Red River. The red-brick streets of Tulsa, where Bob Wills achieved his greatest success, could have easily been mistaken for the red-brick streets of Fort Worth, where Bob Wills began.

Willie’s fluid yet efficient approach to performing and recording was pretty much the same as the way Leon looked at his craft and profession. The difference was that Willie played music he’d grown up with. He sounded like where he came from.

Jerry Wexler recognized that distinction. He’d built a career discovering artists like Willie. Gerald Wexler was a record producer and executive at Atlantic Records, the storied rhythm and blues and pop label. A native New Yorker, he was the son of Polish immigrants with a twist—his mother hung out in largely African American Harlem and wrote for the
Daily Worker,
published by the Communist Party USA. He came into the music business as a writer for the trade journal
Billboard
and developed a reputation for having an ear for original sound.

As a talent scout and producer for Atlantic, a small independent label based in New York, Wexler produced a phenomenal string of hit records—Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman,” which changed the course of modern R&B upon its release in 1954; Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)” and “Respect,” which defined soul music in the mid-1960s; Wilson Pickett’s searing “In the Midnight Hour”; as well as hits on Chuck Willis, Dusty Springfield, Professor Longhair, the Drifters, and Solomon Burke, to name a few. He had enough clout to persuade Ahmet and Neshui Ertegun, the brothers who owned the company, to let him start a country division in Nashville in 1972. He may have been a New York Jew, but Jerry was all about the South. The Erteguns didn’t know much about country music, but they gave Jerry the green light based on his track record.

“There wasn’t a living ass at Atlantic Records that knew country music or was interested in it,” Jerry said. “They wouldn’t know George Jones from Hank Jones. But I’d always been interested in country music. I turned on Paul Ackerman, my editor at
Billboard
and an inductee of the Country Music Hall of Fame, to country music when I gave him seven LPs released by RCA Victor on Jimmie Rodgers.”

Nashville was close enough to Wexler’s beloved Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where he had recorded many of Atlantic’s biggest R&B hits, and not that far from Memphis, the site of other historic sessions involving Wexler. A country division would complement Wexler’s recent purchase of the recording contract of another Texas character, named Doug Sahm, who’d generated some chart action in the mid-1960s with two Tex-Mex pop hits, “She’s About a Mover” and “Mendocino,” and rode the psychedelic wave in San Francisco during the Summer of Love before returning to Texas and settling in Austin. Jerry Wexler knew Doug Sahm was really a country boy at heart—the San Antonio native was a child prodigy on steel guitar and was once photographed with his instrument, sitting in the lap of Hank Williams.

Doug Sahm was one of the keys to making Wexler’s country concept for Atlantic work. He was an outsider with an equal appreciation of roots music and pop hits. Willie Nelson became the other key, an insider and an outsider at the same time. Willie knew how to put together a great song. He had been given little credit for his ability to perform great music and yet had the same kind of regional audience and Austin sensibility as Sir Doug did. So what if the Atlantic country division had a Nashville mailing address? Wexler was really gambling that the Austin sound was the next big thing.

Rick Sanjek, Atlantic Nashville’s head of A&R, had taken Jerry Wexler to Harlan Howard’s house, where he was having his annual pickers’ party during the 1972 Country Music Association Awards week. “Ray Price, Conway Twitty, I can’t remember who all was there,” Wexler said. “But there’s Willie with his Martin, Scotch tape fluttering off the strings, an earring, and a pigtail down to his butt, without a contract. He was in bad order with the Nashville establishment because he had the pigtail and was rolling fat ones with the
yerba buena.
” Wexler, who had a longtime appreciation of the
yerba
himself, was a willing listener when Willie proceeded to sing an album’s worth of songs beginning with “Bloody Mary Morning.” The songs were part of another concept he’d put together about a marital breakup told by the man on one side and the woman on the other.

After Willie finished singing, the little bearded man sauntered up to introduce himself. “I’m Jerry Wexler,” he said to Willie. “I’m starting a country division at Atlantic. I’d love to have the album you just sang. I’ve been looking for you a long time.” Wexler’s ear for distinctive sounds and voices picked up on something about Willie; Willie was ready for Jerry Wexler.

So was Neil Reshen, another new person in Willie’s life. At the recommendation of Waylon Jennings and Waylon’s drummer and right-hand man Richie Albright, Willie had hired Neil Reshen as his business manager. “Richie told me about him,” Willie said. “I asked Waylon about him. He said I needed a Maddog Jew, so I said okay.”

Both men agreed that having a pitbull to fend off the wolves would help them fight for what they wanted. Waylon had been fighting RCA for artistic control, and Neil was the right man to get it. He represented himself as a manager after briefly working as business manager of
Creem,
the irreverent rock music magazine published out of suburban Detroit. “We manage the unmanageable” was his motto, according to music writer Ed Ward, a
Creem
contributor. “At one point, he’d paid to have his open-heart surgery videotaped, a very expensive proposition at the time, ‘to prove that I have a fuckin’ heart,’” Ward later wrote.

Reshen’s first music entertainment client was the jazz trumpet player Miles Davis, a notoriously difficult artist but a very successful one. Neil found his second client, Waylon Jennings, bass ackwards. “There was a Jersey radio station I listened to as a kid that had a show called
Hometown Frolic
that played an hour of country songs every day,” Neil explained in his thick New York accent. “I was fascinated by country. I remember the day they broke into the program to say Hank Williams died. When I got into the business, I went to the Taft Hotel one night because Waylon Jennings was playing there. I talked to him, but he said, ‘I don’t really need a manager, and I don’t need a New York manager, and I probably don’t need a Jewish manager.’ But I stayed on him and went to see him in Nashville when he was sick with hepatitis [in 1972]. RCA was fucking him over. So he let me represent him. I proceeded to get into an argument with Jerry Bradley, who was taking over from Chet Atkins, about recording at RCA. Waylon wanted to record where he wanted to record, not where he had to record.”

Reshen stayed in Bradley’s face and in Chet Atkins’s face. His real aim was to get Waylon off RCA and onto Columbia Records in New York, where he already had a relationship with label chief Clive Davis, but RCA let Waylon and his fourth wife, Jessi Colter, have their own custom label, WGJ. Waylon started producing himself at Chips Moman’s studio in the back of Waylon’s office. The result was an unprecedented string of hit singles and albums.

By getting RCA to agree to let Waylon do his music on his terms, Neil Reshen changed the art of the deal in Nashville, effectively breaking the feudal system where the label owned the artist, and the studio and the producer controlled the creative process. “Waylon’s got a better deal than I do,” Chet Atkins complained to Neil. “I don’t know if I like that.” The manager was not sympathetic. “RCA forgot that they were a record company,” he said. “They thought that they were a brick-and-mortar company that was going to make money on renting out their space to a captive audience. Even if you were good, you hated going into that studio. I kept saying to them that if Waylon could sell a million records, that would beat the income from all the sessions you’re going to do in the next two years. They didn’t believe me until they saw the money come in.”

Willie was introduced to Neil Reshen by Waylon at the Nashville airport. Willie needed help with a tax audit. After resolving the situation, Neil offered to negotiate a more generous deal when Willie’s contract with RCA expired.

Willie was open to the proposition.

“Neil really upset Nashville because they weren’t used to having to deal with people from out of town,” Willie said. “It was fun. They had so many buttons he could push. It opened their eyes to what was really going on, whether they wanted to be a part of it or just let it happen in the back door. They might as well jump in and get some money. Those guys from New York knew how to get it.”

Willie had been locked into a contract that amounted to indentured servitude. The artist received 4½ percent of 90 percent of sales minus their recording costs and promotional budget, an arrangement that put Willie deeper in the red each time he made an album. Chet Atkins, Felton Jarvis, and Jerry Bradley all tried to produce hits on Willie, believing he had talent. But they were all so locked into a formula that drowned out his voice in the wash of strings and the soothing vocal choruses that defined the Nashville Sound that they were clueless.

“Chet liked me,” Willie said. “He liked my writing, my singing. He didn’t care that much for my guitar playing, but at that point, I didn’t either. But whatever happened in Nashville, no matter how much I liked it, no matter how much Chet liked it, if it got to New York, when it would come time to promote and spend money, if it came out of Nashville, it didn’t get the the budget. They wanted to get the same treatment from New York as the New Yorkers were getting, but that didn’t ever happen really.”

Three of his albums,
Country Willie—His Own Songs, Make Way for Willie,
and
The Party’s Over,
made it to the number 9 position on
Billboard
’s country album chart, but that had been five years ago. No single RCA release ever matched what he’d done at Liberty Records. His singles and albums weren’t making a noise anywhere but in Texas.

Neil Reshen and Jerry Wexler hammered out a deal for Willie to record for Atlantic Records that involved relatively little money (the advance was well under $100,000) and loads of creative freedom accompanied by promises of promotion. From a New York perspective, it was no great shakes. But compared with a Nashville boilerplate, Willie’s Atlantic agreement was revolutionary.

Atlantic, like many other medium-size labels flush with cash, such as Warner Brothers, ABC, and Elektra, wanted to get in on the Nashville action in anticipation of a country music growth spurt. Wexler made the hires, including recruitment of Russ Sanjek to run the Nashville office. Sanjek in turn let his son, Rick, run A&R. Russ Sanjek had done some huge favors for Jerry Wexler, and Jerry owed him. The Sanjeks quickly built a roster around country talent David Rogers, who had the first album released under the Atlantic Nashville imprint, Texas honky-tonker and old Willie running buddy Darrell McCall, Henson Cargill, Terry Stafford, Marty Brown, Johnny Paycheck’s front man Don Adams, Wynn Stewart, and Bobby Austin. Willie Nelson and Doug Sahm were the wild cards.

The first week of February 1973, Willie rounded up Bee Spears, Jimmy Day, Paul English, and his sister, Bobbie, and went to New York City. Over the course of a single week, under the guidance of Atlantic producer Arif Mardin, they would record two albums—a gospel album that testified to Willie’s faith, and a secular album of his latest batch of songs, along with a few choice covers.

The gospel album,
The Troublemaker,
included selections that had been constants in Willie’s life, such as “Uncloudy Day,” “Precious Memories,” “Whispering Hope,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and a new song called “The Troublemaker” about a spiritual man whose “hair was much too long” and his motley group of friends who had “nothing but rebellion on their minds” going “from town to town, stirring up the young folks, ’til they’re nothing but a disrespectful mob.”

Just as Wexler had loaded up Doug’s album
Doug Sahm and Band
with such “friends” as Bob Dylan, Dr. John, Garth Hudson, and Rick Danko, Wexler and Mardin embellished Willie’s sessions with Doug Sahm, his keyboard sidekick Augie Meyers, guitar virtuosos David Bromberg, Steve Burgh, and Al Bruno, pianist Jeff Gutcheon, fiddlers Johnny Gimble and J. R. Chatwell, singers Dee Moeller and Sammi Smith, Waylon, Jessi Colter, and Larry Gatlin, along with the Memphis Horns brass section. Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, Leon Russell, and George Jones were all rumored additions but didn’t show.

Willie brought along Sister Bobbie to play piano on the gospel album. If anyone knew spirituals like he did, she was the one. The session marked the first time Bobbie took a ride on an airplane. “I was playing piano at Lakeway and at another club, called Paper Tiger,” she said. “So I hired people to take my place, other pianists who would help me keep my job until I got back.” She didn’t want to lose her day job. “The piano bar was like a paid practice session for me,” she said. “I had all this music, all this knowledge, and was learning new music, the things you think the audience would like. Different crowds wanted different things. It was a learning experience, just like working at Hammond organ, where I had access to all the sheet music you could ever want, like liturgical music that I had grown up with, different from the music I’d learned in beer joints.”