Willie Nelson (30 page)

Willie’s wife, Connie, photographer David Gahr, Neil Reshen’s assistant Sam Uretsky, and
Creem
magazine writer Ed Ward joined the all-star cast singing the chorus to “Shall We Gather at the River?”

Wexler had also invited Chet Flippo from
Rolling Stone.
Chet was impressed.

“I witnessed what I would later recognize as Wexler teaching Willie that he could largely control his own music destiny—that it was in his power to do so if he would dare try to do it,” he later wrote in his
Nashville Skyline
column for
cmt.com
. “Willie’s Outlaw movement, as far as I could tell, began in that New York studio when Wexler completed Willie’s musical training. It was something he would never have heard in a Nashville studio.”

The recording of the second album was sloppy and chaotic, technically and artistically uneven, with horns and strings occasionally bumping up against the musical core of Bee Spears, Paul English, Bobbie Nelson, Jimmy Day, and Willie, although not in a Chet Atkins/Nashville Sound kind of way. The mood was relaxed, helped along by the casual attitude toward smoking weed in the studio, in marked contrast to the house rules at RCA’s Studio B.

In the bathroom of his hotel room between sessions, Willie grabbed a sanitary napkin wrapper and jotted down lyrics for a song about his nickname, earned when he shot at Lana’s husband in defense of Lana back in Ridgetop, Tennessee.

“Shotgun Willie” opened the secular album in a lazy lope that was more blues shuffle than Ray Price shuffle—Willie laconically singing the opening lines, “Shotgun Willie sits around in his underwear / biting on a bullet and pulling out all his hair / Shotgun Willie’s got all of his family here,” with the observation “you can’t make a record if you ain’t got nothing to say” punctuated by a blast of Memphis horns, not the crying moan of pedal steel. Willie plucked out the lead guitar riffs on his gut-string acoustic rather than let a Nashville session picker do it for him. The song was a throwaway in some respects, but Willie liked it and wanted to record it, no matter what its hit potential might be. Jerry Wexler had opened his eyes to what could be. Mr. Record Man was no longer trying to replicate “Crazy” and “Hello Walls.” He was writing what he was thinking, like a singer-songwriter. The times they were a-changing.

The song’s lack of commercial appeal, sealed by Willie’s shout-out to dance hall czar John T. Floore, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan who “sold sheets on the family plan,” was Willie’s creative declaration of independence. (Floore returned the compliment by erecting a permanent sign in front of his country store reading “Willie Nelson Every Sat. Nite.”) More traditional territory was covered with Willie’s version of “Whiskey River,” the honky-tonk anthem penned by his colleague Johnny Bush and highlighted by Sister Bobbie’s barroom piano and Jimmy Day’s steel, and “Sad Songs and Waltzes” and “The Local Memory,” especially the lyrics of “Sad Songs” (“I’d like to get even...with you ’cause you’re leavin’”), which revealed a lot of the real him. The music was more country than what was being played on the radio but somehow different. If there were slips and flubs, they stayed in. During one passage, the pedal steel inexplicably drops out because Jimmy Day had passed out and fallen off his stool.

Doug Sahm made his presence known. His shared respect for Bob Wills and for Western Swing music in general shined through on “Bubbles in My Beer,” where Sahm’s bandmates backed up Willie along with Johnny Gimble and Jimmy Day; on “Stay All Night (Stay a Little Longer),” which was perhaps the best snapshot of Willie’s performing prowess, with Johnny Gimble and J. R. Chatwell on twin fiddles and Arif Mardin playing piano; and on the Western Swing romp of John Philip Sousa’s traditional march “Under the Double Eagle.”

The two Bob Wills covers were the only two tracks on the album with Wexler credited as coproducer. Wexler heard a lot of Bob Wills in both Doug and Willie and had it in his mind to do a
Willie Sings Bob
album. But despite Sahm and Nelson being two of the biggest reasons Austin was generating buzz as a music town, their shared affinity for blues and hard-core country, and their common appreciation of good weed, they ruled separate domains—Sahm played to more of a rock and roll hippie/hipster crowd at Soap Creek Saloon out in the cedar brakes west of Austin, a hundred yards from the hilltop mansion he rented, while Willie was more closely aligned with the country crowd and with singer-songwriter folkies—although they often attracted the same audience.

The stronger bond was between Willie and Leon Russell, who contributed two songs to the New York sessions, though “Me and My Cricket” didn’t make the final cut. Willie closed the secular album with just him and his guitar Trigger doing Leon’s “A Song for You,” a sincere, stripped-down interpretation of the emotional ballad already covered by several pop crooners. Another track that didn’t make
Shotgun Willie
was Floyd Tillman’s “I Gotta Have Something I Ain’t Got,” which Willie belted out in a vocal that careened around a blues shuffle fortified by saxophones, trumpets, and trombones.

After the last track, “Devil in a Sleeping Bag,” was finished, Arif Mardin brought out a bottle of Chateau Bonnet wine. Willie had set a studio record of recording thirty-three tracks in a single week at Atlantic. One of the few lessons learned over Willie’s years of recording for RCA in Nashville was to work fast, since artists typically had three-hour blocks in which to record. Willie might have cultivated a laid-back, laconic image, but he watched the clock. Even with Arif Mardin’s acknowledgment of the feat, Willie didn’t have much time to celebrate. He had a gig back home at Big G’s in Round Rock the very next day.

Willie returned to Texas liking
The Troublemaker
so much, he proposed it as the first Atlantic release. The Atlantic promotion team in Nashville, hungry for hits that could be promoted through radio airplay, nixed the idea. If Willie was the flagship of Atlantic’s country division, he needed a better introduction to the marketplace than church music.

He returned to New York three months later, using the pending release of
Shotgun Willie
as the excuse for Paul, temporary bassist Jackie Deaton, new boy Mickey Raphael on harmonica, and him to blow away the audience during a weeklong engagement at Max’s Kansas City, the punk rock club in New York that Waylon had already electrified. Ian Dove of the
New York Times
observed, “Calling him a country performer is unnecessary straight-jacketing because his range is wide,” and wrote that while he was better known as a songwriter, his singing was “without frill or filigree, very direct and with a lot of heart.”

In Austin,
Shotgun Willie
created a buzz that left Willis Alan Ramsey’s debut, Jerry Jeff Walker’s epic
Viva Terlingua!,
and Michael Murphey’s
Cosmic Cowboy Souvenir
eating dust. The album went into heavy rotation on progressive-country KOKE-FM, on the album rock station KRMH-FM, and on country-rock radio programs that were springing up on the left end of the FM dial across Texas.

Nationally, the album climbed to number 41 on the
Billboard
country album chart, falling well short of the level Willie typically achieved with his RCA recordings. Atlantic radio man Nick Hunter fought with Neil Reshen over releasing the title track as the first single. Nick wanted “Stay All Night” as the first single. Neil took the long view. “If it isn’t a hit, it’s not a hit,” he told Hunter. “I want to establish the name ‘Shotgun Willie.’”

They were both right. The single “Shotgun Willie” peaked on the
Billboard
country chart at number 60, a solid failure. “Stay All Night,” the better single, rose as high as number 22 before stalling. The moniker “Shotgun Willie” lingered for a couple years until a better nickname came along, even though plain ol’ “Willie” was working just fine.

More important, the Family Band, as it was becoming known, was gelling behind him, especially after he added his sister to the show. “Willie had a gig in Houston and said, ‘Why don’t you come with me and play this gig?’” Bobbie recalled. They looked at each other after the Houston show and asked each other the same question: “Why have we not been doing this?”

“Well, we knew why,” Bobbie said with a soft chuckle. “We didn’t have that many jobs and we weren’t famous, so I was still trying to hold down my piano bar jobs. Finally, when we had enough jobs, I gave notice.”

Sister Bobbie fit right in with Willie Nelson and Family and with real family too, marrying Jack Fletcher, Paul English’s character friend from Fort Worth, who was driving and working as a jack-of-all-trades for Willie.

Several months earlier, a Dallas harmonica player named Mickey Raphael had joined up. Mickey Raphael had first encountered Willie Nelson in 1972 at a concert on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas that was being broadcast live on KERA, the local PBS television station.

“Willie was late,” Mickey said. “That old Open Road camper rolled into the back of the venue, and out came Willie and Paul. They had driven from God knows where. Willie was decked in an old straw hat, leather shirt, big Elvis glasses, and Paul was wearing a black cape. I’m thinking, ‘Who are these assholes showing up an hour and a half late?’” But when the two-piece ensemble played, the performance “fucking blew me away,” Mickey said. “So I started taking this shit a little more seriously.”

Weeks later, Mickey got a call from Coach Darrell K Royal, inviting him to a picking session. Coach had heard Mickey play behind B. W. Stevenson and Jerry Jeff Walker in Austin and was sufficiently impressed to invite him to join Willie Nelson and Charley Pride in a Dallas motel room after a football game at the Cotton Bowl.

Mickey managed to hold his own at the picking session, even though he didn’t know squat about country music. “I’d play along with these Hank Williams songs I didn’t know but was starting to learn, trying to follow Willie’s playing,” he said. He was a Jewish hippie city boy from Dallas. Country people, he said, “were rednecks who’d whip my ass.” Still, Willie liked Mickey’s playing. “If you hear we’re in town, come and join us,” he offered.

Willie called Mickey to join him at a fireman’s association benefit in Lancaster, just south of Dallas. Afterwards, he asked him to accompany Paul and him to play Max’s Kansas City in New York. It was baptism by fire. “During a song the first night, Willie turns to me and says, ‘Take it,’” Mickey said of the Max’s gig. “I was like, ‘Take it?’ I was the only one playing—I’m it. ‘
You
take it.’”

Every time Willie scored another booking in Texas, he invited Mickey to come along. “I would drive my own car to the joints and would stay in my car until they got there, because they were bad-ass joints,” Mickey said. “Paul or Willie would walk me in.”

Mickey didn’t know it, but he was filling a void left by Jimmy Day, who had wandered off the reservation again. During a three-night stand at Castle Creek in Austin, Jimmy was so drunk and doped up, he was playing with his volume knob turned up to ten inside the intimate listening room. Willie was nowhere near as wasted as Jimmy but drunk enough to be a whole lot madder. Finally Willie stopped the music in the middle of a song and turned to Jimmy. “Do you see the name on the fucking marquee? It says Willie Nelson, not the fucking Jimmy Day Show! Shut up!” Jimmy hung his head, and his wife, Sheryl, started screaming at Jimmy. During a break, Willie and Jimmy went out in the alley and duked it out. Willie came back. Jimmy didn’t. “The World’s Greatest Steel Guitarist” was no longer part of the Willie Nelson Show. His departure from the band became official when Paul shot Jimmy in the hip after Jimmy’s extended taunting of Paul in an inebriated state.

With Jimmy gone, Mickey’s harmonica added an earthier, rootsy quality to Willie’s sound and quickly became as much of a signature as Jimmy’s steel once was. After a show at Big G’s in Round Rock, Mickey told Willie they were headed places, which led him to wonder aloud how much longer the band would have to play dumps like Big G’s.

“Hopefully a long time,” Willie replied without missing a beat.

J
ODY
Payne joined the Family Band later that year. He had been working in the bands of Merle Haggard and Sammi Smith (to whom he was married at the time) when Willie invited him to add his Kentucky-bred thumb-picking guitar to Willie’s expanding band of gypsies. A child prodigy taught by family friends Ike Everly and Merle Travis and mentored by Charlie Monroe, Bill Monroe’s brother, Jody had solid credentials as a soul man as well as a bluegrass picker, having worked rhythm and blues recording sessions at King Records in Cincinnati and Motown Records in Detroit. A self-described “Telecaster-playing fool,” he showed up at a Texas concert to play second guitar and sing a song or two at Willie’s request. Willie thought Jody could be groomed to be his own front man, just as Willie had groomed Johnny Bush, Ray Price had groomed Willie and Johnny Paycheck and others, and Hank Williams had groomed Ray Price.

Jody was a strong, silent presence onstage. A handsome man with a bigger mane of blond hair than even Michael Murphey, he let his guitar do the talking. “My role was to try and put something down for Willie to walk on [with his guitar], try to lay it down for him and sing a little harmony to support his vocals,” he explained.

Mickey and Jody had hired on despite the band’s feast-or-famine lifestyle. When Willie asked Paul how much Mickey was being paid and Paul replied, “Nothing,” Willie ordered, “Double his salary.” Sister Bobbie Nelson was just thrilled to be playing with her brother.

Despite business manager Neil Reshen’s gruff presence and steamroller attitude, Willie took an immediate shine to Neil’s gopher, a kid named Mark Rothbaum whom he’d met at the Holiday Inn in Nashville when Neil brought him along for a meeting. Mark was a Long Island native who’d played lacrosse at the University of Cincinnati and went to work for Neil at the urging of Neil’s client Miles Davis.

“Miles was playing a date at Central Park in New York City, and my sister was working for the Parks Department,” Mark said. “Through that, I met Miles. He was an affable, funny, endearing man who contradicted the image he was portraying. He could bring a smile to your face. There wasn’t anyone I’d rather hang out with. He took a liking to me and asked Neil Reshen, who managed Miles, to let me work for him. I was a flunky, really.”