Willie Nelson (32 page)

Marc Benno and the Nightcrawlers had to be shoved off the stage so Willie could close out the picnic. “When we came on, we were so into playing that we could not be controlled,” admitted Marc. “I don’t know how long we were playing. We had a ride going and Stevie’s burning. But the power went off. The lights went out, everything went dead. I heard Willie was the one who personally pulled the power plug.”

It was ten p.m.

“You guys don’t know when to quit,” one cowboy onstage informed Doyle Bramhall as he reared back to punch him out. Doyle responded with a swing of his own, a full Budweiser can clutched in his fist. The beer can exploded on contact. “He proceeded to beat the shit out of that cowboy,” Marc Benno related. The Nightcrawlers left the stage with their heads held high, their testosterone raging, the blues cat having whipped the yahoo, at least this time.

The Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic wound down at two a.m. on July 5, with Willie Nelson and Leon Russell commanding the stage. It was a triumphant moment, with Leon working the crowd like a holy-roller preacher and Willie staying with him. The aftermath was not a pretty one. Ticket receipts that actually made it to the site covered production costs. Otherwise, no one knew for sure how much was taken in and how much was skimmed off along the way.

“Randy and I met with Willie afterwards and gave him the financial report,” said Mike Tolleson, who was in charge of the accounting. “We had just enough money to pay all performers the allotted amount, production costs as budgeted, and a small fee for the Armadillo production staff. But there was no money left over to pay Willie. He was not too happy about that, but we also knew that the money from Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston was in somebody’s pocket close to Willie.”

Lana Nelson, Willie’s eldest daughter, saw the Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic as the somewhat twisted realization of what she’d witnessed four years before at the Atlanta Pop Festival. “I didn’t see Dad as a country player and Grand Ole Opry star. That was what he had to do to get out there, but I knew there wasn’t a slot for him. You can’t put him in one slot. He wore the Grand Ole Opry hat just to get his music out. At the picnic, I saw another hat. It was Atlanta Pop all over again, but here.”

Her dad gave all the credit to Leon: “Leon had as much to do with making that picnic a success as anything. He brought in a whole different crowd, the rock ’n’ roll crowd. It’s something that it needed. It’s something everybody wanted. It was all about everybody coming together to listen to music—country, rock, blues, gospel, jazz—everything.”

D
ESPITE
some heated arguments at the picnic, Willie’s business collaboration with the Armadillo World Headquarters continued with another promotion. The Armadillo Country Music Revue was an ambitious mini-tour road show starring Willie and Michael Murphey that would travel to San Antonio, Dallas, Midland, Corpus Christi, and Amarillo. Willie Nelson and Michael Murphey were a can’t-miss combination in Austin, as far as the tour organizers at the Armadillo World Headquarters were concerned. Putting them together on the same bill would spread the fever throughout the rest of the state. Only the rest of Texas hadn’t gotten the word yet. Advance ticket sales were nonexistent in every city and those few who did show up came largely to sing along to “I Just Want to Be a Cosmic Cowboy.”

“Willie was tough as shit, calm, and quickly resigned to the tiny audiences,” Eddie Wilson said. It wasn’t the first time Willie had been in a situation like this. But Michael Murphey was devastated. By the time the tour concluded back in Austin, he was too sick to perform at the homecoming show at the Armadillo, and Jerry Jeff Walker filled in for him in front of a sold-out house.

M
URPHEY
got over his disappointment and agreed to do one more Armadillo Country Music Revue show with Willie at the Armadillo—one that would be videotaped and broadcast on television. Music on television was a relatively new concept. Films from the 1950s such as
The Girl Can’t Help It
and
Rock, Baby, Rock It
featured performances by rock and roll acts, and Elvis and English bands from the 1960s like the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five starred in movies as themselves. But except for a handful of concert films such as
The T.A.M.I. Show
and pay-per-view live concerts by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the 1960s, music concerts on film or television didn’t have much mass appeal.

But by 1973, the response to the films
Woodstock, Sympathy for the Devil,
and
The Concert for Bangladesh
and television programs such as NBC’s
Midnight Special
made music on video something to be taken seriously. Austin embraced the idea wholeheartedly. Concerts at the Armadillo World Headquarters were being videotaped by a visionary crew from Taylorvision in the nearby small town of Taylor, Leon Russell’s Sheltervision was videotaping music in clubs all over town, and Austin’s city government had funded a community access television channel and was offering video equipment and free training to anyone who asked.

The Armadillo Country Music Revue, starring Willie Nelson and Michael Murphey, along with Billy Joe Shaver, Greezy Wheels, D. K. Little, and Diamond Rio, was broadcast live late in 1973 on KLRN-TV, the San Antonio and Austin Public Broadcasting System affiliate, with radio stations in both cities simulcasting the concert.

“We saw this as a pilot for a series of shows [taped at the Armadillo that] we were trying to get off the ground,” explained the Armadillo’s Mike Tolleson, who coordinated the video shoot. “I was searching out every bit of video equipment in town and found that KLRN had a mobile video van. So I talked Bill Arhos into taping a show at the Armadillo for a TV/radio simulcast. We put the talent and show together, KLRN provided the TV crew and truck, then edited it and aired it. The director/producer of the show was Bruce Scafe. Bill was executive producer role on his end and I was on our end.” Ratings were negligible. The audience for a locally televised music concert was out in the clubs instead of at home watching television.

But the TV concert did get Bill Arhos $13,000 in funding to further his idea of a music concert television series based in Austin. Another pilot would be videotaped at the television station’s new state-of-the-art Studio 6-A on the campus of the University of Texas, a setting that made more sense, since the lighting and sound could be controlled. But Arhos stuck with the best talent the Armadillo Country Music Revue had to offer—Willie Nelson—along with singer B. W. Stevenson, who would be edited out of the pilot due to technical glitches and a small turnout for his taping. Arhos described Willie’s performance as so “seamless,” it required only three edits. The pilot birthed
Austin City Limits,
the longest-running music program on television. The Armadillo’s people quickly peeled away. “I saw this as a sterile version of what we thought should happen at the Armadillo,” Mike Tolleson said. “But KLRN had the money and gear and we did not. Bill called me to talk about talent for their pilot and first season of shows. We tried to negotiate a deal whereby we would be consultants regarding talent, but it didn’t work out past the pilot, since we felt so proprietary about the whole concept and we asked for too much participation.”

The fragile Willie-Armadillo alliance broke up for good when Willie came around to book another Armadillo gig following the TV taping. Bobby Hedderman, who was still steamed about how he and the Armadillo staff were treated by some of Willie’s people at the Fourth of July Picnic, objected. “I’d love to have you do a show, but you have got to control your friends,” he said. “I can’t have them pushing around the staff and packing heat in the building.” As far as the ’Dillo crowd was concerned, nothing remotely close to good vibrations came from wild men on dope brandishing pistols.

Willie shot a glare at Bobby and smiled at the other Armadillo people in the room. “They don’t all carry guns,” he said matter-of-factly, conveniently ignoring the fact he had carried a .357 magnum himself until a Dallas cop talked him out of it. Bobby informed Willie that the Armadillo was not a saloon and that weapons weren’t welcome in a place built on hippie ideals—Willie needed to put the brakes on his boys. Willie said he couldn’t be responsible for all his people’s actions. Mike Tolleson and Carlotta Pankratz, the Armadillo staffers who’d brought Willie into the office, counseled Bobby to be a little more understanding of Willie and his background. After all, he was bringing big crowds to the Armadillo. As Willie departed, he told Bobby to call Neil Reshen on Monday to work out the details for his next gig.

When Bobby called Neil on Monday, he got an earful. “Willie says, ‘Fuck you,’” Neil snarled over the phone. “If his friends aren’t good enough for you, then neither is he.”

“Well, he’s probably right,” Bobby replied, relieved he wouldn’t have to deal with that bunch again, no matter how much it cost the Armadillo.

A week after the breakup, Townsend Miller reported in the
Austin American-Statesman
that Willie was looking to open a club of his own with Leon Russell.

O
CTOBER
was traditionally the month for the automotive industry’s unveiling of Detroit’s latest models for the coming year at car dealerships across the nation. Every new-car dealer staged promotions to pull in prospective buyers. Austin’s Bill McMorris was no different. He hired Willie Nelson and band to play on a flatbed trailer at his Ford dealership downtown on West 6th Street at the corner of Wood Street to show off the new 1974 models.

Most of the folks who wandered in were more interested in the free hot dogs and Dr Peppers and the new LTDs, Mustangs, Capris, Broncos, Fairlanes, Mavericks, Falcons, and F-100 pickups than they were in Willie. He ran through his usual set, getting a few claps of recognition when he played the triad of his early songwriting hits and sang a few songs familiar to Texas country fans, like “Mr. Record Man” and “The Party’s Over” and some material from
Shotgun Willie.
But when the band got to “Bloody Mary Morning,” a song that Willie had recorded as a single for RCA and would record again soon as part of his
Phases and Stages
song cycle, people couldn’t help but pay attention.

The song had all the trappings of a country and western hoedown, upbeat and danceable with lyrics celebrating booze for breakfast after partying all night. But when it came time for the instrumental break so the musicians could play their improvised leads, the going got weird. As if on cue, the whole band launched into a jam, the music shifting organically into a fluid flow that recalled the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers Band. With the bass and drums pushing the rhythm, the playing stretched out and intensified over the next fifteen minutes while Willie and band demonstrated that country music pickers could play just as far-out as any rock and rollers. They fed off the small crowd who had bunched around the flatbed trailer, cheering them on. The new Fords could wait.

A
WEEK
later, the movers and shakers of the country music industry in Nashville got the same message loud and clear, times two, at the annual Disc Jockey Convention in October 1973. Neil Reshen booked a special show at Nashville’s Sheraton Hotel starring his two country clients. “They did these breakfast shows during the convention,” Neil Reshen recounted, “but none of my people were awake at that hour unless they were still up from the night before. So we rented the Sheraton. I put Sammi Smith and Bobby Bare and a whole bunch of other people on the bill, and Willie and Waylon kept playing all night. It was a real changing of the guard.” This was no polite thank-you-and-play-your-hit-single-and-leave affair. These were two greasy, long-haired wildcats out of control as Waylon and Willie tried to one-up each other, playing louder, longer, and more hard-charging. No rock concert that had passed through Nashville had had this kind of sweaty intensity. At the Disc Jockey Convention, no less.

“It’s not a secret that a lot of people view Texas as a lot more friendly than Tennessee,” explained Kinky Friedman, the self-proclaimed singing Texas Jewboy and new Willie acolyte, to the
Nashville Tennessean.
“The music industry in Nashville is still based on a repressive establishment system. There are some people who want to be outsiders.”

Music Row was on notice: The Outlaws, true music rebels faithful to the tenets laid down by Hank Williams and Bob Wills and Jimmie Rodgers, were a force to be reckoned with. Waylon lived up to his reputation as a contrarian by blowing off his greaser “country longhair” pompadour—a look that blared “outlaw”—for a beard and a fluffy, shampooed Beatle bob that conveyed the hipness of a boutique shop owner in suburbia (at least Jessi Colter liked it). But it was just a look. His sound was greasier than ever, due in no small part to the addition of two of Willie’s boys to his band.

Bee Spears had left Willie’s band to work for Waylon for the money and the chance to play more rock and roll. Willie went without a bass player for a stretch before hiring Larry Patton from Johnny Bush and the Bandoleros as a fill-in, then Jackie Deaton, another San Antonio four-stringer. He eventually enticed Chris Ethridge, a bass player from Mississippi who had been part of the storied California country-rock band the Flying Burrito Brothers.

Mickey Raphael had joined Bee Spears in Waylon’s band for a couple months until his old boss called.

“Didn’t you used to work for me?” Willie asked Mickey.

Mickey returned to Texas the next day. Bee Spears was not far behind.

W
ILLIE’S
conquest of Texas worked on the domino theory. Once Austin fell, Houston was the next city to go cosmic cowboy, even though it was a tougher sell. Individuals who claimed to be affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan had bombed the transmitter of KPFT-FM, the left-leaning listener-supported radio station in Houston—twice—so Willie headlined a fund-raiser at Hofheinz Arena on the campus of the University of Houston to keep the station on the air. He was joined by a picnic-worthy lineup of Michael Murphey, Jerry Jeff Walker, Asleep at the Wheel, Kinky Friedman, and Sir Doug Sahm with Freda and the Firedogs, who stole the arena show by mixing up hillbilly, rock, and Tex-Mex.