Willie Nelson (34 page)

There were plenty of reasons to reassess Atlantic’s Nashville venture. Country may have been changing, but if anything, it was veering away from the roots sounds that appealed to Jerry Wexler. Country was hell-bent on becoming the sound of America’s suburbs, a trend signaled by the March relocation of the Grand Ole Opry from the Ryman Auditorium to a new development on the northeastern fringe of Nashville called Opryland; soon-to-be-disgraced President Richard M. Nixon yo-yoed with Opry star Roy Acuff onstage at the last Ryman show.

Jerry Wexler’s instincts had served him well, but in this case, hanging out with cool musicians and getting high and having a gas without bringing in a Top 10 hit proved a fatal flaw. His attempt at making Atlantic Nashville as much a Texas label as a Tennessee operation had failed. Jerry had flown Austin-by-way-of-Lubbock blue-collar rocker D. K. Little to Los Angeles in an attempt to cut a deal; once the plane landed, D.K. didn’t leave the terminal before catching the next flight home. Jerry had persuaded Ray Wylie Hubbard, whose song “(Up Against the Wall) Redneck Mother” had become the cosmic cowboy national anthem, to record in Muscle Shoals under Wexler’s direction with Bob Johnston producing. But Ray Wylie and His Cowboy Twinkies turned around and left Alabama after one day in the studio with Johnston. Marcia Ball, the singer, pianist, and front person for Freda and the Firedogs, the one band Wexler actually got to do a demo, hesitated signing any deal long enough for Wexler to pull the offer from the table.

“Whenever I ask who I should sign, nobody seems to know,” Jerry complained to
Rolling Stone.
“Is it a mirage down there?”

Austin music people had a built-in distrust of old record pros like Jerry Wexler who made their living dropping in on similar scenes and cherry-picking the best and brightest to shape them into recording stars. Austin musicians were not into making money, or so they postured. In truth, for all the curiosity about Austin, labels weren’t signing up acts because the potential wasn’t there. Jim Dickinson, a Memphis producer and musician, contended Austin music was not so much about art but rather a celebration of amateurism. Jerry Wexler may have been cool for a record man, blowing weed with Willie, Sir Doug, and the Firedogs, and partying as hard as the kids. But without hits, Jerry Wexler and Atlantic Records were nothing. Most start-up labels with sufficient financing worked on a five-to-seven-year plan. Atlantic Nashville lasted a year and a half.

T
WO
months before the axe fell, Jerry Wexler had bankrolled a Willie Nelson live album at the Texas Opry House, Willie’s new performing home in Austin. The crowd who’d crammed into the Texas Opry House asshole-to-elbow was very drunk, very high, and very sweaty, no matter how well the air-conditioning was supposedly working. They packed the big room to see the star of the Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic and to be part of the live album being recorded over the two-night stand on June 29 and 30, 1974. The recording documented Willie Nelson and Family at the top of their game, throwing out great balls of sonic fire into the sea of fans. The band—Paul English, Bee Spears, Mickey Raphael, and Sister Bobbie—augmented by Jimmy Day, back in good graces again, and Johnny Gimble, Mr. Dependable on the fiddle, was tighter than ever. Willie’s voice had matured and lost some of the flat nasal twang of the RCA years, gaining depth and tone. His guitar playing was virtuous. Everyone cooked.

The show opened the same way all Willie shows opened—with five strums of the guitar followed by the plea:

Whisk-key Riv-verrr take my miiiind. Don’t let her mem-ree torture meeeee

Whis-key Riv-verrr don’t run dry. You’re all I got, take care of meeee

The band joined in, with Mickey wailing blues riffs on his harmonica followed by Bobbie plinking out honky-tonk piano straight from the beer joint. Another midtempo blues original, “Me and Paul,” Willie’s tribute to his friend for life, followed, telling the story of a bond formed by hard times on the road. While the song was never regarded as a hit when it appeared on both
Yesterday’s Wine
and
Shotgun Willie,
it was Willie’s way of explaining in less than three minutes what Paul’s friendship meant to him.

His voice, his guitar, Mickey’s harmonica, and Johnny Gimble’s swing fiddling were the hooks to the medley of “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Crazy,” “Night Life,” and “Stay All Night (Stay a Little Longer),” the Bob Wills swing number that was transformed into a rockin’ toe tapper.

He then launched into “Bloody Mary Morning,” expanding the song into an extended jam that ultimately spilled over into “Take Me Back to Tulsa,” another Bob Wills classic that had been covered by Asleep at the Wheel. The breadth of the songs and the band’s feel for them left a strong impression. This was no run-of-the-mill country band. This family could really play.

“The Party’s Over” had become a standard for sports fans across America thanks to Willie’s old Dallas Cowboy buddy, Don Meredith, who after retiring from playing football became one of the three announcers on ABC’s
Monday Night Football,
the highest-rated sports program on television. Whenever the outcome of the game being televised was assured, Dandy Don would sing in his croaking voice “Turn out the lights, the party’s over” to millions of viewers.

Willie altered the opening lines of the old honky-tonk standard “Truck Driving Man” from “Pulled into a roadhouse in Texas” to “Pulled into a whorehouse in Texas” just because he could, endearing him to the young audience in front of him. He was outlaw and proud and they ate it up.

He mixed originals such as “Sister’s Comin’ Home” and “Good Hearted Woman,” which would become a hit duet with Waylon, with classics like “She Thinks I Still Care” and a cover of Leon Russell’s “You Look Like the Devil.”

During the day between the two concerts that were recorded by Atlantic, Willie and Family recorded an improvised instrumental riff they called “Willie’s After Hours.” The jazzy slow blues featured Jimmy Day’s drenched-in-reverb steel out front accompanied by Willie’s cool guitar, which summoned simultaneous visions of Wes Montgomery and Django Reinhardt, and Bobbie’s stellar piano and organ riffs, some so fat and funky on the Hammond B-3, they could’ve been lifted from a Ray Charles recording.

J
ERRY
Wexler had chosen the Texas Opry House to make a live record for good reason. The room was the kind of club Willie had been wanting to open ever since his split from the Armadillo. He quit looking when he met Wallace Selman.

Wally had arrived in Austin a year after Willie did, in 1973. A fast-talking, thick-drawling hustler with an innate appreciation of the con, he came from Crockett, in the Piney Woods of East Texas, and had done well in the restaurant-supply business in Houston, where he met Bronson Evans, who ran a chain of nightclubs called the Abbey Inn located near singles’ apartment complexes. Together, they moved to Austin and opened up a joint in an old carriage shop on 6th Street downtown between San Jacinto and Trinity streets called the River City Inn.

First developed in Houston in 1918, refrigerated air, commonly known as AC, became prevalent in homes, automobiles, businesses, and institutions across the state by the 1960s. But to hippies running the Armadillo on a shoestring budget, air-conditioning was a luxury, which created an opportunity for Wally Selman and his business partners. “We got to thinking, with all the music going on in this town, why don’t we do a place with air-conditioning and tables and chairs where people can sit down and enjoy a mixed drink?”

Austin was primed for a place like that. Voters had just passed an ordinance extending drinking hours from midnight and one a.m. on Saturday to two a.m. nightly. Two years before, Texas had dropped the legal minimum age for drinking alcohol from twenty-one to eighteen.

Dude McCandless, the owner of two large motor inns in Austin and several other choice properties throughout the city, had shown Wally the convention center ballroom of the Terrace Motor Inn just off South Congress Avenue. The Terrace had seen better days since it was built as a luxury motor inn resort in 1957, mainly because highway traffic had shifted to the Interregional Expressway—Interstate 35. But the convention center was big enough and cool enough for Wally to sign a lease with Dude.

Wally and Bronson Evans headed a partnership that included Wallace’s cousin Ricky Spence and a character from Dallas whom Bronson knew named Buddy Wages. Wallace would handle the booking, the PR, and the bands. Bronson would do the books and take care of the bills while continuing to run the River City Inn with his wife. Ricky and Buddy were in charge of the bar, which, unlike the Armadillo, served mixed drinks. The main room, which was filled with long tables like a Texas dance hall, could hold two thousand customers on a good night. A smaller adjacent room could hold six hundred.

The Texas Opry House opened in early 1974 with Doug Sahm, Freda and the Firedogs, Alvin Crow, and free beer, drawing an overflow crowd the first night. “We gave away thirty kegs of beer and sold fifty-five hundred dollars’ worth of liquor,” Wally said. Two weeks later, the Eagles, the country-rock band from Los Angeles that was just beginning to break nationally with their second album and a single called “Tequila Sunrise,” played the room to another sold-out crowd at $5 a ticket. Wally paid the Eagles $6,300 for the performance. A cabana by the pool became the Texas Opry House Annex, featuring live music seven nights a week for a $1 cover charge.

Before the Texas Opry opened, Willie’s protégé Tim O’Connor had paid Wally and Bronson a visit. “Will and I are opening a club called Nightlife,” Tim informed them, suggesting they might not want to go through with their plans. “When he left, my partners were freaking out,” Wally said. “We’d signed the lease but hadn’t done a show.”

Wally Selman had already met Willie through Townsend Miller, the country music columnist for the
Austin American-Statesman,
who consistently hit at least five clubs in a single night. “Willie and Coach Royal were the two figures in Texas you knew existed but weren’t sure they weren’t figments of the imagination because you’d never see them up close,” Wally said. “Willie was playing on a stool and during a break came and sat with us, and we were knocking back tequila shots and having a good time. Townsend said, ‘Tell him what you’re doing, Wally.’” Willie gave him his phone number and told him to call when the room got up and running.

But Wally’s partners were still nervous about Willie Nelson’s Nightlife and urged Wally to ask Willie if he’d consider being a partner. Willie showed up at the almost-open Texas Opry after playing golf with Coach Royal, and Wally tendered the offer.

“Why don’t we do this?” Willie proposed while sucking on a joint. “Instead of me worrying about you stealing from me, why don’t I just give you my word? I’ll call this my home. I’ll play here. I’ll bring my friends here, and we won’t worry about any partnership.”

Guns were not an issue at the Texas Opry House and there was a whole lot more cocaine floating around backstage than at the Armadillo. (“You can hear it on some live versions of ‘Bloody Mary Morning,’” Mickey Raphael wisecracked.) The room put an upscale face on Austin’s rootsy music scene. Willie demonstrated his approval by performing a string of four-hour shows. He didn’t need to tell the Armadillo people to fuck off (Neil Reshen had already done it for him). Although the cover for shows at the Opry was sometimes twice what the Armadillo was charging, fans could vote with their pocketbooks.

The Annex became Willie’s hangout and unofficial office. “He’d sit in with Milton Chesley Carroll or someone like that and take over the stage for two hours, all for a one-dollar cover charge,” Wally said. He packed the big room consistently and told his friends.
Rolling Stone
devoted three pages to the Texas Opry House, citing wannabe outlaw David Allan Coe’s cussing out the crowd as proof country music and its audience had changed. “Booking agencies knew who we were,” bragged Wally.

Everyone was getting in on the act, including the former Donny Young and Donny Lytle, whom Willie Nelson replaced in Ray Price’s Cherokee Cowboys in 1961. Now known as Johnny Paycheck, he grew his hair, embraced marijuana, scored a monster country and pop hit written by David Allan Coe called “Take This Job and Shove It,” and ultimately lived up to his outlaw reputation by serving two years in prison for shooting a man who allegedly questioned why he called himself Johnny Paycheck instead of Donny Lytle.

Of all the stars coming to the Texas Opry House on Willie’s word, Wally Selman was the most pumped about Waylon Jennings. “Waylon’s rider called for Coors Beer, and at that time the closest place you could get Coors Beer was up in North Texas,” Wally said, ignoring the fact that Waylon himself did not drink alcohol. “I was crazy about Waylon’s music, so I drove to Plano myself. I pulled into the Opry parking lot and there was that big ol’ black bus that had that big ol’ eagle painted on the back and everything. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I went on the bus and said, ‘Here’s your beer.’”

Waylon came out of the back room, looked at Wally, and grunted, “Hey, Hoss, is this Opry your place?”

“Yes, sir,” Wally said, puffing up his chest.

“You working with that short-ass Willie?” Waylon asked him. Wally nodded tentatively. “You tell that little bastard I ain’t goin’ in there and playing one goddamn song if he doesn’t pay me my money for the picnic. Goddamn right, Hoss. Go tell him. Find him.”

“Well, I don’t know anything about that,” Wally protested.

“He does,” Waylon insisted. “Go tell him what I said.”

Wallace went looking for Willie and found him sitting alone in his Mercedes in the parking lot.

“He knew something was going on, because he was sitting low in that Mercedes,” related Wally.

“What are y’all doin’?” Willie asked Wallace offhandedly.

“I just come off the bus with Waylon.”

“What does he got to say?”

“Nothin’ much. We was just talking.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me to tell you to pay him his goddamn money or he wasn’t playing and that you were a short motherfucker,” Wally said.