Willie Nelson (38 page)

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TRANGER
empowered Willie to do as he damn well pleased and still have an audience eager to listen. He performed with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra at their new Summertop tent venue on the grounds of Northpark Mall for the symphony’s summer series. Willie didn’t have sheet music to give symphony musicians, so he urged them to come see him play at Dewey Groom’s Longhorn Ballroom on Industrial Boulevard. Some did and afterwards told Willie to play whatever he wanted.

Columbia gave him his own custom label, Lone Star, which allowed him to sign Billy C, the songwriter Billy Callery, who wrote “Hands on the Wheel” for
Red Headed Stranger
and “Jaded Lover” for Jerry Jeff Walker; Austin songwriter Milton Chesley Carroll, a regular at the Texas Opry Annex; and fiddler Johnny Gimble, Steve Fromholz, the Geezinslaws, Family Band guitarists Jody Payne and Bucky Meadows, and Darrell McCall. Signing them all was payback for helping him along the way.

A
FTER
Red Headed Stranger,
Willie returned to Autumn Sound just before Christmas in 1975 for
The Sound in Your Mind.
He didn’t have a concept in mind this time other than “do some songs we already do that people like to hear when we’re on the road.”

The road band was joined in the studio by Tommy “Wolf” Morrell, Willie’s favorite steel man after Jimmy Day, and extended family who crowded the studio hallways. Steve Fromholz was there because Willie was doing one of his songs. Willie called him into the studio to demonstrate how to sing the diminished minors in “I’d Have to Be Crazy.” Steve, who had a few Lone Stars in his belly, sat where Willie had been sitting, while Willie stood next to him singing. In the middle of the song, Steve started singing along, totally into the groove, his hearty vocals picked up by Willie’s microphone. Phil York recorded three takes. The keeper was the version with Fromholz singing in the background. It became the first single off the album, reaching number 11 on the country singles chart.

He covered the old pop standard “That Lucky Old Sun,” a song of weariness and reflection, and the rugged chestnut “Amazing Grace.” He reprised “Healing Hands of Time,” did his show medley “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Crazy,” and “Night Life,” and paid tribute to Lefty Frizzell with “If You’ve Got the Money (I’ve Got the Time).” Willie’s version was distinguished by Mickey Raphael’s improvised harmonica riffs. “I didn’t have any harmonica people [in country] to copy other than Charlie McCoy, and if he didn’t play on it, I had to wing it,” Mickey said. He winged it just right. The Lefty rave-up was the second single from the album and also went all the way to number 1 on the country singles chart. The album wasn’t the surprise that
Red Headed Stranger
was, but musically it was a little more complex and adventurous, in the spirit of the road show.
Billboard
magazine cited it as the country album of the year.

While recording the album, Phil York received a call from Columbia Records in Nashville, wanting the two-inch tape of
Red Headed Stranger
to do a remix for the Country Music Association Awards show on television. “Willie’s the producer, not me,” Phil said, “and he’s sitting here right next to me. You talk to him.”

Phil handed the phone to Willie. “I was hearing his side of the conversation: ‘You want to do what? Fuck you!’ He wouldn’t let them have it. He didn’t want them to jack with his sound.”

Willie liked making records and putting them out, and now that he was selling so many of them, he could make a record singing the Yellow Pages if he wanted. Thinking positive all those years was reaping rewards. A reporter approached him outside Autumn Sound to ask a few questions, including the zinger “What did it take to become a star?”

“I know the answer to that one real well,” Willie replied. “You get some record label to invest a bunch of money in you. They’ve got to make you a star to get it back.”

Whatever country music was, it was having an identity crisis, and Willie was the outsider that the powers that be could neither rein in nor figure out. Artistically, he and Waylon represented the antidote to an industry that deemed Olivia Newton-John, an innocuous, saccharine-sweet pop singer by way of Australia, worthy of Female Vocalist of the Year honors, and an equally innocuous American folk singer who called himself John Denver, the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year. During a tour of Waylon’s new studio, an engineer eagerly pointed out to a visiting journalist that the facility was so state of the art, “we could record the Eagles here,” referring to the California rock band. Hank Williams was just a memory in Nashville.

On August 8, 1975, music critic John Rockwell wrote in the
New York Times
that Willie was “the acknowledged leader of country music’s ‘left wing,’ working to cleanse Nashville of stale excesses by bringing it up to the present and its own folkish roots.”
Newsweek
simply identified him as “The King of Country Music.” His likeness was on the cover of the
Rolling Stone
. His red bandanna and battered guitar were instantly recognizable symbols.

But the real proof of success was in the bank account. He signed a multimillion-dollar, multiyear contract with Caesar’s Palace, averaging between $25,000 and $100,000 per concert and indulging in such excesses as the lighting director Budrock’s arranging to have Bee fly on a wire above Willie’s head during “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground.” He was getting a $1.43 royalty per album sold, all the money going to Willie Nelson Music, the publishing company owned by Willie Nelson and Paul English, who earned his 20 percent slice by getting back the publishing rights to many of the songs Willie had sold years before.

The move to Texas had been a godsend, he told Robert Hilburn of the
Los Angeles Times.
“The bottom line to me is positive and negative,” he said. “I began to change my life so that I could emphasize the positive things. There were positive things in Nashville, but there were also all the negative ones. I figured there’d be less negative influences in Texas. I’d be among friends and in familiar territory. The rest was up to me.”

Worrying, he told anyone who’d ask, was bad for your health. He had a deal with Paul. “I’ll worry one day, you worry the next.”

Willie got the Texas Opry House up and running again late in 1975. He partnered with Tim O’Connor as Southern Commotion, Inc., taking out a scrap of paper and writing “Tim O’Connor President, Southern Commotion. Paul English, Vice, Willie Nelson, Secretary/Treasurer,” but then scratching it out, telling Tim, “We don’t need one of those.” Despite an asking price of $1.6 million, they put down $10,000 to secure the fourteen-and-a-half-acre tract, and took over 218 apartments, three swimming pools, the fifty-four-thousand-square-foot Opry building, the parking lot, and the old motel office.

“Dude McCandless had an unsecured promissory note with Farm and Home Savings and Loan in Nevada, Missouri,” Tim said. “He was starting to refuse to pay it, so the savings and loan wanted to get it off the books and get it secured. We got it by paying the ten-thousand-dollar note. Willie’s name was enough for them.”

The spread was renamed the Austin Opry House, which prompted Wally Selman to sue the new operators in federal court. Wally still owned the name “Texas Opry House,” and he insisted “Austin Opry House” infringed on that. “Yeah, let’s sue each other,” Tim challenged him. “We will get some notoriety out of it.” The court ruled “opry” was in the public domain.

Willie put Tim in charge of operations at the Opry complex, but overseeing the concert hall and managing the surrounding apartment complex, known as the Willie Hilton, the Willie Arms, and Heartbreak Hotel, was a headache. “A band would show up with a note signed by Willie that read, ‘Tim, take care of these guys,’” Tim O’ Connor said. So Tim would put them into an apartment, even though they didn’t have any money for rent. Half of Austin’s gypsy music community moved in, among them Farmer Dave “Slappy” Gilstrap, Lucinda Williams and her beau, Clyde Woodward, gossip columnist Margaret Moser and her husband, photographer Ken Hoge, the freshly divorced Crow brothers—Alvin and Rick—jazz player and entrepreneur Mike Mordecai and his cohort Paul Pearcy, as well as columnist Townsend Miller, Poodie Locke, Willie’s stage manager, and enough dope dealers, topless dancers, and trust-fund brats to make life interesting.

The Backstage Club, formerly the registration desk and lobby of the Terrace and the Annex, morphed into the third location of Soap Creek Saloon. A small recording studio and a rehearsal hall fronted an alleyway identified by a street sign as Music Lane. The whole operation was a slapdash venture worlds away from the slickness of Nashville’s Music Row. There wasn’t much business to be done in Austin beyond Willie, but no one seemed to care. Everybody was busy having too much fun. Whenever taxes were owed, Tim would call and say, “I need you to come play three or four days,” and Willie would.

The gospel of Texas music was spreading. KAFM, a Dallas FM station, started airing records by Willie, Waylon, and the boys mixed in with the Allman Brothers, Poco, and Pure Prairie League on January 17, 1975, debuting at six a.m. with Willie singing “Phases and stages...” Another Dallas–Fort Worth station, KAMC-FM, had been featuring progressive country on Sundays for several years and was slowly working the sound into the station’s regular music programming. A California station south of the San Francisco Bay, KFAT-FM, was around-the-clock progressive country. A new glossy magazine out of Dallas called
Texas Music
appeared, complementing the free handout
Buddy: The Original Texas Music Magazine
and
Picking Up the Tempo,
a literary journal published in Austin that took seriously country music and the culture emerging from the music.

Geno McCoslin took over the reins of the rickety Dallas Sportatorium, the post–Dust Bowl vintage wrestling arena that was the former home of the Big D Jamboree. The “new and improved” Sportatorium opened with Willie Nelson as headliner. Sam Cutler, an intimidating pistol-packing hard-ass who’d run tours for the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead, had been hired as Willie’s tour coordinator but couldn’t find the Sportatorium on opening night. When the band arrived in a station wagon, they were refused entry by the fire department. The place was oversold and no one was going in until someone came out. Meanwhile, Geno was being chased by angry ticket holders. He had called Dallas Pipe and Drape to put “Men” and “Women” signs over the exits. During the show, customers who thought they were going to the restroom found themselves outside. If they wanted back in, they had to buy another ticket.

Sam Cutler came and went as fast as other out-of-town hustlers like producers Jack Clement and Al Kooper, who left Austin as quickly as they arrived once they assessed the financial realities of the scene. Willie planted more roots, opening a business office in Oak Hill, west of Austin, staffing it with Larry Moeller, son of his old Nashville booker Lucky Moeller, his daughter Lana, and accountant Cookie DeShay.

He’d spent the previous thirty years making time to talk to fans after a show, autographing every piece of paper thrust his way, posing for photographs with his arms around strangers and a smile on his face, employing a “Welcome All Comers” policy with his fans that was paying off in spades. But now the fans were coming like never before. And he was supposed to shoo them away? After wiring his ranch on Fitzhugh Road with fencing and electronic surveillance, he complained to Larry Trader, “This fence isn’t keeping people out. It’s keeping me in.”

Still, there were times when even Willie had had it with promoting his career. “We were out in Denver, it was freezing, and we were supposed to do a short promotion tour to Phoenix for
Red Headed Stranger,
” radio promo man Nick Hunter said. “Willie kept saying he didn’t want to do it. I woke up the next morning and went to go get Willie, but he was gone. He left a note at the front desk: ‘Dear Nick, It’s not supposed to be that way.’”

Connie Nelson was reaching her limit too. She loved seeing her girls don their Donny and Marie Osmond wigs and join the Family Band onstage to sing “I’m a Little Bit Country, A Little Bit Rock and Roll” and have Uncle Kris and Uncle Waylon and Aunt Rita and Aunt Jessi as their doting relatives. Paula developed such a crush on Leon Russell that she named her Bozo the Clown doll “Little Leon.” But the public life, the strangers coming over at all hours, fans hopping the fence, fans wanting to touch Willie, were wearing Connie down. It was either hire a guard or move.

At one point, Willie proposed moving the family to Abbott, but Connie told her husband, “You can’t do that to our kids. You’re famous now and you’re gonna put our two little girls in Abbott and they are going to be Willie Nelson’s kids. That’s not fair to them. You might as well put Christmas lights on both of them, light them up, and let them go everywhere. I didn’t want my girls to be treated better because of Willie, or treated worse because of him.” Connie had enjoyed a conventional childhood and wanted the same for their daughters.

It was crazy at home, or what passed for a home now, because the ranch on Fitzhugh Road was well known to a rapidly expanding fan base. An ambitious picker buzzed the squawk box at the gate and auditioned for the speakerphone and security camera. One night Willie and Connie were awakened by someone singing in the backyard. They snuck out of their room to the upstairs porch, from where they spotted Jerry Jeff Walker sloppy drunk and singing. They snuck back to their room and he eventually left.

“It was spinning out of control,” Connie complained. Willie’s son, Billy, eighteen years old and a roadie for the band, was a particular thorn in her side and hungry for attention. “Billy would come in the middle of the night and throw things through the window. One time Willie and I and the girls went away and there were windows broken in the kids’ room. I was devastated and scared, and knowing Willie was about to leave town again, I started asking questions and found out Billy’s truck had been seen nearby, so I told Willie. He didn’t want to believe it. I told him this happens when he’s gone but asked him not to say anything to Billy.” Connie had “screamers” with Billy one-on-one and told him their differences had nothing to do with his dad. They were between her and him. Connie finally threw in the towel. “We needed to let Billy figure out who he is, and we needed to be out of this sit-uation.”