Willie Nelson (41 page)

He and Paul, along with singer Ray Price, testified in front of a federal grand jury in Dallas investigating narcotics trafficking, specifically cocaine and heroin, in June 1976. When Willie was asked about particular individuals’ use of coke, Willie pled ignorance.

“I don’t know anything about it,” he told the prosecutor. “I wasn’t involved.”

“If you don’t answer, you’re in contempt,” the prosecutor barked.

“You’re in contempt!” Willie shot back. “I’m telling you I don’t know anything about it. And I don’t!” Willie, Paul, and Ray Price escaped indictments and distanced themselves from those who were charged, including car dealer Joe Hicks, to whom Willie had loaned $60,000. But the heat came close enough. Willie didn’t like the feeling of sweatin’ like Ray Price at a bus auction—much as he loved to tell the story of Ray Price getting his bus repossessed with a considerable amount of marijuana stashed on board and having to place the high bid on the bus at the auction to retrieve his dope.

While everyone else was still rolling bills and snorting lines, Willie stepped back and took a hard look. Cocaine didn’t do much for him personally. Still, practically everyone around him persisted in chasing lines in copious quantities, band and crew included, and tales abounded of situations such as sitting in a hotel room in Los Angeles when Dennis Hopper opened a Halliburton suitcase with pink cocaine flown in from Peru on one side and primo red buds on the other, while friendly dealers of unknown origin materialized backstage with vials of flake and powder wanting to share.

The cold hard truth was that coke was eating up his boys’ paychecks like it was eating up all of Waylon’s money. If someone wanted to be paid in coke instead of greenbacks, it had been no big deal. That had to change.

“Willie knew a bad drug when he took one,” Ray Benson observed. “He didn’t avoid using, although he started saying white powder ruined his pot high.”

“I was just hearing the rhythms going too many different ways,” Willie said. “The speed and the weed didn’t mix, especially when you’re up there trying to get a feel going, get the dynamics going. Nobody’s thinking that way. They were just playing. I could handle the weed, but I couldn’t handle the speed. I didn’t want to be around people who were doing it, even my band. I didn’t want in on that vibe. I could see all the negativity in the speed.”

A new road rule—the only rule of the road—was mandated. Cocaine was off-limits. Smoke all the pot you wanted, swallow uppers or downers if you needed ’em. But coke and $1,000-a-week habits had to stop or the Law would stop it for them. “No Snow, No Show” was no longer the operative phrase. “You’re Wired, You’re Fired” was the new code of the road. T-shirts were printed for the band identifying them as the “No Blow Blues Band.”

Word traveled fast about Willie putting on the brakes. He never fired anyone (if someone needed to be fired, there were other ways to make them go away), but this was serious. The band and crew, being the band and the crew, found a way to get around the new rule when they needed to satisfy their urge to inhale something by doing methamphetamine, which was referred to on the buses as “loophole.”

“It was out of control, but hell, everybody was out of control,” Bee Spears said. “Willie was talking about cocaine, so we found a loophole. But everybody did it. It was everywhere. There wasn’t a goddamn record company meeting that didn’t start without a frickin’ line nine inches long.”

Three Family members would eventually depart from the Family due partly to their inability to rein in their habits. “It took a while, but reality eventually set in,” Bee said. “People started getting popped for it, people started dying, you’d pull an all-nighter and you didn’t bounce back, you’d be sick for three or four days, so it wasn’t cool, it wasn’t worth it.”

Larry Trader, one of Willie’s favorite thieves, felt compelled to explain Willie to the readers of his hometown
San Antonio Express-News
in a three-part series. Trader began by stating the obvious: “There are many misconceptions about Willie Nelson. The biggest one is drugs....Let me tell you why. Willie has been connected to drugs,” said Trader, referring to Willie’s and Paul’s grand jury testimony. “He’s constantly on the highway, playing hundreds of shows. He shakes lots of hands and gives a lot of autographs. Every now and then he’s introduced to a guy who’s supposed to be someone important. Will has no way of knowing if the guy is a doctor, a lawyer or what. If he gives the guy his mailing address and later the guy is busted over drug charges, then Willie is linked to the case because his name and address are found on the guy.”

Trader went on to vouch for Willie’s religious fervor and how when a pastor at his church in Abbott asked him during a service where he thought Jesus was at the moment, Willie replied “at the Armadillo,” because the people in church didn’t need Jesus near as bad as people in honky-tonks did.

Trader also wrote about Willie breaking Sinatra’s attendance record in Las Vegas and how the hotel owners couldn’t understand why he lingered to sign autographs for all the fans until there was no one left. Willie’s response: “I’ve worked 35 years to have people ask me for autographs and I’m not about to turn them down now.”

“You’re Wired, You’re Fired” sounded good, but new characters were always showing up, ready to ignore the edict, like the character who started running with Bo and Scooter Franks, Willie’s T-shirt salesmen. “He turned into a drug head, made his teeth fall out and shit,” one roadie said. Step on either bus and you were taking your chances. “People got on there and they’d come back and speak in different languages,” said Poodie Locke, acknowledging the collective urge to go wild on a nightly basis.

A
S
with drugs, Willie had to readjust his loose approach to concert security. Billy “B.C.” Cooper or Trader or Paul by his side wasn’t quite cutting it. Enter the Hell’s Angels. Despite an unsavory reputation burnished at Altamont, where Angels working security beat a man to death, Angels worked for cheap and were fiercely loyal.

“We brought these two guys, Deacon and Boo-Boo, with Waylon,” Neil Reshen said. “We’d get more as we needed them. They didn’t really want to get paid that much and they were good people as far as we were concerned—I mean, I know they weren’t good people, but they suited the purposes we wanted, because the last thing you want to do is get into fights. Only an idiot would fight with the Hell’s Angels. Anybody who tries to fight with the Hell’s Angels is going to get his ass kicked.”

Along with Waylon, Willie had been embraced by the Angels, who showed up in force at shows in northern California. One Hell’s Angels associate (“You know I couldn’t be part of any club”) named Peter Sheridan adopted Willie. A Nordic blond behemoth, Sheridan had run with Hunter Thompson when he was writing the articles for
Rolling Stone
magazine that were later released as the book
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.
Thompson referred to Sheridan as “Chief Boo Hoo,” and he wreaked havoc and initiated several fistfights on presidential candidate Edwin Muskie’s
Sunshine Special
campaign train in Florida after Thompson handed him his press credentials. When he showed up on Neil Reshen’s lawn and later on Willie’s doorstep, offering his intimidating presence, Family life got interesting. Ostensibly, Peter was his chauffeur, but more often than not he was passed out in the back while Willie drove the Mercedes. He was Willie’s kind of people, guaranteeing never a dull moment in the tradition of Ben Dorcy back in Nashville, and Gene McCoslin, Larry Trader, Tom Gresham, and Billy Cooper in Texas.

More than anything, Peter wanted to be a Texan. In exchange for the honorary status and privilege of running with the Texas outlaw, he provided very visible muscle. He could get out of hand, like the time at the Whitehall Hotel in Houston when he started throwing dinner rolls across the dining room at strangers enjoying their meals, or threatened to pound Austin guitarist John X Reed into ground chuck, mistaking him for Austin writer Jan Reid, who wrote the book
The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock,
which pissed off several members of Willie’s Family. “He could spot a weakness in someone and burn right through them,” Ray Benson marveled. “He’d move in and mow people down.”

“He scared me to death,” admitted Connie Nelson, recalling when she first met Peter. He was “bad energy” in her eyes. But he turned out to be a near and dear friend as well as her protector. “I never felt for one minute that he was doing it for the money,” she said. “It was a sense of purpose and pride that he was able to do that.” Connie saw his gentle side when he picked up her daughter Paula at the ranch and took her outside to show her fireflies: “He was so big and she was so little, and there he was out there with her, catching fireflies. He really became a trusted part of the family.”

As a reward, Willie bought him a brand-new Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Peter was riding the Harley in California when a woman ran a red light at an intersection and slammed into the motorcycle, killing him. But he left a legacy. Through the Angels connection, Larry Gorham came into the Family in 1978.

“At the time I was around, country music was appealing to more than just country-western fans,” L.G. said. “I was hanging around with [bassist] Chris Ethridge when they’d come to the Bay Area and every now and then fly to gigs. It became more and more and then I was on the bus.” Sometimes he was driving it, spelling main driver Gates Moore.

The stocky, muscular figure became generally known as Willie’s personal bodyguard, although he described it more diplomatically as filling a hole. “I do security, a little public relations, just help a lot of people out. You have to do it with finesse and make sure he’s safeguarded but not get between him and his fans like a wall. If he doesn’t want to see somebody or talk to somebody, he’ll just turn around and walk away quick as you can wink your eye. He doesn’t want to block anybody or discourage anybody. Those people were our paychecks.”

W
ILLIE
Nelson and Family had been touring in two very crowded ’76 Silver Eagle buses—almost “store-bought” compared with Porter Wagoner’s hand-me-down—twelve people to a bus, when Gates Moore hired on, along with the bus he had been driving for Bonnie Raitt and Delbert McClinton when they were opening for Willie. “The buses were rough,” Gates Moore said, “but the boys were rough, so they didn’t mind.” The Eagle that Gates drove was nicer because he kept his ride meticulous, patiently picking up the beer cans and bottles that were knee-deep in the aisle every morning before the craziness started again a few hours later.

Willie had the back room of one of the buses, but he was hardly sealed off from the rest of the entourage. “There was a round table back there, and it really was a round table—his knights would all sit around him,” said Gates, who assumed the role of gatekeeper to go with his driving gig.

“It was his practice to greet people inside at his table rather than greet them outside, so I would take small groups of people inside to the back of the bus, where they would meet him and get his autograph, and then I would usher them out and usher the next group in,” said the Gator, as he was known on the CB radio. “It took forever. We wouldn’t leave a venue until five o’clock in the morning. But anyone who needed to be greeted got in.”

The rolling party was straight out of the Wild West, with booze, dope, and women part of the hedonistic revue. And everyone still carried guns. “I had a sawed-off shotgun and a .forty-five automatic in a holster in the seat,” Gates Moore said. Before a show at the Soledad prison in California, guards contacted Gates in advance, knowing the band’s reputation. “Look, man, we don’t care what you got, but we don’t want you carrying it in there, because we don’t want any of them [the inmates] to get ahold of it,” Gates was told. “So if you got any drugs or guns, we will hold it for you here at the guard station.” Gates rounded up the weapons and put them in a pillowcase, and collected another pillowcase full of dope. The stash was held in one of the guard turrets until the show was over, when band and crew got it all back.

The buses got fancier the bigger Willie got. When Paul, the “road boss,” got his back room on the crew bus done up in mahogany paneling, Willie went to Gates and asked, “How soon can you build me a bus, all mahogany-niggered from front to back?” Gates got it done soon enough to become the designated driver of the Willie bus. “I think his intention was for his bus to just be him alone,” Gates said, but on the maiden voyage of the new bus, dubbed Honeysuckle Rose, Bobbie approached Gates and said, “I don’t know what to do—I don’t know where to ride.” Gates asked Willie, and from that day on, Bobbie rode with her brother.

While the “Willie Express” gained momentum, Willie’s hired mad dog, Neil Reshen, was putting more and more of his time and energy into Waylon, no matter how the receipts were stacking up. Neil and Waylon were both different kinds of animals than Willie. Waylon was fixated on maintaining control in the studio. Long periods of time locked in a room were good for him and good for those around him. Working the old Chet Atkins system of three hours and you’re out or Willie’s way of no more than two or three takes per track was not Waylon’s style.

Waylon came perilously close to wiping out his career during the last week of August 1977, when agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration stormed Waylon’s Nashville office and arrested him for cocaine possession. A package from Neil Reshen’s office sent via World Courier Inc. had been intercepted before it reached Waylon’s studio. Waylon’s cocaine habit was hardly news around the music community, where a blizzard had been blowing for the past three years just like it had been blowing in Los Angeles, New York, Austin, and all over America. Coke wasn’t addictive, so the story went.

Waylon later said he was personally snorting about a quarter ounce of coke a day, easily a $500-a-day habit. But Waylon dodged the bullet—he was never convicted nor did time. The sender of the package, Mark Rothbaum, Neil Reshen’s gopher, took the fall for him and went to jail for shipping the cocaine.