Willie Nelson (42 page)

It was a rude awakening. The Outlaws weren’t bulletproof. The real world had intruded on the fantasy.

Willie fired Neil Reshen. So did Waylon. So did Miles Davis. For Willie, letting Mark go to jail was merely the tipping point. Neil was the kind of guy who demanded respect even if he didn’t earn it, just as he demanded attention for Willie and Waylon. But an unexpected $71,000 bill from the tax man put Neil’s head squarely on the chopping block. Willie thought Neil had paid those taxes for him, but obviously he had not.

Willie had fired Neil several times previously, once for the tax problem, once for his negativity. He cut the cord for good when Mark went to jail. “That never did sit right with me,” Willie said. “I liked Mark. I admired him. I respected him. I knew he was sharp, young, and had a lot of guts.”

Mark’s former boss, Neil Reshen, knew the clock had run out on his relationship with Willie. “Our management philosophy was to make their deals and try to keep them going, doing their own work,” Reshen said diplomatically. “Willie liked that for the first ten years and then he decided that he would become a businessman as well.”

Paul English, Willie’s closest friend and financial adviser, felt it had been past time for a change. “Neil did a good job up to the point that he couldn’t do it anymore,” he said. In 1972, “when Neil came in, I hadn’t filed income tax for six years because I wasn’t making enough money to fool with it. Willie hadn’t filed in three years. Neil negotiated with the IRS for Willie and for me—they settled with me for six thousand for the entire six years. Then he did a good job for three or four years. I don’t think he had the ability to respect the relationship we had at that time. Something else had taken over. We came to find out he wasn’t a CPA, nor was he a CPA attorney. You’re not supposed to be able to negotiate with the IRS unless you are a CPA attorney, but he did it successfully.”

Mark Rothbaum made the best out of his jail time. He ran the prison newspaper, maintained a garden, and worked out religiously. Willie kept him hired while he was inside, stayed in touch, and played a benefit at the prison on Mark’s behalf. “The warden was a big fan of Willie’s,” Mark said. “He let me use the telephone. A lot of the promoters came to see me, and that was that.” His sentence was reduced from years to months.

Upon Mark’s release, Willie asked him to open an office to look after his interests. “Mark was honest,” Willie said. “I wanted him out there to represent me without having a title. I didn’t want a manager. I just wanted Mark to be out there.” Miles did the same. Waylon came around a year later. “Waylon was a funny guy,” Mark said, affirming again that he had a different relationship with Waylon than with Willie. “If he was nasty to you—not mad at you—you’d see him the next day and he’d go, ‘How ya doin,’ Hoss? Boy, I must have eaten something last night, I didn’t feel well.’ That’s as good an apology as you were gonna get from Waylon. If you understood Waylon-speak, it was good enough.”

Willie was more direct. “Mark’s a friend you can go to and say, ‘Can you do this?’” he said of their relationship. “He’s a friend who’ll call me and say, ‘Hey, I think you ought to do this.’ And I can either do it or not do it, and he will either say okay or argue with me a little bit. You can’t buy a guy like that.”

B
ACK
in Austin, Willie was testing Columbia Records’ definition of artistic control. Lefty Frizzell’s death in 1975 had inspired Willie to do an album of nothing but Lefty songs dedicated to his favorite honky-tonk singer. The suits at Columbia were less than thrilled when they first heard about the idea, especially since the label had dropped Lefty three years earlier. But two years later, after Willie’s version of “If You’ve Got the Money” from the album
The Sound in Your Mind
shot straight to number 1 on the country singles chart in the summer of 1976, Columbia brass came around and released the Lefty tribute. Even then, label personnel tried to get him to title the album
Songs for a Friend,
figuring record buyers didn’t know Lefty Frizzell from Johnny Wright. But Willie held his ground, and
To Lefty from Willie
was released in 1977, featuring ten of his favorite Lefty songs, including “I Love You a Thousand Ways,” which reached number 9 on the country singles chart that summer, “Always Late (with Your Kisses),” “Mom and Dad Waltz,” and “Railroad Lady,” Lefty’s last single before he died, written by Jerry Jeff Walker and Jimmy Buffett. The album charted as high as number 91 on
Billboard
’s album chart, a testament to Willie’s star power more than Lefty’s legacy.

But the mixed results of the Lefty album demonstrated the downside of artistic control. Folding the Columbia/Lone Star custom-label arrangement belied Columbia’s discomfort. Columbia preferred focusing on Willie, not on his friends. A second version of Lone Star Records appeared as an independent label in June 1978, this time distributed by Mercury Records. The new Lone Star was put together by Joel Katz, Willie’s Atlanta attorney, and run by Katz’s friend Guerry Massey. Larry Trader, Willie’s pal, was Lone Star’s vice president. For this go-round, Willie signed Ray Wylie Hubbard and His Cowboy Twinkies, Larry G. Hudson, Don Bowman, the comedian who issued the single “Willon and Waylee,” the Geezinslaw Brothers, Steve Fromholz, and the young country swing band Cooder Browne. Willie released a single, “Will You Remember Mine,” on Lone Star, and
Face of a Fighter,
an album of slow, sad songs that were compiled from old Nashville demos.

The second version of Lone Star Records lasted ten months before it was shut down. Record labels were a nice conceit, but Willie had enough business on his hands. For every well-intentioned idea that went bust like Lone Star Records came ten more wild new ideas. That had been Willie’s MO for most of his life, but few people had paid attention before. Now he was being taken seriously. He’d done the Old West bit, church gospel, and old-school honky-tonk. His RCA catalog had been recycled. Moving forward, he opted to look back and reminisce by reviving the old songs he’d grown up with and make an album out of that. At the Spence Manor in Nashville, he mentioned what he’d been thinking to Rick Blackburn, who was running Columbia’s Nashville office. Rick was hardly convinced.

“You’re crazy! You’re nuts!” he told Willie. “You’re a great writer. Go write. You’re coming off ‘Luckenbach, Texas.’”

Rick Blackburn’s words went in one of Willie’s ears and out the other. Willie was listening to his muse. “Why be predictable?” he asked Rick. “Great songs are great songs, no matter when they’re written. My audience right now is young. They’ll think these are new songs, or a lot of folks will. At the same time, we’ll get the sentiment of the older audience who grew up with all those songs, who don’t necessarily know me as an artist. I think we’ll be able to bridge that gap.”

“I still think you’re crazy,” muttered Blackburn.

Willie had a good feeling about the idea. The year before, he and Connie had secured a six-month lease on an apartment on the beach in Malibu so they and their girls could be near Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge and their daughter, Casey. Willie seemed to be spending half his time in Los Angeles, singing, playing, recording, doing TV, and sniffing around movies, so having a place there made sense. While jogging along the beach, enjoying his new exercise regimen, Willie was recognized by his upstairs neighbor. The neighbor, Booker T. Jones, was a music guy too, and knew Willie’s music and a lot about him through Kris and Rita, who was the sister of Booker T.’s wife, Priscilla Coolidge.

Booker T. may have been black and Willie white, and Willie may have been country while Booker T. was all about soul stylistically, but they came from the same geographic region and were both raised in musical households where gospel music and pop songs from hymnals and songbooks by the piano filled the rooms. Both had experienced the pleasure of being paid to play music at a young age and both retained an encyclopedic knowledge of the songs of their youth. Each was in California exploring musical genres other than the ones he was associated with.

“We had a lot of common influences,” Booker T. said. “Ray Charles was a big influence of mine and he was a big influence on Willie. I had heard Bob Wills and his Texas country jazz. Willie just loved jazz.”

As the front man of Booker T. & the MG’s, Booker T. was one of the cooks in the kitchen who created Southern-style soul music in the 1960s. The MG’s were the house band at Stax Records, aka Soulsville, U.S.A., in Memphis and backed up Eddie Floyd, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Rufus and Carla Thomas, Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave, Johnny Taylor, the Staple Singers, and Albert King on their biggest hit records, while the MG’s scored instrumental hits of their own such as “Green Onions” and “Hip Hug-Her.” An accomplished arranger and producer and coauthor of Albert King’s signature blues piece “Born Under a Bad Sign,” Booker was all about groove.

“He didn’t have to worry about me disturbing him when I was making music because he was making music on his own down there,” Booker T. said. “We were the only ones in the complex who socialized, I think.” They discovered a shared appreciation for the Great American Songbook, the informal name given to the great melodic pop standards of the middle twentieth century that practically every musician coming of age in that era learned sooner or later—songs such as “Georgia on My Mind,” written by Hoagy Carmichael, the eternal “Stardust,” also written by Hoagy, in 1927, “Moonlight in Vermont,” popularized by vocalist Margaret Whiting, “All of Me,” a hit for both Louis Armstrong and Paul Whiteman in 1932, and the Irving Berlin classic “Blue Skies.” “When I got out of high school, I was playing high school proms and high school dances around Memphis with bandleaders to make extra money,” Booker T. said. “Those were the songs we played—‘Tenderly,’ ‘Stardust.’”

Booker T. went downstairs and jammed with Willie with guitars a few times. Then Willie went upstairs and jammed with Booker T. “I had keyboards up there,” he said. One night Willie said, “We ought to record some of these.” They went over songs, and the ones that felt good made the list Willie was compiling. “They were all songs I heard all the time on the radio,” Willie said. “We had sheet music, and Bobbie played them on the piano and I’d figured them out on guitar. Those were hard songs to play. They weren’t your normal country and western tunes. They had a lot of good chords in them, and it took some time to learn them.”

When Willie got a list of ten songs, “he invited me to go into the studio with him,” Booker T. recounted. “We knew what we wanted to do. Willie had a free hand with Columbia pretty much to do whatever he wanted to do, so he chose me as a producer, we got the money and started recording.”

Working with Booker T. made sense to Willie. “I was just singing songs that I liked. Luckily I found a guy who knew how to produce them, arrange them, and record them. I needed him there to make sure they were musically correct and to write the strings and arrangements,” he said.

Booker felt a synergy developing. “You know how it is when you’re with somebody and you don’t talk about it a lot? We had a lot of unspoken understanding about bringing this music to the foreground in a soulful country way and we were just enjoying it, too,” he said. “I had some music in my mind, the sounds, and I knew some of the members of his band pretty well. I knew Chris Ethridge. They fell in pretty easy.” Mickey, Bee, Jody, Paul, and Rex knew their way around a recording situation too and dug the country-soul-southern thing. “The songs naturally fell in,” Booker T. said. “It was pretty informal.”

They gathered in Brian Ahern’s house, tucked away in the Hollywood Hills. A Canadian producer married to the singer Emmylou Harris, Ahern built his Enactron Truck Studio to move around the country and record in any location. In this instance, the wires and cords ran from the recording console in the truck parked in the driveway through the front door of the Ahern residence.

Creature comforts extended to a full kitchen and a swimming pool, but little time was spent partying. The band rehearsed songs until they got it right, rolled tape, and recorded, devoting no more than a few takes for each song before moving on to the next. Most of the musicians were set up in the living room. Mickey Raphael recorded his parts in the same tiled bathroom shower he had played in on Emmylou Harris’s albums, for the “great natural reverb,” he said. In less than a week, they had an album.

“I shaped the sound first and gave it something everybody can access by featuring his guitars and his voice and having the right colors underneath for the songs,” Booker T. said. “I wanted the recording to reflect southern soul, so I played on the songs. We started off with ‘Georgia’ and ‘Stardust,’ and I played them the way I played them when I was working clubs as a boy. My vibe was pretty mellow. We were enjoying working the whole thing out. It was a pleasurable experience. It wasn’t really work. We got the first two songs on the first day, and listening to the tapes on the way home, I realized it was something I loved. That was the most important thing to me.

“Willie saw me as a musician and gave me all the latitude as a producer to do what I wanted with it. He did his part and left. I was mostly an arranger. The producer part was organizing the logistics and doing the work of making a record—making sure the tape was happening, making sure the sound was coordinated with the engineer mastering. I tried some other piano overdubs, overdubbing some strings on some songs, some horn arrangements, having a big ensemble playing on ‘Georgia.’ The middle part of it I left to Willie.”

Booker T. Jones finally understood what Willie was dealing with when he delivered the finished product to Columbia Nashville. “I realized what we did was somewhat unorthodox. I don’t know if [the suits in Nashville] thought it was commercial. I’m not sure what they thought. But they didn’t print many copies when the record was released.”

The front cover of
Stardust,
a painting of the Pleiades constellation in a starlit sky by Susanna Clark, the wife of Texas singer-songwriter Guy Clark, conveyed an ethereal mood reflecting the songs inside. The inner cover was a photograph of a smiling Willie wearing a blue parka “borrowed” from Steve Wynn, Mr. Las Vegas, and a top hat and a beaded “WN” hatband presented to him by the Sioux Nation, with the Spring Mountains near Las Vegas in the background.