Willie Nelson (47 page)
Music built friendships. “I can’t think of any time there wasn’t any chemistry,” Bobby Arnold said. “People would adjust to Willie. Willie didn’t adjust.” Except when he was playing chess with Ray Charles.
W
ILLIE’S
endless quest to partner with as many singers as humanly possible culminated in the all-star duet album
Half Nelson,
a compilation of his various collaborations issued in 1985. He also carved out time to produce and duet with Timi Yuro, the onetime teen balladeer who was Willie’s labelmate at Liberty Records in the early 1960s.
Timi Yuro Sings Willie Nelson
featured two duets on a recording that would be her final album due to throat problems that eventually led to her death from cancer.
He and his best-known duet partner, Waylon Jennings, were so consumed with their respective careers, they became less the pair than the press portrayed them to be. “They had such a mutual respect for each other and their music, it was like a brother bond, literally,” Connie Nelson said. “There was always a little bit of—not jealousy—but Willie would make him feel inferior in some ways, and I think it was because of the cocaine.” Long after “You’re Wired, You’re Fired” came down, Waylon was still chasing white lines. Bee Spears acknowledged the tension. “They truly liked each other,” he said. “Things got crossways between them a little bit, but that happens with artists because every goddamn one of them has a frigging ego as big as this damn bus.”
Mark Rothbaum compared their dynamic to the leads in the 1954 film
La Strada,
directed by Federico Fellini. “Waylon is Anthony Quinn as Zampano, the carnival strongman. Willie’s Richard Base-heart is Il Matto, the Fool, the acrobat, who knew everything the strongman didn’t know and would get under Zampano’s skin by being funny and kind and sweet. Just like Zampano, Waylon would say, ‘That redheaded sumbitch,’ but there was affection when he said it. That was their relationship; it was almost as a Fellini film.”
Mickey Raphael drew a similar comparison. “Willie was like a loose cannon and Waylon was always worrying,” he said. “He never trusted Willie businesswise.” “Willie tended to get the best of the argument,” added Kris Kristofferson. “Willie’s not slow. You don’t want to get in a battle of wits with him.”
Willie and Waylon were close enough to not have to say anything to each other to be understood, and close enough to fight, especially whenever Willie was punching Waylon’s buttons. “I was in an elevator with them at a taping of
Austin City Limits
when they got in a fight,” publicist Evelyn Shriver recalled. “The night before at a concert, Waylon played first but was supposed to join Willie at the end of his set. Instead, he was on his bus on his way out of town. Willie hadn’t forgotten it. Waylon said, ‘I figured with you there, you’d be all right. You didn’t need me. The crowd would forget me.’
“‘And they soon did,’” Willie replied, enjoying the dig.
They were still arguing when the taping began.
Wally Selman of the defunct Texas Opry House was riding on the road with Waylon when he observed the testy Waylon-Willie dynamic up close before an arena show in Albuquerque. Waylon was scheduled to open and was already bent out of shape when Willie stepped onto Waylon’s bus.
“I don’t understand one goddamn thing,” Waylon muttered. “Why the fuck am I opening for you? How come you didn’t open for me?”
Willie smiled an inscrutable smile and nonchalantly said, “Okay. You close.”
Waylon looked him in the eyes, then sputtered, “Well, fuck you, Willie!”
Waylon knew he didn’t want to follow Willie. “Willie sure knew how to punch Waylon’s buttons,” Wally said. “At a birthday party at Willie’s, Waylon was being Waylon and kept going to the bathroom. Whenever Waylon would leave, Willie would say, ‘Don’t anybody sit in that chair over there. It’ll make you real nervous.’” Sure enough, when Waylon returned from the bathroom, he plopped into the chair and fidgeted.
Floyd Domino, the pianist with Asleep at the Wheel who was hired to play in Waylon Jennings’s band in 1983, observed a similar strain in the Waylon-Willie dynamic. “You could tell Waylon was bothered by Willie’s success, although he said he didn’t care. He’d tell audiences, ‘I don’t care if I’m not number one. I’ll be number two.’ The crowd didn’t even know what he was talking about. I saw Willie on some cooking show on TV and the host said Waylon was mad at him. Willie laughed and said, ‘What’s he mad about today?’ Waylon cared. Willie didn’t.”
Waylon’s musicians were almost contemptuous of Willie and Family. “Waylon’s band had no respect for Willie’s band,” Floyd said. “People underestimate the ability of what all those people do in that [Willie’s] band. At Caesar’s Palace in Vegas, we backed Willie up because contractually he had to do forty-five minutes, and it was Waylon’s gig. Willie didn’t bring his band. He didn’t want to do the gig. On ‘Good Hearted Woman,’ everyone had to decide, do we go where we think Willie may be leading the beat, or is he going to land right? Where is the beat? They were all looking at me. I was counting to myself, ‘One, two, three, four, one, two...oh, shit.’ They instantly had more respect.”
Floyd’s sense of timing and talent garnered an invitation to play on the album
Me and the Drummer
for Willie’s Luck Records, where he joined Jimmy Day, Johnny Bush, Paul English, and David Zettner from Willie’s 1960s band, the Offenders. “The problem I have in the studio with Willie is there is so much quiet and so much space,” Floyd said. “I don’t know how Bee [Spears] does it, falling on the beat is easier said than done. Usually, the beat’s subdivided. But take a ballad and all you’re landing on is downbeats. That’s hard, man. There’s a lot of space. You can be very constrained, where you hold back, like touching a hot stove.”
The last of a string of Waylon-Willie collaborations,
Take It to the Limit,
which was released in 1983, the same year as
Tougher Than Leather,
reflected the growing distance. The effort sounded half-hearted, as if they were recording together only because it was good business, and it clocked in at a mere thirty-four minutes. The redo of “Blackjack County Chain,” Willie’s once-banned single, was a standout compared with perfunctory readings of David Allan Coe’s “Would You Lay with Me (in a Field of Stone)?” made famous by a preteen Tanya Tucker, “Why Baby, Why,” George Jones’s first hit record, and the redo of Willie’s “Till I Gain Control Again,” a song Waylon, hell-bent on snorting up his profits, would have been wise to take to heart.
Willie’s world was crazy enough whether or not Waylon was in it. When the Family Band was off the road, some members got as far away as they could. Mickey Raphael had moved to Los Angeles in 1977 to get away from the craziness in Austin and get closer to the record business. Bee Spears and Jody Payne lived near Nashville. “There were too many people around Pedernales to be the family like it was in Bandera,” Bee said. Apparently there were limits to Willie’s chaos theory. His traveling music caravan had grown from a carny show into a corporate behemoth, with five buses, two tractor trailers, and the Franks brothers, the official Willie Nelson merchandisers, trailing behind in a van and trailer. Accountants brought to Willie’s attention that close to $100,000 a year was being spent to stock beer in two cattle troughs for the several hundred close personal friends who’d materialize backstage, more than the cost of diesel fuel to keep the band’s gypsy caravan running.
Innocents were swept into the vortex of excess time after time, even those who should have known better. Billy English, Paul’s little brother, stepped into the crazy world of Willie Nelson in March 1984 when he was hired as Paul’s drum tech. Billy had worked with Willie for a year and a half in the late 1960s and recorded
Both Sides Now
as a nineteen-year-old at the RCA studios, and six years later he appeared on the recording of
Red Headed Stranger
in Garland. That, and being Paul’s brother, qualified Billy as family.
For Billy, joining Willie was a literal leap of faith. He was leaving the fifteen-piece horn band led by Christian television evangelist Kenneth Copeland to join a whole other family of musicians who weren’t exactly Bible students. Billy eventually became Willie’s second percussionist and substitute bass and guitar player. Along the way he strayed from the tenets of the ministry and fell off the wagon, drinking, drugging, and carousing his way through the road along with the rest of the gang. “I took it all the way to intensive care,” Billy said. “I wasn’t a man of moderation when it came to drugs and alcohol until I woke up in the ICU one morning. My brother said it was God tapping me on the shoulder, saying, ‘Pull over.’ I was thirty-nine years old, a three-hundred-fifty-three-pound maniac. I’d stay up for a week at a time. I was a maniac. I was crazy. I got on my knees and repented. Fear of death is very strong motivation.”
Red Headed Stranger, Stardust, Wanted: The Outlaws, Waylon & Willie, Always on My Mind,
and the movies had the cumulative effect of ceremonial recognition by every kind of organization capable of bestowing honors. Willie was recognized as the Man of the Year by the music industry chapter of the United Jewish Appeal and the Indian of the Year at the American Indian Exposition. The Indian recognition was part of an annual powwow in Anadarko, Oklahoma, that drew thousands of Indians in their tribal regalia from all across the country. After a full day of festivities Willie was summoned to the center of the Caddo County Fairgrounds arena and given a headdress, which he donned respectfully. Without any advance warning, the announcer intoned, “And now, Willie Nelson will lead the Chosen People in the dance.” Drums started beating. Willie started moving instinctively to the beat and danced a round dance, moving one foot on the beat of the drum, joined by the other foot on the next beat. As he danced, he was followed by several thousand Native Americans circling the arena several times. “I know he was a little flustered,” said Carolyn McBride of the
Anadarko Daily News.
But he pulled it off. Jew of the Year and Indian of the Year—he must be doing something right.
But no matter how big he seemed, he stuck to his unspoken rule, staying until the last autograph was signed, being gracious to the people who made him who he was. Now and then a few of those fans found their way to the Pedernales, a few of whom were more fanatical than normal. Usually the staff dealt with the uninvited visitors patiently, hearing them out when they insisted Willie had to hear their song, or nodding agreeably if the person claimed they were Willie’s love child. The more aggressive ones were referred to Larry Trader, whose gruff manner could intimidate without his saying a word.
The staff served as a buffer that way. If the visitors got to Willie, more often than not he’d accommodate their request. “I’ve seen Willie stop and write a check so many times,” Bobby Arnold said, shaking his head. “You could always tell when Willie was coming to town because the cars would start showing up—a promoter would want something, somebody wanted a duet sang, somebody was always wanting. Geno would show up. Tom Gresham always had some business to do.”
Despite a relentless touring schedule, recording sessions, movies to make, and places to stay in Austin, the Pedernales, Colorado, Malibu, and Maui, Willie was going home with increasing frequency. Even though Mamma and Daddy Nelson and his father, Ira, had passed, he found comfort in Abbott. Old friends would often see his Mercedes parked next to the church, where he would sometimes go to write. The house he’d grown up in had been torn down, part of it moved to the colored part of town by the highway, so he bought the next best thing, Doc Simms’s place, the home of the doctor who delivered him.
It was no surprise, then, that when Abbott, Texas, celebrated its centennial year in 1981, Willie Nelson was featured prominently in literature promoting the town, often along with his sister, Bobbie. He played a fund-raiser for the centennial and raised several thousand dollars for the celebration and a highway billboard promoting Abbott. At the conclusion of the centennial observance, the dual billboards by Interstate 35 that noted the anniversary were painted over to read “The Home of Willie Nelson.” A local entrepreneur, Donald Holland, opened a souvenir shop in a reconverted trailer underneath the billboards selling Willie Nelson and Abbott T-shirts and knickknacks.
Willie was not impressed. The billboard blew his cover in the one place where he could still be Willie Hugh. He didn’t like the sign and figured since he’d played the benefit that raised money to put it up, he could take it down. One evening following a poker game with his buddy Zeke Varnon, Willie, Zeke, and J. D. Howell, another pal, who used to run a couple of clubs over in Malone, drove to the gas station, filled up a gas can, and put it in the back of Zeke’s pickup.
Abbott’s sole police car pulled into the station and the officer behind the wheel asked, “Hey, Willie, what are you doing?”
“We’re gonna go down here and burn this sign,” Willie told him.
“Okay, have fun!” the officer said, driving away.
“We threw the gasoline on the sign and it burned for two minutes and went out,” Willie said. “We tried again and again, but it had been treated with some chemical and wouldn’t burn, so we left.”
Around daybreak Willie’s boyhood friend Jimmy Bruce was driving across town and noticed a fire. It was the billboard, which had started burning again. The one fire truck in Abbott extinguished the blaze, and a local kid who was considered a troublemaker was arrested under suspicion of arson. Willie called the police to settle the situation. “Let the guy go,” he told the chief. “I was the one who burned the fuckin’ sign.” He was not charged.
Mayor L. A. Hykel’s take on Willie reflected the conflicted feelings some folks in town had toward their most famous native son. “Of course we’d like to see him come down and visit a little more,” the mayor said, adding, “Some say they wish he’d shave so when he does come they can recognize him.”
He raised his hometown profile considerably when he appeared in criminal court as a character witness for Margie Lundy, the owner of the Nite Owl beer joint south of Abbott. Margie had been charged with murder in the shooting death of her brother-in-law, Louis Dickson Jr., which Margie claimed was in self-defense. Willie testified to judge and jury she was the “kindest, most good-hearted person I have ever known. She’s number one in my book. I’ve never heard anyone say anything bad about Margie.” Prosecutor Pat Murphy tried to cast the witness in a cloud of doubt. “I love some of his music,” he said during the trial. “But he leaves a lot to be desired as a witness. He’s well known for his appearance and a past that has been checkered in some fashion by drinking and drugs.”