Willie Nelson (52 page)

For eight months, band and crew were put on hold as his advisers tried to sift through the mess. For the first time ever, doubt crept into the Family.

But for a gambler wise to the fact that his luck should’ve run out a long time ago, Willie’s reaction was succinct and shrewd. If he was broke, he vowed to do what he always did—play the clubs. He figured he could play every club he knew on the right side of I-35 from Laredo all the way to Canada, then turn around and head south, playing all the clubs on the other side of the highway for the rest of his life.

A partial solution to Willie’s tax problems was being hatched by his lawyers and him. Twenty-five audio tracks that had been seized from Pedernales Studio were being assembled into a two-disc record album. The tracks, valued at $2 million, would be sold on television with all profits going straight to the IRS, compliments of its coproducer WN Music. The arrangement marked the first time the Internal Revenue Service partnered in a record deal.

“The whole thing was very unique and very complicated,” Austin attorney Mike Tolleson explained. “Willie and Larry [Trader, the album’s executive producer] called me to come out and talk about setting up a record company to handle sales of the recordings. [Producer] Bob Johnston wanted to be involved as the guy to pull out the old recordings for record release. There was need for mixing and mastering. There were questions about Sony’s rights and ownership of the masters. There was the question of IRS’s rights to the masters under their lien.”

Nashville publicist Evelyn Shriver was hired to generate interest in the album. “Willie was in a very vulnerable position. People were throwing money at Willie onstage and he couldn’t deal with that. He said, ‘If people feel so strongly they want to help me, then let them buy this record and make this music for sale. That way they don’t have to feel like they need to throw me tens and twenties.’ That was the whole theory behind it.”

Shriver observed that although Willie appeared unflappable on the outside, “I could tell it devastated him. His whole life was under scrutiny by the IRS.”

IRS Tapes: Who’ll Buy My Memories?
released by Sony Special Products, was one of Willie’s most profound artistic expressions on record. It was just him and his guitar, singing twenty-five of some of the saddest songs he’d ever written, beginning with the prophetic “Who’ll Buy My Memories?” followed by “Jimmy’s Road,” his protest song about the senselessness of war (written twenty-one years earlier but timed perfectly with an ongoing war in Iraq). A string of classics followed—“I Still Can’t Believe You’re Gone,” “Yesterday’s Wine,” “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way,” “I’d Rather You Didn’t Love Me,” “Country Willie,” “Permanently Lonely,” “Home Motel,” “Lonely Mansion,” “Summer of Roses/December Day,” “Remember the Good Times,” “Wake Me When It’s Over,” and the philosophical chestnut he wrote with Hank Cochran, “What Can You Do to Me Now?”

The recording was sparer than
Red Headed Stranger.
Of all the sessions he was involved in from 1981 to 1989, the one that became
The IRS Tapes
was engineer Bobby Arnold’s favorite. “It was in December 1984 [when it was recorded] and Willie sat down in the studio with Coach Royal, Lana, Larry, and Jody, on this cold, cold day. It was just Willie, his voice, and his guitar. I’ll never forget that. It was like a private concert.

“When it was released, Sony Records had to pay Willie a bunch of money for the recording and Willie gave it away to everybody who was involved in it. So out of nowhere I get a check for several thousand dollars right around the time we were having our first child. He said, ‘This is money used to produce this album. You are the people who produced this album—here’s your money.’”

Good-time Willie had the blues, and it showed on the album. He had the gift of writing words in lyrical rhyme set to melody in three-minute chunks that revealed his emotions. They were songs of hurting, pain, breaking up, and love lost, haunted memories of lonely nights on the Jacksboro and Hempstead highways, of struggling to stay one step ahead of whatever threatened to pull him down, of trying to please strangers in beer joints when headed nowhere but down while an angry wife and crying kids waited for him at home, if he managed to make it home.

The packaging was as spare as the music, in marked contrast to most “As sold on TV” albums. The cover was a photograph of Willie sporting a cowboy hat, white beard, and a smile, his long red tresses falling on an open jacket revealing a black high-neck T-shirt with white letters that spelled “Shit Happens.”

He wrote a note in his loopy cursive script, little changed over the course of fifty years:

Thanks for adding these songs to your collection. These are all original songs from thru the years with just me and my guitar. I hope you enjoy them. Thanks again for being my fan and friend.

Love
Willie Nelson

On the opposite side of the centerfold, song titles were imposed on a black-and-white photograph of Willie in jeans and boots, sitting down, leaning against a cedar post topped by a rusty bucket, looking pensive perhaps, but not necessarily worried.

On the back cover, the recordings were identified as coming from “The Willie Nelson/Internal Revenue Service Tape Library.”

Mike Tolleson, a lawyer from the old Armadillo World Headquarters, had introduced Willie to the Television Group, a business with extensive experience in television production and time buys. TVG paid Willie (meaning the IRS) an advance to market the tapes, along with a second album,
The Hungry Years,
of Willie’s earliest recordings. A telemarketing operation was set up in Nashville with a bank of operators to process credit cards, and a fulfillment center to process and ship orders. A television commercial was produced and legal clearances were negotiated.

Four months of saturation advertising on television, mostly late at night, generated sales of 160,000 copies, far short of the four million figure that was needed to erase Willie’s debt. But Willie feigned hope. “You got to be positive,” he said. “It’s not unheard of. I could sell three million albums. I’ve done it before.” The problem was
The IRS Tapes
wasn’t
Stardust
or
Red Headed Stranger
. The album was eventually released through traditional distribution channels and retail stores. But the idea of salvation through album sales pretty much fell apart when the Television Group got into its own financial straits and declared bankruptcy.

“I spent many hours, days, and weeks dealing with the aftermath of that, including processing all the orders that had come in but were now in the pipeline waiting for fulfillment,” attorney Mike Tolleson said. “There was inventory in Nashville, orders unfulfilled due to lack of payment to the fulfillment house, money tied up in bankruptcy, and Willie customers wanting their records. Meanwhile, the IRS wanted answers, and the TVG business had claims and creditors lining up.” Eventually, customers either got their record or got their money back.

The album and the auctions of Willie’s properties generated about $3.6 million, with Willie reportedly promising to pay another $5.4 million in the coming years, on top of the nearly $8 million he had already paid for the periods in question. A settlement with Price Waterhouse was reached out of the public eye. According to several sources, the balance Willie owed the feds was taken care of as one of the conditions of the settlement.

In spite of his relatively straightforward attempt to resolve his debt, a perception lingered that Willie was a tax dodger. “None of that was true,” Mark Rothbaum said. “Willie had the option of bankruptcy and chose not to use it. He wasn’t so much stubborn as honest, and he no more believed in setting aside his tax obligations than he did his personal bills. He wasn’t going to choose to use that as an option. So we fought the hard fight, and it was very creative and stressful, and at the same time, it took up so much of our time that music was really all we had.”

The debt was officially settled in 1993. Evelyn Shriver was on the conference call that made it official. “I’d ended up working with quite a few people in that department [at the IRS] and they were all crying. Those people loved Willie too. Everybody’s heart broke for him in that situation. When it came to a resolution everybody could live with, they cried. They were happy because it was over.”

“His stubbornness got him in trouble, but it also got him out of it,” Willie’s cohort Kinky Friedman believed. “He has made the point to me that one of the things he has prided himself in since he was a child was getting into trouble and then getting himself out of it. He’s done it his whole fucking life, and this was trouble. He didn’t do it the easy way and plead bankruptcy—he did it the cowboy way. But in the end, the IRS loved Willie.”

The publicity the IRS received could not be quantified. Just as Willie once persuaded a generation of grown men in white belts and white shoes to grow their hair over their ears, try marijuana, and think like an outlaw, he was now a walking billboard reminding the public to pay their taxes on time. More than ten years after the fact, his tax troubles were still fodder for public commentary as New York hip-hopper Ludacris affirmed in his 2004 recording “Large Amounts,” shouting out Willie’s name as a warning not to mess with “that IRS man.”

W
ILLIE
had stayed on the recording track throughout his IRS troubles, issuing another Waylon collaboration,
Clean Shirt,
on Sony/Columbia in 1991, produced by Bob Montgomery. The album with songs such as “Old Age and Treachery,” “Tryin’ to Outrun the Wind,” and “Two Old Sidewinders,” felt like two men of a certain age looking back. The effort was cathartic with “I Could Write a Book About You,” which pretty well summed up their brotherly dynamic.

Besides being the year that his material possessions were auctioned off, 1991 marked two other life-changing events.

On September 16—Diez y Seis de Septiembre—a major Mexican holiday observed throughout Texas, Father Albert Achilles Taliaferro, the founder of St. Alcuin Montessori School in Dallas, married Annie D’Angelo and Willie Nelson, an event marked by Annie clutching a pacifier rather than a bouquet at the altar and by a parade of paparazzi chasing the couple. The marriage made formal a relationship that had already given Annie and Willie two sons, Lukas Autry, born on Christmas Day 1989, named for Willie’s cowboy hero Gene Autry (“Gene was one of the first people to hold Luke,” Willie said proudly), and, the following year, Jacob Micah, named for the Sheriff Micah character in television’s
The Rifleman
series.

Father Taliaferro was an Episcopal priest, an enlightened educator, and an instructor in the Rosicrucian mystical order, a group of believers dating from the sixteenth century who mixed Christianity with alchemy. Willie had listened to tape recordings of A. A. Taliaferro on his bus for years and considered him a wise man for teachings that centered around a favorite saying, “Don’t just sit there and vibrate. Do something!” Father Taliaferro was instrumental in inspiring Annie to advocate on behalf of the Montessori system of education and provided spiritual advice to Willie during a very trying time in his life.

Three months later, on Christmas Day, at the old family homestead in Ridgetop, Tennessee, neighbor Ronald Greer went to check on his friend Billy Nelson, who lived in a cabin back in the woods on the family land. Greer found him hanged with a cord.

Billy’s suicide was a horrible end to a troubled life.

Ridgetop was the first place where Billy had felt at home as a boy, even if his mother was in Waco and his father was mostly on the road, leaving Shirley Nelson and his older sisters to raise him. Married once and having recorded a gospel album once, he insisted on being Billy Nelson, not Willie Hugh Nelson Jr. But Billy never emerged from his father’s shadow. Try as he might, he was never able to be anyone other than his famous father’s son. He had the sensitivity (and deep, soulful eyes) of his father, and his wild streak too—friends didn’t call him Wild Bill for nothing—but those attributes never translated into a happy life.

Too often his father had had to bail him out of trouble. His condo at the Pedernales Country Club had been burned down as revenge for a dope deal gone sour, and when it was rebuilt, the $50,000 he was given to get back on his feet disappeared in a matter of weeks. He had been in and out of rehab. Billy had been hurting for money again that December. Because of his own tax problems, his father wasn’t in a position to bail him out. Willie had visited Billy at Ridgetop, trying to get him to move back to Texas again, but Billy said he wanted to stay with his friends.

Willie Hugh Nelson Jr., thirty-three, was buried the Saturday after Christmas in 1991.

Afterwards, Willie Hugh Nelson Sr. headed to Hawaii to sort out the aftermath. But before he left, Frank Oakley, the proprietor of the Willie Nelson General Store, called and asked him about the New Year’s Eve date he was scheduled to play in Branson, Missouri, as a preview show for the coming tourist season. Willie told Frank he’d call back in an hour. Ten minutes later he was on the line. “Let’s go picking,” Willie told Frank. “It’s foolish for me to sit on a beach somewhere. I should get to working again. There’s nothing I can do about what happened.”

He played the New Year’s Eve show in Branson but did not share his grief with the audience. He stuck around for two hours after the show, signing each and every autograph thrust in his direction.

Publicist Bonnie Garner attempted to ease the pain a few days later by explaining in a press release that Willie was a firm believer in reincarnation. But no words—nothing—could erase the deep sadness of a parent losing a child, regardless of the circumstances. In this case, the hurt seared deeper and was shared with precious few.

One was Coach Darrell K Royal. “Willie’s more than an acquaintance,” explained Coach. “He and I have been together in some pretty emotional situations. When I lost two of my children, Willie was right there. I tried to do the same after Billy. I never brought up the subject much. I just shook his hand and was there for him. But he knew why I was there, just like I knew why he’d come to my house [after the deaths of Coach’s kids]. We’ve been together through some emotional times. That’s the reason I like ‘Healing Hands of Time’ so much.”