Willie Nelson (57 page)
H
IS
celebrity remained viable enough to endorse more products. Old Whiskey River Kentucky Bourbon was promoted with T-shirts and cowboy hats and free recipes for such mixed-bourbon drinks as Red Headed Stranger, Wet Willie, Silly Willie, On the Road Again, and Naked Willie, which was a double shot of Old Whiskey River. Willie’s version of ZZ Top’s “She Loves My Automobile,” a classic Texas rhythm and blues shuffle in the sophisticated style of T-Bone Walker, was the theme song for a Red Bull energy drink television commercial. He became spokesman for the Texas Roadhouse restaurant chain in exchange for a small taste of company ownership.
The more things changed, the more they seemed to stay the same. In April 2002 a reporter for the
Montgomery Bulletin,
Rhonda Bell, who’d followed Willie since his Houston days in the late 1950s, caught a show and noted several changes and some reassuring consistencies in Willie and Family. “The groupies are getting a lot older,” she wrote. “The band and crew are not even looking at them, they just want to go home to their families. I look at my old friend and I see a lot more lines on his face behind that smile and sparkle in his eye. Willie looks tired. It’s 2:30 in the morning and Willie is still shaking hands, taking pictures, and even autographing blue-jeaned butts. He is still giving his all to his fans.”
He also stayed close to old friends, phoning them, visiting with them, recording with them whenever possible. Johnny Bush was in awe that “Whiskey River” remained an integral part of Willie’s stage show more than thirty-five years after Johnny had written it. “To have one of the greatest songwriters ever, right up there with Hank Williams and Leon Payne, choose to cover my song at his shows is beyond flattery,” Johnny said. At last count, Willie had recorded twenty-seven different versions. To coincide with the publication of Johnny’s book
Whiskey River (Take My Mind),
a gritty recollection of Texas honky-tonk life extending back to the Mission City Playboys, when he met Willie, Johnny recorded an album of songs titled
Kashmere Gardens Mud
that Johnny was exposed to growing up on the poor side of Houston. Willie joined Johnny to duet on “Pancho and Lefty” and a stirring “Send Me the Pillow That You Dream On.”
Helping Johnny Bush underscored the fact that Willie enjoyed saying yes. “If you can get to him, nine times out of ten, he’ll tell you yeah, no matter what it is you’re asking,” his personal assistant David Anderson said. Over the years, David had cultivated a furrowed-brow facial expression intended to run people off without having to say anything. It was part of being Willie’s gatekeeper and knowing his boss was an easy touch.
“It is pure selfishness to not allow every Tom, Dick, and Harry to pitch a benefit,” David said. “We get paid by the day, and if it’s a benefit, we don’t get paid. Plus, one guy can only do so much.” Willie did all he could, saying yes to raising money for the Montessori school his boys had attended in Hawaii, to putting his name behind the Willie Nelson shortwave radio channel, to promoting a video series of shoot-’em-ups staged in Luck starring Willie and his buddies, and even to an arts scholarship foundation that David Anderson put together with his boyfriend. If the ideas didn’t pan out, it mattered little. He’d do anything for his friends.
Friendship kept Paul English and Willie together all these years, Willie said. “The kind you can’t buy, that’s not for sale. You know it when you see it. Paul is probably the best friend I got.”
Paul returned the compliment. “Willie is the main relationship I have had in my life,” he said. “It started fifty-one years ago. He’s a great entertainer and a great writer, and I am proud of him for that. Mainly, though, he’s my friend. He sometimes says I’m his best friend. I really appreciate him saying that, because I know he means it, and I love him. He could get a far better drummer than me for half the price. The entertainment business is mentally tougher than the other businesses I’ve worked in. It takes more loyalty, and you don’t get that much in the business unless it’s Willie. I’ve been disappointed by a lot of people, but mainly because they can’t measure up to Willie.
“Family is more than just blood, especially for me,” Paul said. “We’ve been through so much together—the death of a father, the death of a son, the death of my wife, Carlene. When Carlene died, I went from one eighty [pounds] to one thirty, and I was mean. I would have really liked to die, but he was there for me.”
Those around Willie learned to tolerate his eccentricities. It was standard operating procedure on Willie’s bus to wait until he’d mentioned something a second or third time before taking him seriously. Otherwise, they’d be running around, trying to carry out orders all day, only to have the boss say, “What did you do that for?”
Mark Rothbaum spoke to him at least five times a day and otherwise looked after Willie’s interests, especially whenever Willie said yes. “Willie can’t say no,” Mark said. He cited the time Brian Ahern, the producer and husband of singer Emmylou Harris, had persuaded Willie to buy the Enactron Truck Studio, which recorded
Stardust
. When Ahern arrived one day before the scheduled signing of papers, Rothbaum was waiting for him in Willie’s hotel room ready to kill the deal. “When he saw me, he knew it wasn’t going to happen,” Rothbaum said. The last thing Willie needed was another studio.
Another time, Doug Holloway brought Willie a deal for a Willie Nelson credit card, and Willie signed an agreement with him before Mark intervened.
“That’s a very smart deal you made,” Mark told Willie.
“Really?”
“Yeah, it’s genius.”
“How can that be genius?”
“Well, think about it: A third of all credit cards go into receivership, so a third of your fans will go bankrupt, and they will have to look at your picture on that credit card. Every time they see your picture, they will think, That prick is making money off of me. You’ll be making money off of their credit card, so what you won’t have a career. You’ll be making money and that’s the important thing. It’s a smart deal.”
Willie asked Mark to get him out of the agreement.
A
S
much as he seemed to defy aging, seven decades of physically contorting his fingers into chords and holding picks to strum strings first caught up with him in 2003. Willie developed carpal tunnel syndrome, a repetitive-motion injury to his wrist that ultimately required surgery. For months Budrock had noticed Willie shaking his wrist during performances. In Las Vegas, Willie quit twenty minutes into a show for the first time and told the band, “Let’s go home. I can’t do this anymore.” He tried herbal and alternative methods of healing before finally giving in to Mark Rothbaum’s plea for surgery. The Willie Nelson Show was put on hold for four months while Willie healed. With his arm in a sling, he had to have helpers roll him his joints and was so itchy for the road, he was sleeping on his bus instead of in his cabin. On his first string of dates back out, Joey Floyd, who played Willie’s son in the film
Honeysuckle Rose
and had grown up to play guitar with Toby Keith, sat in with the band to spell Willie.
The surgery forced him to give up signing every autograph request thrust in his direction. Honeysuckle Rose left the building within minutes after the show was over. “We have to do it that way because he feels guilty,” explained driver Gates Moore. “He always felt like the meet-and-greet was part of his job, and I have stood beside him in the freezing fucking cold with a flashlight for hours and hours when people who hadn’t even been to the show were getting in line, but he wouldn’t quit. His hands were black from the markers, but he would not quit.” Those hours of signing were important to Willie. “I think that’s what made him,” Gates said. “At his shows, you can’t find a person who won’t pull a picture of him and Willie out of his wallet and say, ‘Yeah, I know Willie. I’m in the family.’” Will spent his seventy-first birthday healing from surgery and listening to Leon Russell play at Poodie’s Hilltop, the closest honky-tonk to the Hill, Luck, Texas, and the Pedernales Country Club. Leon had “backed off,” according to Willie, and settled into playing small clubs. Playing Poodie’s was just another gig, even though the audience was special.
Poodie Locke, Willie’s stage manager, was the only roadie in show business with his own beer joint, custom logo, and line of barbecue sauce (labels designed by David Zettner). Among the memorabilia at the Hilltop was a framed jock strap signed by Earl Campbell, the Heisman Trophy All-American running back for the University of Texas football team.
Willie filmed three television specials between 2002 and 2004 under the title
Willie Nelson & Friends
for the USA Network. He invited a host of friends, including Norah Jones, Ray Price, Keith Richards, Toby Keith, Emmylou Harris, Ryan Adams, Jon Bon Jovi, Sheryl Crow, the Dixie Chicks, Vince Gill, Patty Griffin, John Hiatt, Dave Matthews, Brian McKnight, Aaron Neville, Richie Sambora, Rob Thomas, Hank Williams III, and Lee Ann Womack, to join him at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the former Mother Church of Country Music, for the “Stars & Guitars” edition.
“Live & Kickin’,” filmed at the Beacon Theater in New York, featured ZZ Top, Elvis Costello, Eric Clapton, Ray Charles, Sheryl Crow, Norah Jones, Diana Krall, Lyle Lovett, Shelby Lynne, Dolly Parton, Paul Simon, Shania Twain, and former president Bill Clinton.
The third edition, “Outlaws & Angels,” at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, was headlined by Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, rock rapper Kid Rock, and soul stylist Al Green, along with Jerry Lee Lewis, Merle Haggard, and Lucinda Williams. Ray Charles had to cancel due to illness.
In June 2004, Brother Ray passed away. At least he and Willie had time to say their good-byes. “We did a song together in the studio in April, ‘It Was a Very Good Year’ [a song about aging and looking back],” Willie said. “We had some fun. I was at his birthday party. He and Quincy Jones and two, three, of us sat around and talked and had a drink and ate cake. Right after that I went to the Apollo Theater in Harlem for the anniversary of the theater, and Ray got a tribute that night. So I sang ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You.’”
At Ray’s funeral, one of the few Willie has attended, Willie performed Ray’s signature piece, “Georgia on My Mind,” the official state song of Georgia; he could hardly get through the performance as his voice intermittently cracked with emotion, sounding spent and very blue. B. B. King broke up too when he played during the service. Days later, Willie embarked on a tour of minor league baseball parks with Bob Dylan, one of his few peers in the songwriting craft.
Less than a month after a tsunami in South Asia killed more than two hundred thousand people in 2004, he headlined an Austin benefit with Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, Joe Ely, Alejandro Escovedo, and Patty Griffin that was recorded as a CD and a DVD titled
Tsunami Relief: From Austin to South Asia.
His name stayed in the public eye, even as the medium that brought him to the dance shunned him. Mark Rothbaum utilized multiple means to get Willie across, including movies, television, National Public Radio, and radio stations with AAA (adult album alternative) formats. He no longer invested money promoting his records on country radio because country radio wouldn’t play him. “That ship has sailed,” Rothbaum said. “There is no country music radio. It’s all this soft rock crap. Just because you have a pedal steel doesn’t make you country.”
H
E WAS A MUSICIAN
but more than a musician. He was a songwriter whom some saw as a philosopher. He was a picker who knew how to rouse a crowd. He was a New Age good ol’ boy, a hillbilly Dalai Lama, as Kinky Friedman liked to call him. He was that rare high-profile person who was whatever anyone wanted him to be.
“I see him as full of Christ-like character,” recording engineer Bobby Arnold said somberly. “I think he just realizes he’s blessed in so many ways, and it makes him incredibly generous. There’s a spirituality that is Jesus-like. He tries to make people’s lives better. No one else can touch a broken heart with words the way he can.” Tim O’Connor compared him to a messiah. Tim’s daughter had unexpectedly died during Will and Tim’s Austin Opry adventure, and Tim went to the Hill to ask Willie to cosign a $50,000 loan so he could retreat to a ranch in Montana. “If you don’t want to do that, I completely understand,” Tim told him. “But you have my word that I will repay you. I’ll even give you the title to the property.”
“Wait a minute,” Willie said, excusing himself to go to the bedroom. He returned bearing a $50,000 check that someone had written him.
“I’ve always hated banks, haven’t you?” he said, endorsing the back of the check and handing it to Tim. The favor prompted Tim several years later to take over a benefit concert in Crawford, Nebraska, gone bad. The promoter of the “phone deal” benefit starring Willie Nelson had left town with the money two weeks before the show. Tim stepped in to produce the concert, taking a five-figure bath for his troubles because he didn’t want the locals to think poorly of Willie.
Whether Willie was in the room or far away, he made those around him feel good. When Jody Fischer checked into the Christopher House hospice for cancer patients in Austin, she was unknowingly placed in the Willie Nelson Room to conclude her life, much of it spent in service to Willie. She died peacefully. Whenever Merle Haggard felt Willie’s intense gaze, he turned into a different person. “You’d see Haggard come onto the bus like a caged animal, with that frantic, frenetic look in his eyes, being really uptight with a lot of people,” publicist Evelyn Shriver said. “Then you’d see him sit across from Willie and you’d watch him physically change. When he makes that eye contact with Willie, all of a sudden, everything’s okay. I’ve seen it with so many people that go on the bus. He has that ability to melt your heart and make you feel important.”
Kris Kristofferson was also under Willie’s influence. “I swear to God, being around Willie is like being around Buddha,” he said. “He gives off these positive attitudes. Next thing you know, you’re acting like him. Things that ruffle the rest of us don’t ruffle him. He’s got almost an Asian calm about him. I don’t think things are going to bowl him over. It probably comes from all those years of scrambling and laughing at it.”
Willie walked the walk.
“His creative door is wide open,” Floyd Domino said. “There’s nothing repressed. There’s nothing you can’t talk or write about, whether he feels it or observes it, he understands it. He’s got this transcendence where he understands it, whether he’s lived it or can feel it. Mickey told me about the band meeting this guy at a truck stop in Fort Worth on their way home. He never had a break and he wanted to get his songs recorded. ‘Come on down to the studio,’ Willie said. So the guy got on the bus, rode to Pedernales, and recorded with the band.”
“He takes things in stride,” said Frank Oakley, who’d known him since 1961, when Faron Young introduced them. “He always says everything’s going to work out like it’s supposed to.”
“The most important thing is to breathe,” Willie liked to say. “Inhale and exhale and everything else will fall together.”
The Holy Willie effect was so pervasive it was parodied, riffing off “WWJD?”—What Would Jesus Do?—a popular 1990s catchphrase invoked by people of certain Christian faiths when faced with a moral dilemma. Austin singer-songwriter Bruce Robinson put his spin on the rhetorical with the single “What Would Willie Do?”
I was lost in trouble and strife, I heard a voice and it changed my life
And now it’s a brand new day, and I ain’t afraid to say
You’re not alone when you’re down and out
And I think you know who I’m talking about
When I don’t know how I’ll get through
I ask myself what would Willie do
What would Willie do, when it’s all gone wrong
The answer’s in the words of a sad country song
When you don’t know how to get through,
You better ask yourself, “What would Willie do?”
Long ago, you came unto us,
His words were simple but they went right through us
And the whole world sang along
But then they didn’t want to hear his songs
He was gone and we thought we’d lost him
But he just grew his hair and he moved to Austin
And all of the people smiled
They came to hear him sing from miles
And like a miracle all the rednecks and hippies
From New York City down to Mississippi
Stood together and raised a brew
When your skies are gray, “What would Willie do?”
You know sometimes I wonder when I ain’t gettin’ nowhere
What would old Willie do when things get too much to bear
And I see him sittin’ on his lonely old bus
And he’s got his problems just like any of us
And I bet he’d just take a deep breath and he’d let ’em all go
And then he’d take another deep breath and he’d let ’em all go
And then he’d take another deep breath
And he’d hold it...
And then I bet he’d feel hungry in a way that seems strange
Yes hungry for all the things he just can’t change
Like the time he passed out in his own bedroom
And his ex-wife sewed him up in the sheet and she beat him with a broom
And he forgave her and you think that that’s rough,
Then the IRS came and they took away all his stuff
They took his golf course and his recording studio
And he just went on out and did another show
So when it’s all comin’ down on you
You better ask yourself, “What would Willie do?”
What would Willie do, he travels far with nothin’
But a song and an old guitar
And a tour bus and some semi trucks
And 30 crewmen and a little bit of luck
He loves all the people, the ugly and the randy
If you don’t believe it take a look at the family
And they’ll tell you that it’s true
So when your skies are gray, “What would Willie do?”
What would Willie do, he’d take a little time
And talk to old Rooster as they drive on down the line
There’s millions down that road
And with a word he’s gonna lighten their load
He loves all the people no matter their races
Hell, he even made a hit country song with Julio Iglesias
And that ain’t easy to do
So when it’s all too much, “What would Willie—”
When the game gets rough, “What would Willie—”
When they call your bluff, “What would Willie do?”
Bumper stickers appeared around Austin that read “Matthew, Mark, Luke and Willie.”
And when the pilgrims had questions, Willie had answers.
While hanging with Willie, Ray Wylie Hubbard once suddenly realized he’d forgotten a gig. “It’s two-twenty and I’m supposed to be in San Antonio at three,” he told Willie. “What do I do?”
“Call and tell them you lied,” Willie said automatically, suggesting he’d been in a similar situation before.
Advice was sometimes offered even if not requested, according to Billy Joe Shaver. “Willie’s always had this charisma, this aura thing around him,” he said. “He doesn’t realize it but he’s always good to be around. When you leave, you feel good. The longer you stay around, the better you feel. I got into drugs and women in Nashville. My family was suffering. I had to leave to save my life. I went down to Houston and went cold turkey. I didn’t know they had these places where you could get relief from drugs. Jesus Christ is all I had. I dropped to a hundred fifty pounds. All I could drink was a diet root beer. That’s all I could keep down. Willie called me up and said, ‘Come on over and play with us.’ He always knew when I was down.”
Willie didn’t quibble with the praise or portrayals. If anything, he played up to them. As he’d aged, as his hair grew longer, his beard became scruffier, and his nature more iconoclastic, he looked wiser. He could quote the Bible, Edward Cayce, the Dalai Lama, and Roger Miller with equal ease, and he left the distinct impression that he hovered above the fray, laughing and singing, articulating a simple message: Whatever Happens Happens.
His point of view explained his ability to keep his sunny side up when others around him gave him plenty of reasons to cry in his beer. Waylon’s various ailments, including a quadruple heart bypass, diabetes, emphysema, and carpal tunnel syndrome, took him down for good in 2002. Floyd Tillman passed a year earlier after having a last go-round on record with Willie issued by Heart of Texas Records, a classic country label based in Brady. Geno McCoslin blew his brains out; he’d been diagnosed as bipolar. Jimmy Day went in 1999 from a heart attack following treatment for stomach cancer. David Zettner was taken by a brain aneurysm in 2006. Billy and Bettie Walker were killed in a car wreck on their way back to Nashville, also in 2006. Larry Trader was felled by a stroke and then a heart attack in 2007. (Willie went to the hospital to comfort him, talking to him and telling him jokes for a good twenty minutes before it was brought to his attention that Trader was already dead.) Grady, Bucky, Webb, Faron, Cash, Martha, Billy—all gone. Dee Herrera, the Brown Mexican Bear whose family ran Dallas’s oldest family Mexican restaurant and who showed up for Willie gigs armed with margaritas, was buried in shorts and a Billy Joe Shaver T-shirt, with a Willie Nelson backstage pass attached to a lanyard around his neck and a yellow rose in his hand.
Willie was philosophical about loss. “You know, there are a lot of younger people than you and I already gone on,” he said with a soft sigh. “It has nothing to do with age. There are those huge disasters that happen on the planet when twenty thousand people get wiped out and there are no age preferences there. We’re all headed that way.”
His response was to choogle along and stay one step ahead of the game. He was still driven. People tended to forget his passion for moving forward and his competitive streak. “We were in Sydney in the rooftop pool a half hour before showtime, seeing who could stay underwater the longest,” said Mark Rothbaum. “Connie was standing at the side of the pool, looking at her watch, telling us we were going to be late to the show. Willie shouted, ‘Shut up! Time us!’”
He operated by different rules. One morning, Willie was walking to his bus in a hotel parking lot with Coach Royal, when Coach told him that he’d left a gift from a fan in his hotel room.
“Willie, you forgot your thing there,” Coach told him.
Willie kept walking. He later explained himself to Coach. “After they give it, and I receive it, the transaction is over. They enjoyed giving it to me and I enjoyed receiving it. I don’t have to be a slave to all those possessions.”
He tried to explain that to his Atlanta attorney, Joel Katz, during a meeting in a Los Angeles hotel room where Willie fired him. Joel had scheduled a meeting, wanting to show Willie an estate plan he’d drawn up.
When Willie realized what Joel had done, he blew up.
“Why are you doing this? Who asked you to draw this up? I don’t want an estate plan. I didn’t ask for an estate plan. I never want to hear about an estate plan again,” he fumed, stomping out of the room.
Visions of having lost his most important client swirled around Joel Katz’s head when Willie returned a few minutes later in a calmer state of mind.
“I know you’re really trying to help, so I apologize,” he said, putting his arm around Joel. “You were trying to do what you thought was right for me, but you’ve got to understand my philosophy of life. I want the people around me to be happy, but I look at life as a roller coaster. When I’m up, I’m up. And when I’m down, I’m down. And I hope when it’s all over, the money runs out just about the same time that I’m through with my life.
“Let’s not plan. It’s a lot more fun if we don’t,” he said, shooting Joel a wink.
Shortly after
Stardust
had been certified triple platinum in 1984, Ray Benson tried to use similar forethought, asking Willie about his corporate structure. “Nothing—it just goes in the Willie Nelson bank account,” Willie told him, even though the income stream was reaching $30 million a year. “Do you have a will?” Ray asked. “Naw,” Willie replied. “When I die, I just want to watch them all fight it out. May the best attorney win,” he said, laughing.
It took a while but Ray finally figured out how Willie ticked. Driving down the golf course, Benson told him, “You should take some golf lessons.” Willie stopped the cart and looked him in the eyes. “Let me tell you something, Ray. If there’s a right way to do something, I’ll do it the wrong way first.”
Looking ahead instead of being in the moment got in the way of making music, doing shows, recording with everyone he ever wanted to record with, playing however he had a hankering to play. “A lot of people make money off of fear and negativity and any way they can feed it to you is to their benefit in a lot of ways,” he said. “You can’t avoid it completely; you have to be open enough that shit doesn’t stick on you, it goes through, because you are gonna be hit and bombarded all the time with negativity. It’s kind of like with martial arts when you go through a target instead of hitting a target. You just let things go on through without trying to stop them or block them.”