It's a Long Story

by Willie Nelson

  I studied Wills’s performance. That’s the night I learned what it meant to entertain a big roomful of folks. It meant nonstop music. It meant being the man in charge who wasted no time with flowery remarks or long-winded introductions. I marveled as Wills seamlessly moved from one song into another. I saw him continuously measuring the moods of his fans. He switched from having Tommy Duncan sing bluesy-slow songs like “Trouble in Mind” to fiddle-friendly rompers like “Stay All Night” to lonely laments like “Bubbles in My Beer.”

  Standing there over the course of four hours, I was not only transfixed by the waves of music washing over me, but I witnessed a living example of a lead musician in total command. There, by moonlit Lake Whitney, Bob Wills was telling me, not in words, but in spirit:

  “Young Willie, if you wanna make your way with music, just keep the music coming, song after song after song. Forget about stopping to say something clever. Forget about jokes. Forget about taking breaks. Forget about whatever was on your mind before you came to play. The job is to play like your life depends upon it. The job is to put the pedal to the metal and drive this music machine a hundred miles an hour through every dance hall and beer joint and honky-tonk from here to hell. The job is to give the people what the people want and what the people need. And that ain’t nothing more than songs that will let them dance their troubles away. Do that, young Willie, and you’ll have yourself a career. You might make a fortune or you might go broke, but it won’t matter because you’ll have a ball—and so will the fans who’ll flock to hear you play.”

  Before I’d heard Bob Wills that night, I knew the music of immortals like Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams. I loved them all, just as later I would love Lefty Frizzell. These were figures carved out on the Mount Rushmore of country music. Each had an individual sound and an intimate voice that contributed to my own developing voice.

  Wills, though, showed me how a band, far more than a single singer, could convey a voice of its own. He and his Texas Playboys showed me that a collective voice, capable of expressing every mood from sky-high joy to low-down pain, can captivate the raunchiest crowd from eight in the evening to deep in the midnight hour.

  Going deeper into the music, I would soon discover a guitarist, far from the fields of western swing, whom Bob Wills had also discovered. I’m talking about the great Django Reinhardt. This was a man who changed my musical life by giving me a whole new perspective on the guitar and, on an even more profound level, on my relationship with sound.

  In the aftermath of World War II, when I was a teenager, Django’s music began to surface in America on a regular basis. They had some of his records at the Hillsboro radio station. Over the coming years, in bits and pieces I learned about his myth. He was born in 1910 into a family of Romanian gypsies in Belgium, where his name was Jean. In the dialect of his people, his nickname, Django, meant “I awake.”

  Django awoke in me a new and joyful appreciation of swing and jazz. The appreciation deepened when I learned that, at age eighteen, he was injured in a near-fatal fire that burned two fingers—the fourth and fifth—of his left hand to the point of paralysis. He was told he could never play the guitar again. He was also told that one of his legs, also badly burned, would have to be amputated. But he refused the surgery. He also refused to believe the doctors when they told him he’d never walk again.

  Yet he did walk and, man, did he ever play! He found a way to negotiate his guitar solos with only two fingers, using his two injured fingers for chording. That negotiation—that act of defiance, bravery, and practicality—yielded astounding results.

  In 1933, the year of my birth and of the death of Jimmie Rodgers, Django began recording in Paris. He was promoted by the Hot Club de France, a group of Parisians devoted to spreading what they considered to be genuine American blues-based jazz. That’s when he joined forces with French violinist Stéphane Grappelli, who became Django’s artistic soul mate. The music they made together—light, sweet, easy, breezy, imaginative, and always pretty—ranks as some of the most original jazz ever created.

  I followed Django’s fortunes. In 1946, he came to America, where he was invited by Duke Ellington to appear with Duke’s famous orchestra. I began reading music magazines that reported the controversy surrounding him. When he played clubs in New York and was asked whether he belonged to the camp of traditionalists like Louis Armstrong or modernists like Dizzy Gillespie, he simply said, “Both. I hear it as all one thing. One music expressed in different ways, but always connected to each other.”

  He said that various schools and genres should never fight but reflect the harmony that is, after all, the moral message of all music.

  That lesson was not lost on me. During my formative years, as I listened to Django’s records, especially songs like “Nuages” that I would play for the rest of my life, I studied his technique. Even more, I studied his gentleness. I loved the human sound he gave his acoustic guitar. I loved how he integrated so many foreign feelings into his music: Spain and France, the gypsy camps, New Orleans Dixieland, blues singers like Big Bill Broonzy, the big bands of Chicago and New York.

  Django wasn’t a show-off or a look-at-me kind of star. His star shone with an inner glow. He loved to softly chord while his cohort Stéphane Grappelli soloed. He wasn’t greedy for the spotlight. His delight came in quiet creation. In this way he influenced me perhaps more profoundly than any single musician.

  In my mind, the guitar-and-fiddle counterpoint of Django and Grappelli mirrored the guitar-and-fiddle style of country music. Two different string instruments doing a dance. They never got in each other’s way. They never stepped on each other’s toes. They brought out the best in each other while swinging hard and having a ball.

  Other musical avenues would open to me—big wide boulevards on which I happily traveled. But no one opened my heart like the gypsy jazz guitar of Django Reinhardt.

  “Absorb everything,” his spirit said to me. “Love every style. Love every musical thing. No matter its place of origin, you will find yourself in that style. You will become part of everything. And everything will become part of you.”

  Late at night, my ear close to the Philco radio, the music would float in on a dream. The dream had a name. One night it was “Body and Soul.” One night it was “Laura.” One night it was “Fools Rush In.”

  The dreamy sound of Frank Sinatra’s voice.

  The dreamy sound of Django’s guitar.

  Two artists who could not be any more different from each other or from me—a gypsy jazz guitarist and a New Jersey pop crooner—impressed themselves on my soul.

  And in between here’s Eddy Arnold singing “Texarkana Baby.”

  And here’s Gene Autry singing “Buttons and Bows.”

  And here’s Roy Rogers singing “Blue Shadows on the Trail.”

  Blue shadows, blue singing, blue moon over Abbott, Texas.

  Just a kid, like millions of other kids, falling deeper and deeper in love with music.

  4

  ZEKE

  NOT LONG AGO I WAS telling a friend about my childhood in Hill County. After hearing me describe how I lettered in all the sports, learned music from my grandparents, played in local bands, and subscribed to all those Charles Atlas self-defense programs, the friend said, “Hell, Willie, you were the all-American boy.”

  “Not all-American,” I said. “All-Abbott.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “All-American,” I said, “has me thinking of Jack Armstrong, the hero of the radio program that everyone listened to in the nineteen thirties and forties. Jack was the all-American because he ate his Wheaties and had all these adventures where he always came out on top. He didn’t drink, cuss, or smoke.”

  “And what’s all-Abbott?” asked my buddy.

  “All-Abbott was a kid like me who did it all, the bad and the good. Sure, I was a good competitive athlete, and sure, I sang in church, and sure, I started learning how to play the guitar. Sure, I was something of a
poet, and sure, I had girlfriends. But unlike Jack Armstrong, I was also drawn to the wild side.”

  “Who drew you there?”

  “Probably just nature,” I said. “Probably just my DNA. But it also had to do with the company I kept.”

  “You hung out with some bad guys?”

  “I didn’t see them as bad. I saw them as fun. And no one was more fun than Zeke Varnon.”

  I met Zeke during my formative teen years. I liked him immediately and we stayed friends for life.

  Just as Django Reinhardt and Bob Wills had a lasting influence on my musical life, Zeke exerted a big influence on my personal life. He showed me a different way to live, and I liked it.

  It wasn’t that I rejected the way of Mama and Daddy Nelson, the way that praises the Lord and puts family first. At the same time, though, I adopted Zeke’s way. You might argue that these two ways are incompatible, but that’s an argument I never bought. I wanted it both ways.

  Zeke liked to drink. He liked to smoke. He liked to play poker and pool. He was a world-class dominoes player. He liked chasing women. He liked telling tall tales. And if he could pull off a little con now and then, well, so much the better. From where I sat, it seemed he did all this without hurting a soul.

  If I was sixteen when I met Zeke, he had to be twenty-one or twenty-two. He’d just come out of the service and had far more worldly experience than me. He often dropped by the Nite Owl, a beer joint on the county line where Bobbie and I played in Bud Fletcher’s band. Zeke never tired of telling me how much he liked the way I sang and played. He was among my earliest fans.

  He was also a daredevil. He showed me, for instance, that gambling was more than a matter of learning the game; it was also a question of daring—daring to call your opponent on a bluff, daring to bet money you don’t have, daring to put your ass on the line. Why was I excited by Zeke’s sense of daring? Because it involved danger. Because it gave ordinary life a sharp edge. Because it welcomed the unpredictable and invited the unknown.

  Zeke’s creed—that life is a gamble and you might as well enjoy it—was an attitude I found irresistible. Beyond the attitude, I fell in love with the very act of gambling. I was drawn to the strategizing. You had to be cunning and ruthless, patient and insightful. I already knew the thrill of fierce competition in sports. I was similarly thrilled when I found myself in a poker or a dominoes game. And when Zeke started taking me around to his barroom hangouts, where he and his cohorts played killer card games late into the night, I studied the players. I saw that they not only read the cards, but they read each other. Psychology was always in play. Some players were nonstop talkers; others wouldn’t say a word. Often the mood was jovial. The guys told dirty jokes, they put each other down unmercifully, they used wit and ridicule to lighten the mood or to intimidate an opponent. Every hand was high drama. That drama hooked me for life.

  In the behind-the-barroom gambling world of my misspent youth, Zeke Varnon was top dog. In his hometown of Hillsboro, he eventually bought a trailer house where he ran a poker game four nights a week. He conducted a bookie operation where you could place bets on local and national football games. He also loved running out of town on a minute’s notice.

  Zeke was always ready to hit the road, and when he jumped into a boxcar of a slow-moving freight train, I’d be foolish enough to jump in after him. The destination didn’t matter as much as the journey itself. If that sounds a little Zen, well, in his own Hill County way, Zeke was something of a Zen master.

  Over the years, Zeke got good at telling stories about my coming-of-age. He told them so often and so well that, whether they really happened or not, I began believing them as the gospel truth.

  He loved telling the one about how, late one night in Fort Worth, he dared me to jump a freight headed to California. I took him up on the dare. We got in the boxcar and promptly fell asleep. When the light of day woke me up, I expected to look outside and see the palm trees of Los Angeles.

  “We on the coast, Zeke?” I asked.

  “Afraid not, Willie,” he said.

  “Where are we?”

  “Weatherford, Texas.”

  Weatherford is barely twenty-five miles west of Fort Worth.

  It was the end of the line for this particular freight. Zeke and I wound up out on the highway, thumbs out for hours, until some guy in a rusty ol’ pickup had the heart to stop and haul us back home.

  A little further down the road, I was able to scrape up enough money to buy a beat-up ’46 Ford. Zeke and I were riding around Hillsboro. I’d just gotten gas for the car. Twenty cents a gallon seemed like a lot of money. Maybe the two bucks it cost to fill it up distracted me. We didn’t know it, but while we were driving to my girlfriend’s house, gas had spilled over the side of the car. I’d left the cap off the gas tank. While I went in to fetch my honey, Zeke waited in the passenger seat.

  A kid came by and asked, “What would happen if I lit a match to all this gasoline on the side of the car?”

  “The fuckin’ car would blow up, you dumb son of a bitch.”

  That’s all the kid needed to hear. He lit the match. Zeke jumped out in time to save his ass, barely avoiding the explosion.

  That definitely happened, but here’s where Zeke and I have different memories.

  I remember trying to chase down the kid. I was ready to beat him to a pulp.

  Zeke remembers my girlfriend asking me, “What are we gonna do now, Willie?”

  And me answering, “We’re gonna wait around like everyone else and watch this car burn. And then go get drunk.”

  Both versions sound like me.

  By the time I reached my senior year in high school, I was on top of the world. The fact that my world was small hardly mattered. It was the only world I knew.

  Along with Bud and Sister, I stayed on the air. Thanks to the Hillsboro radio station, I saw that I had a gift for self-promotion.

  Even at the tender age of seventeen, sitting behind a mic felt natural. Felt good having a vast invisible audience listening to my every word. I never worried about what I was gonna say. I just said it. It wasn’t that I was super-articulate or blessed with a vast vocabulary. I was plainspoken. Didn’t have much to say beyond, “Here’s a little tune I hope y’all like.” And I didn’t have much to sing except hit songs by the big artists of the day. Might be “Lovesick Blues” by Hank Williams with his Drifting Cowboys. Might be “One Kiss Too Many” by Eddy Arnold or “Slipping Around” by Ernest Tubb or anything by Tennessee Ernie Ford, Floyd Tillman, Hank Thompson, or Bill Boyd and the Cowboy Ramblers.

  I loved operating a turntable and carefully placing a needle on a piece of shellac. I came to radio just at that moment when shellac was on its way out and the new formats—45 rpm vinyl singles and 33⅓ rpm long-play albums—were coming in. That was another thrill. Right there in Hillsboro, Texas, I was privileged to have a hands-on experience with modern technology in recorded music.

  As the only singer/picker/radio personality in all of Abbott, I was lucky as hell—lucky to have a grandmother who let me perform outside the church, lucky to have a brother-in-law who kept me gigged up, lucky to land a spot on the air, and luckiest of all to have this loyal band of fans, these great gals who put their money together to buy me a Western outfit and made me feel like a star.

  But like I said, small world. Next question:

  What does a local-yokel star do after high school?

  Answer:

  He has no idea.

  So he turns to his friend Zeke, who has an answer for everything, and is told, “We’re going to Tyler.”

  “What’s in Tyler?”

  “Trees.”

  “And what are we gonna do with the trees?”

  “Trim ’em. What the hell else are you supposed to do with trees?”

  So we made our way to Tyler, about 115 miles east of Abbott, where we were set to make some quick money. Zeke, who knew everyone everywhere, knew a guy who owned a tree-trimming outfit.

&nb
sp; My job was to run the chipper, a bright orange machine that ground up the fallen branches and brush. Once the chipper was full, I hauled off its contents to the trash. Easy work.

  The hard work was left to the guys who worked on high.

  One day one of those guys yelled down to me.

  “Hey, kid,” he said. “I need a rope.”

  He was at the top of this giant elm, forty feet off the ground. There were various ways in which I could get him the rope. But being young and proud and eager to show off my athletic skills, I said, “No problem. I’ll bring it right to you.”

  The veteran tree trimmers stopped what they were doing so they could watch my ascension.

  My ascension was quick. With the rope over my shoulder, I scurried up the tree like a chimp. It didn’t take long, though, for the chimp to turn into a chump. After I handed the trimmer the rope, he tied it to a limb. That’s when I decided to show off a little more. Several feet above the electrical high wire, I made a daredevil move. The smart move would have been to carefully climb down, hugging the trunk all the way. Not this boy. I was going to put on a little show for the assembled workers and play Tarzan.

  So there I was, flying high forty feet above the earth, grabbing the rope and swinging in the breeze, determined to get down the fast way. Well, Tarzan fucked up. Before I started my descent, my hand got hung up in the rope. The rope got twisted in my fingers and caught on a branch so I could neither go up nor down. I was stuck all the way up there. The guys started yelling instructions at me, but, given my predicament, I couldn’t focus on what they were saying. All knew was that I wanted down—and quick.

  “Just cut the rope!” I told the trimmer.

  A wiser trimmer would have ignored my demand, but this guy, reacting to my previous cocksure attitude, fulfilled my foolish request.

  The result was a free fall from on high. On the way down, I could have easily hit the electrical wire and left this world as a seventeen-year-old. Somehow the good Lord or good fortune or blind luck let me brush by the wire as I awkwardly tumbled downward, crashing through leaves and breaking branches all the way down, down, down.