Onstage, I knew how to ignite and sustain that now. Onstage, I had my own band that, with David Zettner back from the armed forces, was better than ever. Onstage, I was in charge. But in the studio, I wasn’t in charge and consequently the now escaped me.
I had great respect for Chet Atkins’s musicianship and accomplishments as a guitarist and producer, but in working with Chet the now eluded us. Because Chet was convinced I could be a superstar, it was hard to walk away from his operation. I had stars in my eyes. Always had, and probably always will. I wanted more. I wanted the most and the biggest and the best. Chet saw my ambition and, rather than temper it, he excited it with a promising prospect: that his way of producing would get me what I sought. Yet his way of producing, for all its technical wonders, fenced me in. I knew it, but, blinded by ambition, I accepted his formula.
I should have known better, but the truth is that it took me a long time—all of the sixties, in fact—to finally see the light.
I remember being moved by Ray Charles’s foray into country music. His huge hits like “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and “You Don’t Know Me” didn’t top just the country charts, but the pop charts as well. Before this, Ray was seen as strictly a rhythm and blues artist. His label was afraid that by leaving the R & B field he’d alienate his core fans. Well, Ray didn’t listen to his label. He sang country songs because he loved country songs. And he sang them in his own bluesy way. Didn’t try to be anything he wasn’t. Music fans felt his heart in those songs, and they responded by buying millions of his records. He broke a mold.
I’d seen how Bob Dylan had broken a couple of molds, too. First he was a folkie not inclined to electrify his guitar. When he did plug in and pulled in elements of rock and roll, the folkies might have been pissed, but a bigger audience was there to cheer him. By the end of the sixties, he went even further with Nashville Skyline, where he embraced country music and did a duet with Johnny Cash on “Girl from the North Country.”
Artists like Ray Charles and Bob Dylan had a strong sense of where they wanted to go artistically. Their inner confidence was greater than the outside influence of record moguls or best-selling producers. They resisted the pressure to conform to conventional wisdom. I saw that. I respected that. But I wasn’t there yet. I was still caught up in a system—the Nashville music assembly line—where conformity was mandatory, and where it seemed to come with string sections and choirs of angels.
On the farm, I was my own man, cultivating my own land. On the road, I followed my fancy, even when it led to some questionable places. But in the studio, I gave my power away.
The power of a man to make decisions is a helluva thing. Sometimes ambition will cloud those decisions, but ultimately our independence is always there. It’s an independent decision to go this way or that, to toe the line or rebel, to stay home and repair our relationships or wander off and form new ones.
I’m a wanderer. I’m a rebel. I’ve always been that way. That was my nature. Maybe I didn’t have the consciousness to see how some of my choices would cause havoc. Maybe I didn’t want that consciousness. Maybe I was just happy to be moving from here to there, making music, making friends, treating today like there might not be no tomorrow.
Problems?
Complications?
Consequences?
I’d deal with all those things when I had to.
But not tonight.
Not now.
16
NOW
WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?” Shirley asked me, her face red as a fire engine. She was holding a letter in her right hand. Her hand was shaking.
“Not sure,” I said, looking up from the morning paper. I’d been reading about Spiro Agnew, vice president under Nixon, who’d been saying all kinds of dumb shit about hippies and protesters. The country was fed up with a purposeless war. At home, the culture wars were brewing. I was pissed at politicians like Agnew who did their best to widen that war. Now here was my wife, going to war with me.
We were up on Greer Road. We were nearing Thanksgiving, and I was looking forward to the traditional family meal.
“I want to know what this is,” Shirley demanded. “I need a goddamn explanation—and I need it now.”
“I can’t see what you’re holding,” I said.
With her hand shaking even more, she handed the letter to me.
I glanced at the top of it and saw it was an invoice from a hospital in Houston. No big deal.
“It’s just a bill,” I said. “I needed to go to a hospital in Houston for something minor.”
“It’s not a bill for you,” said Shirley. “You’re not reading it. Read what the bill says, Willie. Read it out loud.”
I looked down a little further and saw why Shirley was shaking with rage. The bill listed charges incurred for the birth of a baby girl, Paula Carlene, born October 27, 1969, to Mrs. Connie Nelson.
“Read it out loud!” Shirley screamed.
“I don’t need to read it. I know what it is.”
“Well, what in tarnation is it? Who is this Connie? Whose baby is this? What the goddamn hell is going on?”
It was simple: I was caught.
Connie Koepke, a beautiful young woman in her early twenties, had been my girlfriend for several years out there on the road. I’d met her in her hometown of Houston. She got pregnant by me. When it was time to have the baby, I made sure to be there and register her at the hospital. When they asked me where to send the bill, for some insane reason—maybe because deep down I wanted to be caught—I listed my address on Greer Road.
Now, in plain terms, I told Shirley the truth.
“How could you?” she asked.
“Hell, woman,” I said, “we really haven’t been together for years.”
I didn’t go into details. I didn’t have to. I didn’t have to remind Shirley that we’d both been down in the dumps with heavy drinking and pill popping—not to mention the crazy shit I’d done, running around the country, staying away from home for months at a time.
Our home life had been a mess. My road life, especially when I was with Connie in Texas, had been peaceful and calm. No fighting, no fussing, just lots of easy talk and good loving.
Even after this revelation, Shirley and I tried to make it work, but by then it was unworkable. I could understand why she was disgusted with me. I could see why one day she just packed up and left. It was damn near ten years later before I saw Shirley again. It happened when she showed up at one of my shows. She sang with me that night. She sang pretty as a nightingale. She still had her incredible yodel. And as if to prove that love wasn’t ever the issue, we got along just fine.
Back in the winter of ’69, when Shirley moved out, Connie and baby Paula moved in with me, Lana, Susie, and Billy. Except for one or two incidents, you could say we were one big happy family. One of those incidents was no small matter. It came to be known as the Great Shoot-Out.
Had to do with me being an overly protective dad. Turned out that Lana—like my mother and Susie, Billy, and Lana’s own mother, Martha—got married when she was sixteen. Just after Connie and Paula came to join us in Tennessee, Lana came over to our house with a black eye and bloody nose. Her husband, Steve, had beaten her up. I walked her back to her place. Steve was there. I bitch-slapped him a couple of times. He whined and ran. As he drove off, I shot out one of the tires on his car. I went out back to the barn and was feeding my horse when a car came roaring by. Shots rang out and a bullet missed my head by about a foot. A little later the cops came by, wanting to know what happened. I told them and they left. Thankfully no one was hurt, but for a while it looked like the Beverly Hillbillies had come to Tennessee.
In the midst of this madness, I still managed to make music. In fact, music was the refuge from the madness. The more intense my personal life became, the more I concentrated on making sounds that soothed my soul. The actual sound itself was important to me. I paid careful attention to the instruments I played. Early on, I’d used Fender Telecast
ers and Stratocasters with their small necks and piercing electric sound. I switched over to a big Baldwin hooked up to an aluminum amp. When the neck broke, I traded it in for a Martin made of rosewood, an acoustic model with the richest, most soulful tone I’d ever heard. I had my man Shot Jackson, a guitar genius in Nashville, customize the Martin by integrating the guts and pickup from the Baldwin. It worked. I had the sound I’d been looking for. I heard it as a human sound, a sound close to my own voice. Didn’t take long for me to pick a hole in it. That’s ’cause classical guitars aren’t meant to be picked. But that hole, along with the aluminum amp—aged by just the right amount of beer that’d been spilled inside—seemed to deepen its soulful tone. I named my guitar Trigger, thinking of the closeness between Roy Rogers and his beloved horse.
Hearing my new sound, producers at RCA had a new idea for me: they thought I’d be a natural as a folk artist. Following Bob Dylan’s Nashville album, the trend was to repackage country music with elements of folk.
“Hell, hoss, they got me singing that stuff,” said Waylon Jennings when I ran into him at the studio. “Now they got me recording ‘MacArthur Park’ and ‘Norwegian Wood.’ Now they’re calling me ‘country folk.’ Before that they were calling me ‘country rock and roll.’ Truth be told, these fuckers don’t know their elbows from their assholes.”
Well, I did sing Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” and “Everybody’s Talkin’ ” from Midnight Cowboy and James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain,” not because I wanted to reinvent myself in the folk medium, but only because I really liked the songs. I was happy to do “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” by Kris Kristofferson, a brilliant writer who’d been everything from a janitor to a Rhodes scholar to an army helicopter pilot.
Also sang Merle Haggard’s “Today I Started Loving You Again.” Another great writer and singer, Merle had come out of the Buck Owens music scene in Bakersfield, California. I met him when he was playing bass with Wynn Stewart at the Nashville Nevada Club in Las Vegas. Then I invited him up to Ridgetop, where we played poker. Merle was another one of those rugged individualists who, like me, was trying to make sense of all the nonsense in the music business. We became buddies for life.
My own songs remained reflective of my own life. Folk be damned—given my domestic complications, it’s no wonder I rerecorded “I Gotta Get Drunk.”
“Bloody Mary Morning” was another boozy song about this boozy period of my life. Its origins might be found in those days on the road when I was still living a double life between Shirley and Connie. Like most songwriters, I changed around the facts to suit the rhythm and rhymes of the song.
It’s a Bloody Mary morning, baby,
Baby left me without warning sometime in the night
So I’m flying down to Houston
With forgetting her the nature of my flight
As we taxi down the runway with the smog and haze
Reminding me of how I feel
Just a country boy who’s learning
That the pitfalls of the city are extremely real
All the nightlife and parties
Temptation and deceit the order of the day
Well, it’s a Bloody Mary morning
And I’m leaving baby somewhere in L.A.
The song had me running fast. The song had me looking for a way to deal with a hangover. I was hungover from too much liquor and too much running. It all made sense in a song, even though I still lacked the good sense to give up booze. I was a lousy drunk, a foolish drunk, a fighting drunk, a drunk who did himself much damage. But I was still caught up in the culture of drinking. That’s what country singers did, right? That’s what pickers did. That was the life.
The country music lifestyle was a heavy thing. I had come up in that lifestyle. It was all about Hank Williams singing the loneliest blues any white man had ever sung. The sadness was born out of many things: poverty, heartbreak, the endless grind on the farm and on the road. As a boy, I felt that sadness and wrote about it before I was old enough to fully understand it. When I did understand it, when I felt the full power of the blues, I also learned to drown my sorrows in a sea of booze. That only made me sadder. It also may have helped me write some sad songs, like “Bloody Mary Morning,” that I’m still singing today. I regret none of this. At the same time, in the last half of the sixties I began witnessing another lifestyle that made more sense to me.
At first I witnessed from afar. My kids Lana and Susie, as well as my bandmate David Zettner, had come back from the Atlanta Pop Festival all excited. They talked about seeing Janis Joplin and Joe Cocker and Creedence Clearwater Revival and Delaney and Bonnie and Blood, Sweat and Tears and Led Zeppelin and the Staple Singers. They said over 150,000 came for the Fourth of July weekend. They said it was peaceful. Everyone was mellow. Everyone was stoned—peacefully stoned. Everyone shared the music and shared the pot.
“It was your kind of scene, Daddy,” Lana said to me. “If you had played your music, everyone would have loved it.”
It got me wondering.
I knew a lot of the music, just by listening to it on the radio, and I liked what I heard. Most of it came out of the blues. I heard Led Zeppelin as a blues band. Janis Joplin sure as hell was singing the blues. Same went for Delaney and Bonnie. Their Oklahoman piano player, Leon Russell, had written a bluesy hit, “Delta Lady,” that Joe Cocker sang the shit out of. Turned out that Leon had been a sideman on one of my first Liberty records. In those days, he dressed normal like the rest of us and did his best to blend in. Now, with hair down to his shoulders and carny-type clothes, he definitely stood out.
Leon was part of what everyone was calling the hippie movement, a generation of kids opposed to the Vietnam War and the uptight, hypocritical establishment. Kids who saw beauty in love, not violence. I liked that they put flowers in their hair and wore bright tie-dyed blouses and bell-bottomed pants. I liked that they had courage to look and act any damn way they pleased. And naturally I liked their notion of free love.
That was the summer of Woodstock, another big revelation for me. The Hippie Nation was growing by leaps and bounds, a nation that held American roots music close to its heart.
Wasn’t long after that I caught Leon Russell on his Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour. He knocked me out. I told Connie, “This man is one of the greatest entertainers I’ve ever seen.” I understood how his image—with his crazy stovepipe hat and dark aviator glasses—added to his mysterious allure. Beyond the mystery, though, I heard that his musical roots and mine were the same: Hank Williams, Bob Wills, country black blues. To me it felt as familiar as an old pair of jeans.
The new world represented by the Grateful Dead or the Jefferson Airplane was new only in appearance. That appearance appealed to me because it was bold and creative and said to the world, “To hell with what you think. I’ll dress any way I please.” The music might have had a new configuration, but hell, I could trace it back to Lightnin’ Hopkins, who I had heard back in Houston in the fifties. The music was as old as time.
It thrilled me to watch the sixties settle in, even as everything else was feeling pretty settled in. In time, the domestic situation at the farm calmed down. Connie and Paula melded in with the rest of the brood. Periodically I went back out on the road. I also went back to writing with my old partner Hank Cochran, a man who thoroughly understood my many moods.
One December night, Hank and I wrote seven songs. The last one we put together was the saddest.
What can you do to me now?
That you haven’t done to me already
You broke my pride and made me cry out loud
What can you do to me now?
I’m seeing things that I never thought I’d see
You’ve opened up the eyes inside of me
How long have you been doing this to me?
I’m seeing sides of me that I can’t believe
Someway, somehow, I’ll make a man of me
I will build me back the way I used to be
> Much stronger now, the second time around
’Cause what can you do to me now?
Even though the title—“What Can You Do to Me Now?”—seemed to invite trouble, the story was really about getting strong in the face of adversity. Like almost all my songs, I didn’t write the lyrics to reflect my literal real-life situation. Because I’m the composer, there are always elements of me in the story. But the woman I was addressing wasn’t Martha or Shirley or Connie. She was a make-believe character in a drama in which a man faces the difficulty—the impossibility—of straightening out his romantic relationship. That man is not me. But when I’m singing the song, the man has to be me. I’ve written the script; I’ve customized the part, the main role, for myself. I’ve got to make you believe that this story is real. And when I’m performing, you can bet your boots it is. I’m crying real tears.
I suppose I could have been crying over the fact that my RCA records still weren’t selling, but I wasn’t. The label was still giving me money to go in and record. Chet Atkins was still trying to package my music and expand my market. Even though his vision and mine were different, I couldn’t get mad at a man who believed so deeply in my talent—especially when that man happened to be one of the best guitarists in the world.
Who was I to complain? I had my family up on Greer Road. I had a wonderful new woman and, in addition to my three other great kids, my baby daughter, Paula. I was surrounded by friends like Waylon. I had all my close musician buddies, like Paul English and Bee Spears and David Zettner, living right close by. Writing partners like Hank Cochran were always stopping by. My poker partners would show up three, maybe four times a week.
Like my newly recorded song said, “What can you do to me now?”
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