Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  After Wade Ray declared he’d had enough of the road, citing health problems, Jimmy Day, Willie’s other loyal sideman, took over bass. James Clayton Day had become a compass for Willie Hugh Nelson. The baby-faced kid from Shreveport with a blond bouffant was a sideman among sidemen, a support player admired by his peers for his musicianship but largely unknown. He began playing lap steel guitar in honky-tonks at the age of sixteen. He came up with Floyd Cramer on the Louisiana Hayride, playing steel behind Webb Pierce, Red Sovine, Hank Williams, Jim Reeves, Lefty Frizzell, and Elvis Presley, ultimately electing not to follow Elvis to New York and the fame and fortune beyond because, he said, “I didn’t want to play rock and roll.”

  His chosen instrument, the steel guitar, was the most evocatively country of all instruments in the modern country music ensemble. He was the unnamed codeveloper of the Sho-Bud pedal steel guitar manufactured by his friend Buddy Emmons and mentor Shot Jackson, setting the standard on Ray Price’s groundbreaking country dance hit “Crazy Arms” and playing the ride on a string of hits for the next seven years while anchoring Ray Price’s Cherokee Cowboys as well as picking up work with Jim Reeves and Ernest Tubb, playing steel, rhythm and lead guitar, and bass.

  He left the Cherokee Cowboys when Willie did, backed Willie and Johnny Bush for spells, moved with Willie and Shirley to Fort Worth briefly, and later returned to the Cherokee Cowboys along with Johnny Bush. After that, he moved on to back Ferlin Husky and George Jones before rejoining Willie in 1966.

  Although Jimmy was hired to play bass, Willie recognized him as the steel guitar virtuoso he was. He could bend chords with his slide bar and slow down a tempo until the notes did a slow-motion moan for mercy. The sonic wail was the perfect complement to Willie’s sad songs. The purposeful tempo and the half-spoken lyrics drew falling teardrops into the beer glass just as Jimmy’s steel echoed the melody of a haunted voice on his instrumental rides.

  Jimmy Day was a purist to the point of being a mess otherwise, prone to drink or pill up so he could stay up a little longer and play a little more. He was mulish to a fault and would often be sent to stand in the corner for a while. Willie and Jimmy were close enough in temperament that they argued and fought verbally and sometimes physically. During one tour while riding on a bus, Willie ordered the driver to pull over, and he took Jimmy outside and whipped his ass. Jimmy might have been a fuckup who deserved being beaten up every now and then, but Willie always apologized and took him back into the band because Jimmy Day was that good a musician.

  “Nobody but me and Willie could get along with Jimmy,” Johnny Bush said. “And it wasn’t easy for me.”

  “You’d hear the stories about Jimmy drinking or pilling or smoking pot, getting crazy, pissing people off, and he’d be gone. Then all of a sudden, he’d be back,” one well-acquainted musician said.

  Willie, as the musicians who played with him learned, could sometimes be as bad a drunk as Jimmy. He was not to be trifled with when he was drinking, demonstrating a proclivity to punch holes in walls, in doors, and windows when he got shit-faced. Friends would blame it on his Indian blood. In truth, he had no one to blame but himself. A charter member of the “ine” generation that knew their benzedrine from their methedrine and morphine, Willie satisfied his nicotine fix by smoking two to three packs of Chesterfields, Camels, Lucky Strikes, or Kools a day. He could keep up with the pickers and pop his fair share of white crosses, Mexican Blackbirds, and Black Mollies when needed. He had heard about LSD and other psychedelic drugs the hippies were doing and had smoked marijuana too. But he wasn’t buying in just yet.

  One night he worked Schroeder Hall, a storied Texas dance hall in the country near Victoria, Texas, where he’d enlisted Johnny Bush to round up bassist Eddie Sweatt and a drummer. Willie pulled up to the dance hall in his car next to a tree where Johnny and Eddie were standing around smoking a joint of marijuana. Johnny offered him a hit, but Willie waved it off. “I can’t smoke that shit, man,” Willie told Johnny. “It gives me a headache.” Whiskey and cigarettes were his drugs of choice.

  Keeping a band together was headache enough. On one run, Willie took Jimmy Day off bass and put him back on steel, recruited Buddy White to play guitar and Sonny Hicks to drum, and moved Johnny Bush to bass. But Buddy White had a bad habit of playing over Willie’s guitar leads, so Willie had Johnny bounce him from the band. Years later, when Buddy showed up at a gig and asked Willie why he fired him, Willie wiggled off the line by telling him truthfully, “I didn’t fire you. Johnny did.”

  FOR all the musical chairs, Willie Nelson’s revolving supporting cast turned into a real band when Paul English signed on late in 1966. Paul was a striking presence, a skinny man with high cheekbones, jet-black hair, and a wicked goatee, who dressed sharp in suits and ties and alligator shoes and was so streetwise he could intimidate a stranger just by looking at him. Willie had worked with Paul for a few weeks back in Fort Worth in 1955 when he was on the radio on KCNC and Paul’s brother, Oliver, considered one of the best country and jazz guitarists in Fort Worth, backed Willie on his thirty-minute daily Western Express program. Willie might not have paid much, but he knew how to pick ’em. “There are people called musicians,” Cowtown jazz piano mainstay John Case said. “And there are those who’re master musicians. Oliver English was a master musician.” When the drummer Tommy Roznosky didn’t show for the radio program, Oliver’s little brother Paul, a trumpet player by training, was recruited to fill in.

  Paul listened to the show every day while he worked at his shop tooling saddles and other leather goods, and not just because his brother was playing. He loved the introduction by the “snuff-dippin’, coffee-pot-dodgin’ hillbilly from Hill County” and the whole persona he projected. He was surprised when he actually saw the impish face behind the voice in the KCNC studio. “Listening to him, I thought he was an old man,” Paul said. “But he wasn’t much older than me. It was a good radio show.”

  The idea of playing drums for the first time did not daunt Paul. “They had a snare drum, and my older brother said, ‘Just start going one and two and three and four.’ That’s all I could do.” Paul dug the experience enough to skip work and back up Willie and Oliver on the radio for three weeks for free. “Someone gave me a bass Salvation Army drum, and I hooked a pedal up to it and sat on a Coke box and managed to hook some bongo drums to the bass drum,” Paul said. “They told me to just keep patting my foot. They kind of counted out every song for me, just one, two, three, four.”

  When Willie hustled a gig at Major’s Place, a dim-lit, low-ceilinged lounge at 4010 Hemphill on the south side, he suggested that Oliver bring along Paul so he could get paid for his drumming—$8 a night, three nights a week for six weeks. “The money wasn’t that great,” Paul admitted. “But I loved playing, and I got to play in front of the girls. The girls loved musicians.”

  Three weeks into the engagement, the club was sold and Major’s took on new management, a common occurrence in the club business, ending their run. But Willie’s friendship with the English brothers endured. He hung with Oliver and Paul and did business with them, purchasing an automobile from the small car lot they operated at 2222 Main near the Stockyards. “We didn’t have one good enough to sell him, so we went out and found a ’forty-seven Buick convertible, one owner, black with red leather upholstery,” Paul said. “I paid $165 plus the $22 tax and sold it to Willie for $175 on time for $25 down. I lost money on the deal.”

  The friendship endured even as Willie pulled up stakes and left Fort Worth with stars in his eyes. Paul kept his day and night jobs. The leatherwork Paul and his cousin Arvel Walden were doing was so good, they could fetch $45 for a saddle when everyone else was getting $15. The used-car lot Paul ran with his brother Oliver provided some nice running change too. Mainly, though, both were covers for Paul’s real profession of running numbers, running whores, and smuggling whatever the marketplace demanded.

  But Paul never gave up his love of playing music. He caught on with a guitar
ist named Billy Wade at a Jacksboro Highway joint, then joined Oliver and their cousin Arvel and an insurance salesman known as Good Time Charlie Taylor, the Texas Fireball. Paul was one of Good Time Charlie’s Famous Rock & Roll Cowboys. The band’s show poster identified his handsome floating head, replete with Sal Mineo curl and pencil-thin mustache, as the “Bip Bob Drummer.”

  As a teenager, Paul had run with a gang of hoodlums called the Peroxide Gang, “because we all peroxided our hair,” Paul said, and became adept at wielding a gun and a knife. “I was headed straight for the penitentiary when I was young because we would hold contests to see how many burglaries you could pull during the daylight hours.” After getting thrown in jail and serving time in Ellis County for breaking and entering, a crime that in this case he did not commit, he made a choice to play the rackets instead of thieving. Racketeers were fined if caught and rarely did time.

  He learned to drill and rob pinball machines that paid cash prizes. He pimped prostitutes and operated backroom card games and telephone banks for betting. He became close to some of Fort Worth’s most storied gangsters, including Tincy Eggleston, Cecil Green, and Herbert “The Cat” Noble, named for surviving nine attempts on his life, only to get blown to pieces opening his mailbox one day. “Herb used to send his wife out to start his car. They were all knocked off around me,” English recalled to reporter John Moulder. “There were as many as five blown up in a weekend.” He made the “Ten Most Unwanted List” in the Fort Worth Press frequently, and after being run out of Fort Worth, he relocated to Arlington, White Settlement, and Hurst, only to be run out of those communities by local police. At one point, Paul was pulling down $3,000 a week while dodging hit men working on contract.

  “I was a good street hustler,” he explained, “because I treated it as a business.”

  He kept up with Willie’s songwriting career, his road work with Ray Price, his joining the Grand Ole Opry, and his records. Paul had been living in Houston, working girls and fading the Fort Worth heat while picking up gigs with Paul Buskirk when they reconnected. Whenever Willie played Gilley’s in Pasadena, Dancetown, U.S.A., or other Houston venues, Willie would spend the night at Paul’s. “I had girls at my house, working girls, but they weren’t working for me,” Paul explained. “A couple of girls Willie knew lived downstairs. Willie would come over and we’d stay up all night talking.” Willie stopped over one night in 1966 and asked Paul if he had a phone number for Tommy Roznosky, who used to play drums with Willie and Paul’s brother Oliver on KCNC back in the 1950s.

  “Why?” Paul asked.

  “I need a drummer,” Willie told him. It was time for Johnny Bush to step out from behind his kit and showcase his powerful tenor voice.

  “I can play better than him,” Paul said about Tommy Roznosky, stretching the truth just a tad. “Or at least as well. Don’t call him. I’ll go with you.”

  Willie acted surprised. “Well, you wouldn’t work for thirty bucks a night, would you?”

  It was a loaded question. Willie knew Paul wouldn’t be crazy enough to do road work for that kind of pay, not when Paul was making thousands a week as a pimp.

  “For you I would,” Paul said. “You got a deal.”

  What Willie didn’t tell Paul was that he could use someone with Paul’s powers of not-so-gentle persuasion. Collecting money was the hardest part of the gig. If Willie was going to be a promoter and go into strange towns on his own, rent a gym or municipal space and four-wall a gig, bringing in sound, lights, and a cigar box to collect money from strangers, he needed protection. Paul was that person. He believed a person’s word was better than a contract, and anyone who broke that word deserved to be tied up with barbed wire in the woods and left to die.

  The gig was supposed to be temporary for Paul. But eleven years after they first gigged together, the arrangement turned permanent. Willie became Paul’s life. He gave up the rackets for the road. It was his first honest job since he had tooled leather. Playing in a band was a chance to go legitimate and do what he loved, and playing with Willie was downright inspirational. “I was really hostile,” Paul said. “If somebody was to say something wrong to me, they would have a fight. I finally learned from Willie to turn around and say, ‘Thank you very much.’ And they’d stand there with a guilty look on their faces and say, ‘What did I just say?’”

  Willie had used that trick when Biff Collie’s daddy tracked him down at the Roundup Club in Bandera, Texas, after Biff’s wife, Shirley, ran off with Willie. The seventy-year-old Pop Collie cornered Willie in the back of the club and after introducing himself informed Willie he was about to beat the shit out of him.

  “Well, whatever will make you feel good, you go right ahead, Mr. Collie,” Willie told him with a smile. Flummoxed at the invitation, Pop Collie just walked away. Biff Collie heard about it and fully understood. “I can’t think of anybody I would rather have had steal my wife than Willie Nelson,” he said.

  “Characters believe that violence breeds violence, but Willie is given to a lot of tolerance,” explained Paul. “I’m sure I’ve changed his attitude toward a lot of things and he’s changed mine.”

  One thing Willie full well understood was Paul’s value watching his back. “The club business was rough,” Willie said. “So you went in with a you-motherfucker-you-better-pay-me attitude from the start. When I was with Ray Price, he’d always say, ‘You guys hurry up, let’s go. Let’s not give that sumbitch any excuse not to pay us.’ Every day he would say that. And he was right. They were just looking for an excuse not to pay you.”

  Paul wouldn’t let that happen. He put a premium on loyalty and friendship. If anyone tried to fuck with Willie, they’d have to fuck with him first. And if they fucked with Paul, Paul liked to point out, “three or four people would be looking for them.”

  Johnny Bush took time to teach Paul some drumming basics, including the kind of beat Willie preferred. “Willie was hard to play with,” Paul said. “I would sit at the table and listen to what John was doing. I had a really hard time learning to play with Willie.” Willie offered better advice. “Don’t count,” he told Paul. “Just feel it.” He was baptized by fire, playing twenty-eight consecutive dates in Texas. After Paul had completed four months of road work, watching, listening, and doing, Willie told John he thought Paul had figured out the groove well enough to do the whole set.

  Of all Willie’s friendships over the years, none was tighter. If not for Paul, Willie Nelson would’ve most likely wound up dead, toothless, or selling Kirby vacuum cleaners. Willie had a smart mouth and didn’t mind using it, especially when he was right. Paul was at home in dark alleyways and dim-lit clubs and knew the unwritten code. He understood the ritual of the honky-tonk, how folks liked to take their fill of Pearl, Lone Star, Jax, and Southern Select with a heaping helping of good ol’ country music, and how that combination inspired dancin’, lovin’, and sometimes even feudin’ and fightin’ with fists and bottles. And whenever a boiling point was reached where guns and knives were displayed, Paul knew how to keep the peace.

  If the situation merited Willie calling a club owner or promoter a “cheap-ass motherfucker,” “shithead,” or “asshole” to make his point, Paul’s presence would prevent them from having Willie’s ass handed to him on a platter for flapping his lip. If Paul happened upon Willie being beaten to a pulp in a back room at the end of a gig, as occurred several times, he wouldn’t hesitate to pull out one of the three heaters he carried. That’s what guns were for, never mind the blood stains on the floor.

  “You see, I have a good reputation,” explained Paul. “A character means exactly what he says. A character has got to have a lot of character. I never drank, didn’t smoke until I was thirty-four, have never had a needle stuck in my arm outside a hospital. All that wasn’t done where I came from. A character has to treat everybody right. When you call a friend a friend, you have to treat him as a friend. It’s respect. Being a character means respect.”

  BUSH, Day, Nelson, Engli
sh. The band needed a name and Johnny Bush was quick on the draw. “I was watching television in Nashville and a television ad came on for a breath mint. The announcer said, ‘It eliminated the offenders, be it garlic, onions...’” Willie loved the name the Offenders, but some promoters did not, so in the spirit of stamping out negative thoughts, they tried the Chosen Few at Paul’s suggestion to fit their self-image as outsiders. But when announced from the stage, “Willie Nelson and the Chosen Few” sounded a little “too Asian,” as in the Chosin Fu. So they went with the Record Men in honor of Willie’s first single for Liberty Records, “Mr. Record Man.”

  They traveled in a 1947 Grumman Flxible Flyer bus that originally belonged to Faron Young before he sold it to a movie company and the movie company sold it to Houston oil well firefighter Red Adair, who sold it to Willie for $4,000. The Flex had seen better days and required constant mechanical repair. Willie Nelson and the Record Men drove it hard, doing between five hundred and eight hundred miles between dates booked by W. E. (“Lucky”) Moeller or Crash Stewart. Johnny, Paul, and Willie took turns behind the wheel, running up the odometer until the road bit back.

  Johnny Bush had been taking care of the band’s business, collecting the money and paying the players and the bills. Paul inherited the job in San Diego after John, Jimmy Day, and Doyle Nelson, Willie’s stepbrother and extra driver, showed up drunk and bloodied from a wild time in Tijuana. Johnny was so trashed, Paul had to take him to the emergency room. On his way out, Johnny gave Paul instructions on how to collect the money for the band at the end of the gig.

  “That’s how I figured out the business,” Paul said wryly. There wasn’t much to figure out. Paul had been schooled in repossessing autos after missed payments and righting wrongs without calling a lawyer or the cops. Getting money after a show was no different. “I wasn’t a really nice person when it came to collecting. I’d put my briefcase on the desk in the club office whenever it came time to settle up after a gig,” without mentioning the briefcase contained a pistol, Paul said. “They knew I meant business. In New Mexico, I had to chase down the guy to get our money. There was a forklift outside the club, so I got the forklift and raised his Thunderbird up on the lift, took the key out of the car, and wrote him a note, ‘Come see me.’ He did.