Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  Another of Willie’s protégés, Johnny Bush, had signed with RCA Records. At the annual Disc Jockey Convention, Johnny met Jerry Bradley, the label’s A&R chief and second in command to Chet Atkins. Jerry told Johnny, “All you gotta do now is write that hit song.” With Harlan Howard, Hank Cochran, Willie Nelson, Dallas Frazier, Red Lane, and loads of other writers knocking at his door, Jerry Bradley hardly needed Johnny Bush to write a hit. But Johnny took up the challenge. While he was driving to a date in Texarkana, a phrase stuck in his head: “Bathing my memory’d mind in the wetness of its soul.” Johnny thought it sounded like a Willie Nelson song. By the time he returned from the date, he’d finished the words to “Whiskey River.”

  Johnny called Willie at Lost Valley and sang it to him over the phone. “What do you think?” he asked.

  “Sounds like you got something there,” Willie told him.

  “Good, I’ll put it with your publishing company,” Johnny told him. “But I’ve only got one verse and a chorus.”

  “Well, you’ve already said everything you need to say,” Willie reassured him. “Sing it all the way through and sing it again.”

  That’s what Johnny did.

  When it was finally issued by RCA in 1972, “Whiskey River” by Johnny Bush reached number 14 on the Billboard country singles chart. But it stayed at number 1 across Texas for weeks and then years, eventually working its way into Willie Nelson’s repertoire.

  Willie’s history of helping others brought rewards that transcended money. By bringing his personal and musical family to Lost Valley, he got to experience the soft bloom of springtime in the Texas Hill Country. The sight of bluebonnets painting hillsides laced with creeks and rivers and of armadillos rooting in the caliche soil, the soothing sensation of soft Gulf breezes warming the skin, accompanied by cold bottles of Lone Star and Pearl to slake thirsts, and the sweet, stinky smell of burning marijuana flower tops did a number on his head. From his temporary perch among the scrub oaks and the live oaks and the artesian springs and clear-running streams flanked by limestone banks came revelations. Willie’s Texas network hadn’t failed him. His audience hadn’t forgotten him. The fire had been a good thing.

  “I was raised in Texas beer joints, so I went back to my old beer joints,” he later said. “I was home again. I knew all the club owners. I met a lot of my old waitresses that took care of me. I was back in my element.”

  He worked with promoters such as Buddy Western of Milano, who was gifted in the art of promoting concerts that were known in the business as “phone deals.” A promoter would go into a town with three or four helpers, rent motel rooms, and start working the phones, calling every business in town in search of a concert sponsor, ideally an organization, like a volunteer fire department. The deal Buddy Western offered to such organizations was simple: “I’m going to raise money for you with a music benefit and I’ll give you twenty percent of the total take.” The organization took care of ticket sales (in most cases, ending up giving tickets away and absorbing the loss), and Western would hire acts like Ernest Tubb for a $1,000 guarantee or thereabouts and pad the bill with local talent willing to play for cheap or free.

  One phone deal for Houston firefighters at the Music Hall downtown was headlined by Conway Twitty, but Conway was a no-show, the MC informed the full house, much to their disappointment. Filling in was one of the undercard acts, Willie Nelson and the Record Men. The crowd was clearly restless, especially once a smiling Willie took the stage with his band. The sight of Paul English dressed in black, mustache and goatee and cape draped around his shoulders telegraphing the Devil, prompted a few fans to start booing, according to one fan. “Willie was unruffled by the response. He kept smiling, didn’t say a word, and started singing his best-known compositions—‘Funny How Time Slips Away,’ ‘Hello Walls,’ and ‘Night Life.’ By the time he got to ‘Crazy,’ the audience was eating out of the palm of his hand.”

  Whenever Johnny Bush found himself on the same show with Willie and being billed as the headliner, he made sure Willie went on last out of respect. “Willie’s the man,” Johnny would say. “He knows it, I know it. What you see today, he’s not going to stay like this.” Bush talked like he was some kind of psychic.

  Instead of searching for ways to please Chet Atkins and RCA, Willie was prompted by the respite in Texas to embark on his most ambitious writing project ever. His composing skills had long ago transcended the simplicity of Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” and other popular country hits of the day. Willie was writing deep and writing prolifically. Bee Spears said that whenever he was cleaning up the bus or the camper they traveled in, some of the pieces of paper he picked up had lyrics on them. “When he wants to write, he wants it right now and writes on whatever he’s got to write on,” Bee said.

  All the playing and touring and recording mixed with the new drugs he was experimenting with were pushing new ideas and new concepts to the surface. That much became clear to David Zettner the afternoon he returned to the Holiday Inn in Nashville, where he was sharing a room with Willie on a trip back to Nashville for a recording session. David had gone out catting around the day before when Willie nicely asked him to get lost because he had some writing to do. David returned the next day to a darkened room with Willie passed out under a pile of notebook paper and more paper scattered over both beds and the floor. Zettner picked up a page and squinted. The pages were covered with scribbled lyrics. Willie had been in a writing frenzy. Seven songs in one night.

  Willie shrugged it off. He was due in the studio the next day and needed to finish the album that had been kicking around in his head. “In my mind, it was one big picture anyway, one long song,” he said. “The creative juices were flowing. I was open, writing a lot of good stuff.”

  Yesterday’s Wine was a whole concept, a concept far bolder (and riskier) than Chet Atkins’s idea of a concept, an album of songs all about Texas. Willie’s concept was about “imperfect man” contemplating his own mortality.

  It was such a far-out idea that when it came time to record in early May of 1971, Felton Jarvis had no choice but to let the tapes roll. Willie and David Zettner were joined by guitarist Dave Kirby, who’d toured with Willie back in the early 1960s, Pete Wade, another fellow traveler from the Ray Price days, and Chip Young, the ghost guitarist on Live Country Music Concert. Weldon Myrick played steel, Junior Huskey bass, Pig Robbins piano, Jerry Carrigan drums, Bobby Thompson banjo, Charlie McCoy harmonica, and Norman Keith and Buddy Spicher fiddle. Hillbillies were scratching their heads before the music even began.

  A god-like voice from on high opens the album, asking the question: “You do know why you’re here?”

  “Yes,” replies a human voice. “There is great confusion on earth, and the power that is has concluded the following: Perfect man has visited earth already, and his voice was heard; the voice of imperfect man must now be manifest. And I have been selected as the most likely candidate.”

  “Yes,” God agrees. “The time is April, and therefore you, a Taurus, must go. To be born under the same sign twice adds strength, and this strength, combined with wisdom and love, is the key.”

  Yesterday’s Wine revealed Willie as a deep thinker who put his philosophy on the table in three-minute melodic chunks for all to ponder:

  Explain to me again, O Lord, why I’m here

  I don’t know, I don’t know

  The setting for the stage is still not done

  Where’s the show? Where’s the show?

  “It scared a lot of people,” admitted Willie. “RCA’s reaction was ‘Who’s gonna play this?’ They started thinking about AM radio. My whole idea was playing the album all the way through. It was a spiritual album.” And definitely too strange for Hee Haw.

  Yesterday’s Wine marked the beginning of the end of Willie’s relationship with RCA. The label pressed up the standard ten thousand copies and let nature take its course. Promotion behind Willie Nelson’s albums had historically been nonexistent. Nothi
ng had changed and the situation would remain the same for the three RCA albums that followed, Willie Nelson and Family (featuring a photograph of the extended family at Ridgetop on the cover), The Willie Way, and The Words Don’t Fit the Picture.

  He’d made fourteen albums for RCA with not much to show. Chet Atkins tried but never sold Willie as a recording artist, other than reissuing his version of “Pretty Paper” as a Christmas single every year. Chet may have been a picker’s picker. But as a producer and label chief, he stuck to formula.

  It wasn’t just that Yesterday’s Wine was too weird for RCA. “Willie was way too weird for Chet,” observed Cowboy Jack Clement, who came from Memphis to Nashville as Chet’s first assistant about the same time as Willie arrived in Nashville. Chet Atkins had kept country music alive when rock and roll took over the sales bins. The Nashville Sound he helped create kept churning out product with enough hits to justify his position. But there was no way he was going to have hits on all the acts he produced, and Willie was proof. (Then again, Chet likened Dolly Parton’s vocal talents to those of a “screech owl.”)

  “The thing with Willie is he had to go and show them what he was gonna do, and he didn’t know what he was gonna do when he got in the studio,” Hank Cochran said in his defense.

  Once the house in Ridgetop was rebuilt and ready to be reoccupied, Willie and Connie and the kids spent three months back in Tennessee, long enough for Willie to record and release his final album for RCA, The Words Don’t Fit the Picture, notable for the first recorded version of “Good Hearted Woman,” a song Willie had written with Waylon Jennings.

  The song came out of a late-night poker game at the Fort Worther Motel on Jacksboro Highway in Fort Worth. Billy Gray, Willie, and Waylon had been playing poker all night. Toward the end of the game, Waylon said, “Willie, I’ve got this song I want you to help me write.” Connie Nelson was a witness. “Willie had been drinking and Waylon was doing his thing [making trips to the bathroom to snort cocaine],” she said. “The only part Willie came up with was ‘Through teardrops and laughter we’re gonna walk through this world hand in hand.’ Waylon said, ‘That’s it! That’s what’s missing’ and gave Willie half the song.” Waylon asked Connie to write down the lyrics because they were so out of it, “none of us is going to remember this tomorrow,” he told her.

  The album cover of The Words Don’t Fit the Picture was meant to be a joke. A photograph depicted Willie wearing bubble aviator shades with his hair hanging over his ears, holding a guitar case covered with bumper stickers while standing in front of producer Felton Jarvis’s Rolls-Royce, flanked by Connie in a black gown and white fur hat and Felton dressed as the chauffeur.

  It didn’t matter if record buyers got the joke or not. The record didn’t matter anymore. Neither did Ridgetop. Willie and Connie had been back just long enough to realize that nothing about Nashville and the music business felt right anymore. Willie Nelson and Many Others were GTT—Gone to Texas.

  By leaving, Willie was doing what dozens of Texans in Tennessee wished they could do but never did. Losing the immediate connection to the business of music was career suicide, in the eyes of many. No one left and succeeded. Bakersfield was its own scene, thanks to Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, and Jim Halsey was doing all right building a small management/recording empire in Tulsa. A smattering of country records were being made in Memphis, Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Los Angeles, and Houston. But Willie was crazy to think he could move to Central Texas and stay in the game. Still, everyone was secretly rooting for him.

  He had put down a deposit on an apartment lease in Houston, but a festival near Austin and some friendly persuasion changed his plans.

  Staged over a three-day weekend on March 17, 18, and 19, in 1972 on a seven-thousand-acre ranch thirty miles west of Austin, the Dripping Springs Reunion attempted to replicate the festive spirit of Woodstock, only with country acts. Governor Preston Smith and former senator Ralph Yarborough showed up, along with a few thousand fans, for the Friday bluegrass lineup of Jimmy Martin, Earl Scruggs, Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, Jim and Jessie, Charlie Rich, Buck Owens, and the Light Crust Doughboys. Around ten thousand fans attended on Saturday, March 18, to hear the stars and legends, such as Tex Ritter, Roy Acuff and his Smokey Mountain Boys, Hank Snow, Charlie Walker, Roger Miller, Sonny James, Dottie West, and Austin yodeler Kenneth Threadgill, whose first venture into the recording studio was bankrolled by Kris Kristofferson.

  The crowd count was lower for the Sunday concert, which starred Merle Haggard and Bonnie Owens, Tom T. Hall, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and Willie. What few fans there were glommed onto Willie, Waylon, and Kris—they represented a new kind of country that didn’t make them sound like old fart rednecks. Willie responded by playing his songwriting hits and some rocked-up country and joining Waylon to sing “Good Hearted Woman.” Promoters who had predicted a turnout of sixty thousand fans were claiming losses in excess of $140,000. Bob Woltering, the executive editor of Music City News, the Nashville trade paper owned by Faron Young, which printed programs for the event, reported fewer than three thousand copies sold. A county fair drew bigger crowds.

  The payoff came after the show. The picking session at the home of Darrell K Royal following the close of the Dripping Springs Reunion made up for it all, at least for those who wrangled an invite from Coach. “Coach” was the name everyone used when referring to Royal, the University of Texas football coach who loved homespun music almost as much as he loved football, maybe even more. Willie, Kris, Rita, Red Lane, Red Steagall, Kenneth Threadgill, and Charlie Rich passed the guitar around Royal’s living room while Coach, supported by his wife, Edith, kept a tight rein on the gathering, whistling loudly to warn talkers who weren’t paying attention to the music to either cool it or cut out. Waylon and Willie sang “Good Hearted Woman.” Rita Coolidge joined Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Rich on “Life Has Its Little Ups and Downs.” Mr. Threadgill yodeled.

  Shortly after the Reunion, Paul, Willie, and Bee went back to Nashville to RCA’s studios to record their final sessions, laying down tracks late at night for another concept album. The songs—“Phases, Stages, Circles, Cycles, and Scenes,” “Pretend I Never Happened,” “Sister’s Coming Home,” “Down at the Corner Beerjoint,” “I’m Falling in Love Again,” “Who’ll Buy My Memories?,” “No Love Around,” “Come On Home,” and a cover of the old hillbilly stomper “Mountain Dew”—were all part of a story floating around Willie’s mind.

  “Willie was into that Astara thing,” Bee Spears said. “He was really expanding his way of thinking.” The pot and the acid and whatever else came along helped.

  “Mountain Dew” b/w “Phases, Stages, Circles, Cycles, and Scenes,” the last single for RCA, did not chart. The last album for RCA, The Willie Way, stalled at number 34.

  SHIRLEY Collie Nelson finally agreed to a divorce. With her real and imaginary illnesses, her depression aggravated by leaving her career behind, and her being totally pissed at Willie for shacking up with other women and having a child with Connie, she concluded their marriage was done.

  Connie dropped Paula Carlene with her parents in Houston and she and Willie flew to Las Vegas and got married at the Chapel of the Bells, with the minister’s wife as witness. Steve Wynn, the owner of the Golden Nugget, where Willie frequently played, provided the hospitality.

  The Dripping Springs Reunion had strengthened the bond between Willie and Kris Kristofferson. A few months earlier, Willie and Paul English had showed up at Kris’s Philharmonic Hall concert in New York, and Kris had put Willie onstage. “I had to introduce him to the crowd; they didn’t know who he was,” Kris said. “He stole the show.”

  After Dripping Springs and getting married, Willie rounded up a carload of pals to drive to Durango, Mexico, to watch Kris make a movie with Bob Dylan for filmmaker Sam Peckinpah called Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Willie ended up serenading the cast and crew all day long at Peckinpah’s house, gladly accommodating Dylan’s requests to hear more and more. “
Dylan was a little shy, scared to death,” observed Willie. “They had him jumpin’ and runnin’ on them horses, and he ain’t no cowboy.” “Willie was so much fun to be around,” Kris said. “We were close friends and we were both bucking the system.” It wasn’t just them, either. Willie’s wife, Connie, and Kris’s girlfriend and duet partner, Rita Coolidge, shared a wild streak and became running buddies too.

  Austin, 1972

  THE HIPPIE CHICK didn’t hesitate when the Open Road camper pulled over to offer her a ride just outside of Kerrville. The woman looked old enough to vote, but barely. She was certainly not the down-and-out variety of hitchhiker who once populated the sides of highways. She was a genuine Texas hippie chick—straight, long hair below her shoulders, no makeup, tight tank top, no bra, denim cut-off shorts, sandals, stash bag, macramé belt, redolent of patchouli oil, the whole package sunbaked and radiating an I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude. She just wanted a ride to Austin.

  The men in the camper required no discussion among themselves before pulling over to fetch the young woman with her thumb pointing east.

  To the hippie chick, the men in the Open Road camper appeared to be older guys in their thirties and forties who looked sorta like bikers but sorta not, a rough bunch showing signs of wear and tear maybe, but with a modicum of cool, although they sure weren’t hippies like she was. And yet, the aroma of righteous weed wafting from inside the camper got her attention before she even stepped inside.

  A high time was had by all on the ride through the Hill Country. The country singer and his band and the hippie chick got along just fine. She was dropped off in the caliche dirt parking lot of a body shop near the corner of South First Street and Barton Springs in South Austin, just across the Colorado River from downtown, at the Armadillo World Headquarters, an old National Guard Armory that had been transformed into a hippie concert hall, beer garden, and cultural center.