Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  With considerable experience operating clubs along the Harry Hines strip in the sleazier part of northwest Dallas, Geno spoke the language of old-school entertainment, where gambling, drugs, and prostitutes all figured in the income stream. In the same way Crash Stewart once booked Texas dates for Willie while Lucky Moeller booked his dates everywhere else, Willie allowed Geno to informally operate on his behalf in Texas while Neil Reshen represented Willie in the rest of the world. There was more than a little used-car Dixie mafia in Geno, who never hesitated to display whatever firearm he happened to be packing. Unlike Willie, Geno had absolutely no crossover appeal to hippies. Guns intimidated the folks who ran the Armadillo World Headquarters but did not impress. “He was a thug,” Eddie Wilson of the Armadillo groused.

  Jerry Retzloff of Lone Star Beer did not dispute that assessment. “We had so many run-ins with Geno in Dallas when he was a retailer there. He pulled a gun on my district manager up there. He pulled a gun on everybody. His elevator would go up and down so quick.” But Jerry quickly gleaned that Geno was someone you had to deal with because he was part of the Willie package. “When you’re friends, Willie don’t draw no boundaries and he never forgets you,” he said. Even Geno, or especially Geno.

  The Armadillo’s attorney, Mike Tolleson, and his accountant friend from college, Randy McCall, set up a budget for the picnic, managed the checkbook, and controlled ticket sales in Austin. Bobby Hedderman and the Armadillo stage crew did most of the site prep and stage production, hiring Showco Productions, the Dallas company regarded as the best in the business for concert sound.

  The first Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic was staged in 1973 in an open field charitably described as a natural amphitheater on Burt Hurlbut’s seven-thousand-acre ranch near Dripping Springs, forty miles west of Austin, the same site as the Dripping Springs Reunion held the year before. The lineup was a mix of progressive and traditional country featuring Willie’s expanding band of fellow renegades, including Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and wife and duet partner, Rita Coolidge; singer Sammi Smith, who had become Willie’s frequent duet partner; a hot Texas songwriter who wrote for Waylon named Billy Joe Shaver; two other budding songwriters named John Prine and Lee Clayton; Willie’s new hero, Leon Russell, country-folk singer Tom T. Hall; old buddies Hank Cochran, Johnny Bush, and Ray Price; old-guard stars like Loretta Lynn, Ernest Tubb, Larry Gatlin, and Charlie Rich; and George Chambers and His Country Gentlemen, the country dance band from San Antonio that Willie raided for David Zettner and Bee Spears. Austin was represented by the Geezinslaws, Asleep at the Wheel, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Doug Sahm and his Tex-Mex Trip. Bob Dylan was a rumored guest but never showed.

  Willie gave away three hundred tickets to the good people of his hometown, Abbott. Admission for everyone else was $5.50, $6 at the door, with tickets sold at all Pant Place locations in Dallas, L&M Western stores in San Antonio, and the Armadillo in Austin. Country music stations across Texas, including KKYX and KVET, advertised the picnic, as did XERF in Mexico. Super Roper Radio KOKE-FM, the new progressive-country radio station in Austin, hyped the event around the clock.

  The demand was certainly there. Willie was promoting Shotgun Willie, and Waylon was fresh out of the chute with his smokingest, hard-rockingest album yet, Honky-tonk Heroes, almost every song written by the hard-bitten crazy-ass cowboy primitive from Waco, Billy Joe Shaver.

  Billy Joe and Willie were Texas country boys with once-upon-a-time dreams of writing songs for a living—Willie’s realized, Billy Joe’s not quite yet—and a similar history. “We met in ’fifty-six out on the highway,” Billy Joe recalled. “A guy named Johnny Dallas [real name: Joe Poovey] introduced us. He was a friend of mine and he liked my songs. Willie wrote on a little matchbox, ‘Good luck with your songs in Nashville.’ I used to admire him so much. I’d see him at the Terrace Club, the Nite Owl, he’d play up and down that road [the Dallas Highway between West and Waco], little-bitty jobs that didn’t pay no money. If I was in a bar where he was in there singing and someone was talking, I’d take them outside and whip their ass.”

  They had palled around Nashville after Billy Joe moved there in 1966. “Willie would always say, ‘If you can help yourself with my name, go ahead,’ but he didn’t really help,” Billy Joe said. “He’d just get me drunk.” That changed the year before at the Dripping Springs Reunion in a trailer behind the stage. Billy Joe was singing “Willie the Wandering Gypsy and Me” when Waylon came in, higher than a kite.

  “Who wrote that song, Hoss?” Waylon asked Billy Joe.

  “I did,” Billy Joe said.

  “You got any more of them cowboy songs?” Waylon asked him.

  “I’ve got a whole sackful,” Billy Joe said, smiling sheepishly.

  “You come up to Nashville and I’ll record a whole album of your songs,” Waylon promised him. Billy Joe did not forget. For six months, he chased after Waylon in Nashville. “Finally, I had had it,” Billy Joe said. “He was recording in the big studio at RCA full of wannabes, hangers-on, and bikers all over the place. I was determined to get to him one way or another.” Waylon’s people thought the hulking big boy from Texas was a nuisance. Captain Midnight, a disc jockey friend of Waylon’s, handed him a folded $100 bill and told him, “Waylon said for you to take this and vamoose.”

  “Well, you just tell him to stick that up his ass,” Billy Joe replied, fuming.

  Waylon stormed out of the control room all pissed off, with a couple bikers on each side of him, all three headed to the restroom. Billy Joe followed.

  “Whatchoo want, Hoss?” Waylon glowered while standing at a urinal, giving Billy Joe the nastiest look he could conjure.

  “I tell you what I want,” Billy Joe said, standing toe to toe with him, clutching his guitar in one hand. “I’ve got these songs here. You told me you was gonna do this album.”

  “I tell you what I’m gonna do,” Waylon said, clearly irritated. “I’m gonna whip your ass in front of everybody.” The bikers moved in, ready for a stomping, but Waylon pulled them back and moved in himself. “He started coming towards me and I figured, if he’s going to take a shot, I’m going to take a shot too, ’cause I used to box,” Billy Joe said.

  Waylon grabbed him by his funny bone and said, “Come on with me, Hoss. I’m going to let you play one song. I’m going to have you do that ‘Willie the Wandering Gypsy and Me.’ If I stop you in the middle of the song, you’re going to have to get out that door and that’s the end of it. I don’t ever want to see you again.”

  Billy Joe played the song without being stopped. Then he did “Ain’t No God in Mexico.”

  “That’s pretty good,” Waylon allowed. “You got another one?”

  “Old Five and Dimers” came next.

  By the time Billy Joe got to “Honky-tonk Heroes” Waylon slapped his knee. “I know what I gotta do,” he told Billy Joe. “He called his whole band in and recorded the mess,” Billy Joe said.

  A “MESS” was an accurate description of Billy Joe’s appearance at Willie’s musical summer holiday picnic. He claimed he’d been bitten by a black widow spider but more likely had ingested some psychotropic substance.

  The morning of the picnic, cars and trucks were backed up on Farm to Market Road and Ranch Road in northern Hays and western Travis County. “I spent the day of the show out on the road leading into the area, trying to direct traffic,” Mike Tolleson said. “I was standing in the middle of three lines of cars going off in each direction as far as you could see. It was total gridlock.”

  The crowd count ranged from twenty thousand to sixty thousand. No one knew for sure because the $6 ticket price failed to discourage thrift-conscious brothers and sisters from tearing down fences and storming the gates. Advance ticket sales had been tepid. With Willie’s associates as copromoters, the volatile chemistry of rednecks on pills, speed, beer, pot, and maybe even some acid, and hippies on their usual botaña platter of herbal stimulants and psychedelics warmed by hundred-degree heat, spontaneous
combustion was guaranteed. Fights broke out over the sight of hippie chicks going topless on the shoulders of their boyfriends, and horn dogs thinking they were hippie chick magnets. The power failed. Brains were fried. The whole shebang sizzled like spit on a frying pan.

  The rednecks and the hippies did not lie down together in the soft grass like lions and lambs, much less stand on concrete next to one another amicably enough like they did at the Armadillo. Meanness trumped good vibes in the audience. Pistol-packing yahoos cruised the parking areas looking for trouble. Fists flew with the intensity of hand-to-hand military combat. The fragile alliance between Willie’s family and the Armadillo World Headquarters’ collective frayed.

  “The whole day from the time I tried to get Willie to help me convince [powerful state legislator] Jumbo Atwell to move his RV is just an unpleasant blur,” said Bobby Hedderman from the Armadillo, who was trying to manage the chaos on the stage, including territorial fights for small patches of shade. “I pretty much gave up after that.”

  Brother George W. Cooper, the Bible-thumping, hellfire-invoking radio preacher heard on KDRY and XERF in Mexico (and daddy of Willie’s personal driver, B.C.), married Paul English and his fiancée, Diane Huddleston, onstage that afternoon. Waylon Jennings was best man. Sammi Smith was matron of honor. “My nephew got married a while back and it cost me sixty bucks to go to his wedding,” Paul explained to the Daily Texan. “I didn’t want my friends to have to rent a tux and drive one hundred miles. Since most of my friends are in the entertainment business, they’ll be at Dripping Springs anyway.”

  Rather than honeymoon, Paul surveyed the battlefield with $100 bills hanging out of his pockets and a bone-handle skinning knife hanging from his hip with a pistol stuffed into a sock. The message he telegraphed was plain. “Touch the money, I’ll cut your hand off.” Nobody tried.

  In the midst of the craziness, bands played music. Waylon electrified the crowd with a set that rocked up his country songs with lots of twang and thunder, staking a claim to both the rock and the country legacies that this thing called progressive country was built upon. Ernest Tubb and His Texas Troubadours performed a set of traditional Texas-style country music by which all Texas country music could be judged, even though most of the crowd failed to appreciate it. In a disjointed daze, Billy Joe Shaver previewed many of his original songs that were about to make Waylon even more famous. Backstage, a very young Stevie Ray Vaughan was photographed hanging out with Charlie Rich, the Silver-Haired Fox and master of mellow crooning.

  Stevie played guitar with Marc Benno and the Nightcrawlers, who’d been added to the bill shortly before the event in a perfectly Willie way. Marc was a Dallas cat who’d partnered with Leon Russell as the Asylum Choir in Los Angeles, which sputtered to an end just as Leon’s solo career took off. Marc knew his way around a studio, played lead guitar on the Doors’ “L.A. Woman,” and had written the hit “Nice Feeling” for Rita Coolidge. On a back-to-his-Texas-blues-roots kick with funds provided by A&M Records, he had hired an Austin blues-rock outfit called the Nightcrawlers, which featured a singing drummer with a smoky voice named Doyle Bramhall and Stevie Vaughan on guitar. The main reason Marc Benno got added to the picnic, though, was that he lived across the street from Willie.

  “It was on Redbud Trail in Westlake Hills,” Marc said. “People kept telling me there was a guy across the street who wanted to meet me. I went over to his house with a big garbage bag full of Oaxacan tops and there were these guys playing on the floor. It was Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, and Willie. Willie played for about thirty minutes, we talked and played, and he put our band on the bill.”

  Marc Benno and the Nightcrawlers had to be shoved off the stage so Willie could close out the picnic. “When we came on, we were so into playing that we could not be controlled,” admitted Marc. “I don’t know how long we were playing. We had a ride going and Stevie’s burning. But the power went off. The lights went out, everything went dead. I heard Willie was the one who personally pulled the power plug.”

  It was ten p.m.

  “You guys don’t know when to quit,” one cowboy onstage informed Doyle Bramhall as he reared back to punch him out. Doyle responded with a swing of his own, a full Budweiser can clutched in his fist. The beer can exploded on contact. “He proceeded to beat the shit out of that cowboy,” Marc Benno related. The Nightcrawlers left the stage with their heads held high, their testosterone raging, the blues cat having whipped the yahoo, at least this time.

  The Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic wound down at two a.m. on July 5, with Willie Nelson and Leon Russell commanding the stage. It was a triumphant moment, with Leon working the crowd like a holy-roller preacher and Willie staying with him. The aftermath was not a pretty one. Ticket receipts that actually made it to the site covered production costs. Otherwise, no one knew for sure how much was taken in and how much was skimmed off along the way.

  “Randy and I met with Willie afterwards and gave him the financial report,” said Mike Tolleson, who was in charge of the accounting. “We had just enough money to pay all performers the allotted amount, production costs as budgeted, and a small fee for the Armadillo production staff. But there was no money left over to pay Willie. He was not too happy about that, but we also knew that the money from Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston was in somebody’s pocket close to Willie.”

  Lana Nelson, Willie’s eldest daughter, saw the Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic as the somewhat twisted realization of what she’d witnessed four years before at the Atlanta Pop Festival. “I didn’t see Dad as a country player and Grand Ole Opry star. That was what he had to do to get out there, but I knew there wasn’t a slot for him. You can’t put him in one slot. He wore the Grand Ole Opry hat just to get his music out. At the picnic, I saw another hat. It was Atlanta Pop all over again, but here.”

  Her dad gave all the credit to Leon: “Leon had as much to do with making that picnic a success as anything. He brought in a whole different crowd, the rock ’n’ roll crowd. It’s something that it needed. It’s something everybody wanted. It was all about everybody coming together to listen to music—country, rock, blues, gospel, jazz—everything.”

  DESPITE some heated arguments at the picnic, Willie’s business collaboration with the Armadillo World Headquarters continued with another promotion. The Armadillo Country Music Revue was an ambitious mini-tour road show starring Willie and Michael Murphey that would travel to San Antonio, Dallas, Midland, Corpus Christi, and Amarillo. Willie Nelson and Michael Murphey were a can’t-miss combination in Austin, as far as the tour organizers at the Armadillo World Headquarters were concerned. Putting them together on the same bill would spread the fever throughout the rest of the state. Only the rest of Texas hadn’t gotten the word yet. Advance ticket sales were nonexistent in every city and those few who did show up came largely to sing along to “I Just Want to Be a Cosmic Cowboy.”

  “Willie was tough as shit, calm, and quickly resigned to the tiny audiences,” Eddie Wilson said. It wasn’t the first time Willie had been in a situation like this. But Michael Murphey was devastated. By the time the tour concluded back in Austin, he was too sick to perform at the homecoming show at the Armadillo, and Jerry Jeff Walker filled in for him in front of a sold-out house.

  MURPHEY got over his disappointment and agreed to do one more Armadillo Country Music Revue show with Willie at the Armadillo—one that would be videotaped and broadcast on television. Music on television was a relatively new concept. Films from the 1950s such as The Girl Can’t Help It and Rock, Baby, Rock It featured performances by rock and roll acts, and Elvis and English bands from the 1960s like the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five starred in movies as themselves. But except for a handful of concert films such as The T.A.M.I. Show and pay-per-view live concerts by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the 1960s, music concerts on film or television didn’t have much mass appeal.

  But by 1973, the response to the films Woodstock, Sympathy for the Devil, and The Concer
t for Bangladesh and television programs such as NBC’s Midnight Special made music on video something to be taken seriously. Austin embraced the idea wholeheartedly. Concerts at the Armadillo World Headquarters were being videotaped by a visionary crew from Taylorvision in the nearby small town of Taylor, Leon Russell’s Sheltervision was videotaping music in clubs all over town, and Austin’s city government had funded a community access television channel and was offering video equipment and free training to anyone who asked.

  The Armadillo Country Music Revue, starring Willie Nelson and Michael Murphey, along with Billy Joe Shaver, Greezy Wheels, D. K. Little, and Diamond Rio, was broadcast live late in 1973 on KLRN-TV, the San Antonio and Austin Public Broadcasting System affiliate, with radio stations in both cities simulcasting the concert.

  “We saw this as a pilot for a series of shows [taped at the Armadillo that] we were trying to get off the ground,” explained the Armadillo’s Mike Tolleson, who coordinated the video shoot. “I was searching out every bit of video equipment in town and found that KLRN had a mobile video van. So I talked Bill Arhos into taping a show at the Armadillo for a TV/radio simulcast. We put the talent and show together, KLRN provided the TV crew and truck, then edited it and aired it. The director/producer of the show was Bruce Scafe. Bill was executive producer role on his end and I was on our end.” Ratings were negligible. The audience for a locally televised music concert was out in the clubs instead of at home watching television.

  But the TV concert did get Bill Arhos $13,000 in funding to further his idea of a music concert television series based in Austin. Another pilot would be videotaped at the television station’s new state-of-the-art Studio 6-A on the campus of the University of Texas, a setting that made more sense, since the lighting and sound could be controlled. But Arhos stuck with the best talent the Armadillo Country Music Revue had to offer—Willie Nelson—along with singer B. W. Stevenson, who would be edited out of the pilot due to technical glitches and a small turnout for his taping. Arhos described Willie’s performance as so “seamless,” it required only three edits. The pilot birthed Austin City Limits, the longest-running music program on television. The Armadillo’s people quickly peeled away. “I saw this as a sterile version of what we thought should happen at the Armadillo,” Mike Tolleson said. “But KLRN had the money and gear and we did not. Bill called me to talk about talent for their pilot and first season of shows. We tried to negotiate a deal whereby we would be consultants regarding talent, but it didn’t work out past the pilot, since we felt so proprietary about the whole concept and we asked for too much participation.”