The fragile Willie-Armadillo alliance broke up for good when Willie came around to book another Armadillo gig following the TV taping. Bobby Hedderman, who was still steamed about how he and the Armadillo staff were treated by some of Willie’s people at the Fourth of July Picnic, objected. “I’d love to have you do a show, but you have got to control your friends,” he said. “I can’t have them pushing around the staff and packing heat in the building.” As far as the ’Dillo crowd was concerned, nothing remotely close to good vibrations came from wild men on dope brandishing pistols.
Willie shot a glare at Bobby and smiled at the other Armadillo people in the room. “They don’t all carry guns,” he said matter-of-factly, conveniently ignoring the fact he had carried a .357 magnum himself until a Dallas cop talked him out of it. Bobby informed Willie that the Armadillo was not a saloon and that weapons weren’t welcome in a place built on hippie ideals—Willie needed to put the brakes on his boys. Willie said he couldn’t be responsible for all his people’s actions. Mike Tolleson and Carlotta Pankratz, the Armadillo staffers who’d brought Willie into the office, counseled Bobby to be a little more understanding of Willie and his background. After all, he was bringing big crowds to the Armadillo. As Willie departed, he told Bobby to call Neil Reshen on Monday to work out the details for his next gig.
When Bobby called Neil on Monday, he got an earful. “Willie says, ‘Fuck you,’” Neil snarled over the phone. “If his friends aren’t good enough for you, then neither is he.”
“Well, he’s probably right,” Bobby replied, relieved he wouldn’t have to deal with that bunch again, no matter how much it cost the Armadillo.
A week after the breakup, Townsend Miller reported in the Austin American-Statesman that Willie was looking to open a club of his own with Leon Russell.
OCTOBER was traditionally the month for the automotive industry’s unveiling of Detroit’s latest models for the coming year at car dealerships across the nation. Every new-car dealer staged promotions to pull in prospective buyers. Austin’s Bill McMorris was no different. He hired Willie Nelson and band to play on a flatbed trailer at his Ford dealership downtown on West 6th Street at the corner of Wood Street to show off the new 1974 models.
Most of the folks who wandered in were more interested in the free hot dogs and Dr Peppers and the new LTDs, Mustangs, Capris, Broncos, Fairlanes, Mavericks, Falcons, and F-100 pickups than they were in Willie. He ran through his usual set, getting a few claps of recognition when he played the triad of his early songwriting hits and sang a few songs familiar to Texas country fans, like “Mr. Record Man” and “The Party’s Over” and some material from Shotgun Willie. But when the band got to “Bloody Mary Morning,” a song that Willie had recorded as a single for RCA and would record again soon as part of his Phases and Stages song cycle, people couldn’t help but pay attention.
The song had all the trappings of a country and western hoedown, upbeat and danceable with lyrics celebrating booze for breakfast after partying all night. But when it came time for the instrumental break so the musicians could play their improvised leads, the going got weird. As if on cue, the whole band launched into a jam, the music shifting organically into a fluid flow that recalled the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers Band. With the bass and drums pushing the rhythm, the playing stretched out and intensified over the next fifteen minutes while Willie and band demonstrated that country music pickers could play just as far-out as any rock and rollers. They fed off the small crowd who had bunched around the flatbed trailer, cheering them on. The new Fords could wait.
A WEEK later, the movers and shakers of the country music industry in Nashville got the same message loud and clear, times two, at the annual Disc Jockey Convention in October 1973. Neil Reshen booked a special show at Nashville’s Sheraton Hotel starring his two country clients. “They did these breakfast shows during the convention,” Neil Reshen recounted, “but none of my people were awake at that hour unless they were still up from the night before. So we rented the Sheraton. I put Sammi Smith and Bobby Bare and a whole bunch of other people on the bill, and Willie and Waylon kept playing all night. It was a real changing of the guard.” This was no polite thank-you-and-play-your-hit-single-and-leave affair. These were two greasy, long-haired wildcats out of control as Waylon and Willie tried to one-up each other, playing louder, longer, and more hard-charging. No rock concert that had passed through Nashville had had this kind of sweaty intensity. At the Disc Jockey Convention, no less.
“It’s not a secret that a lot of people view Texas as a lot more friendly than Tennessee,” explained Kinky Friedman, the self-proclaimed singing Texas Jewboy and new Willie acolyte, to the Nashville Tennessean. “The music industry in Nashville is still based on a repressive establishment system. There are some people who want to be outsiders.”
Music Row was on notice: The Outlaws, true music rebels faithful to the tenets laid down by Hank Williams and Bob Wills and Jimmie Rodgers, were a force to be reckoned with. Waylon lived up to his reputation as a contrarian by blowing off his greaser “country longhair” pompadour—a look that blared “outlaw”—for a beard and a fluffy, shampooed Beatle bob that conveyed the hipness of a boutique shop owner in suburbia (at least Jessi Colter liked it). But it was just a look. His sound was greasier than ever, due in no small part to the addition of two of Willie’s boys to his band.
Bee Spears had left Willie’s band to work for Waylon for the money and the chance to play more rock and roll. Willie went without a bass player for a stretch before hiring Larry Patton from Johnny Bush and the Bandoleros as a fill-in, then Jackie Deaton, another San Antonio four-stringer. He eventually enticed Chris Ethridge, a bass player from Mississippi who had been part of the storied California country-rock band the Flying Burrito Brothers.
Mickey Raphael had joined Bee Spears in Waylon’s band for a couple months until his old boss called.
“Didn’t you used to work for me?” Willie asked Mickey.
Mickey returned to Texas the next day. Bee Spears was not far behind.
WILLIE’S conquest of Texas worked on the domino theory. Once Austin fell, Houston was the next city to go cosmic cowboy, even though it was a tougher sell. Individuals who claimed to be affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan had bombed the transmitter of KPFT-FM, the left-leaning listener-supported radio station in Houston—twice—so Willie headlined a fund-raiser at Hofheinz Arena on the campus of the University of Houston to keep the station on the air. He was joined by a picnic-worthy lineup of Michael Murphey, Jerry Jeff Walker, Asleep at the Wheel, Kinky Friedman, and Sir Doug Sahm with Freda and the Firedogs, who stole the arena show by mixing up hillbilly, rock, and Tex-Mex.
Willie attempted to bring his musical movement back home with the Abbott Homecoming, staged in Willie’s hometown on November 11, 1973, to coincide with the high school’s homecoming football weekend. He announced his intentions in a press conference, promising to give any profit to the Abbott PTA. But some residents were not eager to embrace Abbott’s prodigal son. He had a hard time finding a site. “The man who bought the store from Billy Pope offered his land north of town,” Willie’s boyhood friend Morris Russell reported. “But people were giving the landlord a hard time because all these hippies were going to show up. People just got in an uproar. One guy told me, ‘There’s going to be a hippie in every barn.’” Not coincidentally, the advertising for the event used old promotional photos that depicted Abbott’s favorite native son as a clean-cut and clean-shaven smooth operator.
There was hardly a hippie in every barn, but ten thousand fans did show up, along with most of the three hundred citizens of Abbott for a twelve-hour music marathon starring their favorite son and a bunch of his buddies, including Johnny Bush, Waylon Jennings (though Waylon didn’t perform, due to a curfew), Michael Murphey, Jerry Jeff Walker, Billy Joe Shaver, Sammi Smith, Kinky Friedman, and Kenneth Threadgill and His Velvet Cowpasture. Sammy Allred, Willie’s disc jockey friend from Austin who was one-half of the satir
ical Geezinslaws, was designated MC and carried out his duties in a very stoned state after Willie handed him the list of bands and instructed him to let everyone play as long as they wanted.
Many of the acts, including Willie, Jerry Jeff, Asleep at the Wheel, and Waylon, had driven six hundred miles overnight from Terlingua, a mining ghost town west of Big Bend National Park in extreme southwest Texas, where they’d just played a country-rock festival. The festival had been inspired by the Terlingua International Chili Cookoff, an event that had grown out of a pissing match between New York journalist H. Allen Smith and Dallas scribe Frank X. Tolbert over who made the best bowl of chili, an original Texas concoction of beef, corn flour, and spices. The Terlingua chili cookoff attracted several thousand chiliheads to the middle of nowhere on the first Saturday every November. The music festival, which had nothing to do with chili, drew about sixty curious and determined fans and a crazed film crew under the direction of Nick Ray, the director of Rebel Without a Cause.
The Abbott Homecoming lost nowhere near as much money as the Terlingua event did, but Geno McCoslin blamed the Abbott losses on the local PTA anyway. If there had been any profit, it had been taken long before the cash reached the PTA.
Despite the financial baths at outdoor concerts and less-thanstellar record sales beyond the state line, Dallas newspaperman John Anders declared Willie to be the Godfather of Texas Country music. When Willie did a four-night stand at 57 Doors, North Texas’s first progressive-country nightclub not coincidentally owned by Geno McCoslin, Dallas Morning News reviewer Dave McNeely compared one of the performances to Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Willie Nelson and Family closed out a very good year at Dallas’s cavernous Market Hall, sharing the New Year’s Eve bill with Leon Russell and Kinky Friedman. The $5,000 guarantee Willie and band received was the most money they’d ever made for a single show.
Music was an all-night, every-night proposition, and Willie was up for the challenge. Willie and band played a four-night run at Castle Creek in Austin, the listening room a block from the state capitol, while Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, the young band of rockers doing Western Swing and boogie, recorded a live album at the Armadillo, where the crowd was so loud, the audio was later inserted into live recordings by other bands. Willie sat in with Freda and the Firedogs at Aqua Fest, Austin’s annual August celebration at Fiesta Gardens, and double-billed with the band at a fund-raiser for Symphony Square and at a voter registration benefit in Dallas. He played an unadvertised, sold-out gig with the Family Band at Soap Creek Saloon, where he’d been hanging out and partying with his pals, and split the box-office receipts evenly with the club, even though he could’ve taken it all. “At the end of the night David Anderson [one of the new additions to Willie’s family] took all the money and divided it up among everyone, even the employees,” Soap Creek co-owner Carlyne Majer said. “The employees had their rent paid for a month, grocery money, and money to do things with. It was a gift that he played—he wanted to play Soap Creek. It had nothing to do with money.”
Ira Nelson had a hard time believing what his son had started in Austin until he saw it for himself. Willie Hugh had hair flowing over his ears, neck, and collar, an earring, a beard, and Lord knows what else. Ira couldn’t help but ask, “What’s happened to you? The last time I saw you, your hair was short and you had on a suit.”
“That’s right, Pop,” Willie said. “And the last time you saw me, I was poor and hungry, and now I’m fat and happy.”
“I got to grow me some hair,” Ira said with a chuckle.
He did just that when he and Lorraine moved down to Austin to run Willie’s Pool Hall, an old U-Tote-M convenience store at 2712 South Lamar Boulevard that had been refashioned into a beer joint. A hangout for his buddies and a touchstone for tourists, it provided a decent income for Ira and Lorraine.
The pool hall was home away from home for Zeke Varnon, Willie’s longtime partner in crime from Hillsboro and Waco, who played dominoes out front and slept in the back. “Just mention Zeke’s name and you’ll hear sirens,” joshed Sammy Allred, the wild KVET disc jockey who was a regular. Sammy marveled at Willie’s sense of timing around the old pool hall. “He was a genius at knowin’ when to hang out. He knew just how often to come by to keep the rumors going— ‘Hey, Willie’s comin’ in.’ ‘Willie was here.’”
When tourists grew impatient waiting for Willie, they posed for pictures with “Mom and Pop” Nelson and went away happy.
News of the pool hall reached all the way to Washington state, where Willie’s birth mother, Myrle, was living again. “Myrle got tired of everybody calling Lorraine Willie’s mom, so she decided that she’s gonna let the world know that Lorraine was not Willie’s mom,” Willie’s nephew Freddy Fletcher said. “And you don’t tell Myrle no.” Myrle was so ticked, she telephoned media people to tell them she was Willie’s mother and damn proud of it.
THE VIBE that Willie had created down in Texas convinced Atlantic Records to record a second Willie album, Phases and Stages, an ambitious song cycle in the tradition of Yesterday’s Wine, only more overt. The theme was a marital breakup told from the viewpoint of both the husband and the wife. Willie used his first marriage for inspiration, as he had been doing for years, and drew upon Lana’s bad marriage to Steve as well. Family was an underlying theme of the album. “Sister’s Coming Home” was about Lana. “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way” was inspired by Susie’s first experiences with dating.
Willie had been road testing and massaging the song cycle at picking sessions and guitar pullings in Nashville and Austin for several years, and the title song had been issued as a single for RCA when nobody was looking or listening. All the folks who counted, from Coach Royal to Jerry Wexler (especially), gave him their thumbs-up on the material, so it was worth a shot. As the buzz for Shotgun Willie faded in the fall of 1973, a November recording session was set up in a small town of trailer parks and shotgun shacks tucked away in the northeast corner of Alabama.
“For Phases and Stages, I wanted Willie to come to Muscle Shoals,” Jerry Wexler said. The fact that Shotgun Willie was done at Atlantic’s New York studio had pleased the Erteguns and the Atlantic brass. Jerry wanted this one on his turf—Muscle Shoals, Alabama, 130 miles south of Nashville, about as close as Jerry wanted to get to Music Row, where he had been producing soul and rhythm and blues hits by African American artists largely backed by a studio band of white boys who happened to play very funky. Wexler came to Muscle Shoals from Memphis and the Stax studios and had already rung up a string of million sellers, including the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There” and Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally” and “Land of 1000 Dances.”
Jerry recruited Conway Twitty’s pedal steel man John Hughey (Jimmy Day being on the outs with Willie and family) and the earth-iest of all Nashville session guitarists, Fred Carter Jr., whose credits included the Band, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, and Muddy Waters. Willie brought along his boys, plus Johnny Gimble, the swing fiddler who’d worked the Shotgun Willie sessions. Guitarist/dobroist Pete Carr, keyboardist Barry Beckett, David Hood, and Roger Hawkins came with the house.
Eleven tracks were recorded and mixed in two days before Thanksgiving, nothing out of the ordinary for someone conditioned to watching the clock. But a few weeks later, Rick Sanjek, the head of A&R at Atlantic Nashville, convinced Willie he could do it better, leaving Jerry Wexler out of the loop. So they went to Fred Carter’s Nugget Studios in Goodlettsville, just down the road from Ridgetop. Willie brought his road band of Mickey Raphael, Bobbie Nelson, Paul English, and Bee Spears to join Grady Martin, and they cut the whole album all over again in another two days, with the exception of “Pretend I Never Happened.”
“It was nowhere near as slick as Jerry’s production, but it was Willie,” said Nick Hunter, Atlantic Nashville’s radio guy. Rick Sanjek took Hunter with him to New York for a meeting with Jerry Wexler. “The Muscle Shoals tracks were too R&B,” Sanjek insisted to Jerry. Country radi
o would never buy it. On his own, Sanjek told Wexler, he had remixed the album to give it more of a country flavor. This new mix was the one to use. Sanjek avoided telling Wexler they’d rerecorded the entire album. Calling it a new mix was easier to explain.
Jerry went ballistic nonetheless. “After I listened, the red rage started in my heels, up my backbone, up to my neck,” he said. “It was the most horrible piece of shit you ever heard. Suddenly, I slapped myself: What the fuck is a country mix? There is no such thing. A mix is a mix.”
“This was the one that closed Atlantic Nashville,” Nick Hunter said of the meeting.
Jerry Wexler ran Rick Sanjek out of his office. Within weeks, he fired him. “Rick was my representative of the Nashville aristocracy,” Jerry later said. “I took him on because he was the son of a very dear friend of mine. Big mistake. He came down from Yale with a ten-gallon hat and a big buckle and he tells me, ‘You gotta know how to talk to these people.’”
Wexler authorized Tom Dowd, Atlantic’s chief engineer, to do the final mix of Phases and Stages, which was released in March 1974. The album was promoted as something new and completely different, using the phrase “When Willie Nelson tells you the same old story, it’s not the same old story anymore.”
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