“Waylon, for God’s sake, this is Willie. He’ll give you the money from his pocket before he’ll let you leave here. But don’t tell him that—that’s a slap in his face,” she said.
Waylon cooled down. Connie walked off the bus and told Wally everything was okay. The show went on without incident. Waylon rocked. Willie sat in. They acted like brothers onstage. The crowd went beserk, and Wally Selman developed a strong liking for Connie Nelson. Fans may have thought Willie and Waylon were blood brothers, but Wally learned, as others would, they were on separate paths.
The Texas Opry was more Waylon’s style than the Armadillo was. Waylon didn’t smoke pot or drink beer. But he did cocaine—piles of the sparkling white powder, so much coke that when he played poker with friends in Austin, he kept excusing himself and going to the bathroom, though everyone knew what he was doing in there.
“Why don’t you just do your coke out here?” a buddy asked him.
“Because I want you to be able to say, ‘On October nineteenth, 1974, I never saw Waylon take coke,’” Waylon said.
The Texas Opry House was the setting for Waylon’s hugely popular single “Bob Wills Is Still the King,” a live recording that came on the heels of “This Time,” Waylon’s first number one country single ever. The album of the same name was charting in the Top 5. Many misinterpreted the song to be a put-down of Willie for the line “It don’t matter who’s in Austin/Bob Wills is still the King.” Waylon’s song simply put the whole movement in perspective: Both he and Willie were sons of Bob Wills, who put Texas music on the map.
The old school met the new school at the Opry. Bee Spears remembers looking back at Paul English working his brushes onstage and leaning so far forward that Bee could see a gun sticking out of his hip pocket.
“You expecting trouble, Paul?” Bee asked him.
“You can never tell,” Paul replied with a wicked grin.
Paul was preaching peace and love, carrying a business card that read “So long as we love, we serve. So long as we are loved by others, we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.” But just in case, he still packed heat. That preferred method of security may have offended hippies, but someone had to collect the money, and if there were going to be questions raised at the settlement, a chrome .45 caliber pistol was a persuasive means of getting them answered.
When Willie scored a gig in California a few years later to play for the HBO cable television channel that paid $79,000 for a single show, Paul insisted the band be paid in cash before going onstage, no matter how good the check looked. “No money, no Willie,” he declared. His demand may have struck the corporate types who were paying Willie as offensive, but the method worked. “He’s my friend who watches over me,” Willie said of Paul. Paul felt the same about Willie.
Waylon Jennings corroborated the realities of the business of music in the 1970s during an impromptu talk to a class at the University of Texas. He concluded by citing the last tour with Buddy Holly in February of 1959, on which Waylon and Tommy Allsup were Holly’s backing band, to explain what he’d learned over his career. The tour bus had arrived in Moorhead, Minnesota, after an overnight drive from Clear Lake, Iowa, but Buddy, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens were not there waiting for them, even though they were supposed to have flown in the night before on a private plane Buddy had chartered (Waylon and Allsup gave up their seats on the plane to the Big Bopper and Valens). “We knew something was wrong,” Waylon related. “The weather was bad, and we got the word that the plane had crashed. The promoter talked us into doing the gig anyway. We just wanted to go home. But we did the show. After the gig, the promoter said he wouldn’t pay us, and the reason he gave for not paying us was that Buddy wasn’t there.” In other words, the music business was full of sharks and assholes lacking sympathy, much less ethics. Waylon paused, then told the room full of college students, “That’s what you need to know about the music business.”
THE SECOND Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic, expanded to three days, was held at the Texas Motor Speedway, an auto racetrack near the towns of Bryan and College Station, ninety miles northeast of Austin, over the July Fourth weekend of 1974. Tim O’Connor and Larry Moeller, Lucky’s son, shared production duties, constructing a wide stage out of telephone poles and sliding barn doors so one band could be setting up on one side of the stage while another was performing. Tim was also in charge of security and hired bouncers from Austin nightclubs to protect the performers and the stage.
Leon Russell headlined again. Floyd Tillman was revived to perform with Freda and the Firedogs as Willie’s oldest old friend on the show. Jerry Jeff Walker and the Lost Gonzo Band, the Dirt Band, Doug Kershaw, Sir Doug Sahm, Greezy Wheels, featuring Sweet Mary Egan on fiddle, B. W. Stevenson, Michael Murphey, and Steve Fromholz all played on the raceway’s treeless infield, along with a few close personal friends of Willie. Musicians showed up bearing notes from Willie that said they could play the picnic. Tim took them at their word and would later consult Willie with the list of acts, which often led Willie to ask, “Who is that?”
“I don’t know, you sent them to me,” Tim would tell him. So they made a rule. “If you don’t know them, and I don’t know them, we’ll pay them five hundred,” Willie decided.
The rednecks and hippies went wild together at the picnic, partaking of beer, whiskey, marijuana, acid, meth, white crosses, uppers, downers, peyote, and, increasingly, the by now ever-present cocaine.
A few arrests were made before the picnic got under way for racing RVs around the racetrack. There was a ruckus when Willy Nelson, the cousin and manager of former teen sensation Ricky Nelson, whose musical memoir “Garden Party” was a huge hit, tried to get backstage and was attacked by a security goon under the influence who thought anyone trying to pass himself off as Willie Nelson deserved to get beat up.
Sixteen cars in the racetrack infield caught fire and burned, sending an apocalyptic black cloud into the sky that persisted for days after the event. Leon Russell got sloppy drunk and delivered a half-ass performance. Police and sheriffs enforced the Texas Mass Gathering Act curfew of eleven p.m. each night. Wolfman Jack and a crew from NBC Television’s Midnight Special music series had several confrontations with security guards. Still, the crowd, estimated to be anywhere from twenty thousand to seventy-five thousand, was large enough to prompt some folks to conclude this Texas thing had legs.
Tim O’Connor had to flash a gun to collect the money from the picnic’s other business partner, a judge in Brazos County, so he could pay Leon Russell his $10,000 guarantee. When it came time to settle at the end of the event, the judge remembered O’Connor’s strong-arm tactic and slowly peeled off fifty $1 bills for Tim’s work, telling him, “Get out of Brazos County and don’t come back.”
WILLIE didn’t spend a whole lot of time crying over a picnic gone bad or over losing his deal with Atlantic Records. From the front porch of his ranch, life looked pretty good. The move to Texas that was supposed to mark the end of his career had revived it instead. His blood family and his musical family were living around him. Musicians were streaming into Austin in droves in search of the scene he helped build. The national media were taking note of the scene boiling up in Texas and its ringleader who had been anointed in Austin as Godfather and was regarded as almost as big a deal in Dallas and Houston. What was there not to like?
The Willie effect was directly responsible for the much-publicized relocation of the band Asleep at the Wheel from northern California to Texas at the end of the summer of 1974. Choice slots on picnics, numerous shared bills with Willie, and a history at the Armadillo through their friends Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen made the move a no-brainer.
“We were already known,” the pianist Floyd Domino said. “We were on the radio in Austin. Townsend Miller wrote us up. We were in. We were nobodies out in Berkeley. I’ve never been a strong melody player, I just keyed off the chords, but in Texas, people would come up and say, ‘I like how you solo.’ ‘You so
lo like Al Stricklin.’ ‘You play out on the edge like Jimmy Day.’ We were a natural fit down here.”
The Wheel played a week at the Armadillo, living in the parking lot on their bus. “We were booked to play six nights at the Western Place in Dallas, but after two nights, Geno McCoslin, the owner, said, ‘You’re not playing. Willie’s playing,’” Floyd said. Geno wanted to kick them off the bill. They’d drawn twelve paying customers the first night and not many more the second, no matter how well they played Western Swing and sounded like Bob Wills. When Willie showed up, the Wheel told him they’d been bumped from the bill. Willie told Geno in no uncertain terms, “They don’t play, I don’t play.”
“Geno immediately starts kissing our ass,” Floyd said. “Geno was a real standup guy. Our road manager, Baggett, was a black belt in karate, and Geno put his gun on the table when they were settling up. Baggett asked him, ‘Is that faster than my hand?’ We got paid, no problem.”
The Wheel’s introduction to characters like Geno was instructive. Geno was having a small war with a vending machine distributor over pool tables in the club. At one point, he removed the pool tables and put them on the sidewalk and said, ‘Come get your fucking pool tables.’ The next week on Saturday night the place was packed, when three Doberman Pinschers were set loose in the club as retaliation, clearing out the place. “That’s the kind of people we were dealing with,” Ray Benson, Asleep at the Wheel’s leader, concluded. Geno attracted trouble, yet Willie always did business with him. Did Geno have something on him? Or was this loyalty of the most extraordinary degree? Ray Benson developed a theory: “The more you fucked up, the more Willie liked you.”
Ray had already learned a lot about the business from Willie when they met on the road in Greenville, South Carolina, early in 1972. Asleep at the Wheel was backing up Connie Smith, Stoney Edwards, Freddy Hart, Vickie Lee, and the rest of a package show that Willie was joining. “We were really excited because we knew who Willie Nelson was,” Ray said. “They pulled up in that Open Road mobile home with Bee and Paul. The first thing Willie asked us was whether we’d been paid. It was the fourth show that week and no one had been paid. Otis Woody, the promoter, told everybody not to worry, that we’d be paid on the next date.” Ray got to drinking Jack Daniel’s and talking about dope with Paul English and Bee Spears, when Willie interrupted the conversation. “Come on, boys, we’re going home,” he said without further discussion. “Willie saw that the promoter didn’t have the money, wasn’t going to pay him, so he said ‘fuck you’ and went home,” Ray said. “That’s how I met Willie Nelson.”
Ray Benson realized he was witnessing the start of something big at Geno’s new Dallas club, 57 Doors. “The room was a dump, but the gigs were amazing. We played Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, starting at nine, four alternating sets. On Thursday, there were forty people in the club. By Saturday it was packed. These strippers came in who just worshipped Willie Nelson. They would say, ‘You speak to me.’ People were fanatically devoted to Willie. Waylon Jennings was supposed to be the star—he was sexy, the women loved him. Willie was goofy, a hippie like all the rest of us.”
He was also a certified rabble-rouser. Things started turning ugly at the Texas Opry House after Willie’s endorsement of the Opry at the expense of the Armadillo helped ignite bidding wars over several acts, including Willie, Waylon, Boz Scaggs, and Ray Charles. “I wrote a column in the Statesman knocking the Opry people for stealing Ray Charles,” said Joe Gracey, the paper’s rock and roll columnist and the KOKE-FM disc jockey. “They threatened to kill me,” he claimed. “They put out a hit on me with some thug in San Marcos.”
Gracey’s worry over the threat was short-lived. Despite the crowds, the Texas Opry House folded less than a year after it opened. Bronson Evans hadn’t paid rent in two months and suddenly disappeared with no forwarding address. Wally Selman faced tax evasion charges for failing to withhold income tax on the Opry’s employees. “The beer license people was on me, the liquor license people was on me, they pulled my license. The whole house of cards fell. They come out and put tape on the doors. The IRS locked the doors and they didn’t give me no key.”
Wally went to Willie for help. He found him in a booth at the Opry Annex, which remained open.
“I need some money or I’m going to jail,” Wally pleaded.
“You know what we used to do in Fort Worth when a place we played had financial trouble?” Willie asked him.
Wally shook his head.
“We’d go somewhere else and play.”
Wally’s heart sank.
“We’ll help,” Willie said, laughing, once he knew he had made Wally squirm. Willie and band played five nights at the Opry Annex club to pay off debts and make sure neither Wally Selman nor anyone else had to go to jail for having too good a time. Waylon joined the shows, asking only that Wally pay for his rooms at the Holiday Inn on Town Lake, where he liked to stay.
Wallace Selman paid the taxes, stayed out of jail, and went to Houston and opened another Texas Opry House.
And Willie Nelson got a new record label.
On his way out the door, Jerry Wexler had left a gift for Willie—the release from his contract, along with the promise he could keep the signing bonuses and the masters he’d recorded for the label. “We got more to leave than we did to come to Atlantic,” Neil Reshen bragged. He was free to negotiate a deal with anyone except RCA—no way would Willie go back there. RCA represented everything wrong about the business in Nashville.
Columbia Records had been a suitable prospective home for Waylon two years earlier before he ended up with a new contract with RCA. Columbia might be even more perfect for Willie. The label was one of the oldest in American recorded music and had a history of iconoclastic artists, including Johnny Cash, the original Nashville rebel, folk-rocker Bob Dylan, folk-popper Paul Simon, and jazz trumpet master Miles Davis, another Neil Reshen client. Even more important, the label was flush with cash.
“I was sitting on the porch swing with Willie at his place on Fitzhugh Road and he was talking with his accountant on the phone,” Jerry Retzloff of Lone Star Beer said. When he hung up, Willie turned to Jerry and said, “I made a million dollars for the first time last year.” He credited Neil Reshen. “New York Jews, you have to have them,” Willie told Jerry. “If you don’t have a New York Jew in the record business, you ain’t gonna make it. I got a New York Jew. I don’t like it, but I got him.”
He actually got more than one. Mark Rothbaum, the kid learning the business by working for Neil, was assuming more of the day-to-day responsibilities for Willie. “Willie was almost forgotten by Neil,” Mark said. “It seemed to me that Neil thought Waylon was the greatest living artist and that’s where his attention was. I respected Waylon’s talent and his ability. Willie was just so much more of a human being. When I saw the album cover of Willie Nelson and Family with everybody around that circle, I wanted to be one of them—part of a different family than the one I grew up with. It was safe haven. I wanted to make their lives a little easier, make things flow better.”
Mark loved Willie, adored Connie, and found Paul to be “the most honest person I knew,” recalling Bob Dylan’s observation that “to live outside the law, you must be honest.” And he became tighter than tight with Mickey Raphael. Both were nice Jewish boys with the same MSR initials whose fathers were in the furniture business. Both were taking a lot of heat from their families for casting their lot with a Texas country musician instead of striving to become a doctor, lawyer, or accountant. And neither gave much of a shit.
“I want him,” Bruce Lundvall, the CEO of Columbia Records, told Neil Reshen late in 1974 when informed of Willie’s availability. Lundvall loved Willie’s writing and loved his voice, and signing him would be a poke in the eye of Jerry Wexler and Atlantic Records, who had stolen Aretha Franklin from Columbia and made her a star. Turnabout was fair play.
Bruce Lundvall called Billy Sherrill, the record producer who for all practical purposes ra
n Columbia’s country division in Nashville, based upon the slick, made-for-radio product he was cranking out on George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Johnny Paycheck, David Allan Coe, and the rest of the roster. Billy Sherrill’s blessing was important to Lundvall, but Billy wasn’t biting.
“What?” Sherrill said to Lundvall when he was told Columbia was signing Willie. “We don’t need him. He’s old.”
“He’s a genius,” Bruce said, reminding Billy that he worked for him.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Billy shrugged.
Bruce Lundvall could afford to gamble. Willie fit in as a prestige act for the label, an outsider appreciated mostly by insiders, who, if nothing else, made Columbia cool. The New York office could handle him if Nashville couldn’t. There was little risk in the deal. The investment was less than $100,000, pocket change compared with what the company was advancing to rock royalty such as Blood, Sweat & Tears, Santana, and Aerosmith. The advance for the first album was $60,000 plus another $17,000 each for the rights to The Troublemaker and To Lefty from Willie, albums that had been made on Atlantic’s coin.
“We did a signing party at Marty’s, a club that used to be Toots Shor, right next door to the CBS building,” Bruce Lundvall said. “Very few people showed. People in New York didn’t know who he was. What was going on down in Texas hadn’t reached here yet. Willie and I got drunk and had a great time talking.”
Garland to Hollywood, 1975
IN JANUARY 1975, while driving back to Texas from their first ski trip ever to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, Willie informed Connie he had to deliver an album to Columbia soon and didn’t have a clue what to do. He needed songs. According to the contract Neil Reshen had hammered out with Columbia Records, giving him artistic control for the first time in his career, Willie knew he could go in and do whatever he wanted, and the label would take it. Connie pulled out a pad of paper while they were talking about songs. She brought up “Red Headed Stranger” and how that and similar songs might make a nice story album, like a cowboy movie on record.
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