Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  Along with sunburns, heat strokes, overdoses, bug bites, and more music than a mortal could keep up with, the picnic served notice that Willie and Texas were happening on their own terms.

  The picnic conveniently coincided with Columbia’s release of the first single from Willie’s new album. Nick Hunter hatched a plan to send white label copies of the album to the program directors of the fifty-four country radio stations that reported their charts to the music trade magazines. The PDs would know if there were hits on the album.

  Columbia’s radio people were leaning toward “Remember Me” as the first single. The disc jockeys thought otherwise. Joe Ladd of KIKK in Houston, the top market for country record sales, was dead certain: “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” was a smash. It had all the right ingredients to move up the charts, never mind that the song was written by Fred Rose for Roy Acuff thirty years ago and there were no drums on the track.

  Willie had been building goodwill with radio people since 1961. For once, he’d given them a song they could pay him back with for all the generosity and good hang time. Airplay was strong the day the single of the beautiful lullaby was released, thirty years after the song was written.

  The single struck a particular chord with Bruce Lundvall. “I remembered hearing ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’ when I was ten years old,” he said. “I knew the original by heart because I’d always hear it on Hometown Frolic on WAAT in Newark, the only country radio in the New York/New Jersey area. I was a country fan before I was a jazz fan.”

  The single finally reached number 1 on the country singles chart the first week of October as it began crossing over onto the pop charts, peaking at number 21 a few weeks later. But Willie was still being second-guessed. The appeal of the record escaped country legend Charlie Louvin. One night on Bill Mack’s Midnight Cowboy program on WBAP-AM, a truckers’ show broadcast from Fort Worth that could be heard throughout half the nation, one-half of the Louvin Brothers voiced his opinion: “I can’t understand it. That thing wouldn’t have even made a good demo.”

  Willie discovered that despite all of the doubts, he was a pretty good producer. “Chet Atkins was a better guitar player than me,” he said. “Grady Martin was a better guitar player than me. I thought they knew the answers in the studio. Come to find out, they didn’t know any better than I did.” He had made an album against all odds and at one-tenth the usual expense.

  “Columbia wanted to pay for the sessions, so I called Phil York in Garland and told him to send me the bill,” said Nick Hunter. “I sent it over to the accountant. She called me back really nice. Could I get all the bills together so she could send just one check all at once? I said, ‘That’s it.’ She started laughing.”

  The Red Headed Stranger album officially debuted in Houston at a Halloween party with a live performance by Willie and band at the Shepherd Drive-In movie theater, an unlikely venue for an album debut, much less a concert. The Halloween night show was promoted by Dar Jamail, Joe Jamail’s eighteen-year-old son. Even stranger, Paul Simon, the folk-rock singer who was once half of the duo Simon & Garfunkel, showed up to sit in with Willie Nelson and Family. Columbia’s CEO Bruce Lundvall had come to Houston to see Paul perform in concert at an arena and go to Willie’s drive-in show. Willie urged Lundvall to bring Paul over. “He knew Willie’s songs but he didn’t really know who Willie was,” Poodie Locke, a Willie roadie, said. “He was sitting on the steps with Steve [Koepke] and me and he’d ask, ‘Did Willie write that?’ We’d nod. Willie called him up, hadn’t even met him, just handed him his guitar.”

  The first real concert date supporting the album was scheduled for Ebbets Field, a small room in Denver. Willie asked Nick Hunter not to bring Hank Cochran to the Denver gig as planned. He wanted to stay focused. Hank would get him sidelined. Ebbets Field was chosen because Chuck Morris owned the room and Willie had committed to a national tour promoted by Barry Fey and Morris and Feyline Concerts, which controlled the mountain states territory for concerts, much like Bill Graham owned northern California and Ron Delsener dominated New York City and the Tri-State area. It was a big leap for both parties. Feyline specialized in rock acts that could fill hockey arenas. Other than Waylon, country acts weren’t working those kinds of venues. Fey and Morris thought Willie had the potential once they witnessed a few shows in Texas. Willie saw the potential too. After a career represented by booking agents from Texas and Nashville, going with Barry Fey and Chuck Morris was a step up.

  “It is my time,” he explained to another friend.

  For the first time ever, Willie had the wherewithal to hire a full-time road crew. Before then, “He’d sit out in his Mercedes, smoking pot, watching people arrive in the parking lot,” Wally Selman of the Texas Opry House recalled. “We’d be talking until it was time to go inside and he’d get his stuff from the U-Haul trailer and everyone would carry their stuff in.”

  Mickey Raphael called Poodie Locke, who was the only roadie in Austin worth a shit besides Bobby “Flaco” Lemons and Travis Potter. Poodie had worked with Mickey when Mickey was with B. W. Stevenson and had twice turned down offers to join Willie to stay with B. W. “Buckwheat was such a mess, somebody had to watch him,” Poodie reasoned. “I couldn’t leave him. He was drinking two bottles of Jack Daniel’s a day.” But Poodie did leave when Mickey called a third time.

  Poodie went to Paul English’s, where he was introduced to Paul’s son, Darrell Wayne, Connie Nelson’s brother Steve Koepke, and Willie’s son, Billy, aka Wild Bill—the road crew of record—and shown the battered green Blazer wagon that Austin car dealer Bill McMorris had loaned to the band. Paul handed Poodie $1,000 and instructions for where to meet him in Los Angeles, where the band was going to showcase the album. Flush with running change and aided by two ounces of weed and an eight ball of coke, Poodie drove west, hauling the guts of the Willie Nelson and his Family Band road show to the big time.

  Word about Willie and his new album had L.A. primed and ready. Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and most of the West Coast staff of Columbia Records turned out for the label-sponsored showcase at the Troubadour Club on Santa Monica Boulevard, a musical launching pad since 1957. The acoustic-friendly club, which could hardly accommodate two hundred customers, was an ideal setting for a song cycle that demanded paying attention to. The heavyweights in attendance validated Willie with record buyers. More important, Columbia staff finally got what the album was about.

  Other dates were added quickly. The Palomino in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles for the country fans, two nights at Jay’s Silver Cloud in Algodones, New Mexico, near Albuquerque. “Two-thirds of the bar was for regular customers. The other third was padded for the drunk Indians,” Poodie Locke said about the rough start. “Until we got to play in front of Carl Perkins and the Tennessee Three at the Jackson Coliseum in Jackson, Tennessee, we were making five hundred a gig,” Poodie said. Then the going got good, and kept on going. “It was supposed to be for two weeks. We were out for six months.”

  None of the crew had a title. Everyone did everything and found their place amid the chaos Willie enjoyed creating. A job description was beside the point, Willie said, “except Bee—he plays bass.” They were pickers, gypsies, pirates, vagabonds, wanderers, and carneys, each addicted to “having a new reality every day,” as the front man liked to say.

  The band, which had been flying to gigs out of Texas for the past year, and the crew, who had been in the old Blazer, began riding in old Porter Wagoner’s bus. Nice as it was to have everyone in one vehicle, it was already too small. Selling records put them on a steep learning curve. “Willie didn’t know shit about sound checks, so we’d leave [for a gig] when Willie wanted to leave,” Poodie Locke said. “We were touring with Poco [on Willie’s first major arena tour, opening for the West Coast country-rock band] when Timmy Schmidt, Chris Hillman, and Sneaky Pete were playing with them. They’d do two sound checks. I’d go in myself and set up in the dark behind them. We blew them away every show, six shows in a row.
They got all these bad reviews. Dennis Wall, their road manager, called me in Atlanta. He said, ‘We really love you guys, but you guys are too unprofessional. We don’t think you’re going to make it.’”

  Getting kicked off the Poco tour was a back-handed compliment. Within a year they would be headlining the Omni Arena in Atlanta for three nights running with the future President of the United States of America, Jimmy Carter, among the Willie-ites.

  After the album passed the five-hundred-thousand-units-sold mark (it was certified gold in March 1976), Bruce Lundvall sent Waylon a gold record with the note, “This is from that tin-eared tone-deaf son-of-a-bitch. You were right. Here’s your album.” The album soon eclipsed one million in sales and was certified double platinum, signifying sales of two million units, in 1986. Willie took a cue from Lund-vall’s graciousness by sending a framed platinum album to his friend Joe Jamail, who had told Willie the album was shit. Beneath the platinum record was a message from Willie. “You’re right, lawyer.”

  RED HEADED STRANGER empowered Willie to do as he damn well pleased and still have an audience eager to listen. He performed with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra at their new Summertop tent venue on the grounds of Northpark Mall for the symphony’s summer series. Willie didn’t have sheet music to give symphony musicians, so he urged them to come see him play at Dewey Groom’s Longhorn Ballroom on Industrial Boulevard. Some did and afterwards told Willie to play whatever he wanted.

  Columbia gave him his own custom label, Lone Star, which allowed him to sign Billy C, the songwriter Billy Callery, who wrote “Hands on the Wheel” for Red Headed Stranger and “Jaded Lover” for Jerry Jeff Walker; Austin songwriter Milton Chesley Carroll, a regular at the Texas Opry Annex; and fiddler Johnny Gimble, Steve Fromholz, the Geezinslaws, Family Band guitarists Jody Payne and Bucky Meadows, and Darrell McCall. Signing them all was payback for helping him along the way.

  AFTER Red Headed Stranger, Willie returned to Autumn Sound just before Christmas in 1975 for The Sound in Your Mind. He didn’t have a concept in mind this time other than “do some songs we already do that people like to hear when we’re on the road.”

  The road band was joined in the studio by Tommy “Wolf” Morrell, Willie’s favorite steel man after Jimmy Day, and extended family who crowded the studio hallways. Steve Fromholz was there because Willie was doing one of his songs. Willie called him into the studio to demonstrate how to sing the diminished minors in “I’d Have to Be Crazy.” Steve, who had a few Lone Stars in his belly, sat where Willie had been sitting, while Willie stood next to him singing. In the middle of the song, Steve started singing along, totally into the groove, his hearty vocals picked up by Willie’s microphone. Phil York recorded three takes. The keeper was the version with Fromholz singing in the background. It became the first single off the album, reaching number 11 on the country singles chart.

  He covered the old pop standard “That Lucky Old Sun,” a song of weariness and reflection, and the rugged chestnut “Amazing Grace.” He reprised “Healing Hands of Time,” did his show medley “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Crazy,” and “Night Life,” and paid tribute to Lefty Frizzell with “If You’ve Got the Money (I’ve Got the Time).” Willie’s version was distinguished by Mickey Raphael’s improvised harmonica riffs. “I didn’t have any harmonica people [in country] to copy other than Charlie McCoy, and if he didn’t play on it, I had to wing it,” Mickey said. He winged it just right. The Lefty rave-up was the second single from the album and also went all the way to number 1 on the country singles chart. The album wasn’t the surprise that Red Headed Stranger was, but musically it was a little more complex and adventurous, in the spirit of the road show. Billboard magazine cited it as the country album of the year.

  While recording the album, Phil York received a call from Columbia Records in Nashville, wanting the two-inch tape of Red Headed Stranger to do a remix for the Country Music Association Awards show on television. “Willie’s the producer, not me,” Phil said, “and he’s sitting here right next to me. You talk to him.”

  Phil handed the phone to Willie. “I was hearing his side of the conversation: ‘You want to do what? Fuck you!’ He wouldn’t let them have it. He didn’t want them to jack with his sound.”

  Willie liked making records and putting them out, and now that he was selling so many of them, he could make a record singing the Yellow Pages if he wanted. Thinking positive all those years was reaping rewards. A reporter approached him outside Autumn Sound to ask a few questions, including the zinger “What did it take to become a star?”

  “I know the answer to that one real well,” Willie replied. “You get some record label to invest a bunch of money in you. They’ve got to make you a star to get it back.”

  Whatever country music was, it was having an identity crisis, and Willie was the outsider that the powers that be could neither rein in nor figure out. Artistically, he and Waylon represented the antidote to an industry that deemed Olivia Newton-John, an innocuous, saccharine-sweet pop singer by way of Australia, worthy of Female Vocalist of the Year honors, and an equally innocuous American folk singer who called himself John Denver, the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year. During a tour of Waylon’s new studio, an engineer eagerly pointed out to a visiting journalist that the facility was so state of the art, “we could record the Eagles here,” referring to the California rock band. Hank Williams was just a memory in Nashville.

  On August 8, 1975, music critic John Rockwell wrote in the New York Times that Willie was “the acknowledged leader of country music’s ‘left wing,’ working to cleanse Nashville of stale excesses by bringing it up to the present and its own folkish roots.” Newsweek simply identified him as “The King of Country Music.” His likeness was on the cover of the Rolling Stone. His red bandanna and battered guitar were instantly recognizable symbols.

  But the real proof of success was in the bank account. He signed a multimillion-dollar, multiyear contract with Caesar’s Palace, averaging between $25,000 and $100,000 per concert and indulging in such excesses as the lighting director Budrock’s arranging to have Bee fly on a wire above Willie’s head during “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground.” He was getting a $1.43 royalty per album sold, all the money going to Willie Nelson Music, the publishing company owned by Willie Nelson and Paul English, who earned his 20 percent slice by getting back the publishing rights to many of the songs Willie had sold years before.

  The move to Texas had been a godsend, he told Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times. “The bottom line to me is positive and negative,” he said. “I began to change my life so that I could emphasize the positive things. There were positive things in Nashville, but there were also all the negative ones. I figured there’d be less negative influences in Texas. I’d be among friends and in familiar territory. The rest was up to me.”

  Worrying, he told anyone who’d ask, was bad for your health. He had a deal with Paul. “I’ll worry one day, you worry the next.”

  Willie got the Texas Opry House up and running again late in 1975. He partnered with Tim O’Connor as Southern Commotion, Inc., taking out a scrap of paper and writing “Tim O’Connor President, Southern Commotion. Paul English, Vice, Willie Nelson, Secretary/Treasurer,” but then scratching it out, telling Tim, “We don’t need one of those.” Despite an asking price of $1.6 million, they put down $10,000 to secure the fourteen-and-a-half-acre tract, and took over 218 apartments, three swimming pools, the fifty-four-thousand-square-foot Opry building, the parking lot, and the old motel office.

  “Dude McCandless had an unsecured promissory note with Farm and Home Savings and Loan in Nevada, Missouri,” Tim said. “He was starting to refuse to pay it, so the savings and loan wanted to get it off the books and get it secured. We got it by paying the ten-thousand-dollar note. Willie’s name was enough for them.”

  The spread was renamed the Austin Opry House, which prompted Wally Selman to sue the new operators in federal court. Wally still owned t
he name “Texas Opry House,” and he insisted “Austin Opry House” infringed on that. “Yeah, let’s sue each other,” Tim challenged him. “We will get some notoriety out of it.” The court ruled “opry” was in the public domain.

  Willie put Tim in charge of operations at the Opry complex, but overseeing the concert hall and managing the surrounding apartment complex, known as the Willie Hilton, the Willie Arms, and Heartbreak Hotel, was a headache. “A band would show up with a note signed by Willie that read, ‘Tim, take care of these guys,’” Tim O’ Connor said. So Tim would put them into an apartment, even though they didn’t have any money for rent. Half of Austin’s gypsy music community moved in, among them Farmer Dave “Slappy” Gilstrap, Lucinda Williams and her beau, Clyde Woodward, gossip columnist Margaret Moser and her husband, photographer Ken Hoge, the freshly divorced Crow brothers—Alvin and Rick—jazz player and entrepreneur Mike Mordecai and his cohort Paul Pearcy, as well as columnist Townsend Miller, Poodie Locke, Willie’s stage manager, and enough dope dealers, topless dancers, and trust-fund brats to make life interesting.