The Backstage Club, formerly the registration desk and lobby of the Terrace and the Annex, morphed into the third location of Soap Creek Saloon. A small recording studio and a rehearsal hall fronted an alleyway identified by a street sign as Music Lane. The whole operation was a slapdash venture worlds away from the slickness of Nashville’s Music Row. There wasn’t much business to be done in Austin beyond Willie, but no one seemed to care. Everybody was busy having too much fun. Whenever taxes were owed, Tim would call and say, “I need you to come play three or four days,” and Willie would.
The gospel of Texas music was spreading. KAFM, a Dallas FM station, started airing records by Willie, Waylon, and the boys mixed in with the Allman Brothers, Poco, and Pure Prairie League on January 17, 1975, debuting at six a.m. with Willie singing “Phases and stages...” Another Dallas–Fort Worth station, KAMC-FM, had been featuring progressive country on Sundays for several years and was slowly working the sound into the station’s regular music programming. A California station south of the San Francisco Bay, KFAT-FM, was around-the-clock progressive country. A new glossy magazine out of Dallas called Texas Music appeared, complementing the free handout Buddy: The Original Texas Music Magazine and Picking Up the Tempo, a literary journal published in Austin that took seriously country music and the culture emerging from the music.
Geno McCoslin took over the reins of the rickety Dallas Sportatorium, the post–Dust Bowl vintage wrestling arena that was the former home of the Big D Jamboree. The “new and improved” Sportatorium opened with Willie Nelson as headliner. Sam Cutler, an intimidating pistol-packing hard-ass who’d run tours for the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead, had been hired as Willie’s tour coordinator but couldn’t find the Sportatorium on opening night. When the band arrived in a station wagon, they were refused entry by the fire department. The place was oversold and no one was going in until someone came out. Meanwhile, Geno was being chased by angry ticket holders. He had called Dallas Pipe and Drape to put “Men” and “Women” signs over the exits. During the show, customers who thought they were going to the restroom found themselves outside. If they wanted back in, they had to buy another ticket.
Sam Cutler came and went as fast as other out-of-town hustlers like producers Jack Clement and Al Kooper, who left Austin as quickly as they arrived once they assessed the financial realities of the scene. Willie planted more roots, opening a business office in Oak Hill, west of Austin, staffing it with Larry Moeller, son of his old Nashville booker Lucky Moeller, his daughter Lana, and accountant Cookie DeShay.
He’d spent the previous thirty years making time to talk to fans after a show, autographing every piece of paper thrust his way, posing for photographs with his arms around strangers and a smile on his face, employing a “Welcome All Comers” policy with his fans that was paying off in spades. But now the fans were coming like never before. And he was supposed to shoo them away? After wiring his ranch on Fitzhugh Road with fencing and electronic surveillance, he complained to Larry Trader, “This fence isn’t keeping people out. It’s keeping me in.”
Still, there were times when even Willie had had it with promoting his career. “We were out in Denver, it was freezing, and we were supposed to do a short promotion tour to Phoenix for Red Headed Stranger,” radio promo man Nick Hunter said. “Willie kept saying he didn’t want to do it. I woke up the next morning and went to go get Willie, but he was gone. He left a note at the front desk: ‘Dear Nick, It’s not supposed to be that way.’”
Connie Nelson was reaching her limit too. She loved seeing her girls don their Donny and Marie Osmond wigs and join the Family Band onstage to sing “I’m a Little Bit Country, A Little Bit Rock and Roll” and have Uncle Kris and Uncle Waylon and Aunt Rita and Aunt Jessi as their doting relatives. Paula developed such a crush on Leon Russell that she named her Bozo the Clown doll “Little Leon.” But the public life, the strangers coming over at all hours, fans hopping the fence, fans wanting to touch Willie, were wearing Connie down. It was either hire a guard or move.
At one point, Willie proposed moving the family to Abbott, but Connie told her husband, “You can’t do that to our kids. You’re famous now and you’re gonna put our two little girls in Abbott and they are going to be Willie Nelson’s kids. That’s not fair to them. You might as well put Christmas lights on both of them, light them up, and let them go everywhere. I didn’t want my girls to be treated better because of Willie, or treated worse because of him.” Connie had enjoyed a conventional childhood and wanted the same for their daughters.
It was crazy at home, or what passed for a home now, because the ranch on Fitzhugh Road was well known to a rapidly expanding fan base. An ambitious picker buzzed the squawk box at the gate and auditioned for the speakerphone and security camera. One night Willie and Connie were awakened by someone singing in the backyard. They snuck out of their room to the upstairs porch, from where they spotted Jerry Jeff Walker sloppy drunk and singing. They snuck back to their room and he eventually left.
“It was spinning out of control,” Connie complained. Willie’s son, Billy, eighteen years old and a roadie for the band, was a particular thorn in her side and hungry for attention. “Billy would come in the middle of the night and throw things through the window. One time Willie and I and the girls went away and there were windows broken in the kids’ room. I was devastated and scared, and knowing Willie was about to leave town again, I started asking questions and found out Billy’s truck had been seen nearby, so I told Willie. He didn’t want to believe it. I told him this happens when he’s gone but asked him not to say anything to Billy.” Connie had “screamers” with Billy one-on-one and told him their differences had nothing to do with his dad. They were between her and him. Connie finally threw in the towel. “We needed to let Billy figure out who he is, and we needed to be out of this sit-uation.”
Connie moved with Paula Carlene and Amy Lee to Conifer, Colorado, in the summer of 1976, and a year later to a 122-acre spread in Evergreen, forty miles west of Denver, with a three-story, twelve-room chalet and three other houses, a teepee, horses, red Ferrari in the garage, and all the trappings of the good life in the Rockies. Connie knew her husband too well. If they were to spend time together as a family, it would be away from the craziness. “He just can’t or won’t say no to anybody,” Connie said. “He likes people and he’ll put everybody above him first. When Kris wants privacy, he’ll take it. But I’ve seen Will so tired to the point where he can’t go any further and someone will call and he’ll say, ‘Sure.’ And from somewhere, he’ll get enough energy to do it. I think the main reason is because he doesn’t ever want anybody to think that because he’s successful, it’s changed him. I’ve heard him say it enough times that I know it’s true.”
Willie put it in a slightly different light. “I was conducting business with all manner of characters, and it just got a little bit out of hand,” he said. “People don’t bother me, but I can’t say that for the people who have to be around me all the time. They get bummed out sometimes.”
Lana wasn’t pleased that Connie took her dad to Colorado. “I took it personally that someone would move him away from his family. No matter if there was this other stuff, the fact that he moved somewhere else was hard to take. I didn’t think it was right. I knew where Connie was coming from, but I thought my kids and me got the short end of the deal. His parents, his sister, and everybody else were here because of him. When he moved, we started wondering, what are we doing here?”
Connie said she wasn’t trying to take Willie away from Lana and Susie (Billy was a different matter). “What I was looking for was—when he was home, for God’s sake, let’s have family time,” she said. “Give us a chance, when you’re off the road, to be a family. I was thinking, Willie needs this as much as I do, but that’s probably not true. Willie’s more ‘of the people,’ and that’s by choice.”
Connie and the girls got addicted to snow skiing in the winter. Willie stayed hooked on the road, sometimes
flying from Austin to Colorado in his private jet to have dinner with his wife and children, sing “Old Blue” and “Red Headed Stranger” to the girls before bed, or, in the summer, mow the lawn with his John Deere tractor before jetting off for a concert and flying back to his Texas spread at the end of the night. “I tried to be like other people,” he said. “I tried to come home and watch TV. That just wasn’t me.”
He was busy going faster, and getting harder to keep up with. “He was a superstar, and everybody wanted a piece of him,” Ray Benson said. “He would try to set the rules—like never answer your phone in the hotel room—but it was overwhelming. It was getting harder and harder to be close to him, and one of the things about Willie is the proximity effect. If you get next to him and talk to him, you have more influence than anybody else.”
The craziness Connie and the girls were escaping reared its ugly head in a field on the eight-hundred-acre Sterling Kelly ranch near the south central Texas town of Gonzales, fifty miles southeast of Austin, for the bicentennial edition of the Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic. At least 150,000 fans were predicted to show up to hear a lineup of Texas progressive-country stars Jerry Jeff Walker, Rusty Weir, Kinky Friedman, and Doug Sahm, and Nashville giants George Jones, Bobby Bare, Roger Miller, and the dynamic duos of Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter, Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge, and Leon and Mary Russell.
A local ad hoc group called Citizens for Law, Order and Decency (CLOD) threatened lawsuits and ultimately persuaded Gonzales County commissioners to deny a three-day permit citing the potential for “immorality, drunkenness, narcotics abuse and nudity.” CLOD’s head, James Darnell, said, “To allow this invasion is to invite the anti-American, anti-Christian hippie subculture right into our homes.”
Geno McCoslin ignored the permit denial and paid the fine after the fact. He was too busy planning a three-day around-the-clock music festival in his office in a rented house in Gonzales. Willie sent two roadies in his Mercedes to check on Geno. They found him in his office with an ounce of blow on his desk next to a bottle of whiskey, looking sharp in sunglasses, doing a telephone interview with WLS radio in Chicago. Asked what someone from Chicago should bring if they were picnicking in Gonzales, Geno croaked, “Ten dollars, ten dollars.”
On the day of the picnic, Geno was selling tickets on one highway and Neil Reshen was selling tickets on the other highway. Despite the protests by vocal locals, the fourth Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic drew close to eighty thousand fans who paid $10 to sit and fry on the treeless plain in thunderstorms and hundred-degree heat. Liberty Hill had been manageable. Gonzales got out of hand, turning into a Texas version of Altamont, the free concert the Rolling Stones staged in northern California in 1969, where there were four accidental deaths and one killing. Security guards kept the crowd off the stage by rapping knuckles with two-by-fours.
After heavy rains halted the concert on the second day, the overhead tarp covering the stage sagged with so much water that on Sunday morning, Paul English resolved the situation by whipping out his pistol and shooting a hole in the canvas to drain the water. “The supports holding up the canvas had bent in,” said Flaco Lemons, who’d been hired to do sound at the picnic. “It was a sky swimming pool and was going to go at any time.” The crowd roared its approval of Paul’s shot. Paul’s show of arms inspired others to display their weaponry. “Everybody was carrying guns, the crew, everybody,” Flaco Lemons said. “I was at a meeting a few days before the picnic started, and we were told we couldn’t wear our guns on the outside, so everybody had their guns in their boots. After Paul pulled out his pistol and shot the canvas, it was pretty much open season for everybody else to pull out their pistols. Everybody had been working there for a week—we were all toast.”
A twenty-six-year-old man from Pasadena, Texas, drowned in a nearby stock pond. The Bandidos motorcycle gang made a show of force. A woman was raped. A man’s clothing caught fire while he was sleeping. George Jones did his crossover, sorta, though his nervousness showed throughout his performance and a roaring encore. Floyd Tillman, Asleep at the Wheel, Kris and Rita, Waylon, Jessi, Bare, Coe, Weir, Hubbard, Shaver, Fromholz, B. W. Stevenson, and Linda Hargrove performed. Jerry Jeff Walker sang “This Land Is Your Land.” Willie sat in with Doug Sahm at three a.m. and with Leon Russell at eight a.m. but Willie Nelson and Family never got around to doing their own set. “I was up all night promoting it with radio stations in San Antonio and just barely made it to get to Waylon’s set to close it,” he said after the fact. “So I got to sit in but never did do my show.”
By show’s end, the whereabouts of the box-office receipts was a bone of contention. Dar Jamail had ferried some of the advance sales in a Brink’s armored truck to a Houston bank, but promoters were $200,000 short of meeting expenses. It didn’t help that Geno had gone ballistic. “He had a bag of coke and a knife in one hand, a pistol in the other, ready to snort and shoot,” a friend said. “Stick your head out the window and I’ll blow it off,” he dared all comers.
Billboard disapproved. “If Nelson ever again tries one, some of the money should be diverted back into sensible, efficient organization and control,” Gerry Wood wrote in the trade magazine. “Otherwise he should hold his party in his backyard and invite over a few neighbors for a hot dog and a song. Confusion and callousness perpetrated in the name of Nelson only result in Nelson getting a bad name—and that’s something this generous, kind, loving and talented man does not deserve.”
What the Billboard writer did not realize was the same thing the Armadillo World Headquarters folks didn’t realize when they complained to Willie about his friends toting weapons backstage. Loyalty trumped efficiency. People like McCoslin, who promoted Gonzales, had helped out Willie way back when. He didn’t forget them. Thieves and gypsies needed work too. “I know they’re stealing from me,” Willie reasoned to one intimate. “But at least I know who they are. They have families to feed too. I could clear them out and get a whole new set, and then I wouldn’t know who they are.”
Willie had a history of embracing scalawags, and the thieves were not to be fucked with. “There was no way to fit in with those folks,” complained Mark Rothbaum, Willie’s liaison with New York manager Neil Reshen. “You couldn’t be friends with them. Willie could be friends with them because he could laugh it off, he was amused by it. I didn’t have standing. I wouldn’t challenge the Genos, the Tom Greshams, and the Larry Traders, because I would lose. Willie would coach me, prompt me, and when he didn’t trust somebody, would say to me, ‘I really want you to look at this hard.’ It could have been a total fucking gangster who just machine-gunned someone a week before. Willie would do it as a kind of sport, send a limo and deliver me to the wolves, just for the fun of it. He knew I was tough. I didn’t have a ton of common sense but I had a lot of initiative.”
The reporter from Billboard would have done better to look at the whole affair as Willie’s version of a good time. “Willie liked chaos. He liked anarchy. He didn’t like order, and he didn’t like manicures,” Mark Rothbaum explained. “He wanted things to be wild and to be crazy and to have volcanic eruptions. With every phone call would come another catastrophe, calamity, hysterical situation. I guess he fed off it.”
A month and a half after Gonzales, Gene McCoslin resurfaced in an article written by John Anders of the Dallas Morning News in which the Gonzales picnic was described as Willie’s “greatest fiasco.” Geno told Anders, “We don’t make any money on it. We have to stay in jerkwater towns. I was put in jail twice for just trying to do my job. I’ve got a wife and kids. I don’t need this hassle. But if Willie asks me to, I will.” Geno reported that Willie was crushed by the bad rap he was getting (which Geno was partly responsible for). “Willie Nelson has never made any money off any of the picnics. In fact, they’ve cost him a fortune. But he always pays his acts and he pays them well. The only reason he gives the picnic is that he believes the people of Texas want it. He’s sick of the hassle, but he plans on do
ing it next year anyway.”
Anders went on to quote an unidentified friend—could it have been Geno?—stating Willie’s biggest flaw was “he just can’t say no. He’s a notorious easy touch for people needing money, and people who need favors. He gets into trouble sometimes because he overextends himself. He is by no means a wealthy man, but if somebody tells him they’re low on funds, or need his talents, he doesn’t know how to say no.”
Wally Selman, one of Willie’s promoter friends through the Texas Opry House in Austin, learned about Geno the hard way. “Willie had like a mafia in Texas,” Wally said. “He had an arrangement with his manager and booker that his old cronies, promoters, and burnouts could handle Texas for him. He had divided it up into territories. Geno had Dallas, Tom Gresham had Waco, Trader had San Antonio. I knew where mine was.” But when Wally booked a Willie date in Fort Worth, Geno got in his face.
“What the fuck are you in Fort Worth for, man? Fort Worth is my territory,” Geno raged.
“No, Dallas is your territory,” Wally countered. “Fort Worth is another city.”
“Bad things are going to happen to you,” Geno threatened. “You ain’t ever going to work again. I’m going to kill you.”
Wally was sufficiently rattled to fly to Albuquerque, where Willie was playing.
“Are y’all having a range war?” Willie asked when Wally stepped on the bus.
“Well, yeah,” Wally told him. “Geno’s saying he’s going to kill me for promoting your date in Fort Worth.”
Willie looked as if he’d heard it before. “Well, you get back on that plane and tell Geno that Will said, ‘Quit that!’”
It worked.
After settling their differences (Fort Worth wasn’t territory worth fighting over), Geno and Wally were playing cards and drinking beer one night, when Geno leaned across the table and hissed into Wally’s ear, “Do you steal from Will?”
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