Wally flinched and shook his head no, wondering if this was a test or something.
“Goddamn!” Geno exclaimed. “Why not? Willie expects you to take a little.” It was the unwritten Code of Willie, a philosophy of show business built on Darwinism steeped in four decades of honky-tonk music dipped in sweat and puke and sperm and 100 percent of the door.
WALLY and the other Texas promoters were close enough to Willie to learn the important need-to-know stuff about him—particularly what pissed him off and how altruistic he could be toward those around him, including cons like himself, the only people he really trusted to promote his shows.
Wally promoted a Willie show in Galveston on the same night that Galveston Ball High School happened to be playing in the nearby Houston Astrodome in the regional playoffs for the Texas 4A high school football championship in November 1976, which effectively depopulated Galveston Island. The show bombed. Afterwards, Willie and Wally sat on separate beds in Wally’s room at the Flagship Hotel, counting the meager take. They usually worked a split after paying expenses. This time, there wasn’t enough to pay for the overhead.
“Willie, I can’t take any out,” Wally told Willie, tossing him the money bag.
“No, take what you spent,” Willie insisted, tossing the bag back. “We’ll make it up another time.” He’d seen gigs like this before. Taking a hit was part of business.
Wally shook his head. “I can’t do it, no, Will.” He threw the bag to Willie.
Willie fixed his eyes on Wally and spoke slowly. “I’m going to throw this bag to you one time. If you throw it back, I’m going to keep it.”
“Pitch it here,” Wally told him.
Willie’s affinity for rogues underscored a worldview that everyone was equal as far as he was concerned. Before a concert at the Forum in Los Angeles, an assistant to the promoter informed him that steak and lobster were waiting for him backstage.
“That’s for everybody, right?” Willie said.
“No, we got hamburgers for the guys,” the assistant replied. Willie was getting the star treatment.
“Well,” Willie said, grinning at the aspiring promoter, “I guess I’m eating a hamburger.”
Poorly attended shows and debacles such as the Fourth of July Picnic at Gonzales were becoming anomalies next to skyrocketing record sales and concert grosses. The band added a second show bus that was tricked out with CB radios, sleeping bunks, televisions, stereos, showers, and all the accessories to stay on the road for months. There was solid product to tour behind, and Willie saw no roadblocks ahead.
The Troublemaker, the gospel album recorded in New York in 1973 for Atlantic Records, was finally released by Columbia in 1976. The collection, composed of spiritual songs he’d grown up with in church and the original by Bruce Belland and David Somerville about Jesus as shit-stirrer, was a new and completely different kind of concept album as far as fans were concerned. But another album that hadn’t been conceptualized by Willie was making a far louder noise.
Jerry Bradley had been running RCA Records in Nashville in the wake of Chet Atkins’s departure from the label, allowing Owen Bradley’s fortunate son to step out from under the guitar master’s shadow. Jerry had the family name but didn’t necessarily have the family touch as producer, and Waylon was pissed as ever at the label. “I’d go over to a meeting and Waylon would have an ad that RCA had run on the back of his door,” Jerry said. “You shut the door and him and his crew would be throwing knives at it.”
Waylon was still the label’s biggest gun in Nashville. “He was selling two hundred fifty to three hundred fifty thousand albums,” Jerry Bradley said. “We were trying to get him into the million category. All of a sudden, Willie had Red Headed Stranger. He sold a million. Jessi Colter, Waylon’s wife, had the single ‘I’m Not Lisa’ out on Capitol, and I guess she sold a million. We thought we had the better talent and we were trying desperately to get something going. We looked around—I looked around, wasn’t no ‘we’ to it—to see what was happening. We had a lot of artists who were doing fifty to sixty thousand albums. Back then one hundred thousand albums was a success story. You didn’t have but about twenty-five thousand bucks in an album. But nothing was happening. We were in a rebuilding stage. So I got on the phone and called business affairs in New York and said, ‘Don’t we have the right to put out an album on Waylon and Willie? Cain’t I go down to the vault and just put ’em out?’ And they said, yes, I did have the right.
“Neil Reshen came to the office, playing the part he had to play. If I wanted to go right, he wanted to go left. I told Neil, ‘I got this idea, here’s what I want to do.’ He said, ‘I don’t think we want to do that.’
“I said, ‘What’d y’all make last year? Three or four million dollars?’
“He said, ‘That’s close.’
“I said, ‘I made fifty thousand. I’ve got the right to put this thing out. And you know what? If I put this thing out, I might make fifty thousand next year. This is insurance on my job for one more year.’”
Reshen relented and Bradley went to work. “Nobody had any interest in it except me. I picked all the songs,” Jerry said. He chose well, pulling “Yesterday’s Wine” and “Me and Paul” from Willie’s Yesterday’s Wine album and “Healing Hands of Time” and “You Left a Long, Long Time Ago” from elsewhere in Willie’s catalog. Jessi Colter delivered two new songs of her own and a Waylon and Jessi duet of “Suspicious Minds,” popularized by Elvis. Jerry added two songs sung by Tompall Glaser, another RCA recording artist and songwriter with a contrary streak, “Put Another Log on the Fire” and “T for Texas,” the old Jimmie Rodgers yodel from the 1930s. He cobbled them together with Waylon’s sentimental “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” and two Waylon and Willie duets, “Good Hearted Woman,” the old Waylon track that Willie overdubbed his vocal to, and “Heaven or Hell.”
Willie had suggested a new, live version of “Good Hearted Woman” in exchange for an advance from RCA. “I just bought a club down here in Austin and I need two hundred and fifty thousand,” he told Jerry. “Could you advance me two fifty and let me have the B-side to the next single?”
“You got it,” Jerry Bradley said. Willie and Waylon’s live version of “Good Hearted Woman,” recorded at Geno McCoslin’s Western Place in Dallas, was added to the album.
Jerry got busy trying to capture a feel for what he was putting together. “I picked up on the vibe that they were a bunch of outlaws hanging around Nashville going up against the big corporate structure,” he said. “I had about fourteen volumes of The Wild, Wild West, these Time Warner books sold on television, in my office and I was thumbing through one and found this ‘Wanted’ poster. I took it down to Herb Burnette at Pinwheel Studios and told Herb I wanted to make an album cover and I wanted to put Waylon’s picture in the middle, just a little bit bigger than the ones of Jessi, Tompall, and Willie underneath. I gave him their pictures. I said, ‘Put bullet holes in it and that parchment brown paper.’ Herb made it up.
“I had to take it over to Waylon’s one night. He and all his buddies were all meeting at his office. My kid was with me. I took it and handed the cover mock-up to Waylon. He looked at it and said, ‘That’s all right to me,’ and he started passing it around the room. This one didn’t like it, that one didn’t like it. I had a hard time hiding my expressions. I was beginning to boil a little bit but I didn’t say anything and Waylon said, ‘Bring it back up here.’ He said to me, ‘This is your idea, do whatever the hell you want.’ I said thank you and walked out the door.
“Rolling Stone was killing Waylon. They didn’t have any interest in Waylon, ’cause if we could’ve got Rolling Stone to accept Waylon, he’d’ve been right up there with Willie and Jessi. They loved Willie and Jessi; they waddn’t that thrilled with Waylon’s music. [Bradley was stretching the truth; Rolling Stone loved Waylon too.] So I called Chet Flippo and said, ‘I got this album of things put together out of the vault. I’d like for you to write the liner notes
. I’ll give you a thousand dollars.’ Back then, liner notes were going for about a hundred. He said he’d be glad to. I sent him a copy of the tape. He wrote back and said he loved it. I called Chet. ‘Can I use your signature?’ I called Herb to get him to handwrite Chet’s signature. It gave a very personal endorsement from a big writer at Rolling Stone that he liked the album.”
Sales were projected at anywhere between three hundred and five hundred thousand units, a hit by any standard. “The way they were doing deals back then was, you do a single, and if something happened, you’d do an album,” Jerry Bradley said. “This one didn’t cost anything. All it cost was three new sides on Waylon plus the album cover.”
Jerry leaned heavily on Willie to help promote the album. “Waylon was doing a lot of things to piss off a lot of people,” he said. “Willie looked rebellious but he was very kind and generous and knew when to turn the corporate charm on. He kinda eased around a room when Waylon was bouncing off the wall. Willie was never anything but gracious when we communicated. He didn’t care at all. It was another gig to him.”
Wanted: The Outlaws was released on January 12, 1976, to great fanfare. “We had a big party up at Rockefeller Center in the Rainbow Room the night after the Super Bowl,” Jerry Bradley said. “We had Jane Pauley and all these news press people coming out. Waylon and Willie had played a Super Bowl party the night before, and we had this big party and all this press and we couldn’t find them. When they finally showed up, you’ve never seen so many flashbulbs going off in your life.” The attention bugged Waylon, who told Joe Galante, RCA’s sales and marketing guru, “If you don’t get those photographers to quit flashing those pictures, I’m going to kick your ass out the window.”
The album shot to number 1 on the country album charts for six consecutive weeks and became a pop hit too. “We knew we had something, but we never knew it was going to be the first RIAA [Recording Industry Association of America]-certified million-selling country album,” Jerry Bradley admitted. “I’m kinda like the old boy who took a beating but came out ahead.”
SEVEN Willie Nelson albums and six singles charted in Billboard in 1976. A single that Jerry Bradley put together with Waylon and Willie called “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love),” released in May 1977, would become a number 1 country single and a Top 20 pop 45. Set in the tiny Hill Country village made famous four years earlier when Jerry Jeff Walker recorded Viva Terlingua! there, the wistful love song was pure Nashville confection. Songwriters Bobby Emmons and Chips Moman had never set foot in Luckenbach, Texas, nor had Waylon. (Willie, on the other hand, knew Luckenbach well.) But the fantasy they conjured sold over a million copies, spurring a parade of cars, pickups, motorcycles, and tour buses to make pilgrimages to the hamlet.
With and without Waylon, Willie was becoming a one-name brand with a common touch that suggested he was still just plain folks. He won his first Grammy Award, sponsored by the National Academy for the Recording Arts and Sciences, for best male vocalist in country music. He was recording wherever and whenever he liked, and as often as possible, as if it would all disappear tomorrow. During one twenty-four-hour session, he and Leon Russell recorded more than three hundred songs, just to see if they could. If management wanted him to hold back and avoid overexposure, he wasn’t paying attention. He was a picker doing what pickers were supposed to do.
He was also doing his best to bring together the Austin and Nashville factions of country. The Country Music Association staged a party at Soap Creek Saloon in Austin starring Willie, Charley Pride, and old-timers Pee Wee King and Floyd Tillman, effectively uniting the two country cultures in the pursuit of a good time. Murray Olderman reported for the NEA wire service, “The chic drink is beer—Lone Star—and the smoke hangs hazily under the ceiling in a cloud layer, much of it sweet smelling.”
Willie’s career was so superheated, he could afford to put the Fourth of July Picnic into cold storage for 1977 and do two nights at his Austin Opry House with Waylon instead, then take the show to Tulsa to play to sixty thousand. The Texas picnic needed a rest. So did some of the Family. At least two hundred close personal friends were showing up backstage at gigs, each and every one of them Willie Nelson fans, most of them seized with the simple urge to get close to Willie. Those who got closest included a most unusual collection of celebrities, coke dealers, pot dealers, used-car salesmen, Texas pols, lawmen, criminals, hookers, Dallas Cowboys, preachers, con artists, churchgoing Christians, friends whom he grew up with and newcomers who’d just discovered him. A disproportionate number of weirdos materialized along with them, including psychic surgeons, who could pull guts out of your stomach without even cutting into you, curanderos, shamans, and healers. True to form, Willie made time for them all, lingering after the show until every autograph was signed.
Willie did a little of this and that of the offerings brought to him. Mainly, though, he smoked pot. It was a fair trade for the three-pack-a-day cigarette habit. “I was getting some benefit from pot and no benefit at all from cigarettes,” he said. “So I took my last pack of cigarettes, rolled up twenty joints, and put them back and put them in my pocket. Every time I wanted a cigarette, I had a joint.”
He quit drinking heavily too, a good thing because he was a lousy drunk, as the women in his life knew too well. “I was never much of a beer drinker. I really didn’t like it,” he said. “I drank to get drunk. Beer was a slow way to get there.”
“He’d hit the window, hit the wall, hit the door,” his daughter Lana said. “Our houses had big holes. He was driving up the ridge [in Tennessee] one day and got mad at [his ex-wife] Shirley and punched out the windshield in the car while we were moving. He realized there might have been an anger-management problem. Pot slows you down so much that by the time you want to react, the situation is over. By the time he moved to Austin, smoking pot was a daily thing. I don’t recall any more punching holes in the wall.”
Connie witnessed the same dark side. “One time we were at a motel and he didn’t have his key, and he was, by God, going to kick the door down,” she said. “This was after drinking whiskey, and I told him, ‘Stay there.’ And I ran the full length of the parking lot and got another key and ran back before he kicked the door down. I can’t tell you how many doors Will has kicked down; sometimes he even had the key in his pocket. He knew he was bad on alcohol.”
“The first week he played Castle Creek, he got so drunk he broke the microphone and thought I’d turned off the sound and he walked off and quit,” Tim O’Connor said. “The next day he said, ‘I will never play here again. I can’t believe you turned off the sound.’”
Pot tamped down the rage and helped him mellow down easy.
When he quit smoking marijuana for several months on doctor’s orders due to a bout of pneumonia, “he was a bastard to be around,” Mickey Raphael said. “I was so much hoping he’d get a joint.”
“To be the kind of person he wants to be, he has to take the edge off,” Johnny Bush added.
“I don’t advocate it for everybody,” Willie was quick to tell Johnny and anyone else who’d ask. But marijuana worked for him.
“You know why Hitler didn’t drink?” he once joked to Johnny. “Because it made him mean.”
POT and booze were small potatoes compared with the by-now established high of choice—cocaine, the most expensive, most insidious stimulant on the black market. By the 1970s coke was a party drug that appealed to all social strata and sensibilities in America; at $100 a gram, it was a perverted symbol of status, excess, and allure.
Flurries of coke backstage had become part of the show wherever Willie went, including two establishments he became associated with—Willie Nelson’s Nightlife, a dance hall on FM 1960 in the booming northern suburbs of Houston to which he lent his name as a favor for his old friends Larry and Pat Butler, and at Whiskey River, on Lover’s Lane and Greenville Road in Dallas, a club where he was given a small piece of the action in exchange for playing there and partying there.
His name, his reputation, and the presence of cocaine drew the attention of the authorities.
He and Paul, along with singer Ray Price, testified in front of a federal grand jury in Dallas investigating narcotics trafficking, specifically cocaine and heroin, in June 1976. When Willie was asked about particular individuals’ use of coke, Willie pled ignorance.
“I don’t know anything about it,” he told the prosecutor. “I wasn’t involved.”
“If you don’t answer, you’re in contempt,” the prosecutor barked.
“You’re in contempt!” Willie shot back. “I’m telling you I don’t know anything about it. And I don’t!” Willie, Paul, and Ray Price escaped indictments and distanced themselves from those who were charged, including car dealer Joe Hicks, to whom Willie had loaned $60,000. But the heat came close enough. Willie didn’t like the feeling of sweatin’ like Ray Price at a bus auction—much as he loved to tell the story of Ray Price getting his bus repossessed with a considerable amount of marijuana stashed on board and having to place the high bid on the bus at the auction to retrieve his dope.
While everyone else was still rolling bills and snorting lines, Willie stepped back and took a hard look. Cocaine didn’t do much for him personally. Still, practically everyone around him persisted in chasing lines in copious quantities, band and crew included, and tales abounded of situations such as sitting in a hotel room in Los Angeles when Dennis Hopper opened a Halliburton suitcase with pink cocaine flown in from Peru on one side and primo red buds on the other, while friendly dealers of unknown origin materialized backstage with vials of flake and powder wanting to share.
The cold hard truth was that coke was eating up his boys’ paychecks like it was eating up all of Waylon’s money. If someone wanted to be paid in coke instead of greenbacks, it had been no big deal. That had to change.
“Willie knew a bad drug when he took one,” Ray Benson observed. “He didn’t avoid using, although he started saying white powder ruined his pot high.”
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