Annie had been married to Willie longer than his previous three wives. She was the strong, steely type, like Mamma Nelson and Bobbie and Connie, spoke her mind like Myrle and Martha, and didn’t suffer layabouts. She did not hesitate to upbraid him for not doing his part as a father or to tell him to pick up his wet towel off the floor when he was home, reminding him he wasn’t in some motel. Whatever Willie’s ol’ boy friends may have thought of her, she embodied ideals similar to the people who embraced Willie when he got to Austin thirty years before. The tree-hugging, animal-loving, tofu-eating, peace-agitating earth-mama hippie matched Willie’s personal philosophy of the way things ought to be.
Annie didn’t just talk the talk, she role-modeled, helping move her husband’s activist sentiments from words to actions when she bought a brand-new 2003 Volkswagen Jetta wagon that ran on cooking grease. The Maui landfill had banned restaurant grease about the same time Bob King, a diesel mechanic, launched Pacific Biodiesel, the first biofuel plant on Maui. Annie got involved with the company out of her desire for “clean air, clean water, and clean food for my children” on the island where they lived.
Willie thought she was crazy at first. “She must have gotten in my stash” was the standard line he repeated again and again. But Willie saw the light and bought a Mercedes that ran on biodiesel. His three buses were refitted to run on biodiesel after Neil Young had rigged up his own fleet. Annie said the conversion was as much for the health of the drivers and the passengers on the buses as anything; they risked chronic respiratory ailments and even cancer by breathing the exhaust of conventional diesel over the years. In 2005, he rented his name to a branded biodiesel, BioWillie.
Annie Nelson saw biofuel as an extension of the mission of Farm Aid. “I thought of it as the answer to the farmers’ problems if we could get them back on the land they’ve been foreclosed on and get them growing clean food and our fuel,” she said.
Annie did the research and fed Willie the information. “All I had to do was help him to understand the actual potential of biodiesel for this country, how it would help farmers, how it would help the economy and national security,” she said. “I keep him up on everything that’s happening. There is no better spokesperson.”
Willie’s interest was initially piqued back in 1991 when he rode around Kentucky with Gatewood Galbraith in his Mercedes fueled by hemp oil. When Gatewood stepped on Willie’s bus thirteen years later while Willie and Family were touring minor league baseball parks with Bob Dylan, Willie greeted him saying, “I never forgot that day when you and I poured that hemp oil into the Mercedes. I’ve started WN Biodiesel, and you laid it out for me.”
Willie saw it as a practical solution to several problems and set out to sell it. “It’s a way for the farmers to work themselves out of the financial hole that they’ve been in for years and years,” he reasoned. “They can grow corn for ethanol. They can grow cotton for biodiesel. It’s like a community telling a farmer what they’d like to eat so he can grow food for the whole neighborhood.”
His advocacy dovetailed onto his embrace of organic food, another cause that connected him to his hometown. Willie cited the case of Eldon Stafford, with whom he spent many nights on his family’s farm when he was young, as one motivation. “I believe Eldon died because of the chemical poison he used on his crops,” he said. “He had the best cotton. He was always out in the fields, applying the poison himself with the tractor, breathing all that stuff ten to twelve hours a day. Nobody told you chemicals were bad.”
Mark Rothbaum viewed Willie’s embrace of causes as natural. “Willie sees the plight of the farmer from a poet’s eyes. He’s almost like Steinbeck or Willa Cather—he’s taken by the farming life. He sees himself as a farmer on the prairie, scratching out a meager existence. The fundamental struggle between the corporate and the personal, the encroachment of the monopolistic capitalistic private sector, and the genetically modified foods—he sees it as good against evil. It’s not just for the farmer; selfishly he knows that the environment will be made better without all of the pesticides and chemicals, and that he will get better food.”
Willie was determined to spread his message, and his activism extended to ex-wives. Willie helped Connie lobby Congress to ban horse slaughterhouses in the United States. In his seventies, he became the face of the Willie Nelson Peace Research Institute, promoting “The Promise of Peace on Earth in Our Lifetime as the Birthright of Our Global Human Family.” The institute operated according to the following tenets: “Peace on Earth is possible NOW with Unconditional Love; Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is the Golden Rule from the Highest Order; Peace on Earth is possible NOW with Unyielding Hope; Replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts to create positive results; Peace on Earth is possible NOW with Unlimited Compassion; and Open your heart and make connections to people everywhere and to the world around us.”
Home, 2006
YES, SUH! YES, SUH! ‘You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man.’ Sounds like Loretta, but that’s Martina!” It was a May afternoon in the spring of 2006 and Bill Mack was on the air on Channel 171, the Open Road on XM satellite radio, talking Texas-style country to thousands of his faithful listeners, the vast majority of whom were driving trucks while tuned in to his daily show broadcast live from his home studio on the east side of Fort Worth, Texas. The house was a few blocks from the former studios of WBAP radio 820 AM, where for more than twenty years Bill was the Midnight Cowboy, the drawling late-night voice speaking to truckers coast-to-coast via the station’s powerful 50,000-watt signal.
“When Willie made the transition, when he came back home to Texas after his house burned down in Nashville and he killed Ray Price’s prized fighting rooster, the people in Nashville were saying, ‘He’s lost his mind,’” Bill was telling his audience in his distinctive baritone as a lead-in to Willie Wednesday when Willie Nelson called to talk to the Satellite Cowboy on the air. For the next hour, Willie would shoot the bull with Bill and his wife, sweet Cindy, and Bill’s talking duck, Truman, and field questions and requests from listeners.
On this particular day, Willie was calling from New York, where he reported he’d had “ninety-two-dollar pea soup” for lunch, leading Bill to ask what he was having for dinner? “Ninety-two-dollar pea soup.”
Mormon Boy, Odie in New Mexico, Stargazer headed to Cleveland from Pennsylvania, the Rebel Kid somewhere in the south, John in Magnolia, Texas, Sherri from Tomball, Skeeter, Simple Cowboy, Big Mike, and Carolina Pepsi were all waiting on the phone lines. Several wanted to talk about BioWillie, the biodiesel fuel Nelson was endorsing and E85 ethanol fuel and other alternatives to gasoline. Biodiesel offered hope for economically depressed communities in America’s farm belt, some callers said.
Fifty miles south of Bill Mack’s studio, Carl Cornelius, owner of Carl’s Corner, was fixing to host one of two Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnics scheduled for 2006, this one the day before the official July Fourth version behind Billy Bob’s, the World’s Biggest Honky-tonk, in Fort Worth’s Stockyards district.
Carl’s version of the Fourth of July Picnic was a glorified “phone deal.” Before the event was publicly announced, Willie gave away one thousand tickets to the family of Jimmy Giles, a Department of Public Safety trooper and fan who had recently passed away, to defray funeral expenses. Hill County firefighters received five thousand tickets for all eighteen fire departments in the county, which would raise well over $100,000. Another five hundred tickets went to Paw Pals, a group formed to establish a Humane Society for animals in the county. Since the give-aways were in the name of charity, it was hard for Billy Bob’s to complain about the “competing” picnic.
Leon Russell, David Allan Coe, Ray Price, Johnny Bush, Johnny Gimble, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Noel Haggard (Merle’s son), Shooter Jennings (Waylon’s son), the Harmonic Tribe (Willie’s own sons’ world music/reggae band from Maui), daughter Paula Nelson and her country band, Pauline Reese’s country band, the Latino band Del Castillo, h
onky-tonk singer James “Slim” Hand, and Dar Jamail’s “way underground” band, Titty Bingo, all played the twelve-hour music marathon at Carl’s on July 3. The real show was backstage, where buses were lined up in two long rows, their occupants mixing and mingling like carnival workers pausing for a visit before taking off in all directions to put on their own shows. Willie merchandise, including Willie braids for $10, T-shirts for $20, and Willie red bandannas for $5, moved briskly.
A few months before, Willie Hugh Nelson had been inducted into the Hill County Hall of Fame. Several church representatives indicated they wouldn’t attend the ceremony due to the recipient’s lifestyle, never mind his ability to quote from the Bible or his donation of $275,000 from two benefit concerts toward a $9 million restoration of the Hill County Courthouse, whose gingerbread architecture earned accolades as the most beautiful courthouse in Texas until it burned in a fire in 1993. Nor did the churches object when Willie donated $25,000 to the Hill County Cellblock Museum, where a display honors Willie. They said nothing about his keeping open the only grocery in Abbott, or raising money to help the hospital in Whitney in the northwest corner of the county, or bringing in $325,000 for the American Heart Association in Waco.
He shrugged off the disrespect. He’d been hearing the same hypocritical judgments ever since he was a kid. He was humble in his acceptance speech, telling the Hall of Fame gathering at the old train station, “When people ask me where I’m from, I say, Abbott, Hillsboro, and West. When I was growing up, you could get anything you want between Hillsboro, Abbott, and West. I imagine it still holds true.” For all the miles racked up, all the faces he’d seen and places he’d been, he was still at home in the place where he came from.
“When I’m around him, it’s just like it was fifty years ago,” Jackie Clements, Abbott High Class of ’50, said one Sunday morning in Abbott. “We’re just buddies. Nothing’s changed.”
“He’s one of my best friends,” said Donald Reed, another member of the same graduating class. “He always will be, no matter what he does or I do.”
“Willie’s my inspiration,” agreed Faye Dell Brown Clements, his one-time fiancé who was never able to get him out of her life, even after she married Jackie, one of Willie’s best friends. “Not many gals my age get compliments, and he lays them on me. He called from Hawaii and said when he came back, he could come over so we could get in trouble. What would two people our age do to get in trouble? I don’t smoke pot.”
WILLIE had plenty of ways to get in trouble, or at least stir up some controversy. Booker T. Jones had tried to goad Willie into writing more songs and recorded six demos of originals in early 2005. But his proposed album of all new Willie Nelson material was shelved when another song Willie had recorded, a cover of Ned Sublette’s humorous cowboy song “Cowboys Are Secretly, Frequently (Fond of Each Other),” gained traction in the wake of the success of the gay cowboy romance film Brokeback Mountain, on whose soundtrack Willie performed Bob Dylan’s “He Was a Friend of Mine.” The songs kept his name in the news and shored up his gay following, an audience he’d unwittingly tapped into when he wrote “Crazy” more than forty years earlier. Patsy Cline’s sad rendition of “Crazy” had been a jukebox staple of lesbian bars across America ever since.
Of all the people Booker T. had worked with, he held Willie in highest regard. “He’s more special,” Booker T. said with a chuckle, “because he’s a journeyman musician. Willie’s a farmer that found out he was a musician. He comes from where I come from in the music, from making six dollars a night playing to four a.m. That’s what we have in common. None of the other people that I’ve worked with have that blue-collar journeyman past.”
No one else had made an album with Booker T. that stayed on the country charts for more than ten years, selling more than four million copies, either.
Booker T. had witnessed a change in Willie as he’d aged. Booker wondered if Willie had lost confidence in his songwriting, because he’d written so little in recent years. But Willie didn’t see eye to eye with Booker T.’s assessment. He liked having his friends around, especially his gypsy pirate friends who kept life interesting. As for writing, “I don’t have any discipline at all,” he admitted. “I’m a lazy, lazy writer, and I’ll put off doing it until a line or something comes along that just kills me and I feel really guilty if I don’t go write the song. Didn’t used to be that way—when I was hungrier, I wasn’t that goddamn lazy.” He still wrote, but the drive wasn’t the same.
But he wasn’t taking Fats Domino’s path either; the New Orleans rock-and-roll pianist Fats Domino reasoned, “Why should I write any more songs? I can’t play all the ones I wrote in a single show anyhow.”
Willie used to think of material to write while driving, and riding in the back of a bus didn’t stimulate ideas the same way. “Driving is still the best way for me to write, I believe—to get in a car and take off driving, head anywhere and start thinking about something,” he said. “If I’m lucky, I’ll write a song. But I have to get somewhere by myself to do it. There are a lot of things going on and a lot of interruptions that make it difficult to do that riding on the bus.”
He did roll out two new numbers with a humorous bent: “I Ain’t Superman” (“Too many pain pills/too much pot/Trying to be/something I’m not/Superman”), which was released on the iTunes music download site on the Internet, and “You Don’t Think I’m Funny Anymore” (“Did you hear the one about the dirty whore?/Oh, I forgot/You don’t think I’m funny anymore”), from Momemt of Forever, produced by Kenny Chesney and released on Lost Highway, Willie’s label of record. A third new song built on a single riff without a bridge, “I Gotta Get Over You,” was also on the Chesney album and played at live dates.
If there was a creative crisis of confidence, Willie wasn’t letting it show. In early 2007 he ginned up rave reviews for his performance with jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis’s quintet and Mickey Raphael at Lincoln Center.
Despite Willie’s limited range, his talking blues vocals dragging behind the beat were the ensemble’s signature. His guitar picking was the bigger surprise. The New York Times’ Nate Chinen noted a “flinty and casually gripping guitar solo on ‘Rainy Day Blues’ when everything clicked into place....Wynton Marsalis shot the saxophonist Walter Blanding, Jr. a knowing glance, one eyebrow appreciatively raised.” Chinen observed that during the stop-time breaks of “Basin Street Blues,” “Mr. Nelson’s phrasing was almost perversely free of tempo, rustling like a breeze.” With Marsalis’s trumpet popping out front and his cool combo in back, “Stardust,” “Georgia,” “Don’t Get Around Much Any More,” and “Down By the River Side” were injected with a Second Line strut, making the ensemble sound as if they were marching down St. Charles Avenue arm in arm.
Two months later, Mac Randall of Newsday called the Last of the Breed tour, starring Willie Nelson, his mentor Ray Price, and his colleague Merle Haggard, along with Ray Benson and Asleep at the Wheel, Floyd Domino, and reliable Mickey Raphael, “historic,” while Rolling Stone’s Amanda Trimble described the triple bill as “a master class in classic country music.”
Of course, not everyone loved Willie. The same voice hailed for its distinctive jazz qualities at Lincoln Center was derided by a Merle Haggard and Ray Price fan reacting to a review in the Nashville Tennessean. “This dude has never been able to sing a note,” read a message on the newspaper’s Web site discussion board. “He couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.”
OVER the course of Willie’s career, the Bible Belt had transformed into the Sun Belt, and the technology of recorded music had evolved from 78 rpm discs to twelve-inch polyvinyl chloride phonograph records played at 33N revolutions per minute and seven-inch 45 rpm singles to compact discs to MP3 files downloaded from the Internet and played on devices smaller than a pack of cigarettes.
Communications on the road had advanced from sending telegrams and talking on pay phones to CB radios, cell phones, BlackBerry personal digital assistants, global positionin
g satellite devices to tell you where you are, and televisions and computers with wireless connectivity.
“It’s easier than it used to be,” Paul English said, looking back. “We used to drive a station wagon pulling a trailer, and I worked the books with a crank calculator and had receipts scattered up and down the hall. Now I’ve got a fine bus and computers to work with. I do the books on an Excel spreadsheet. I can be on the Internet as we are driving down the road.”
“The ride is a thousand percent better,” Gates Moore said. “The old buses were like dump trucks. There was a reason to sedate yourself. Roads are four hundred percent better, despite congestion.” Fuel worked the other way. A fill-up that once was eighty bucks is five hundred. The places to fill up changed too. “Truck stops used to be friendly places, but now they don’t care,” Gates said.
The road was Willie’s calling. He had performed at church socials, revivals, community dance halls, beer joints, roadhouses, honky-tonks, ballrooms, living rooms, motel rooms, race tracks, nightclubs, dives, basketball arenas, football stadiums, opera houses, and open fields. It was all the same stage.
His Fourth of July picnics were a Texas tradition, the Farm Aid concerts a slice of heartland Americana. Ben Ratliff of the New York Times described the twenty-second Farm Aid, held in New York City in September 2007, as “circuslike: it included American Indian wisdom dancers, a few marines, a talented practitioner of the stumpf fiddle (a bouncing stick with noisemakers attached), two of his children and about a dozen guitarists onstage at the same time, including Neil Young and Derek Trucks.” But to Ratliff, the most striking thing about Farm Aid was “the novelty of going to a (more or less) rock festival focused not on outsiderness, fashion, derangement of the senses or even its own brand power, but on the survival of small businesses and the health of our species.”
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