Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  Willie returned to the stage for a very loose and very rambling forty-five-minute set as Grandpa Nelson and His Extended Family, the band augmented by sons Luke on guitar and Micah on percussion (the boys had just finished recording an album at Pedernales by their new band, 40 Points) and, for the last three songs, Dallas actress-singer Jessica Simpson.

  Lest anyone think the idea of Willie performing with a symphony behind him was a one-of-a-kind experience, Mickey Raphael put the show in perspective. “Yeah, this was a good gig. But you should have heard us with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl.” He was referring to the four-night stand where Mrs. Gene Autry showed up to present Willie with another pair of her deceased husband’s custom cowboy boots. “Willie didn’t take them off the whole time we were California,” Bobbie Nelson said.

  ON a chilly April afternoon in 2007, forty years after the Summer of Love in San Francisco spawned the hippie phenomenon, three buses and a tractor-trailer bearing the Willie Nelson and Family Show rolled up to a side street by a park one block from the corner of Fillmore and Geary, signaling the beginning of a five-night run at the Fillmore Ballroom. The storied music venue dated back to the 1930s but was best known as the mother ship of psychedelic music in the late 1960s, where bands like Santana, the Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Steve Miller, and the Grateful Dead, as well as concert promoter Bill Graham, got their start. The Fillmore had been one of the most enduring institutions of the counterculture ever since.

  “It’s not a very good payday,” Paul English said of the 1,250capacity room, “but they’re good people and the room’s got a reputation. We play here for several nights every year.”

  Rick Moher drove the equipment truck. Neal Smidt was behind the wheel of the bus dubbed the Smoking Bus, which carried stage manager Poodie Locke, audio pro Kenny Koepke, house engineer Flaco Lemons, lighting director Buddy Prewitt Jr., aka Budrock, and guitarist Jody Payne.

  The second bus, driven by Johnny Sizemore, was the no-smoking bus. It carried drummer and business manager Paul English, his brother Billy, the band’s percussionist, harmonica player Mickey Raphael, bassist Bee Spears, L.G.—Larry Gorham—Willie’s security, Tunin’ Tom Hawkins, the piano tuner and guitar tech, and Josh Duke, the hired hand in charge of monitors.

  The no-smoking bus was inspired by Paul’s quitting smoking after a house fire. He had raced back into his home in Dallas to fetch his black hat with the gold bling and some of his guns, and suffered permanent lung damage. Whether marijuana qualified as smoking was a running debate among the Family.

  The third bus, with the airbrushed painting of an Indian warrior on horseback on one side and a painting of an eagle’s head morphing into Willie Nelson’s face on the back, was Honeysuckle Rose IV, the 2004 Prevost known simply as the Bus, containing the boss, his sister, his eldest daughter, his right-hand man, and his drivers.

  The crew did their usual afternoon load-in. Tunin’ Tom invested close to an hour unpacking and tuning Sister Bobbie’s Steinway B piano as Poodie oversaw the stage setup, backstage accommodations, and hospitality rider. In the back of the room, Flaco Lemons tweaked the knobs and pods on the huge audio console. Upstairs, Budrock conversed with the house lighting director, matching his ideal lighting chart with her lighting computer program. In a dressing room off to the side of the stage, Jody Payne was pulling out the pickup from the base of his guitar to fiddle with the electronics while Kenny Koepke positioned the microphones onstage and helped Billy English set up his array of percussion instruments.

  The band and crew ate the dinner served by the Fillmore in the back bar, talked about the previous night’s gig at the TV Land Awards show in Los Angeles, honoring classic television series, where Jerry Mathers and Tony Dow, who played Beaver and his brother, Wally, in the series Leave It to Beaver, showed up; planned group tours of Alcatraz; a medical marijuana clinic; and two golf excursions, and went through the familiar ritual of getting ready for the show. Several individuals were invited to step inside Honeysuckle Rose such as veteran San Francisco Chronicle music writer Joel Selvin and the manager of the reggae band Toots and the Maytals, bearing an herbal gift to Willie from Toots.

  By eight o’clock, the auditorium was packed with a sold-out house of young and middle-aged hipsters primed for the night. Tobacco smokers had to go outside to a designated smoking area to indulge their habit. But the ballroom was clouded with a thick haze of smoke bearing the pungent scent of high-quality marijuana.

  Fifteen minutes later, Scooter Franks, all three hundred pounds of him, scooted to the microphone. Scooter, along with his brother Bo, had been following Willie Nelson and Family in their van and trailer since the early 1970s, hawking Willie T-shirts, posters (“Willie Nelson For President, Paul English For Vice”), records, tapes, CDs, and Willie braids. Scooter had adopted a secondary role as Willie’s announcer, and his bullshit ran thick as a midway carnival barker’s as he hyped the five Willie albums out this year, including the fifty-five-song four-CD set (“sold only at the Fillmore tonight!”), cited Willie’s birthday (“He’s been saying that for the past two months,” Budrock muttered in the lighting booth), and told everyone that Paul English was celebrating his forty-first year with Willie (Budrock weighed in on that one too), and that they could hear this kind of music on Willie’s Place on XM satellite radio and could even call Willie on Willie Wednesdays on Bill Mack’s XM show. With a final flourish extolling the virtues of an artist who’s “played over six thousand stages” (greatly underestimating the real number), Scooter shouted, “Let’s hear it for Willie Nelson!” as the band shuffled onto the stage and the lights hit the huge State of Texas flag hanging from the backdrop.

  The cumulative experience of Willie Nelson’s six-piece band exceeded four hundred years, a number unmatched by any group in popular music. Sister Bobbie Lee, seventy-six, wearing a black pantsuit with subtle sparkles and a black wide-brim felt hat that deliciously complemented her long mane of blonde hair, sat down in front of her piano. Helping seat Bobbie was Jody Payne, seventy-one and rock-star handsome after all these years with a full head of honey-colored hair and full mustache and fresh beard that tempered his crusty, grizzly countenance. On the opposite side of the stage, Mickey Raphael, fifty-five, stood tall, looking dark and cool in a black long-sleeved button-down shirt, shirttail out, jeans, and boots, one hand clutching a harmonica. Behind them, bunched together on a riser, were Paul English, seventy-five, the man in black and Willie’s best friend, sitting on a stool and playing a snare drum with brushes, and, at the other end, Paul’s little brother, Billy, fifty-six (“We don’t know what he does,” Willie says, introducing him to the audience), dressed casually, moving businesslike among bells, chimes, shakers, bongos, and sticks to embellish the percussive impact. Between Paul and Billy was Bee Spears, fifty-four, alternately sitting and standing while playing bass and keeping the beat.

  The crew were the graybeards of roadies, with less turnover than even the Grateful Dead’s. “We’re all Texans and we grew up together,” Kenny Koepke said during setup before one Fillmore show. “When I joined, my sister [Connie] warned me this was something that wasn’t going to last long, and that was twenty-nine years ago.”

  Willie bounded onto the stage with his arms raised high like a boxing champion, wearing a black T-shirt advertising Poodie’s Hilltop Bar, loose black jeans, dark tennis shoes, and a black felt cowboy hat over his long braids. He draped his familiar red-white-and-blue macramé guitar strap around his neck and strummed Trigger, his battered, beat-up, priceless Martin guitar. He looked older and grayer because he was older and grayer, his wild eyebrows and large ears accentuating his almost seventy-four years. He flashed a quick smile that seemed sincere while his piercing brown eyes scanned the crowd, trying to make eye contact. Cell phones with cameras raised high above heads in the audience captured the grand entry.

  Without a cue, he strummed the chords to “Whiskey River” with his right hand, his left hand pressing string
s onto the fret board. The lyrics rolled out of his mouth slurred in a talking blues. The race was on. The next two hours were spent thumbing through his own version of the Great American Songbook, introducing himself with the familiar “Well, hello, there,” the first lines to “Funny How Time Slips Away,” one of his first songwriting successes in 1961, and segueing into “Crazy” and “Night Life,” his vocals warming up and gaining strength as he spoke both wisdom and poetry in lines like “life is just another scene / in this old world of broken dreams.”

  “Little sister” Bobbie cut loose on the instrumental breakdown “Down Yonder,” her attack of the notes establishing the band’s honky-tonk bona fides before the spotlight shifted to Jody, who croaked out Merle Haggard’s “Working Man’s Blues” in honor of his former employer and blue-collar folks everywhere, followed by Willie singing three Kris Kristofferson songs in a row—“Help Me Make It Through the Night,” “Me and Bobby McGee,” and a new one, “Moment of Forever.”

  Over the course of the first few minutes, Willie the Showman, Willie the Songwriter, Willie the Bandleader, and Willie the Stylist all made appearances. The band was hardly warmed up. The music went stone country on Lefty Frizzell’s “If You’ve Got the Money (I’ve Got the Time)” as Willie tossed his hat into the crowd and started twisting up a headband out of a Willie bandanna, using his guitar neck as an extra hand before putting it on. The band got to swinging on “All of Me,” did a dramatic build with some serious rock and roll three-chord guitar riffing on the new Willie composition, “Gotta Get Over You,” and shifted into a sweet groove for “Red Headed Stranger,” “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” “Blue Skies,” and “Stardust”—all singles from Willie’s biggest hit-making period—before stomping their way through three Hank Williams songs in a row.

  Elvis-worthy screams greeted the romantic ballad “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” made famous by his duet with Julio Iglesias. He sang Hoagy Carmichael’s ballad “Georgia,” popularized by Ray Charles, Steve Goodman’s “City of New Orleans,” made famous by Arlo Guthrie, and Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty” with so much familiarity that all the songs sounded like he’d written them. There were plenty of reasons for the perception. Willie’s version of “Georgia” alternated with Brother Ray’s on the sound system at the Stone Mountain Park historic site near Atlanta at sunset every day. Arlo may have had the hit single of Goodman’s tune, but the lines “Good morning, America, how are ya? Don’t you know me? I’m your native son/ I’m a train they call the City of New Orleans, I’ll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done,” with the crowd singing along and adding whoops, were autobiographical as far as Willie was concerned. And without Willie covering his song, Townes would have likely died unrecognized and unappreciated.

  “Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” and “On the Road Again” got the sing-along treatment from the audience too, but it was the gospel numbers—“Will the Circle Be Unbroken?,” “I’ll Fly Away,” and “I Saw the Light”—that roused them so much that the room felt like it was levitating. Agnostics may have outnumbered Christians in the crowd, but the man onstage holding his index finger high in the air for emphasis, preaching salvation through music, had them testifying, shouting, and raising beer cups and cellular telephones.

  “Me and Paul” was a literal telling, with Paul watching Willie’s back like he’d done for more than forty years, moving the brushes over the snare and beaming every time the words made the audience cheer, especially the references to something illegal going on. The line “Nashville was the roughest” had become “Branson was the roughest” because it was. “Still Is Still Moving,” his signature piece of the 1990s, was followed by two newer originals, “I Ain’t Superman” and “You Don’t Think I’m Funny Anymore.” He was pure drama on his ballad “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” and pure rowdy on his own “I Gotta Get Drunk.” The audience spontaneously sang along and swayed without any prompting whatsoever to “Always on My Mind” and stayed with him on “Good Hearted Woman” as the spirit of Waylon filled the room.

  He did “Georgia on a Fast Train” as a shout-out to Billy Joe Shaver and played some nasty guitar riffs as he grooved through Bob Wills’s “Milk Cow Blues.” Willie’s guitar was getting respect like it never had before for good reason. He wasn’t playing second to anyone anymore.

  “There used to be Jackie King over there, and before that, Grady Martin over there,” Willie explained. “When it got to ‘Stardust,’ did I want to hear me play or did I want to hear Grady play? I’m enjoying playing, I’m enjoying getting to do Django stuff. Jody instinctively does it right, [invoking Merle] Travis, Chet [Atkins], bluegrass, or whatever that is in there, with an authentic sound. I’ve got a good rhythm section behind me and a good band and I can go for it,” he said.

  The musicianship ranged from sloppy (the musicians looking at one another to find the beat) to precise (Billy English donning headphones to ring a bell on cue) to hillbilly (Bobbie’s piano) to urbane (Mickey’s lonely notes on his Hohner) to jazzy (Willie and Bobbie’s interplay on Django Reinhardt’s “Nuages”)—all clearly feeding off an audience that was giving back.

  Budrock worked the lighting board upstairs like an extra instrument, making the lights sync with the music, calling up cues on a computer, chattering into his headset to hip the spotlight operators to what was coming up next, sliding knobs, and orchestrating the low-key visuals, gently leading the audience to focus on vocals and instrumental solos.

  An hour and forty-five minutes into the set, Willie swung around and popped the question, “Anybody have any requests?” The band was clearly tuckered out, but Willie was feeling his oats, working the house. Jody leaned in to suggest “Why Do I Have to Choose,” a Willie original the band hadn’t performed in at least four years. They remembered it well enough to pull it off.

  After positing a rhetorical “Y’all got time for a couple more?” Willie eventually returned to a verse of “Whiskey River” and the band’s instrumental outro.

  On cue, David Anderson and L.G. materialized by the side of the stage to walk Willie off as soon as he finished blowing kisses, shaking hands, tossing out guitar picks, signing books, and basking in the adoration. They escorted him past the side of the stage, where folk singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, the daughter of late guitarist Sandy Bull, and several other FOWs were standing, down the alley, and onto the bus parked in front of the Fillmore. He signed fifteen posters advertising the concert that were laid out on a sofa of Honeysuckle Rose as Bobbie tossed onto another sofa a dozen roses that had been given to her. Five minutes later, the bus pulled away from the curb in a chilly rain, headed to the next town, while Lana Nelson started cooking eggs, hash browns, and toast for her father and aunt.

  Outside on the crew bus, Jody Payne waxed philosophical, telling a visitor, “Music is the only thing that’s never changed. G has always been G. It never runs away, never runs off with your old lady, never gets drunk. Music is just music. I can’t imagine not hearing music. We’re sitting here talking in northern California, but in the background, there’s a doorbell, wind chimes—it’s music.”

  Poodie and Bee toe-to-toe in the aisle argued good-naturedly about a piece of equipment. “They wanted four hundred dollars. I wouldn’t spend that on two whores!” Poodie groused. “Poodie, I believe you spent more than that on one whore,” corrected Bee.

  SOONER or later, no matter where they’d been or where they were going, the road led back to Abbott. “It keeps calling me back,” Willie said. “You go back to where you feel good. It’s not really a big surprise to me that I can’t wait to get back there again and hang out or ride my bike or run or take off on some of those little roads.”

  On the first Sunday morning of July in the year of our Lord 2006, just north of West and not too far from Bug Tussle, Honeysuckle Rose IV and four other buses found their way to the Abbott Methodist Church and surrounded the modest 107-year-old white clapboard church with its humble sh
ake-shingled steeple like wagons around the campfire. The United Methodist congregation of the church that Bobbie Lee and Willie Hugh Nelson had grown up in had dwindled to the point where they had merged with the larger United Methodist congregation in Hillsboro. The small church building was put up for sale, with a likely fate of being torn down or moved to become a wedding chapel on the highway or a steakhouse in Dallas. Donald Reed, Willie’s classmate from the class of ’50, called him with a heads-up. The asking price for the prettiest building in all of Abbott was $72,000.

  “See if they’ll take twenty-five hundred more than they’re asking,” Willie instructed Donald.

  An old-fashioned Sunday-morning gospel singing celebrated the church’s rebirth. The chapel, which could seat a little more than one hundred worshippers, was packed. All two hundred folding chairs under tent awnings on the lawn outside the church were filled, its occupants cooling themselves with commemorative fans while watching two giant flat-screens showing what was going on inside. On the lawn by the tents, a Sunday community supper of fresh food along with free bottles of Willie Nelson Spring Water was being readied by members of the Texas Organic Farmers & Gardeners Association and the Austin Spice Company.

  Inside, on the platform by the pulpit, was Sister Bobbie, with her long mane of honey blonde hair, seated behind the seven-foot Steinway B she played on the road, home again with her brother by her side, dressed in his Sunday best, with a dark suit jacket over a black oxford shirt, his hair pulled back in a ponytail down to the small of his back—as long as his sister’s—playing the prelude to “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” she on piano, he on guitar.

  “What a glorious day,” preached Pastor Denise Rogers to open the service. “Let us pray.” With the congregation bowing their heads she read from chapter 43, verse 19 of the Book of Isaiah, focusing on the line “I am about to do a new thing, now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”