Willie Nelson

by Graeme Thomson

  CONTENTS

  About the Author

  Also by Graeme Thomson

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction by Keith Richards

  Happiness

  1. 1933–1950

  No Such Thing as an Ex-Wife

  2. 1950–1957

  Labour Pains

  3. 1958–1961

  Who Gives a Damn?

  4. 1961–1965

  Smoking Pot Made It Better

  5. 1966–1970

  Where Was I Going to Go?

  6. 1970–1972

  Texas Was Always There

  7. 1972–1973

  The Outlaw

  8. 1974–1976

  You Need Friends

  9. 1976–1978

  I Never Listen to the Band

  10. 1978–1984

  It Will Have To Be Solved Spiritually

  11. 1985–1990

  Bad

  12. 1990–1992

  I’ve Been Out Here So Long

  13. 1993–1998

  I Have No Reason To Think About Quitting Anything

  14. 1999–2005

  Picture Section

  Biographical Notes

  Notes on Sources

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Graeme Thomson writes on music for several publications, including Word, the Observer, Time Out and the Herald. He is author of Complicated Shadows: The Life & Music of Elvis Costello.

  Also by Graeme Thomson

  Complicated Shadows: The Life and Music of Elvis Costello

  Willie Nelson

  The Outlaw

  Graeme Thomson

  For Louis and Martha

  INTRODUCTION

  I started to hear the songs first, things like ‘Funny How Time Slips Away’ and ‘Crazy’. Then I started to see his name. Back in the days of 45s it was easier to check out who wrote what, and each time I heard a really interesting song, half the time I’d find Willie Nelson’s name attached to it.

  The minute we looked in each other’s eyes I thought, Oh yeah, I know you. I might have known him for years and years. Willie is an all American, one of the great Westerners. He’s an American patriot, but not in the flag-waving sense. He has a real love and a feel for the soil of the land; a real concern for what you live on. It’s a beautiful thing, and really honest. He’s dedicated to his ideas and on top of that he’s a brilliant musician and a songwriter par excellence.

  I’m attracted to the man as a character and a player and for his knowledge of music: those wonderful mixtures he has between blues and country and Mariachi. He’s got a beautiful bravado. He doesn’t mind going off on a flight somewhere in the middle of a song, just taking it and seeing where he ends up, and I admire that. Willie is unique. Nobody else could play like that. Look at the state of his guitar! He has punched holes through it, scraped it away, and it still sounds better than ever. And he’s a great singer. Such a wry delivery.

  Willie is a great magnet. He brings people together. I met Merle Haggard via him. I was sitting rehearsing with Willie and there was this guy with a baseball cap on – the right way around – and a grey beard, picking like a maniac. I said, ‘Your name’s not Merle is it?’ Yup! It ended up with Merle working with the Stones. Willie pulls together diverse people from every spectrum of music.

  It’s amazing to see the heart and diplomacy of the man, his dedication and amazing energy; a lovely enthusiasm for music. He’s got it all together, very smooth, absolutely beautiful, no sweat. He’s an amazing guy. He finishes the show and then spends an hour or more signing every autograph in the audience, It just shows that great patience that Willie has. He should be President. I think we’d be a lot better off.

  Willie’s a busy man, but he always makes a little space to hang and I always have a great time with him. We’re guitar pickers and songwriters and so we can just kick shit around. When I work with him I judge Willie’s shows by how many guys he’s got rolling behind him in the bus: ‘This is a three Frisbee show!’ And it’s always good stuff, believe me. I’m a connoisseur.

  He’s been incredibly productive in the last few years and working really hard, but then I don’t think he couldn’t work hard. If he wasn’t working I could imagine him fading away. The road becomes like an addiction: white line fever. On the other hand, there are loads of people out there who want to see what he does and he still feels like doing it. It’s really as simple as that.

  He has an amazing effect on people, a sort of calmness, but under that there’s a hint of real danger if it blows up. He’s the most unlikely star – such a recluse in a way. As a man he’s actually a bit of a mystery and I don’t think he really knows all of himself. All I know is that, although we come from totally different places, I feel at home with Willie.

  Keith Richards Portland, Oregon November 2005

  HAPPINESS

  ROOM 210, K-WEST HOTEL, SHEPHERD’S BUSH, WEST LONDON, APRIL 2005

  WILLIE NELSON IS talking about happiness.

  ‘Happiness is kind of a decision you make: whether you want to be happy or you want to be unhappy,’ he says slowly.

  The parts of his face which aren’t framed by his loose ponytail are shaded beneath the dark hood of his tracksuit top. He is wearing white socks and green trainers. He looks incongruous in this setting: a modern hotel, all chrome and glass. It has nothing he needs. Beside him one of his London buddies is passed out on the sofa, a victim of the brutally powerful weed Nelson has been smoking for the best part of the afternoon. Or the last four decades, if you prefer. ‘Wherever you’re at you can decide,’ he continues. ‘I’ve decided it’s a lot easier to decide to be happy. Otherwise it’s a lot of trouble.’

  His eyes are almost black, endlessly deep, and they speak volumes about all that trouble and the measures he has taken over the years to banish it. On a table behind him a sleek silver laptop plays music beamed down by satellite from another age, the age when he started writing some of the most simple, sorrowful songs imaginable. He doesn’t write those kinds of songs any more.

  ‘I don’t like to write negative things,’ he says. ‘Something that you have to sing every night, if it happened to turn out to be a smash or something that would be the worst thing that could happen to you. I always think of my songs as having a possibility of a happy ending somewhere.’ He continues to talk about happiness; about how it evaded him for a long time, how he was confused and succumbed to seeing the world as a dark place.

  ‘My spirituality was always there, but there were other things getting in the way. Then somewhere all of a sudden it was back. I had to work to get there. It was just a matter of living, realising that this works and this doesn’t work and that positive is better than negative. It’s really that simple. And that’s where I’ve been since then.’

  There is a loud snap of thunder outside. The stoned, prostrate body lying next to Nelson on the sofa doesn’t flicker. He is 72 years old and, like it or not, he has seen plenty of badness in his time. ‘You won’t get me ever to admit that,’ he says clearly. ‘I’m not going to give it any energy.’

  He used to drink a lot of whisky but it made him negative and brought some kind of deep rage to the surface. So now he smokes prodigious amounts of marijuana each day, the kind of pot that makes most people pass out after two hits. He has ‘crazy dreams’ without it – some might suggest it is simply reality crashing in on a private world he has shaped and moulded and dreamed into being. He calls it medicine.

  He has been on the road since 1950 and he is still out there. He lives his life in a state of almost continual motion, moving from one city to the next with his band, some of who
m he has known for fifty years. He sleeps mostly on his bus. It doesn’t matter too much where he is as long as there is an audience and a stage. That is his purpose. He has found the life that suits him. A long time ago, making music became something that facilitated the way he wanted to live. It allows him to look neither backwards nor forwards – he simply stares down at a never-ending, immediate present.

  ‘It’s not possible for me to do anything other than that,’ he says. ‘I just have to live here and now. That’s all we have, that’s all there is, there’s no use even arguing about yesterday or tomorrow because I don’t know what it is. Well, I know what yesterday was. I have no fucking idea what tomorrow’s going to be.’

  Keith Richards calls him a man-of-the-soil. Others have called him a Shaman. He has lived a life full enough for ten men and people want him to have big answers. Viewed from this spyhole, he could be a redneck cowboy, a Zen master or simply an old, stoned hippie. Of course, he is really all three, and several other things into the bargain.

  ‘The main thing is, I think we’re all the same,’ he says. ‘People that I’ve sung to all over the world, there’s no difference – from London to Houston. As you get more into it, you realise that this is a Universal thing; the Universal mind and your mind is the same thing. We’re all thinking basically the same thing, we’re all basically the same person, and once you realise that, everything is kinda simplified. There’s a lot of things going on: quantum leaps into the future. A lot of things are happening at quantum speeds.’

  He relights his joint, flicks ash on the floor and looks at his buddy next to him, as though he has only just noticed he is there. ‘Are you back? Did you make it back OK? You had a good trip?’

  There is no answer. ‘We lost him. He went out the door.’ Willie Nelson smiles. He is happy. It hasn’t always been this way.

  1. 1933–1950

  IF ABBOTT WASN’T home it would be hard to love. That applies as truly now as it did back then, when Willie Nelson was born surrounded by the flat blackland cotton prairies of central Texas and the hard white rock that lurks just beneath the ground. Somewhere like Abbott needed a reason to exist, and before baby Nelson grew and put it on the map with his music, the Missouri–Kansas–Texas railroad provided it. In the 1880s a few houses and businesses settled alongside the tracks. Today the old, rusty cotton gin still overlooks the line as it continues to stretch away to its nearest significant points: the little town of West a few miles to the south, the larger town of Hillsboro – the seat of Hill County – about five miles to the north. The railway divides the settlement in half. The Nelsons lived to the east of the line, and the east side in the USA usually equates with poverty. So it proved here, except that everyone was poor. The Nelsons were just that little bit poorer than most.

  Abbott is a faceless place, a little bleak without being isolated. The grey university town of Waco lies about twenty miles to the south, while the major conurbations of Fort Worth and Dallas are not far over the northern horizon. Today, Interstate 35 runs right past its outer limits, advertising Czech pastries, cheap motels and gas stations in garish hoardings twelve feet wide. George W. Bush has his holiday ranch nearby, and everything from bumper stickers to baseball hats reminds the traveller that ‘Freedom Don’t Come For Free’. This is not the pretty part of Texas. Forget canyons and mountains, or fields of blue bonnets. The route connecting Austin and San Antonio in the South to Dallas in the North is flat, dry and bereft of much in the way of beauty. Abbott is no exception.

  In many ways, that I-35 has provided the spine to Nelson’s otherwise itinerant life: he has lived most of his 72 years keeping close to this main artery, always happiest with Texan soil beneath his feet. He owns the land on which he was born, and still has a home in Abbott, once owned by the doctor who delivered him. He cut his still-magnificent Live Country Music Concert album in 1966 at Panther Hall in Fort Worth. His ranch outside Austin is a mere two hours’ drive away. He had spells in San Antonio and Houston as a young married man. The famously nefarious Nite Owl club where he made some of his earliest performances has changed site since the 50s but still occupies a spot on the roadside between Abbott and Waco. It is now only a neglected shell, but even without its scrapping GIs and cheating couples, it still exudes an air of disreputable menace.

  What it all adds up to is this: when the huge Lone Star flag of Texas unravels behind him as the opening snare crack of ‘Whiskey River’ fills the air in concert each night, it is no hollow gesture. Texas – and specifically his early years in Abbott – have made Willie Nelson the way he is, probably even more than he knows or would care to acknowledge.

  Abbott’s population has fluctuated little over the years, between 350 in Nelson’s day to perhaps 300 nowadays. Anyone used to the cramped proportions of a British village would be surprised by the space. Its perimeters stretch and drawl like a Texan getting out of bed, but it’s still possible to drive from one end to the other in the length of time it takes to sing ‘Crazy’. It is surrounded by cotton fields and farm land, but it has an archetypal heart: the post office, the general store, the lot where the barber once stood and, a little further up the road, the two churches which stand impassively facing each other across the crossroads: one Baptist, one Methodist. The Church of Christ is just a stone’s throw away.

  Willie Hugh Nelson was born here, perhaps a quarter of a mile south-east of these churches, in the early hours on 30 April, 1933. He once claimed that he was actually born late on 29 April and that it just took his mother a while to alert the doctor, but then maybe he was just hedging his bets: ‘Will is always working on his birthday,’ claimed his third wife Connie.1 He was always working on something.

  Life was simple. Residents earned their small incomes from agriculture – most predominantly picking cotton, pulling corn or undertaking general farm work – or by providing essential local services: at the grocers, the auto repair shop, the service station, the barbershop or post office. Major shopping was a railroad ride away in Hillsboro or Waco. There were mostly white residents with some scattering of ‘coloured’ dwellings on the outskirts of the town. It was an era of what has been termed ‘benevolent racism’: minorities here were not hated or abused, merely denied their civil rights and casually termed ‘niggers’. There were other ethnicities too. Even today, a stroll round the centre of nearby West is like walking into a traditional Czech village, and a glance at the old school register of Nelson’s classmates at Abbott High School reveals several surnames of Czech origin: Cepak, Janecka, Hutrya, Hlavaty. Poles too, Germans and, of course, Mexicans have all made significant impressions upon Texas. The surname Nelson is apparently of Irish descent.

  His parents were no more than children. Ira Doyle Nelson had hooked up with Myrle Greenhaw in Searcy County, Arkansas in the late 1920s. Their families lived close to each other. He was sixteen and she was fifteen when they married in Pindall in 1929. Soon after, they left the slopes of the Ozark mountains and travelled with Ira’s parents to Abbott in the neighbouring state of Texas, where they trusted the cotton picking might be better. They all moved into a relatively comfortable two-storey house, typical of the town.

  Myrle had some native American blood from her mother’s side: when her son unbuckles his hair and lets it hang around his shoulders, you can see the inheritance. She was by all accounts a spirited girl from colourful stock.

  Willie Nelson: They were talented bootleggers and moonshiners as well as musicians. My mother told me that her folks used to run hideouts in the mountains where outlaws could come and find safety.2

  Ira Nelson was a more prosaic soul. His descendants were among the numerous Irish and British immigrants who came to the US in the 1800s, steeped in traditional songs and stories. His father loved music and played the guitar, and his son followed suit. William Nelson was a mechanic by trade, although he had turned to blacksmithing by the time he settled in Abbott. Ira inherited his skill with engines, but when there were no cars to fix he would work on farms and in the
fields to earn his pay. It was a tough life, about to get tougher. Their first child arrived on the first day of 1931. They called her Bobbie Lee. Myrle was still only sixteen.

  Ira and Myrle were the originators of a domestic pattern which has run like a seam through Nelson family history ever since: early marriage, followed by a break-up, physical abandonment, alcohol or substance abuse, and plain old pain. This is one family which has lived every country music cliché to the full. Nelson caught his share as a child and he has passed it on as a husband and a father. At the time the key moment in his life occurred, he felt it but would have been unable to articulate it.

  Myrle left Abbott and her family in 1933 when he was only six months old, the drudgery and confinement of life in a tiny town with two children proving too much for a lively nineteen-year-old. She hit the road unannounced one day, simply walking out and not coming back, joining the endless stream of desperate drifters cut loose from normality by the Great Depression, which had been precipitated by the stock market crash of 1929 and had really begun to bite hard by 1933. She took work wherever she could find it: dancing, waitressing, dealing cards. She sought out high times and bright lights, which in reality would have meant endless road-side honky-tonks and dives. But she was not for turning, and seemed later to possess an admirable recognition of the inevitability of her own impulsive nature.

  Myrle Nelson: I left [the kids] with their daddy’s folks, because I knew they’d take them to church and Sunday school. I wanted them to stay out of my kind of life – the restaurants and the bars.3

  In their mother’s absence, the children were effectively raised by Ira and his parents, William and Nancy. However, they weren’t even allowed the certainty of a complete abandonment. About a year after she departed, Myrle returned to Abbott declaring she had cancer and was all set to die. She apparently came back with the fantastically maudlin and melodramatic purpose of teaching her children a song – ‘I’ll Be Gone When You Read This Last Letter From Me’ – before she passed away. However, she was successfully operated upon and, realising that she was still very much alive and there was presumably plenty more living to do (and many more last letters to write), she promptly went away again. She had already divorced Ira and re-married; she would divorce again and marry a man called Ken Harvey in 1943 before she settled, first in Eugene, Oregon, and then later Yakima, Washington, right out on the Pacific coast. She kept in touch and would even visit, but with a heart-stuttering inconsistency.