Willie Nelson

by Graeme Thomson

  A proper job helped a little. Nelson became the morning disc jockey at KBOP radio station in Pleasanton, a small, rural town about thirty miles south of San Antonio. Just as almost every little backwater in the 40s and 50s had a dance hall, so many of them also had a local radio station. KBOP was founded in February 1951 by Dr Ben Parker, a chiropractor by trade, and operated on a modest scale. His wife Mona was the engineer.

  KBOP was considered one of the first small-town country music stations in Texas, an antidote to the slicker sounds of big band music and Frank Sinatra types which WOAI would play in San Antonio. It could broadcast over a hundred-mile radius on a good clear day, and built up a decent-sized audience. Nelson got the gig through sheer chutzpah. He overstated his credentials, exaggerated his experiences at KHBR in Hillsboro, bluffed his way through the technical side, and in general thoroughly messed up his audition. However, Dr Parker loved him. They had a very fond and close relationship for many years, a little reminiscent of father and son. He was hired on the strength of his personality as much as anything else – people just liked him, his mix of shyness and mischief. Also, the station had very few other options.

  Charlotte Ramsay: Most people know if they wanted to make it as a DJ they had to start at the little stations, because they’ll hire anybody! Just about anybody could pass the test. So you’re pretty lenient about who you hire.

  His wages were $40 a week, a small but decent enough salary. His job was to open the station at dawn each morning and stay on air for about four hours until the next DJ came along. Programming was half in English and half in Spanish; Nelson worked the English side of the fence. There wasn’t much room for improvisation. In those days, programmes were typed up in advance and you were effectively told what your programme would consist of prior to going on air. There was no room for shock jocks; all air space was logged and signed for. Advertising was king, and there would only be time for a couple of country songs before he had to read out some adverts. It was very commercial and competitive. Once he came off air one of Nelson’s other tasks was to sell air space, though he had little appetite for that. But it was work and it was in the music industry, and in many ways he was lucky just to have a job at all.

  The task of opening at the station at daybreak could hardly have been given to a less capable candidate. He was playing weekends with the Mission City Playboys and often didn’t get off stage until one in the morning. Then he would go home and grab some sleep – or sometimes stay up through the night – and try to get down to Pleasanton for 4.30 a.m. Dr Parker and his wife would wake up and turn on the radio in their bedroom, waiting to see if he had made it. More often than not he hadn’t, and the residents of south Texas were greeted with a grave silence when they switched on their sets as they headed off to the fields or into town. Trying to get him up in the morning was, according to his wife, ‘the damnedest thing you ever saw. He could sleep through a darn tornado.’10

  Johnny Bush also started working sessions at the studio. They were all in and around each other’s business – Bush had his own sideline band, Johnny Bush and his Hillbilly Playboys, which Nelson was ‘exclusively managing’ – and Nelson managed to find room for his friend at KBOP. Bush’s weather forecasts were legendary: ‘I had a very scientific method. I’d just look out the window and report what I saw. I was 100 per cent.’ He and Nelson and another DJ called Red Hillburn each had a fifteen-minute slot which they were supposed to fill each week by finding interesting musicians to play and interview. The three of them quickly turned these spots into a little self-publicising scam.

  Johnny Bush: Red would go on and do his fifteen minutes, and have Willie as his guest. Well, I would do my show and have Red as my guest. Then Willie would come on and do his fifteen minutes show, and have me as his guest. Out of three of us, we would get thirty minutes each. It was troubadour style.

  This went on for three or four weeks, until Dr Parker finally put his foot down; he came in and informed them that if they didn’t go out and actually interview someone else, they were all fired. It was an empty threat. He loved them, and Nelson loved the work – if not the hours – and the tiny bit of local celebrity it gave him. Indeed, it was such a secure job that at some point Martha, Lana and Nelson left San Antonio and rented an apartment in Pleasanton itself, perhaps in a bid to get him to work on time.

  Aside from playing with the band and working on the radio, he was trying to work on his own material. The very first songs he ever recorded were taped in the KBOP studio in early 1955. As a DJ, he had the perfect opportunity to record a demo for next to nothing, using old reel-to-reel tape from previous broadcasts. With just his voice and an acoustic guitar, he cut ‘The Storm Has Just Begun’, written back in Abbott a decade earlier, and ‘When I’ve Sang My Last Hillbilly Song’. Neither was a particularly inspiring effort, nor did they have the virtue of being distinctive. They followed traditional country structures and Nelson had yet to find his true voice – he sang on the beat and with little flair, with none of the jazzy phrasing or metre-messing which later made him stand out. He sent the recordings to Charlie Fitch, the producer at the influential local label SARG which had already released two singles by Dave Isbell on which Nelson played guitar.

  Johnny Bush: They naturally turned him down. I still have that old tape. He used an old studio tape – of a farm market report – and you can hear it in the background! At the time, my impression of him was as a guitar player. I even made a comment to him one time that he ought to stick to playing the guitar and let me do the singing. I liked his playing better than his singing. He never forgot that! Knowing Willie like I do, why would he give a damn what I thought one way or the other? But even to this day he still brings it up. But you listen to that tape and you can see why I said that.

  The KBOP demo of ‘The Storm Has Just Begun’ does throw in a few neat jazz moves on the guitar which were somewhat out of the ordinary for the genre, but nobody in south Texas was looking for the next Django Reinhardt. However, it meant a lot to him that he was a good guitar player. He will still claim that it is what he works hardest at, recognising it as a discipline that was endlessly variable, limitlessly expressive, and ultimately unmasterable.

  Merle Haggard: Knowing him personally, he’s studied that bugger like I have. He would be sitting there and we’d both have the same blank looks on our faces about how to understand it. It is a monster.

  Nelson was disillusioned with the rejection, especially as it hadn’t been the only one. For several months he had been sending his songs not just to SARG but to other labels as well. Nobody was interested. He walked into KBOP and told Dr Parker, ‘I’ve had it, I’m not going to do it any more,’ and threw a sheaf of his songs into the bin in disgust. Parker pulled them out and said: ‘A lot of people aren’t famous until they die. It’s going to take you a long time. You’re very talented, don’t give it up. Keep your day job, but keep doing what you’re doing.’

  He perhaps held this advice too closely to his heart. To observe the years between 1955 and 1958 from this distance is like looking at a hamster on a wheel. The locations change but the song is on repeat. There he goes: heading into a new city, picking up some DJ work, working nights with any band he can find, arguing with Martha about money and women – she would always feel that there wasn’t nearly enough of the former and a few too many dalliances with the latter – until the only thing that could be done was to move on, in the hope that their life somehow wouldn’t follow them. But bad luck proved less easy to shake off than bad debts. ‘They were,’ recalls Johnny Bush, ‘wild and desperate times. We were all struggling just to make a living.’ Each time the rent was due, it was time to move.

  Charlotte Ramsay: Willie was always broke and he was always in trouble. Not so much in trouble with the law, but with the bills and stuff. He had a little apartment and an old car and he was just really not doing well. At that time he didn’t have much to offer.

  But for the first time in his life he had something approachin
g a career. After Pleasanton he moved his family to Fort Worth, back into familiar central Texas territory and close to his father Ira and his second wife Lorraine. He moved into a three-room apartment and quickly found work at a tiny 250-watt station called KDNT in Denton, about sixty miles north of Fort Worth. If anything, it was a step down from Pleasanton. The station had been built in a burned-out building and when the copywriter walked into the control room her footfall would knock the arm off the record.

  He worked there for about nine months, earning $40 a week, until a better job came along at KCNC in Fort Worth itself. KCNC was still a local station, but it was a city station and it was much more professional. Nelson worked the morning shift and then presented an afternoon show called The Western Express, where he could perform for the opening half-hour of the three-hour show. He began to enjoy himself and the response from the public seemed to indicate that they enjoyed him too, but things were still rocky. One of the songs Nelson wrote around this time was called ‘Too Young To Settle Down’ and it was all too autobiographical. Johnny Bush had married and moved back to Houston for a spell, and he and his wife would travel up to Fort Worth to see them. He was impressed by the strides his friend was making in his career, but rather dismayed at the state of his marriage. Martha had become pregnant again in the late spring of 1956, but nothing had changed.

  Johnny Bush: He was doing rather well. On the Fourth of July weekend [of 1956] we went up to visit for a few days, and Willie was good. He was a very popular DJ and all the musicians knew him. During that week, Willie was showing me some guitar licks, and Martha said, ‘Willie, put up the damn guitar.’ He just ignored her and kept playing. ‘I said, put up the damn guitar, we wanna visit.’ After the third time I heard this noise, this missile coming through the air. It was a bottle of hair tonic. She threw it at him and he ducked, it hit the lamp, went through the lampshade and smashed the light bulb. And he looked up at me and said: ‘Well, John, I guess we should put the guitars up, we’ve done enough for today.’

  On another occasion he came home late. He had played a poker joint where he was making $8 a night – the same wage he was picking up when he was thirteen – and then stopped at the 811 Club for a pot of coffee and a game on the pinball machines which paid out in cash. He got home and walked through the door to be met once again with a hail of pots and pans, Martha’s favourite means of showing her displeasure. He seemed to take it all. For a man with a lethal temper, he knew where to draw the line.

  Paul English: He was the kind of guy who would never hit back. Martha would beat him up and he’d never fight back. I learned a lot from things like that.

  Home was only marginally safer than the clubs he was playing. Fort Worth was like Sodom and Gomorrah twinned with Dodge City. Actually, its closest comparison was Prohibition-era Chicago, riddled as it was with gang feuds, violent crime, prostitution, drugs and guns. Fort Worth had risen up as an annex to oil-rich Dallas, just a few miles to the east, and was the equivalent of a down-at-heel outhouse tacked on to an elegant townhouse. It had its mainstream establishment venues such as the Skyline or the Rocket Club, but the real centre of the action was Jacksonboro Highway, a five-mile strip of nightclubs and throbbing neon which conducted itself in the manner of some Wild West town from the previous century.

  There were several murders, frequent stabbings, nightly fights, and all manner of attendant dangers. One beer joint was called the County Dump, next to the real dump and without even a telephone. The stage at the Mountaineer Club was situated behind the bar for safety reasons, while the S&S Club was subject to a boycott by its regular musicians because playing it was such a hairy experience: many players, including Nelson, were hit with beer bottles. The club responded by putting chicken wire across the front of the stage to protect the musicians – and the fights went on. Another club was simply called the Bloody Bucket. It made the Nite Owl back near Abbott look like the Albert Hall.

  Nelson learned a lot in Fort Worth. He refined the economical stagecraft of Bob Wills to even greater lengths: stop for no one, say nothing, keep your head down or at least your eyes straight ahead. He played with black and Mexican musicians for the first time, which brought a few extra strings to his bow. He added more overt jazz and blues songs to his repertoire onstage. He saw that there really were no boundaries to music.

  Willie Nelson: When you played a club in Texas back then, you had to do ‘San Antonio Rose’ and you had to do ‘Stardust’, because those people didn’t know what was country and what wasn’t. They [hadn’t] been educated that music is separated. Back then, you just took requests and if you knew the song you played it.’11

  He also smoked pot for the first time and – like many steady drinkers – found it a little pointless: it would take years for that particular love to take hold. He became accustomed to the company of criminals, and found that they could be fun, as well as useful and helpful. He has always loved cutting deals and has scant regard for authority. His essential moral core was formed in Abbott, but his adult code of honour was really established in the bars of Fort Worth.

  He loved the drama and the loyalty. Later, in the 70s, he would befriend the Hell’s Angels, entranced by these big, violent, frequently highly intelligent men with their codes and sentimental brand of fraternal love. His Family Band have fulfilled much the same purpose over the years. What he could never seemingly find in a conventional family of husband, wife and children, he found in the cowboy stereotypes of male bonding. In Fort Worth, he would judge people as he found them and make few assumptions. He liked being on the outer edges of criminality and recognised the echoes of old-time Wild West values: loyalty, courtesy, do-unto-others. He liked to sit back and watch them at work and play. It was Damon Runyon in oil country. He began to carry a gun in his guitar case; everyone else did.

  But his luck was failing. 1956 was the time of Elvis Presley and rock ’n’ roll hysteria. Those who disliked rock ’n’ roll became more firmly entrenched in their views and upheld the populist status quo of Pat Boone and Doris Day, but many nightclubs had to start booking acts which reflected the changing times. The teenager was arriving, and he was powerful. The rawness of old-time country had been superseded by something new and wonderfully vibrant, and eventually country music would give up the ghost and dissolve into the saccharine, polished gloop which spewed out of Nashville with production line monotony for much of the next decade. Willie Nelson would later feel the impact of that, too, on a more significant level, when he set up shop in Music Row. But for now rock ’n’ roll was simply a contributory factor in a whole host of reasons which ensured he couldn’t make ends meet.

  There would always be a place in Texas for the old-fashioned honky-tonks and skull orchards of Fort Worth, but there was less work to go around and someone in his position was not at the front of the queue. Also, the dangerous nature of the country clubs meant that there was little media interest in who played there. The bottom line was: even with his DJ-ing and his moonlighting, he was still flat broke.

  Johnny Bush: Between jobs if he got broke he would hawk his guitar for rent and grocery money. Then a [gig] would come up and he wouldn’t have the guitar to play the job. That happened more than once.

  With Martha and Lana and their unborn baby in tow, he picked up sticks again. The hamster prepared himself for a few more circuits of the wheel. He tried San Diego but he couldn’t play unless he paid $100 to the union. They headed back to Oregon, this time to Portland, where his mother was now living. They stayed with Myrle for a while then moved into a house on 148th Street, across the Columbia river in Vancouver. His second daughter was born there on 20 January 1957, and they called her Susie. There was more DJ work with KVAN on Main Street. He called himself Wee Willie Nelson – other DJs included Shorty the Hired Hand and ‘Cactus’ Ken DeBord – and was a great success, by all accounts, although the wage was meagre. He played a little. For about six months he was a member of Roger Crandall and the Barn Dance Boys, even appearing on local musician H
eck Harper’s TV show, and would check out whoever happened to be playing at the Frontier Room club across from the radio station. On the surface, things seemed good, but still it wasn’t happening the way he wanted it to. It was slow work in the North.

  Willie Nelson: I don’t know if you could call it a [music scene] or not. There were a few good bands around that I used to go and play [with], whenever I could find a job somewhere around Portland or Vancouver.12

  Whatever he earned he spent. It was all getting a little too depressing. Almost within six months of Susie being born, Martha was pregnant again. Nelson would tell his wife that everything was going to be all right, and she would reply: ‘Ain’t nothing goin’ to be all right.’ He asked, or rather he told KVAN that he needed an extra $100 a week or else he would have to leave. Then leave, they said. He had recently interviewed the songwriter Mae Axton on his show. She was the composer of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and was on tour with Hank Snow, handling his PR. He cornered her afterwards and played her some of his own songs, and she told him what he already knew: he was in the wrong place. He left town with the same question he had been carrying around in his head for the past seven years: where was the right place?