Willie Nelson

by Graeme Thomson

  LABOUR PAINS

  WILLIE NELSON IS talking about writing songs. He has been doing it for nearly seventy years and yet still finds it an odd, uncomfortable experience, somewhere between a drag and a beautiful compulsion.

  ‘It’s kind of like labour pains,’ he says. ‘When something comes along, if it worries you enough then you have to write about it. That’s good. I want to be worried by it. You gotta do it. It’s labour pains.’

  Something seems to occur to him. ‘’Course, I don’t have to write.’

  Once upon a time he had to write. Once upon a time it put food on his table, but more than that, he had to write because the things that were happening to him demanded some kind of release. He leans back on the sofa, exhales, and looks deep into the past. It’s not possible to follow him. He remembers what worried him into writing songs like ‘Crazy’ and ‘Night Life’, but he doesn’t want to remember out loud.

  ‘Oh, you could pin me down,’ he sighs. He stands up and readies himself for the bathroom. ‘I probably wouldn’t be able to tell you whether it was a Thursday or not. They were either my experiences or yours, you know? That’s what I always wrote about, what I knew about or saw.’

  He is still standing up, his hand on the door knob.

  ‘I knew pretty early in life that what I’m thinking is not that far from what you’re thinking, and what makes you happy, laugh or cry, is probably going to make me happy or laugh or cry. Once you realise that you’re the same as the audience, then everything else is pretty simple. You just do what you like.’

  He doesn’t write too much any more. One or two truly great songs slip out each decade, but most of the time he just jots down what he calls ‘mind farts’. He has chosen to become an interpreter – as much of his own songs as other people’s – rather than a creator. More than anything, he is a communicator. A point of connection.

  ‘If you’re a singer you can get up in front of an audience and sing songs that you know communicate,’ he explains. ‘It doesn’t matter whether you wrote them or not. I play “Stardust” and “Georgia On My Mind” because I know that these songs are not only great and I love to sing them, but probably more important is the fact that everybody in that audience will like them. Whether they’ve ever heard them or not, they’re going to like it.’

  He smiles. ‘You don’t have to write ’em. Just sing ’em.’

  He looks suddenly relieved. He opens the door and disappears from view.

  3. 1958–1961

  WHAT DOES IT mean to an artist when he plays a song almost fifty years after he wrote it? What does it signify to him? When Willie Nelson slips ‘Night Life’ into his medley of old classics in concert each night, is he immediately transported back to the stretch of highway between Houston and Pasadena where he first pieced together the song in his head; is his sleeve still tugged by the lure of the clubs which kept calling him, despite the infidelities, marital fights, hangovers and numerous small humiliations which they meted out in return? Does he feel the phantom pains of those draining days on the road somewhere in the pit of his stomach, or is he – to borrow Brian Eno’s classic analogy of onstage detachment – simply thinking about his laundry?

  More than any of these things, the fact that the song has stood up to almost five decades of constant wear and tear and who-knows-how-many performances tells him that he has created a timeless piece of art. It tells him he has succeeded. Up until the point when he wrote it, Nelson had offered up nothing out of the ordinary, nothing truly special. He was concentrating primarily on being a performer and – probably more than anything else – a guitarist, and though he could write songs at the drop of a hat, he was spending too little time on the craft to create anything that transcended mere competent imitation.

  Willie Nelson: When I was playing clubs in Texas, before I went to Nashville, my songwriting was secondary then. I was earning a living as a singer and guitar player.1 I didn’t come up with anything I thought was worth anything until I was 20 to 25 years old.2

  He left a slight but useful trail of evidence behind him, which largely backs up his analysis. Following on from his failed demos at KBOP in 1955, he had made a handful of slightly more polished recordings. Back in Vancouver in 1957 he’d cut a single, again using equipment which he could access through the radio station, recording it in a friend’s garage and paying for it to be issued independently under his own label: Willie Nelson Records.

  In a typewritten, KVAN-headed letter to Don Pierce, the president of the Nashville-based record company Starday which was pressing it for him, he wrote: ‘This is the kind of label I would like to have if possible: background in black and letters in yellow.’ He accompanies his note with a crude sketch of the record, with the words Willie Nelson prominently displayed, and signs off: ‘P.S. Check enclosed.’ He was only 24 and clearly rather excited. ‘It was,’ he later admitted, ‘a magic thing.’3

  The songs he cut in Vancouver were his own ‘No Place For Me’ and Leon Payne’s ‘Lumberjack’. He sold the single hard over the airwaves on his radio show for $1, and for your dollar you also got a slick black and white autographed photograph. He always had an eye for a good deal, and it eventually shifted about 500 copies. ‘No Place For Me’ is very reminiscent of Johnny Cash’s early Sun sides, 78 seconds of boom-chicka-boom, drenched in reverb, with bass and pedal steel buried in the mix. It nonetheless displays a believable sense of disaffection with his life and his wife: ‘Your love is as cold as the north wind that blows/ And the river that runs to the sea,’ it begins, before concluding: ‘I can see this is no place for me.’ Payne’s ‘Lumberjack’ – which name-checked Eugene, Oregon and was probably included with an eye on the local market – was forgettable fare, a logging song with ‘Rawhide’-style whip cracks interspersed throughout.

  He recorded again over a year later. He had by now left Vancouver for Texas, making a few hopeful detours in Missouri and Denver before arriving back in Fort Worth in 1958 with the intention of giving up on music and settling down. Martha gave birth to their third child, Billy, on 21 May, and Nelson knew in his heart that he couldn’t support his family on what he was making. He took a job selling encyclopedias door-to-door. He enjoyed it, and with his easy grin and quiet charm, he was good at it. He tried to forget about the clubs and knuckle down, coming home at five o’clock to have his dinner before turning the television on.

  He tried, but he was kidding himself. Soon enough, he was back prowling the joints of Jacksonboro Highway once again, and even returned to clubs like the Nite Owl and Scotty’s, literally back where he started. If Martha could get a babysitter she would happily join him; she was, after all, still only 22. He was doing a little commercial radio work from Fort Worth for XEG, one of the huge ‘X’ stations transmitting from over the border in Monterey, Mexico. A surviving spool of him reading a leadenly scripted advert appealing to songwriters to send in their own songs – and $10, of course – does little to eulogise his talents as a DJ.

  He was a little lost, and seemed to veer back towards the comfort of religion. Whether his spell at Baylor a few years earlier had ignited something slow-burning, or whether it was the influence of his father and Bobbie – who was now also living in Fort Worth – isn’t clear, but he was baptised into the Metropolitan Baptist Church and began teaching Sunday School in the mornings. It offered some peace and tranquillity among the chaos. He would head to church just hours after singing through a storm at some dive or other on the strip. Mama Nelson would have been appalled at the dissonance, and she was not the only one. The preacher of the church told Nelson that he disapproved of his lifestyle and asked him to give up the honky-tonks and the music and the nights spent dodging bottles behind chicken wire.

  Willie Nelson: I tried to explain to them that the plumber was in there putting in the commode; he was getting his money and nobody was bitching about him. Same with the electrician stringing the lights. But the guy who was up there singing his ass off, he couldn’t sing in beer joints and churches,
too.4

  An astute preacher would have recognised that for Nelson, the joints were not simply a place of work; they had become essential to his life. He couldn’t escape them even if he wanted to. In disgust, he ditched formal religion and instead re-affirmed his commitment to making music – he wrote the wonderful ‘Family Bible’ around this time, trying to reconcile his warm spiritual feelings with his love of music. From now on he would mould his beliefs into something that suited and reflected his own lifestyle and choices. His spirituality became the very definition of a broad church.

  He made his first professional quality recording in early 1959. A DJ friend based in Cleburne called Hank Craig had contacts with H.W. ‘Pappy’ Daily, who ran ‘D’ Records in Houston. The new label was designed to discover new talent and had recently had a hit with George Jones’s classic ‘Why Baby Why’. Nelson also had a vague connection with ‘D’ records: Daily had previously founded Starday records, the company who had pressed Nelson’s Vancouver songs. Nelson started cutting singles for Daily. He sold half of the rights to one of the songs, ‘Man With The Blues’, to Craig in order to pay for the first session, which took place in the Manco studio in Fort Worth in early 1959.

  For the first time Nelson featured with a full band of local musicians behind him. It was a tight little song, driven by nifty walking bass, and a clever enough lyric about a man who offers unhappiness as a speciality, like a salesman proudly hawking his finest wares. ‘The Storm Has Just Begun’ was the other song recorded. Fifteen years after it was written, the addition of sickly sweet backing vocals from the Reil Singers, trilling in something just less than unison, didn’t help improve what had been a landmark composition for a teenager but merely an average song for an adult.

  The record did nothing of any note, but it did, improbably, create some interest in the B-side. Billy Walker, a Waco-born musician whom Nelson knew well, re-recorded ‘The Storm Has Just Begun’ as ‘The Storm In My Heart’ for Columbia, and it was released as a single in April 1959, becoming a minor regional hit in Texas. It was a small vindication, and an indication that he was on the right track. His second recording for ‘D’ Records marked further improvement: ‘What A Way To Live’ was another step forwards, Nelson’s confident, breezy vocals leading the way, although the mood is plaintive: lyrically it contained the essence of some of his landmark compositions – it documents a dissolute lifestyle with a certain characteristic proud resignation – but lacks the spareness and economy. On the flip side, ‘Misery Mansion’ was a self-explanatory and bleakly enjoyable exercise in self-loathing, utilising the cold, rudimentary fabric of an empty home to accentuate his heartache. He would revisit that particular idea again. It boded well.

  In 1959, in the metropolis of Houston something at long last clicked in Nelson’s songwriting. In a short spell he wrote the songs which were to change his life: ‘Night Life’, ‘Crazy’, ‘Mr Record Man’, ‘Funny How Time Slips Away’. He wrote them quickly and simply, and they have endured. What happened? Initially Houston had seemed like just another stop on the line. Another hustle. Nelson knew the city well enough: like most places in Texas, he had passed through, slept on floors, mooched around. Bolstered by Billy Walker’s success, which he felt legitimised him as a songwriter, he tried to persuade Starday to get one of their acts, Frankie Miller, to record ‘Family Bible’, but Dan Pierce wasn’t keen. Lana was now almost six, Susie was two and Billy had just turned one. Work was proving hard to come by and Nelson was pushed to some drastic measures.

  Jack Clements: When we were in High school, Willie played with Charlie Brown and the Browns on the weekend. Charlie got divorced and went to Houston, and he was playing in a nightclub when Willie showed up with his three kids. He told Charlie, ‘I’ve got a problem here. I’ve got no money, I’m out of work, I’ve got to get a job.’ Charlie said, ‘I’ll give you some money and you can play for me two or three times a week.’ This went on for about a week until the manager said, ‘Charlie, you’re going to have to fire that boy. He can’t sing and he’s frightening off all the customers!’

  He tried the same stunt at the Esquire Club, out east on the Hempstead Highway. The band at the Esquire was headed by Larry Butler, a well-known Texan musician whom Nelson knew a little. He turned up and asked if there were any vacancies in the band. He was told no. So Nelson offered to sell him some songs. To his immense credit, Butler refused to take them, although they would have cost him just $10 each. He knew they were good – they included ‘Family Bible’ and ‘Mr Record Man’ – but his conscience wouldn’t allow it. Instead, he loaned Nelson $50 and sent him on his way. With the money, he was able to rent an apartment in Pasadena, an eastern suburb of Houston, and buy some food. Later, when a vacancy arose at the Esquire, Nelson was hired to play guitar in Butler’s band six nights a week. Soon, he found some more work as the Sunday morning sign-in DJ on KCRT radio in Houston.

  He also became tight with Paul Buskirk, an extraordinarily talented guitarist and mandolinist who had settled in Houston and opened the Paul Buskirk School of Guitar. Buskirk had already had a long and prestigious recording career, and indeed played on Nelson’s ‘What A Way To Live’ session for ‘D’ Records. He offered Nelson work teaching at his guitar school, which he happily accepted, although he struggled to keep ahead of the students. In return, Nelson offered him ‘Family Bible’. The legend states that the two were having dinner in a Pasadena bar. Nelson had no money with which to pay and so he leaned across the table and began singing ‘Family Bible’ to Buskirk. ‘This is a tune you’ll like,’ he smiled. ‘I’ll sell you this one.’ Buskirk offered to give him $50 for it – and pay the bill. It was a deal.

  Selling songs is almost unheard of now, but it was fairly common practice back in the 40s and 50s. It was a simple process. A budding songwriter took a flat cash fee, which bought the purchaser the right to put their name on the song and pick up any royalties that it might accrue in the future. It was a small gamble on behalf of the buyer, perhaps, but a much bigger exploitation of a poor songwriter who was desperate enough to flog his best songs for a pittance just to make ends meet in the here and now. Floyd Tillman had sold one of his classics, ‘It Makes No Difference Now’, for $300 to Louisiana Governor Jimmie Davis in 1937. It became a country hit for Cliff Bruner and a pop hit for Bing Crosby, and was later recorded by Gene Autry, Bob Wills, Ray Charles, and Diana Ross and The Supremes. His was not the only such tale. Nelson, utterly hopeless with money and not one to ever take the long view, was ripe for the picking.

  Buddy Killen: Back then, writers were really struggling to make a living. It was very, very tough. Unfortunately, sometimes writers struggle or might be a little bit frivolous with what they do earn. Willie in the beginning was [part of] those days, so he felt he had to sell off some rights to survive.

  Buskirk took the song to Claude Gray, a singer also signed to ‘D’ Records, who liked it and duly recorded it. The credit was split between Gray, Buskirk and Walt Breeland, Buskirk’s business partner, who presumably raised the bulk of the funds. Nelson’s name was nowhere to be seen on the record. That Gray’s recording of ‘Family Bible’ went into Billboard’s country Top 10 was a mixed blessing: on the one hand, it gave him the confidence to know he could write a song which had mass, popular appeal within its genre. On the other hand, he had traded in a considerable sum in royalties for a flat $50 which, given his lifestyle, didn’t go far and indeed had already been spent. Buskirk has sometimes been portrayed as the villain in this tale, the exploitative older man taking advantage of his stymied friend, but as he later pointed out, ‘We were all poor and [that] was a bunch of money – a bundle – to gamble on an unheard of tune.’5 Nelson said he never regretted it.

  Johnny Bush: Up to a point he [took his marriage and responsibilities seriously]. He was responsible in the respect that he always tried his best. The one thing he had to sell was his songs. He needed the money at the time and they had the money. Willie is a very positive thinker. This is his philosophy: i
f I can write songs good enough for people to buy, then I can write other songs – and he did.

  Nelson saw song-selling as a quick way to make ends meets. It was a hand-to-mouth philosophy, but it was the best idea he had at the time. Indeed, it may even have spurred him on creatively. Always a reluctant writer when times have been good, he has often needed the promise of money or the threat of trouble to get him going. Where previously he may have dragged his heels and viewed his writing as an indulgence when there were mouths to be fed, now he had a real purpose.

  Following the sale of ‘Family Bible’, there is not necessarily a sense of him writing to order, but he had one eye on the cash register. He focused. Driving between Pasadena and the Esquire club in Houston and back every night, he finally made the breakthrough. ‘Night Life’ came in fits and starts as he sat silently at the wheel. It had all the economy of the oldest of blues song – nothing was wasted. Its mood is best summed up as a kind of heroic loneliness, a simple and almost defiant acceptance of what he is. It is written without melodrama or shame, and could only have come from a man who had spent the best part of a decade seeking solace in the most transient places and who now finds himself alone in the early hours with nowhere to hide. Despite the fact that it became a hugely successful song, it sounds like someone who has given up on trying to write what he thinks a record company might like to hear and is simply pleasing himself. It became a kind of template for Nelson’s early songwriting: a Texan haiku.

  Rodney Crowell: It’s so economical and powerful at the same time, distilling it down to that one true sentence: ‘When the evening sun goes down/ You will find me hanging around/ The night life/ Ain’t no good life/ But it’s my life.’ That’s sort of like Hemingway to me! When it’s distilled down to that much truth and simplicity, then it accesses to the power of the universe. It becomes archetypal.

  The music too was superb, flitting between blues and jazz and country, with a lovely slice of musical onomatopoeia in the bridge as Nelson invites the listener to ‘listen to the blues they’re playing’ then reels off a burst of pure Delta blues guitar. It was restrained, intimate and enormously powerful. It went on to sell over 30 million copies in over 70 different versions. And he sold it for $150.