English had first run into Willie Nelson back in the wild lands of Fort Worth in the mid-50s, when Nelson was working as a disc jockey at KCNC. Their initial connection came from Paul’s brother Oliver playing guitar with Nelson during the half-hour live spot on his radio show. One day they found they were a drummer short. Despite the fact that English had never played drums before in his life – he was, he claims, a trumpet player – Oliver called him up. All he did was keep time tapping on a snare, but that was all they needed. When Nelson got a steady job at one of the Fort Worth clubs, he asked English to join the band.
They worked together as a three-piece with a long-forgotten front man for about six weeks, until Nelson got a better job on the Jacksonboro Highway. But they stayed friends and remained in contact. It’s likely that a few favours passed back and forth along the way. Later, English moved to Houston and continued working on the wrong side of the tracks, and whenever Nelson passed through he and the band would stay with him and his wife Carlene. In 1966, Nelson and the Record Men came to town, and he mentioned he was trying to get hold of Skeeter Davis’s drummer, whom they both knew from Fort Worth. English said, ‘Hell, I play drums better than him!’ and Nelson replied: ‘Well, you wouldn’t work for $30 a day, would you?’ So he did. And he’s been there ever since.
Paul English: I was not a very nice person when I went to work for Willie. I was pretty roustabout – if a fight came along I was gonna be in there. I’ve never lied about that. I never did wear that badge [of respectability]. Whatever you saw with me was what I was, and Willie knew that when he hired me. When Willie came along I gave it up. If I hadn’t met him I’d be doing time.
English didn’t automatically turn into a saint. Initially, his job in the entourage was to play behind Johnny Bush in the section of the show where Bush sang a few of his own songs. The Record Men would play two two-hour shows each night and eventually, when Bush felt English was sufficiently equipped to follow Nelson’s wayward muse, he allowed him to play drums on the first Record Men set. He finally took over drums completely in 1968 when Bush left to pursue his own very successful solo career, but being a musician has always been perhaps the least notable of English’s attributes. He has rather unkindly been called the worst drummer in the world, and anybody who has heard his snare shuffling up a tempo and then slowing down again during the same song might have some sympathy with that judgment.
He has played with Nelson for approaching forty years and has known him for fifty, which leads to the inevitable conclusion that English was not brought on board simply for his musical prowess. Although he is now into his 70s and times have changed, in the old days his role was untitled but well-defined: he was there to take care of business, whether that meant paying hotel bills, or simply pulling a gun when the promoter proved reluctant to pay, or keeping the band and crew in line. He was brought in to give the band a bit of swagger and muscle and danger, and he did it admirably. Above all, he was there to look out for his boss.
This was the first real band of Nelson’s career, and it contained trace elements of the general ethos which eventually transferred itself to his famous Family Band, the one that’s still on the seemingly eternal road with him today. During the next three years they not only evolved into an extraordinarily tight musical unit, but also became fast and loyal friends, a true gang in thought and word and deed. It was like a family. When David Zettner – by far the youngest member – was drafted in 1970, Nelson paid for him to fly home and then talked around his contacts to try and get him off the hook. When Zettner was later discharged on medical grounds, the band picked him up from the army base in a limousine and instantly created a role for him back in the band, despite the fact they now had a new bass player. ‘It was,’ he recalls, ‘like I’d just been in the bathroom for a long time.’
It was a communal philosophy that also worked its way down into his home life. Between 1965 and 1970, Ridgetop became the base for an extended family of Nelson acolytes. After she divorced her second husband, Martha re-married and came to live nearby so she could be near the children. Ira and Myrle came – separately, of course – with their spouses and their other children and settled. Nelson may have noted ruefully that there was nothing like money and success for bringing a family back together, but he never provided anything other than love and support for his parents. His sister Bobbie moved with her third husband Jack and her three children. David Zettner took a room. Paul English and his family came and moved to Madison, about ten miles away. Wade Ray was across the road. It became a little rebel county, an independent annex of Texas in the Tennessee mountains.
RCA were running out of ideas. Felton Jarvis’s first session in 1966 had been a disaster. He had tried to update Nelson’s sound by throwing strings, cheesy trumpets, scratchy funk guitar and a truly awful swinging rock beat to ‘San Antonio Rose’ and ‘Columbus Stockade Blues’, of all things, and it had been – inevitably – a spectacular failure. Nelson tried to sing with a cheerful swing but merely sounded rightfully embarrassed. Even the most significant new song that he had recently written – ‘The Party’s Over’, a classic 4 a.m. ballad in its rawest form – was scrubbed and sanitised by the production sheen. The single reached No. 24 in March 1967, following on from the minor success of ‘One In A Row’, which had climbed to No. 19 in late 1966. It was a reasonable showing, but not good enough. The label was tiring of Nelson’s inability to make a major breakthrough and had no solution to offer other than to keep throwing different styles at him in the hope that something might stick. Nelson thought the solution should have been simple: let him do what he wanted – which was to recreate in the studio the natural, slightly rough music he was making on the road with the band – and then get the label to push it as hard as they could. Their failure to do so told him they didn’t really believe in him.
Willie Nelson: With that name RCA they should be able to do anything they want to do with an artist. If an artist has any talent at all they should have enough money and promotional work and experience to at least get that artist’s material out somewhere and get it exposed. I was an artist on RCA but there was no money being spent promotion-wise on Willie Nelson and it seemed like I was only cutting my albums there like dub sessions. They would release them and see if anyone [else] wanted to record them. I just didn’t feel the promotional department were behind me. In fact, I knew they weren’t.2
It was not an uncommon problem. The RCA roster back in the mid to late 60s was full of successful songwriters. It was a definite and conscious policy of the time to sign a top writer like, say, Justin Tubb, and at least ensure that you had access to his best songs for your major artists. In many ways, Nelson was becoming a victim of his own early, spectacular success as a songwriter, but he was also at fault for choosing the wrong label when he stood at the crossroads between RCA and Monument back in 1964. Strangely, he didn’t really fight his corner. There were no stand-up fights over artistic freedom. He just did what he was told and went away and brooded.
He was also a victim of timing: there wasn’t a general public appetite for raw country music at this time, and there’s no indication that, even if he had been allowed to do what he wanted and it had been promoted to the hilt, he would necessarily have broken through. He would, however, have relished the opportunity to find out. The two sessions in Nashville for The Party’s Over album in June 1967 summed up the whole problem. It was a rare session in that both Johnny Bush and Jimmy Day were part of the studio band, which they thought augured well for the outcome. However, the ideas they had worked up together night after night on tour were dismissed out of hand by Chet Atkins.
Johnny Bush: Willie would write these things and we would want to play them the way we were doing them on the road. I knew what he wanted. When we got to the studio, Chet would take over: ‘Well, we’re going to do it this way.’ It would be completely different from what we were doing on the road. The day we cut [this] session, Jimmy Day and Paul English and I drove from Texas to Nashvil
le. Chet had rode my ass unmercifully, kept saying the drums weren’t very good. I was playing a bolero beat the way I knew Willie liked it, and he really embarrassed me. Jerry Reed was on that session, and [later] he turned and said: ‘Why don’t you go over there and tell Chet Atkins to kiss your ass!’ I thought that was a great compliment.
Bush would soon be free to pursue his own interests. As promised, Nelson did produce his first session – taping Bush’s ‘Sound Of A Heartache’ and his own ‘A Moment Isn’t Very Long’ in June 1967 – and by the time Bush left in 1968 he was making $2,500 a night as opposed to the Record Men’s $800. They gave him a rowdy send-off nonetheless.
As a songwriter, Nelson was still capable of fitful genius, but life on the road sapped time and energy. He usually wrote alone in the seclusion of his hotel room, but ‘pre-production’ tended not to be a quiet, contemplative process, but rather a chaotic immersion in bits and pieces of half-ideas which somehow came together at the last minute. He literally picked up scraps of inspiration wherever he could.
David Zettner: The way he would go about writing a tune was just extraordinary to me. My first job in the band was to help Johnny Bush take care of Willie’s clothes. I kind of took over that job. John told me, ‘Make sure you always go through all the pockets, especially in the coats.’ And sure enough, I’d find little pieces of newspapers with something written on it, napkins – a lot of napkins – with stuff written on it. I’d always fold it up and put it in a cigar box, and after one of the shows we’d present Willie with what we’d found. He’d go, ‘Oh yeah, this is a cool tune!’ He was writing these tunes in little bits and pieces, and he’d sit there and play them. I remember asking him, ‘How can you remember all of this?’ We were all pretty wasted, you know. He said, ‘I never worry about it. My rule of thumb is: if it comes back a second time and I remember it, it’s worth looking at. It’s a good ’un.’
It was 1967. Pet Sounds had been and gone and the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was just around the corner, but the vibrant primary colours and LSD-influenced carnivalism of prime psychedelia seemed a long way away from Nashville and the conservative enclave of country music. Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan were close friends but, by and large, any attempts to emulate the counter-culture were generally hopelessly misguided, uncomprehending and ‘square’, amounting to little more than a cynical effort in taking a popular song of the time, castrating it and then selling it to a country audience. However, shifts in society ensured that small changes were taking place at a personal level. Marijuana had now become a drug of choice for many artists, including The Record Men, although by no means exclusively. Nelson would occasionally take amphetamine on the road to keep awake, and although he had already had lots of experience with pot, for a long time he could take or leave it.
Johnny Bush: I was smoking this shit before he was. I remember one night in south Texas, at a place called Schroeder Hall. Wade Ray and Jimmy Day and I were out under this tree and we were burning one. Willie walked by and we said, ‘Want some?’ and he said, ‘Nah, that stuff gives me a headache,’ and just kept walking. Can you imagine that!
Alcohol was still his primary means of escape – and his downfall. ‘Aw, I never drank half as much as people thought I did,’ he said later. ‘[But] once I did pull a bender everybody in the world heard about it.’3 Indeed, he was by all accounts a horrible drunk, violent and prone to blackouts, and the endless routine of the road exacerbated it: they would play the gig, then afterwards pile into the station wagon and head off to wherever the good times might reasonably be expected to be. When Nelson later claimed that he ‘knew all the bartenders and waitresses by their first names [in Texas]’,4 he really wasn’t kidding. Often he would shout from the back of the car, ‘Y’all pull down to this club, I’ve got some old friends there.’ They would stay up all night entertaining and then head on up the road in the morning, usually with Paul English cracking the whip.
It got so bad that in a hotel in Waco the band engineered his arrest. Nelson had been up partying for days, playing shows then getting everyone back to the hotel for some more fun, then doing it all over again. He was exhausted, but genetically simply incapable of calling it quits. Paul slipped some cash to the man at the reception desk and told him: ‘Could you go up there and just arrest him? Just say, “Y’all been making too much noise, Mr Nelson, will you come with us?” Then we’re going to get him another room down the hall and we’ll put him in there. Nobody will be the wiser.’ Nelson was thus manoeuvred two doors down to a new room, and the party was broken up. Except nobody seemed to have told him.
David Zettner: We started hearing this crash! boom! bang! two doors down in Willie’s [new] room. It was 1 a.m. So we called Paul. He went in there and when he came out, he said, ‘It’s OK. We’re going to have to pay for that room though!’ Willie was practising karate and had kicked out all the lights in the ceiling. Poor guy, I don’t think he even remembered doing it.
English simply lit up a joint for Nelson and they smoked ‘until his head was literally under the table’. He was put to bed and the next day woke up in a ransacked room, asking innocently, ‘What happened?’ Alcohol unleashed a depressive rage that worried his friends, but marijuana seemed to tame him. Both he and his closest friends have commented how it acts like medicine, how it calms him and makes him see clearly. He is ‘hostile’ without it, claims Johnny Bush, and long ago reached the stage where he struggles to function without it.
Paul English: When Willie drank he was a terrible drunk. He knows it, he really does. Willie’s not [a happy drunk]. He was the kind of drunk who doesn’t know anything that happened. He’d always want to drive, somehow I’d have to catch him and get his feet on the ground so he can’t run away from me. I remember this one thing very vividly: he had a new Lincoln – this was in Nashville – and he kicked the door then he tried to get in. I finally got the keys off him and said, ‘I’m driving.’ I pulled him by the belt into the car and said, ‘You don’t want to hurt my friends. You don’t want to get arrested or anything?’ ‘Awww no, I wouldn’t do that.’ Then he tried to jump out! That’s the kind of drunk he is. He started kicking the window, and he kicked that window about three inches out. It’s better for him to smoke that marijuana. He don’t get out of it. He says he smokes to get normal. He don’t get high, he gets normal. And I believe him.
It was a symptom of unhappiness, and by the late-60s Nelson was actively feeling around and asking some serious spiritual questions, and there is little doubt that his escalating use of marijuana was a factor in some of the answers he would later come up with. Having Paul English on the road made access to drugs easier all round. He could arrange safe and regular supplies through his contacts, paying $15–20 for a can – or a lid as they called it – and spread it around. Other drug use was limited. The band had all been slipped a Mickey Finn containing some kind of horse tranquilliser before a show in Fort Worth which caused them to have a nightmarish onstage experience, shaking and sweating through gritted teeth. Although Nelson experimented with hallucinogens for a short time, he found that his psyche wasn’t cut out for it. He had one too many bad trips and quit.
Willie Nelson: I was thinking I was going to have to go out into the mountains and face down the devil, and I finally figured out that I don’t need to worry about that shit.5
The other most obvious secession to the spirit of the times occurred when the band went to play on the West Coast. They rented a place in Hollywood on Sunset Strip and Nelson handed out $100 each for them all to buy some new clothes. Until then they had been wearing brocade jackets, frilly shirts and bulldog ties, pretty standard uniform for a country outfit. This time they decided to cut loose. English bought his famous black cape for $29, and added a sash, trousers and a shirt – the whole thing coming off like a cross between Count Dracula and a low-rent magician. Day bought a pirate-style outfit, Zettner chose a Davy Crockett costume, and Nelson bought some kind of fishnet shirt and a poncho. Of cou
rse, they were able to walk down the Strip in the late-60s wearing whatever they wanted and nobody batted an eyelid, but when they got back to Texas the reaction was somewhat different. It might have been that Nelson was already thinking that he could attract a hippie audience to country music and thus bring the redneck and the long-hair closer together, as he eventually was credited with doing in 1973, but it was still too early for Texas. More likely he was just trying to cause a bit of a stir. A fraught night in Fort Worth was enough to make them all think twice.
David Zettner: About the first twenty minutes of that show it was normal, then all of a sudden they turned on us. We noticed how they were coming closer to the bandstand: ‘Hey, what’s the matter with you? You queer or something? What’s that thing you’re wearing? What happened to you?’ And it starts spreading. They didn’t like us, because we looked like these hippies. It kinda scared me. Paul told me, ‘I wouldn’t go out there in that crowd. Just stay back here.’ It was fashion. We thought we were hip, man, but Texas was not ready for this West Coast, hippie thing, where men and women were both wearing the same clothes. We had to watch ourselves after that. We thought: Let’s go buy our cowboy clothes and get blue jeans again, and in Texas we’ll just dress like street guys. Save the other stuff.
Paul English could always get away with a little more than the others because he gave off the kind of vibe which strongly suggested it would require either a brave or foolish man to take him on. He was obviously packing something. He became a kind of protector for all the guys in the band, and several times he had to approach an unfriendly face and quietly ask, ‘What’s your problem?’ He couldn’t have been further removed from the hippie mentality if he had tried, but he liked the theatrical aspect of it all, as well as the fact that it wound people up and put them on edge. Nelson has always been an arch-antagonist in his own sweet way, and English could relate to that. Besides, the new look worked for him. Before a show at Panther Hall, most bands would appear on the Panther Hall Ballroom TV Show on KTVY Channel 11, hosted by Texas DJ Bill Mack. The show was taped at six o’clock and then broadcast at eight. English had worn his cape on the show and when he came off the bandstand there were thirteen girls waiting for his autograph. And he thought to himself: the cape, it stays.
Willie Nelson Page 11
