Willie Nelson

by Graeme Thomson

  None of this frenetic, electric last-gang-in-town interplay was making it onto record. Nelson released two albums in 1968, Texas In My Soul and Good Times. The former had been an easy sell, recorded back in August 1967 in two quick sessions. Nelson needed no bidding to sing the songs that eulogised his home state, while Chet Atkins believed it would at least have a ready-made audience: the clubs and honky-tonks of Texas remained Nelson’s primary hunting ground as a live act. He was back in the studio in December 1967 and March 1968, cutting the tracks for Good Times. It was an odd record, with some of the songs culled from sessions as far back as 1965. While attractively sparse in places – with just guitar, bass and vocals – elsewhere its two producers (Jarvis and Atkins) and three arrangers administered overdubs of varying quality and styles, ensuring it was ultimately a patchy, disjointed piece of work. One thing Nelson became brilliantly adept at when he finally gained control over his own recordings was creating a strong single mood throughout an entire record, but too many of his RCA albums were simply collections of disparate songs rather than proper albums.

  Paul English: He wasn’t doing anything with RCA. We were doing pretty well on the road, but our records weren’t doing it. They didn’t sound like us and we couldn’t sound like them. They were slick and polished, and we weren’t, by far, anywhere near slick and polished! Sometimes slick and polished don’t go with the common people – they like something real.

  Having a photograph of the artist on the cover teaching a woman in shorts how to grip a golf club didn’t really help sell him as a serious artist: in taking him out of his suits and ties, they succeeded only in making him look cheesy. The stand-outs on Good Times were the laid-back, tongue-in-cheek pop of the title track, which reached the nursery slopes of the country charts but was later taken to greater mainstream success by Jack Jones, and the jazzy, melancholy ‘December Day’, later worked over for Yesterday’s Wine and hinting a little at the more philosophical side of Nelson’s current predilections.

  The record also featured a trio of songs co-written with Shirley: ‘Pages’, ‘She’s Still Gone’ and ‘Little Things’, each one an essay in escalating mawkish despair. The latter in particular is almost a textbook study of knee-jerk country ticks: abandoned children with outstanding school grades, a broken-down marriage, even houses torn down to make way for freeways. If this was what life was like for Nelson and his wife in Ridgetop, then God help them. In fact, the marriage was in worse shape than even the songs which described it. ‘We were in a very bad period,’ Nelson later admitted. ‘Having terrible fights, breaking up and getting back together again then breaking up again.’6

  Having long ago failed in her attempts to keep her husband off the road, Shirley now looked on as he continued with his career and hers disappeared as she stayed at home and raised the children – his children. Who knows what private pacts were broken. There was certainly a little old-fashioned chauvinism going on: he asked her to stop writing songs, perhaps wary of the competition, or not caring to hear whatever home truths they contained.

  All in all, she was both professionally and emotionally frustrated, drinking as hard if not harder than Nelson, popping pills and generally running out of control. She was in and out of hospital, if not for her drinking or drug-taking then for her annual bouts of pneumonia. She wrecked numerous cars, once skidding for 200 metres as she mowed down post-boxes, fences and hedges. She threw her husband through a glass door – ‘He taught me just enough karate to make me dangerous,’ she said – during one of their almost endless arguments. When Nelson was home, he would often camp out in the hollow behind the house. She slapped the children, who – under Shirley’s wayward jurisdiction – looked upon school as a mere option. Susie once went 28 days without attending, while Lana, at 14, was dating a 27-year-old called Mickey Newbury and planning to run away with him until Nelson pulled a gun on Newbury and told him to disappear. Newbury was a Nashville songwriter who would later write ‘Sweet Memories’ and ‘(I Just Dropped In) To See What Condition My Condition Was In’, both of which have since been recorded by Nelson. Circles and cycles, indeed. Lana had other admirers, too.

  David Zettner: I was living in the house when all that occurred. I was 23 and Willie had this gorgeous daughter named Lana. Oh shit! We became two peas in a pod, which worried Shirley. She very nicely asked, ‘Don’t you think y’all getting a little heavy here in the house?’ So I thought maybe I’d better find an apartment to make it easier on the family. Willie didn’t really want that to happen: ‘I don’t see anything wrong with it, I enjoy having you around.’ I think him and Shirley were having problems. They were good about keeping it from all of us, but we just knew they were having a problem.

  All in all, his marriage to Shirley was a story with only one possible ending. In his autobiography, which is largely free of great emotional insight, Nelson recounts the truly horrendous moment when Shirley discovered that another women had borne him a child. It was November 1969, and baby Paula Carlene had been born in Houston on 27 October. The hospital bill had been sent to his home address, and Shirley had opened the mail to read the blunt, mechanical facts which confirmed that her husband had not merely been unfaithful (in broad terms at least, she must surely have known that was already a likelihood) but had now also fathered an illegitimate child; the one thing, of course, she could never give him. Perhaps the deepest cut of all was that the faceless woman who had finally destroyed her marriage was registered as Mrs Connie Nelson. She had not only stolen her man, thought Shirley, she had also stolen her name.

  It would have been scant consolation to know that, back in Texas, the so-called Mrs Connie Nelson wasn’t feeling much better about the whole thing. Like so many young women before her, Constance Koepke had fallen in love with the song first, and the singer second. Born on 6 June 1944, Connie was a Texas girl. Smart, tall, beautiful and inherently nice, she was raised as a Catholic in the roughhouse suburbs of Federal Road, east Houston, described by Rodney Crowell, who also grew up there, as a ‘hellhole’. At the age of twenty she was still living at home with her parents, working in Anchor Hocking Glass factory in Jacinto City just east of Houston, bingeing on British rock ’n’ roll and dismissing the country music that buzzed all around her as ‘twangy’ and headache inducing. Then she heard Willie Nelson’s ‘I Never Cared For You’ in late 1964.

  Connie Nelson: Oh my God, it was just haunting – the melody, the words, the voice. I just absolutely loved it. I knew when I heard that song that there was nothing like him. I would listen to the [pop] radio all the time trying to hear that song as much as I could, and one day the DJ mentioned that it was a crossover hit by a country singer, Willie Nelson. So I started listening to the country stations just to hear that song more.

  When she heard one country station announce that Nelson was coming to play at the 21 Club in the tiny town of Cut ’n’ Shoot, near Conroe, about forty miles north of Houston, she couldn’t resist. She and a girlfriend were booked to work the 3 p.m.–11 p.m. shift at the factory, but they both skipped work and headed up to Conroe at the last minute. They made no reservations. Connie and her friend were sitting at the back until Jimmy Day spotted them and motioned them to sit right at the front. This wasn’t fate, merely tactics. Connie was exceptionally pretty, blonde, blue-eyed, and Nelson wasn’t the first – nor indeed the hundredth – musician to have a piece of eye candy manoeuvred into his eye line. On the contrary, he was very good at it.

  Johnny Bush: Where do wives come from? They come from the third row at a concert. It’s the tender trap. Willie once said, ‘If they’re gonna bait the trap with pussy, they’re going to catch me every time!’

  For her part, Connie had arrived with no expectations. She wasn’t going to see Willie Nelson, she was going to hear ‘I Never Cared For You’. Or at least that’s what she told herself until she saw him.

  Connie Nelson: Willie got up to sing, we were right in front of him, and he kept looking down and smiling, you know. And I thought, Oooh, he�
�s even cute! Oh God, it was ridiculous.

  According to David Zettner, who wasn’t there but obviously heard the story passed down through the band, ‘Willie spotted Connie out on the dance floor – and it was all over. I mean, Jimmy Day went out there during the break and told this beautiful girl, “Willie would sure like to meet you if that’s possible.” She just jumped right up – “Sure” – and walked back there and, man, they were rocking and rolling from that time on.’

  Nelson invited Connie and her friend back to his hotel room after the show. It was an innocent and entirely routine occasion: around twenty people, including the band, friends and various hangers-on, spent the night passing a guitar around, drinking and singing and playing songs until the sun rose. Connie listened to Nelson talking a little and singing a lot and became smitten. He took her phone number, and every time he passed through town – which was a lot in those days, Texas being their main source of live income – she would go and see him. And one thing led to another. She became his Houston Girl. It was 1965.

  Though they continued seeing each other throughout that year and into 1966, they weren’t really an item. If she had even thought or indeed cared about it, Connie must have been aware that she was not holding exclusive world rights to the Willie Nelson franchise. Far from it. Even so, she claims she had no idea that Nelson was a married man with children. He didn’t wear a ring, he didn’t mention a wife and, anyway, she didn’t really want to know. She was, she confesses, in ‘denial, denial, denial’, about it all. By the time Paul English confirmed her unarticulated suspicions and told her about Shirley, it barely measured as a shock.

  Even then, English tried to twist her arm. The band liked her, thought she was fun and good for their friend. ‘It’s a bad marriage,’ English told Connie. ‘She’s in and out of the hospital, she’s sick, and Willie’s scared if he divorces her that something bad will happen.’ This was obviously a reference to suicide, underlining the extent to which Shirley’s drinking, depressions, drug dependency and spells in detox were laying her low. Desperate to believe there was some justification for continuing their relationship despite the fact that she instinctively balked at the idea of dating a married man, Connie felt sympathetic for Nelson. In truth, she had fallen for him with a passion beyond that which a mere fling demanded. She recalls an evening in one of the Houston clubs where she and Nelson and some of the band were sitting at a table having drinks after the show.

  Connie Nelson: This falling-down-on-you drunk guy off the street kept falling over me, and the table, and into Willie, and saying, Oh man, I love you so much, I love this song and that. And I was thinking to myself, ‘Oh God, will you just please leave,’ but Willie is talking to him like he’s an old friend that he hadn’t seen in years, as nice to him as he was to anybody. And I sat there long enough to just start watching the way Willie was, and there was something so gentle and sweet about it. This guy was drunk, so what? He was a nice guy, and he was a fan, and he liked Willie’s music. It made me look at the whole situation different, and at Willie different. That was exactly the moment when I knew I was in love with him.

  It was this easy quality which generally seemed to hold the key to Nelson’s allure for women. He was kind yet mischievous; the ultimate what-you-see-is-what-you-get person. Fundamentally rather shy, certainly not loud, he would never walk into a room and announce his presence. Then again, everyone would know that he was there, and they would also pick up on his vibe, which essentially said: ‘I know who I am and I’m comfortable with it.’ And it would also state: ‘I don’t really care who you are, just sit down and we’ll see how it goes.’ It was a slightly mysterious aura, essentially benevolent, somehow wise. And very attractive. There was no fakery in him, which is not the same thing as saying he was without a dishonest streak. He was capable of grave deceits, but it was all done with a take-it-or-leave-it insouciance. He would almost always give the lasting impression that being true and honest to his own heart was the best way forwards for everyone. It would have been a neat trick, except it didn’t seem to be a trick at all. As Connie would one day find out, it allowed him to get away with some unbelievably bad behaviour over the years without severing bonds of friendship or trust.

  After a while spent chewing over Nelson’s marital status, Connie’s conscience got the better of her. She resolved to back off sometime in 1967 and they stopped seeing each other for about a year. She embarked on a relationship with another man who, she discovered after many months, was also married. ‘He just flat lied, said that he wasn’t. So that was over.’ She split up with her married man in February 1968, and the very same night she heard that Nelson was coming into Houston. She went to see him, thinking – hoping – that perhaps he would now be available.

  Connie Nelson: His marriage wasn’t over, but it was still bad. And anyway, when I went back to see him that was just that. I was with him from then on.

  This time, she became more than his Houston Girl. The two were hardly a conventional couple, but they had known each other for almost three years, and Nelson was now ‘stone in love’ with her. In contrast to his marriage, every day they were together was like going on honeymoon. She would travel a little with him and he wrote the wonderful ‘Local Memory’ about her, describing how he would lie unhappily in bed – presumably with his wife – and be haunted in his dreams by ‘the hardest working memory in this town’. He first recorded the song in November of 1968, and at this point it sounds like he is documenting a doomed affair, a love that can never be properly fulfilled. Or more likely, that was still the only kind of love song he knew how to write.

  Connie fell pregnant in January 1969 and the goalposts instantly moved. Nelson seemed to see a way out of his predicament with Shirley. He ‘honestly just happened’ to be in Houston on the day she went into labour and so drove her to hospital, went off to do the gig at night, and then returned after the show to find he had a new baby daughter. The rest of the band stopped by in the morning with flowers. Then he returned to Nashville, and all hell broke loose. He had given the hospital his home address so that he could arrange to pay the bill, and despite Connie’s frantic last-minute efforts to get it stopped when she found out what he had done, it was too late. It was clearly a calculated and deliberate move. As he later admitted, ‘I ain’t stupid. I must have been tired of the secrecy.’7 He would have known that Shirley would read the letter – addressed as it was to Mrs Nelson, not to mention the fact that he was away from home much of the time – and that the information it contained would at long last have forced her beyond the point of no return; what’s more, he wouldn’t even have to go through the trauma of a confession. It was textbook passive aggressive and unbearably cruel, especially on a woman whose mentality was as fragile as Shirley’s.

  Connie Nelson: Maybe he was [subconsciously trying to force the issue]. Probably, when you really think about it. I can’t imagine any other reason he would have had it sent to the house. It was probably easier than telling her. Maybe it wasn’t subconscious, either! I never wanted to break up a marriage, ever, although consequently that’s what happened. I sure never intended it.

  A few screaming rows later and Shirley was gone. Nelson shuttled the kids off to live in an apartment complex next to Paul and Carlene English in Madison, where they were looked after for a spell by a topless dancer from Atlanta called Helen, who would leave them on their own as she ducked out to watch Tom Jones concerts. Shirley apparently made efforts to see the children, but she wasn’t allowed through. Nobody even spoke her name. ‘It was,’ recalled Susie Nelson, ‘like she had died.’8 In fact, she very nearly had. Stricken with pneumonia and alcoholism, she returned to her parents in Chillicothe, Missouri and fell apart. Nelson wouldn’t see her again for ten years, and even then she somehow found the good grace not to kill him.

  Shirley Nelson: I just couldn’t handle it. I thought it was my fault. Maybe I wasn’t a good enough mother. I never did think that Willie did anything wrong.9

  Within a m
onth of her leaving, Connie was installed in Ridgetop. If the freeze-out had been harsh on Shirley, it was also utterly alienating to the children. Lana, Billy and Susie had a new maternal figure to deal with, the third in their short lifetimes, and a new half-sister in Paula Carlene. Nelson introduced Connie to his children with the immortal words: ‘Here’s your new mother.’

  It was Christmas time 1969, and Connie could have had absolutely no idea what she was walking into. She entered a household that bore comparison with few others. There were visitors and guests of all sorts at all hours, Zettner was still bunking down in the basement, and then there were the kids: Lana was 16 and already pregnant (she would, with almost comical mawkishness, christen the baby ‘Nelson’), having replaced Mickey Newbury with another 27-year-old ne’er-do-well called Steve Warren, who was beating her up. Susie was almost thirteen, and frequently strung out on pot or tripping on acid; her father’s idea of bonding with her was to join her in her walk-in double wardrobe and smoke a joint with her while she played Jimi Hendrix or Doors records.