Willie Nelson

by Graeme Thomson

  David Zettner: It was just charcoal and slabs and junk everywhere. All these guns were in there with all the barrels bent over. ‘What are we looking for, Willie?’ ‘Oh, it’s a box.’ Well we found a jar full of old [grass] seeds. We went through that house and we [tried to] figure out what happened.

  Everything changed immediately after the fire. Nelson had loved Ridgetop, it had been a true home to him and his kids and he had built a community around it. He was genuinely upset by the fire and immediately had to work out what to do. At first the family lived in a trailer behind the house through Christmas, which the children rather enjoyed, and then Nelson took Connie and the kids to stay next to Paul and his family in an apartment in Madison until he came up with a viable solution. In general terms, he had to provide a roof for his family. In career terms, he had to consider whether Nashville was really the best place for him to be.

  This is the first time that anyone recalls the friendship between Nelson and Waylon Jennings becoming really tight. Jennings and his drummer Richie Albright would come up to visit Nelson in Madison in their old black bus and ‘talk, talk, talk for days about something’.1 It is far too convenient to view this as a cowboy council of war, the inaugural meeting of the Outlaw Society, but it was a significant crossroads in both their careers nonetheless.

  Jessi Colter: Waylon was very concerned about Willie just going around in circles. His house had burned down and he was very burned out about Nashville, and Waylon was very concerned about that.

  Nelson and Jennings had been good but not close friends for years. Jennings was a fellow Texan, born in Littlefield in 1937, who had played bass with Buddy Holly’s backing band in the late-50s following the demise of the Crickets. They had first crossed paths back in 1964, when Jennings was playing a residency at JDs in Phoenix, Arizona. Jennings also had a Saturday afternoon TV show, and when Nelson came into town to play at the Riverside Ballroom, he was invited on. Later, Jennings asked advice about whether he should go to Nashville as RCA were showing interest. Nelson asked what kind of money he was making in Phoenix and – already disillusioned with the way things were working out for himself – when he heard the reply he said: ‘Stay right where you’re at!’ Of course, the lure of Nashville proved too strong. Jennings moved there in 1965 and he and Nelson became friends, without getting really close. There was a mutual respect and understanding which grew, fuelled by a sense of injustice at the way they had been treated by their label and a natural tendency to stir up trouble.

  In Madison they talked and a decision was finally reached. One afternoon in the spring of 1971, Nelson announced to his family and his band that ‘Crash’ Stewart had arranged for them to go and stay for free at the Lost Valley Ranch in Bandera, about fifty miles north-west of San Antonio. The ranch was closed, apparently in receivership, and consisted of a main lodge with a group of smaller cabins scattered over its many acres. The scenery was beautiful, and there were tennis courts, a swimming pool and a nine-hole golf course at their disposal. It was at Bandera that the golfing bug really hit him. With little to do and lots of time to do it in, he played obsessively and has been virtually addicted to it ever since.

  There was no sudden epiphany. He had been toying with the idea of going back to live in Texas for some time, but Bandera was only a temporary solution: he loved Ridgetop and planned to return after the fire. He, Connie and the children took the lodge house at the ranch, and all the band and their families came to gather around them. There was a new face: an eighteen-year-old friend of David Zettner who had been hanging out with the group for a while on the road, Dan ‘Bee’ Spears had arrived recently to take over bass duties when Zettner got drafted. Spears was the baby of the band. Zettner later returned to play second guitar behind Nelson for a short while.

  Bee Spears: They talked it over and they just decided on me. I was just there. I hadn’t been playing very long, only about a year and a half, but that was one reason why they hired me. They discussed it and said, ‘Well, he learns fast, and we can teach him what we want him to play.’ It was a good deal for them, I guess, and a great deal for me.

  Despite the tranquil nature of the setting, they were long, hard, slow months in Bandera. The records weren’t selling and the royalties had stopped flowing quite so freely. More importantly, the band weren’t playing many shows. John T. Floores Country Store club in Helotes was nearby and they would play there once or twice a month, but it would only bring in $700 or $800 and Nelson had to provide for his entire entourage until things started ticking over again. Many times Connie and Carlene would sit at the kitchen table and count out pennies, hoping to scrape enough money together to buy groceries. It became like a redneck version of a hippie commune, with cowboy boots and guns replacing beads and joss sticks. This kind of coming together was already common in rock music: there were already ‘family’ bands in San Francisco and The Band had come together in Woodstock, but it was unheard of in country music. The experience helped to fully cement the familial bond which had been forged on the road. The strength of the loyalties formed at Bandera have been severely tested over the years but have never been breached.

  Paul English: We sure weren’t hippies! We were just there hanging out, but we weren’t making any money. One evening we’d all have a big dinner at Willie’s house, and Connie would fix up a stew or a Hungarian goulash, and that would be great. Another night we’d have a barbecue up at Bee’s, another night Carlene would fix something up at my house. We all lived within forty feet of each other and we just sort of pooled everything we had, our cars or whatever.

  During their time at Bandera, Nelson and Connie married in Las Vegas, on 30 April 1971, Nelson’s 38th birthday. The date became something of a joke over the years. He has always been a keen marker of his birthday, and during the 70s the celebrations grew bigger and bigger until one year they both forgot it was their anniversary at all, so they decided to re-marry on 10 June 1978, in Nevada. There was another reason, as it turned out, why this was a wise move. When he originally married Connie in 1971, Nelson was still married to Shirley. They wouldn’t be officially divorced until November, so for six months he was technically a bigamist. Connie didn’t discover the truth until the late-80s.

  Connie Nelson: I had no idea! You know how I found out? I saw it at a convenience store on the front of the National Enquirer, because he had written his book: ‘One thing Connie never knew, I never told her, was that I was still married to Shirley.’ I had no idea. God! It’s just unbelievable.

  Nelson later claimed that getting married was the beginning of the end for he and Connie, that it added stress and took the fun and spontaneity out of their relationship. However, he thought it was an important commitment to make at the time, and it is one he has been prepared to make again. He has been a serial husband since his teens. It seems he can hardly bear to be alone, and yet can’t embrace or conform to the reality of what being married actually means. Which is where the Family Band comes in: a mobile family with him at the head, no conventional moral boundaries, no judgments, no expectations other than to go on the road and keep the show moving. Most families – his own included – crumble under the weight of constant flight, so he managed to create a family that couldn’t exist without movement, whose entire raison d’etre wastobe in motion.

  Connie Nelson: When he and I got married, he said the one thing he’d always wanted but had never had was a family. Those were his exact words to me. And I thought, Well, I can my gosh give you that! And I did, for a lot of years. I honestly think [the Family Band] is all a big part of that. I think family is extremely important to Willie, it was something that was always missing from his life.

  The shock of the fire and life at Bandera brought a lot of these deep, raw feelings to the surface. Things had been getting interesting around Nelson for a while, and one way of life going up in flames to be replaced by communal life on the ranch simply seemed to unify and clarify matters in his head, culminating finally in the creation of a truly marvellou
s work of art. The people who held the reins in country music seemed to want the genre to exist in a vacuum, but it was like trying to put a finger in the dyke as all around them the plains flooded with fresh ideas, social shifts and unlikely unions. In the last few years, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash had been forming a mutual admiration which led to Dylan’s Nashville Skyline and Cash becoming an icon of American music, way beyond country music boundaries. On the West Coast, the Byrds had cross-pollinated old-time country with their psychedelic pop sensibility, recording their landmark Sweetheart Of The Rodeo record, made with Gram Parsons, in 1968, which featured songs by the Louvin Brothers, Merle Haggard and several other country greats. They played the Grand Ole Opry the same year, to almost universal disdain from the country community: DJ Ralph Emery even publicly vilified them on his radio show. Later Parsons would form the Flying Burrito Brothers and delve even deeper into country roots on The Gilded Palace Of Sin album and beyond into his remarkable solo records.

  ‘Going country’ was not really a commercially successful move. Sweetheart Of The Radio bombed, but it was culturally significant. Where once there had been rock music and country music and a whole ocean of deep water in between, things were beginning to close up a little, although there was still much resistance from both sides. By 1970 the Grateful Dead were revisiting old-time country on their two records, American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead, laced with pedal steel and harmony and garnering great acclaim. On the East Coast The Band were recording ‘Long Black Veil’. Even the Rolling Stones were in on the act, recording ‘Country Honk’ on Let It Bleed. Country was moving out of the ghetto and into the slipstream of what Parsons would later define as ‘Cosmic American Music’, although it was generally one-way traffic: pop and rock were embracing and absorbing country, but country would always be a little slower in returning the favour. Nelson was perhaps a little ahead of the game: he had played Beatles songs in concert, and was aware of the influence of Jimi Hendrix, the Doors and Leon Russell through his children’s musical tastes. He had observed Woodstock in 1969 with interest and admiration. And although at this stage he was very much on the outside looking in, a peripheral figure without any power within the industry, he was aware that things were in the process of change: musically, culturally, politically.

  And yet it would be difficult to pin any explicitly political badges on him around this time. Admittedly, he did perform a song at a benefit in support of Democratic US senator Ralph Yarborough’s re-election campaign in 1970, and had written and recorded ‘Jimmy’s Road’ back in the summer of 1968, his most explicit and unnerving protest song. ‘Jimmy’s Road’ had originally been called ‘David’s Road’ and was based on a letter that Nelson had written to David Zettner when it looked like the bass player was going to be drafted. The name was changed, either because Jimmy scanned better or – as Zettner believes – because Jimmy Day undertook some pretty intensive lobbying. It was an eerie little anti-war song, but hardly political. More like metaphysical. He cut a zippy ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ at the same session just for balance, a bizarre juxtaposition of moods which pretty much sums up his later RCA years.

  But he remained a conundrum, or more likely a product of his upbringing and background colliding head-on with the times. He would always take each man as he came and had done his bit for race relations by kissing the black country singer Charley Pride on stage in front of a hostile cowboy crowd at the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, but would still use the term ‘nigger’ – non-ironically – in conversation and indeed even in print well into the 70s. He was living in a commune, beginning to grow his hair longer and sporting an earring, yet he was still spending most of his time with the kind of people many would dismiss as gun-carrying rednecks, the type of folk most hippies would cross the road to avoid. He later claimed that the gradual change in his appearance was primarily for mischief and effect: no one was playing country music looking like this, and it is tempting to view it as less a sincere engagement with the counter-culture than simply an easy way of mixing things up a little. He wasn’t a hippie so much as a pirate. He wanted to know, he said, what it felt like to be a nigger.

  Willie Nelson: I like to piss people off. I’d go around to truck stops hoping people would say something to me about my hair. Back before I was really trying to take care of myself.2

  He was getting more and more into smoking pot, seeing it as one of many avenues towards finding a way of squeezing some kind of happiness and significance out of his existence. His interest in kung fu and the power of positive thought had led him to investigate Buddhism and other more mystically spiritual avenues such as the Astarian principles of Dr Earlyne Chaney, Rosicruciansim, the writings of Edgar Cayce and the poems of Kahlil Gibran, which advocated the idea that life on earth is a continual quest to return to God. Nelson’s strong belief in reincarnation and his interest in psychic power and mysticism can be traced back to these sources. It naturally wasn’t long until the mood of the times and his own beliefs started to find their way into his music, albeit in the most esoteric and unusual of ways. He had something more profound than protest songs in mind, something on a grander scale. During the latter days of the Record Men, he sought a kind of ESP-based understanding between himself and boys. They would be the first telepathic country band.

  Willie Nelson: As you get more into it, you realise, hey, this is kind of like [a] universal thing. The universal mind and your own 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.3

  It says something for Nelson’s charisma and gentle powers of persuasion that he got away with this kind of half-baked stoner talk amongst a bunch of hard-nosed country shit-kickers. Of course, they were all smoking a lot of dope. For months on the road the band would get in the dressing room and lock the door. Usually the door would have been left open and everyone from stage crew to members of other groups would mill in and out. Now it was locked. Everybody would take a little pillow and they would stand on their heads in a circle – Jimmy Day never quite managed to stand on his head so he learned to lean against a wall – and they would begin deep breathing exercises. Then Nelson would say: ‘I’ll start sending now,’ and the band would close their eyes and attempt to receive. This was pure Cayce-ism, adopting a meditative state of self-induced sleep and attempting to take ‘readings’.

  David Zettner: Willie had all these books about everything from Buddhism to the correct way to breathe. He started training us about mind over matter stuff. We discussed it: where does this all get to? And he said, ‘In the end I should be able to send messages to you guys and y’all would pick them up instantaneously, and you’d be able to replicate it.’ Wow! OK! I never could get any revelation until one night we went out on stage. I’ll never forget this as long as I live. Big old show. Willie walked out there and started, and in the middle of ‘Night Life’ he just flipped into another song we’d never heard. Everybody went right with him. Another key, another beat. Everybody, just like that. After that show we sat back and said, ‘Man, it’s true! You can reach people like that.’ We all got into this thing real heavy for a while.

  Zettner still believes he and Nelson and Bush have a telepathic understanding. Naturally, this kind of behaviour didn’t go unnoticed among the other musicians on the circuit. There was plenty of ribbing. Other bands would watch them meditating on the bus and yell, ‘Man, you’re all a sect. Help!’ Faron Young looked at his drummer Jerry ‘Cootie’ Hunley one night and barked: ‘The only [telepathic] message I’ve got for you, Cootie, is that when you die I’m going to have you stuffed and made into a couch.’ But what is astonishing is that it seemed to gain Nelson respect. Primarily, this was down to the fact that he treated his group like equals, and they therefore seemed like a proper band rather than the star and a bunch of menials. They liked being with each other. Ernest Tubbs’ band would try and hide from Tubbs because he discouraged any kind of fun, and soon half of the othe
r bands on a package tour would want to ride on the Nelson bus. It was fun, but it was also interesting. He was not merely trying to use his music to bring people together, but to explore the concept of psychic unity among his fellow musicians and by extension, the audience. It is still the key to what he does as a performer.

  All of these loose strands first found a crucible on the Yesterday’s Wine record, which he cut in Nashville in May 1971. He would go on to record six more sessions for RCA before he left the label, but Yesterday’s Wine was effectively his farewell. It remains an astonishing album, and for all the alienating nonsense in the opening intonation about ‘Perfect Man’ and ‘Imperfect Man’ and his later talk about it being a concept album documenting a man attending his own funeral, it is in reality a very stark and clear cry from the heart. Nelson revisits the religious imagery of his childhood, rustles up old characters and reclaims old places, until finally the simple, beautiful universality of his writing cuts through to a calm, spiritual understanding you can physically hear on the closing ‘Goin’ Home’.

  The album as a whole denotes nothing less than a man giving himself up to God. ‘I’m born,’ he sings. ‘Can you use me?’ Looking back at his life, Nelson sounds like he is both giving up and starting again at the very same time, which is not very far from the truth. It is, almost literally, a rebirth. He was saying goodbye to something and would never be quite the same again: ‘Remember the good times/ They’re smaller in number and easier to recall/ Don’t spend too much time on the bad times/ Their staggering number will be heavy as lead on your mind.’

  Musically, the title track and ‘In God’s Eyes’ look forward to the stark, hard, old country of Red Headed Stranger, while ‘Summer Of Roses’ and ‘December Day’ nodded their heads to the standards he would later re-visit on Stardust. Yesterday’s Wine is all the more incredible for the fact that it was written by a man with his back up against the wall. Apart from ‘Family Bible’ and ‘December Day’, all the rest of the songs were new and at least seven of them were written on the night before he was due in the studio.