Willie Nelson

by Graeme Thomson

  Booker T. Jones: It was just an informal discussion of songs we both had admired over the years. Just a general acknowledgment of our similar admiration for music of the earlier era. That naturally led to informal jams and run-throughs of various songs, and Willie just said, ‘Why don’t we go to a studio and do this?’

  It was an irresistibly nostalgic notion. It was still just about open season as far as Nelson’s records were concerned. He was big enough and popular enough to be able to do pretty much what he wanted, although it would have struck CBS as ironic that aside from his debut smash with Red Headed Stranger his biggest records – those patched together collaborations with Waylon Jennings – were being released by RCA, the company who had let him go for $1,000, and not them. His other records were selling well but not amazingly so, probably because there were so many of them and the styles were so disparate. The record company were keen for him to keep on the straight and narrow, and his new project didn’t sound too promising. It is easy to forget in these days, when everyone from Rod Stewart to Robbie Williams has recorded the great American songbook with great commercial success, that the notion of tunnelling back to the music of the 20s and 30s was not regarded as particularly appealing in general, and was simply unheard of within country music circles. All in all, CBS were less than keen on the idea. Rick Blackburn, who had taken over as president of CBS Nashville in 1976, suggested Nelson should stick to the outlaw country market and perhaps write some new songs as well. ‘Stay with the mood that’s hot,’ he advised sagely.7 Nelson predictably demurred. It wasn’t just that he wanted to do this record, it was also that he felt in his bones that it had innate commercial appeal. He was always good at spotting the angles.

  Willie Nelson: My audience right now is young, college age and mid-20s. They’ll think these are new songs, and at the same time we’ll get the sentiment of the older audience who grew up with these songs but don’t necessarily know me as an artist. We’ll bridge that gap.8

  In late 1977 Nelson, Jones and the band set up shop in Emmylou Harris’s house in southern California, which she shared with her husband, the producer Brian Ahern, whose Enactron mobile recording truck with its 24-track recorder was put in the driveway. The sessions ran along very informally. They set up a Christmas tree with decorations in the living room, hung out by the pool, ate lunch in the kitchen, and almost as a by-product recorded the biggest record of Nelson’s career.

  Jones was vital in the pre-production process: he scoped out about eighty songs before the sessions, getting all the lyrics together and transposing the trickier chord progressions. Not all of the songs he dug up were aired, and the ones that were played really selected themselves naturally: ‘Stardust’, ‘Moonlight In Vermont’, ‘Georgia On My Mind’, each held a synonymous memory and meaning for Nelson from his childhood, taking him back to when he would hear Sinatra or Crosby on the radio, or sit with Bobbie as she picked out the melody on the piano. Jones had similarly close and warm associations to the music. There could probably be a profound sociological thesis built around the fact that a 33-year-old black man steeped in soul and a 45-year-old country shitkicker from Texas found themselves sitting in California playing Hoagy Carmichael songs, but that would be missing the point. They were brought together by music they loved, and were just playing for that love. There was no real game plan. The band were used to things taking odd detours and were happy to go along with the flow. There were some new faces on board: Bee Spears had recently taken a brief leave of absence and when he returned he was sharing bass duties with Chris Ethridge, while Paul English shared the drums with Rex Ludwig. Indeed, for a short period Nelson was touring with two drummers on stage. But the balance hadn’t really changed. They had all long ago learned to defer to Nelson’s instincts and better judgment when it came to musical choices.

  Paul English: Sometimes we have difference of opinions – I’m just talking about business-wise – but on the part of picking a song, I never do any of that. With music he’s the main man. He just does what he wants to do, and [with Stardust] people thought just like he did: these are good songs!

  Set up in the front room, they played live while Jones played organ. As usual, Nelson preferred a fast, no-nonsense approach, and one song led to another until it was more a matter of what to leave off the record rather than what to include. As was customary when he was working with a producer, once they were done Nelson left the leg work to someone else: Jones did most of the mixing, mastering, string overdubs, and also delivered the record to apprehensive and sceptical CBS executives.

  Bruce Lundvall: The next thing I know he came in with Stardust, and everyone said, ‘Oh my God, we’re selling all these records with Willie and country radio loves him. Nobody is going to play this. It’s all pop songs. It sounds like a Frank Sinatra record.’

  It only sounded like a Frank Sinatra record to someone with malfunctioning ears. Stardust is a beautiful and timeless and brave record, but every note is perfectly in step with the man who made it. Anyone who had seen him in concert, or heard much of his 60s output, could not have been surprised that he had made the album, nor that he had done so naturally and without sounding forced or fake. He has called ‘Moonlight In Vermont’ his favourite song of all time and it was ideal for his voice and phrasing. There are no rhymes in the song’s lyrics, they are a perfect, glacial prose portrait and hellishly hard to sing, but Nelson skips across the song impeccably. Throughout, Jones’s organ playing is superb, giving the music a church-like ambience. People asked: was Stardust jazz, blues, country, pop, soul? Well, yes, it was all of those things. CBS were essentially worried that it was too old-fashioned, too middle-of-the-road, that it would dilute his appeal and alienate his core audience. Initially, they planned to make it a low-key release and hopefully move swiftly on to something more amenable.

  Booker T. Jones: Stardust was the LP that wasn’t supposed to be released! If you could find the invoices for the first pressings you would see that very few copies were printed in the beginning. I for one held on tight to my studio tapes because they were all I had to listen to for a while. It wasn’t expected to sell big.

  Bruce Lundvall made a trip to speak to the programme director for WHN radio (now WEPN), an influential country music station in New Jersey. They reassured him that it was going to be fine. ‘This guy can sing the telephone directory, he’s that special,’ they told him. Wise words. Stardust was released in March 1978 and became the biggest selling record of Nelson’s career, staying on Billboard’s charts for over ten years and going multi-platinum. Its three singles reaped two No. 1s and a No. 3 in the country charts, and he won Grammies in 1979 for his close to definitive reading of ‘Georgia On My Mind’ (he and Ray Charles share the honours), as well as his duet of ‘Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys’ with Waylon Jennings, from Waylon & Willie. The cover of Newsweek said it all: he was ‘The King of Country Music’.

  The record did stick in the craw of some of the Nashville establishment. Nelson wasn’t nominated for any CMA awards that year, but in truth he was far beyond having to worry about that. He hadn’t attended the ceremony since 1976 and had asked for his name to be removed from the ballot in 1977; he didn’t like being in competition with his friends and peers, and he probably detected a whiff of hypocrisy about the whole proceedings. He finally showed up in 1979 when they awarded him Entertainer Of The Year, but by then it was abundantly clear that labelling him as a country artist was merely a badge of convenience. The success of Stardust was further proof that his instincts were aligned to the mood of the times, while his communicative skills as a singer and song selector were finely attuned to his audience. He wasn’t interested in elitism or musical boundaries.

  Willie Nelson: I [did] ‘Stardust’ and ‘Georgia On My Mind’, because I [knew] 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. If you’re a singer you
can get up in front of an audience and sing songs that you know communicate. It doesn’t matter what they are or whether you wrote them or not.

  He had once sat down with Johnny Bush in the mid-60s when he was banging his head against a brick wall of indifference and told him: ‘Of all the people who don’t like what I’m doing now, look at the millions who have never even heard me yet!’ He had always believed they were there. Now he had reached them.

  I NEVER LISTEN TO THE BAND

  WILLIE NELSON IS talking about his band.

  He has played with the same people for over thirty years. Two hundred nights a year for thirty years. Maybe 6,000 shows. And he still loves them.

  ‘I’m guilty of taking them for granted, a lot of times,’ he says. ‘Most of the time.’ He inhales deeply and considers the view outside. There isn’t one. ‘I know they’re there and I know I don’t have to worry about it. Being able to take them for granted is a compliment to them. Very same thing in the studio. I just do it and they’re there behind me doing it with me. We do it two or three times and we’ve probably done it as well as we’re ever going to do it.’

  The band are all here. Somewhere. Filling the space on either side of Nelson, just like they do on stage, waiting for show time, waiting to slip into a routine as familiar to them as their own reflections, the long, unbreakable chain of music that begins with ‘Whiskey river take my mind . . .’

  It is left unexpressed most of the time, but the idea of Nelson alone on stage with just his guitar and a bundle of songs he hasn’t played for a while is an alluring one. He knows it, but he won’t do it. What would the band do while he was out there all by himself? And what would he do out on the road all alone?

  ‘I’ve always thought that maybe, one day, when there is no band and there’s just me, then I can always do that,’ he says, rolling the idea around. ‘It’s not something I want to take off and do a year of right now, because I’ve got a great band and it’s so easy to work with those guys.’

  He talks like a thirty-year-old rather than a seventy-three-year-old. The restrictions of time are meaningless to him. It’s so simple with the band. They don’t even rehearse.

  ‘It would be much harder, in a lot of ways, to go out there just by myself. It would be a challenge in a way and I’m sure I could do it and one day maybe I’ll have to do it that way, but right now I’ve got the luxury of having the greatest musicians in the world right behind me.’

  He operates a benign autocracy. He does what he wants and he has a band which enables him to do what he wants. They are the greatest musicians in the world, and they know their place.

  ‘No, I don’t ever listen to the band!’ He explodes with laughter, and tilts his head almost imperceptibly upwards. He reaches for his lighter. ‘I’d never be that weak.’

  10. 1978–1984

  WILLIE NELSON: AS for being wealthy – well, what is wealth? There is just so much money you can spend.1

  In his breakthrough year of 1975 Nelson had earned $581,000. By 1978 the figure was $2.1 million. By the mid-80s it was somewhere between five and ten times that amount. It was, for the first time, more money than he could easily spend, but he did his best. It was not the usual tale of rock star indulgences, although of course there was a touch of that. He had a shiny new Silver Eagle tour bus decked out with the latest home comforts (video golf, computers, faxes, state-of-the-art stereos, television, VCR), and over and above the ranch in Texas – which, almost apologetically, had all the tell-tale trappings of Jacuzzis, bars, grand pianos and superfluous things shaped liked flamingos, as well as real, live horses – he had two homes in Colorado, an apartment in Malibu, and he still owned Ridgetop and dozens of other investment properties scattered around, in Hawaii, Utah, Alabama. He has always loved making money and the freedom it brings, but in terms of his creature comforts or his most pressing needs it makes only a negligible difference to his life. He demands very little and has no interest in material things. He likes the fact that money enables him to cut deals, to hustle a little and see what might happen, to set sparks flying, but the accumulation of wealth and the tokens it buys is anathema to him. He will give away the Rolexes, the expensive Armani suits and $5,000 cowboys boots that people give him without a backward glance.

  Mickey Raphael: Willie goes on the road with a tiny shaving kit, a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and a pair of tennis shoes. He picks up stuff, people bring him stuff. For his birthday – you wanna get him a Rolex, or a new guitar? No, I buy him socks and underwear. There’s no material object that I would ever think about getting Willie. He just isn’t attached to it. It means nothing to him.

  Above all, money was for spreading about. Nelson’s philosophy was simple: in the words of Eddie Wilson, ‘You get your hands on the cash, cover your ass, and then pass the rest around.’ He had always been generous in spirit and in deed, but the arrival of really big money illuminated the true breadth of Nelson’s philanthropy. His almost manic desire to give it away could be psychoanalysed as guilt, or even as buying people’s loyalty, but it was far too widespread and instinctive for that. It really began with wanting the people around him – his family, his Family Band and crew, his friends – to be well looked after and comfortable. It was good for his karma.

  He bought a pool hall for his father in Austin and called it – honestly if unimaginatively – Willie’s Pool Hall, where Ira could play a little music with his band and be settled. He cut Paul English a share of his song publishing company, Willie Nelson Music, first at ten per cent, then at twenty per cent. When the company was sold in 1990, English pocketed $360,000. Simply from hitting his drums with a stick, English earned $150,000 in 1978, an enormous amount for a hired hand. The rest of the band were all well paid, well fed and well looked after. They weren’t on retainers, but because they toured so frequently and would get a cut of any album money if they played on it, they really could have no complaints financially. And if they were not quite treated as equals – after all, the entire operation was designed to ensure Nelson didn’t have to even think about what he was doing next, it would just happen, and they were all part of that hierarchy – they were certainly treated like human beings.

  Mickey Raphael: The other musicians I’ve met on the road, they meet Willie and they say, ‘Man, we’ve worked with these really big stars but they don’t talk to us. They don’t even acknowledge we’re there. We’re like punch-the-clock employees. So you’ve got a great deal with Willie – as squirrelly as it may get at times, he’s a human being. He acknowledges your existence.’

  It was a laudable attitude and it came as naturally to him as breathing. It stemmed from his belief in loyalty, reincarnation and karma. The more good he did this time around the better off he would be in the next life. He wasn’t always able to put aside the basic temptations of the here-and-now in return for the promise of his heavenly reward – especially when it came to women – but he felt that spreading his good fortune might go some way towards redressing the balance. He had a long memory when it came to those close to him or those he felt he still owed something. He gave Faron Young a $38,000 prize bull in belated repayment for the $500 loan he had collected in Tootsie’s back in 1961. He made Larry Butler, his mentor and helper at the Esquire club in Houston in the late-50s, a partner in a nightclub venture. In April 1981 he caught two planes and put down $6,000 of his own cash to play a fundraiser in Pleasanton at the behest of Dr Ben Parker, his old boss at KBOP. There were numerous other benefits: several for Native American Indians; for the mass unemployed in Lima, Ohio; for 1,500 prisoners in Missouri State penitentiary who had sent him a birthday card; for a local theatre in Hawaii; for abused children, where he displayed his singular sense of humour by suggesting that they play the old swing standard ‘Beat Me Daddy (Eight To The Bar)’ as an opener.

  A few weeks after Bruce Lundvall had left CBS in 1982, Nelson ensured his entire family got front row seats at his New Jersey show. When he learned that Lundvall’s son was in hospital for an operation,
he and Connie sent a pinball machine and balloons. He would hear about sick children and arrange personal gifts and photographs. When Waylon Jennings’ drummer Richie Albright got badly burned in 1981 working on his car, Nelson immediately handed him $10,000 to ease the medical costs. When his friend, roadie and business partner Tim O’Connor asked him to sign on as the guarantor for a $50,000 bank loan, Nelson simply gave him the money himself. Even relatively recent friends would find themselves swept away by his kindness.

  Booker T. Jones: My memory is of him being hugely generous with his resources and energy. He must have had hundreds of homes, one of which he freely lent to me to stay in. Others were occupied by his children. I heard stories of Willie making operations available for sick people and the like. He was hugely popular in the Austin area.

  There are literally hundreds of similar tales, and the majority of them are true. Sometimes he went too far. When CBS agreed in 1978 to let him set up Lone Star Records, his own record company, it was in many ways the crowning glory of his long fight against the system; his huge success and clout enabled him to release the occasional off-shoot record on his own label and put out other people’s records as well, all with the backing and support of CBS. It was a golden opportunity and a recognition of the dues that he had paid and that he was now collecting on, but instead of nurturing the label he handed its day-to-day running over to Larry Trader, who had no idea what he was doing. The whole thing fell apart almost before it began.

  The most noticeable downside of his generosity was that news of it reached out to a wider circle and attracted some vulturous characters. One of the other reasons Nelson had such a bewildering array of human wildlife hanging on to his coat-tails was that they scented money like sharks scent blood. Hangers-on, usually on the outer edges of the slipstream of his success rather than in the centre, would abuse his trust, siphon off cash, run up huge room service bills in his name and assume he had too much money and had smoked too much pot to ever notice. Even when those closest to him pointed out what was going on he was invariably infuriatingly obtuse and buried his head in the sand.