Willie Nelson

by Graeme Thomson

  Stagecoach was a much more successful and light-hearted romp. It was a made-for-TV remake of the classic 1939 John Wayne Western and his co-stars were a significant bunch: his new band of collaborators. In September 1985 Nelson had released an album under the guise of the Highwaymen, a catch-all for himself, Cash, Jennings and Kristofferson working as a somewhat grizzled country super-group. The previous November, of 1984, they had all travelled to Switzerland to take part in the recording of Johnny Cash’s annual Christmas TV special, which was being filmed in Montreux. While there, they batted some songs back and forth in the hotel room in a loose manner, at the end of which Jennings suggested that they might bring the quartet into the studio. He had, in fact, mooted the idea before, to Kristofferson at least, of Nelson, Jennings and Kristofferson working together on a kind of expanded Outlaw project. Kristofferson didn’t think it would work. At the Montreux show between 12 and 17 November, Jennings tried again and the response was more positive.

  Jessi Colter: It was like four big stallions trying to pull in one direction! I think Waylon had a lot to do with that. It was some time before Waylon re-introduced the idea, maybe Waylon and Willie talked, and then they brought John in. They found a way to do it.

  The following month in Nashville, Chips Moman was producing a duet between Nelson and Cash called ‘They’re All The Same’, ear-marked for Cash’s Rainbow album; Jennings and Kristofferson came by the studio separately to visit. The quartet began singing the Jimmy Webb song ‘The Highwayman’, which they had toyed with in Switzerland, about a creative and impulsive spirit which lingers through the centuries, from the dirt roads of the age of the highwayman to the era of space technology. It was really about the many guises and incarnations of the deathless Spirit of America, and the song would have appealed to Nelson’s sensibilities in particular. Once they had finished ‘The Highwayman’ they ‘did another, then another’, according to Jennings, with the result that an album was in the can before Christmas.

  The backing band consisted of some of Nashville’s finest, men like Bobby Emmons and Reggie Young, but the tracks were a bit sloppy, and featured a strange mix of voices and tones. Although a compellingly unusual project, in many ways they struggled to find a song big enough to accommodate them all. It was all a little gruff and nobody quite sounded at ease. Nonetheless, the atmospheric title track was a country No. 1, its success built on the back of a video film which took five weeks to shoot, each star playing the character they represented in the song: Nelson’s highwayman, Kristofferson’s sailor, Jennings’ dam-builder, and Cash’s singularly unlikely jet fighter. The idea to make Stagecoach really grew as an extension of the video experience, offering the opportunity for the four overgrown cowboys to build some more on-screen chemistry together. It was an ensemble piece, with Nelson playing Doc Holliday, and it wasn’t a happy set in many ways: there were tensions between the producers and the Apaches who were extras on the film, and Nelson ‘was appointed by Johnny Cash’4 to step in to complain about their conditions. There was even a threatened walk-out at one point over the lack of direction.

  In a more profound sense as well, Nelson’s time might have been better off spent keeping his own house in order. All the wives had gone down to New Mexico for the shoot – June Carter Cash had a small role in the picture – but Connie had made the difficult decision to stay behind to look after their daughter Paula Carlene, who at sixteen was now heavily involved in drugs.

  Connie Nelson: I knew Paula was into drugs. There had been some major things that had gone on, there was no question, but I couldn’t ever catch her at it. I just couldn’t leave her with my mom and go off and have fun knowing this was going to happen. I felt like it was her life. So I told Willie: ‘I can’t go. It’s not that I don’t want to, I can’t.’ It was going to be a real big buzz, but I stayed home and I did find proof that she was doing drugs. I put her into rehab in San Diego and my mom came out to visit me from Colorado. I put my mom on her plane a week later, she called me that night – and the next day she was dead. I went to her funeral. I hadn’t seen my oldest brother Mike in about five months and he looked bad, really sick. I asked him if he was OK and he said he had bronchitis and he was taking medication. A week later, he was in hospital with AIDS. He’d contracted it from a transfusion after a bad car wreck . . . it was just unbelievable. And while all this was going on, Willie is having an affair with the make-up girl on the movie. I hated him for that. There was a year when I hated him. Absolutely hated his guts.

  Nelson met Ann-Marie D’Angelo on the set of Stagecoach. She was a dark, attractive 29-year-old from California with Hispanic roots. As a make-up artist she had worked on a handful of movies, including Bachelor Party in 1984, and also appeared as a bit-part actress in the abundantly silly TV movie Starflight: The Plane That Couldn’t Land. D’Angelo became the mother of his two boys, Lukas and Micah, and finally his fourth and current wife when they married on 16 September 1991 in Dallas, in a service overseen by the Episcopal priest and Rosicrucian, the Reverend A. A. Taliaferro, whose taped sermons Nelson often listened to on the bus.

  He later commented that ‘they say you marry what you need. Kris Kristofferson married a lawyer and I married a make-up girl’,5 but it is unlikely he had such firm intentions when the couple first came together. The affair with D’Angelo was by no means a one-off during this period. In 1990 Nelson was sued by a journalist called Nancy Helen Watson, who claimed she had a six-month affair with him in 1985. ‘I almost felt like a virgin because I had never before experienced sex with that depth and clarity,’ she told the television programme A Current Affair. ‘And I don’t expect ever to find it again.’ Hence a rather optimistic $50m lawsuit, claiming that he broke his promise to marry her and that she also broke her ankle at his ranch. $25m for each catastrophe, apparently.

  The writing had been on the wall with Nelson and Connie for some time. The serious affair with Amy Irving aside, he had written the beautiful, self-explanatory ‘Is The Better Part Over?’ in 1984 (it finally ended up on the A Horse Called Music record in 1989), detailing the sad decline of a once-powerful, all-consuming relationship: ‘Is the better part over/ Has a raging river turned into a stream?’ Even so, judging by past history it looked odds-on that he would return to the homestead and the kids at some point, but this time it proved to be the end. It was much more than sexual betrayal. However painful, that had become somewhat routine and had been faced up to and dealt with before. This was a breach of loyalty, respect and support to his wife during the time she had needed him the most.

  Connie Nelson: He was surprised when I filed for divorce. I don’t think he expected me to leave him, but there was no way I could stay either. I just had to cut my losses. I just couldn’t deal with everything. I had to let [the marriage] go and deal with the rest of it.

  It would take her some years to forgive him, but the bond was too strong to be severed for ever. They divorced in 1988 and she toyed with writing a tell-all book, but eventually abandoned the idea. Paula Carlene came through rehab and went on the Oprah Winfrey Show to complete her journey through the standard American rites of passage. She now writes and sings and works as a masseuse in Colorado. Connie moved to San Diego to be near Paula Carlene and began to get her own life together again, away from Nelson. Slowly the wounds healed. Nowadays they are great friends, talking at least once a week and seeing each other regularly. She prefers, in the wise words of her ex-husband, to remember the good times.

  Connie Nelson: My brother died in 1990, and while he was in the hospital Willie came in with all the band. Now Willie hates hospitals, but he came to the hospital and saw my brother. By this time I knew all the AIDS patients in every room, and while he was there Willie went with me and visited every single one. After he’d left I thought, What’s really, really important? Willie did this for me and my brother and all these people. This is the real Willie. How can I hate him? I just kind of put things in perspective – that he’s a good guy. The marriage just didn’t work.
He had a different view of marriage than I did.

  The impact of her departure on Nelson is hard to gauge. Those closest to him unanimously vote Connie as their favourite of all the wives and maintain that he lacks something without her. There have been grumblings about Annie, or the ‘new wife’ as she is still called, nearly twenty years after they got together. Merle Haggard, like some playground rebel whose partner in crime starts dating the prom queen, mutters that ‘she doesn’t like me. She don’t like me, I don’t know why. Maybe because Willie likes me. I’m hoping that’s what it is.’

  Others at Pedernales have less kind things to say. Annie bases herself in Maui and has never really relished spending a lot of time in Texas. She is involved in political activism and environmental issues and chooses a quiet life for herself and her children. She will bring her boys, both musicians, out on the road in the summer, but other than that she leads her own life. She possibly didn’t envisage having to spend her married life competing for her husband’s affections with a coterie of frequently stoned, no-nonsense, good-time Southern gentlemen who could also lay claim to being ‘family’. She has never gone out of her way to court Nelson’s entourage.

  David Zettner: Connie was the favourite. She was the darling. All the musicians loved her. Everybody loves Connie. Willie still loves Connie! She was the one who put the life in him. She was always thinking for him. This new wife, I don’t know if she does that for Willie. Her first trip into meeting us, we were recording in the big studio, and we could tell she was either scared or something. She didn’t want to say much anyhow. I never really did get to know her before she bought that place down in [Maui]. I don’t think she wanted to be that friendly with all of us. Roger Miller told me right before he died: ‘Yeah, the new wife comes in, the old friends go out.’ Of course, Willie’s deal is that there are a bunch of us!

  The usual relentless round of touring was continuing apace, although basic human fallibility made the occasional attempt at slowing down the bus a little. Nelson fractured his left thumb – on his chord-forming hand – riding his bicycle at home in May 1986. It made guitar playing impossible and meant he had to take the best part of two months off the road leading up to Farm Aid II, although it had no long-term repercussions on his playing. In April 1987, Paul English suffered the effects of smoke inhalation during a fire at his home in Dallas caused by sawdust catching alight, which caused $150,000 worth of damage to the building and $50,000 worth to its contents, including gold discs, equipment and old memorabilia. It also had another impact.

  Paul English: I can’t smoke [pot], not since 1987 when my house burned down. I was in it. I got lung damage so I can’t inhale anything. But that’s all right. Pot is a thing that comes and goes with me, and it came and it went.

  Marijuana was still firmly on the agenda for Nelson and many of his cohorts, but the insanity of the Family Band’s cocaine years had largely passed. Things had settled down. Nelson smoked his weed, played video golf, watched movies, jogged and hit the stage night after night, while road manager David Anderson juggled the co-ordinates, handling communications between Nelson’s HQs in Connecticut and Austin and his mobile office, situated in a cubbyhole under a bunk bed on the bus. It was furnished with an IBM XT computer, a fax machine and photocopier, a modular phone, a cheque writer and a machine gun, and in this cramped space the outside world and Willie Nelson somehow connected. Elsewhere on the bus, christened first Honeysuckle Rose then Honeysuckle Rose II, there was satellite TV, comfortable couches, a kitchen well stocked with vegetables and watermelon, thick velvet curtains to maintain a little privacy, mahogany panelling on the walls and heavy carpeting underfoot. Bee was the practical joker, horsing around, gaffer taping shut the doors on the bus where others were asleep. ‘Just too much free time,’ says Mickey Raphael.

  There was still a smattering of the old, heavy vibe, provided by the likes of Larry Gorham, his bodyguard and an ex-Hell’s Angel, but a seat on the bus was just as likely to be occupied by a man from Wrangler jeans, with whom Nelson had just signed a 3-year, $7 million sponsorship deal. The deal allowed Wrangler to promote one hundred of his concerts each year and distribute front row tickets to their dealers. The outlaw movement had always been a corporate-driven notion, this was just a more overtly commercial use of the brand name. Nelson now occupied a unique niche in American music and indeed culture: the benign face of the anti-establishment, wearing rebellion as a logo. He would endorse the ‘Don’t Mess With Texas’ anti-litter campaign in 1989: the dope-smoking pirate urging the nation’s youth to put their roaches and Rizlas neatly in the nearest bin.

  Musically, he was spreading himself far too thin and suffering from burn-out. He was not alone: Dylan, Bowie, Neil Young, Johnny Cash and others were all struggling to understand where they fitted into the rather barren musical landscape of the mid-80s. Nelson occupied a safe haven in the sense that he was a celebrity who no longer needed to make hit records in order to keep doing what he loved, but his releases were increasingly disjointed, containing mere moments rather than whole sides of inspiration. His 1986 single ‘Living In The Promiseland’ was a country No. 1, but it was an unexceptional, all too socially aware slice of rock-tinged MOR, taken from the equally unexceptional, jumbled up and often somnambulant album The Promiseland. His time spent hanging out with Mellencamp and Neil Young seemed to have turned his head, but the bottom line was that the bulk of the material simply wasn’t good enough and he in turn seemed suitably uninspired.

  Commercially, his star was waning. There were no further crossover hits on the pop charts, and his albums of the era were a paradox: schizophrenic and jumpy, and yet containing too many pales echoes of ideas he had already investigated with greater success in the past to attract anything other than a niche market. Island In The Sea from 1987 was a laid-back slice of old-time textures, including Hawaiian music, yodelling, folk and country, with four over-produced tracks by Booker T. Jones tacked on at the end; 1988’s What A Wonderful World, which again revisited standards from the early part of the century, was produced by Chips Moman and featured Julio Iglesias on, somewhat inevitably, ‘Spanish Eyes’. It failed to reach even the lower reaches of the pop charts, a sure sign that the formula was failing through overuse. Nelson seemed unconcerned. He was simply doing what he wanted.

  His collaboration with Fred Foster on A Horse Called Music in 1989 promised much, and delivered to a certain extent. Foster had produced Nelson’s magnificent ‘Forgiving You Was Easy’ back in 1984, not to mention ‘I Never Cared For You’ in 1964, and often encouraged Nelson to keep things clear and uncluttered. A Horse Called Music contained the wonderfully fresh ‘Nothing I Can Do About It Now’, which had been written to order by songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman. An upbeat country two-step in the mould of Lefty Frizzel’s ‘If You’ve Got The Money I’ve Got The Time’, it was his last solo country No. 1 to date and featured such absolutely on-the-money lyrics that most people assumed that Nelson had written it himself: ‘And I could cry for the time I’ve wasted/ But that’s a waste of time and tears/And I know just what I’d change/ If I went back in time somehow/ But there’s nothing I can do about it now.’

  The song was embraced by his slightly disaffected constituency in the south-east as a kind of homecoming, and he sang it with an energy and abandon that had become rare. The track clearly highlighted his dilemma: such songs were hard to come by, and if he wasn’t going to write them himself then there were few people that could. Elsewhere there were the usual re-recordings of his own classic songs – in this case ‘Mr Record Man’ and ‘I Never Cared For You’ – and other people’s songs, like ‘If I Were A Painting’, which couldn’t cope with the company they were keeping. A Horse Called Music also included the poignant waltz of ‘Is The Better Part Over?’, his long, slow farewell to Connie which tracked the universal cycle of a relationship’s fast, bright beginning and slow, regretful ending. Foster counts it as his favourite Nelson song. Significantly, he used the demo version.

 
Fred Foster: It’s such a great song. We tried to do it with the band two or three times and never could make it. I said, ‘Willie, just you and the guitar is so great, can I just take it and let me play with it?’ He said, ‘Sure, I’ll trust you.’ I took him just him and the guitar, it’s magic, but I wanted to do something because the song was so special. I took it to Nashville and created an overture on the strings. Just the strings and a bass that I added to Willie. I just think it was brilliant. I think it would have been a hit single if Columbia would have released it.

  Even on stage, the first and last bastion of Nelson’s art, the real beating pulse of his music down through the years, things had become tame, a bit predictable. Many reviewers had cottoned on to the seemingly lazy, perfunctory concerts. Nashville session supremo Grady Martin had joined on third guitar, but little changed: if you caught Nelson as he wound his way around the country (and there was a good chance you would, he was still on tour for nine months out of every twelve), you either accepted and embraced the very narrow parameters in which he and the band would work or you were going to come away disappointed and a little confused.

  The sets were virtually identical night after night and unsurprisingly low on energy. He opened with ‘Whiskey River’, played a medley of ‘Funny How Time Slips Away’, ‘Crazy’, and ‘Night Life’ which gave each of those classic tunes pretty short shrift, performed mini-suites of songs by Kris Kristofferson, Hank Williams and tracks from Stardust, Jody Payne would get a chance to sing, Bobbie would lead an instrumental ‘Over Yonder’, there would be a handful of gospel songs and then a reprise of ‘Whiskey River’. Unvarying highlights from the rest of his classic songbook were crowbarred into the cracks. His vocals travelled between economical and simply offhand and disinterested. There was much to be admired in the instinctive, almost telepathic interplay between the band, but at what point does telepathy simply breed boredom?