Willie Nelson

by Graeme Thomson

  Elsewhere on the record, Nelson’s eldest son Lukas wrote and played guitar on ‘You Were It’, a neat little tearjerker – ‘I once had a heart/ Now I have a song’ – which suggested he was well acquainted with his father’s back catalogue and also had a viable future ahead of him as a musician. He wrote it when he was twelve. Lukas has become a seriously talented guitar player, specialising in sinewy blues in the Stevie Ray Vaughn vernacular. His younger brother Micah plays the drums. Back in Hawaii Nelson has his own little family bar band, and they go out and play for fun. ‘I’m very proud of them,’ he says. Despite the fact he raises them from a distance most of the time, he is close to his boys.

  As the Millennium rolls on, inevitably the shadows of mortality have begun to lengthen over Nelson and his gang. Many of his closest friends haven’t made the distance. The great Jimmy Day, the engine of the band in the 60s and one of the all time legendary steel players, passed away from cancer in January 1999. In the following years Nelson has lost a whole host of others who were close to him. Grady Martin, his old guitarist, died in 2001, while Waylon Jennings had been suffering for some years and seemed only to keep going through force of will and love of music. In December 2001 his left foot was amputated and by the following February he was gone, a victim of complications arising from diabetes. Nelson said little, but let the music reach out to his soulmate. He prefaced one of the gospel songs in his set with a quiet, ‘This one’s for Waylon,’ and kept his own counsel.

  Two months later Paul Buskirk was also dead, but not before Nelson had made one final record with his old Houston buddy, a retread of Without A Song called Nacogdoches. Johnny Cash, too, finally slipped away on 12 September 2003, and in July 2004 Ray Charles passed on; he sang a tearful ‘Georgia On My Mind’ at his funeral. His oldest pal, Zeke Varnon, is also dead, and there have been other brushes: Hank Cochran underwent triple heart bypass surgery in March 2005, while Billy Joe Shaver lost his son Eddy to a heroin overdose on New Year’s Eve 2000. Eddy and Billy were due to play a show that night at Poodie Locke’s Hilltop Bar and Grill in Austin, and Nelson stepped in to help Shaver make it through the night.

  Billy Joe Shaver: Willie put a band together and insisted that I come down there. I guess If I’d stayed at home there’s no telling . . . I held it together long enough to go up there and do a few songs, and Willie did a bunch. I didn’t do many because I really wasn’t capable of it. He was the best one I could have run into. I spent the night over at his house and we talked and he talked me into not doing anything about it, because I was so mad I was going to run out and kill a bunch of drug dealers. He told me it’s best to let God take care of it. He paid for Eddy’s funeral. I couldn’t make him take the money. I’ll never be able to repay him for it, but if I mention it he gets real mad at me. He did what a real friend is supposed to do.

  Nelson himself is beginning to take on a little wear and tear. Most recently he was struck with a severe bout of flu which caused him to cancel an Australian tour in early 2005. Under strict doctor’s orders, he was forced to stop smoking, stop talking and stop singing for a few weeks. ‘It was educational!’ he says, but his friends are a little concerned that he is beginning to wear himself out.

  Merle Haggard: I disagree with the length of his show and the amount of time he gives people autographing. I think he’s paying for it. He has given of himself more than any human being is ever required in life. I’ve told him that. I just don’t understand it. He’s the hardest working man I’ve ever known. Shit, he’s Willie Nelson, he don’t have to show up in the afternoon and sign autographs, but that’s his business and not for me to judge.

  In the past few years he has also suffered serious nosebleeds which hospitalised him, and a bronchial infection which turned into pneumonia. In May 2004 he was forced to undergo carpal tunnel surgery on his left hand after experiencing severe pain for much of the previous year. The doctor diagnosed acute nerve damage through age and overuse and recommended surgery, but Nelson’s fear of hospitals ensured he tried every available alternative before relenting to an operation. It took nearly three months out of his touring schedule, and even when he returned to the stage in July he couldn’t play guitar for a short time. Lukas backed him up on guitar, and Micah and Annie also joined the tour in the summer holidays.

  None of his illnesses have succeeded in slowing him down for any length of time. Immediately after his recovery from surgery he was back on the road, this time with Bob Dylan, undertaking a co-headlining tour of minor league baseball parks through August and September. It was the first time they had gone on the road together, although the two had a long history. Nelson had played the Houston date on Dylan’s legendary Rolling Thunder Revue on 8 May 1976, joining in on the encore of ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken’, but the quiet alliance between them had really begun with Farm Aid, an overdue meeting of minds between two of America’s finest songwriters.

  The 2004 tour was a logical seal on a growing friendship and mutual appreciation. Their instincts and art were not as far apart as might be supposed: each refused to be backed into a corner, and each boasted a bottomless knowledge and appreciation of the American songbook, everything from traditional folk songs to Stephen Foster, Woody Guthrie, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams and Paul Simon was devoured; each had a love of Broadway, Tin Pan Alley and the timeless art of Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael and the great songwriting teams of Cahn and Van Heusen, Rodgers and Hart et al. Each could now comfortably take their place in that lineage. If Nelson’s lyrical gift was flatter, more prosaic and succinct than Dylan’s, at its best it was no less spellbinding. Both had voices which could divide a room, with those poor, misguided souls who thought that neither of them could sing – in the way that, say, Mariah Carey could sing – being condemned to the dunces’ corner.

  Dylan was the undisputed, if reluctant, sovereign of the well-educated, middle-class, liberal cognoscenti, each morsel of his life and lyrics endlessly swallowed, regurgitated and re-consumed. Nelson’s status was equally deified among the less culturally visible members of the country’s blue-collar population, but he was largely free from the attentions of such overwrought analysis, principally due to plain old snobbery. Both were regarded as leaders, as teachers, and while Dylan has strained every sinew trying to deconstruct and re-assemble his myth into new and unsettling shapes, deep down there is the sense that Nelson is happy with his role and really does regard himself as being born for a singular purpose; that he might really be, as one of the magician-priests on his Hawaiian island home of Maui once claimed, an Old King born to bring native races together. In the words of Dylan, ‘he is a philosopher-poet who gets to the heart of it in a quick way’.

  On tour, it was an interesting contrast: Dylan mixing it up every night, throwing in obscurities from his back catalogue, messing with the arrangements, playing the piano rather than the guitar. Then there was Nelson, throwing down an hour of greatest hits, so ingrained in his mind that he virtually breathed it, although because of his recent surgery he was playing less guitar and things sounded a little different. He even opened with ‘Living In The Promiseland’ instead of ‘Whiskey River’, the kind of thing that makes the superstitious consult the skies for strange and ominous signs. Dylan allowed no one backstage, insisting on a clear run from dressing room to stage, whereas it would take Nelson thirty minutes to get through the autograph hunters, smiling all the way. They hung out a little together, Dylan enjoying the fact that Nelson had his children with him on the bus and on stage.

  Above all, the tour was a gratifying, almost moving experience. To see two of the genuine musical greats from the past half-century doing what they do best without any fuss or fancy embellishment was to jump aboard a rolling exhibition of living musical history, for between them Dylan and Nelson cover almost all the ground of the past fifty years of American music, rap and hip hop excluded. And as the recent years of bereavement indicated, it was an opportunity to glimpse a dying breed in their natural habitat, like seeing two rare o
ld birds take flight together. They enjoyed it so much they repeated the exercise again in the summer of 2005, a more worthy use of Nelson’s time and talents than his role as Uncle Jesse in the witless big screen version of The Dukes Of Hazzard which came out around the same time.

  For some the lure of the highway is endless, and at the final end what Nelson is left with is the road. The bus, the band, the songs and the road. It is virtually impossible to over-emphasise just how much of his life has been spent touring. A glance at his itineraries from as far back as 1986 make for exhausting reading. Nearly two hundred days of his life neatly typed up and accounted for between April and December, for instance, is a typical example – the ‘days off’ marked on early drafts soon filling up as more and more dates are added. The name of the hotel and the nearest golf courses and jogging tracks are marked on the sheets. A 24-hour restaurant might be flagged up. On the page it looks utterly daunting: Humboldt, California one week, Fayetteville, North Carolina the next, and on and on, as spring turns to winter, as 1986 turns to 1987, as the 80s turn into the 90s and on into the new Millennium, which also fails to stop the show. In 2005 he played around 150 dates, which doesn’t account for the off-days inbetween the shows which are also spent travelling.

  To most observers it looks like life with all the sharp corners cut off, but it is the meat of his existence nonetheless. Everything he does, every record cut, every song written, every love affair conducted, every movie shot, every TV show visited, is done in the shadow of the big bus tumbling down the road. Everything else is done only with permission; he is leased out and quickly called back. It is the one true constant in his life, providing the backdrop to everything he has done for the last thirty years. It is his only real home and it is the reason he doesn’t really have a home. He has a sign which reads: ‘He who lives by the song will die by the road,’ and he seems hell-bent on proving it. It will be a most unkind conspiracy of fate if he ends up taking his leave anywhere other than on his bus or on a stage.

  David Zettner: Every time he has a birthday I ask him, ‘Well this year Willie, what’s your words of wisdom?’ On his sixty-ninth birthday he said, ‘At this age you buy licence to be senile automatically at will. You don’t have to remember shit!’ This year I asked him, ‘How do you want to be found, Will? How do you want to go out?’ That kind of set him back a little bit. I thought, uh oh! Then he said, ‘You know, I think I’d rather be found lying backstage between the third and fourth set.’ And that’s it. Cool. I notice he didn’t get mad at me this time about negativity. He wants to rock – out. We’ll get a phone call one day.

  Things have changed out there, of course. It’s calmer now. Most of the band don’t even smoke marijuana any more; Mickey Raphael might have half a glass of wine with his dinner, but he is more likely to be jogging, using the hotel gym or doing his laundry than anything else. That’s not to say that the crew don’t still have a little wildness in them and around them, but the scene is nothing like it once was. Paul English is still the band leader, the man who commands instant respect, the ultimate moral policeman, but he is no longer feared. He no longer rules with an iron fist. Nowadays his bond with the band has settled into a paternal relationship of mutual affection.

  Paul English: I call them my boys, my young boys, because they’re always getting squabbling and I’m the one who tries to straighten them out. They love me, I know that, and they know that I care about them too. When I go home, I’m with one family but I’m away from my other family. I really have no friends at home. I have my family. Out here, I have my friends and family. We’ve got a lot of good guys. They’ve grown up out here. Mickey was 21 years old. David Anderson was 18 years old, now he’s about 57. Poodie Locke has been with us 28 years, Buddy Prewitt [lighting director] 26 years. Tom Hawkins, the piano tuner, 26 years. We’ve got a couple of bus drivers: Gator Moore, he’s been with us some thirty-odd years, and Tony Sizemore, he’s been with us 25 years. Billy, my younger brother, has been with us now 21, 22 years, and he’s a new member of the band! I’ve seen them grow up, that’s what I mean. We’ve been out here all of our lives.

  Life is a sight more comfortable compared to the days when Nelson would squeeze himself up onto the dashboard of a station wagon and will himself to sleep, or when they would all lie in the back of a Winnebago in sleeping bags with no air conditioning. His bus is as well equipped as any hotel: state-of-the-art stereo, satellite TV, Internet, good food. His personal quarters have all the relaxed trappings of his home, with paintings of Native American art, beads, necklaces, flags, photos of his boys, a hand-carved wooden king-size bed, guitars, music, books. He keeps up with current innovations, listening to XM and Sirius satellite radio so he can still hear Hank Williams, and reading Dan Brown’s blockbuster The Da Vinci Code, which touched on mystical, quasi-religious themes like Rosicrucianism which are close to his heart. The book became a minor obsession. ‘He loves conspiracies,’ says Raphael. ‘Even though it was the No. 1 fiction bestseller, that was fact – historical fact. It was great, because [Willie] was digging through the Internet to prove and find these different theories. He loves that stuff.’

  His door remains open. Any of the band might want to knock and come in and hang out for a while, but most have their own interests. Nelson still takes good care of himself, jogging every day, eating well, drinking lots of water. Golf, meals and getting on stage to play their music remains the primary source of interaction. They have seen every corner of America and much of the world but have absorbed almost none of it. Bee Spears, who has spent over 35 years on the road playing bass with Nelson, plans to return to the road with his wife and an RV in his retirement and investigate all the places they have been. That is, if retirement day every arrives. As Spears himself admits, ‘You can’t quit. Even if you die you don’t quit.’ As the years roll on and the pace keeps rolling relentlessly on, there is an increasing sense of a destiny having to be fulfilled at whatever price. The road is a pact that can’t be reneged upon, a deal with the devil which has no crossroads.

  David Zettner: I’ve been in touch with band members and even they are saying, ‘God Almighty, we’re just at our wits end sometimes because he just will not stop. And when he does, that throws us all in a bind because we’ve got to sit and twiddle our thumbs. None of us know how to live at home.’ I saw a sadness in that. I thanked myself for getting away from that bubble. I think I’d have been very unhappy, making all this money and not being able to do nothing with it except keep making more, until you get sick and die – what’s left? That’s their life. I think the band at this point, I couldn’t say for sure, but it feels like they’re at the point where they just can’t give up the race. They gotta finish! They don’t care about losing their health, they’ve come this far and they have to finish.

  It is an extraordinary life. The hotels and venues might be bigger and better but the basic shape is the same: another night, another town, another gig, the same old songs by and large, and then back on the bus to sleep through the night until the morning brings another town, another scene, a new beginning. The family he is closest to and chooses to spend the majority of his time with is the one he keeps on a payroll: 5 men and 1 woman, the youngest at 53, the oldest at 75, living in a bus for a good part of the year, all there to fulfil the timeless passion of one man.

  Although some band members maintain a much clearer sense of their own identity – both personal and musical – than others away from the bus, all of them are defined by Willie Nelson’s lifestyle. Their lives are lived through his own. Then there is the crew, more than two dozen men spread over three buses. All still paid by the show. No show, no dough. The old way.

  He is full of energy. In light of his schedule and his age it is remarkable that he gets so much work done, and in light of how many shows he plays, it is above all incredible that he takes so few chances on stage. Unlike Bob Dylan, who keeps up a tour schedule which is almost as punishing as Nelson’s but who is constantly changing his set and – for g
ood or ill – chiselling away at the structure of his songs, he is content to stick to a tried and tested formula. It has, in some ways, destroyed him as a creatively vibrant and relevant artist. His records occasionally take the listener down new avenues, but a harsh critic might conclude that in concert he has become his own tribute band, reeling off the oldies to the converted.

  Underneath the surface of the songs all the band are improvising, playing with their own little parts each night, while Nelson toys with the melodies of his best-loved songs, snapping them often, working his guitar hard. No one on stage is locked in or told what to do. You have to listen hard but things do move around. Nonetheless, the lingering sensation is of a remarkably gifted man who has been content to let himself stand still on stage for the last twenty years as the musicians around him have tried to maintain an interest in the proceedings. There is no question that the repetition of the set grates a little.

  Mickey Raphael: The set is the same. I get tired of ‘Whiskey River’, but I’m not the guy in the middle. I asked him one time jokingly, ‘When do I get to stand in the middle?’ He said, ‘Anytime that you want!’ But he does love the songs. What’s weird is, we finally mutinied one time and said ‘We gotta do some different songs!’ He changed the whole set-up and the audience, like, attacked him! It was heresy, because they’re used to a set pattern, they’re used to these songs. He’s got so many great songs other than those, but they wanna hear these songs, and they really turned on him.

  In many ways his strengths are also his biggest weaknesses: his ability to communicate, his desire to please, his energy and his charisma – the very things that make him such a wonderful and regular draw into his 70s have also held him back. He could spend more time on his records and his songwriting and less on the road and the results would be more interesting, but that would deny him the intimate connection he craves.