Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain

by Grand Ole Opry

  Also in 1961, Billy Walker introduced Willie’s “Funny How Time Slips Away.” And he very nearly recorded “Crazy.” Instead, Patsy Cline did later that year.

  “He had written ‘Crazy’ a year or so before,” Billy recalled. “I cut a demo of it over at Starday Studio, tryin’ to show the guy what kind of songs Willie Nelson was writing. And this guy said, ‘I don’t think that song’ll ever sell.’ Willie had gotten a job with Pamper Music, and so Hank Cochran came to me and he said, ‘Owen [Bradley] wants to cut “Crazy” on Patsy Cline. Would you let the “hold” go that you’ve got on it?’ I really didn’t want to, but Hank promised me that he would find me another song, which he did. It sold a million records for me, a song called ‘Charlie’s Shoes.’”

  After leaving Billy Walker’s house, Willie rented a place in Dunn’s Trailer Court. It was, in fact, the same mobile home that songwriters Hank Cochran and Roger Miller had once rented. Dunn’s sign, “Trailers for Sale or Rent,” was later used by Roger as the opening line of 1965’s “King of the Road.”

  Although stars were having hits with his songs, Willie’s royalty checks weren’t coming in just yet. He needed cash, so he turned to performing once again.

  “I was a songwriter at a publishing company that Ray Price was an owner of. He and Hal Smith owned it. Ray was traveling around, touring. Johnny Paycheck—or Donny Young as he was called—was playing bass for Ray at the time. Ray called me from the road and wanted to know if I knew a bass player, because Donny Young was leaving. I said, ‘Sure.’ He said, ‘Who?’ I said, ‘Me.’ Of course, I’d never played bass in my life, but I didn’t figure Ray would notice for a while. But bass players around the world would know it immediately. On the way to the first gig, which was in Winchester, Virginia, Patsy Cline’s hometown, [steel guitarist] Jimmy Day taught me to play bass on the bus from here to there . . . sort of.”

  Being on the road and carousing with his songwriter buddies when he was home didn’t sit well with the fiery-tempered Martha. The couple’s battles became the stuff of Nashville music lore. At one point she tied up the drunken Willie in a sheet and beat him with a broom handle. At another, she chased him over the tombstones at the Veterans’ Cemetery, which was near the trailer park. Martha was wielding a butcher knife. Willie was in his underwear.

  On the other hand, it was Martha who saved his life following a bizarre suicide attempt. Drunk and despondent, Willie laid down on Broadway in front of Tootsie’s one night, hoping to be run over by a car. Martha and some friends dragged him to safety.

  Despite his case of the blues, things were looking up for Willie Nelson. Songwriting success led to a contract with Liberty Records. He recorded “Willingly” as a duet with Shirley Collie. It became a top-ten hit in early 1962. Willie followed it with his solo top-ten hit “Touch Me.” He quit Ray’s band and hit the road with Shirley to promote their successes. When Martha found out that he was having an affair with Shirley, she took the children and left Nashville. Willie and Shirley both got divorces and married in 1963. They settled on the 400-acre farm in Ridgetop.

  And Then I Wrote (1962) and Here’s Willie Nelson (1963) were issued by Liberty as his first albums. Neither one sold particularly well. But his songwriting successes continued with Ray Price’s recording of “Night Life” and Roy Orbison’s recording of Willie’s holiday classic “Pretty Paper.” So Willie decided to quit the road, collect royalties, and try his hand at farming.

  “I took a year off and went out to Ridgetop and raised hogs for a year. It was more or less to take myself off the market for a while, because I felt that I had been on the road for a long time and needed some rest. I didn’t want to plug nothing. I just wanted to rest for a year and be a farmer. But unfortunately, I needed to make some money, too. I lost a lot of money raising hogs.

  “It was sort of a casual type of thing. However, it was an expensive casual type of thing. I bought a lot of hogs for 25 cents a pound. Then I raised them for five months, put a lot of weight on them, and sold them for 17 cents a pound. So I found out immediately that farm profits are shaky.” Shirley raised chickens. The children soon joined the couple at Ridgetop.

  By late 1964, Willie was bored with farming and itching to return to music. He recorded a few tunes for Monument Records, then signed with RCA. On November 24, 1964, he agreed to join the Opry cast. Willie’s debut as an Opry member was on November 28.

  “I was very nervous the first time I played the Opry,” Willie comments. “Because, you know, it’s the Ryman Auditorium, it’s the Grand Ole Opry, and it’s where Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams and my heroes had played. In fact, Ernest Tubb was across the street at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop. After I did the Opry, I got to go across the street and do his show [The Midnite Jamboree]. He treated me like I was really somebody. I said, ‘Well, heck, I like ole Ernest.’ He treated all of us that way.

  “The Grand Ole Opry has been here for so many years that the local people have a tendency to take all that for granted. They don’t realize what they’re missing. I think they should get out and see the shows more often.

  “When I lived in Ridgetop, I was 20 miles north of Nashville. I didn’t come into Nashville except to go to the Grand Ole Opry.”

  Ernest Tubb had been one of Willie’s boyhood heroes. In 1965, Ernest invited Willie to be the cohost of his syndicated television show. He wanted to help the struggling, fledgling artist, even though Willie wasn’t talkative or comfortable in front of the camera. Willie never forgot the superstar’s kindness to him.

  “I’ll tell you about Ernest Tubb. He called me just maybe a couple of weeks before he died [in 1984]. His band was breaking up, and at that time I was using two drummers and two bass players. He called me to see if I had any room anywhere in my band for any of his guys. Because he was trying to place everybody. And I thought that really said a lot for the man. That’s exactly what he was like.”

  While Willie had only modest RCA successes through the 1960s, his singing and songwriting were hugely popular among his peers in the Nashville music business. However, that didn’t translate into any national fame.

  Kris Kristofferson, who arrived in Nashville in 1965, recalls that Willie was the hero of every young songwriter on Music Row: “We were a little underground bunch of songwriters who took songwriting very seriously. We happened to be guys who were just absolutely disciples of Willie Nelson. Every one of Willie’s songs would be sung and analyzed for his emotion and his delivery and all this. It was a training ground for a whole bunch of us. We said, ‘Willie will never make it because he’s way too deep. He’ll never make it, because they don’t understand him.’ Well, he proved us wrong.”

  Waylon Jennings was also a Willie fan. The two met in Phoenix in 1965.

  “I was in Phoenix on tour doing one-nighters,” Willie recalls. “Waylon was over there at a club named J.D.’s. He’d been there for many years, I think, and he had a great job, makin’ a lot of money. We’d never met, but he called me and said, ‘Since we’re both from Texas, I thought we might have a little something in common. So you wanna get a cup of coffee?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ So we went down to the Holiday Inn 24-hour restaurant and started talking. He wanted to know what I thought about him leaving Phoenix and going to Nashville and traveling around.

  “I said, ‘You’ve got to be crazy. You’ve got a good job. Stay with it.’ Because I was out there traveling around with a six-piece band all over the world trying to make it. And I wasn’t making as much money as he was, right there at J.D.’s. Of course, we all know that’s not the important thing. He wasn’t out where he needed to be. So naturally, he didn’t pay any attention to me, went right on to Nashville . . . and did pretty good.”

  Willie was also on the road when he met his third wife, Connie. They met in Texas in 1968. She had their daughter Paula Carlene in 1969. Shirley left Willie when she found out. Willie and Connie married in 1971.

  At the time of the Ridgetop fire, Connie was at home with their baby. The farm also h
oused a number of Willie’s other relatives and many of his band members and their families. After the clan decamped to Texas, the house was rebuilt. In 1971, everyone returned to Nashville, where Willie recorded his masterpiece RCA LP Yesterday’s Wine, a concept album about a dead man looking back on his life. Despite his lack of radio success, the label had never given up on him. RCA issued fifteen Willie Nelson albums between 1965 and 1972, though they considered Yesterday’s Wine weird and noncommercial. After fulfilling his contract, Willie finally left the company.

  Atlantic Records was starting a country division and signed Willie as its flagship artist. His albums for the company, Shotgun Willie (1973) and Phases and Stages (1974), were the most critically acclaimed and best selling of his career to date. “Bloody Mary Morning” and his “After the Fire Is Gone” duet with Tracy Nelson (no relation) became modest radio hits in 1974. Nevertheless, Atlantic decided to get out of the country-music business.

  With the demise of his Atlantic contract, the Willie Nelson family, including his infant daughter Amy, left Nashville for good. This time, they headed for Austin, Texas. And that is where Willie found his future.

  No one was more important in developing a hip, young audience for country music than Willie. In Texas, he discovered that he was popular with both rednecks and hippies.

  “I think it was Big G’s in Round Rock, Texas, which was a highly redneck place back in those days. But there were a few little long-haired cowboys that were coming in there, and of course they got the shit kicked out of ’em a couple of times. But they kept comin’ back. They kept showin’ up.

  “Then I heard about a place called The Armadillo World Headquarters [in Austin], and they were also hangin’ out over there, where they didn’t get the shit kicked out of them. They were welcome over there. So I realized that there were young people who wanted to hear not only my music but a lot of good country music, but who weren’t exactly being welcomed with open arms in the beer joints.

  “So I said, ‘Why don’t I go down to the Armadillo and see how they like what I do?’ The manager was real optimistic about it, and sure enough, there was a whole lot of people who showed up. A whole lot of young people. Plus, there were a few of the cowboys from Big G’s who had ventured in there, just to see, because they’d never been around the hippies and the long hairs.

  “Anyway, they came in there and they mixed around. They looked around, and they drank a beer and did whatever they did there together, and they wound up not disliking each other at all. They found out that it’s not hard to like Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb. They found a common ground.”

  A 1972 “country Woodstock” called The Dripping Springs Reunion also showed Willie and the other attendees that hippies and rednecks could coexist, at least in Texas. Willie began staging his Fourth of July “Picnics” in the Lone Star State the following year. Still much admired within the music industry, he landed a contract with Columbia Records. In 1975, he and his band went into an ad-jingle studio in Garland, Texas, and recorded an album in three days for a reported $12,000.

  Like Yesterday’s Wine and Phases and Stages before it, 1975’s Red Headed Stranger was a concept album. Using his old radio kiddie show song as its title tune and thematic center, Willie wove together a western saga that fused original tunes with country golden oldies like “Remember Me,” “I Couldn’t Believe it Was True,” and “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” His label executives thought the spare, simple recording sounded unfinished. But it sold millions, made Willie a superstar, and brought him his first number-one hit, his take on Roy Acuff’s 1945 hit “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”

  Comments Willie, “I wasn’t doing anything at all except singing my songs the way I wanted to sing them. I had thirty albums of my own songs just sitting there. So I decided to do a song I knew everybody likes, ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.’”

  Around this same time, Waylon Jennings was demanding artistic control of his recordings at RCA. He once reportedly pointed to a photo of Willie on the wall at the company and told the label boss, “You blew it with him, hoss. Now just don’t blow it with me.” Waylon got his way. Journalist Hazel Smith described what Waylon and Willie were up to as being musical “outlaws.” RCA packaged recordings by them, plus Jessi Colter and Tompall Glaser, on an LP titled Wanted! The Outlaws in 1976. It became country music’s first million-selling platinum record.

  “I don’t know about the rest, but I am an outlaw,” says Willie. “I don’t know what the laws are, so I don’t know when I’m outside one.

  “We wanted to see the artist have a little more control. And that fight still goes on. I mean, every time you go to the studio, that’s the big fight. Sometimes the artist knows what he wants and doesn’t need a lot of help. A lot of times he knows what he’s doing and doesn’t get the chance to do it. And I think that’s sort of sad.”

  Willie and Waylon became an award-winning duet team with “Good Hearted Woman” (1976), “Luchenbach, Texas” (1977), and “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” (1978). Willie issued his Lefty Frizzell tribute LP To Lefty From Willie in 1976 and scored a number-one hit with a remake of “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time.” He suggested to Columbia that he’d like to make an album of pop standards. The company told him he was nuts. He made Stardust anyhow. After its appearance in 1978, it remained on the popularity charts for more than two years and sold in excess of five million copies. “Georgia on My Mind,” “Blue Skies,” and “All of Me” all became gigantic hits from the album.

  Robert Redford cast Willie in his 1979 film The Electric Horseman. Willie scored another number-one hit by performing “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” on its soundtrack. Next, the singer was cast in a film that was loosely based on his experiences, 1980’s Honeysuckle Rose. While traveling together on a flight, the film’s producer challenged Willie to come up with some appropriate theme music and was astonished when Willie wrote “On the Road Again” on an envelope then and there.

  “I really think that’s a good challenge for a writer, to come up with something to go with the story,” says Willie. “And I enjoy the challenge.

  “I’m not sure if ‘fear’ is the word. But I do wonder about myself, ‘Well, have I written my last song? Is that it?’ But so far, I’ve always been able to come up with more.”

  Many musicians find moviemaking tedious. Not Willie.

  “They’re a lot of fun,” he insists. “There’s a lot of waiting around, but that’s what I do best. Everything else is waiting around, too, I’ve always felt.”

  Along with Grand Ole Opry star John Conlee, Willie founded the annual Farm Aid benefit concerts in 1985. He picked up six Grammy Awards and memorably returned to Nashville for his inductions into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame (1973) and Country Music Hall of Fame (1993). Despite his early-career difficulties, he has never held any grudges or harbored any bitterness about Music City.

  “This town hasn’t really treated me worse than any other town. Geography really has nothing to do with it. What I was doing was a little bit different from what they were geared to sell. I understood what their problems were. I’m not sure they understood mine. I definitely knew the odds were stacked against me. They are any time a newcomer comes in. It’s difficult for anyone to get started.”

  Willie has always carried his wounds with grace. One of his most difficult periods began in 1991, when the Internal Revenue Service announced he owed a staggering $16.7 million in back taxes. He’d earned hundreds of millions since his 1975 breakthrough. But Willie’s generosity and cavalier attitude about material possessions are legendary. What he didn’t give away was lost due to poor investment advice. He was warned by the IRS in 1984 and 1988. In 1990, the agency swooped down on his home, studio, and property near Austin, seizing anything that looked valuable, intending to auction off his assets. He hid his famous battered, autographed guitar, Trigger.

  “When they came in and confiscated the studio, they also confiscated
the tapes that I had recorded over the years,” he reported. “So I thought a good way to pay them back was to put out an album—The IRS Tapes—with the songs they seized and use these songs to pay them back. And they thought that was a good idea.

  “I’ve known eventually this was going to happen, so I had a long time to get over my first reaction: I screamed for the first six months.

  “I’ve been broke before,” Willie added serenely. “I’ve been a lot broker than this. I try not to worry. Worrying will make you old and gray. I like for other people to worry. That way I don’t have to.

  “Actually, I think it’s the greatest thing that has happened in my career. I haven’t had this much publicity in years. And the sympathy factor is great out there.”

  He did, indeed, sell Who’ll Buy My Memories: The IRS Tapes. He also gave up all the profits from his 1991 “I.R.S. Tour.”

  After the tour was over, Willie stopped in Nashville to visit his son, Billy, who was back living in the Ridgetop cabin. It was shortly before Christmas. Billy was divorced and was struggling with drugs and alcohol. Willie invited him to come to Texas for the holidays, but his son declined. When he left, Willie thought everything was fine. Billy was found dead on Christmas Day. It was ruled a suicide. But Frank Oakley, who runs the Willie Nelson General Store in Nashville, isn’t so sure.

  “Billy had drank a bottle of liquor and had gotten drunk,” Frank recalled in his book The Nashville “Sidekick.” “Somehow a Venetian blind cord was wrapped around his neck, and he fell off of the loft, where his bed was above the living room, and somehow had hanged himself.

  “I had forgotten about the New Year’s Eve show coming up in Branson [Missouri]. When I spoke with Willie, I asked him what he wanted to do about the show. . . . I asked him if he wanted me to get someone to replace him on the show, or just cancel it. He said, ‘Frank, let me call you back within the hour and let me think about it.’ Within approximately ten minutes, Willie called back and said, ‘Let’s go pickin’ . . . I think it will be better for me to get back to work instead of sitting on the beach, grieving over what has happened.’