With his bib overalls and straw hat, he was the walking embodiment of his grandfather Daddy Nelson. Bobby Bruce, the former Texas Playboy who played with Willie on his Liberty Records sessions, got a taste of Willie as Country Boy when he dropped by Ridgetop after playing Nashville on tour with pop orchestra leader Lawrence Welk. Willie picked him up and took him home and invited neighbor Wade Ray to come over with his fiddle for a jam session in the living room, aided by frequent sips of white lightning. “Willie brought out some of the most delicious homemade corn liquor I’d ever tasted,” Bobby said. “Where’d you get this?” he asked Willie.
“The town sheriff,” Willie beamed.
Willie showed Bobby around his house, opening the door to the bedroom he shared with Shirley, then opening the next door, where a sheep rested on a blanket piled with hay.
“That was Pamper,” Willie’s daughter Lana said. “Shirley raised her with a bottle and she was always trying to get into the house. One day she jumped through the plate-glass door. So after that, we let her in.” Pamper wasn’t the only head of livestock being treated like a pet. Shirley had given all the chickens names. One of the horses adopted a calf named Flower. “The horse tried to cut the calf off from Dad and Mr. Hughes when they were trying to load it up to go sell it in Springfield,” Lana said. “We were all bawling in the truck on the way to Springfield. When we got there, Dad said, ‘Forget it.’ We brought her back and kept her.”
Tennessee to Texas, 1965
WILLIE WAS REALLY all about picking. Proof was the souvenir program sold at his shows; if he’d really been a farmer first and foremost, like the program implied, there would have been no need for a program. Even Willie wasn’t buying into his own hype. “I didn’t want to sit there and raise hogs and write songs,” he said. “I wanted to be out there playing, going from town to town and playing my music.”
When there were gigs, he’d take Wade Ray with him to Texas and elsewhere and work with house bands or pickup bands. After they had performed for several months as a duo, Willie enlisted Johnny Bush to join him again. Johnny had been barely surviving as a Cherokee Cowboy, making $25 a night to play drums behind stars making $350 a night. Tommy Hill at Starday would throw him some spare change whenever Johnny was off the road, with demo session work at $10 a pop, but Johnny wanted some of that front-man money, so he quit the Cowboys.
He went by Ridgetop to store some stuff at Willie’s.
“Why did you leave Ray Price?” Willie asked Johnny.
Johnny sucked in a deep breath and unloaded. “I want to record. I want to get something going with me. I don’t want to be dependent on someone else anymore.”
“Would you go with me for ten days back to Texas at thirty-five bucks a night?” Willie asked him.
Johnny knew that Texas was solid ground. Willie Nelson might be a minor celebrity in Nashville but he could pull in a thousand people at the Cotton Club in Lubbock, Big G’s in Round Rock, or the Reo Palm Isle in Longview on a good night just by showing up. Johnny took the bait. It was ten bucks more than Ray Price was paying him. Texas was home for Johnny too. Between the drive from Nashville to Memphis they’d done enough catching up for Willie to make Johnny an offer. “Stay with me a year and I’ll produce a session on you. You find your own musicians. You find the songs. I’ll pick up the tab. I’ll turn that red light on for you. Then it’s up to you.”
Johnny turned down George Jones’s offer of $50 a day to go on the road as one of the Jones Boys to cast his lot with Willie, which meant memorizing every gas stop and all-night café along the almost seven-hundred-mile drive from Nashville to Fort Worth along Highways 70, 67, and 80—a drive they would be making several times a month.
Johnny arrived just in time to join Wade Ray on Willie’s four-song recording session in June 1966, accompanying studio pros Jerry Reed and Velma Smith on guitar, Buddy Emmons on steel, Pig Robbins on piano, Junior Huskey on bass, and a full complement of strings and backup singers. Two originals—“One in a Row,” a phrase borrowed from Crash Stewart, Willie’s Texas booking agent, and “The Party’s Over,” which Claude Gray had recorded seven years earlier in Houston as “My Party’s Over”—would be the A-sides of his next two singles.
IN July, Johnny Bush and Wade Ray backed Willie on the album Live Country Music Concert, recorded over two nights at Panther Hall, Willie’s home away from home in Fort Worth. Chet Atkins was fine with a live album because the cost was considerably less than a studio recording and it could be easily marketed to Willie’s hard-core fans. To be on the safe side, Chet let Felton Jarvis—Elvis’s producer—produce and Chip Young overdub guitar parts and add some steel guitar fills back in RCA’s Nashville studio.
Willie was a Panther Hall regular, stopping in every four to six weeks to play the big room on Fort Worth’s east side or the Annex across Collard Avenue, Panther Hall’s own little honky-tonk that was kept darker than dark, no matter what time of day it was.
From the night Panther Hall had opened in June 1963, the building with the futuristic, eight-sided exterior that resembled a flying saucer was the country music showcase in Fort Worth and Dallas. No chicken wire was necessary to separate the bandstand from the audience. The dance floor was huge, the air-conditioning cold, and the surroundings nice, with long tables for seating. Waitresses dressed in western outfits. Even though pop tops had already been developed for beer cans in 1962, the waitresses or bartenders could still open cans quicker with a can opener (popularly known as a church key) as long as the cans were opened on the bottom, which explained why beers were served upside down.
Panther Hall was also Willie’s second television home. He played Panther Hall so often, he was a semiregular on the Cowtown Jamboree, broadcast live from Panther Hall from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. every Saturday to viewers in the Fort Worth–Dallas area to hype the show later the same night. The televised portion of Jamboree was hosted at various times by popular Fort Worth disc jockeys Bill Mack, Bo Powell, and Dale Wood. The primitive production was so notoriously horrible that “Buck Owens always seemed to take sick just before the broadcasts, only to recover in time to play the show later that night,” Bill Mack noted. Hank Thompson flat out refused to appear.
But KTVT was the first nonnetwork independent channel in North Texas and an early adapter of an emerging technology called cable television. In isolated pockets all over the United States where cable was available, KTVT was often part of the channel lineup, which meant the Cowtown Jamboree Live from Panther Hall had a nationwide, albeit limited, audience. Front and center was Willie Nelson, dapper in outfits that ranged from bow ties to a brown suit with a turtleneck sweater—a marked contrast to typical country music couture.
Willie’s relationship with Panther Hall had been cemented by Bo Powell, a disc jockey at KCUL, who started at Fort Worth’s country music station in November 1963. “I always looked on the record to see who wrote the song,” he explained. “It seems like every good song I was hearing was written by Willie Nelson.” The singles and albums that Willie put out under his own name impressed him too, which is why Bo was surprised to hear Panther Hall’s co-owner Corky Kuykendall complain one night, “I really like Willie Nelson, but he doesn’t draw worth a shit as a headline act, and he’s getting too expensive to bring in to open for somebody else.”
“Tell you what,” Bo Powell offered Corky. “Bring him in as a single act and give me thirty days advance. I’ll bet you a pair of cowboy boots I can fill this place.”
Bo had a 50,000-watt radio station to cover his bet. “It got kind of embarrassing,” he said. “After a while, everything I’d play on the air would either be a Willie Nelson song or Willie Nelson singing.”
By eight p.m. the night of the show, there was a line snaking outside the building all the way to Collard Avenue. Corky Kuykendall was more than happy buying Bo Powell a pair of cowboy boots. He told Willie about the bet and suggested he drop in on Bo at the station. “He’s really a fan of yours and he plays the hell out of your songs.”
Willie showed up at KCUL with a demo of a new song. He and Bo went to the production room at KCUL and listened to “The Party’s Over.”
“What do you think?” Willie asked. Bo reckoned it was a hit.
Willie had found another friendly ear in radio, which in his line of work was as important as finding a record label to put out your records. KCUL and especially Bo Powell showcased Willie Nelson with as many as three singles charting simultaneously on the station’s Top 30 survey. When Jack Clement at RCA called Bo to inform him the record label was going to record a live album on Willie at Panther Hall, he said Willie wanted Bo to be master of ceremonies.
“I’ll do it on a stretcher if I have to,” Bo said.
Bo Powell’s booming voice introduced Willie Nelson with all the flair of a wrestling announcer. The live music concert recording that followed validated Willie Nelson as a songwriter and a performer as he covered his own songs and songs of other composers. The material suggested he had eclipsed his earlier goals of being the next Ray Price or Ernest Tubb and was striving to be an even more distinctive voice.
The recording replicated the heart of the Willie Nelson Show. “Wade Ray was a ripping swing fiddle player and with the house band would just destroy the audience,” Johnny said. “Wade would call me up and I’d sing for a while so the audience would dance their ass off. Then we’d get the house band off the stage, Wade would go to bass and I would go to drums, and we’d call Willie up.”
Johnny would invite the audience to move in closer. Most of Willie’s songs were too blue or circumspect for a Ray Price shuffle. Instead of two-stepping, the crowd stood and watched as if he were a folk singer or sat at the long tables, drinking whiskey out of brown bags. Either way, Willie made them listen.
“It had a lot to do with me singing my own songs and performing as a songwriter,” Willie said. “I felt it was important that they understood what I was saying. A loud band behind me would interfere with what I was trying to say. If they can’t understand my lyrics, which were a little different to begin with, or some of the chord progressions which were different, too much production would be confusing.”
The stripped-down ensemble with Willie playing guitar covered the Beatles’“Yesterday” with its “weird changes” that the three had rehearsed back in Ridgetop. Willie’s fealty to Bob Wills’s philosophy of presentation by never giving the audience time to catch their breath was underscored by three medleys of originals. The first strung together “Mr. Record Man,” “Hello Walls,” and “One Day at a Time.” The second medley of “The Last Letter” and “Half a Man” emphasized sad themes. The third medley of “Opportunity to Cry” and “Permanently Lonely” was even sadder.
Unlike Wills’s music, most of the album’s material was not dance tunes but songs that told a story. One in particular, “I Just Can’t Let You Say Goodbye,” bordered on psycho-creepy. Willie had read about a crime of passion in the newspaper and used his imagination to take it one step further. Delivered in an up-tempo Latin rhythm, it was told from the perspective of a man so distraught over his breakup and so upset by the bad things his lover is saying to him that he gets pissed off and strangles her to death. Country music was a hotbed of twisted tales. Next to songs such as “I’m Gonna Kill You” (“...and forever shut your cheatin’ bedroom eyes /...and cut you up in a box half your size”), a collaboration between Jimmy Velvet and Wynn Stewart, or the ditty by Willie’s old D Records labelmate from Houston, Eddie Noack, “You Think I’m Psycho, Don’t You, Mama?” Willie’s happy downers were rather tame by comparison.
The cover of Live Country Music Concert depicted a clean-cut, clear-eyed, confident young man in a dark suit, white shirt, and skinny tie, hair slicked back, face beaming as he sang while playing a Fender Jazzmaster electric guitar, with the banner “Cowtown Jamboree, Panther Hall, Fort Worth, Texas” hanging behind him. A deep thinker hunkered beneath his urbane, country-club-sophisticate exterior, someone who was in fact the polar opposite of the image he was projecting. On the back of the album cover was another photograph of Willie as a sharp-dressed man in a suit and tie, with the words “None To Compare To Willie Nelson” imposed over the picture.
The album enjoyed decent sales in Texas and lousy sales almost everywhere else. What the bean counters couldn’t see was a very small number of younger fans more attuned to rock than country who were getting hip to Willie’s trip. And the live album was validation for Willie because it showcased his work with his own band. “I wanted to record with my band so I could reproduce every night what I was doing in the studio, but no one would let me do that,” he said. “I recorded with studio musicians and made really good records, but there was no fucking chance of doing them on the road because those guys didn’t travel.”
That’s what people came to hear—the sound that they bought on the record. But using your road band in the studio was a foreign concept in Nashville. Precious few artists got away with making records with the band they played with on tour, the notable exceptions being Hank Williams, Little Jimmy Dickens, and Bob Wills. Except for the live album, Willie would have to learn to live within the system and “just play the song and forget it.”
RATHER than chafe against the system, he was trying to be more accepting of it for what it was. His attitude was informed by a growing interest in personal fulfillment. Wade Ray, Willie’s Ridgetop neighbor and his steadiest road companion, turned Willie on to a spiritual organization known as Astara. The group embraced a lot of the ideas and thinking that Johnny Bush and Willie had read in Kahlil Gilbran’s The Prophet and in the writings of the psychic Edgar Cayce. Concepts such as reincarnation, an afterlife, and astral traveling were nothing new to them. “The Prophet made sense to us,” Johnny Bush said. “If you’re going to do anything, like be a baker, make that bread as if you’re making it for the person you love the most.”
Astara took that kind of thinking one step beyond. Wade and his wife, Grace, were avid followers of the discipline that Willie later described as a “mystery school,” leading him to spend time in libraries reading about religion in general and specific religions around the world. He became as well versed in the concept of reincarnation as he was in the Bible. Going through this world and getting it right the first time was a tough go, he concluded. He arrived at this way of thinking by taking note of the millions of people who suffered, starved to death, or were massacred. “You wonder why a just and loving God would let things like that happen. I figured that there was more to it than what we see. I knew there was something else at work, calling the shots. Then I learned about the law of karma, that you live more than one time until you get it right, and if you want to come back one more time and show off, that’s okay too. I started thinking and believing that, and the more I saw, the more I knew it made sense. It was like going to school: Pass your lessons in the first grade and you advance to the second grade. If you don’t, you repeat first grade again to learn what you missed the first time.”
Johnny began to look at Willie as more than a friend and a benevolent bandleader. He was a teacher and a spiritual guide who gave good advice, but always with caveat “Take it or leave it. It worked for me. It may not work for you.”
Johnny had never forgotten a sit-down he had had with Willie a few years earlier while preparing for a run on the road with Jimmy Day, Paul Buskirk, and Dave Kirby. Johnny fretted over his ability to hold his own with the other musicians in the band and had confessed to Willie that he might not be cut out for the job playing in the band. “What the fuck are you talking about?” Willie told Johnny with fire in his eyes. “You’re a negative thinker, do you know that?”
“I always thought I was a realist,” Johnny replied. “Weren’t you at the rehearsal today?”
“You’re not Gene Krupa,” Willie acknowledged. “But you’re a good drummer and you’re going to get better. Your main problem is you’re a negative thinker and you’ve got to stop it. Set your sights high, and even if you don’t hit as high, look how much better off yo
u are than when you started.” Johnny took Willie’s advice to heart. His faith in Willie remained strong after that.
For all his vocal disgust toward negativity, Willie could bring it on himself at times. Rayovac flashlight batteries put together gigantic Country & Western Road Show package tours with twenty acts that would tour coast-to-coast for a year. The head of the company, Art Anderson, was such a big Willie Nelson fan that he let Willie choose many of the acts for the 1966 tour, which included Webb Pierce, Carl Smith, and Ray Price. At one of the first shows in Key Biscayne, Florida, Art Anderson showed up along with Fort Worth disc jockey Bo Powell to visit with Willie. Sideman Johnny Bush was thrilled to be on the tour because he was starving on Willie’s schedule of ten to twelve dates a month.
“I heard this familiar monotone saying, ‘Well, as far as I’m concerned, you can take your Rayovac batteries and stick them up your ass,’” Johnny Bush said. “Then I heard Art saying, ‘If that’s the way you feel about it, then that’s the way I feel about it.’ The next day I asked Willie, What was that all about?” Willie said Art had been bugging him for a while and he was tired of listening to him.
“Willie, this is three hundred shows. Is there any way this can be...?” Johnny asked.
“Not as far as I’m concerned,” Willie said, cutting Johnny off. He knew what he wanted. Willie went back to playing dates on his own while Johnny Bush and the rest of the band tried to survive on their meager pay. That was the price for following Willie.
Willie Nelson Page 19