Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  “I’ve never had a club that didn’t pay me,” Paul later told reporter John Moulder. “No, I had one,” he said, correcting himself. It was in Florida, shortly after he joined up with Willie. The owner offered $750 instead of the guaranteed $900. Willie said, “All or nothing.” Paul’s gun was on the bus, and the owner had his own security detail. “I ran to the bus to get my pistol and they shut the steel doors in front of the club. I tried to kick the doors open but couldn’t. They had cops working for them anyway.”

  The best defense was a good offense, especially a firearm. On an off-night at a bar in Phoenix, Doyle Nelson sought out Paul. “Two guys I was playing pool with lost their bets to me and won’t pay up,” Doyle reported.

  Paul got up from his table and walked into the pool room.

  “Hey, you lost this bet, why don’t you pay it?” Paul said, confronting the two men with his piercing eyes and threatening countenance.

  “We were just playing for a quarter,” one protested.

  “Pay him the quarter,” Paul said, seething. “Anybody who won’t pay on a bet is a rotten motherfucker.” Making a bet was like signing a contract as far as Paul was concerned, and these two were not men of honor.

  A fight erupted, with Paul ending up on top of one guy, pounding his head with his fists. The other came up behind Paul and used his pool stick as a garrote around his neck, pulling him back. Paul swung his right arm up. In his hand was his “bidness,” whose snub-nosed barrel was inserted into the guy’s nostril. The gun was cocked and ready when Willie walked in. “Paul will whip any one of you guys, and I’ll take the other,” he said with perfect timing. The fight was over.

  Despite his commitment to Willie, Paul says he harbored no delusions. “I never figured it would amount to anything,” he said. “I was just along for the ride and for what it was at that time. We were having a real good time.” On Christmas Day 1966 they found themselves at a Holiday Inn hundreds of miles from home. “We went out and got shaving cream and toilet paper and decorated the Holiday Inn and took pictures,” Paul said. “It was being with best friends.”

  Willie’s next hire was David Zettner, a bass and pedal steel player with George Chambers’ Country Gentlemen out of San Antonio, the showcase dance-hall band of South Texas. Adding David allowed Willie to move Jimmy Day to pedal steel full-time. David was multitalented, a painter in addition to being a musician, and a sensitive, soulful cat. His tenure with the Offenders/Record Men/Willie Nelson Show was cut short in 1968 when he was drafted into the military to fight a war in Vietnam. Just before he left, his friend Bee Spears, who replaced David in the Country Gentlemen back in San Antonio, showed up in Houston with a couple ounces of manicured Mexican mota.

  The band had developed an appreciation for good weed, Willie included, once Paul put his connections to characters trafficking in high-quality marijuana to use. While the band gathered on the bus to check out the farewell gift from David’s San Antonio buddy, the conversation drifted to David’s pending departure. Who would they get to play bass? Willie asked Paul about a bass player they knew from California.

  “Naw,” Paul said. “We can’t afford him. Besides, he’s married and has three kids.”

  Jimmy Day glanced his glazed eyes toward the tall, gawky friend of David’s who brought the dope. “Why not him? He can’t play worth a shit but we can teach him what we want him to play and he gets high.”

  Why not? Bee Spears may have been a stringbean of a nineteen-year-old and half crazy with a healthy appetite for illicit substances, but he was good enough to replace David Zettner in the Country Gentlemen and came from good stock. His daddy, Sam, a fiddle player with the Texas Tophands, raised his family across the road from John T. Floore’s Country Store and dance hall in the Hill Country town of Helotes, outside San Antonio.

  “Can he play?” Willie asked David.

  “Naw,” David said, twisting his face into a wise-ass grin, plainly high as a Georgia pine. “But he’s a fast learner,” he said, exhaling smoke.

  From that day forward, George Chambers would always turn just a tad testy whenever Willie Nelson’s name came up; the Country Gentlemen wasn’t Willie’s farm team.

  Bee’s first gig with Willie Nelson and the Record Men was the Nashville Room in the basement of the Taft Hotel in New York City. “I was scared to death,” Bee said. “There was a very steep learning curve, but Jimmy helped a lot and I snapped real quick that Willie plays bass lines on his guitar, so I started playing low.” The New York gig was followed by twenty-eight gigs in twenty-eight nights.

  The 1947 Flex eventually gave out at the end of the tour, forcing them to switch to a black Lincoln Continental with a matching black trailer that Paul bought from Leroy Van Dyke. The Continental gave out a few months later, prompting the band to switch to a turquoise Mercury Marquis station wagon that Billy Gray sold them.

  The musicians got by on $100 a week if they were lucky, plus whatever bar tab they could run up wherever they were playing. But that didn’t stop them from looking sharp like the professional musicians they were, resplendent for a few hours every night in their shiny blue outfits or Nehru jackets with turtlenecks. Other bands wore uniforms. Willie Nelson and the Record Men styled.

  “We dressed hipper than most of Nashville,” Paul English said. “That’s what I liked about Willie—we weren’t conformists.” When Paul first went to work for the band, they were wearing frilly shirts, maroon brocade tuxedo-like coats, bulldog ties, and black pants. When cleaning all the coordinated outfits at the same time became a pain in the ass, Willie gave them each $100 during a layover in Los Angeles and encouraged them to go out and buy something different.

  Paul and Willie were walking past the display window of Sy Devore’s in Hollywood, when Willie spied a cape.

  “You have to have that!” he said.

  Paul’s trimmed beard and sharp-edged sideburns had always prompted comments that he looked like the devil, which he took as a compliment, since he always said, “The devil was the prettiest angel in heaven.” A cape would enhance the image.

  The effect was immediate. People treated him differently when he wore the cape. At Panther Hall, he took the image one step further, placing dry ice around his drum kit, creating the effect of smoke. “When I got off the stage, there were fifteen girls waiting for me, wanting my autograph,” Paul said.

  Willie Nelson and the Record Men stood out on any package show bill. They were road dogs of the highest—and most offbeat—standing.

  And they were always evolving. David Zettner’s flat feet earned a medical discharge from the military after he’d been away from the band for a year, and he picked up the bass again and Bee moved to play behind Johnny Bush, who was touring as a single act on the Willie Nelson Show. “David and I would get together and he’d play guitar and I’d play bass,” Bee said. “The older guys taught the younger guys how to play, one on one. They’d tell you, ‘Sorry, son, that shit ain’t gonna fly.’ They taught you feel. We were learning cool tunes, all kinds of jazz—Brubeck, “Blue Rondo Ala Turk” in nine/eight time, odd beats like seven/four, five/four. Country guys jammed jazz. We didn’t jam to ‘Stand by Your Man.’”

  A THOUSAND miles west, another iconoclast was making a name for himself. He was the embodiment of macho, a ladies’ man who favored black leather to match his slicked-back greasy pompadour, and had a cigarette constantly dangling from his lip and a bad-ass biker vibe. His husky voice matched the image.

  Waylon Jennings was a fellow Texan who was even more outside the box than Willie was. Like Willie, he had been a disc jockey, first in Lubbock, Texas, near where he grew up, and at KCKY in Phoenix. When they met at the Adams Hotel in Phoenix, Willie, newly signed to RCA, was doing a one-nighter at the Riverside Ballroom. Waylon, on the verge of being signed to RCA by Chet Atkins, was enjoying a very sweet setup at JD’s, a giant nightclub in Phoenix near the campus of Arizona State University, with two dance floors and two bands. A different rock-and-roll band was booked downstai
rs every week for the college crowd. Upstairs, Waylon Jennings and his Waylors played their unique brand of country and western music mixed with rock and roll in front of more than a thousand customers a night six nights a week, each band member taking home a $1,200 weekly guarantee.

  Waylon and Willie compared notes about their recording deals. Waylon was still signed to A&M Records in Los Angeles, which put out an album and a single of “Just to Satisfy You” with a version of the Ian and Sylvia folk song “Four Strong Winds” on the flip side, which was a local hit. Willie hadn’t gotten over how Monument Records had treated him. Waylon told Willie he was thinking of moving to Nashville. Willie half-jokingly offered to take over Waylon’s gig at JD’s if he left.

  “He asked me what I thought about him going to Nashville, and when he told me what he was making, I told him he’d better stay where he was at,” Willie said. “I knew what I’d have to do out there to make the equivalent of what he was making. You have to gross a whole lot of money to come out with that kind of net income, and on the road, that’s not even a guarantee. But Waylon knew what he wanted to do.”

  Waylon already had quite a story to tell. He’d gotten into the music business as a protégé of West Texas rock-and-roller Buddy Holly, who’d produced sessions on him in Clovis, New Mexico. Along with Tommy Allsup, Waylon was part of Buddy’s band on the Winter Dance Party tour. Scheduled to fly out with Buddy in a private plane after a show in Clear Lake, Iowa, on February 3, 1959, Waylon gave up his seat to J. P. Richardson—the Big Bopper—who had the hit “Chantilly Lace” and was feeling ill, while Tommy Allsup let Mexican American rocker Ritchie Valens, who was promoting his hit “La Bamba,” have his seat. Richardson, Valens, and Holly were killed when the plane crashed shortly after takeoff in a snowstorm. Waylon possessed a rich, vibrant voice and projected a magnetic presence onstage. He also was writing some splendid songs. He was a country boy through and through, but he played with a rock and roll swagger. Plenty of Buddy Holly had rubbed off on him.

  Bobby Bare, one of the most popular singer-songwriters in the emerging folk-country subgenre, heard Waylon’s version of “Four Strong Winds” and recorded the song himself, charting number 3 as a country single. At Bare’s urging—-“He’s the best thing since Elvis,” Bare told RCA’s chief, Chet Atkins—Atkins signed Waylon to RCA and Waylon immediately moved to Nashville. Willie did not take over Waylon’s residency at JD’s.

  RCA’s executives knew where they thought Waylon should be slotted, titling his debut Folk-Country. But the more records Waylon made and the more he understood how the system worked, the less he appreciated what RCA thought was best for him. As his record sales increased, his complaints grew louder. The Nashville Sound was cramping his style.

  The two W’s from Texas were soul brothers. “We both liked each other, respected each other’s music and ideas, but our music wasn’t that similar,” admitted Willie. “It was the fact we both were pretty independent and insisted on doing it the way we wanted to do it that made us closer friends. It got to be fun to play games with the studios and with the record company and record with other artists from different companies at four in the morning that RCA didn’t know anything about and all of a sudden come out with a record and we’re all on it—that was fun.”

  He was referring to “Poor Old Ugly Gladys Jones,” a joke song written by country comedian Don Bowman and Waylon that Waylon, Don, Bobby Bare, Jerry Reed, Willie, and others cut at RCA when nobody was looking.

  Willie kept plugging away in the studio. In March 1966, the overwhelmed Chet Atkins farmed out Willie to staff producer Felton Jarvis, who had just started producing Elvis Presley, for four tracks. “I had about thirty-five artists and had hired some people to help me produce,” explained Chet. “There was a lot of mediocre stuff. But that’s the way we did it. Make a bunch of records and throw them out.”

  Felton had a lighter touch, and Willie was nowhere near as intimidated by Felton as he was by Chet. When it came to picking guitar, no one was as good as Chet, so Willie often deferred to Chet’s judgment at his own expense. Felton accommodated Willie’s request to bring in Jimmy Day and Johnny Bush from his road band to join Jerry Reed, Velma Smith, Junior Huskey, and Jerry Smith in Studio B. The tracks became most of the album Make Way for Willie Nelson, one very mixed bag of music. Willie covered old standards like Hank Williams’s “Mansion on the Hill,” Cy Coben’s schmaltzy “Make Way for a Better Man,” Frankie Brown’s “Born to Lose,” and the ballad “What Now My Love?” as if he meant every word he sang. His own “One in a Row,” recorded in June with Johnny Bush and Wade Ray, was released as a single and worked its way into the Top 20, peaking at number 19 on the country singles chart in September, Willie’s first significant chart single since he was with Liberty Records. The album followed suit, entering the Top 10 and stalling at number 9 on the country albums chart in early 1967.

  Album sales were a pittance from a performer’s standpoint. Unless you were someone huge like Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, or Merle Haggard, you couldn’t move enough units to get out of debt to your record label. For several years, Willie lived well off songwriter royalties from “Hello Walls,” “Crazy,” and “Funny How Time Slips Away,” but those had slowed to a trickle. Although Willie owned land, a tractor, and hogs, he was tight on cash, and whenever he had money, he spent it. His eye was on the road. Playing live gave him the greatest personal satisfaction. He didn’t feel whole unless he was on a stage in front of a crowd. And in order to do that, he had to have a single or an album to promote. “Nashville recording artist” was his calling card.

  Chet Atkins produced the next album of all-Willie originals, The Party’s Over and Other Great Willie Nelson Songs. Jimmy Day and Johnny Bush returned to the studio to play steel and drums along with Grady Martin, the studio legend who’d been recording with Ray Price for years under Don Law’s tutelage until Law retired in 1967, Junior Huskey, Jerry Smith, Jerry Reed, and three violins, a viola, and a cello.

  The material, which included “A Moment Isn’t Very Long,” “No Tomorrow in Sight,” “Hold Me Tighter” (cowritten with Hank Cochran), and “A Long Story Short (She’s Gone),” cowritten with Fred Foster, was solid. But except for “The Party’s Over,” a redo of the codified last call in a nightclub or bar with the phrase “turn out the lights,” it was not Willie’s most stellar work. “The Party’s Over” reached number 24 on the country singles chart. A follow-up single, “Blackjack County Chain,” written by Willie’s friend Red Lane, was released later that year with Floyd Tillman’s “Some Other World” on the flip. It was climbing the country singles chart at number 21 when radio stations started banning the record for its grisly content. The song tells the tale of a Negro chain-gang convict who wins his freedom by killing a sheriff with “thirty-five pounds of Blackjack County chain” to gain his freedom. Red Lane had originally offered the song to a rising young talent named Charley Pride, who was black. Pride, anticipating the potential controversy, wisely turned down the offer.

  Charley Pride entered Willie’s life through the Willie Nelson Show package tour featuring Marty Robbins, Lefty Frizzell, and Bob Wills, with Tag Lambert and Hank Cochran and Jeannie Seely. “That was me and Crash Stewart’s production,” Willie said. “Nobody knew who in the hell I was, but we called it the Willie Nelson Show featuring Bob Wills, Marty Robbins, and the others.” There was a method to the madness. “Most of the audience didn’t know who I was but they knew who all those other folks were,” explained Willie, “and after the show, they knew who I was too.”

  One night, Marty tried to hip Willie to a new singer who wanted to get on the tour. “His name is Charley Pride,” Marty told him, “and he only wants two hundred fifty a night, and his manager Jack Johnson is coming with him and they’ll share a room.” Willie knew who Marty was talking about. Crash Stewart had already been working on Willie, telling him, “He isn’t just a country singer, he’s a black country singer.”

  “Never heard of him,” Willie said.r />
  After Crash played him Charley’s single “Snakes Crawl at Night,” Willie turned more receptive.

  “Don’t you worry about taking him into Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, all those places?” Crash wondered. “What do you think’s going to happen?”

  “I don’t know,” Willie said, sensing another opportunity to stir up some shit for the sake of stirring up shit. “Let’s go see.”

  Charley Pride’s first night on the Willie Nelson Show was in Dallas. Johnny Bush was fronting Willie’s band and sang two songs before he started introducing the stars of the show. When he’d met Charley backstage, Johnny realized his announcing chores would be a little trickier than normal. Country music was white folks’ music, never mind that Charley had grown up in Mississippi. No black man had ever been identified as a country music singer before; his label had wisely omitted sending out a publicity photograph to accompany his singles. Most country fans didn’t much cotton to the idea of a colored country singer. They were still chafing at new civil rights laws being enforced by the federal government, particularly in the South, where segregation was still embraced.

  Johnny Bush gave Charley Pride a straight-up introduction: “Ladies and gentleman, here he is, the new singing sensation with the hit ‘The Snakes Crawl at Night.’ Let’s give a big Big D welcome to Country Charley Pride!”

  The crowd cheered. The record was hot and many in the audience were familiar with it. Then Charley Pride came out from behind the curtain. The clapping stopped. Beads of sweat were visible on Charley Pride’s brow as he stepped to the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I know I look funny to y’all standing up here. Don’t let this permanent tan fool you. I’m a country singer and I hope you enjoy hearing it as much as I enjoy singing it. My favorite country singers are Ray Price, Jim Reeves, and Connie Smith.”