Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  The Martin guitar changed Willie Nelson’s sound, giving it an earthy folk texture. But you couldn’t tell by the records he was making. Vibes, trumpets, violins, a cello, saxophones, and a trombone embellished My Own Peculiar Way to the point of once again drowning out Willie’s voice and the sound of his guitar. Worse, the production did little to change the public’s perception of Willie Nelson as a recording artist. The recent success of the single “Bring Me Sunshine” was an anomaly. Chet Atkins brought in Danny Davis, a producer, arranger, trumpet player, and leader of his own instrumental group, the Nashville Brass, to fluff up four tracks.

  Willie had already recorded the title song on his debut album for Liberty seven years earlier, on his Panther Hall concert recording, and it had been covered by pop crooner Perry Como. Five other tracks—“I Let My Mind Wander,” “I Just Don’t Understand,” “The Local Memory,” “I Just Dropped By,” and “The Message”—were Willie originals, along with a Hank Cochran collaboration, “Any Old Arms Won’t Do.” He did five covers—John Hartford’s “Natural to Be Gone,” Marty Robbins’s “I Walk Alone,” by the esteemed thumb picker Merle Travis, Don Baird’s “It Will Come to Pass,” and Dallas Frazier’s “Love Has a Mind of Its Own”—but to no avail. The album reached number 39 on the country album charts. The single of “Natural to Be Gone” b/w “Jimmy’s Road,” the protest song Willie wrote for David Zettner, didn’t even chart.

  Chet Atkins and RCA were losing faith. A year passed before the November 1969 sessions for Both Sides Now. Producer Felton Jarvis let Willie record on his own terms and bring along Billy English, Paul’s nineteen-year-old brother, on drums, young David Zettner on guitar and bass, Shirley Nelson on vocals (her last collaboration with her husband), and Jimmy Day on bass and steel.

  Billy English joined Willie by drumming for Billy Stack, a Fort Worth singer with a Roy Orbison voice whom Willie, Paul, and Jack Fletcher were backing to launch as a solo act like they had with Johnny Bush. Session player Norbert Putnam led one session and added his bass. James Isbell, the brother of Dave Isbell, who’d fronted the Mission City Playboys that Willie played with thirteen years earlier, played bongos to convey the folkie vibe Willie was going after. He covered Joni Mitchell on the title track, New York folk singer Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’,” made popular by the film Midnight Cowboy, Shirley Nelson’s “Once More with Feeling,” and the old folk-country chestnuts “Crazy Arms” (if Ray Price’s classic was old enough to be classified as folk), “Pins and Needles (in My Heart),” a Fred Rose original written under his Floyd Jenkins pseudonym, “Wabash Cannonball,” and the honky-tonk standard “One Has My Name.” He also introduced a new original—a slice of the wild side of life on the road called “Bloody Merry Morning”—and threw in his underappreciated original “I Gotta Get Drunk” and another Hank Cochran collaboration, “Who Do I Know in Dallas?” that had nothing whatsoever to do with folk music. The cover featured a photograph of Willie standing in the woods on his land, dressed in a double-breasted suit, a cigarette in his hand, looking pensive. “Once More with Feeling” was released as a single, reaching number 42 on the country singles chart.

  The “Billy Stack as the Next Johnny Bush” promotion cratered when Stack returned to Fort Worth due to marital troubles. But Billy English stuck around. “I’d been coming out playing guitar and David would switch off to trumpet, but Willie couldn’t afford the bigger band,” Billy English said. But he stayed with Willie long enough to play the Palomino in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and more than a hundred other cities. “I know we played New York,” Billy said, “because the electric windows on the Mercury Marquis got stuck and it was wintertime.” On one run in the Mercury Marquis, Willie Nelson and the Record Men covered fifteen thousand miles in eighteen days, playing nine gigs, including one in Stamford, Connecticut, after playing Los Angeles, making the thirty-two-hundred-mile drive in sixty-nine hours.

  The long drives left plenty of time to contemplate the grind, smoke cigarettes, drink beer or whiskey, pop pills, listen to the radio, shoot the shit, tell jokes, cuss the electric windows when they got stuck, or do whatever it took to get on down the road.

  Late one evening in that darkest time between midnight and dawn, on the way from one show to the next, Willie and Paul were going over gigs past and gigs to come. Willie was lying down in the back of the station wagon. Paul was in the backseat. At one point, Willie propped himself up on his elbows until his eyes made contact with Paul’s eyes, illuminated by the flickering lights of passing cars.

  “One of these days,” he said to Paul in a soft voice, “I’m going to make it up to you.”

  WILLIE’S promise to Paul reflected his growing feeling that recordwise, he was spinning his wheels and going nowhere. His next two albums, Laying My Burdens Down and Willie Nelson and Family, were familiar stories: a new cast of studio players (guitarists Pete Wade and Chip Young, Norbert Putnam on bass, David Briggs on piano, and Jerry Carrigan on drums); good cover songs (solid versions of “Sunday Morning Coming Down” by Kris Kristofferson, Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” Merle Haggard’s “Today I Started Loving You Again,” and folk-rocker James Taylor’s hit “Fire and Rain”); good originals (a stirring gospel tune, “Kneel at the Feet of Jesus,” and the weeper “I’m a Memory,” which reached number 28 on the country singles chart); interesting concepts (a collection of downer blues and the Ridgetop gang posing for an album cover); and lousy sales.

  Willie had become a problem to the suits at RCA. Waylon was enough of a pain in the ass. In addition to doing more and more of the songs he wanted to do rather than what the producer chose, Waylon wanted to produce himself and was demanding control of where the records were made, the song selection, and the artwork that decorated the album cover. Waylon gave RCA plenty of reasons to compromise, namely impressive record sales and box-office receipts. Handling Willie was like selling fine art that no one wanted to buy. “Honestly, I always thought I could sing pretty good, and it bothered me that nobody else thought so,” Willie told Carleton Stowers. “The more I thought about it, the more negative I got. I got into fights with the recording company and all kind of bad things.” It was a delicate balancing act. He knew in his head what he wanted his music to sound like, but it never came out that way on record. And yet he needed to have a record so he could sell himself. Chet Atkins and Felton Jarvis were supposed to know what record buyers wanted—that’s why they were producers, or so Willie thought. So if they were so smart, why couldn’t they get him a hit?

  His unconventional manner of singing, his painfully sad songs, and his preference to play songs for a listening audience rather than a dancing crowd, not only made it hard for the RCA boys to understand him, but it sometimes cost him bookings. Management at Cain’s Academy in Tulsa sent him a letter informing him, “We no longer need your services.” But other venues rarely frequented by Nashville recording artists, such as Hillbilly Heaven in Upstate New York, at the dead end of a lonely road in the woods by the Canadian border, and the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto, where Canada’s biggest country star, Stompin’ Tom Connors, would open the show, welcomed him with open arms.

  The relentless road work made his brief stops at home almost pleasurable, despite the fact that his once-fiery romance with Shirley seemed cooler and cooler each time he came back. By 1969, Ridgetop had grown into one big happy family—some by birth, others through friendship. The lettering on the mailbox identified the tenants as “Willie Nelson and Many Others.” It might have been called Nashville’s first hippie commune, only hippies didn’t exist in Tennessee and no one knew what a commune was.

  Once he had discovered how easy it was to accumulate things whenever he was flush with cash, Willie began developing contempt for material goods. He’d go out of his way to break something just to show he didn’t care, his don’t-give-a-damn attitude usually expressed when he was shit-faced. Fans offered drinks so often, he started carrying a collapsible cup in his back pocket. And when he got real
loaded, he turned mean.

  “Willie was a bad drunk,” Paul English stated flatly. “When he got really liquored-up, he’d want to drive. I’d have to take the keys from him. He didn’t know what he was doing, he was so drunk.”

  No small part of it was the friends he kept. He was wild, all right, but Hank Cochran, Roger Miller, and Zeke Varnon were wilder. He could pop pills, drink whiskey, and pick for a few days straight, but he could never keep up with Jimmy Day, who could stay up for weeks. Compared with them, Willie was kind of straight-laced.

  “Ridgetop was wild as hell,” Bee Spears said. “People in rural Tennessee—as long as you mind your business, they’ll leave you alone. Willie showed me this house to live in, but I’m not sure if anyone knew who owned it. It didn’t have any electricity. The shower was a piece of garden hose that ran into a big can that had holes punched in it. It was a mess. It was Peyton Place. That’s what happens with whiskey and amphetamines.”

  Whatever problems were caused by liquor and pills, women, friends, or family, or any combination thereof, they tended to disappear on the lost highway in the land of one-nighters. If Shirley was harping too much, the bills were piling up, or someone was bugging him, there was always the road. The moving landscape allowed him to reinvent himself nightly.

  Playing a package show in Dallas, he was buttonholed by Morgan Choat, a North Texas disc jockey. “Willie went onstage in pink pants,” observed Choat, an avowed country traditionalist. “Everyone else was wearing western clothes. After the show, I asked, ‘Willie, what in the world’s going on?’”

  Willie leaned into his ear and whispered confidentially, “Morgan, I’m changing my style.”

  Crash Stewart, the San Antonio hustler with a car lot and finance company on General McMullen Road who booked Willie’s Texas dates, worked up a promotional flyer for the band that hyped Willie Nelson and the Record Men as “The Singin’est, The Playin’est, The Sellin’est Band from Nashville, Tennessee.” In Texas, they were from Tennessee. In Tennessee, they were from Texas.

  For every choice booking, such as sharing the bill with Hank Thompson at the University of Texas in Austin or headlining the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, where he was advertised as “writer-singer Willie Nelson,” or being one of the four featured performers of the annual Texas Prison Rodeo in Huntsville in October (Jerry Lee Lewis, Conway Twitty, and Faron Young headlined the other shows), there were an equal number of shit-hole gigs quickly forgotten.

  The cost of barnstorming may have sometimes required four grown men to share a single motel room, but you couldn’t help feeling like a millionaire, standing behind a microphone and hearing the applause and cheers of people who paid money to come see you. Willie had seen too many friends, like Roger Miller, Johnny Cash, and now Waylon Jennings, pull down the big bucks and live the high life. For a few weeks, Willie was so convinced he was destined for the same success, he tried flying to gigs in an Aero Commander. Then the bills for operating the plane arrived in the mail.

  The preferred mode of transportation became an Open Road camper. He may have owed Paul English $5,250 in back pay, and more than once Paul and Carlene English had to cover his utility bills, but he was a country music singing star in the eyes of those around him. Jimmy Day was semipermanently passed out in the back of the camper until Willie ran him off again, opening the door for the return of Bee Spears, the teenage bass player and pot dealer who’d gone back to San Antonio to play in a Mexican jazz ensemble. With Bee’s return, David Zettner moved over to steel. The band had a history, a cool sharp-dressed look, and a sound that was out of the mainstream but clearly with a depth worth paying attention to.

  IN July of 1969, Willie’s daughters, Lana and Susie, their cousins Freddy and Mike Fletcher, and Willie’s steel player David Zettner experienced their first rock festival. The delegation from Ridgetop drove to Atlanta to join 150,000 people like them at the Atlanta Pop Festival at the Atlanta International Raceway. The hippie phenomenon going on in California, which they had heard on records, seen on TV, and read about, was right there in front of their faces.

  Atlanta Pop featured several new acts ushering in a new post-Beatles era for rock. A four-piece group from England called Led Zeppelin would sell tens of millions of albums and concert tickets by doing a revved-up version of American blues music. Two growling soul shouters, an Englishman named Joe Cocker and a sassy woman from Port Arthur, Texas, by way of Austin and San Francisco named Janis Joplin, reinterpreted rhythm and blues for young white audiences. Creedence Clearwater Revival, a band from the suburbs of northern California, rode a string of swampy Southern-sounding hit singles to displace the Beatles as the most popular band in the world. Two big band ensembles, Blood, Sweat & Tears and the Chicago Transit Authority, were in the process of creating a new genre known as jazz-rock. Also on the bill at Atlanta Pop were influential jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, the Los Angeles boogie band Canned Heat, Chuck Berry, the father of modern rock and roll, the pioneering power trio Grand Funk Railroad, Bob Dylan’s organist Al Kooper, a gypsy rock-and-soul ensemble known as Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, and a blues-rocking albino kid who grew up just down the road from Janis Joplin named Johnny Winter.

  Lana came back from the trip to Georgia blown away by the coolness of the entire event. “I wished all these people could hear Dad’s music,” she said. “If they liked Blood, Sweat, and Tears, I knew they’d like him.” The way Willie thought, the way he approached life, and the community of family and friends he’d created at Ridgetop would have fit right in at Atlanta Pop or at Woodstock, the rock festival in Upstate New York staged six weeks after Atlanta Pop.

  ONE morning in late November 1969, Shirley Nelson was sorting through the mail in the kitchen when Lana heard a piercing scream. “There’s a hospital bill and a baby!” Shirley shrieked. She had opened an envelope and pulled out a bill from a Houston hospital for the birth of Paula Carlene, daughter of Connie Koepke and Willie Nelson, delivered on Halloween.

  Shirley flipped out and started throwing things, but Willie wasn’t there to hit. She shrieked again and reached for a bottle of pills, gobbling them down impulsively. Lana realized what she had done and dragged her into her car so she could drive Shirley to the hospital to get her stomach pumped, even though Lana didn’t have a driver’s license. “I felt so sorry for her,” Lana said. “I wanted to help her but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. All I could do is support her and be there for her.”

  When Willie returned from his tour, Shirley cornered him in the backyard with a gun in her hand. After he tried talking to her, she decided not to use it, although she did fire several shots later while they were riding in the car.

  The knot between Willie and Shirley had unraveled. In reality, it had been loosening ever since she’d settled at Ridgetop to raise Willie’s kids. Shirley was bored and jealous, knowing he was catting around away from home, just like he’d done with her when they fell in love behind Martha’s and Biff’s backs. She’d taken lovers out of need and out of spite, knowing he was taking lovers. He was taking lovers on the road because he could.

  Whenever he was headed for a gig in the eastern half of Texas, he’d give Connie Koepke a call. Once Connie had discovered he was married, she put the relationship on ice for almost two years before the flame was rekindled. It was some kind of crazy love, and the affair intensified until Connie discovered she was pregnant. She told Willie she wanted to keep the baby and raise the child herself. Willie offered to help out financially, as if he were sitting on a bundle of cash. Connie rented an apartment in Houston for herself and the baby she was expecting, with her parents’ support.

  Shirley and Willie tried to patch things up. Willie promised he’d stay out of Houston. Shirley promised she’d take the straight-and-narrow path and quit pilling and seeing other men. The promises didn’t hold. Willie tracked Shirley to the apartment of her backdoor man in Nashville and confronted him. Shirley continued finding lipstick on Willie’s collars and smelling perfume on his clothes.
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  “At one point he bugged a phone to find out who it was,” recalled Lana. “He came home once and she was gone. He asked where she was. I said I didn’t know. Susie said she was over at Larry’s house. After dad got the taped phone conversation, he told her she had to leave.”

  Willie and the kids moved into an apartment. When Shirley finally departed, going back to her family in Missouri, Willie and the kids moved back into the house, along with a stripper Willie knew named Helen and her kids. Two weeks of another new family led Lana to run off and get married at the age of sixteen, the same age as Martha when she married Willie, the same age as his mom and dad when they married, and the same age as Bobbie when she married Bud Fletcher.

  Susie, now a precocious thirteen-year-old, called and talked to Connie and asked if she could come to visit her and the new baby, Paula Carlene. Connie welcomed Susie and they all got along fine. A few weeks later, Willie called Connie before he played Houston and ended up staying overnight with Connie and Paula Carlene. The next morning, he asked Connie to come with him to Ridgetop. Shirley was gone. So was Helen the stripper, who had been marched away by Carlene English, Paul’s wife.

  The band helped her load her belongings into the Open Road camper, and Connie and Paula Carlene arrived at Ridgetop in the summer of 1970. The next day, Willie kissed her good-bye and hit the road again.

  Lana took an immediate liking to Connie. “She was about ten years older than me, so I could relate,” Lana said. “She was pretty and she loved my dad. She wasn’t a musician, she didn’t have her own career etched out, and she brought us a baby, my little sister—she was real cute.”