Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  Connie bonded with the kids’ aunt Bobbie, who had moved from Austin with her boys, Mike, Freddy, and Randy. Bobbie felt like the sister Connie never had. Willie’s mother, Myrle, and her husband, Ken “Kilowatt” Harvey, an electrician from Washington state, moved in on the other side of Willie from his father, Ira, and his wife, Lorraine, who tended the seven-hundred-acre plot west of the house. Daughter Susie moved into a trailer by Pop and Lorraine’s place. Wade Ray and Jimmy Day lived close enough to borrow a cup of sugar or a guitar pick. David Zettner resided in the basement of the Nelson house, where Willie went to write when he needed to get away from everyone and record songs on a two-track tape machine. Bee Spears stayed in a rickety house and later a trailer. Paul and Carlene English had moved up from Fort Worth in 1968, followed by Jack Fletcher, who was working with Paul and helping drive the band. Lana moved into another trailer nearby with her husband, Steve Warren, and their new baby boy, Nelson Ray. Even Martha Nelson, Willie’s first wife, came back, moving in with Lana and Steve to look after baby Nelson.

  Myrle was happy to demonstrate where Willie’s wild streak came from. “She was a tough woman,” Freddy Fletcher, her grandson, said. “I was in high school at Ridgetop, and she called me and said, ‘I think somebody’s trying to break in the house and I’m about to blow his fucking brains out.’ I went to her place and she’s got some vodka and a pistol on the table, just waiting. I saw a lot of Willie in Mother Harvey—Myrle. She was no bullshit. She had been down the road. She knew I was knee-deep in music and we were probably smoking a little pot here and there, but she didn’t put up with anything that was out of bounds.”

  Myrle and Lorraine didn’t get along much. Everyone else was more or less on the same wavelength, with one exception. Shortly after Nelson was born, Lana and Steve had a hellacious fight. Lana called Willie and Connie, crying. Steve had hit her. Willie went ballistic and drove down the road, where he confronted Steve and punched him out, advising him never to lay a hand on his daughter again or he’d kill him.

  “Don’t hit me, Willie, don’t hit me,” Steve begged while lying on the floor. “I got anxiety, I got anxiety.”

  Willie went home. Lana called to say Steve had left and that Martha, the baby, and she would come over directly.

  An hour later, Steve returned to Willie’s house accompanied by his brothers, who were armed with rifles. They started shooting at the house, just as Lana, baby Nelson, and Martha walked in the back door, unaware they were in the middle of a shoot-out. Connie and the kids lay low on the living room floor. As Steve and his brothers made a second pass, Martha stood up and started yelling about kicking Steve’s sorry ass, until Connie pulled her down to the floor again. She introduced herself to Martha, whom she’d never met.

  Willie jumped up from where he was hiding in the yard, returning fire with a single shotgun blast, joined by Paul firing his M-1 rifle from the side of the house, aiming under the bumper as Steve’s car peeled away.

  Steve returned a few minutes later, just as Paul predicted, because “his pride was hurt.” This time Willie used Paul’s M-1 rifle, while Paul produced his snub nose .38 pistol and they both returned fire. Steve stopped the car and yelled out his surrender.

  “Whatever I’ve done, let me cool it out,” he said with his hands held up.

  Steve came back the next day and apologized, promising not to hit Lana again. Paul told him he was glad he kept driving after his tire was shot out; otherwise he would have had to aim to kill rather than shoot to miss. Steve told Paul he was glad he’d missed, too.

  The incident brought the family closer, much to Lana’s amazement and embarrassment. “There was Myrle and Ken and Pop and Lorraine and Connie and Martha all under one roof, along with Jack Fletcher and his ex-wife. It was quite a tribe. I almost got my father killed and caused quite a bit of trouble,” Lana said.

  Fussing and feuding was one thing, but no one messed with family.

  Connie tried hard to be an accommodating partner, considering what she’d walked into. One night, Willie brought home songwriters Hank Cochran and Red Lane, along with two women she did not know or care to know. They all were roaring drunk and itching to play music. Connie cooked them dinner and cleaned up the dishes, but she was perplexed when the party didn’t end but rather continued into the next day.

  Susie came into the bedroom in the morning to tell Connie that Red Lane and his girlfriend had kicked Susie out of her room because they wanted the bed. Connie dutifully got up and cooked everyone breakfast, again without the girlfriends so much as offering to help. When she went out on the porch and asked Hank how he wanted his eggs and he said, “Who said I wanted eggs?” in a gruff tone, she blew her top.

  “That was the trigger,” Connie said. “That and Red Lane and his girlfriend kicking Susie out of her room.” Connie let loose a string of expletives and went around the house, telling everyone to get out and get out now. Willie pulled her aside and told her, “You can’t do that, we can’t do that, it’ll hurt their feelings.” He had a better plan. He told her to get Paula and Susie and Billy in the car and leave. Once the visitors figured out they weren’t there, they’d leave, too. “That was Willie’s way of dealing with it—we’ll get out, and then they’ll have to get out,” Connie said. “And that’s what we did.”

  The ruse worked. Connie had a healthy dislike of Hank from that time on but tolerated him.

  Usually she enjoyed the friends Willie brought home for picking sessions. “That was the fun stuff. You never knew who would show up.” But Willie would just as likely be holed up in one of the suites at the Spence Manor across the street from BMI in Nashville, where the “store” was and where the other songwriters were hanging, and play until he couldn’t.

  “WHEN I came to Nashville, the people I hung out with were serious songwriters, none of whom were successful yet,” said Kris Kristofferson. “Willie was the hero of the soulful set—the people who were in the business because they loved the soul of country music. They loved Willie, John [Cash], and Roger Miller, the singer-songwriters. The closest I got to Willie was Jimmy Day. He used to hang out with us. We’d sit around at these jam sessions, sing Willie songs. I went out to his place in Ridgetop, hung out with Jimmy Day, but I never did meet Willie.”

  Still, Kris was a fan.

  “When Johnny Cash had his TV show, Mickey Newbury and I were talking to Linda Ronstadt’s manager, telling him about Willie, how he was like a jazz singer. ‘You’re really missing a bet if you don’t pick up on him,’” Kris told the manager. Kris knew Willie had it, for all the wrong reasons as far as the Nashville establishment was concerned. “Ray Price came out to talk to me on the road once. He said performing was going to ruin my songwriting like it did Willie.”

  In November of 1970, Willie recorded a new song he and Hank Cochran had written called “What Can You Do to Me Now?” The lyrics were prophetic. Two weeks before Christmas, Willie bought Connie a new Mercury Cougar, the first new car she’d ever had. On her way back from the grocery, one of the first trips she’d taken in her new ride, she stopped at the mailbox to fetch the mail. As soon as she stepped out of the car, the vehicle started rolling down the hill. She tried jumping back in but couldn’t engage the brake. The car headed into the woods and rolled over, stopping just before a steep drop-off. Connie’s arm was cut from broken glass, but otherwise she was fine.

  When the wrecker arrived to tow the car out, the front seats were missing. Someone had stolen them, someone, evidently, who knew that a brand-new car had crashed in the middle of nowhere.

  Then, two days before Christmas, as a light snow dusted the Cumberland Valley, Willie was in Nashville at a pre-Christmas party at Lucky Moeller’s, when he got a phone call.

  “Hey, Willie, your house is on fire. The house is melting.” It was Randy Fletcher, one of his nephews.

  “Well, pull the car in the garage, let them have it,” Willie said calmly. If his possessions were going up in flames, he could at least collect more insurance mo
ney.

  Connie had been alone in the house that night with Paula Carlene when Randy stopped by, waking her from a nap. She went to check on Paula Carlene so she could show her off to Randy when she saw smoke scaling up the wall by Paula’s bed. The wiring that Willie’s stepfather, Ken “Kilowatt” Harvey, had rigged in the basement had caught fire. “He had wired the whole house,” Lana said. “When you’d sit on the toilet, you’d get shocked. When you swam too close to the underwater light in the swimming pool you’d feel little shock waves.”

  Connie grabbed Paula Carlene and ran out of the house. Randy called the fire department and Willie. Willie was on the scene in less than thirty minutes. While he’d meant what he said about driving the car into the garage, he forgot about some other valuables that needed fetching. While the volunteer fire department was dousing the flames, Willie leapt over the fire hoses and dashed into the house, ignoring repeated warnings. He emerged from the smoldering ruins with his guitar, Trigger, and a plastic trash bag containing his stash of fine Colombian Gold marijuana. A few days later, Pop Nelson—his father, Ira—found in the debris a footlocker containing the first demos Willie had recorded in Nashville in 1961 and files of song lyrics and memorabilia.

  The night of the fire, the family moved into the two-bedroom trailer Willie kept at Pop’s place, where Susie was living. Susie fashioned a Christmas tree out of one of Willie’s boots with an evergreen limb stuck in it. They spent Christmas Eve at musician and songwriter Dottie West’s home, where Dottie took Connie aside for some woman-to-woman advice. It could’ve been worse, she told her: “You’ve got everything,” Dottie said. “You didn’t lose anything but stuff. I’ve been through a fire. I’m older than you and lived longer and I’ve come to realize what’s really important. You’ve got your family, everybody’s healthy. That was just stuff. And you get to get new stuff!” The way Dottie put it made Connie think starting over wouldn’t be so hard.

  “I had so much respect for her as a person,” Connie said. “Forget the singer part—she got me through a really hard time.”

  After Christmas, with their house burned to cinders and the wrecked Cougar in the body shop, Willie and Connie took Lana, Susie, and Billy to Austin to visit Willie’s sister. Bobbie Nelson had moved back from Ridgetop a few months earlier to work the piano bar circuit there. Bobbie had made a lot of friends in Austin after she moved there from Fort Worth in 1965 to play the Hammond organ at the El Chico Mexican restaurant at Hancock Center, Austin’s first shopping mall. This time around, she was working places like the 40 Acres Club, the Stephen F. Austin Hotel, the Scotch Mist Lounge by Seton Hospital, the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge at I-35 and 183, and Norman Eaton’s Polonaise Room private club next to the state capitol, making fans of prominent doctors, lawyers, politicians, and lobbyists, a budding young pianist named Marcia Ball, and perhaps the most popular person in all Texas—University of Texas football coach Darrell K Royal. By extension, Willie was already wired in.

  Lost Valley, 1971

  NOTHING LIKE A FIRE to cleanse the soul. Texas felt better than ever, especially after Crash Stewart called with an offer Willie couldn’t pass up. Crash had found temporary shelter for Willie and Many Others at the Lost Valley Dude Ranch in the Hill Country near the town of Bandera, west of San Antonio. The property was in bankruptcy, and Crash arranged it so they could stay through the summer while the house in Ridgetop was being rebuilt.

  Willie was game. “I was already working most of my dates in Texas,” he reasoned. “Going back and forth was wearing me out.”

  The improvised family moved in, putting the Olympic pool, the guest cabanas, and golf course to good use. Willie, Connie, Susie, Billy, Paula Carlene, Aunt Bobbie’s son Freddy, and David Zettner lived in the ranch foreman’s house. For a while singer Johnny Darnell and his wife, Sam, joined them. Paul and Carlene English and their son, Darrell Wayne, moved into the house across the way. Bee Spears and his wife had the house on the other side of them. Since they were living on the cheap, they cooked communally and were happiest whenever Connie prepared her Hungarian stew.

  It was at Lost Valley that Willie really became one with the game about which he used to razz Paul and Bee for “chasing that little white ball around a cow pasture.” He played seventy-two holes of golf the first day, with chemical and herbal inspiration. Before the week was over, Paul knew his buddy was hooked when rain started pouring down in the middle of a round and Willie told Paul to go on, he was going to finish his round.

  They approached the game creatively, such as the time everyone on the course was high on psychedelics and played golf backwards, from the putting green to the teebox. Bee had brought up some LSD he’d scored in San Antonio called Goofy Grape. Almost everyone at Lost Valley dropped a hit. The next morning, Willie was at Bee’s door, asking, “You got any more of that Purple Jesus?”

  “LSD, THC, STP, NAACP, we were doing the whole alphabet,” said Billy Cooper, a recent addition to the Many Others. “We’d go, Let’s try two of these or this and see what happens.”

  When they weren’t doing dope, playing golf, playing cards, or playing chess, a pursuit that Paul English picked up as a teenager in jail, they were playing music. One dependable gig was down the road at John T. Floore’s Country Store in Helotes, where Bee Spears and David Zettner had come of age and where country music and Western Swing ruled. The store was actually a bar and indoor dance floor with a giant outside patio for big dances. Mr. Floore was a cantankerous cuss known for his tamales and his old-fashioned ways—men removed their hats inside his place or faced expulsion.

  Willie Nelson and band played for the door at Floore’s, gradually increasing their earnings from $500 to $1,500 a night as attendance grew from 100 to 150 to 300. The uncertainty of their income was tempered by the satisfaction in knowing they controlled the deal. “I’m tired of hearing the club owners bitch about losing money,” Willie said. “If I take the door, they can’t bitch.”

  Larry Trader and Billy Ray Cooper were among the first to show up at Floore’s and hang at Lost Valley. B.C., as Cooper was called, and Trader were veterans of the same kind of off-the-books, under-the-table rackets in San Antonio as the “businesses” Paul English used to run in Fort Worth and in Houston.

  Larry Trader was one tough hombre. Over the ten years B.C. had known him, he figured he’d seen Larry get seriously cut or shot up at least five times. And Larry was Willie Nelson’s friend for life. They’d met in the mid-1960s when Larry was Ray Price’s bagman, collecting the performance fee after shows. After doing a show in Denton, Texas, opening for Price, Willie sensed he was about to get stiffed by the club owner and complained to Ray. “We gotta leave town tonight and I think this guy’s screwing with us. Do you know anybody we can send in to count money for us so we don’t get screwed?” Price told him he did. A black Cadillac rolled up to the venue and out stepped an imposing gentleman wearing a suit and tie and carrying a violin case. “He didn’t look like no fiddle player, either,” observed Willie. After introducing himself, Larry stayed after the show long enough to make sure Willie Nelson got paid in full.

  When Trader took B.C. to Lost Valley to meet Willie, B.C. saw him in a different light. “He was this great little guy who didn’t say anything,” B.C. marveled, as if he’d met a mystic. Trader ended up taking Willie to a string of honky-tonks in the Alamo City so he could show off the country music star to his pals. B.C. went back to his place out on Babcock Road on the northern edge of San Antonio, where his daddy, Brother George W. Cooper, had a broadcasting studio in the back of their home.

  Brother Cooper was a radio preacher. His sermons were broadcast on XEG, XERF, XELO, and other radio stations in Mexico whose powerful signals reaching across North America helped build a profitable mail-order business selling Bibles, sermons, religious tracts, and greeting cards for all occasions to millions of listeners at home.

  Billy ran an ambulance business after a brief stint as a used-car salesman. He prided himself on his driving skills. In
all his years of racing ambulance services to wrecks, he’d never had an accident. He was not so proud of his salesmanship, which he claimed was so persuasive, “people would practically beg you to sell them a piece of shit.”

  Willie took a shine to Billy Ray in no small part out of admiration for his daddy, the radio preacher. Brother Cooper reminded Willie of his own experiences as a pitchman on XEG back when he was at the Cowtown Hoedown in Fort Worth.

  Whenever Willie Nelson and his Lost Valley Boys worked John T. Floore’s, which was just about every week, Willie would go over to B.C.’s after the show with a few band members and friends, where they’d sit on the floor, drink beer, do dope, and listen to Willie Nelson sing and play guitar until the sun came up.

  One morning after an all-nighter at his place, B.C. pointed Willie toward the Austin Highway so he could drive home. “Instead, he took Fredericksburg Road, picked up an Indian hitchhiker who had a joint, and ended up at his house,” Billy said. In the spirit of wanting to help out Willie, the owner of Cooper’s Ambulance Service offered his services. “Anytime you need a driver, I’m there for you.”

  TEXAS was solid ground; anywhere else, not so much. Bookings were hard to come by once he crossed the Sabine River into Louisiana or crossed the Red River toward Oklahoma. Whenever the band was out on the road and money was tight, Connie Nelson and Carlene English would gather pennies and put them in rolls so they could buy groceries.

  Willie’s musician friend Darrell McCall followed him to Texas at the behest of Crash Stewart, who had worldwide and outer space rights to book McCall. Darrell was sick of Nashville and longed for the crowds he remembered playing in front of in Texas. “They were into fiddles and steel,” he said. “That’s why I wanted to go to Texas, to play in those dance halls, the same places I played with Faron and Ray. I always said you’ll never get rich working ’em, but you’ll work all your life till you’re ninety years old. I had enough of a name that Crash Stewart had a market for me.”