Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  Two years earlier, Eddie had crossed over from beer-drinking yahoo to manager of Shiva’s Headband, a homegrown hippie band that had a contract with Capitol Records. Shiva’s performed psychedelic music driven by electric fiddle and guitar and was prone to play twenty-minute versions of every song. After the Vulcan closed, they needed a new place to play. Eddie Wilson found the Armadillo for them and rounded up some friends to help open the place in August of 1970.

  Unlike most of his Armadillo brethren, Eddie was hip to Willie Nelson. He had gone on a dope run to San Francisco, to where many Austin hippies migrated, trying to make contact with the Grateful Dead and move a few pounds of Mexican weed in order to help pay the Armadillo’s rent. He was staying with a homesick Texan who was playing over and over Willie’s Live Country Music Concert album recorded at Panther Hall in Fort Worth. When the friend mentioned Willie had moved from Nashville to Austin, Eddie was determined to find him. A week after his return, Wilson was standing in the cabaret in the back of the club, when he turned around saw Willie and Paul in front of him.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” Eddie said to Willie, introducing himself.

  “You just found me,” Willie said, grinning.

  “I want you to play here.”

  “I want to play here.”

  A handshake sealed the deal.

  Willie had met some unusual folks in the nightclub business. This group might have been the most unusual of all. They made him feel right at home. Several customers at other tables left their pitchers of beer to come and say hello. As Willie and Paul graciously accepted the welcomes, Eddie Wilson noticed a trait he hadn’t seen in other music people who’d played the ’Dillo: As long as someone was speaking to him, Willie didn’t break eye contact. “It’s a quality I’d seen in only two other people—[former Texas governor] Ann Richards when being talked to by children, and Muhammad Ali when he’s talking to girls,” Eddie said.

  A date and terms were agreed upon. Willie would get half the door, no guarantee. It was the same deal the Armadillo worked with Dallas bluesman Freddie King and he was packing fifteen hundred hippie fans into the building every few months while he continued to work the chicken-shack circuit in the rest of Texas.

  Micael Priest, one of the Armadillo’s in-house poster artists, whipped up a poster depicting an old cowboy crying into his mug of beer, with a jukebox playing “Hello Walls” in the background and a small picture of Willie hanging on the wall up in the corner.

  The Armadillo had booked some weird stuff in its two years of existence. Willie Nelson might be the weirdest booking yet. Eddie Wilson hedged his bet by asking Greezy Wheels to open for Willie and accept a $100 fee even though the band had played to a full house as headliners a few weeks before. After some debate over whether the regular crowd would pay a higher price, Eddie and Bobby Hedderman set the cover charge at the increased price of $2.

  Willie helped promote the booking a few nights before by dropping by Mother Earth, the rock and roll club on North Lamar at 9th Street, where Michael Murphey, Austin’s cosmic cowboy, was holding forth.

  On the evening of August 12, 1972, the day the last U.S. troops departed Vietnam, Willie Nelson took the stage of the Armadillo World Headquarters in front of 450 paying customers. Although the air temperature outside had peaked at ninety-six degrees a few hours earlier, the ’Dillo felt hotter than Laredo, since it lacked air-conditioning. At least half the crowd had come for Greezy Wheels, but there were at least a hundred hard-core Willie Nelson fans who’d never stepped inside the big building with its murals of strange characters, like Big Rikki, the Guacamole Queen, Shiva’s Headband, and Freddie King playing guitar while an armadillo popped out of his heart. Pantsuits mixed with bell-bottoms. Beehive hairdos contrasted with long and stringy hairdon’ts. Beer flowed from the taps. A cloud of smoke hung under the ceiling.

  Backstage, Willie posed calmly for photographer Burton Wilson, who was archiving the musicians and staff of the Armadillo before Willie took the stage with Bee and Paul. He was thirty-nine years old. He’d been a scrapper for ten years, a Nashville recording star for ten years after that, and he still felt like he was getting his first wind. He was clean-shaven and his hair barely covered his ears. But as he scanned the audience, making eye contact, the expression on his face telegraphed to the crowd that he might look like an old redneck shit-kicker, but deep inside, he was one of them.

  Bassman Bee Spears stood to one side. “Willie passed me off as an Indian,” Bee said. “I had a headband and moccasins if we were going into a place where we knew we’d get some shit. I wasn’t making a fuckin’ statement; I’m a redneck too.” Paul English, Willie’s Man in Black, sat on a drum stool on a riser behind them, sticks in hand, black cape with red lining draped over his shoulders.

  Willie rolled out the medley of hits like he did at Woolridge Park—“Crazy,” “Hello Walls,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” and “Night Life.” Applause greeted recognition of each song. Sticking to the Bob Wills formula of presentation, he played one song after another without pause, keeping the songs short and sweet, save for a couple of solos to show the audience he could play some serious guitar.

  Paul, who was now up to seven capes in his wardrobe, was in ecstasy. He drummed so hard that at one point, he fell back off his stool. “The cape I was wearing was velvet, and it was around my throat, and I got up and all of a sudden fell back because it was choking me to death,” he explained. “I was sweating profusely and didn’t have much oxygen, and I just went down.”

  After the show, the band, fans, family, and friends retreated across Town Lake to the Crest Hotel, where writers Edwin “Bud” Shrake and Gary “Jap” Cartwright had rented a suite. A guitar pulling ensued, starring Willie Hugh Nelson with UT football coach Darrell K Royal as producer. Even though he’d rented the suite, Cartwright was threatened with expulsion by Coach when he continued talking while Willie played. “Leave or listen,” Royal ordered curtly. Jap shut up and stayed, paying attention to Willie and his songs. “I don’t remember having to quiet Bud Shrake,” Coach said. “He was an educated listener. Gary was not as informed as Bud.”

  Willie might have taken a leap of faith by abandoning the Nashville establishment for the fringes of a counterculture in the making, but on that hot night in August, he knew it was the right call.

  FOR all the great music being made, Willie was the only one who could work both sides of the aisle—the Armadillo one week, Big G’s the next—and be completely at home in both environments, although each side had a very different reaction to Willie’s new shaggy look.

  Lana Nelson noticed the change when she left Ridgetop and her husband, Steve, and brought her two children to join the rest of the family in Austin late in the fall of 1972. “Dad picked me up at the airport,” she said. “He was wearing shorts and sandals and had real long hair and a beard and an earring. He didn’t look anything like he looked when he left. He looked like everybody that I had seen at the Atlanta Pop Festival. This was a total different look but I thought it was cool. Everyone in Austin was that way.”

  Hippies hurled insults at Merle Haggard for his composition celebrating middle American values, “Okie from Muskogee,” not knowing the song was actually a parody and that Merle was a political liberal who enjoyed smoking pot as much as they did. In Austin, folks like Merle didn’t have to hide it. Willie sure didn’t. He signaled to the hippies he belonged by the clothes he wore, the facial hair he grew, and his open embrace of illicit drugs.

  Lana saw what was happening. “I kept thinking, ‘They’re catching up. This is it. Get ready.’”

  In November 1972, Townsend Miller reported in the Austin American-Statesman that Willie was enjoying chart success as the songwriter of Waylon’s hit single “Pretend I Never Happened” and as the performer of the single “Mountain Dew” b/w “Phases and Stages.” He was the toast of the town, the new hot act at the Armadillo and enough of an insider to play a private gig for UT football coach Royal, Coach’s pal F
ord dealer Bill McMorris, and the entire University of Texas Longhorn football team. Willie and Coach had become best friends, playing golf, pitching washers, and eating Mexican food together at least three times a week.

  The exotic, very local blend of music and culture taking shape was growing sufficiently significant for an Austin radio station to switch to a progressive country music format. Willie had accompanied Eddie Wilson and a local radio announcer named Joe Gracey to urge the owners of KOKE-FM in Austin to devote at least a portion of their broadcast day to a mix of country and rock and roll recording artists, including Willie, Waylon, and Johnny Cash, local stars like Doug Sahm, Jerry Jeff Walker, Michael Murphey, Willis Alan Ramsey, and B. W. Stevenson, along with the Rolling Stones, Creedence Clear-water Revival, the Band, the Byrds, Bob Dylan, and the Allman Brothers. “I was all over the concept of Texas artists on a radio station, and I’d loved the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” Joe Gracey said. “So the idea was very obvious to me, to do country music in a new Texas, young, hip way. And Willie was the greatest Texas country artist there was.”

  The owners initially resisted, but they eventually came around, allotting nine a.m. to midnight for the format, following the Spanish-language morning show hosted by José Jaime Garcia. It was like Willie had his own station. Joe Gracey, who also wrote the weekly rock music column for the Austin American-Statesman, did his part by describing Willie in one of his columns as “the Dylan of country music” and wearing out the grooves of Shotgun Willie on KRMH-FM, the local album rock station he worked for before joining the KOKE-FM staff as Ol’ Blue Eyes.

  “Willie did a lot for KOKE,” Joe Gracey said, citing the jingle he recorded for the station to the tune of “Mr. Record Man” (“I was driving down the highway with KOKE-FM turned on”). “He was always up at the station,” Gracey said. “He’d play the New Year’s Eve shows that were done live in the studio and drop in or call in on a whim. You could tell he was a radio guy. He realized that some DJs do it for the love of music and the love of performers. He really paid us back for anything we did for him.”

  Radio was one means of shoring up support. Beer was another.

  “After I got to Austin in 1973 to work for Lone Star Beer, Willie called me,” said Jerry Retzloff, a native of San Antonio, where Lone Star Beer was brewed. “You’ve got a problem with your beer because the kids won’t drink what their father drinks,” Willie told him. “That’s what’s happening with me with the music. They’re not listening to my music because I’m country and their mothers and fathers listened to country. So I’m doing a little crossover deal. They won’t drink your beer because Mom and Pop drink your beer and they won’t listen to my music for the same reason.”

  It made sense to Jerry. “Willie wanted to be associated with beer because he wanted his audience to be beer,” he said. “He didn’t want his crowd to get drunk, and that’s why he liked the Armadillo so much, because when you smoke dope and you drink beer and you reach that moderate level, you pass out if you do too much. You were really the best customer.”

  Jerry and Willie worked out a handshake deal. “Lone Star wouldn’t pay him for anything, but I would buy ads to help promote concerts—make posters and do stuff for him like that,” Jerry said. “He’d drink Lone Star, which he already did anyway. Heineken had started giving the New Riders of the Purple Sage free beer backstage and they started carrying it onstage, and Heineken started getting a movement going. I convinced the people at Lone Star to do the music thing as well.”

  Sales of Lone Star Beer in Austin increased 46 percent in one year. The brass in San Antonio listened when a few folks at the Armadillo, including Eddie Wilson and Woody Roberts, spun off an ad agency called TYNA-TACI (shorthand for Thought You’d Never Ask, The Austin Consultants Inc.) and pitched an ad campaign to Lone Star revolving around their traditional longneck bottles, which were losing favor among consumers, who preferred throwaway cans and throwaway bottles.

  As a beer man, Jerry Retzloff understood the difference drinking beer out of longnecks made. “There was a taste factor,” he said. “When you put a lid on a can, you shoot CO2 across it and then you put the lid on, and what that does is put excess CO2 in the can. The bottle is just the opposite. It lets CO2 impure air out. I learned this from real beer people.”

  The “Long Live Longnecks” campaign began with Kinky Friedman and the Lost Gonzo Band singing the praises of Lone Star in radio commercials. The Armadillo’s chief poster artist, Jim Franklin, developed a series of posters incorporating Armadillos and Lone Star longnecks. T-shirts bearing the Lone Star Beer logo were more sought after than those with the Zig-Zag rolling papers logo. Within a year, more Lone Star was being sold at the Armadillo World Headquarters than in any other retail outlet except the Astrodome in Houston.

  Meanwhile, Austin-style progressive country developed its own sense of fashion—T-shirts, blue jeans, and cutoff blue jeans shorts in the summer, duck-billed gimme caps (as in “Gimme a cap”) for men, and scarves and bandannas for women. Manny Gammage, the famous Austin hatter whose Texas Hatters shop was on South Lamar Boulevard, got into the act by developing an upscale cosmic cowboy look with his High Roller hat worn by Willie Nelson, disc jockey Sammy Allred, and Ronnie Van Zant, the lead singer for the southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. Fancy-ass, pointy-toed cowboy boots became the favored manly footwear among hippies who could afford it. Charlie Dunn, the boot maker for Capitol Saddlery near the state capitol, became “the man to see” for handmade custom cowboy boots after Jerry Jeff Walker lionized him in a song.

  AUSTIN was meant to be. Willie didn’t need to consult Astara or reread Gibran to feel the vibes. Sister Bobbie was finding steady work at Lakeway, a posh country club community on the shores of Lake Travis, and several of her old piano bar haunts. For the first time since Fort Worth, Bobbie and Hughty were both enjoying careers in music in the same town.

  Even if he failed—and he didn’t think like that or put up with those who believed failing was an option—he could at least afford to. The living was easy in Austin. It didn’t take much to get by. Garage apartments in Hyde Park and Old West Austin rented for well under $100 a month. A six-pack of Texas Pride went for ninety-nine cents. An ounce of good commercial marijuana sold for $10. LSD and peyote were plentiful (it was a UT-Austin student who first synthesized mescaline from peyote). The weather was warm, the winters mild, and good times were no farther than Barton Springs, Lake Austin, and Lake Travis.

  The new culture welded the hedonistic attributes of the hippie lifestyle (drugs and sex, especially) onto the body of a Texas redneck. Real rednecks and hippie rednecks both loved pickups and both liked to drive while drinking, a longneck held between their legs (totally legal in the eyes of Texas law as long they weren’t drunk). Both liked hanging in clubs and hearing music, and both liked getting high and howling at the moon just for the hell of it.

  With Paul watching his back, Bee at his side, Jimmy Day reentering the picture, and friends and family all around him, Willie was sitting in the catbird’s seat.

  Billy Ray Cooper—B.C.—came up from San Antonio and moved in with Willie and Connie and their brood to split shifts driving the band’s Open Road camper with Jack Fletcher. B.C. quickly discovered that his former career driving ambulances might be a safer line of work.

  Jack was behind the wheel of the Open Road on their way back to Lost Valley after a show in Llano in the Hill Country. The road was full of twists and tight curves and the camper had clearly seen better days (“You could stick your finger through the plywood,” B.C. said). Willie and Paul were in the back, playing poker, when Jack suddenly shouted, “Will, the brakes are going! What are we going to do?”

  “Deal the cards,” Willie shouted back. Somehow the Open Road limped back home.

  B.C. became Willie’s personal driver when Willie bought an old Mercedes sedan from Bill McMorris, the Austin car dealer he met through Darrell K Royal. McMorris also got the band a Blazer to haul their gear, which Bee Spears drove.r />
  “If we could pay expenses and everybody got a hundred bucks after a gig, everything was fine,” B.C. said.

  Tim O’Connor signed on shortly after he met Willie one night at the door of Castle Creek, the Austin club he was comanaging. “He walked in and asked for me and introduced himself. I said, ‘Sir, I know who you are.’ He said he wanted to play my joint, so I asked him what he was drinking,” Tim said. They went back to a little office couch, where there was a cooler with some beer “and we became friends right there.” Over the course of a few weeks, Tim informed his partner, Doug Moyes, “You can have the club. I’m going with Willie.”

  Tim knew enough about the club and concert business to think he could help Willie upgrade his show. He began to travel with the band and demand better sound and better treatment wherever Willie was booked. At Gilley’s in Pasadena near Houston, a regular stop for Willie for years, Tim got crosswise with Sherwood Cryer, who owned the massive honky-tonk, when he informed Sherwood that Willie was canceling unless a decent sound system was brought in to accommodate Willie’s new and improved show, and better security was provided to protect the band from the often rowdy crowd. “That was not something you said to Sherwood, especially not at Gilley’s, and you sure as hell didn’t do it when they didn’t know who the hell you are and had never seen you before,” explained Tim. “Plus, Willie wanted the gig.” Sherwood provided better sound but security was nonexistent. “Cowboys kept walking up on the stage while Willie was playing, which didn’t bother Willie but really bothered me,” said Tim, who bitched about it loudly to anyone within range of his voice. It was raining as Willie and Tim walked out to Willie’s red Mercedes for the drive home. Tim was carrying Willie’s guitar and still complaining about the sound and the cowboys climbing onstage. “Goddamnit, what do you want me to be?” he fumed to Willie after Willie treated it like no big deal. “Willie turned around and his eyes turned black, the way they do when he is angry,” Tim recalled. “He said, ‘I’ll tell you three things I never want you to be—cold, wet, or hungry.’”