Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  The ideas started flying back and forth. Willie could write some songs like that and find some others that fit in. The ideas were flowing without his even trying. When they drove over a rise and saw Denver at night, he came up with the line “The bright lights of Denver were shining like diamonds.” “It was the weirdest feeling,” Connie said. “The whole drive we didn’t even get sleepy because we were so excited. By the time we got back to Austin, he pretty much had the whole thing done,” she said. “He just sat down with his guitar and the tape recorder at the ranch on Fitzhugh Road and filled it all in.”

  The idea was not without risk. If it didn’t sell, there would be no second Columbia album. A Willie Nelson concept album would be industry shorthand for commercial death. But he didn’t second-guess himself. He simply pushed all his chips to the center of the table.

  This bet was cowboy mythic, based on the song made popular by Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith, the Charlotte, North Carolina, singer and pioneering country music television star in the early 1950s. It was the same song that Willie used to sing on his radio program on KCNC in Fort Worth when it was nap time for the children listening at home and that he sang to Lana, Susie, and Billy at bedtime, and to Paula and Amy years later.

  Trying to imagine what happened to the Red Headed Stranger, he wrote “Time of the Preacher” in the same spirit as his package show fellow traveler Marty Robbins’s “El Paso City,” which was a follow-up to his hit “El Paso.” A gothic western storyline began to take shape about a preacher man who killed his wife, then drifted from town to town, condemned to pull his dead lover’s horse behind him. He resuscitated “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” a forgotten country music ballad written thirty years earlier by Fred Rose that had been previously covered by Gene Autry and Elvis Presley; “Can I Sleep in Your Arms?” one of Hank Cochran’s saddest, straight-to-the-heart compositions; and Eddy Arnold’s “I Couldn’t Believe It Was True,” the most downbeat song Eddy ever made popular. Billy Callery, a young songwriter who found Willie in Austin, brought him “Hands on the Wheel.” “Just As I Am,” one of the least judgmental numbers in the hymnal, added a spiritual component.

  The ideas would be articulated at Autumn Sound, a new recording studio in a light tan one-story stone building in an industrial park in Garland, a suburb beyond the northeastern city limits of Dallas. Autumn’s studio, a quiet room with cypress wood paneling, featured the first twenty-four-track studio console in Texas and came equipped with a Bösendorfer concert grand piano, a ninety-two-key instrument made in Vienna with four extra bass notes that retailed for $25,000.

  Mickey Raphael found Autumn Sound. Western Swing banjo virtuoso Marvin “Smokey” Montgomery of the Light Crust Doughboys had introduced the nineteen-year-old harmonica player to studio engineer Phil York at Sumet-Bernet Studios in Dallas when both were just starting out. Mickey was hungry to do recording work, so whenever Phil was doing a session, he’d call Mickey to come and hang out in the studio’s coffee room. “I’d leave the control room door open so he could play along with whatever was being recorded,” Phil said. During a break, Phil would ask a recording artist to get him a cup of coffee in the hope he’d hear Mickey playing and perhaps be inspired to invite him into the session. The ploy actually worked on several occasions, with Mickey picking up a few bucks while gaining valuable recording experience.

  When Autumn Sound opened in October 1974, Phil York was recruited to use the studio as a freelance engineer and bring in some of the artists he’d already been working with. He could earn more than twice what he was pulling down at Sumet-Bernet. But no one followed Phil. Desperate for business, he cajoled the owners into giving Willie Nelson a free day in the studio to road test the room, no strings attached.

  “I heard he was looking for a studio in Texas to make a concept album,” Phil said. “He wasn’t happy with what they did with his recordings after he left the studio, overdubbing his singing with chirpy background singers, speeding the track up to give it more pep because producers thought he was laying back too much. He’d be driving down the highway and hear his song on the radio for the first time and discover they’d screwed it up. I told Mickey to come on in, have a good time, bring the beer and whatever, the studio was theirs, no charge.”

  Willie liked the proposition. You couldn’t beat free. The band showed up on a cold January day and recorded five songs, including “A Maiden’s Prayer” and “Bonaparte’s Retreat.” Bobbie fell in love with the Bösendorfer piano. Paul English dug the drummer’s booth. The whole band felt comfortable in the room.

  “Thanks, Phil,” Willie said on his way out the door after the freebie session wound down. “Mix it and send it to me down in Austin.”

  “You mean I get to mix it myself?” Phil asked.

  “Yep. Send it down to me.”

  Phil did as instructed. A week and a half after the freebie session, Mickey called Phil. Willie wanted to record his concept album at Autumn.

  A full week was blocked out at the studio. The band hauled in their equipment and set up. Willie proceeded to play the cassette of the album he’d made at the ranch on Fitzhugh Road. No one had heard the songs before. The whole room burst out laughing over Willie’s semi-solo rendition of “Hands on the Wheel.”

  Phil York: “As Willie sang the lyrics ‘There’s a man, and a boy, catching whales, spinning tales, of the lady that they both enjoy...,’ you’d hear this dog in the cabin with him, howling. He’d start over, and as soon as he got to ‘catching whales, spinning tales,’ the dog started barking. This happened three or four times. Then you heard Willie letting out a long sigh, then yelling, ‘Goddamnit! Shut up!’ Then you heard his wife coming in, saying ‘Poor puppy, get away from that mean man’ right there on the tape. We just roared. That set the tone of the session.”

  Willie kept it loose. His real and musical families clogged the studio hallways throughout the run. Bobbie didn’t show up for the first day, so Bucky Meadows, whom Willie added to the sessions, subbed on piano (and subbed very well before switching to guitar after Bobbie arrived). Willie also invited Paul’s brother Billy English, who was playing drums with the Austin dance band Country Music Revue, to join in.

  With one exception, Phil York was the neutral recording engineer. He had noted what he described as “Willie’s penetrating voice” and EQed the edges out for a mellower vocal bottom. When Willie came into the control room to hear the playback of the song, he glared at Phil. “What the hell did you do to my voice? You ruined it!” Phil quickly undid the EQ on the playback and Willie nodded approvingly. Phil tried adding some reverb to his voice as well but Willie nixed that, too. “That’s what Nashville did to me,” Willie instructed. “Take it off.”

  Phil did as he was told. “My job was to get the sound Willie wanted to get,” he said. “He was the producer. I was the engineer.”

  “Time of the Preacher,” the first track in the studio and the first track on the album, was knocked off in several takes. “I didn’t know this album was anything special,” said Phil York. “I knew it wasn’t the Nashville cookie-cutter formula. I remember thinking, What’s he going to do with this? Nashville isn’t going to buy it, it wasn’t cut there, and it isn’t their sound.”

  The third song was the chestnut written by Fred Rose, cofounder of the Nashville powerhouse song publisher Acuff-Rose, “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”

  “Just play what you feel,” Willie instructed the band on the first run-through without the tapes rolling. Bucky Meadows responded by playing tricky jazz licks on his big Gibson. Bee Spears did a rave-up of jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius. Paul and Billy swung the brushes.

  “That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” Willie said after the run-through. “This is more of a solitude-sounding kind of song. I tell you what, put your instruments down and let me play it solo. Just play along only if you feel like you can add something to it.”

  Bucky walked out of the room, followed by Billy and Paul. Bee and Mickey stuck around, adding minim
al fills. “It was all about Willie,” Mickey Raphael said. “We learned to lay back.”

  Willie knew what he wanted. He did one song at a time until he got it right, then moved on to the next. Phil York was used to saving money in the studio by starting the tape only when he knew the musicians were recording a keeper. After several starts and stops, he noticed Willie whispering to Paul in the main room, and Paul came into the control room to repeat this message from Willie: “Phil, stop stopping the tape machine. Let the damn tape roll.”

  “I didn’t get what was going on until about a third of the way through the damn record,” Bee Spears said. But he never doubted Willie. “I learned a long time ago not to second-guess him.”

  The cost for five days of recording and a day of mixing was under $4,000. The $60,000 advance from Columbia that Neil Reshen had negotiated was nonrecoupable, meaning whatever Willie didn’t spend from the advance, he was able to keep. Enough was left over to upgrade the band bus and band equipment and still have some running change.

  Phil York came away from the sessions a believer. Bobby Earl Smith, the singer-bassist for Freda and the Firedogs, and Joe Gracey, the most popular disc jockey on progressive-country KOKE-FM in Austin and an aspiring engineer, called Phil, needing a dub of a song he’d recorded called “Muleshoe.” Phil told Bobby Earl and Joe to come up and get a dub and listen to these tapes he had.

  “I’ve never heard anything like it,” Phil told them when they arrived while he was rewinding tape to sequence the songs correctly. Bobby Earl was stunned. “‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’ actually had lyrics. I’d been hooked on the Shot Jackson/Buddy Emmons instrumental version on the album Sho-Budding Again and thought it was the prettiest melody ever, and here was Willie, singing the words,” he said. “We knew we’d just heard something like never before.”

  Gracey was not so impressed. “I thought it was a career-ending mistake, because it was too stark and too off-the-wall. I thought he had just taken a really hard road.”

  Willie tracked down Hank Cochran, who was hanging out on his boat in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and asked him to fly to Dallas that day to hear what he’d just done.

  “Here I are,” Hank announced after he arrived at the motel where the band was staying.

  Willie played him the entire recording and asked Hank what he thought.

  “Truthfully, I don’t have the slightest damn idea,” Hank told him. “But I love it, I like it, and I guess that’s all that matters. Because what else is there? I don’t know what to compare it to, which is great. And thank you for putting one of my songs in it. And I’ll tell you one thing: If you do put it out—and I know you will—and my song is on it, I’ll spend all the money on the other side, promoting it. I’ll make damn sure it’s promoted.”

  Stripped-down, spare, and clocking in at just thirty-four minutes, Red Headed Stranger was a dark, violent telling masked in graceful melodies, effectively capturing the same harsh Old West reality that the writer Cormac McCarthy would soon bring to his novels. But Bruce Lundvall, Columbia Records’ president, didn’t hear a hit, or an album, when Neil Reshen brought an acetate of the recording, along with a leather-clad Waylon Jennings, to a listening session in New York. Lundvall thought Neil was pulling his leg. The ink on the contract wasn’t dry, Lundvall thought to himself. And what the hell is Waylon Jennings doing here? He’s on RCA.

  Lundvall diplomatically commented that the recording might be a real collectors’ record, it was so unusual. Spare and simple was nice for a demo, but four days in the studio and you’re done—that was ridiculous. No one of Willie’s stature was making albums for less than $250,000.

  Waylon practically jumped up on Bruce Lundvall’s desk.

  “You tin-eared, tone-deaf son of a bitch!” he fumed. “See, that’s where you’re wrong. You ain’t got a goddamn clue what Willie Nelson’s music is about.” Waylon glared menacingly at the CEO, fist clenched and ready to coldcock his Yankee ass onto the rug. “He doesn’t need a producer, he doesn’t need Jerry Wexler. This is what he’s all about! That’s why I’m here. To tell you that.”

  Waylon stomped out, with Neil Reshen following behind.

  Bruce Lundvall honestly thought there wasn’t much to the album. “You can hear the drum pedal squeaking through the whole album,” he said, though the performance by Waylon made him wonder. Maybe Billy Sherrill down in Nashville should sweeten up the recording with some strings or background singers. Lundvall overnighted an acetate to Nashville and spent the weekend listening to what Neil had delivered.

  “Did he make this in his living room?” Billy asked when Bruce called Monday morning. “It’s a piece of shit! It sounds like he did this for about two bucks. It’s not produced.”

  “I think that’s the whole idea,” said Bruce, who was starting to feel defensive.

  Willie knew he was upping the risk by making a record so inexpensively. “There weren’t a lot of people who made money off the recording,” he admitted. “It’s a lot better if you’ve got a million dollars, and that way you can spend half of that on studio time and the rest of it on musicians, and a few well-placed dollar bills in this guy’s pocket. Then everybody gets fat off of somebody’s album. But it doesn’t mean that ten good songs were cut.”

  The reaction in the rest of Columbia’s Nashville office was similar to Billy Sherrill’s. “Ron Bledsoe, who was running Columbia Nashville, Dan Beck, Mary Ann McCready, and I all sat and listened to the record,” said Nick Hunter, who had been hired by Neil Reshen. “They were disappointed. They had seen Willie’s high-energy shows, and this record just laid there.”

  The live show was dynamite. With Jody Payne being primed as a solo act with the release of the single “Three Dollar Bill,” a second drummer, Rex Ludwick, had been brought in to augment Paul. After Carlene English’s death, “Paul got sick,” Willie said. “He needed help back there. Some days he just couldn’t get there, so I hired Rex. When Paul got better and came back, I kept Rex.” After rolling with Waylon Jennings for almost a year, including playing on Waylon’s Honky-tonk Heroes, then moving on to work with singer-songwriter Guy Clark for a spell, Bee Spears came back too. But Willie wanted to keep Chris Ethridge, so the band expanded into a two-bassist, two-drummer ensemble that packed a wallop. “Whiskey River” had been transformed from a honky-tonk anthem done as a Ray Price shuffle into a crunching rocker. Willie Nelson and Family were no longer tethered to the traditions of Ray Price, Faron Young, and Ernest Tubb. Their new peers were Southern rock bands like the Allman Brothers of Macon, Georgia, who also carried two guitars and two drums, the Charlie Daniels Band of rural Tennessee, the Marshall Tucker Band of South Carolina, and whatever ensemble Leon Russell had going up in Tulsa. “When it worked, it was like thunder, or a train rolling down the track,” Bee Spears marveled. “It was smokin’.” “It sounded great if you had the right chemical mixture in your body,” observed Willie. “It was a really hard-core, heavy metal, rock kind of country.”

  People had noticed, including Columbia Nashville’s Ron Bledsoe, who was wondering, where was that band on the recording?

  Even Willie’s friends were questioning his wisdom. “Willie, that album isn’t going to sell shit,” Joe Jamail told him flat out.

  Bruce Lundvall played the recording at an executive meeting in the New York office, announcing to everyone around the table, “This is the first album by Willie Nelson on Columbia. It’s probably not commercial and might not be made for country radio, but I want you to live with it. It’s going to be a collector’s item because it’s so special.”

  Bruce was ready to suck it in. Jerry Wexler might not have had a hit on Willie, but Columbia would stick with him until he did. He was worth the investment. Bruce Lundvall’s instincts were validated by national media coverage of Willie’s picnic at Liberty Hill. As the Bee Gees dominated the national pop charts in 1975 with the disco hit “Jive Talking,” the Third Annual Fourth of July Picnic drew seventy thousand true believers to a five-hundred-acre tree
less pasture on the banks of the South San Gabriel River near Liberty Hill, a picturesque small town in the Hill Country, thirty miles northwest of Austin. The picnic starred Willie, Kris and Rita, Billy Swan, the Charlie Daniels Band, Doug Sahm and His Tex-Mex Trip, singer-songwriter Alex Harvey, Johnny Bush, Delbert McClinton, Floyd Tillman, and the Pointer Sisters, a trio of retro-dressing, very good-looking African American females from San Francisco whose cool harmonies had been championed by the Armadillo World Headquarters.

  Fifty thousand advance tickets priced at $5.50 were sold, and another ten to twenty thousand were sold at the gate for $7.50. The Texas Senate declared Willie Nelson Day. Music press was flown in from around the world to take note of the cultural phenomenon in progress, signifying Willie, as it were.

  To live up to its image as a giant-size wild and woolly outlaw concert, traffic backed up for miles on Farm to Market Road 1869, the main route into the site, and Paul English drew down on a guy he caught hopping the fence, inserting the barrels of two pistols into his mouth before running him off. Otherwise, it was basically a whole lot of roaring, musically and personally.

  The accounting system Paul and Neil Reshen had devised was primitive at best. Paul, Neil, and Willie had a plywood box built with a hole in it and had Lana sit inside. “They threw the money in the box and I counted it and handed it to the Purolator armored-car man,” she explained. But the heat and lack of ventilation made her pass out. “Dad came in with Neil Reshen and Paul,” she said. “Paul was still scuffed up by the altercation. I was sopping wet. They picked me up and told me to get out. They shoved the money into the plywood box with a padlock on it for three hours until it got full enough to give it to the Purolator man.”

  No matter how much came in, it wasn’t enough to pay for the cost of throwing the picnic, just like Dripping Springs and Bryan–College Station. Unlike with the Bryan and Dripping Springs picnics, Geno McCoslin and friends did not bother applying for a Texas Mass Gatherings Act permit, passed by the Texas Legislature in 1971 to prevent any more hippie conventions like the Texas International Pop Festival staged in 1969. Why bother, when the penalty was a misdemeanor punishable by ninety days in jail and/or a $1,000 fine? They were thinking like characters. The show ran all the way to five a.m. the next day, but only ten arrests were made and thirty-five traffic violations issued, relatively tame by previous standards, with no clashes between factions in the audience. Williamson County sheriff August Bosshard ignored enforcing the Texas Mass Gatherings Act and reported “no violence, no affrays, and no complaints about the crowd’s behavior from locals. Those people who were down there, if they want to swear there were more than five thousand people there for more than twelve hours, they can file a complaint. I’m not going to.”