“I was just hearing the rhythms going too many different ways,” Willie said. “The speed and the weed didn’t mix, especially when you’re up there trying to get a feel going, get the dynamics going. Nobody’s thinking that way. They were just playing. I could handle the weed, but I couldn’t handle the speed. I didn’t want to be around people who were doing it, even my band. I didn’t want in on that vibe. I could see all the negativity in the speed.”
A new road rule—the only rule of the road—was mandated. Cocaine was off-limits. Smoke all the pot you wanted, swallow uppers or downers if you needed ’em. But coke and $1,000-a-week habits had to stop or the Law would stop it for them. “No Snow, No Show” was no longer the operative phrase. “You’re Wired, You’re Fired” was the new code of the road. T-shirts were printed for the band identifying them as the “No Blow Blues Band.”
Word traveled fast about Willie putting on the brakes. He never fired anyone (if someone needed to be fired, there were other ways to make them go away), but this was serious. The band and crew, being the band and the crew, found a way to get around the new rule when they needed to satisfy their urge to inhale something by doing methamphetamine, which was referred to on the buses as “loophole.”
“It was out of control, but hell, everybody was out of control,” Bee Spears said. “Willie was talking about cocaine, so we found a loophole. But everybody did it. It was everywhere. There wasn’t a goddamn record company meeting that didn’t start without a frickin’ line nine inches long.”
Three Family members would eventually depart from the Family due partly to their inability to rein in their habits. “It took a while, but reality eventually set in,” Bee said. “People started getting popped for it, people started dying, you’d pull an all-nighter and you didn’t bounce back, you’d be sick for three or four days, so it wasn’t cool, it wasn’t worth it.”
Larry Trader, one of Willie’s favorite thieves, felt compelled to explain Willie to the readers of his hometown San Antonio Express-News in a three-part series. Trader began by stating the obvious: “There are many misconceptions about Willie Nelson. The biggest one is drugs....Let me tell you why. Willie has been connected to drugs,” said Trader, referring to Willie’s and Paul’s grand jury testimony. “He’s constantly on the highway, playing hundreds of shows. He shakes lots of hands and gives a lot of autographs. Every now and then he’s introduced to a guy who’s supposed to be someone important. Will has no way of knowing if the guy is a doctor, a lawyer or what. If he gives the guy his mailing address and later the guy is busted over drug charges, then Willie is linked to the case because his name and address are found on the guy.”
Trader went on to vouch for Willie’s religious fervor and how when a pastor at his church in Abbott asked him during a service where he thought Jesus was at the moment, Willie replied “at the Armadillo,” because the people in church didn’t need Jesus near as bad as people in honky-tonks did.
Trader also wrote about Willie breaking Sinatra’s attendance record in Las Vegas and how the hotel owners couldn’t understand why he lingered to sign autographs for all the fans until there was no one left. Willie’s response: “I’ve worked 35 years to have people ask me for autographs and I’m not about to turn them down now.”
“You’re Wired, You’re Fired” sounded good, but new characters were always showing up, ready to ignore the edict, like the character who started running with Bo and Scooter Franks, Willie’s T-shirt salesmen. “He turned into a drug head, made his teeth fall out and shit,” one roadie said. Step on either bus and you were taking your chances. “People got on there and they’d come back and speak in different languages,” said Poodie Locke, acknowledging the collective urge to go wild on a nightly basis.
AS with drugs, Willie had to readjust his loose approach to concert security. Billy “B.C.” Cooper or Trader or Paul by his side wasn’t quite cutting it. Enter the Hell’s Angels. Despite an unsavory reputation burnished at Altamont, where Angels working security beat a man to death, Angels worked for cheap and were fiercely loyal.
“We brought these two guys, Deacon and Boo-Boo, with Waylon,” Neil Reshen said. “We’d get more as we needed them. They didn’t really want to get paid that much and they were good people as far as we were concerned—I mean, I know they weren’t good people, but they suited the purposes we wanted, because the last thing you want to do is get into fights. Only an idiot would fight with the Hell’s Angels. Anybody who tries to fight with the Hell’s Angels is going to get his ass kicked.”
Along with Waylon, Willie had been embraced by the Angels, who showed up in force at shows in northern California. One Hell’s Angels associate (“You know I couldn’t be part of any club”) named Peter Sheridan adopted Willie. A Nordic blond behemoth, Sheridan had run with Hunter Thompson when he was writing the articles for Rolling Stone magazine that were later released as the book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. Thompson referred to Sheridan as “Chief Boo Hoo,” and he wreaked havoc and initiated several fistfights on presidential candidate Edwin Muskie’s Sunshine Special campaign train in Florida after Thompson handed him his press credentials. When he showed up on Neil Reshen’s lawn and later on Willie’s doorstep, offering his intimidating presence, Family life got interesting. Ostensibly, Peter was his chauffeur, but more often than not he was passed out in the back while Willie drove the Mercedes. He was Willie’s kind of people, guaranteeing never a dull moment in the tradition of Ben Dorcy back in Nashville, and Gene McCoslin, Larry Trader, Tom Gresham, and Billy Cooper in Texas.
More than anything, Peter wanted to be a Texan. In exchange for the honorary status and privilege of running with the Texas outlaw, he provided very visible muscle. He could get out of hand, like the time at the Whitehall Hotel in Houston when he started throwing dinner rolls across the dining room at strangers enjoying their meals, or threatened to pound Austin guitarist John X Reed into ground chuck, mistaking him for Austin writer Jan Reid, who wrote the book The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, which pissed off several members of Willie’s Family. “He could spot a weakness in someone and burn right through them,” Ray Benson marveled. “He’d move in and mow people down.”
“He scared me to death,” admitted Connie Nelson, recalling when she first met Peter. He was “bad energy” in her eyes. But he turned out to be a near and dear friend as well as her protector. “I never felt for one minute that he was doing it for the money,” she said. “It was a sense of purpose and pride that he was able to do that.” Connie saw his gentle side when he picked up her daughter Paula at the ranch and took her outside to show her fireflies: “He was so big and she was so little, and there he was out there with her, catching fireflies. He really became a trusted part of the family.”
As a reward, Willie bought him a brand-new Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Peter was riding the Harley in California when a woman ran a red light at an intersection and slammed into the motorcycle, killing him. But he left a legacy. Through the Angels connection, Larry Gorham came into the Family in 1978.
“At the time I was around, country music was appealing to more than just country-western fans,” L.G. said. “I was hanging around with [bassist] Chris Ethridge when they’d come to the Bay Area and every now and then fly to gigs. It became more and more and then I was on the bus.” Sometimes he was driving it, spelling main driver Gates Moore.
The stocky, muscular figure became generally known as Willie’s personal bodyguard, although he described it more diplomatically as filling a hole. “I do security, a little public relations, just help a lot of people out. You have to do it with finesse and make sure he’s safeguarded but not get between him and his fans like a wall. If he doesn’t want to see somebody or talk to somebody, he’ll just turn around and walk away quick as you can wink your eye. He doesn’t want to block anybody or discourage anybody. Those people were our paychecks.”
WILLIE Nelson and Family had been touring in two very crowded ’76 Silver Eagle buses—almost “store-bo
ught” compared with Porter Wagoner’s hand-me-down—twelve people to a bus, when Gates Moore hired on, along with the bus he had been driving for Bonnie Raitt and Delbert McClinton when they were opening for Willie. “The buses were rough,” Gates Moore said, “but the boys were rough, so they didn’t mind.” The Eagle that Gates drove was nicer because he kept his ride meticulous, patiently picking up the beer cans and bottles that were knee-deep in the aisle every morning before the craziness started again a few hours later.
Willie had the back room of one of the buses, but he was hardly sealed off from the rest of the entourage. “There was a round table back there, and it really was a round table—his knights would all sit around him,” said Gates, who assumed the role of gatekeeper to go with his driving gig.
“It was his practice to greet people inside at his table rather than greet them outside, so I would take small groups of people inside to the back of the bus, where they would meet him and get his autograph, and then I would usher them out and usher the next group in,” said the Gator, as he was known on the CB radio. “It took forever. We wouldn’t leave a venue until five o’clock in the morning. But anyone who needed to be greeted got in.”
The rolling party was straight out of the Wild West, with booze, dope, and women part of the hedonistic revue. And everyone still carried guns. “I had a sawed-off shotgun and a .forty-five automatic in a holster in the seat,” Gates Moore said. Before a show at the Soledad prison in California, guards contacted Gates in advance, knowing the band’s reputation. “Look, man, we don’t care what you got, but we don’t want you carrying it in there, because we don’t want any of them [the inmates] to get ahold of it,” Gates was told. “So if you got any drugs or guns, we will hold it for you here at the guard station.” Gates rounded up the weapons and put them in a pillowcase, and collected another pillowcase full of dope. The stash was held in one of the guard turrets until the show was over, when band and crew got it all back.
The buses got fancier the bigger Willie got. When Paul, the “road boss,” got his back room on the crew bus done up in mahogany paneling, Willie went to Gates and asked, “How soon can you build me a bus, all mahogany-niggered from front to back?” Gates got it done soon enough to become the designated driver of the Willie bus. “I think his intention was for his bus to just be him alone,” Gates said, but on the maiden voyage of the new bus, dubbed Honeysuckle Rose, Bobbie approached Gates and said, “I don’t know what to do—I don’t know where to ride.” Gates asked Willie, and from that day on, Bobbie rode with her brother.
While the “Willie Express” gained momentum, Willie’s hired mad dog, Neil Reshen, was putting more and more of his time and energy into Waylon, no matter how the receipts were stacking up. Neil and Waylon were both different kinds of animals than Willie. Waylon was fixated on maintaining control in the studio. Long periods of time locked in a room were good for him and good for those around him. Working the old Chet Atkins system of three hours and you’re out or Willie’s way of no more than two or three takes per track was not Waylon’s style.
Waylon came perilously close to wiping out his career during the last week of August 1977, when agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration stormed Waylon’s Nashville office and arrested him for cocaine possession. A package from Neil Reshen’s office sent via World Courier Inc. had been intercepted before it reached Waylon’s studio. Waylon’s cocaine habit was hardly news around the music community, where a blizzard had been blowing for the past three years just like it had been blowing in Los Angeles, New York, Austin, and all over America. Coke wasn’t addictive, so the story went.
Waylon later said he was personally snorting about a quarter ounce of coke a day, easily a $500-a-day habit. But Waylon dodged the bullet—he was never convicted nor did time. The sender of the package, Mark Rothbaum, Neil Reshen’s gopher, took the fall for him and went to jail for shipping the cocaine.
It was a rude awakening. The Outlaws weren’t bulletproof. The real world had intruded on the fantasy.
Willie fired Neil Reshen. So did Waylon. So did Miles Davis. For Willie, letting Mark go to jail was merely the tipping point. Neil was the kind of guy who demanded respect even if he didn’t earn it, just as he demanded attention for Willie and Waylon. But an unexpected $71,000 bill from the tax man put Neil’s head squarely on the chopping block. Willie thought Neil had paid those taxes for him, but obviously he had not.
Willie had fired Neil several times previously, once for the tax problem, once for his negativity. He cut the cord for good when Mark went to jail. “That never did sit right with me,” Willie said. “I liked Mark. I admired him. I respected him. I knew he was sharp, young, and had a lot of guts.”
Mark’s former boss, Neil Reshen, knew the clock had run out on his relationship with Willie. “Our management philosophy was to make their deals and try to keep them going, doing their own work,” Reshen said diplomatically. “Willie liked that for the first ten years and then he decided that he would become a businessman as well.”
Paul English, Willie’s closest friend and financial adviser, felt it had been past time for a change. “Neil did a good job up to the point that he couldn’t do it anymore,” he said. In 1972, “when Neil came in, I hadn’t filed income tax for six years because I wasn’t making enough money to fool with it. Willie hadn’t filed in three years. Neil negotiated with the IRS for Willie and for me—they settled with me for six thousand for the entire six years. Then he did a good job for three or four years. I don’t think he had the ability to respect the relationship we had at that time. Something else had taken over. We came to find out he wasn’t a CPA, nor was he a CPA attorney. You’re not supposed to be able to negotiate with the IRS unless you are a CPA attorney, but he did it successfully.”
Mark Rothbaum made the best out of his jail time. He ran the prison newspaper, maintained a garden, and worked out religiously. Willie kept him hired while he was inside, stayed in touch, and played a benefit at the prison on Mark’s behalf. “The warden was a big fan of Willie’s,” Mark said. “He let me use the telephone. A lot of the promoters came to see me, and that was that.” His sentence was reduced from years to months.
Upon Mark’s release, Willie asked him to open an office to look after his interests. “Mark was honest,” Willie said. “I wanted him out there to represent me without having a title. I didn’t want a manager. I just wanted Mark to be out there.” Miles did the same. Waylon came around a year later. “Waylon was a funny guy,” Mark said, affirming again that he had a different relationship with Waylon than with Willie. “If he was nasty to you—not mad at you—you’d see him the next day and he’d go, ‘How ya doin,’ Hoss? Boy, I must have eaten something last night, I didn’t feel well.’ That’s as good an apology as you were gonna get from Waylon. If you understood Waylon-speak, it was good enough.”
Willie was more direct. “Mark’s a friend you can go to and say, ‘Can you do this?’” he said of their relationship. “He’s a friend who’ll call me and say, ‘Hey, I think you ought to do this.’ And I can either do it or not do it, and he will either say okay or argue with me a little bit. You can’t buy a guy like that.”
BACK in Austin, Willie was testing Columbia Records’ definition of artistic control. Lefty Frizzell’s death in 1975 had inspired Willie to do an album of nothing but Lefty songs dedicated to his favorite honky-tonk singer. The suits at Columbia were less than thrilled when they first heard about the idea, especially since the label had dropped Lefty three years earlier. But two years later, after Willie’s version of “If You’ve Got the Money” from the album The Sound in Your Mind shot straight to number 1 on the country singles chart in the summer of 1976, Columbia brass came around and released the Lefty tribute. Even then, label personnel tried to get him to title the album Songs for a Friend, figuring record buyers didn’t know Lefty Frizzell from Johnny Wright. But Willie held his ground, and To Lefty from Willie was released in 1977, featuring ten of his favorite Lefty songs, including
“I Love You a Thousand Ways,” which reached number 9 on the country singles chart that summer, “Always Late (with Your Kisses),” “Mom and Dad Waltz,” and “Railroad Lady,” Lefty’s last single before he died, written by Jerry Jeff Walker and Jimmy Buffett. The album charted as high as number 91 on Billboard’s album chart, a testament to Willie’s star power more than Lefty’s legacy.
But the mixed results of the Lefty album demonstrated the downside of artistic control. Folding the Columbia/Lone Star custom-label arrangement belied Columbia’s discomfort. Columbia preferred focusing on Willie, not on his friends. A second version of Lone Star Records appeared as an independent label in June 1978, this time distributed by Mercury Records. The new Lone Star was put together by Joel Katz, Willie’s Atlanta attorney, and run by Katz’s friend Guerry Massey. Larry Trader, Willie’s pal, was Lone Star’s vice president. For this go-round, Willie signed Ray Wylie Hubbard and His Cowboy Twinkies, Larry G. Hudson, Don Bowman, the comedian who issued the single “Willon and Waylee,” the Geezinslaw Brothers, Steve Fromholz, and the young country swing band Cooder Browne. Willie released a single, “Will You Remember Mine,” on Lone Star, and Face of a Fighter, an album of slow, sad songs that were compiled from old Nashville demos.
The second version of Lone Star Records lasted ten months before it was shut down. Record labels were a nice conceit, but Willie had enough business on his hands. For every well-intentioned idea that went bust like Lone Star Records came ten more wild new ideas. That had been Willie’s MO for most of his life, but few people had paid attention before. Now he was being taken seriously. He’d done the Old West bit, church gospel, and old-school honky-tonk. His RCA catalog had been recycled. Moving forward, he opted to look back and reminisce by reviving the old songs he’d grown up with and make an album out of that. At the Spence Manor in Nashville, he mentioned what he’d been thinking to Rick Blackburn, who was running Columbia’s Nashville office. Rick was hardly convinced.
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