Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  “You’re crazy! You’re nuts!” he told Willie. “You’re a great writer. Go write. You’re coming off ‘Luckenbach, Texas.’”

  Rick Blackburn’s words went in one of Willie’s ears and out the other. Willie was listening to his muse. “Why be predictable?” he asked Rick. “Great songs are great songs, no matter when they’re written. My audience right now is young. They’ll think these are new songs, or a lot of folks will. At the same time, we’ll get the sentiment of the older audience who grew up with all those songs, who don’t necessarily know me as an artist. I think we’ll be able to bridge that gap.”

  “I still think you’re crazy,” muttered Blackburn.

  Willie had a good feeling about the idea. The year before, he and Connie had secured a six-month lease on an apartment on the beach in Malibu so they and their girls could be near Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge and their daughter, Casey. Willie seemed to be spending half his time in Los Angeles, singing, playing, recording, doing TV, and sniffing around movies, so having a place there made sense. While jogging along the beach, enjoying his new exercise regimen, Willie was recognized by his upstairs neighbor. The neighbor, Booker T. Jones, was a music guy too, and knew Willie’s music and a lot about him through Kris and Rita, who was the sister of Booker T.’s wife, Priscilla Coolidge.

  Booker T. may have been black and Willie white, and Willie may have been country while Booker T. was all about soul stylistically, but they came from the same geographic region and were both raised in musical households where gospel music and pop songs from hymnals and songbooks by the piano filled the rooms. Both had experienced the pleasure of being paid to play music at a young age and both retained an encyclopedic knowledge of the songs of their youth. Each was in California exploring musical genres other than the ones he was associated with.

  “We had a lot of common influences,” Booker T. said. “Ray Charles was a big influence of mine and he was a big influence on Willie. I had heard Bob Wills and his Texas country jazz. Willie just loved jazz.”

  As the front man of Booker T. & the MG’s, Booker T. was one of the cooks in the kitchen who created Southern-style soul music in the 1960s. The MG’s were the house band at Stax Records, aka Soulsville, U.S.A., in Memphis and backed up Eddie Floyd, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Rufus and Carla Thomas, Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave, Johnny Taylor, the Staple Singers, and Albert King on their biggest hit records, while the MG’s scored instrumental hits of their own such as “Green Onions” and “Hip Hug-Her.” An accomplished arranger and producer and coauthor of Albert King’s signature blues piece “Born Under a Bad Sign,” Booker was all about groove.

  “He didn’t have to worry about me disturbing him when I was making music because he was making music on his own down there,” Booker T. said. “We were the only ones in the complex who socialized, I think.” They discovered a shared appreciation for the Great American Songbook, the informal name given to the great melodic pop standards of the middle twentieth century that practically every musician coming of age in that era learned sooner or later—songs such as “Georgia on My Mind,” written by Hoagy Carmichael, the eternal “Stardust,” also written by Hoagy, in 1927, “Moonlight in Vermont,” popularized by vocalist Margaret Whiting, “All of Me,” a hit for both Louis Armstrong and Paul Whiteman in 1932, and the Irving Berlin classic “Blue Skies.” “When I got out of high school, I was playing high school proms and high school dances around Memphis with bandleaders to make extra money,” Booker T. said. “Those were the songs we played—‘Tenderly,’ ‘Stardust.’”

  Booker T. went downstairs and jammed with Willie with guitars a few times. Then Willie went upstairs and jammed with Booker T. “I had keyboards up there,” he said. One night Willie said, “We ought to record some of these.” They went over songs, and the ones that felt good made the list Willie was compiling. “They were all songs I heard all the time on the radio,” Willie said. “We had sheet music, and Bobbie played them on the piano and I’d figured them out on guitar. Those were hard songs to play. They weren’t your normal country and western tunes. They had a lot of good chords in them, and it took some time to learn them.”

  When Willie got a list of ten songs, “he invited me to go into the studio with him,” Booker T. recounted. “We knew what we wanted to do. Willie had a free hand with Columbia pretty much to do whatever he wanted to do, so he chose me as a producer, we got the money and started recording.”

  Working with Booker T. made sense to Willie. “I was just singing songs that I liked. Luckily I found a guy who knew how to produce them, arrange them, and record them. I needed him there to make sure they were musically correct and to write the strings and arrangements,” he said.

  Booker felt a synergy developing. “You know how it is when you’re with somebody and you don’t talk about it a lot? We had a lot of unspoken understanding about bringing this music to the foreground in a soulful country way and we were just enjoying it, too,” he said. “I had some music in my mind, the sounds, and I knew some of the members of his band pretty well. I knew Chris Ethridge. They fell in pretty easy.” Mickey, Bee, Jody, Paul, and Rex knew their way around a recording situation too and dug the country-soul-southern thing. “The songs naturally fell in,” Booker T. said. “It was pretty informal.”

  They gathered in Brian Ahern’s house, tucked away in the Hollywood Hills. A Canadian producer married to the singer Emmylou Harris, Ahern built his Enactron Truck Studio to move around the country and record in any location. In this instance, the wires and cords ran from the recording console in the truck parked in the driveway through the front door of the Ahern residence.

  Creature comforts extended to a full kitchen and a swimming pool, but little time was spent partying. The band rehearsed songs until they got it right, rolled tape, and recorded, devoting no more than a few takes for each song before moving on to the next. Most of the musicians were set up in the living room. Mickey Raphael recorded his parts in the same tiled bathroom shower he had played in on Emmylou Harris’s albums, for the “great natural reverb,” he said. In less than a week, they had an album.

  “I shaped the sound first and gave it something everybody can access by featuring his guitars and his voice and having the right colors underneath for the songs,” Booker T. said. “I wanted the recording to reflect southern soul, so I played on the songs. We started off with ‘Georgia’ and ‘Stardust,’ and I played them the way I played them when I was working clubs as a boy. My vibe was pretty mellow. We were enjoying working the whole thing out. It was a pleasurable experience. It wasn’t really work. We got the first two songs on the first day, and listening to the tapes on the way home, I realized it was something I loved. That was the most important thing to me.

  “Willie saw me as a musician and gave me all the latitude as a producer to do what I wanted with it. He did his part and left. I was mostly an arranger. The producer part was organizing the logistics and doing the work of making a record—making sure the tape was happening, making sure the sound was coordinated with the engineer mastering. I tried some other piano overdubs, overdubbing some strings on some songs, some horn arrangements, having a big ensemble playing on ‘Georgia.’ The middle part of it I left to Willie.”

  Booker T. Jones finally understood what Willie was dealing with when he delivered the finished product to Columbia Nashville. “I realized what we did was somewhat unorthodox. I don’t know if [the suits in Nashville] thought it was commercial. I’m not sure what they thought. But they didn’t print many copies when the record was released.”

  The front cover of Stardust, a painting of the Pleiades constellation in a starlit sky by Susanna Clark, the wife of Texas singer-songwriter Guy Clark, conveyed an ethereal mood reflecting the songs inside. The inner cover was a photograph of a smiling Willie wearing a blue parka “borrowed” from Steve Wynn, Mr. Las Vegas, and a top hat and a beaded “WN” hatband presented to him by the Sioux Nation, with the Spring Mountains near Las Vegas in the background.


  By the time Stardust was released in April 1978, “Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” his duet with Waylon, had rocketed to number 1 on the country charts and crossed over to Top 40. “Mammas” was on the new compilation that RCA’s Jerry Bradley had orchestrated to follow Wanted: The Outlaws, once again pairing the two Ws but this time leaving out Jessi Colter and Tompall Glaser. The title Waylon & Willie and the album cover, done up to look like a tooled-leather picture frame with their smiling faces painted over a landscape with a silhouetted cowboy on horseback in the background, said it all: Inside the cardboard package was a polyvinyl disc twelve inches in diameter containing audio performances by the country duo of country duos, the baddest-assed of all the bad-ass Texas outlaws, Big Chief and Little Willie. Several other singles spun from the album, including Willie’s “If You Can’t Touch Her at All,” a number 5 country single, and Waylon’s “Wurlitzer Prize,” a sentimental slice of life about a lovesick guy pouring his coins into the jukebox to hear sad songs. The album stayed atop the country album chart for three months, eventually going double platinum, signifying sales of two million units. Willie’s guitar was absent from the recording, but nobody seemed to notice.

  No sooner had “Mammas” started descending from the top of the charts than “Georgia on My Mind” from Stardust ascended to number 1 country and number 5 pop. Whatever Columbia’s initial hesitation about Stardust may have been, the label ended up printing more and more copies. Willie had been right. The songs sounded new to his younger fans. When he roadtested “Stardust” at the Austin Opry House, the kids responded as if Willie had written it. As for the old-timers, “the same people who danced to ‘Bubbles in My Beer’ danced to ‘Stardust,’” he observed. The buzz grew exponentially and never stopped. “I didn’t realize how many records it sold until we got a platinum record,” Booker T. Jones said.

  STARDUST put Willie on a whole other level of celebrity. He was flying to his gigs on a Lear jet, making runs to Vegas, to Colorado, back to Texas, often on the same day, because he could. He was a bold-faced name in newspaper gossip columns, celebrating his birthday with come-dian Richard Pryor and club-hopping with James Caan, as if he were a movie star, which he was intent on becoming.

  He and Connie renewed their wedding vows at the home of Las Vegas impresario Steve Wynn on June 10, 1978. Steve was best man and his wife, Elaine, was matron of honor. Country pop superstar Kenny Rogers and his wife, Marianne, were witnesses.

  Even though Willie and Waylon could both pull down $200,000 playing a stadium concert, they continued to book into the Golden Nugget with Steve Wynn for weeklong runs at $20,000 a week, ten shows a week, along with all the perks that went with it, mainly because it was Wynn and Vegas. Waylon especially appreciated the town’s proximity to Phoenix, where he would take Jessi to stay with her mother, a Pentecostal preacher, until he couldn’t take her religious fervor anymore.

  Willie liked hanging with Wynn. They rode horses together on Steve’s ranch. “I was a roper in those days, a header,” Steve said. “Whenever Willie came to Vegas we’d go to the desert and ride. Willie can ride. He’s comfortable on a horse. I used to rope with Spider; he’d ride Chicaro. Spider was blazing fast. Spider had a great personality. You could call him like you call a dog. I promised Willie if I was ever done with Spider I’d let him have him. When I was done roping, I gave Spider to Willie, and he lived out his days on Willie’s ranch in Evergreen, Colorado.”

  Four weeks after renewing his vows with Connie, Willie spent the Fourth of July weekend at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas as part of the Texxas World Jam with Waylon, then throwing an indoor picnic at the Austin Opry. They were trendsetters at the top of their game, topping the charts with hit after hit while making aviator sunglasses, leather vests, long hair under cowboy hats, and cowboy boots fashionable. The whole Family was in on the act. Before a Hollywood Bowl concert starring Willie and Waylon, flamboyant rock and roll entertainer Little Richard spied Paul English walking into the venue. “Nice cape, man,” Little Richard told him, paying a compliment. “I dig that!” His road gang, now led by a wiry ex-paratrooper called T Snake, could be found registered at hotels under the name Fast Eddie and the Electric Japs.

  Willie had reached the pinnacle of celebrity. Two weeks after the release of Stardust, he had performed at the White House for President Jimmy Carter. Jimmy regarded Willie so highly that he invited him back for a private performance in September. While the president was away at Camp David, trying to broker a Middle East peace agreement, Willie played a show on the White House lawn for NASCAR, singing a duet with First Lady Rosalynn Carter. That night, before retiring to the Lincoln Bedroom, where he and Connie spent the night, he climbed on the roof of the White House and smoked a joint with one of the Carter boys.

  The larger his stature grew, the more driven he became. Four albums (Stardust, Red Headed Stranger, Wanted: The Outlaws, and Waylon & Willie) had been certified platinum, signifying one million copies sold, the highest achievement in the business. For most artists, one platinum album would make a career. Four was unprecedented for anyone associated with country music. Rather than rest on those laurels, he stepped up his recording pace. Willie Nelson and Family Live, a two-disc set of his live show recorded at Lake Tahoe, was the first record to capture the dynamic of the Family Band in concert, with the two-bass, two-drum setup cranking out extended jams.

  Even his old material, recycled and reissued, was charting. Record labels he’d never heard of—Creative Sounds, Double Barrel, Allegiance, Back-Trac, Eclipse Music Group, Hallmark, Sunset, Potomac, Delta, Tudor, Aura, Merit, Sierra, Ditto, That’s Country, Ronco, Soundsational, Quicksilver—were putting out product bearing his name. Most spelled it right, which was all Willie said he cared about. He might not have had a piece of the action, and not all the releases might have been legal. But every one was promoting Willie Nelson, something he’d been doing all his life.

  Every other project was turning into a buddy concept. Booker T. Jones was added to the Family Band for Willie Nelson Sings Kristofferson, along with Jerry Reed, the talented Nashville guitarist who played on numerous RCA sessions with Willie in the 1960s, and Albert Lee from Emmylou Harris’s band. When Booker joined the Family Band for a Stardust tour, Bobbie Nelson dropped out. Booker T. also produced and played on a Christmas album, Pretty Paper, easily Willie’s most soulful Christmas sessions yet.

  Willie finally got around to making an album with Leon Russell, whom he had once described as a “genius,” by tapping into the Great American Songbook again as well as the hymnal and the Nashville hit parade circa 1956 for the double album Willie and Leon: One for the Road. The dynamic-duo recording was almost an afterthought. Leon had lost a couple steps, mojo-wise. Too cheap and too petty to keep a steady band together and too reclusive to bother winning over new fans even as he was riding on the coattails of Williemania, Leon had faded ever so slightly. Like with Waylon Jennings, Johnny Bush, and Ray Price, when Leon wasn’t looking, his impish little redheaded friend snuck past on his way to superstardom. It didn’t matter. They sounded like a duo who’d been playing together all their lives in some sleazy roadhouse on their rendition of “Heartbreak Hotel,” the song Elvis made famous that was written by Mae Boren Axton, the songwriter who had advised Texas Willie Nelson in Vancouver, Washington, to go to Nashville to be a star. Willie and Leon’s version reached number 1 on the country singles chart in June 1979.

  Their two bands merged into a single unit for a forty-five-date tour promoting the album and the single. Bobbie Nelson chose to stay home again while Leon played piano with Willie, even though her piano was tuned and set up for her to play every night.

  STANDING toe-to-toe with Leon, taking the W&W brand around the world, reviving pop songs with Booker T., playing in front of thousands of wild-ass fans night after night, smoking dope on the roof of the White House—no whim went unrealized. So he took it in stride when he found himself riding horses in Utah with a big movie star, although Conn
ie admitted to being intimidated. The views around the Double R Ranch in Utah were dreamy; Hollywood westerns never had backdrops like this—majestic mountains with jagged peaks, verdant valleys with swift-running rivers, pristine wilderness in every direction. Doing all that alongside Robert Redford made it all the dreamier as far as Connie Nelson was concerned. But there they were, several weeks after the actor made famous for his role as the Sundance Kid extended an invitation to come visit, hang out, take in the view.

  The actor and the musician had met a few weeks before at a Nashville fund-raiser at producer Billy Sherrill’s mansion. “We flew back the next day to L.A. on the same plane, sitting next to each other, talking about this and that,” Willie said. Somewhere along the way, Redford asked Willie if he’d ever thought about acting.

  “Yeah,” Willie admitted. “You must like my conversation.”

  While riding on a trail on his ranch, the movie star asked Connie Nelson if she thought Willie would be interested in being in a movie with him. “Yes!” Connie blurted without consulting her husband. She was starstruck, but so was Willie. Then again, Robert Redford was starstruck too, bearing witness to one of the great Hollywood truisms: The only people movie stars look up to are music stars. It’s one thing to perform in front of cameras on a set and have millions watch the filmed performance in movie theaters; musicians put it all on the line night after night in front of thousands, no reshooting or do-overs allowed.

  The ranch vacation was followed by a call from producer-director Sydney Pollack. Did Willie want to be in Redford’s movie Electric Horseman? Willie realized Redford knew exactly what he was doing when he was talking to him on the plane and to Connie at the ranch. “He was checking me out to see if it was something I’d want to do,” he said.