Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  Willie had had a few experiences with films beyond absorbing movies at the Saturday picture shows as a kid. He sang “Time of the Preacher” in Renaldo and Clara, the unreleased film documentary commissioned by Bob Dylan, and had hung out on the movie set of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid in Mexico.

  Willie didn’t bother preparing for the role. Redford had told him acting in movies was like having a conversation. “You don’t have to go to school for that,” Willie said. He played Wendell Hickson, sidekick and manager of Robert Redford’s character, Norman “Sonny” Steele, a washed-up drunk of a rodeo cowboy consigned to hawking Ranch Breakfast sugar-coated cereal on TV. Leading lady Jane Fonda was in the role of Alice “Hallie” Martin, a TV reporter and city girl who falls in love with Sonny, with actress and native Texan Valerie Perrine playing Charlotta Steele, Redford’s wife.

  Redford and Fonda had drawn accolades for their roles in 1967’s Barefoot in the Park. Their star power and chemistry all but guaranteed success for the film. Redford did all his own horseback riding in the film rather than let a stunt double do it for him. “We did some of it in Utah and around Las Vegas,” Willie said. “We roped a horse. I had a lot of fun. It was an easy gig to do.”

  In addition to reading lines, Willie contributed the song “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” to the movie soundtrack along with a new version of “Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” With the movie promoting the single, “My Heroes” reached number 1 on the country charts in January 1980, less than a month after the movie premiere in New York.

  While the plot of the comedic-romantic western was predictable, Electric Horseman was nonetheless nominated for an Oscar in the Best Sound category, more a tribute to Willie than to Redford’s and Fonda’s appeal.

  Sydney Pollack was mightily impressed with Willie’s work, especially the way he delivered the memorable line “I’m gonna get myself a bottle of tequila and one of those Keno girls who can suck the chrome off a trailer hitch, and kick back,” a line he cribbed from the Bud Shrake and Dan Jenkins novel Limo. Pollack urged him to continue movie work, but Willie needed no persuading. His childhood fantasy of being like Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and Johnny Mack Brown at the picture show was being realized.

  “He felt so comfortable with Redford, it wasn’t scary anymore,” Connie Nelson said of Willie’s cinematic debut. “He realized he could do it and do it well.” He hadn’t talked about making movies before Robert Redford called, she said. “But Willie’s got that little side that he keeps to himself always, and I think that was probably in that little pocket. It was just one of the things he didn’t want to say much about in case it didn’t happen. After Redford talked to him about it, it blew the doors open.”

  By the time Electric Horseman was released, Honeysuckle Rose, a vehicle for Willie as Star, was already in preproduction. Again, Willie didn’t prepare other than to just be himself. “There was no acting there,” he said.

  For the remake of Ingrid Bergman’s Intermezzo, directed by Jerry Schatzberg, about cheating with other women, Willie played a character named Buck Bonham, a country singer torn between his wife and his best friend’s daughter. He was surrounded by an all-star cast, including Dyan Cannon in the role of his long-suffering wife, Viv; Slim Pickens as Buck’s sidekick, Garland Ramsey; and Amy Irving as Lily Ramsey, Garland’s daughter and the Other Woman; along with Lane Smith, Mickey Rooney Jr., Emmylou Harris, Priscilla Pointer (Amy Irving’s mother), and Willie’s band in the role of his band. Emmylou Harris’s cameo was a consolation prize. The female folk-country singer was originally chosen to play Willie’s love interest, but pregnancy forced her to bow out and give up the part to Amy Irving.

  With a title inspired by the jazz standard written by pianist Fats Waller and Andy Razaf in 1928, Honeysuckle Rose depicted the twenty-year career of a made-up character who was eerily similar to Willie Nelson, down to the friction between his home life and life on the road and the ending with the moral “Don’t buy into material trappings and deal with success on your own terms.”

  Filming was done mostly in and around Austin. A free concert was staged near Ranch Road 2222 and Loop 360, west of the city, to replicate a real Willie concert. When the film wrapped, Slim Pickens declared that Willie plays Willie Nelson “better than anybody.”

  Willie did not disagree. “Acting is like singing,” he reckoned, “except there’s no melody. There’s a lot of one-liners in movies, every now and then a zinger or two, with conversation in between. In a song, you have to condense the whole story in two minutes or less.” The experience led him to write a movie script with his tour assistant David Anderson called “The Man Who Owes Everyone,” but like most scripts, it did not advance beyond the development stage.

  At Sydney Pollack’s urging, Willie did his first serious songwriting since becoming a one-name superstar. “Sydney Pollack, Jerry Schatzberg, and I were flying in some private plane from L.A. to New York, talking about the movie and music for the movie,” Willie said.

  “I’d like you to write a song for the film,” Sydney told him.

  “What do you want it to say?” Willie asked.

  “Make it about being on the road,” Sydney replied.

  The words rolled out of Willie’s mouth: “On the road again / Can’t wait to get on the road again / making music with my friends / I just can’t wait to get on the road again.”

  Pollack gave Willie a puzzled look.

  “Obviously he wasn’t impressed,” Willie said, “because he couldn’t hear it like I did, didn’t hear the rhythm, didn’t hear anything except all those words.” But Willie had the makings of a song. “I knew how he wanted it and I knew how easy it was gonna be. When he said the words ‘on the road,’ it all opened up. There it was. It was a no-brainer, a slam-dunk. It was the easiest song I ever wrote. I’d been doing it for years and years. I just hadn’t written a song about it yet.”

  The melody didn’t come until several weeks later. When it did, a classic took shape.

  “On the Road Again” was an off-the-cuff ditty that captured the romance of wanderlust in a way that transcended mere movie filler. It became an anthem for America on the move and one of his most enduring compositions ever. Nominated for an Oscar in the Best Music, Original Song category, the song proved so potent that when the film aired on television, the title had changed from Honeysuckle Rose to On the Road Again.

  He was used to being onstage every night and clearly relished his role as the object of female fans’ affection. Movie stardom generated even more interest from women, including Hollywood starlets working in the same movie. Amy Irving, whose role in Honeysuckle Rose consisted largely of mooning at Willie with pining eyes, was winning Willie’s heart.

  Honeysuckle Rose was an eerie reflection of his real life. His friendship on the set with Amy Irving turned into something more—much more than the usual “Willie or Won’t He?” encounters he had with woman admirers. Balancing time spent with his buddies and his blood family was a fact of life. Both would always be there, with Willie managing to juggle both and somehow keep everybody happy. But just as Willie’s touring bus was christened Honeysuckle Rose, the line between reality and movies was blurring.

  The make-believe world made the sadness in his real life a little easier to accept. His father, Ira Doyle (Pop) Nelson, passed away on December 5, 1978, at the age of sixty-five due to lung cancer. Eleven months later, on November 9, 1979, Nancy Nelson—Mamma Nelson, the grandmother who raised him and who was the glue who held their family together—died.

  “There is an extremely strong sense of family, especially within the immediate family that we grew up with,” said Freddy Fletcher, Nancy’s great-grandson. “Willie’s oldest kids, Susie, Billy, and Lana, we all kind of grew up through some hard times—I remember for one Thanksgiving we split a can of soup—so everybody took care of each other, especially if they needed it. I’m glad that I got to grow up like that. You really appreciate the worth of things and how lucky you are.
” And Mamma Nelson’s death underscored what they’d all been through.

  As his birth family passed on, his real family—the one he had cultivated on the road—grew larger. Kenny Koepke, the younger brother of Connie Nelson and crew member Steve Koepke, joined up in 1979. He’d been living in Denver, working at a Record Warehouse retail store when Willie called. “Why don’t you quit your day job and come work for me?” Willie said. “I need you to drive my Mercedes to Miami.” Kenny arrived in time for a sold-out concert with hometown boys the Bee Gees, the Kings of Disco, opening the show, and started doing whatever needed to be done, from loading in and loading out to setting up the back line and breaking it down and making sure everything was where it needed to be.

  “I didn’t know what I’d gotten into,” Kenny said. “I didn’t think I was naive, but I really was. I had to learn the hard way. I watched Poodie a lot.”

  Despite the band members’ reputation as pirates, Poodie was nothing but encouraging, and Paul oversaw the crew without having to resort to intimidation. “If something was wrong, he’d come up and put his arm around you and let you know you’d done wrong and how you could do it right. He never raised his voice. You just wanted to do right by everybody,” Kenny said. Tunin’ Tom Hawkins, a friend of lighting director Buddy Prewitt, was hired to tune Bobbie Nelson’s piano for three nights and ended up being sole caretaker of Willie’s guitar Trigger. Tom treated the battered Martin differently from the rest of the band’s guitars. “He’s with me, always,” Tunin’ Tom said. “It’s got an extra hole. It’s been beat like Noah’s Ark in the desert. It’s gone—no it’s not, it’s beautiful, just like Willie. Willie keeps it together. We don’t ask questions. Things work. It’s not allowed to go out of tune. I’ve got to be able to read the weather, factor in whether the gig is indoors or outdoors. Bobbie’s Steinway B is the same. It’s his guitar, that’s her piano. It’s her Trigger.”

  The touring band was rolling with five buses, including the one that new sponsor Jose Cuervo tequila was taking on the road, and two trucks carrying equipment and lighting gear. But Willie himself traveled light, carrying a little bag containing his hairbrush.

  The Hill, 1979

  IT WAS FRANK Oakley’s idea to open the Willie Nelson General Store in Nashville, Tennessee. Back when Willie was making records for RCA, having your own souvenir shop near Music Row was a status symbol, the surest sign you were country royalty. A store in Nashville featuring all things Willie was almost beside the point now, but Willie understood the value of playing to his old fans as well as the new ones. So when Frank came to Austin in 1979 at the suggestion of Frank’s running buddy Faron Young to pitch Willie shot glasses, Willie bandannas, and Willie braids to sell at Willie Nelson’s Country Store, Willie was ready to give his blessing with one stipulation. Frank had to change the name.

  “I don’t want to be country,” he told Frank. “I want to be a general.”

  He had his own record label and his own concert hall. Why not his own store? Come to think of it, why stop there? Why not create his own reality?

  The Pedernales Country Club was a bankrupt golf course resort near the village of Spicewood, twenty-nine miles west of downtown Austin, where the Pedernales River flowed into Lake Travis, the most popular recreation destination in the Austin metropolitan area. Willie had bid on a smaller piece of the club in 1977 but his offer was rejected when a competing bidder stepped in. The winning bidder’s development plans went south in no time and Willie ended up with more land at a better price, paying $250,000 to buy the club out of bankruptcy in 1979. Besides his ranch, his place in Malibu, the ranch in Colorado where Connie and their kids found refuge, and the Austin Opry House and adjoining apartment complex, his domain now extended to a golf course, ninety-three undeveloped lots, and three houses in Briarcliff, the community adjacent to the golf course, each lot appraised at $6,000, fourteen condominium units in the Ledge Resort section, and, ultimately, 688 acres after donating 20 acres to the nearby Lake Travis Independent School District.

  Most celebrities of a similar stature would have made the club their private hideaway. Willie saw it more as a place where all his friends and family could get together. It was the perfect place to throw the next Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic.

  Despite the familiar threat of a court injunction filed by wary neighbors to stop the event, the sixth Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic was held at Willie’s new headquarters on Independence Day 1979. A rambunctious crowd of twenty thousand gathered around the number 7 tee box on the golf course, where the stage had been erected.

  The new site was not the only change. Unlike previous picnics, this one was actually scheduled to run under twelve hours. A press release stated that “although the Texas tradition will not fall under the [Texas Mass Gatherings] act, extreme precautions and preparations have been made to comply with the regulations and to help insure proper personnel to create a relaxed atmosphere for both the surrounding residents and, of course, the picnicgoers themselves.” Tickets were $10.50, $12.50 at the gate.

  Headlining were the host, his long-ago Nashville mentor, Ernest Tubb, and his new partner, Leon Russell, celebrating the release of his belated collaboration with Willie, One for the Road. The undercard included Ray Wylie Hubbard, Sammy Allred and the Geezinslaws, comedian Don Bowman, and country-folk troubadours Steve Fromholz, Bobby Bare, the Cooder Browne Band, and Larry G. Hudson.

  The picnic kicked off at high noon—“very high noon” is how James Albrecht described it to readers of Country Style magazine—with Johnny Gimble leading the crowd in “God Bless America.” A new act, Debbie Allen from Memphis, Tennessee, envisioned as the leading lady of Willie Nelson’s first starring vehicle (working title: Sad Songs and Waltzes), was introduced by the forty-six-year-old Godfather himself.

  University of Texas football great Earl Campbell, UT coaching legend Darrell K Royal, and actor Jan-Michael Vincent hung out backstage. Although Bobby Bare remarked, “I’ve been to two of Willie’s picnics and can only remember one of them,” this one was almost civil. Drug overdoses were down, gate crashers minimal. “I didn’t hear of no stabbings,” said Buster Doss, the Nashville promoter relocated to Austin who managed the band Cooder Browne. “This might be the closest thing to what Willie wanted when he started having picnics.”

  The show concluded with Willie singing duets with Ernest Tubb and Leon Russell before the redheaded stranger left the scene in a helicopter headed to Vegas.

  He held another picnic at the same site the following July in the midst of one of the hottest summers on record in Texas, where the string of hundred-degree days seemed endless. The day after his first major motion picture, Honeysuckle Rose, premiered in Austin, anywhere from thirty thousand to ninety thousand fans, depending on who was doing the estimating, showed up for the picnic at the Pedernales Country Club to hear Willie, Merle Haggard, Asleep at the Wheel, Ray Price, Johnny Paycheck, and other close personal friends—although one of the headliners, the Charlie Daniels Band, had to cancel when they landed at the wrong airport. Willie sang “Crazy Arms” with Ray Price, and “Waltz Across Texas.” For the first time ever, the picnic made a profit, going $62,000 into the black.

  No one had time to appreciate it. The warp speed at which Willie was moving was epitomized by a three-week stretch beginning August 14, when he sang the national anthem at the Democratic National Convention in New York and hung out backstage with President Jimmy Carter, who told him he’d been playing his new tape all day long for the past two days. The bourbon Willie sipped backstage, which was supplied by Democratic National Committee chair John C. White, may have been to blame for mangling a few lines of The Star-Spangled Banner, such as “bright stars and broad stripes through the perilous fight,” and “from the land of the free.” But nobody questioned the flubs. With his red, white, and blue macramé guitar strap, Willie was the paragon of patriotism.

  A few days later, he was at the federal correctional institution at Big Spring, Texas, playing a s
how for the men in white, most of them incarcerated for drug convictions. One of them was Dr. John Marcus Young, a radiologist from Athens, Texas, who’d been sentenced in January to three years’ time for unlawful possession and dispensing “narcotic controlled substances” such as amphetamines, barbiturates, sedatives, diet pills, and painkillers over the previous five years to a number of people, including Willie and Connie, Waylon and Jessi, Steve Fromholz, Sammi Smith, Johnny Rodriguez, Playboy playmate Kelli Murphy, and Dallas party girl Priscilla Davis, who obtained thirty-two hundred Percodan pills over four months. The prison date was payback for all the good times Dr. John had shared with his friends.

  On September 1, he made the cover of People, the weekly magazine devoted to celebrity. The cover photograph of a smiling Willie in headband with Connie and the girls made life in Colorado look sweet. The headline on the cover read “His third marriage and new Hollywood stardom mellow music’s outlaw.”

  Willie was People-worthy thanks in no small part to the popularity of a movie called Urban Cowboy, released in 1980. An indirect extension of the Willie effect, the film was a triumph of marketing country as cool to the noncountry masses.

  The movie was based on a 1978 Esquire magazine article by Aaron Latham titled “The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy: America’s Search for True Grit,” a blue-collar love story set in Gilley’s, a ratty tin-sided mega-roadhouse in the shadow of Houston’s oil refineries. The drama of the article centered on Gilley’s mechanical bull, the contraption upon which city boys (and female lead character Sissy) emulated rodeo cowboys in proving their manhood by riding the bucking mechanical bovine without getting thrown.

  John Travolta was the movie’s male lead. The poster boy of the disco dance movement through his starring role in the film Saturday Night Fever was dancing kicker-style this time around, and the whole nation was two-stepping and line dancing along with him.