Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  Merle was sleeping on his bus in the parking lot outside the studio when Willie knocked on the door. It was four in the morning. “Haggard, I’ve found this great song,” Willie said. “Come into the studio with me.” The band was already running through the instrumental. Merle suggested that Willie do the track and he’d come in sometime in the morning and finish it, but Willie was persistent. “You need to come in with me. Now.”

  Merle shuffled into the studio, bleary-eyed and more than a little spaced out. Willie handed him the lyrics he’d scribbled on a brown paper bag. Merle ran through the vocals with Willie as they both got a feel for the song about a Mexican bandit and his inscrutable friend, both of them living outside the law. The tape rolled. Merle nailed his vocal in one take and went back to his bus to sleep.

  The next morning, he found Willie on the golf course and asked if he could do another vocal of the song they’d recorded a few hours earlier.

  Willie laughed and shook his head. “Hell, the tape’s already on the way to New York.”

  The single of “Pancho and Lefty” reached number 1 on the country singles chart in July 1983. The album went platinum.

  DOING covers came more easily than writing a new song. “I used to not write unless I was hungry,” Willie explained. “That’s what motivated me back then, to get money to pay the rent. Writing is sometimes a painful experience. You have to dig it out of yourself and stay with it. A lot of the time what you’re talking about is not that pleasant a subject. Country songs are usually about love that didn’t make it or one thing or another that’s negative. In order to go through those things in your mind, you have to build up your nerve and jump into it.” Well-fed, loved, satisfied, and content, he was having too good a time making music with his friends to write sad songs like he used to.

  Willie was taking a more expansive view, as he testified to the audience tuned to WHN, New York City’s only country radio station. During an interview with Lee Arnold, he said, “I believe that music, not only country music, is the great communicator. It crosses all boundaries. There is zero difference between the people from Fort Worth, Texas, and the people from Tokyo, Japan. We all laugh at the same things and cry at the same things.” He’d just toured Japan with Jackie King to promote Angel Eyes after using Jackie to play behind him and Ray Charles on his On the Road Again television concert broadcast from the Austin Opry House.

  The Sentimental Journey album reunited Willie with his Django pals from Somewhere over the Rainbow. “There was no list of songs,” said Bobby Arnold. “They’d sit around and say, ‘Anybody know this one?’ and of course they’d know it, and they’d do it two times and it’s done. They’d just wing it.”

  While Willie’s preferences changed from record to record, he always used a U 87 microphone for vocals and a KM 84 microphone on the guitar amp. Headphones for Coach Darrell Royal, the retired University of Texas football coach, were always placed next to Willie’s. Coach showed up so frequently for the recordings, he had his own chair. Willie did not have to tell him about studio etiquette. “He knows that I know to sit and not make any noise in a recording studio,” Darrell said. “Around my chair you could hear a mouse piss on cotton.”

  A loose-knit staff kept the operations going when Willie was on tour, making a movie, or otherwise occupied. Larry Trader was the golf pro—he married his wife, Linda, on the seventh tee and was frequently Willie’s partner in taking on all comers in a golf scramble. Larry Greenhill and Bobby Arnold were the studio guys. Lana Nelson and Jody Fischer took care of business; Jody was Willie’s personal assistant. “Jody was a servant,” Bobby Arnold said. “Everything she did was about Willie. She was the most underestimated person out there.”

  “When he opened that studio, he needed someone to manage it,” explained Lana Nelson. “He didn’t really want to make money on the studio because he didn’t want to rent it out a lot. He wanted access to it. He needed to bring in some money, but it would irritate him if he wanted to record and there was a session scheduled. He needed someone to balance it all out. It never really balanced, of course. It wouldn’t have been one of our projects if it had balanced—you’d have known something was up. Jody and I would always make sure there was a pot of beans and cornbread on the stove and tomatoes and onions and milk and buttermilk and coffee, especially if Dad was there.”

  Every day was a new adventure. “We responded to things as they came up,” explained Bobby Arnold. “One morning we woke up and Greenhill told us we were going to be recording a movie soundtrack that day, and we needed nine TV monitors. We didn’t know where to get them or how to hook them up, but you can bet that we had them working by the time they needed them. Willie would keep you on your toes—you wouldn’t get bored.”

  Making music was a family affair more than ever. Lana Nelson directed the video for “Little Old Fashioned Karma” from Tougher Than Leather, taking a small cast and crew for a ride on Honeysuckle Rose to the South Texas town of Brackettville for location shooting. The town and Fort Clark, a U.S. military outpost on the Indian frontier, were built around Las Moras Springs, one of the largest in Texas. After the shoot, the cast and crew went to the springs, which had been developed into a swimming hole and resort.

  “As soon as the bus pulled in, people started showing up,” Bobby Arnold said. “Willie stood on the bus, looking out at the crowd, and said, ‘I’m trying to decide if I’m going to go swimming.’ When he stepped off the bus, the crowd moved in closer. It took twenty minutes to get from the bus to the water, all eyes on him. The first thing he does is a flip off the diving board, his pigtails flying. Willie crawls up onto this floating dock, and talks to everyone in the pool, answering every question they had,” Bobby Arnold said.

  Play remained an integral part of work. Everyone was expected to hold up his or her part of the bargain. “Willie, Trader, Coach, and me were playing golf and it was getting to be golf-thirty, we were recording later that night,” Bobby Arnold related. “I said, ‘Willie, I got to go in and get ready for the session.’ And he looked at me and his eyes got really black like they do when he’s mad. He said, ‘When I say golf, we golf.’ So I kept golfing. He got mad at me for trying to go to work.”

  The parade of personalities walking through the doors of Pedernales Studio was straight out of the pages of People. Dolly Parton and Dom DeLuise came to Pedernales when they were doing the film Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Kenny Rogers stopped by. Roger Miller flitted in and out several times, often stoned out of his gourd. Webb Pierce, Faron Young, Merle Haggard, Kris Kristofferson, George Jones, Ray Price, Chet Atkins, James Burton, Hoyt Axton, and Emmylou Harris all came through, along with rockers such as Aero-smith and Bon Jovi. Ray Charles recorded several sessions, including the one that produced the Willie-Ray hit duet “Seven Spanish Angels.”

  Mickey Raphael brought Louisiana songwriter Bobby Charles to Pedernales for some sessions, and Bobby brought along Neil Young, Rufus Thibodeaux, and Ben Keith; the recording session that ensued planted the seed for Farm Aid as well as introduced Mickey to heroin. “I brought Richard Manuel [of the Band] with me to get him out of L.A. because he was strung out,” Mickey said. “When I went to the studio, I took Richard’s shit from him so he wouldn’t get into it. I remembered I had his junk with me in my pocket and wondered what the stuff smelled like. So I snorted a little. I didn’t know what to expect. We were doing the first song with Webb Pierce. All I remember is putting the harmonica to my mouth, and the song is over. Finally, it wore off and I remember Richard playing piano. I didn’t know who Webb Pierce was. All I knew was these were old country guys, Willie’s old country partners, and Willie wanted to help them out. Now I realize they were icons and that Willie idolized Webb Pierce. I had no idea. I didn’t realize how cool Webb was.”

  Webb was a legend, but so was just about every other character who showed up at the studio. It got to the point that recording was virtually a revolving door exercise. Unbeknownst to Hank Snow, he was one of four duet partners re
cording with Willie in a single day (Faron Young, Webb Pierce, and Roger Miller were the others). On his way out of the studios, Snow innocently asked, “Do you boys always cut this fast?”

  One of those old-timers, Faron Young, who put Willie on the map in Nashville when he recorded “Hello Walls” in 1960, brought Fred Foster, another familiar from Willie’s Nashville days, back into Willie’s life. Fred had lost Monument Records and his wealth by investing in a bank that failed. Just when he needed money and validation most, Willie called. He wanted him to produce an album on Faron Young and him.

  “Faron was cold,” recounted Foster. “He hadn’t sold a record in years. So we went to Austin, and Willie said, ‘You set it up the way it oughta be.’ I said, ‘You do three of Faron’s hits, Faron does three of yours, and then let’s have a couple new ones.’ The album was real country. I don’t put a label on Willie, but Faron’s real country. We’re down to the place where we have to have a new country song. I called a few people. They weren’t encouraging. Willie said, ‘I can try to write one.’ ‘That’d be helpful,’ I told him. He woke me the next morning at five thirty, and we drove up to the Y store for breakfast. We were getting ready to play golf. I asked him if he wrote anything. He had. We played golf, but I kept wondering what this song was, because I know what he’s capable of. After we golfed, he got out his guitar and sang, ‘Forgiving you is easy but forgetting seems to take the longest time...”

  Whether it was Foster’s easygoing style or a case of duct-taping the old Nashville formula to the New Austin sensibility, the song became a number one country hit.

  THE unlikeliest duet at Pedernales Studio was the one with Latin crooner Julio Iglesias, who entered Willie’s life while he and Connie were listening to the radio after midnight when they were in London. The next day, Connie went to the Virgin Records superstore and brought Julio’s latest album back for Willie to hear.

  “I’d like to sing a song with him,” Willie told her after listening.

  He called Mark Rothbaum, who tracked Julio down. One of the most popular singers in the world, Julio was recording his first all-English album in Los Angeles with producer Richard Perry to tap into the U.S. market, one of the few countries he’d yet to conquer. Julio told Mark he was cutting a song that just might be right for Willie and him to do together. The Albert Hammond and Hal David composition “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” had been written in 1976 for Frank Sinatra, but Frank had never recorded it. Julio finished the instrumental track and brought it with him to Austin. By that time, Willie Nelson had realized that the guy whose voice he liked so much that he wanted to sing with him was the most popular singer in the Latin world, bigger than he was in the Anglo world, and had already scored one number one pop hit in English, “Begin the Beguine.”

  Coach Darrell Royal drove up in his golf cart, having caught wind of the news that Julio Iglesias was coming to do a song with Willie. Coach asked Willie what they were going to record.

  “Hell, I don’t know, he’s bringing it with him,” Willie said.

  “How do you know you want to do it?” Coach wondered.

  “Coach, have you heard about all the records that son of a bitch has been selling in Europe?” Willie answered.

  Julio made quite an impression on Coach and everybody else at Pedernales when he arrived in a limousine accompanied by composers Hal David and Albert Hammond and producer Richard Perry.

  “The guy gets out of his limo and he’s got white shoes, white socks, a white suit, all immaculate,” Coach said. “Willie greeted him and I could see the shocked look on Iglesias’s face: ‘What in the hell have I got myself into?’”

  “It was like a Spanish Mafia,” marveled Bobby Arnold at Julio’s crew. It was pretty intense, with all the people, the language barrier, and the status of Julio Iglesias.”

  The two stars got along fine. Mark Rothbaum had advised Willie not to smoke weed in the studio around Julio because he was a lawyer as well as a singing star. Willie sized up Julio before whipping out some bombers and passing them around.

  Once the tape rolled, Coach sat down in his usual chair right behind Willie, near Julio, keeping quiet. “Willie would let me come in,” Coach said, “but Julio kept looking back at me and wondering what in the hell I was doing sitting there. They went through ‘To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before’ twice. Julio said, ‘Weellie, may I suggest: The wind is blo-o-o-wing, blo-o-o-wing.’ Willie nodded okay and cut it a third time. Julio, with those white socks, white shoes, white shirt, white slacks, dropped on his hands and knees on the floor and gave Willie a big bow. He damn sure did. He knew they’d nailed it. That was the one they released.”

  Julio’s and Willie’s voices were drenched in a shimmering wash of synthesizer strings and riding a sweet, almost syrupy melody. They made beautiful music together.

  “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” was released as a single in March 1984 and shot straight to the top of the pop charts, introducing Julio to a whole other English-speaking audience and validating Willie among Latin fans beyond Tejano circles, where he was already venerated. The duo no one could have predicted performed the song at the Country Music Association Awards, where they were nominated for Best Duo of the Year in 1984, even though the song was about as far as you could get from outlaw or even Stardust.

  Ray Charles was the mirror opposite of Julio Iglesias in his approach to recording at Willie’s. He showed up at the studio a few weeks after Julio with his assistant and no one else to hang out before recording. The studio engineers accompanied Ray and some of Willie’s band to Willie’s cabin on the Hill, where they sat down to dinner and chatted the evening away without talking about work.

  “They became good friends,” Bobby Arnold said. “That dinner led to their HBO special.” After dinner, the two musical giants discovered their mutual love of chess. “We played a lot,” Willie said. “He kicked my ass more than once and enjoyed it, I guess, better than anybody. We was playing down here one time, we’d done a show together and he was staying over at a hotel. I went over to visit him and he invited me to play chess. I said, ‘Sure.’ And I kind of thought to myself, Okay, I’ll play chess. The hallway was nice and bright and everything. We walked into where the table was and sat down. Not a light on anywhere. Then Ray brought out his chess set. All the pieces were the same color. It was a Braille chess set where he could feel the pieces and play. And he kicked my ass really bad. Of course in the dark, it’s hard to play. I made him promise me the next time we’d turn on some lights.

  “We talked a little bit about music whenever it came time to decide what we wanted to do together. Whenever anyone asked him what he wanted to do, he’d say, ‘Whatever Willie wants to do.’ And whatever I wanted to do, he would do it. But it was mutual.”

  Music built friendships. “I can’t think of any time there wasn’t any chemistry,” Bobby Arnold said. “People would adjust to Willie. Willie didn’t adjust.” Except when he was playing chess with Ray Charles.

  WILLIE’S endless quest to partner with as many singers as humanly possible culminated in the all-star duet album Half Nelson, a compilation of his various collaborations issued in 1985. He also carved out time to produce and duet with Timi Yuro, the onetime teen balladeer who was Willie’s labelmate at Liberty Records in the early 1960s. Timi Yuro Sings Willie Nelson featured two duets on a recording that would be her final album due to throat problems that eventually led to her death from cancer.

  He and his best-known duet partner, Waylon Jennings, were so consumed with their respective careers, they became less the pair than the press portrayed them to be. “They had such a mutual respect for each other and their music, it was like a brother bond, literally,” Connie Nelson said. “There was always a little bit of—not jealousy—but Willie would make him feel inferior in some ways, and I think it was because of the cocaine.” Long after “You’re Wired, You’re Fired” came down, Waylon was still chasing white lines. Bee Spears acknowledged the tension. “They truly liked
each other,” he said. “Things got crossways between them a little bit, but that happens with artists because every goddamn one of them has a frigging ego as big as this damn bus.”

  Mark Rothbaum compared their dynamic to the leads in the 1954 film La Strada, directed by Federico Fellini. “Waylon is Anthony Quinn as Zampano, the carnival strongman. Willie’s Richard Base-heart is Il Matto, the Fool, the acrobat, who knew everything the strongman didn’t know and would get under Zampano’s skin by being funny and kind and sweet. Just like Zampano, Waylon would say, ‘That redheaded sumbitch,’ but there was affection when he said it. That was their relationship; it was almost as a Fellini film.”

  Mickey Raphael drew a similar comparison. “Willie was like a loose cannon and Waylon was always worrying,” he said. “He never trusted Willie businesswise.” “Willie tended to get the best of the argument,” added Kris Kristofferson. “Willie’s not slow. You don’t want to get in a battle of wits with him.”

  Willie and Waylon were close enough to not have to say anything to each other to be understood, and close enough to fight, especially whenever Willie was punching Waylon’s buttons. “I was in an elevator with them at a taping of Austin City Limits when they got in a fight,” publicist Evelyn Shriver recalled. “The night before at a concert, Waylon played first but was supposed to join Willie at the end of his set. Instead, he was on his bus on his way out of town. Willie hadn’t forgotten it. Waylon said, ‘I figured with you there, you’d be all right. You didn’t need me. The crowd would forget me.’

  “‘And they soon did,’” Willie replied, enjoying the dig.