Movie money helped underwrite construction of a second studio, the twenty-four-track Arlyn Studios, adjacent to the main room of the Austin Opry House, operated by his nephew, Freddy Fletcher.
The studios led to a glut of Willie product, which worried Mark Rothbaum. “I had to adopt a mind-set that [all the albums were] good for his career, when privately I knew it wasn’t. At the same time, there were people at the record companies who earned money through billing, so four records at once from their hottest artist may not be good long-term, but these record executives weren’t there for the long term. They were going to be there until they made their money and could retire, which is in fact what happened. They would welcome [more records], even though they too did not believe it was best for his long-term career.”
No one spoke up about Willie being overexposed other than Colonel Tom Parker, who had opined that no way would he let Willie play as much as he was playing—not if the Colonel were running the show—and Bruce Lundvall of Columbia Records. “I had to tell him to stop,” Bruce said. “There were too many Willie Nelson records. I told him he’d lose his special attraction. He wouldn’t listen, but he was such a sweet man.”
Bruce Lundvall remained friends with Willie after Bruce left the label in 1982 to run Elektra Records. He knew signing him in 1975 was one of the wisest career moves he’d ever made. “People like Willie and Norah Jones [another Texan who Lundvall would sign to Blue Note Records, twenty-six years later] are completely and utterly unique. When you find one, man, you don’t ask questions. I learned that from John Hammond. He was my mentor. He couldn’t spot a hit record but he could spot a unique artist every time. You don’t even need to see the lyrics. That was Willie.”
From the outside looking in, he had it all. In August 1983, Willie was featured on the cover of Life magazine, sitting on a fence post, guitar in hand, headband holding back his hair, surrounded by Connie and his daughters Amy and Paula Carlene on their beautiful Colorado spread next to the headline “Where C&W’s Top Star Hides Away with His Family.”
The Life cover was ironic in two respects. It wrongly suggested Willie actually stayed in one place for more than a few nights. And it ignored what many around him knew too well. Amy Irving remained in Willie’s life.
Connie Nelson had hoped the relationship between her husband and his leading lady in Honeysuckle Rose had been an impulsive fling tied to moviemaking. What Connie didn’t know was that Amy Irving had broken up with Willie instead of the other way around. He’d arranged to throw a party for Amy in New York in February of 1982 following her short but successful run as the female lead in Amadeus on Broadway, her first project after Honeysuckle Rose. But when he showed up at the party, she treated him like a country bumpkin rather than her lover. He walked out of the party and around the corner into an alley where he wept openly.
But their affair was on again. When Connie got a call tipping her off that Willie was shacking up with Amy in condo number one at the Pedernales Country Club in 1983, she flew from Colorado to Texas to confront Willie and to tell Amy Irving to keep her paws off her husband. She showed up well past midnight, very drunk and very pissed, and tried to punch out Willie when he opened the door naked. She broke her hand instead. Even as she struggled with him, Connie hollered at Amy to come downstairs so she could whip her ass, but Amy stayed upstairs. “I all but stalked her—literally—just to keep her at a distance,” Connie said.
Somehow Willie and Connie talked it out and patched things up, but Willie and Amy kept coming back to each other.
In February 1985 Willie went into Pedernales Studio to make an album with his longtime bud Roger Miller. Mary Miller and Connie Nelson were close friends and came to the sessions too. But when the recording was finished, Willie informed Connie he wasn’t going back to Colorado with her. He wanted to stay in Texas, he said, and he wanted to see Amy Irving again.
However, Amy blew off Willie one last time and married movie producer Steven Spielberg, her longtime fiancé. Connie moved the girls back to West Lake Hills, west of Austin, to try to be closer to him, but the flame that lit their marriage was flickering. The return was not the happiest homecoming. Paula was at an age when being pulled from her high school was as upsetting as it had been to Susie when the family moved from Tennessee back to Texas. And the Nelson girls’ reputation preceded them. “Paula got into drugs at Westlake High,” Connie said. “The drug crowd could have cared less if Willie was famous or not. They cared if she could get them pot. Paula fit in good.”
Paula knew the drill too well. “They weren’t interested in me,” she acknowledged. “It was just because I was Willie Nelson’s daughter.”
Willie Nelson’s mother may have had similar feelings, knowing people were interested in her only because of her famous son, but it didn’t bother Myrle Harvey. She enjoyed letting the world know who she was. There was more than a little of Willie in her, as was revealed in a handwritten note on lined notebook paper that she had composed:
I fully realize that no wealth or position, can endure unless built upon truth and justice.
Therefore I will engage in no transaction which does not benefit all whom it affects.
I will succeed by attracting to my self the forces I wish to use. And the cooperation of other people. I will endorse others to serve me, because of my willingness to serve others.
I will eliminate hatred, envy, jealousy, selfishness, and cynicism by developing love for all humanity because I know that or negative attitude to record? Others, can bring me, success. I will cause others to believe in me. Because I will believe in them, and in my self.
I will sign my home to this formula, commit it to a memory, repeat it long once a day with full faith that’s will gradually in chance. My troubles on actions as that I will become a self reliant and successful person.
Myrle M Harvey Rt 8, Box 291 d., Yakima WA 98908
On December 11, 1983, Myrle departed this earth in Yakima, taken by lung cancer, the same disease that took ex-husband Ira Nelson. She had been living in eastern Washington state for nine years after moving from Eugene, Oregon, with her third husband, Ken Harvey. The sassy gal and gypsy rambler who taught her daughter and son a few things about moving down the highway was gone. Willie Nelson and Family tried to make the funeral service, but their flight was delayed due to bad weather. By the time three black stretch limousines pulled into the Terrace Heights Memorial Park cemetery, the crowds had departed. It was pitch-black dark. The only people left were the grave diggers, waiting to do their business after her son and his family said good-bye.
IF Willie’s life sometimes seemed too large to believe, his friends only magnified the myth. Houston lawyer Joe Jamail was representing the Pennzoil oil company in a high-stakes lawsuit against petro-rival Texaco, and the night before presenting his final argument in court, Joe was interrupted by Willie and Coach. They’d been golfing at Willie’s course, as usual, when Willie suggested flying over to Houston to cheer up Joe. He had a jet at his disposal. Why not use it? So instead of spending the evening preparing his presentation, the lawyer welcomed the coach and the musician, and three regular guys who happened to be the best at what they did spent the evening telling lies, knocking back drinks, and listening to the musician play music until two in the morning.
“Obviously it hurt Joe because he didn’t get anything out of it,” Coach joshed, because the initial judgment—in favor of Jamail’s client—exceeded $10 billion, the largest jury verdict in history. The figure was ultimately reduced to $3 billion, but the lawyer did very well for himself, earning $335 million for his troubles. He’d already won one case using Willie as an argument. “Some guy was really hurt in a car wreck, and [Joe] used the lyrics to ‘Half a Man’ to convince the jury to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars that [the guy’s] insurance didn’t want to pay,” Willie said. “Joe didn’t mind borrowing a few words.”
WILLIE’S drawing power remained strong, enticing thirty thousand fans to pay $18 for an all-da
y admission to the 1984 version of the Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic, staged at South Park Meadows, an eleven-acre open-air concert venue with no seating (read: a big ol’ pasture) in deep south Austin. After he had held “picnics” in stadiums in New Jersey, Syracuse, and Atlanta the previous year, it was time to come back to Texas. It was a classic progressive-country bill with Waylon, Jessi, Kris, and Leon headlining, joined by Joe Ely, the Lubbock songster and rocker who’d relocated to Austin, Extreme Outlaw David Allan Coe, San Antonio country singer Moe Bandy, semi-reformed Austin icon Jerry Jeff Walker, whose career had been revived when his wife, Susan, a onetime state political operative, took over as his manager, actor Gary Busey, who, like too many music biopic lead actors thought he was really a rock star after he did The Buddy Holly Story, pal Johnny Bush, ol’ Faron Young, and Austin folkie Steve Fromholz.
Unlike previous picnics, this one was promoted by Pace Concerts, the dominant concert promoter in the southwest that had been staging Willie’s big New Year’s Eve bashes in Houston. “Now Louis Messina [of Pace] can worry about losing half the money,” Willie joked. The outlaw vibe lingered, but the suits were running the show now.
A year later, it rained throughout most of the 1985 picnic at South Park Meadows, holding the crowd count to fifteen thousand, despite one of the strongest lineups ever: Neil Young at his first picnic; the Highwaymen, an old-lions-of-country supergroup consisting of Willie, Kris, Waylon, and Cash; several stars with two first names—David Allan, Jerry Jeff, Ray Wiley, and Billy Joe; the Nashville greats—June Carter Cash, Faron Young, Johnny Bush, and Hank Snow; and several Austin FOWs—Geezinslaws, Fromholz, Rattlesnake Annie, and Jubal Clark, the self-styled Gypsy Cowboy who opened the festivities. Clearly, the vibe surrounding picnics past had faded. No matter how good the music was, sitting in a field full of stickers and ticks surrounded by drunks and dopeheads had lost its charm among a significant number of Willie’s old fans.
The picnic was no longer the only way to experience Willie Nelson—movies, television appearances, touring, and the continuous barrage of new albums made him more accessible than ever. Of all the multimedia projects, the most surprising was the 1985 film Red Headed Stranger, on which he bet some of his own money. After six years of hemming and hawing, he bought back the film rights to the movie from Robert Redford, who at one time fancied playing the Stranger himself.
As with his music career, Willie had learned enough about how the movie business worked to think he wanted to promote the show as well as star in it. He and writer-director Bill Witliff shared the title of producers. They put together a group of investors headed by Don Tyson, the president of the biggest poultry processor in America, to get the movie made. Concert promoter Barry Fey and Willie’s right-hand man on the road, David Anderson, were associate producers. Tim O’Connor unloaded what ownership he had left in the Austin Opry complex to add money to the producer’s pot. Caroline Mugar, a friend and fan of some means from Boston, added $500,000 to the pot to get the movie finished. She later would become the executive director of a Willie project called Farm Aid.
The movie stuck to the same script as Willie’s album, with the addition of a Texas Ranger character named El Viejo that had been created by scriptwriter Michael Mann for his hit television series Miami Vice. Willie played the Stranger, the Reverend Julian Shay. Dallas native Morgan Fairchild played his wife, Raysha, and Katharine Ross of The Graduate and Butch Cassidy fame played Laurie, the Stranger’s love interest. Character actor R. G. Armstrong played the sheriff. Also in the cast were Austin actor Sonny Carl Davis; Paul English and Bee Spears from Willie’s band; Elberta Hunter; Bill Richardson, who went on to fame making Invasion of the Space Preachers; Austin power attorney Joe K. Longley; and the thieves of the Pedernales, including Billy Cooper, Bo Franks, Ralph (the Midget) Franzetti, Jody Fischer, several dozen other family friends, and Jubal Clark, one of the most talented songwriters you’d never heard of, who got a speaking role as the third horse thief:
JUBAL: Get me some spurs!
(No one answers.)
The STRANGER, emerging from the shadows: Get Jubal some spurs!
All the THIEVES suddenly run around, yelling: Get Jubal some spurs! Get Jubal some spurs
The day after filming Jubal’s scene, Willie spied him on the set.
“How do you like the way I shot you in the ass off that horse?” Willie asked him, reveling in the joys of being a movie cowboy.
“Willie, if you were a little taller and aimed a little higher, you wouldn’t have shot me in the ass,” Jubal said.
Willie sold the finished film to Shep Gordon, a movie producer who had been manager of the rock personality Alice Cooper. Shep paid enough up front to give the investors their money back plus a 25 percent profit. Willie had risen to the challenge, but the experience involved enough heavy lifting to convince him he had better things to do with his time than produce films. “Making movies is a slower process than making music,” he said with understatement. “The payoff depends on who you are doing the movie with and if you are enjoying it.”
But movie ownership had its perquisites. Willie got to keep the movie set as his own personal western town, which he named Luck, Texas, complete with facades of a church, horse stables, hardware store, and saloon. The saloon was eventually refashioned into the Luck World Headquarters, where Willie tended bar, cooked breakfast for the boys, played chess and pool, and picked music the old-fashioned way, sitting around, singing, and playing guitars.
Weddings were held in Luck. Cowboy gunfights were filmed in Luck. Whenever Willie had to do interviews or photo shoots, like the one he did with Annie Leibovitz, Luck was the place. The town motto—“When you’re here, you’re in Luck. When you’re not here, you’re out of luck”—said it all.
Outside the bubbles of the Pedernales Country Club and the adjacent Luck, a good part of the nation was reeling from a real-estate bust, with falling prices, rising bankruptcies, and vanishing buyers. The downturn was caused by corrupt savings and loan executives, who cost taxpayers billions of dollars by loaning easy money to speculators.
The earlier boom had jacked up housing prices in Austin, and the subsequent bust offered some real steals and bargains as the overheated economy cooled, but the breather didn’t last long. City boosters had seen past the old-school wisdom of trying to attract heavy industry by offering tax breaks. Instead, two critical semigovernmental high-technology research bodies discovered Austin, like Willie had eleven years earlier. Austin won out over three other finalists (San Diego, Raleigh, and Atlanta) as the location for the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, a consortium of twelve American technology companies that banded together to stave off competition from Japan and advance supercomputer research, bringing a new wave of best and brightest minds to town led by Admiral Bobby Inman. Another fourteen-company consortium, called Sematech, formed in Austin in 1986 to advance semiconductor (computer chip) research.
As Austin ascended to global-city status and the rest of Texas was embracing its new reputation as America on Steroids (San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston consistently ranked in the top ten of America’s Fattest Cities), Willie was polishing his altruistic credentials.
Giving was always part of his philosophy. When the offering plate was passed around Abbott Methodist on Sunday mornings after the sermon, he felt responsible, like everyone else did, and wanted to drop something in the plate, even if he had nothing to give. Alfred and Nancy had taught him to do right, especially when someone less fortunate needed help. Mamma Nelson would have been proud of him and Bobbie becoming the people they were—two of the closest siblings on earth doing what they were raised to do, and doing it better and with more grace than almost anyone else. The urge to help others stayed with him. He remembered the other side of this life too well.
The desire to help took Willie to the end zone of a college football stadium in Champaign, Illinois. It was harvest time—September 22, 1985, to be exact—the time of the year when crops came
in all across America, and those who prepared, planted, and nurtured them hoped to reap the rewards for the previous nine months of toil and gamble.
Willie was standing on an improvised stage between John Mellencamp and Neil Young with Illinois governor Jim Thompson to his side, looking over a crowd of eighty thousand gathered to honor the American family farmer at a fourteen-hour marathon concert dubbed Farm Aid.
Real farmers needed help, at least the ones who were still hanging in. Most of the tillable soil in America was owned by corporations. Harvesting was done on a mass scale with machinery and cheap labor. Family farmers were pretty much a memory when Willie put his mind to honoring them. The aim was to raise awareness for American farmers the same way money had been raised for AIDS through the Live Aid concerts in London and Philadelphia two months before. During his Live Aid set in Philadelphia, Bob Dylan had weighed in with the comment “The American family farmer could use a hand too.” Willie had heard the sentiment loud and clear.
Farmers were to Dylan what Gene Autry was to Willie, mostly an idealized fantasy of Americana Lost. To Willie, farmers were the folks he grew up with and who shaped his worldview. An idea grew in his head after he talked to Dylan. The more he talked to the kids he’d grown up with in Abbott who were still farming in Hill County, the more he wanted to do something on their behalf.
At a gig Willie played in Springfield, the capital of Illinois, he brought the subject up to a visitor on the bus, Governor Jim Thompson. “Every time we’d play the state fair, Big Jim would come on the bus and we’d have a beer and a bowl of chili and talk about things,” Willie said. “This particular year, I’d heard the farmers were having problems and asked him if he knew anything about it.”
Farmers were having a bad year, Governor Thompson told him, going into detail about the upcoming federal farm bill, soft markets, price supports, parity, drought, fuel costs, and other agricultural issues.
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