Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  “That’s when we started talking about doing Farm Aid,” Willie said. “I knew [the government wasn’t] doing the right thing. There was no good farm bill. All of us out here know that we need a good farm bill to save the farmer, and there’s no good farm bill right now to protect the farmer from the big corporations. That pissed me off. I thought one Farm Aid one time with me and the governor there, how could they argue with that?”

  Twenty-one days later he was at Champaign, taking the stage with Neil Young at ten a.m. to open the show with a song about farmers “trying to make a stand.” A stream of superstars followed throughout the day, including Bob Dylan, B. B. King, the Beach Boys, Billy Joel, Loretta Lynn, Bonnie Raitt, Rickie Lee Jones, Waylon Jennings, John Denver, Roger Miller, Tom Petty, Lou Reed, John Fogarty, Randy Newman, Roy Orbison, Charley Pride, Kris Kristofferson, Van Halen, Merle Haggard, and George Jones. In all, more than fifty acts volunteered their services. June Carter and Johnny Cash reworked “Old McDonald Had a Farm” to tie into the day’s theme. Charlie Daniels wrote and performed a new song called “American Farmer.” The event raised $7 million for family farmers, which was disbursed through the nonprofit organization Willie had formed.

  “No one knew what the fuck he was talking about at the first Farm Aid,” said Floyd Domino, who was playing piano for Waylon Jennings at the time. “But because it was Willie, everybody figured it was for a good cause.” The ones who really got it—John Mellencamp, Neil Young, and, later on, Dave Matthews—were artists representing a broad spectrum of music that shared the common trait of integrity, which people were happy to pay good money to witness.

  Months later, Willie was still speaking out. Farm Aid was no feel-good one-off. It had turned into a crusade. If not for music, his involvement with Future Farmers of America in high school would have eventually led him down the agrarian path. The least he could do for all the folks back home was help.

  Willie became Farm Aid’s voice. He testified in front of a panel of U.S. senators in Washington, DC, telling them, “The farmers in this country are dropping out—they’re dropping like flies.” Back at the ranch, personal secretary Jody Fischer, who was supposed to be handling the business end of Pedernales Studio, became a crisis-hotline counselor, fielding calls from farmers and their families who wanted to talk to Willie, saying such things as “I need help,” “I’m going to kill myself,” and “My husband’s in the barn with a gun.”

  “I was really discouraged because I saw us losing more and more farmers every week,” Willie explained in a radio interview. “And we had about eight million small-family farmers. Now, we’re down to less than two million, still losing three to four hundred every week. So I’ve been watching that happen and it was very discouraging. The bills passed to help the farmer were not helping the farmer. The Freedom to Farm bill was laughingly called the Freedom to Fail bill by small farmers.”

  In the summer of 1986, Texas’s sesquicentennial year, Willie combined his picnic and Farm Aid, staging the July Fourth event at Manor Downs, a quarterhorse track east of Austin owned by Frances Carr, the comanager of Stevie Ray Vaughan, and former girlfriend and business partner of Sam Cutler, the one-time road manager for the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, and (briefly) Willie Nelson. SRV joined an eclectic Farm Aid on the Fourth lineup that included the Beach Boys, Los Lobos, X, Rick James, Julio Iglesias, Waylon, George Jones, Little Joe Hernandez, Steve Earle, illusionist the Amazing Kreskin, and seventy other acts, who performed a nineteen-hour marathon in front of forty thousand fans and a nationwide audience watching on the VH-1 cable channel, raising $1.3 million for small family farmers.

  The day before Farm Aid II, Willie attended Richard and Cathy Anderson’s wedding in the Luck, Texas, western town, along with actor Dennis Hopper and the funk singer Rick James of “Superfreak” fame as marriage witnesses. Richard managed the club at Pedernales. Marrying the couple was Dr. Robert Shelton, the president of the Austin Theological Seminary, who liked to preach a sermon he called “The Gospel According to Willie.” Richard and Cathy’s dog Cinnamon was best man. Willie blessed the event by singing “Amazing Grace” to the couple. He would sing the same song at Bill and Melinda Gates’s wedding on the island of Lanai in Hawaii on January 1, 1994, at the request of the founder of the Microsoft Corporation—the richest man in the world—for which he was paid $1,000,000.

  The World, 1986

  BY 1986, WILLIE was demonstrating that he was indeed human and fallible. He had been putting out so many records that sales began to wane, and no longer was every album guaranteed to turn gold. His transition from outlaw to grand old man had been signified by formation of the Highwaymen—the country music singer-songwriter supergroup of Johnny Cash, Waylon, Kris, and Willie. The strength-in-numbers collaboration aimed to bolster the careers of four giants old enough to be regarded as legends but who were no longer considered suitable for contemporary country radio.

  The idea had originated with Johnny Cash, the man in black who was Nashville’s biggest outlaw of the 1960s and briefly Waylon’s roommate when both were between marriages. “One night, Johnny said to Willie, ‘You know, you’ve made a record with everybody in the world except me. We should do one together,’” said Kris Kristofferson. Cash was putting on a Christmas show in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1984 for a TV special and suggested a recording session in Nashville before the concert. “Willie told me it would be to my advantage to be there because I could pitch them songs,” Kris said. Waylon was dealt in too.

  Producer Chips Moman brought a song to the session written by Jimmy Webb called “The Highwayman” that Chips thought the four should record. “Next thing you know, we brought in some of our stuff and we had enough for an album,” Kris said. “It was really acci-dental.”

  The camaraderie in person and onstage at Montreux transcended their professional status. They genuinely liked one another. “You have to realize each one of these guys was my hero when I came to town, and to be up on the same stage with them was like a dream,” said Kris Kristofferson. “I could have never imagined that back in the days when they wouldn’t let me sing my own demos, that I was able to sing right along with Johnny Cash, whether he liked it or not. Considering there were four people up there who had gone their own way, had always been individuals and never followers, it’s pretty amazing that we got along so well.

  “We were being interviewed right before we went on The Tonight Show and they were asking about how we got started,” Kris said. The Christmas show in Montreux was cited. The interviewer asked John why he chose Montreux. Before John could answer, Waylon piped up, “Because that’s where the Baby Jesus was born.”

  For all their individual talent, the four began to jell as a group, with Willie often showing the way offstage. “Those guys didn’t sign autographs like Willie did,” Larry Gorham, Willie’s bodyguard, remembered. “So when Willie stood out there and signed after shows, they had to too, otherwise they’d look bad.”

  The album led to a collaborative moviemaking adventure in 1986, a made-for-TV remake of the movie Stagecoach, which was being filmed near Albuquerque. All the spouses came along for the shoot except Willie’s. “It was going to be a big get-together for all the wives, and we were looking forward to it, but Paula was having major drug behavior problems, and I was worried sick,” Connie said. She had gone through all of Paula’s belongings after suspecting something was up. A month before the New Mexico shoot with Willie, Connie found cocaine.

  “I told Willie I couldn’t go,” Connie said. “Paula needed help; this was her life. I couldn’t leave my daughter doing coke. I couldn’t go have fun, wondering if she’s going to come back on the weekends.” Connie told Willie she was putting Paula in a rehab facility at the recommendation of Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson, the former Dallas Cowboy football player who was a drug counselor in Austin.

  “You wouldn’t really?” Willie said.

  “She’s going,” Connie said emphatically.

  Willie went on to Albuquer
que. Connie took Paula to Del Mar, California, near San Diego to begin treatment. With the help of a school counselor, Paula was able to continue her studies and graduate from Westlake High School, taking correspondence courses while she was cleaning up. Paula Carlene was the first Nelson offspring to earn a high school diploma. Billy had quit in the sixth grade, and Susie and Lana had dropped out in high school. Willie had told Connie the kids didn’t have to finish school, but Connie dug in her heels when it came to Paula Carlene. “Yes, she does,” Connie told Willie. “Not just for what she’ll learn in school, but how to get along with other people.”

  Kris Kristofferson said the remake of Stagecoach “wasn’t a very good film.” But it was a lot of fun making, he said. Before shooting a scene where Mary Crosby’s character was giving birth, Willie snuck in a rabbit. With cameras rolling, Willie pulled out the rabbit instead of a baby during the birth scene. The Johnny-Willie dynamic provided plenty of amusement on the set. “We were calling [Johnny and Willie] MacArthur and Truman,” Kristofferson said, “because one wouldn’t come out of his bus until the other came out. There could have been outrageous egos and there weren’t. It was mutual respect.”

  For Willie, the movie was memorable for another reason.

  “That’s where he got mixed up with the makeup girl,” Connie Nelson said. “He was the only one who didn’t have a spouse there, and she was, by God, going to find a star. That was the deal; Waylon told me that.”

  “The makeup girl” was Ann Marie D’Angelo, who applied makeup to all the lead actors every morning and helped remove it every evening. True to her nature, Annie didn’t mind giving Willie a little shit when she put on his face in the morning. She knew who he was—she used to water-ski with friends on the Colorado River on the CaliforniaArizona border while listening to Willie and Waylon tapes—but she wasn’t buying into his bullshit. Willie took a shine to her and her feisty spirit. She had a mouth and knew how to use it. She also knew how to flatter and fuss over him. Everyone else on the set seemed to have someone they were with. They fell together naturally.

  Her Sicilian features vaguely suggested Amy Irving, first wife Martha, and mother Myrle, but Annie really was like no one before. She’d grown up in the Lakewood section of Los Angeles, the middle of five children, and through a cousin who owned the old Desilu Studios learned to do makeup, earning a credit in the comedy Bachelor Party, starring Tom Hanks. After Stagecoach wrapped, she did makeup on the B movies The Rosary Murders and Gleaming the Cube and served as makeup supervisor on the film Hot Pursuit. But as much as she loved the travel and the camaraderie of a film shoot, her career track veered into the ditch when she met Willie.

  When Connie caught wind of Willie’s wandering, she put her foot down. This time, though, Willie wasn’t listening. So she removed his belongings from their West Lake Hills home and dumped them in the cabin on the Hill at the Pedernales Country Club. Connie and Amy moved to Del Mar, where Paula Carlene was undergoing treatment for drug abuse and for being Willie Nelson’s daughter.

  “My senior year of high school I had had enough,” Paula said. “Not just of school work but of the whole Willie Nelson [thing]....I just didn’t want to be there. I was feeling a lot of pressure. I was hanging out with the wrong crowd. I went to rehab in San Diego and loved it. I was seventeen and I didn’t have to go to school. I didn’t miss partying. I didn’t miss the Willie crowd.”

  Paula did so well she was asked to be a counselor, partly due to her celebrity ties. “Once I became a counselor, they told everybody. That was a selling point to the parents—Willie Nelson’s daughter was a counselor. I did a lot of speaking, I told my story a lot. Same thing. It’s hard to be anonymous anywhere, but I’m not blaming anybody.”

  Her own counselor’s husband helped Paula to see the positives of her privileged life. “You know what it is about your dad?” he told her. “The everyday working man and woman sees your dad at an award show in jeans and a T-shirt with long hair and braids, and everyone wants to vicariously live through him.” It turned Paula’s head around. “He wasn’t fish food,” she realized. “I was always trying to protect him from people around him all the time. I would drag him through a crowd—‘Come on!’ We went out to dinner, we couldn’t have a dinner. People would come up, form a line.”

  THE WILLIE NELSON Fourth of July Picnic kept moving almost as much as Willie. Giant likenesses of Willie Nelson, Zeke Varnon, and Carl Cornelius on billboards welcomed twenty-five thousand fans to Carl’s Corner truck stop, the site of the 1987 version of Willie’s picnic. Carl’s, about fifteen miles northeast of Abbott on Interstate 35E, just north of the I-35 split, was the perfect choice for a picnic dedicated to America’s Truckers. The truck stop was its own incorporated city run by Carl Cornelius, a longtime buddy of Zeke Varnon’s, Willie’s hell-raising friend. Carl’s sold gas and diesel fuel and served comfort food to truckers like most truck stops did, with added features no other truck stop could claim: a topless bar that served liquor, statues of three dancing frogs on the roof that had been designed by Texas imagineer Bob “Daddy-O” Wade, and a hostess named Treasure Chest who used her sultry voice on Channel 19 on the CB radio to invite truckers to pull over at the Carl’s exit for “a piece...of watermelon.”

  The one-day affair was low key, drawing fewer than twenty thousand, despite a lineup of Kris, Shaver, Coe, Merle, Jerry Jeff, Emmylou, Roger Miller, and Asleep at the Wheel, along with pianist Bruce Hornsby, neo-honky-tonker Dwight Yoakum, blues powerhouse the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Eric Johnson, Joe Ely, Delbert McClinton, Joe Walsh, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. The celebrities on hand were local—McLennan County district attorney Vic Feazell and Texas attorney general Jim Mattox.

  The picnic also marked the publication of Heartworn Memories, a very personal memoir written by Willie’s second daughter, Susie. The book was therapy for Susie, who grew up with her father gone a lot. Like her sister, her mother, grandmother, grandfather, and aunt, Susie married at sixteen. She was a teenage mother and a divorcee at nineteen, and a victim of domestic violence, having been beaten by her second husband, who died in a car crash. Like her famous father, Susie had the show-business bug, studying ballet at the Juilliard School in New York, performing in the lead role in a road-show version of the Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun, and recording a single of “Heartworn Memories” with stepmother Shirley Nelson.

  Almost two months later, on August 30, 1987, Farm Aid III was staged in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the heart of the farm belt. A citizen petition drive persuaded University of Nebraska officials to host the event, which starred Emmylou Harris, Arlo Guthrie, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, John Mellencamp, Neil Young, and Willie. According to several press reports, folk-pop singer John Denver unexpectedly stole the show, putting on a performance that had seventy thousand fans roaring. The result was $1.6 million more raised for small family farmers.

  WHATEVER money was lost on good causes, there was always Vegas to pump up the checking account. Beginning in the early 1960s, Willie found Nevada gambling casinos his most dependable paydays. He initially worked Reno and Lake Tahoe, especially Harrah’s, where owner Bill Harrah told him straight up, “Mr. Nelson, I don’t really agree with your wardrobe, but you sure bring in the dough.”

  Willie’s first regular Las Vegas gig was at the Horseshoe Casino, run by Benny Binion, whose history with Willie went back to the 1950s. Benny was a true believer.

  “He’s got magic, that son of a bitch,” he told the writer Bud Shrake. “I never seen nothing like him and Billy Graham. They can just capture you. He was the same kind of a person he is now. You could already look at him and tell that this guy’s going to be on his way. You see a guy that can attract people.”

  Benny didn’t hold on to Willie long. He was too good a drawing card.

  “Every time we played Vegas, the dealers would get a little upset because the players were leaving the tables to watch the show,” Willie said. “I just played the show. We were playing six shows a night back-to-back, for
ty minutes on and twenty minutes off, so I didn’t give a shit what they were doing out there. I was trying to get through the night.”

  Willie moved on to the new Caesar’s Palace, where the casino draw at the hotel jumped from an average $15,000 an hour to $75,000 an hour when Willie performed during the 1979 National Finals Rodeo.

  Willie got so big that even Frank Sinatra opened for him at Golden Nugget’s newly refurbished Theatre Ballroom cabaret in 1984. The double-bill had been engineered by Steve Wynn, who was on his way to becoming the biggest casino operator of all. Wynn proposed the billing to Frank Sinatra during a visit at his home in Palm Springs, California. “I took two CDs, Stardust and the soundtrack from Electric Horseman, over to the Tamarisk Country Club in Palm Springs, where Frank lived on the seventeenth hole. Frank had a couple of homes on the golf course, and one was the screening room where the stereo was. Frank was wearing a gray sweater and open-collar shirt and leaned his butt up against the back of the couch as I played him ‘Georgia,’ ‘Moonlight in Vermont,’ and ‘My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.’”

  “That cat can sing,” Frank said. “That cat’s a blues singer. He can sing my stuff but I don’t know if I can sing his.” The deal was on.

  At the grand opening, Frank Sinatra, Willie Nelson’s opening act, sang three numbers before walking off the stage with a very pale look on his face. “He felt something happen in his throat,” Steve Wynn said. “Something popped.” Years earlier, Sinatra had had a small vein in his throat break, and evidently it had happened again, Wynn said. “He flew back to Palm Springs that night and spent the next three days in the hospital. He was forbidden to talk for another week.” Others suspected he pulled out because he didn’t like opening for anyone.

  Willie played the rest of the opening week solo. Frank’s entourage, including Jilly Rizzo, stuck around and partied with Willie’s band and crew. “Frank loved Willie’s music,” said Willie’s stage manager, Poodie Locke, pointing out that Sinatra had contemplated an album of Willie Nelson covers back in the 1960s. “But he couldn’t handle us [the crew]. We’re wearing Wranglers and we’ve got titty dancers backstage. It wasn’t his version of classy.”