Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  Besides the fat guarantees, Las Vegas spoke to Willie’s affinity for gambling. He’d been placing bets on games his entire life and had mastered the art of the bluff. He was good enough and wealthy enough to take on the professional gambler Tom Preston, better known as Amarillo Slim, in a high-stakes game of dominoes on Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas. In his autobiography, Amarillo Slim in a World of Fat People, Slim claimed Steve Wynn bet $50,000 and a new Jeep Renegade on Willie, but Wynn said he wasn’t at the match and, besides, didn’t bet on dominoes. “I wouldn’t know how to handicap two domino players. Why would I lose money? When it comes to bullshitters, Slim is Mount Everest,” Wynn said. No one, including Willie, disputed Slim’s claim that Willie bet $300,000 on himself and that Slim won the best-four-out-of-seven match.

  “He cheated,” Willie said of Amarillo Slim twenty years after the fact. Benny Binion, who was there, had told him so, Willie said. “He had a guy looking over your shoulder, tipping off your hand,” Benny said to Willie, fingering the man who was sending him over. Willie was hardly surprised. “I knew he was going to do it. But I thought, well, maybe I could beat him anyway. ’Course I didn’t.”

  Willie wrote a blurb for Slim’s book anyway, saying, “Every one of Slim’s tall tales about his gambling exploits had me in stitches, except, of course, the time that country cowboy took me for a pretty penny playing dominoes. I would never make another bet with Slim, but I’d bet everything that Slim’s memoir is the best I’ve ever read.”

  In November 1987 Willie shared top billing with Hank Williams Jr. for a concert at Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas celebrating Benny Binion’s eighty-third birthday. Benny sat onstage next to Moe Dalitz, another Vegas pioneer, while Steve Wynn served as master of ceremonies.

  Vegas was the favored destination for unusual Nelson family reunions. In 1979, Myrle Harvey, Willie’s mom, had made an unannounced appearance as part of her one-woman campaign to let the world know she was her son’s mother. “She showed up in Vegas when Willie’s playing Caesar’s Palace and made her grand entrance when the band was playing ‘Redneck Mother,’ just walked onto the stage,” her grandson Freddy Fletcher said. “She did the same thing in Houston for a New Year’s Eve show at the Summit, just to let everybody know, this is Willie’s mom; that other woman is not his mother. No one on the crew was going to tell her no. Nobody could stop her, not even Willie.”

  Second ex-wife Shirley, who disappeared for ten years after she secured her divorce from Willie, resurfaced at a gig in Vegas to join Willie singing “Amazing Grace.” Seeing her ex-husband reassured Shirley. “I was so afraid that the one I knew so long ago wouldn’t be there,” she said. “I didn’t think I had the courage to see him the way he looks now, beard and all. But he’s still the same heart, the same man who’s so full of love, the same sensitivity.”

  “There is no such thing as an ex-wife,” Willie liked to say. Martha, who had remarried and was living in China Springs, west of Waco, already knew that. Willie paid for a new trailer for her to live in and was still taking care of her taxes.

  PERSONAL affairs led to the cancellation of both the Fourth of July Picnic and Farm Aid in 1988. Willie was busy working for Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey’s outsider campaign for president, promoting the autobiography he’d written with Austin writer and golfing partner Bud Shrake, and working out the final details of the divorce from Connie. The affair with Annie D’Angelo was ongoing, but when Connie put her foot down over the continuing public displays of affection that seemed to always get back to her, Willie still wouldn’t listen. The parting had been amicable but still difficult to accept for both, especially in the wake of Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge’s divorce. Staying faithful was a promise he no longer felt compelled to say he would try to fulfill. Connie stayed in touch and continued to call him “my best friend.”

  Being married to him was a whole other deal. At least they weren’t alone. Divorces outnumbered marriages in Texas in 1987.

  Willie had written a poem to Connie in cursive script just after Stardust:

  Home is where I’ll go when it’s all over

  Rome (sic) is what I’ll do until I die.

  But as long as I’m with you I’ll be in clover

  And life will be the sweeter lulabye (sic)

  The song “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” was also written about her, many believed.

  If you had not fallen, then I would not have found you...

  ONSTAGE, he was unwittingly stirring up his most political and potentially most damaging shit storm yet. One of his new acting friends, Peter Coyote, had talked Willie, Kris Kristofferson, Joni Mitchell, and Robin Williams into playing a benefit fund-raiser for Leonard Peltier, an American Indian activist convicted of killing two FBI agents on an Indian reservation in South Dakota. The following July, representatives of an organization called Friends of the Police picketed the Willie Nelson concert in Warwick, Rhode Island, to protest Willie’s support of a cop killer. Back in Texas, another dustup erupted in Waco almost simultaneously, tied to the failure of the Leroy Bank the year before, leaving six hundred depositors in the small town of Leroy, northeast of Waco, broke and without recourse. A fund-raiser concert had been proposed for the grand opening of the new Ferrell Special Events Center at Baylor University in Waco, starring Willie Nelson. But when the event was announced, the Texas Rangers and other law-enforcement agencies in the state threatened to picket, having caught wind of the protests in Rhode Island. A big stink was raised, and Baylor withdrew the invitation to Willie.

  Baylor University president Herbert H. Reynolds insisted that canceling Willie’s appearance at the opening of the center had nothing to do with benefit concerts for Indian activists accused of killing FBI agents or songs like “Whiskey River” and “I Gotta Get Drunk” or his lifestyle. “His singing—I know people enjoy it. I know he’s popular,” the Baptist University president intoned before lowering the hammer with a big But. “It is our hope that he will use his influence in the future to strengthen the moral fiber of our nation.” In Reynolds’s opinion, Willie Nelson had fallen short. The real reason Willie had been axed from the grand opening, Reynolds declared, was out of “concern for the health and well-being of the American people.” Reynolds evidently did not mean Native American people or citizens whose town bank had failed.

  The Baylor University president’s statements rang hollow in the ears of the good people of Leroy, Texas. C. A. Anderson, president of the Leroy Bank depositors’ association, was confused. “Their explanation didn’t explain,” he told the Waco Tribune-Herald. “It wasn’t a reason at all. Usually Christians want to help each other. To sympathize with us and refuse to help in any way is another matter.” Willie was just as confused. “I couldn’t figure what the hell Baylor wanted me for to open their building,” he said. “They didn’t like me all that much before.”

  Willie resolved to apologize to policemen everywhere, playing a benefit in Springfield, Massachusetts, following the Rhode Island date and splitting proceeds between the American Indian Movement and the Policeman’s Memorial Fund. He also raised money for Leroy Bank depositors at a separate concert at the Heart O’ Texas Coliseum in Waco.

  Willie understood why the police would be upset about him playing for Leonard Peltier. “I didn’t intend to offend anybody,” he said. “This was a benefit for an Indian in prison. It seemed like an okay thing to do. I didn’t know what he’d been charged with [killing two FBI agents], but I don’t think that would’ve mattered. A lot of people thought that he was innocent. That was reason enough to go do it.” Willie telephoned William Sessions, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, late in 1987, and attempted to explain himself to his fellow Texan. He ended up donating more money to police organizations and moved on.

  “Willie went out on the road right after the Peltier benefit,” Kris Kristofferson said. “And his base of crowd was pretty conservative. He took more heat than anyone did.” Willie was used to being critici
zed for his convictions and celebrity. The University of Texas had denied Willie permission to perform during the opening ceremonies of the Special Olympics for disabled children on the UT campus five years before, citing Willie’s potential for attracting “undesirables” to a family event, even though Special Olympics staff had extended an invitation specifically to Willie.

  Usually, it was water off a duck’s back to him. But sometimes Willie bit back. When the U.S. Forest Service held an auction for logging rights to two tracts of land in the Winema National Forest in southern Oregon that the service had designated Willy and Nelson, attorney Joel Katz fired off a nasty brief accusing the Forest Service of “desecrating invaluable cultural and burial sites and destroying pristine old-growth forests.” The lumber sale went through but without Willie’s name attached.

  Lawsuits, protests, and divorces were distractions from what mattered most—the music. It had been three years since his last number one single, “Living in the Promised Land,” for Columbia Records, which had been bought by Sony Music. Although he had put out several fine recordings after Half Nelson—Me and Paul, Partners, The Promised Land, Island in the Sea, and What a Wonderful World that followed the smooth groove he found with Stardust, Willie wanted more, so he asked Fred Foster to produce A Horse Called Music, his thirty-first album for Columbia/CBS/Sony. “I Never Cared for You” and “Mr. Record Man” were resuscitated for the 1989 release and Willie wrote an incisive new song called “Is the Better Part Over?” But the producer brought the hit, a song written by rising Nashville talent Beth Nielsen Chapman.

  “I ran into her in a parking lot and I told her I was looking for songs for Willie,” Fred Foster said. Three songs were on his desk the following day, all solid and good but not Willie material, Fred related to her. She protested, “I think they’re perfect for him.”

  “Tell you what,” Fred said. “He’s your favorite singer, right? Would you agree he’s had an interesting life?” She nodded twice. “Go home, put yourself in his shoes, and write about that life.”

  The next day, he got a call from Beth’s husband. “What did you do to my wife?” Ernest Nielsen wanted to know. “She’s locked herself in her writing room and won’t come out. If I get near the door she screams, ‘Get away!’” Two mornings later, Beth called Fred herself. She had the song, although she told him, “You probably won’t like it.”

  Fred liked it enough to see if Willie would like it. He would play it for him along with her other songs, as Beth requested. He flew to Texas and was driving around Willie World with Willie listening to music in the cassette player in his Mercedes where no one could bother them. Willie agreed the earlier songs she’d written were good, but not for him.

  “That’s what I tried to tell her,” Fred said, pushing the cassette of the song she’d written for Willie into the player.

  “I’ll do this,” Willie blurted one verse into the song. “Do you think she’d sing this with me?”

  Beth Nielsen Chapman sang with Willie on the recording, his first number one country single in three years.

  But he didn’t have time to bask in any glory because he was already on to Farm Aid IV, staged in Indianapolis on April 4, 1990. The rock group Guns N’ Roses was the buzz band among the sixty acts on the bill, but a child dying of AIDS named Ryan White stole the show when Elton John dedicated “Candle in the Wind” to him. Dwight Yoakum, Lou Reed, Bonnie Raitt, Don Henley, and Jackson Browne also performed in front of a gathering of forty-five thousand, helping raise $1.2 million for family farmers.

  The Fourth of July Picnic that year moved to Austin’s Zilker Park and starred the Highwaymen, with Billy Joe and Eddy Shaver as the opening acts, a lean bill that drew fifteen thousand fans who paid $7 advance and $9 at the gate. Twenty-eight thousand dollars were raised at the picnic for Carl’s Corner, Willie’s favorite truck stop, which had been damaged by an extensive fire.

  The name brand was leading to more endorsements. He’d gotten sponsorship deals before, drinking all the Lone Star Beer the band and crew cared to drink, wearing all the New Balance shoes everyone needed, and drinking all the Jose Cuervo Gold tequila they could drink, meaning a case of the Mexican liquor was always on the bus. At the height of the Urban Cowboy craze, 575,000 pairs of Willie designer jeans were sold by Mr. Fine of Dallas. But the three-year $11 million agreement to be the spokesperson for Wrangler Jeans changed how the advertising world perceived him. The endorsement led to Arrow Shirt endorsements (Willie donated that fee to Farm Aid), television commercials for the Gap clothing stores, and a Super Bowl commercial for H&R Block tax consultants, uttering the priceless line “My face is burning, my face is burning!” when being shaved at the barber shop.

  Not all branding came to pass, such as Willie’s Chili, but he was always game to listen to another pitch. So was his Family. That was their nature because they were still gypsies at heart. After Willie scored his Wrangler deal, Paul made his own pitch to the sponsors in his gently persuasive way. There were twenty-two Family members besides Will, he reminded the Wrangler brass, and what was to stop them from all showing up at gigs wearing Levi’s? Wouldn’t it be better if they all wore Wranglers? “I got ten thousand dollars a year and all the Wranglers I could wear,” Bee Spears crowed.

  Then the good times quit rolling.

  The Valley, 1991

  AT HIGH NOON on a Wednesday, the next to the last day of January 1991, a crowd had gathered on the steps of the quaint Hays County Courthouse in San Marcos, twenty-nine miles south of Austin. They had come for an old-fashioned auction. Most were realtors, bankers, and speculators, many of whom had registered as buyers and carried cashier’s checks in case they had a winning bid. There were also forty farmers, many of them members of the activist American Agriculture Movement, who had driven from across Texas and elsewhere in the United States and immediately made their presence known. The object of everyone’s interest was the forty-four-acre ranch on Fitzhugh Road that belonged to Willie Nelson, a prime piece of property that would easily fetch more than the minimum asking bid of $203,840.

  The farmers insisted that shouldn’t happen. A cattle rancher and oats farmer named Sonya Brumbloe from Midlothian, one county north of Hill County, was one of the first to speak up: “Maggots, buzzards, things that would only eat off the dead, you don’t prey on the wounded,” she said disapprovingly, looking around herself. When the wife of a retired businessman from Austin told her Willie Nelson would benefit from her husband’s buying his ranch, Brumbloe raged, “He’s my friend, and you are spitting on him.” Bob Thornton, a wheat and milo farmer from Anna, northeast of Dallas, said Willie was being persecuted by the Internal Revenue Service, just like Saddam Hussein was gassing hundreds of thousands of his own Iraqi people to tamp down unrest.

  Before the bidding began, Wayne Cryts, a farmer from Missouri, addressed the gathering while IRS officials glowered in his direction. “The farmers who are here today have come to show our support of Willie Nelson,” Cryts said. “He has stood up for American farmers and because of him he has given hope to hundreds of thousands of farmers and their families. Willie had raised money to feed farmers and their children, even when they lost everything they had and had nowhere to turn. We believe if the IRS will back off and give Willie Nelson a chance that he has the talent to raise the money he needs. This would be in the interest of all U.S. taxpayers and anyone who bids on his property.”

  A realtor who’d been prepared to pay twice the asking price turned to Bob Thornton and said, “I see what you are all trying to do.” No way would he bid on the ranch after that speech. No way any of the other prospective buyers would either.

  John Ahrens, an Arkansas attorney who specialized in helping farmers stay out of bankruptcy, offered the only bid, $203,840, the bare-ass minimum.

  Ahrens explained to writer Bill Minutaglio that during the 1980s Willie was “the only voice to be heard that farmers are worth saving. He was so faithful standing with us when people were saying, ‘Why the heck are you s
upporting them?,’ saying that we should export the farmers and keep the grain. Willie Nelson gave us great hope there was at least somebody out there who cared. The decision makers who would never care were reminded of the problem. And he got involved in other things that most people don’t, including congressional issues and legislation. We know how sad it is, how cold it is to be alone and not even your friends come to the auction of your home and land. We went, initially, with just the simple mission of standing there.”

  After the auction, the farmers drove out to Willie World on the Pedernales, where John Ahrens informed Willie the ranch had been bought for “safekeeping.” Behind the scenes, Willie’s business adviser, Mark Rothbaum, his attorney, Joel Katz, and Buddy Lee, the former wrestler and promoter once married to wrestling star the Fabulous Moolah, who was Willie’s booking agent of record (“You could take his jobs to the bank,” Paul English had said), were gathering funds to complete the transaction.

  How Willie Nelson almost lost everything was quite a tale.

  TWO months before on one of those warm November days that made Central Texas feel close to perfect with the air temperature climbing into the 70s, Willie was indulging in a round of golf. His concert grosses had dropped off from $14.5 million in the tall cotton days to $3.3 million in 1990, but between the shows and records, he was making plenty. As long as he could play music and play golf, all was right in his world.

  Play on the fairway was interrupted by a dozen IRS agents and federal marshals who materialized out of nowhere to greet him with the news, “You’re under arrest.” Willie calmly advised the buddies around him to refrain from inflicting physical harm on the lawmen. He led the revenuers to his clubhouse office, where he opened the safe for their inspection. Much to the agents’ disappointment, the cupboard was bare. If there was a stash of cash, jewels, or valuables, it wasn’t in the safe. He offered to show the agents the saloon in Luck, where all the bad art his fans gave him wound up on the walls, but the feds demurred. They wanted his Chagalls. Only Willie didn’t have any Chagalls.