Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  The publicity the IRS received could not be quantified. Just as Willie once persuaded a generation of grown men in white belts and white shoes to grow their hair over their ears, try marijuana, and think like an outlaw, he was now a walking billboard reminding the public to pay their taxes on time. More than ten years after the fact, his tax troubles were still fodder for public commentary as New York hip-hopper Ludacris affirmed in his 2004 recording “Large Amounts,” shouting out Willie’s name as a warning not to mess with “that IRS man.”

  WILLIE had stayed on the recording track throughout his IRS troubles, issuing another Waylon collaboration, Clean Shirt, on Sony/Columbia in 1991, produced by Bob Montgomery. The album with songs such as “Old Age and Treachery,” “Tryin’ to Outrun the Wind,” and “Two Old Sidewinders,” felt like two men of a certain age looking back. The effort was cathartic with “I Could Write a Book About You,” which pretty well summed up their brotherly dynamic.

  Besides being the year that his material possessions were auctioned off, 1991 marked two other life-changing events.

  On September 16—Diez y Seis de Septiembre—a major Mexican holiday observed throughout Texas, Father Albert Achilles Taliaferro, the founder of St. Alcuin Montessori School in Dallas, married Annie D’Angelo and Willie Nelson, an event marked by Annie clutching a pacifier rather than a bouquet at the altar and by a parade of paparazzi chasing the couple. The marriage made formal a relationship that had already given Annie and Willie two sons, Lukas Autry, born on Christmas Day 1989, named for Willie’s cowboy hero Gene Autry (“Gene was one of the first people to hold Luke,” Willie said proudly), and, the following year, Jacob Micah, named for the Sheriff Micah character in television’s The Rifleman series.

  Father Taliaferro was an Episcopal priest, an enlightened educator, and an instructor in the Rosicrucian mystical order, a group of believers dating from the sixteenth century who mixed Christianity with alchemy. Willie had listened to tape recordings of A. A. Taliaferro on his bus for years and considered him a wise man for teachings that centered around a favorite saying, “Don’t just sit there and vibrate. Do something!” Father Taliaferro was instrumental in inspiring Annie to advocate on behalf of the Montessori system of education and provided spiritual advice to Willie during a very trying time in his life.

  Three months later, on Christmas Day, at the old family homestead in Ridgetop, Tennessee, neighbor Ronald Greer went to check on his friend Billy Nelson, who lived in a cabin back in the woods on the family land. Greer found him hanged with a cord.

  Billy’s suicide was a horrible end to a troubled life.

  Ridgetop was the first place where Billy had felt at home as a boy, even if his mother was in Waco and his father was mostly on the road, leaving Shirley Nelson and his older sisters to raise him. Married once and having recorded a gospel album once, he insisted on being Billy Nelson, not Willie Hugh Nelson Jr. But Billy never emerged from his father’s shadow. Try as he might, he was never able to be anyone other than his famous father’s son. He had the sensitivity (and deep, soulful eyes) of his father, and his wild streak too—friends didn’t call him Wild Bill for nothing—but those attributes never translated into a happy life.

  Too often his father had had to bail him out of trouble. His condo at the Pedernales Country Club had been burned down as revenge for a dope deal gone sour, and when it was rebuilt, the $50,000 he was given to get back on his feet disappeared in a matter of weeks. He had been in and out of rehab. Billy had been hurting for money again that December. Because of his own tax problems, his father wasn’t in a position to bail him out. Willie had visited Billy at Ridgetop, trying to get him to move back to Texas again, but Billy said he wanted to stay with his friends.

  Willie Hugh Nelson Jr., thirty-three, was buried the Saturday after Christmas in 1991.

  Afterwards, Willie Hugh Nelson Sr. headed to Hawaii to sort out the aftermath. But before he left, Frank Oakley, the proprietor of the Willie Nelson General Store, called and asked him about the New Year’s Eve date he was scheduled to play in Branson, Missouri, as a preview show for the coming tourist season. Willie told Frank he’d call back in an hour. Ten minutes later he was on the line. “Let’s go picking,” Willie told Frank. “It’s foolish for me to sit on a beach somewhere. I should get to working again. There’s nothing I can do about what happened.”

  He played the New Year’s Eve show in Branson but did not share his grief with the audience. He stuck around for two hours after the show, signing each and every autograph thrust in his direction.

  Publicist Bonnie Garner attempted to ease the pain a few days later by explaining in a press release that Willie was a firm believer in reincarnation. But no words—nothing—could erase the deep sadness of a parent losing a child, regardless of the circumstances. In this case, the hurt seared deeper and was shared with precious few.

  One was Coach Darrell K Royal. “Willie’s more than an acquaintance,” explained Coach. “He and I have been together in some pretty emotional situations. When I lost two of my children, Willie was right there. I tried to do the same after Billy. I never brought up the subject much. I just shook his hand and was there for him. But he knew why I was there, just like I knew why he’d come to my house [after the deaths of Coach’s kids]. We’ve been together through some emotional times. That’s the reason I like ‘Healing Hands of Time’ so much.”

  Billy had appeared troubled to others around Willie. “Anytime Willie was in Nashville, Billy was around,” observed Evelyn Shriver. “But, you know, so often celebrities have such fucked-up kids, particularly musicians when they’re on the road all the time. They have various lives, various family groups. Willie’s family is his fans, his crew, those old guys he plays cards with. Bringing women into those situations is difficult. Who has withstood the test of time longer than the wives? His friends.”

  Asked several years later about his biggest disappointment in life, Willie replied, “Losing Billy.” He retreated to the only comfort zone he knew, the stage.

  When May rolled around, Willie began a 144-show, six-month engagement in Branson, Missouri (pop. 3,706), the tourist town in the Ozarks that had evolved into a new model for country music, where fans came to the artists instead of the artists going to the fans. More than twenty theaters operated in Branson, each featuring entertainers associated with country music, many who’d seen better days (Moe Bandy, Mickey Gilley), a few who historically operated on the periphery (Shoji Tabuchi, Boxcar Willie, Chisai Childs), with almost everyone packing the house twice a day with tour busloads of middle-aged, Middle American, middle-of-the-road country music fans.

  Willie’s one-man chamber of commerce welcome committee to Branson was Mel Tillis, the stuttering singer and songwriter who arrived in Nashville about the same time Willie did and who had a theater in Branson. Mel spoke of the theater glowingly when he visited Willie on the road, bringing along a bottle of tequila, an ounce of pot, and a mouthful of good bullshit. Over the course of the evening, Willie grew amenable to the idea of the Mel Tillis Theater becoming Willie Nelson’s Ozark Theater, Gift Shop, and Museum, featuring Willie Nelson. (Mel was building a bigger theater for himself.)

  Frank and Jeanie Oakley were enlisted to oversee the theater’s merchandise while continuing to run the Willie Nelson General Store in Nashville. A good part of the museum that was in the back of the Willie Nelson General Store (including many items Frank purchased at the IRS auction) was moved to Branson.

  Willie might have thought Branson was the solution to his heartache and his finances, but the minute he arrived for the extended engagement, he knew he’d made a mistake. He was used to moving. It was the natural state of life. “Everything else in the universe is moving,” he said. “Why shouldn’t we? Even the heart is moving the blood around. I just like to keep moving. It feels good to me.” In Branson, he was playing a stage that never moved, just like the people who came to Branson. The town of theaters didn’t much move either. Traffic was in a semipermanent state o
f gridlock, gummed up by congestion and road construction as the town boomed into a major RV and motor-coach destination.

  “Branson at that time was being bandied about as the new Mecca of country music,” publicist Evelyn Shriver said. “Mel talked him into it. He was making money hand over fist and you didn’t have to travel. But Branson wasn’t finished yet. Willie was living in a motel that wasn’t finished. You couldn’t figure out where the office was to find out who was in what room. You couldn’t get out from the motel because roads weren’t finished. The traffic was a nightmare. It was like being in the middle of Fan Fair every day of your life. There was trash everywhere.”

  Willie insisted on doing it his way, refusing to take breaks like most Branson performers did, mainly so they could sell more merchandise. Most acts did forty-five-minute sets followed by hourlong autograph sessions. Willie did his typical two-hour shows, then signed autographs until there was no one left. Playing two shows a day without a break and staying to sign autographs meant long days and weary nights.

  “[Branson] was a nightmare,” Mickey Raphael said. “We were stuck in one spot. The traffic was horrible. Artistically it sucked. It didn’t sell that well. You have to schedule the bus tours that come to Branson months in advance. That was the darkest period, just being stuck there.”

  “He signed that agreement with Mel Tillis without even calling Mark [Rothbaum, his business adviser],” Ray Benson said of the Branson mess. Mark wanted no part of it, but it was too late. “Branson became a subject I could not discuss with Willie,” Mark Rothbaum explained. “The first real substantive conversation Willie and I had happened after I told Willie, ‘If you are going to be there, enjoy the Ozarks,’ Mark said. “I bought him sleeping bags and a tent. Willie pitched the tent in his motel room and put the sleeping bags in the tent. When I went to visit him, the tent was set up in his motel room.”

  “What are you doing? Why don’t you go camping?” Mark asked.

  “You see this tent pitched here?” Willie said. “Next is a campfire.”

  Willie was not a happy camper. “Get me out of here,” he begged Mark.

  Willie may have been a sucker to take Mel Tillis’s theater, but so was Merle Haggard, who bit on Willie’s offer to play three days a week, so Willie cut back to four days a week, two shows a day, giving him more time to play golf or play benefits for H. Ross Perot, the feisty Dallas billionaire businessman who was running as a third-party candidate for president of the United States. “Crazy” was adopted as Perot’s campaign theme song. As Ethan Smith of Entertainment Weekly noted, “The tune was meant to allude, facetiously, to the Establishment’s view of the pint-size libertarian. The song actually reflected with uncanny accuracy on the wisdom of waging a $1 million-a-day, no-chance campaign out of sheer orneriness.”

  Willie was GTT the day his contract expired, his residency with Merle Haggard replaced by Loretta Lynn and Charley Pride. He didn’t think twice. All he had to do was compare and contrast. Which was it going to be? Farm Aid, which drew fifty thousand fans to Texas Stadium in Irving, the home of the Dallas Cowboys football team, in March to hear Willie, Paul Simon, the Highwaymen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Little Village, Asleep at the Wheel, the Texas Tornados, and Little Joe y La Familia? Or Shoji Tabuchi, Boxcar Willie, Jim Stafford, Kenny Rogers, Ray Stevens, Moe Bandy, and Andy Williams, each in his own theater, two shows a day, forever and ever?

  Band and crew were champing at the bit. “We just weren’t geared for sitting still that long,” roadie Kenny Koepke said. “After Branson, everybody was so ready for the road, no one was complaining about anything. It was real smooth after that.”

  One upside to Branson was the friendship he made with theater owner Johnny Herrington. The former and future mayor of Springhill, Louisiana, in the Piney Woods of northwestern Louisiana, served as Willie’s proxy to buy back the Pedernales Country Club and Golf Course. Herrington went with Willie to Austin to negotiate with James Noryian, who’d bought the course from the IRS, agreeing on a price of $350,000. Willie promised to pay Herrington back within three years. Noryian realized a tidy $120,000 profit for holding on to the property for less than a year.

  Willie raised his higher-than-ever pot-smoking profile when he was named cochair of the board of advisers to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

  His embrace of weed led him to Gatewood Galbraith, a Lexington, Kentucky, attorney running for governor in 1991 on a pro-pot platform. With a campaign that was so broke that his phones had been cut off, Galbraith had sent out a plea for funding via satellite television. “The next day, I was coming back from practicing law in eastern Kentucky and there was a note on the door of my office that said Willie Nelson was trying to get in touch with me.”

  Willie flew Gatewood down to Texas and put him up in Doc Simms’s former residence in Abbott, and for three days the music guy and the gubernatorial candidate ran together. “We rode around Texas in his pickup truck, played poker with his poker-playing buddies, hit all the night spots,” Gatewood said. He was awed by Willie’s humility and by his cool. While riding along a fairway, Gatewood turned to him and said, “Willie, I appreciate you spending all this time with me. You’re an international superstar, you could be hanging out with kings and queens and other superstars and you’re spending all this time with me.”

  “Well, hell, Gatewood,” Willie said with a smile. “You smoke pot, play golf, and like to look at women. Who else would I want to be spending time with?”

  Willie did a Hemp Aid benefit concert for Galbraith in Louisville, posed with him for the cover of High Times magazine, and rode on the campaign trail in Galbraith’s Hempmobile. “It was a stock Mercedes station wagon with a diesel engine in it,” explained Gatewood. “Rudolf Diesel designed his patented engine to run on seed oil. I was one of the few people way back then who actually knew what hemp oil was. My campaign had gotten several hundred pounds of sterilized hemp seed from China. We took it up to a seed oil company and they distilled it using the hexane method, which creates some of the clearest, cleanest oil. We decided to illustrate it by driving across the state in a cavalcade of about two hundred cars. Later on, we got a freestanding diesel engine that we set up on a platform at our public meetings.”

  Gatewood Galbraith captured 5.3 percent of the vote in Kentucky’s Democratic Party gubernatorial primary. When he ran again in 1995, he captured 9 percent of the vote in the primary. He ran for governor in the general election in 1999 on the Reform Party ticket and received 15 percent of the vote. Each time, Willie played benefits for him. In 2007, he ran again in the Kentucky Democratic Party primary, garnering 6 percent of the vote. It didn’t matter if he won. Willie liked him for what he believed in. Plus, the publicity was good for them both.

  “Willie brought a presence and strength of character and commitment to my campaigns,” Gatewood said. “He’s educable. The ability to stay young is the continuing ability to unlearn old lies. Willie puts his money and his being where his mouth is. It’s doing what you think is right.”

  Willie cast his lot with marijuana in other ways, endorsing a new line of hemp clothes called the Willie Nelson Hemp Collection that was grown in China and made in Macao. But his hangs with Gatewood Galbraith left a deeper impression. Why stop at hemp oil? Why not grow all kinds of crops for fuel?

  Or, in the meantime, smoke it?

  In the early hours of May 10, 1994, after Willie had spent a night of poker with Carl Cornelius and friends in Hill County, two highway patrolmen shined their flashlight into a Mercedes pulled over to the side of the frontage road of Interstate 35 near Hewitt, just south of Waco. They saw a bearded man curled up in the backseat. Willie had been driving back to Austin when he decided to take a nap on the shoulder rather than fall asleep at the wheel. They patrolmen also discovered the remnants of a marijuana cigarette in the ashtray.

  “What’s that?” said the voice behind the flashlight.

  “A joint,” a very sleepy, very startled Willie replied.
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br />   “Any more in the vehicle?”

  “Under the seat.”

  “You’re under arrest for possession of marijuana. You have the right to remain silent...”

  Willie Nelson was released from McLennan County Jail in Waco a few hours later on $500 bail. He faced six months in jail and a $2,000 fine if convicted of the Class B misdemeanor.

  Months later, he passed up a chance to perform at the Grammy Awards to fight for his constitutional rights at a court hearing. Attorney Joseph Turner, a noted criminal defense lawyer in Austin, pointed out discrepancies in the two officers’ versions of where the marijuana was found. During the search, police twice switched off a microphone that was part of the patrol car’s video recording system. Willie told the court, “It is becoming apparent in this country that we are losing our rights one after another.” County Court at Law Judge Mike Gassaway agreed that the police had had no business searching Willie’s car. The evidence was thrown out and the case was dropped entirely.

  Sergeant Mike Cooper, one of the arresting officers, had already been fired for sexual harassment in an unrelated incident. Willie claimed celebrity discrimination. “He was not a fan,” he said of the arresting officer. “I do think that once he found out who I was, he thought this might be good for his career.”

  Four months after the case was dismissed, Willie played a dance for a Sheriff’s Association of Texas training conference in Waco. McLennan County sheriff Jack Harwell, a longtime friend and occasional golfing pal, vouched for Willie’s credibility and his upstanding role in the community. “Anything that Mr. Nelson tells me, I’d believe,” the sheriff said. “I’d go to the bank on it.”

  Willie felt the same way about the sheriff and his colleagues. But he took the opportunity to call for the legalization of marijuana. “I think it should be taxed and regulated like your cigarettes,” he declared after the bust went away. If he was worried about being harassed, he didn’t show it.