Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  Willie had spent most of his adult life banishing worry, negativity, and bad vibes from his thinking. Worrying was a Waylon thing, as publicist Evelyn Shriver learned the hard way shortly after she’d been hired to represent the Highwaymen. Cash, Kris, Waylon, and Willie had managed to sell enough albums and tickets to stretch the concept to three albums and several tours over a ten-year span, even if it wasn’t always peace and love between them.

  Waylon wanted to fire Evelyn because she was from Willie’s camp. She didn’t take it personally. “He was pissed off about everything—the business, country music, not being on the radio,” she said. “Waylon’s legend will certainly outlive him being an asshole, but he was not the larger-than-life figure that Willie was when he didn’t live here. Waylon was in town and around the business. He should have left earlier and then it would have been okay.”

  Evelyn knew Waylon and Willie’s history: Waylon was the groundbreaker who fought to use his own band when Willie was wearing a tie and a suit and trying to do it the Nashville way. It was Waylon who ranted and raved about taking control of his own career. But that was a long time ago.

  “Waylon was bitter about the fact Willie’s star eclipsed everybody because of the movies,” she said. “Willie became somebody everybody knew more because of TV appearances with Julio Iglesias than from ‘Whiskey River.’ [“To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before” was sung on The Tonight Show, starring Johnny Carson, three times in three years.] If you were outside country music, you didn’t know ‘Whiskey River.’ You would see this when the Highwaymen would tour in Australia, Japan, or Europe,” she said. “Everybody knows the Man in Black, everybody knows the guy with braids. Kris was a movie star. They thought Waylon was the roadie. His music wasn’t international. His stardom wasn’t international. Waylon resented everybody. There was big jealousy over Willie from Waylon, truthfully. When that second Highwaymen project came about, Capitol hired me. Waylon wrote them a letter saying he didn’t want me hired because I was biased towards Willie. They wrote him back saying I was hired. I was copied on all these letters and I felt awful.

  “I didn’t know Waylon well,” she said. “We were doing something at the Opry House in Austin, so I got Waylon to go into one of those tiny dressing rooms and he’s just towering above me in all that black leather. I said, ‘Waylon, I know you’re not happy about me being hired.’ He said, ‘No. It’s not you. I think the world of you. It’s that goddamn Mark [Rothbaum, who was still Willie’s manager after he and Waylon had parted ways]. He’s always fixing things to favor Willie, putting everything off balance.’

  “Forget Mark,” Evelyn told Waylon. “Do you think Willie would let me push things for him over you, or Johnny Cash or Kristofferson? Don’t you think Willie would fire my ass in a second if I shortchanged any of you to slant things for him?”

  Waylon knew Willie well enough to know that that was true. He was okay with Evelyn after that.

  The New World, 1993

  BEING INDUCTED INTO the Country Music Hall of Fame usually meant either the best days of your career were behind you or you were dead. Willie was gracious in accepting the honor bestowed him in 1993 but didn’t spend much time looking back. Nostalgia was for other people. He had more music to make.

  Mark Rothbaum had approached record producer Don Was in search of someone who could orchestrate an album for Willie that would do what the song “Don’t Give Up” did for Kate Bush and what the album So did for British rocker Peter Gabriel—reenergize their careers. Willie had already worked with Was. While touring with the Highwaymen in Europe, Sony asked Willie to do Elvis’s “Blue Hawaii” for the film Honeymoon in Vegas. Don Was flew to Dublin, where he recorded the song with Reggie Young and the Highwaymen band backing Willie up. Don Was also recorded Willie singing “Across the Borderline,” a song written by John Hiatt, Ry Cooder, and Jim Dickinson, on which Kris Kristofferson sang the backing vocals. The two recordings were the seed of Across the Borderline, an album where Bob Dylan sang with Willie on “Heartland,” the song they’d written together, Paul Simon produced the track “Graceland” and played lead on “American Tune”—songs that Simon had written—and Sinéad O’Connor sang Kate Bush’s part on “Don’t Give Up.”

  The collaborations worked. Across the Borderline was the first Willie Nelson album to enter the pop album charts since 1985, largely on the legs of “Still Is Still Moving,” an updated, more ethereal version of “On the Road Again,” which became another Willie theme.

  The album also marked the end of Willie’s eighteen-year association with Columbia/CBS/Sony. Sales had diminished since the glory days spanning Red Headed Stranger to Always on My Mind, dropping from millions of units to hundreds of thousands to even tens of thousands for some albums. A new management team had been installed in the Sony Nashville office in 1994. Sony Nashville president Roy Wunsch, who had told Mark Rothbaum in no uncertain terms he was going to pick up the option and re-sign Willie, was fired. Allen Butler, Wunsch’s replacement, dropped Willie and several other legacy artists from the label’s roster.

  Willie greeted the news with a shrug and a yawn. He was never shy about his willingness to record whenever he had the itch. He had a studio. He needed a label less than a label needed him. After his release from Sony, he recorded the album Six Hours at Pedernales with Curtis Potter, his friend from Hank Thompson’s Brazos Valley Boys, who’d run with him in Vegas in the early 1960s, for the small independent Stop One Records. “Turn Me Loose and Let Me Swing” from the album was a number one video on CMT cable television for three weeks in 1995.

  During the same period, he recorded a session with his friend Rattlesnake Annie, appeared on a recording by San Antonio swing fiddler J. R. “Chat the Cat” Chatwell, and cameoed with German country singer Tom Astor on his album Meilen Steine with the song “Two Stories Wide.” He offered up his version of “What a Wonderful World” for the Put On Your Green Shoes all-star album dedicated to healing the planet. He added swinging vocals and guitar to the avant-garde versions of Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and the Eddy Arnold standard “I’m Sending You a Big Bouquet of Roses” interpreted by Blue Note jazz trumpeter Jack Walrath for Walrath’s Master of Suspense album. And he engaged in a mellow exercise in crooning titled “Augusta” with his longtime friend Don Cherry, the Singing Golfer from Wichita Falls made rich by writing the Mr. Clean jingle. Officially, he was touring behind an album released under his own name, Healing Hands of Time, a countrypolitan collection of his ballads backed by a lush string section, which was his first album for his new label, Liberty Records, for whom he had recorded thirty years before. The album cover, a photograph of Willie dressed for the occasion in a tuxedo, was telling. The outlaw outsider had come full circle and was dressing like he did when he was recording for RCA in the 1960s.

  He promoted a creatively marketed box set of three unreleased albums. One was Sugar Moon, an album of swing classics and pop standards made with Freddy Powers, Merle’s onetime songwriting partner, and Merle’s band the Strangers, notable for covers of Louis Armstrong’s “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue” and “Rosetta,” the Earl “Fatha” Hines swing composition popularized by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. He had also recorded a tribute album to Hank Williams with Larry Butler, the singer and guitarist who took him in at the Esquire Ballroom in Houston almost forty years before, and Jimmy Day, who played steel guitar and was well versed in “snap rhythm,” the sonic technique that kept the beat because Hank didn’t use drums. Also in the set was the unreleased 1974 live album recorded at the Texas Opry House for Atlantic Records, plus outtakes from the Shotgun Willie sessions in New York in 1973.

  The compilation was put together by Rhino Records and sold on the QVC Home Shopping Channel in 1993. A year later, it was rereleased by Rhino in stores as A Classic and Unreleased Collection.

  Willie toured Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and China with the Highwaymen and performed by himself in front of forty thousand at the 1996 edition
of Farm Aid in Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia, South Carolina, while touring around the country in his new forty-five-foot Prevost bus, Honeysuckle III. Slow ticket sales the following year forced Farm Aid, now an annual affair held in different locations across the country, to relocate from Dallas to suburban Tinley Park near Chicago three weeks before the event. He’d been at it long enough to know it was no big deal. Not every benefit was going to raise $1 million. Not every show could be a sellout. Not every record was destined to go gold.

  IN a stroke of good timing, Randall Jamail, the son of Willie’s Houston lawyer friend Joe Jamail, started his own record company shortly after Willie was dropped by Sony. Two of Justice Records’ first signings were Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings.

  The Justice Records deal allowed Willie to continue a second recording career, working with Kimmie Rhodes, the country singer-songwriter-author-playwright who lived down the road from the Hill. They met through Willie’s daughter Lana, who’d given her dad a demo tape of Kimmie’s song “I Just Drove By.”

  Kimmie had been helping Lana and Jody Fischer, Willie’s office assistant, organize a celebrity golf tournament, when Coach Royal drove up in a golf cart. “He comes scooting up, saying someone had played the song for Willie, and how everyone crowded around him had tears in their eyes,” Kimmie said. “Coach liked my song too.”

  Willie liked her band too, since Kimmie was using Bucky Meadows, David Zettner, and Freddy Fletcher—Willie’s “south of the big-time players,” as she called the musicians who occasionally showed up on Willie’s albums.

  One afternoon, Kimmie went searching for Billy Joe Shaver at the Pedernales studio. “He was going to play me this song,” Kimmie said. “We were sitting in the back part of the studio off the kitchen. We were encouraged to hang out in those days. Willie liked people being around. Billy Joe played me a song and I played him a song. We ended up playing songs when Willie walked in and said to me, ‘Play me that song of yours.’ I played ‘I Just Drove By’ for him.”

  “Play another one,” he requested.

  She played him “Just One Love.”

  “Well, let’s just go in there and record those right now,” Willie said without hesitation.

  Kimmie’s eyes got big as she followed Willie into the studio. “There was this humongous session going on with Grady Martin, Buddy Emmons, Jody Payne, Ray Edenton, Pete Wade, Chip Young, Bobbie Nelson, Mike Leach, Buddy Harman, Freddy Fletcher, Grandpa Jones (Willie’s old neighbor from Ridgetop, Tennessee) on banjo, and Grandpa’s daughter Lisa Jones on hammered dulcimer. They had a session going and they’d been on dinner break. I ended up spending the whole week with Willie doing background vocals.”

  “I loved doing ‘Four Walls,’” Kimmie said. “We played it over a speaker instead of using headphones and stood in front of a microphone and sang. We decided neither of us liked headphones. We were doing harmonies on the chords. I’d sung with him before live, but it was the first time I’d recorded it with him.

  “We’d work all night. Sometimes Willie would go off. For a couple nights, when Willie wasn’t around, Grady would get Willie’s guitar Trigger and go in and redo some of the solos. Grady had been like a three-year-old, parading around with Willie’s guitar, holding it up, yelling, ‘The damn thing’s playing itself!’ It was sounding so amazing. We were ready to pack up and leave [the second night], when Willie came back in about three in the morning. Willie heard Grady had played all these solos, taking Willie’s solos off, so when Grady left, Willie went back in and rerecorded the solos. He ended up leaving some of Grady’s solos on there.

  “We mixed it and sequenced it. Willie kept writing on his pad and drawing while we were listening to the playback. Grady and I were dancing to the playback. All of a sudden, Willie whirled around in the chair and said, ‘I think this should be the title cut.’ He’d drawn a cover that said ‘Just One Love’ and drawn a little record on it that read ‘by Kimmie Rhodes and Willie Nelson.’ It was something like a kid would do.

  “He’s the easiest person I’ve ever worked with,” Kimmie said. “I’m a real natural harmony singer and so is he. You don’t find that a lot. We have the same gospel background. The church is where we learned music. I was a child singer in a gospel band with my father and my brother. He’s the same animal.

  “In the studio, he’d ask, ‘What do you think?’ meaning ‘How was it?’ We were just people having a lot of fun making music together for the first time. He’s not real anal in the studio. He doesn’t take it to a realm of getting nit-picky or what we call fly-fucking. He’s not a fly-fucker. He just makes music. Willie likes to play music more than any musician I have ever known in my life.”

  “Just One Love,” produced by Grady Martin and released on Justice Records, was the first of more than one hundred tracks Kimmie recorded with Willie. He could survive outside the mainstream again, take on a permanent duet partner, or do anything he wanted to do in the confines of the studio. Making music remained the driving force.

  He continued making albums for mainstream record companies too, most notably the atmospheric Teatro, released by Island Records in 1998. Producer Daniel Lanois put a vaguely flamenco, drum-heavy twist to the album, recorded over four days in a Mexican movie theater with Emmylou Harris. Along the way, he harmonized with the Beach Boys on their 1996 release Stars and Stripes Vol. 1, singing a cover of their 1964 ballad “The Warmth of the Sun.”

  THE CORE band and core family tightened around him. Only the strong had survived, and it felt better than good. Bobby “Flaco” Lemons signed on with Willie’s crew in 1996, joining Poodie, Tunin’ Tom, Kenny Koepke, and the rest of a gang of familiars he’d known in Austin since the time he did sound for Plum Nelly, one of the most promising progressive-country acts circulating around Austin when Willie hit town. Flaco had been working for Jerry Jeff Walker, who’d hired him at the fourth Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic in Gonzales; at one time, Jerry Jeff was living in his car in Flaco’s front yard. After Jerry’s wife, Susan, took over his career and had it running like a well-oiled machine, Flaco moved on to do sound for Joe Ely, Darden Smith, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Rosie Flores, and spent three years doing time for smuggling marijuana, before walking into his best gig yet—running the soundboard for Willie. “It was supposed to be for three days, which turned into ten days, and then turned into ‘See if we can keep this guy,’” Flaco said two thousand gigs later.

  Jimmy Day returned to the outer orbit of the family inner circle after an extended exile, showing up backstage at a Willie Nelson performance at Bass Concert Hall on the University of Texas campus in Austin. Paul welcomed Jimmy back by hugging his neck without breaking it, prompting tears of gratitude from Jimmy, although Paul he was still pissed at Jimmy for insulting him after his wife, Carlene, killed herself. Willie suggested Jimmy take the stage alone and play one of his surefire showstoppers, “Greensleeves.” Half the hall, it seemed, was crying along with him. Willie took a tolerant view of Jimmy Day. “You had to take him as he was, accept him as he was, and hope he was better than the last time you saw him,” he said. “And sometimes he was.”

  BY the dawn of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Austin had grown into a city of more than half a million inhabitants and another half million residing beyond its city limits. It was known as a Creative City, one of the few cities its size that continued to attract young, educated people from around the world to seek their fortune. The appeal was largely attributed to dozens of small design shops devoted to computer gaming and graphics and several giant-size computer companies, including Freescale Semiconductor, Advanced Micro Devices, Motorola, Samsung, IBM, and the homegrown Dell Computers.

  Instead of practicing in garages and recording for small independent labels, young people were pulling twenty-hour shifts creating software and video games. But Austin’s high-tech community would not have flourished without Austin’s alternative scene, which was as much a magnet as the companies themselves.

  The city c
ouncil declared Austin “The Live Music Capital of the World” based on the vibrant club scene that Willie helped jump-start, and it posted signs on the jetways and played Austin artists on the sound system at the airport to remind arrivals this wasn’t Dallas.

  A healthy film community grew out of the Austin Film Society at the University of Texas and the work of three young directors—Rick Linklater, who blazed the trail with his 1991 slice of low-motivation Bohemian Austin, Slacker, and captured stoner culture in Dazed and Confused; Robert Rodriguez, whose El Mariachi artsy shoot-’em-up was filmed in the border town of Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila, across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas, for less than $7,000 and launched a career in gore films (From Dusk till Dawn and Sin City) and kids’ movies (the Spy Kids franchise); and Mike Judge, a bass player from a Dallas blues band who created two twisted and stupid cartoon characters called Beavis and Butt-Head for MTV before making the geek cult film Office Space and launching the animated Fox TV series King of the Hill, celebrating modern Texas redneck suburbia. A study commissioned by the city pegged the economic impact of film and visual media on Austin at $359 million annually. Music’s impact was almost twice that, worth $660 million a year.

  Alternative Austin went mainstream. Whole Foods Market, a natural grocery chain founded by three small organic-food-store owners shortly after Red Headed Stranger charted, had grown into the world’s-largest retailer of natural and organic food, with more than two hundred stores across the United States and the United Kingdom. Austin being Austin, competition sprang up in the form of HEB Central Market, an upscale supersize gourmet market emphasizing natural foods that was an offshoot of the San Antonio–based HEB grocery chain, arguably the finest regional chain of supermarkets in the nation.