Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  Prosperity came at a price. A good part of Austin’s funky, earthy charm had been bulldozed to make way for progress. Real estate was the priciest in Texas. The city’s crown jewel, Barton Springs, still attracted several hundred thousand locals and visitors with its clear, cool, 68-degree water, but its water quality had been degraded by pollution tied to development upstream. Where the Broken Spoke, the honky-tonk on South Lamar, once marked the southern edge of town, urban sprawl extended twenty-five miles, all the way out to Willie World on the Pedernales. At the same time, the Spoke was now regarded as a historic treasure. Owner James White, who erected a new exterior roof at considerable expense to keep the rain off the existing low ceiling without compromising the earthy ambience, opened a small museum and “tourist trap” in the club, while reminding visitors the club had the best chicken-fried steaks in South Austin but didn’t serve no “Pierre” water.

  By 2001, Austin City Limits had aired nationally on the Public Broadcasting System for twenty-five years, becoming the longest-running music series on television by featuring a mix of Austin-based and national roots–oriented music acts. The companion Austin City Limits music festival would be first staged in the fall of 2002 in Austin’s Zilker Park, showcasing the kind of music aired on the television series and attracting close to seventy-five thousand fans every September.

  The biggest made-in-Austin alternative creation was the South by Southwest music, film, and interactive conferences staged over ten days every March since 1987. By 2001, SXSW, which began as an “outsiders as insiders” music conference for those who had been shut out of the music industry, had blossomed into the largest music convention in the world, drawing industry people from more than forty countries, as well as movie, high-tech, and alternative-media types. Still, the conference remained faithful to the same sensibilities that brought Willie Nelson to Austin by presenting more than two thousand bands and solo acts in Austin’s clubs and music venues over five days and nights.

  At the beginning of the new millennium, Willie’s friend Ann Richards was the most famous ex-governor in Texas, if not the country. The current governor, the Connecticut-born George W. Bush, was running for president of the United States as a Texan, following in the footsteps of his father, George H. W. Bush.

  And Willie was pretty much the same old guy that Waylon had described years ago. “He’ll give you everything, say yes to anybody, and trust events will turn out fine.” For all the hurt, emotional scars, and financial challenges he had endured, he hadn’t changed that much. More often than not, his instincts had proved right. What Willie started almost thirty years earlier when he walked onto the stage of the Armadillo World Headquarters and introduced himself was still in play.

  At the request of his daughter Amy, Willie and David Zettner ushered in the new century by making a record of children’s songs in the little studio that Willie had built in the back of the Luck World Headquarters saloon. As a child, Amy Nelson had loved Kermit the Frog’s song “Rainbow Connection.” As an adult, she suggested to her father that he record it. The song had been written by pop songwriter Paul Williams as a protest anthem directed at the South African government’s apartheid system of racial segregation. But when Kermit the Frog, the star puppet character in The Muppet Movie, recorded a version of “Rainbow Connection” as an anti-anti-amphibian piece, the meaning expanded to include all forms of discrimination.

  Willie finally got around to recording “Rainbow Connection” with David while Amy was visiting Pedernales from her home in Nashville. The result was so pleasing that they figured, why stop with one song? Willie played guitar and sang. David played rhythm guitar, pedal steel, and bass. Matt Hubbard, a computer-savvy in-law married to Lana’s daughter who had been hanging at Luck, contributed bongos, harmonica, and keyboards, and scored engineering and production credit, even though it was a Willie and David collaboration and Amy’s idea.

  As they fiddle-farted their way through “Ol’ Blue,” “Won’t You Ride in My Little Red Wagon?” “I’m Looking over a Four-Leaf Clover,” and the Lonzo and Oscar classic “I’m My Own Grandpa,” Gabe Rhodes, a neighbor with his own recording studio and a part-time picking partner of David’s, dropped by to add more guitar. Amy, who was forming the irreverent duo Folk Uke (semi-hit single: “Shit Makes the Flowers Grow”) with Arlo Guthrie’s daughter Cathie, added her vocals.

  The children’s album veered into adult territory when they recorded “Playin’ Dominos and Shootin’ Dice,” about a “guitar picker [who] lived a life of wine and liquor,” written by the 1950s rockabilly Ramblin’ Jimmie Dolan; Mickey Newbury’s 1960s slice of psychedelia popularized by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition called “Just Dropped In (to See What Condition My Condition Was In)”; and “The Thirty-third of August,” a stark, contemplative self-examination of one person’s life that could’ve been an outtake from Yesterday’s Wine.

  Surreal material aside (care for some windowpane acid, kids?), Willie and David intentionally underproduced Rainbow Connection, letting their musicianship and deep familiarity with each other carry the recordings. Making a cool album on his terms with one of his favorite playing partners was just as satisfying as, or even more satisfying than, a Don Was or Daniel Lanois production. The tab for the album was less than what Red Headed Stranger cost. They sold it to Island Music for $500,000, with Willie splitting the proceeds with David Zettner, Matt Hubbard, and Amy Nelson.

  THE new century was treating Willie all right. “Crazy” was voted the Number One Jukebox Single of All Time, according to National Public Radio; Johnny Bush Sings Bob Wills, one of the tapes confiscated by the IRS back in 1990, was finally released as an album by the Texas Music Group; and Willie earned his black belt in tae kwon do from Master Oh, his instructor in Austin.

  And married life was suiting him just fine. Annie D’Angelo Nelson, mother of Lukas and Micah, became her husband’s right-hand man and was instrumental in founding the Tierra Vista Montessori School of Spicewood in 1995, for which Willie donated twenty acres of Pedernales land and played several benefits. She loved the peace and quiet of the cabin on the Hill, which had been expanded considerably since her arrival, and seeing the Pedernales River winding through Hill Country at sunrise and sunset.

  Her direct, outspoken manner (“my Sicilian shows sometimes,” she admitted) earned her the reputation as a hard-ass. On their first encounter, she turned off business manager Mark Rothbaum by dissing the venue Willie was playing in New York, the same room Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young had recently worked. “Have you ever been there?” Mark asked her. “I’ve been told about it,” she replied.

  Annie’s abrasiveness put the old guard around Luck, Texas, and Pedernales Studio on notice. As Willie’s wife, she was in charge, not them. Hell on wheels, she would send sidemen, sidekicks, running buddies, and golfing pals scurrying whenever she showed up. Willie World regulars had a code for Annie:

  “When you see the White Rover, you know the party is over.”

  But Willie loved her, and since Willie was the reason everyone was there, she was tolerated as part of the package, even if she could kill a buzz without saying a word. And the ol’ boys liked her a whole lot more when she moved with Lukas and Micah to the Hawaiian island of Maui to get away from Willie World, just as Connie had fled the ranch on Fitzhugh Road with their girls for Colorado.

  The permanent move was good for all parties concerned. “The boys needed to be in school more full-time,” Annie said. “We decided on Maui because it is a place where it really doesn’t matter who you are or what you do as long as you contribute like family and respect the host culture.” Whenever Willie had a hankering to be with family, he had an island paradise to go home to. Maybe it was all those years with Jimmy Day and his florid steel guitar or the fact that Kris Kristofferson had discovered Maui in the early 1970s and lived there permanently, but Hawaii spoke to him. His chosen path limited time spent on Maui to two or three months over the course of a year. Despite a history of broken marri
ages and scattered offspring, blood family still gave Willie the greatest comfort outside of music—all members of his family, ex-wives included.

  That much was evident in a corner booth of the Saxon Pub in Austin one Sunday afternoon before Christmas in 2006. He’d driven in overnight from Shreveport, Louisiana, where he’d been making a Dukes of Hazzard movie with Jessica Simpson, and before that he’d been in Nashville, where he’d recorded with contemporary-country heartthrob Kenny Chesney. He’d come to the Saxon to hear his daughter Paula Carlene, who’d moved back to Texas and was fronting her own band. Mentored by a number of independent music people in Austin, including blues impresario Clifford Antone and singers Lou Ann Barton, Marcia Ball, and Toni Price, Paula Nelson had released an album of her own songs. In one called “Alone,” she wished she could have her dad alone to herself just once. “He belongs to the world and it’s hard to share with the world,” Paula explained. “That’s where the song came from. It used to hurt my feelings at the world that I couldn’t be with him and have him to myself.”

  The back booths of the club doubled for a family reunion setting as Susie, Amy, Lana, and ex-wife Connie visited with Willie and caught up with one another. When Willie took the stage to join Paula, the packed club went wild, like it usually did, and the band kicked into overdrive.

  Playing music with his kids was a special pleasure. Willie had joined Susie in the studio on her sole recording, a single titled “Once upon a Time” for Delta Records, a small independent label based in Nacogdoches, Texas. His teenage sons, Lukas and Micah, were now eighteen and seventeen, old enough and capable enough to tour with the Family Band, playing guitar and percussion respectively, beginning in the summer of 2004, when they jammed with Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top on the stage of the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. The boys moved from being part of a Hawaiian reggae jam band called the Harmonic Tribe to becoming half of a four-piece rock band named 40 Points, which was the first signing to a new version of Pedernales Records that Willie had formed in partnership with Nashville record producer James Stroud, his financial manager Mark Rothbaum, and his nephew Freddy Fletcher of Pedernales Studio. But the boys didn’t need a manager. Their mother would look out for their interests.

  Ever since the IRS troubles, recording at Pedernales Studio was no longer a spur-of-the-moment matter. Freddy Fletcher ran Pedernales Studio as a business and sold block time to outside acts, meaning Uncle Willie no longer had unfettered access to record whenever the urge struck. So he asked Joe Gracey to build him a small studio in the pantry in the back of the Luck World Headquarters. The saloon was still Willie’s official hangout and his designated setting for doing interviews, tapings, or formal visiting. Its walls were plastered with Willie photographs, posters, and other memorabilia. Willie played barkeep, cooking breakfast or serving up drinks while doing interviews. Tables with chessboards and checkerboards were strategically placed in the middle of the room. Upstairs was a gym with speed bags, punching bags, and kickboxing gear.

  Music broke out in the Luck headquarters at the drop of a hat. All that had been missing was a means to capture it. Joe Gracey heard Willie loud and clear. “He wanted a place he could just walk into and jam with all the musicians he cared to have in that one little room, and record it all,” he said. Digital technology conveniently converged with Willie’s yearnings. Gracey put together a system with eight inputs, eight preamps, and eight microphones rigged into a Macintosh computer, along with various pieces of hardware and software. Within a matter of days, Willie was sitting on a stool in front of a microphone in a room with wood walls and a high ceiling, singing “One Day at a Time,” a reflective gospel song with secular appeal.

  “He can go in there and record anytime he wants,” Gracey said. “It’s spontaneous. He’s sitting down there picking anyway. He can just record what he’s doing now. He’s got his chessboard to play chess with Coach Royal, the bar, kitchen, cappuccino machine, the big giant-screen TV, the woodstove. And next to it is the recording-studio room, where some days he’ll cut a hit and some days all someone will do is add another Zig-Zag pack to the wall. It’s Willie’s clubhouse.”

  Joe Gracey engineered Picture in a Frame, the 2003 album of duets with Willie and Kimmie Rhodes, released on Kimmie’s Sunbird Records label, in the Luck saloon studio with Willie, David Zettner on an upright bass, and Gabe Rhodes on guitar. “We didn’t need to go to Pedernales and do all that,” Joe said.

  “While some artists are singers only, and some bands have a sound but no idea how to record it, Willie seems to plan it all out, knowing what he wants before going in,” Joe Gracey said. “He understands the old-style producer situation, but he doesn’t need guidance. I’ve seen him be more flexible than you would expect, like he was at those Fred Foster sessions when he recorded Horse Called Music. Fred did all the tracks and Willie just sang over them.”

  Gracey brought out the polkaholic in Willie, which he’d hinted at when he did “Beer Barrel Polka” on the Tougher Than Leather album in 1983. With Gracey at the controls, Willie joined polka legend Jimmy Sturr through the miracle of electronic recording, adding his vocals to “Just Because,” “On the Road Again,” “Yellow Rose of Texas,” and “Waltz Across Texas” for Sturr’s Gone Polka album; “All Night Long,” “Tavern in the Town,” and “Big Ball’s in Cowtown” for Sturr’s Polka! All Night Long album; “Blueberry Hill,” “Unchained Melody,” and “I Walk the Line” for Sturr’s Shake, Rattle and Polka! album; and “Since I Met You Baby,” “Singin’ the Blues,” and “Bye Bye Love” on Sturr’s Rock ’N Polka album.

  “He reminds me of ET,” Joe Gracey said of Willie, invoking Ernest Tubb. “They have the same work ethic and they just get out there and play.” Willie also followed ET’s lead in his desire to help others out once he was in a position to do so. Gracey observed the respect and deference Willie showed to Ray Price when they recorded the Grammy-nominated Run That by Me One More Time album. “Willie assumed the role of session leader, but they’d work it out together.” There was little planning or preproduction, and a whole lot of “Let’s try this” and “Remember this one?” That project took all of two days.

  Gracey was working the audio console years before at Pedernales Studio for the recording of Spirit, the 1996 album that marked a dramatic shift in the live sound of Willie Nelson and Family.

  The Family Band was on a tour break while Willie and Bobbie were going to do an acoustic brother-and-sister show at the Greer Garson Theatre in Santa Fe. Jody Payne joined the bill when he called Willie and told him about a new downsized guitar he’d gotten. “How ’bout if I go with you?” he proposed. Jody climbed aboard Honeysuckle Rose in Columbus, Ohio, and played the new instrument all the way to Santa Fe. “It was really, really a different thing for me,” Jody said.

  After the performance in Santa Fe, the three of them went back to Austin, where Willie summoned Joe Gracey so the three, along with fiddler Johnny Gimble, could record. “We played all that afternoon,” remembered Jody. “I left the next morning.”

  “Willie totally controlled the whole record,” Joe Gracey said. “He loves to record and he hates turning it into a chore. He’s not into splicing and dicing. When it came time for sequencing Spirit, he turned it all over to me and said, ‘Finish it.’ He didn’t review the mixes every day. He sent me to master the tapes in Nashville. Willie likes me because (a) I love voices, and (b) I mix them loud.”

  Willie liked the atmosphere of Spirit so much he decided to downsize the Family Band on their next run on the road as well, taking only Bobbie, Jody, and Mickey as his band, with Paul coming along to collect the money. But after being drowned out by a loud crowd at Tramp’s in New York, Willie suggested expanding the quartet. “Let’s get Paul some drums,” he said, still wanting to keep the groove spare. Paul called his brother Billy to come back on the road as drum tech.

  “I had been setting up a full kit for Paul prior to that,” Billy English said. “The tour to promote Spirit was eighteen shows, and after nine s
hows, Paul called while I was producing a CD on a friend up in Colorado Springs and said Willie wanted me and Bee to come out for the last part of this tour.” But Willie gave Billy specific orders: “Get rid of the timbals and all the loud, heavy percussion and go to the subtle stuff—triangles, wind chimes, salt shakers, things like that. We’re going to have just one snare drum, not a kit.” Paul wasn’t too happy with the simple setup at first, but the more shows they played, the more he embraced the tamped-down ambience.

  The Willie Nelson wall of sound was now infused with subtlety. For the first time in years, Willie’s voice and guitar were front and center. Bobbie’s piano was as distinctive a complement to Willie’s voice and guitar as Mickey’s harmonica. “It was totally different from what we had with the two drummers and two bass players,” Jody said. “That was a rompin’, stompin’ band, don’t get me wrong. This was the same amount of energy, only not overpowering.”

  Willie wanted the lighting the same way, dropping the lighting truck driver and lighting crew, leaving only Budrock the lighting director to do the job. The road caravan dropped to three buses and one tractor-trailer.

  Later, Willie added jazz guitarist Jackie King in the wake of Grady Martin’s death in 2001, much to the displeasure of the regular band. “Willie asked him to come out and play two songs,” complained Mickey Raphael. “He never left. Willie liked his playing, but every song he’d play all over it.” It didn’t help that Jackie thought of himself as a virtuoso and insisted on bringing along his wife on tour. The band cheered when Willie informed them Jackie was leaving. In Jackie’s absence, Willie’s guitar led the way again.

  BY now, it had become obvious there were two kinds of albums—Mark albums and Willie albums. Mark albums were projects put together by Mark Rothbaum as a means of maintaining a high profile for Willie and keeping his career fresh. Willie and Rob Thomas, Willie and Ryan Adams, Willie produced by James Stroud in Nashville, Willie with Wynton Marsalis’s jazz band—those were Mark albums.