Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  His March shows at the Backyard Amphitheater halfway between Austin and Spicewood, kicking off the six-thousand-seat amphitheater’s warm-weather season, were an annual rite; it was a favor to the venue’s owner, Tim O’Connor. When the Backyard opened in 1993, it was an idyllic Hill Country oasis shaded by four-hundred-year-old oaks. Since then, Austin had grown right up to its doorstep, and an upscale shopping mall surrounded the facility.

  Willie remained a familiar face on the big and small screen. He appeared in an episode of the NBC-TV comedy My Name Is Earl as the character Uncle Jess and on an episode of Myth Busters on the Discovery Channel. He contributed songs to the “House of the Rising Sun” episode of the ABC-TV adventure series Lost and the “Script and the Sherpa” episode of the HBO series Entourage. He performed “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” “Old Five and Dimers Like Me,” and “Funny How Time Slips Away” in the Tommy Lee Jones action-comedy Man of the House, set in Austin, and sang “Uncloudy Day,” appearing as himself in the film Broken Bridges, a vehicle for country singer Toby Keith.

  He made cameos in It’s Happiness: A Polka Documentary, the movie comedy Beerfest, set around Munich, Germany’s Oktoberfest, the marijuana documentary The Hempsters: Plant the Seed, the dope comedy Half Baked, two episodes of the cartoon comedy series Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, and the Disney family film The Country Bears, and performed at the Nobel Peace Prize concert in Sweden.

  Outside the spotlight he was wheeling and dealing, partnering with nephew Freddy Fletcher and Stratus Properties on a new two-thousand-seat venue and studio for the Austin City Limits music series in downtown Austin, while Bobby Day, a developer friend who was managing Willie’s golf course, built forty-one luxury homes in a sixty-three-acre subdivision by the highway on the Pedernales ranch.

  FOUR thousand miles west of Willie World, the breezes off the Pacific blew soft and seductive. The low-slung ranch house hidden in the coastal vegetation on the island of Maui was unremarkable when viewed from the road. The interior was earthy, comfortable, and solar-powered, with a saline pool in back. Two wings extended from the main house, one wing with a beaded curtain entrance to Django’s Lounge, Willie Nelson’s own personal Shangri-la beer joint/casino/studio/party palace, with hand-cranked glass windows, Hank Williams on the sound system, and a view where you could see all the way to tomorrow.

  In the center of the neon-lit room, Willie Nelson sat shirtless in his master’s chair, his already furrowed brow creased deep as he twisted the end of a long strand of his unbraided hair, lost in concentration. Recording equipment and musical instruments were within arm’s reach. A shuffleboard table was against the wall, the heavy metal discs set up on the slick-as-a-dance-floor surface, ready for play. His eyes darted from side to side, from the chessboard to the card table in front of him. Bills were piled high in the middle of the card table and to the side of the chessboard. One hand held five cards. The other nudged a pawn. Several old mountain men who’d descended from the surrounding hills sat across the tables from Willie, their eyes following his from one table to the other and back to Willie. Bets accompanied all of Willie’s games—$100 a game for chess, $100 a hole for golf, whatever the players could bear around the poker table. “Usually at the end of the night we’re about even,” Willie said.

  His concentration was broken when the beads parted and Kris Kristofferson walked in, followed by Pat Simmons from the Doobie Brothers, pro basketball coach Don Nelson, and former Alice Cooper manager Shep Gordon—his Maui neighbors.

  As the sun dipped into the west and Hank Williams warbled “...no matter how I struggle and strive, I’ll never get out of this world alive,” the games, the gambling, and the music went on.

  “It’s really a place to get away,” Willie said of his Hawaii residence. He could rest, play golf, play music, play family man, or play poker. “I think of Maui as my hospital,” he said. “It’s where I go to heal up from the battle zone.”

  But he never got too serious about staying. During a three-month break in the fall of 2006, the longest stretch off since his carpal tunnel surgery, Willie spent quality time at Django’s but also managed to record an album in Nashville, appear in a movie in Louisiana, work a jazz gig in New York, and lay down some country tracks in Texas.

  Hawaii was nice—as a short break. “It’s kind of like you stopped a big train for a minute,” Willie said. “It gives everybody a time to stop and think, Whatever this is, it is not going to last forever. So we might as well enjoy the rest and take it as far as we can.” The highway was home. His bus was like other tour buses—sofas, booth, toilet/shower, bunks, the back room for the star—with a few tricked-out extras. The hand-carved wooden pillars above the booth in the front of the bus were the kind of elaborate ornamentation fit for a gypsy king. The kitchen across the aisle from the booth was the envy of any celebrity chef, with all the essentials needed to cook and roll. There were flat-screen televisions, satellite hookups, video games, computers with Internet access, and phones to stay plugged in and connected. Often as not, though, the mobile cocoon he shared with Bobbie, Lana, David, L.G., Gator, and Tony Sizemore was shrouded in silence, a safe place like nowhere else on earth. “We know each other so well, we can sit on the bus for four hours without saying a word,” Gates Moore said.

  Gates the Gator was recognized among tour bus drivers as the ultimate road dog, the first driver in the modern era to surpass a million miles driving the same act. With well over three million road miles under their belts, Gates and Tony Sizemore both eclipsed Hoot Shaw, the driver for Ernest Tubb and the Texas Troubadours for several decades, as the kings of the road. Everyone else on board shared Willie’s love of the highway.

  “Billy Joe Shaver wrote, ‘Moving is the closest thing to being free,’” Willie said. “I believe that. It’s that old cowboy trail-riding thing.” He reveled in the surprise factor that mobility brought to his life every day. “You lift the shades and you’re looking at a new view and you didn’t have to buy a home to appreciate the scenery,” he said about the joys of peering out the tinted window. “The other night we were in Los Angeles and we went over to [Texas film actor] Matthew McConaughey’s place on the ocean and had some steaks. He’s got one of those Airstream trailers. He drove it in from somewhere and knows he can drive it out of there when he gets ready to leave. It’s kinda like this bus.”

  Brother and sister were doing what they had been raised to do. “We had a lot of energy and we fortunately had instruments to work with,” Willie said. “Sister Bobbie had a piano and I had a guitar and we had a place to act out our fantasies and put words to melodies. Nothing’s changed.”

  Sister agreed. “I have tried so many times in my life to change something that I want to do so much,” she said. “But you have to know it’s just supposed to be that way. All I want to do is the best I can. My job is to assist him, and that’s my desire. We just want to make sure every night’s a great show. Once a show is over, we can’t wait to do it again. We have the energy and we love the music. I’m at this spot right now where I’m going back and remembering. I’m going into the studio and playing this beautiful piano I’ve got out at Pedernales Studio that Freddy rebuilt, and I’m playing some things I remember from a long time ago, just the piano. But I want to learn more new things too. It’s very hard when you get to the stage that everything you play is a performance. I want to still be learning, do some learning. There are many things to learn, many shows to play.” In the fall of 2007, Bobbie finally got around to releasing an album of her own, Audiobiography. Her little brother joined her to sing and play guitar on the first and last songs on the album, “Back to Earth” and “Til Tomorrow,” which he wrote. The other ten tracks were simply Bobbie playing the Bösendorfer piano.

  Bobbie was as zealous as her brother when it came to playing for the sake of playing. She filled in at Abbott Methodist Church, where she first performed as a pianist, when the church’s volunteer organist quit in protest of the well-publicized arrest of the Nelson sib
lings near Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, on September 18, 2006. Bobbie, Willie, David Anderson, Gates Moore, and Tony Sizemore were returning to Texas after Willie headlined a benefit concert with Ray Price, Don Helms, and Andy Norman at the Riverwalk Theatre in Montgomery, Alabama, celebrating Hank Williams’s birthday. At a commercial vehicle checkpoint on Interstate 10, Louisiana state police detected a suspicious odor emanating from the bus. A search of Honeysuckle Rose yielded nearly one and a half pounds of high-quality marijuana and a baggie full of psychedelic mushrooms. The accused, all eligible for AARP membership, were issued misdemeanor drug-possession citations and released at the scene.

  Willie joked about the incident. “It was like they busted an old folks home,” he said. The cops didn’t wake Ben Dorcy, eighty-three, the world’s oldest band boy, who was asleep on the sofa. “I told them you were dead,” Willie informed Ben afterwards. Willie considered himself fortunate. “It’s a good thing I had a bag of marijuana instead of a bag of spinach—I’d be dead by now,” he said, referring to a nationwide outbreak of E. coli–tainted spinach that had killed several people. Television comedian Jay Leno joked, “Willie was really worried he was going to have to spend the rest of 1969 in jail.”

  The stop prevented Willie, his sister, and his road manager and drivers from attending the funeral of former Texas governor Ann Richards, a Waco native and a kindred celebrity. They both stood tall in their chosen paths and shared a love of where they came from. Willie sang the cowboy lament, “Don’t Fence Me In” for Ann’s official biography film, which was adopted as the theme song for the 110th Congress of the United States by Nancy Pelosi, the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives.

  Willie was philosophical about the bust. “Compared to other negative experiences it could have been, it was okay,” he said.

  While Willie didn’t often share his beliefs with the audience when he was onstage (he was there to give a great show, not to tell the audience what he was thinking), he did offer comfort, bandannas, and whiskey to Democratic Party lawmakers from the Texas Legislature who fled the state to Oklahoma and New Mexico to avoid voting on redistricting mandated by Texas Republican congressman Tom DeLay, whose efforts were ultimately repudiated by the United States Supreme Court. Willie’s support of the renegade Democrats, the dominant political party in Texas for all of Willie’s life up until the 1990s, prompted several Republican legislators in Texas to shoot down efforts to name a road in Willie’s honor (Republican presidents George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan all had Texas roadways named in their honor while they were still alive). Willie said he wouldn’t have wanted a road named after him anyway, because people would be cussing him while stuck in traffic.

  Willie leaned left and populist but otherwise was predictably unpredictable. He supported Republican Barry Goldwater when he was running against Texas Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson for president in 1964, according to Zeke Varnon, and recorded a radio spot for Texas Republican John Tower in one of his races for U.S. Senate. In 1989, he and Waylon campaigned for Houston mayor Fred Hofheinz. In 1992, he backed third-party presidential candidate H. Ross Perot. In 2004 and 2008 Willie endorsed Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich, a Gandhi Peace Prize winner, in his unsuccessful bids for the Democratic Party nomination for president of the United States. Although Kucinich garnered few delegate votes, he positioned himself squarely as an antiwar, anticorporate candidate.

  “Willie has always been to the left of me, and always a little higher than me,” Kinky Friedman said. “Before the Iraq invasion [in 2003], we were arguing about the wisdom of it, and Willie was against it. He was where the country is now. I was for it. I thought, quite logically at the time, having a stake in the Middle East and Israel, let’s knock off a bad guy. Willie was smoking a joint the size of a large Kosher salami on this occasion, and I felt I wasn’t getting through to him, which was very frustrating. That’s when I told him, ‘Look, Willie, this guy is a tyrannical bully, and we’ve got to take him out.’ Willie said, ‘No, he’s our president, and we’ve got to stand by him.’”

  Kinky, whose best-selling detective novels earned him status as a White House guest during both the Clinton and Bush administrations, was still smarting from his unsuccessful run for governor of Texas. He garnered less than 15 percent of the vote—taking last place in the four-candidate race—despite his promise if elected to name Willie Texas’s energy czar. Humbled in defeat, he credited Willie as the better politician. “His political instincts are very good. The beauty of Willie is that he can do a show and you don’t know where he stands. He won’t make an off-the-cuff political remark onstage or be flying an American flag or anything. But if you talk to him offstage, he’ll give it to you.”

  But for all the ways he’d been able to spread whatever wealth and knowledge he’d gained through Farm Aid, through BioWillie, through singing the gospel and celebrating the secular, through being one of the few on earth to resolve the eternal contradiction of embracing the sacred and the profane with equal joy, at the end of the day it was all about the music.

  “Some people feared movies would distract him,” his daughter Lana said. “But I never thought it did. He had so much fun playing cowboy, he was like a kid. Maybe some of the band had the fear that movies would become more important, because during the movie they wouldn’t work unless Willie got them a part in the movie (which he did a lot of times). There might have been some hesitancy from the band, but if you really knew him, there was no comparison. He loved the music.

  “He works all the time by choice—he’s a workaholic.”

  “If he slowed down, he’d die,” agreed Carl Cornelius, seven years his junior. “I asked him when he was going to retire, and he said, ‘What do you want me to retire from? My music or my golf? That’s all I do and I enjoy both of ’em.’”

  Hank Cochran, Willie’s long-ago partner in songwriting, wondered why Willie bothered. He didn’t need the money. “Well, Hank, first of all, I like room service,” Willie told him. “If I was home, I’d be pickin’ in one of them bars downtown or somewhere around there for nothing. And as long as they are gonna pay me to sit on this two- or three-million-dollar bus with everything imaginable on it, I’m going to keep doin’ it.”

  “He just wants to pick,” Hank concluded. “He picks constantly. He’s like Chet Atkins. Chet Atkins could never go an hour without pickin’ up his guitar and pickin’. No matter where he was—on a boat, in the office, anywhere. He could talk on the phone, pick two or three songs at the same time on the guitar, and carry on a conversation with you.”

  To sing, to play guitar, to write songs, to lead a band, to lead a movement, to perform and entertain, to play wherever and whenever—that was living.

  ON a cool, cloudy day in early January 2007, some of the crew showed up at Bobbie Nelson’s house, less than a quarter mile from Pedernales Studio, led by stage manager Poodie Locke, Bobby “Flaco” Lemons, Budrock, aka Buddy Prewitt Jr., aka Peckerhead, Willie’s lighting director since 1978, and a couple regulars from Poodie’s Hilltop Bar down the road.

  Flaco was orchestrating the teardown, packing, and moving of Bobbie’s grand piano from her living room into a six-foot-tall anvil case, where it would be wheeled into a tractor-trailer and hauled to Miami. When the band arrived in Florida after a run through Europe, the piano would be waiting.

  Bobbie Nelson’s Persian rug was rolled up and then Flaco broke down the piano in less than fifteen minutes, removed the wheels and legs, and directed helpers as they tilted the instrument into the padded case. It was the same drill done every night following a performance before the piano was unpacked at the next tour stop.

  “Did you have a good time off?” Bobbie asked the men, who’d all been on an extended break. Vacation stories were swapped and grumbles exchanged over the news that there would be a nineteen-city mini-tour in March with Willie, Merle Haggard, and Ray Price, backed by Asleep at the Wheel and without the Family Band, which meant without most of the crew. The three-mont
h break had been long enough, the road crew agreed. Two months on and another month off was putting the hurt on their wallets.

  Bobbie understood the situation. Merle and Ray probably needed the work worse than they did, she reasoned. Willie was just doing what he always did, trying to lend a hand to those who extended a hand to him when he needed it. “He wasn’t thinking he was hurting anybody,” she said. “He was thinking of helping Ray and Merle.”

  There was idle chatter about the band’s semi-acoustic live sound. “His voice is as good as it’s ever been,” Poodie Locke reckoned. “I can hear myself better,” Bobbie nodded. Budrock agreed: “When I listen to the Willie and Family Live album from Harrah’s in 1978, it sounds like everybody was on speed. Every song is too fast. Everything’s slowed down now.”

  Paul English had initially resisted the downsizing. “It was Willie’s idea to cut me down to one snare drum, which I thought was ridiculous,” he said later. “But he was right all along. We used to be a hot, smoking band. Now that we are in our seventies, we don’t wanna be a hot, smoking band anymore.” They don’t have to be. As Paul put it, “The band just feels the music. You never know where he’s going to go, but then he will hit a chord and it will bring it back to your memory, and you know where he is going. It just comes to your mind. I mainly just listen. Playing with Willie is like driving a car, you float along, and then you come to a red light, which is the end of a song. Then you stop, and you have to pay attention. Then the red light turns green, and then you are going and you can think of other things while you are driving. But then you come to another red light, and it’s time to stop and look both ways before you take off again. It’s similar to that.”