Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  Flaco Lemons heard it all. It took a special kind of soundman to understand Willie, and the lean West Texan did so more than anyone. “On the surface, Willie has a band that can’t find One [the beat] with both hands,” he said. “The beat is flexible. All these things people try to spend days, months, years, to avoid doing—everybody loves him for it. He’ll forget the words or do something that’s not supposed to be there, and he’ll just stop and smile. The crowd just loves it. Usually, if the crowd sees that you’re vulnerable, they’ll turn on you. Not Willie. He just smiles and starts over.”

  Flaco factored everyone’s age on stage when he miked the band. “Willie’s voice is not as strong as it was,” he said. “A lot of times you gotta have a lot of input and I don’t care what kind of PA you have, you only have a certain amount of gain. When you don’t have that, you can’t turn a knob and get it. Basically, it’s a pyramid. The vocal is at the top. At the bottom are kick drums and bass, but we’ve just got the bass and Bee plays it differently because he doesn’t have drums to couple up with. He plays more of a melodic bass. A lot of times, I can tune out Willie’s guitar from the PA and can’t tell the difference. I get more out of his guitar with his vocal mic than I do out of the mic that’s three inches away. Nobody else does anything like this. Nobody else could get away with it.”

  Flaco told Willie that keeping up with him was “like throwing up a ball and turning around real fast three times and being able to catch it.”

  “Well, yeah, most of the time,” Willie replied.

  Part of Flaco’s job was to record every show. For the first couple of years he was doing sound, he spent hours on Willie’s bus, listening to show tapes with the boss. “He hired me to get a feel of what he was trying to feel because standing up there you can’t tell. His style is not as casual and lax as you might think. It’s like an orchestra. They are all playing different things; it’s how they fit together. That’s a lot harder to do than with everyone up there playing on the beat.”

  He cited the night Phil Lesh, the Grateful Dead’s bassist, asked to sit in. Bee handed him the bass and walked off. “Phil was lost,” Flaco said. At the end of the song, Bee walked back on. As Phil handed back the instrument, Bee winked. “Ain’t so easy playing nine and a half, is it?”

  “He follows me,” Bee explained of Willie and his behind-the-beat sense of timing. “That’s my job. My job is to show him where One is, so he can go wherever he wants to but he’s got a place to come back home to. I don’t listen to him. I’ve gotten to the point where I can listen to him now, but you don’t get too caught up in what he’s doing because he’ll take you up the creek and dump you. That’s the fun of it. That’s his style. I think Waylon had it right: Willie can’t count. He did it last night where he broke meter a couple times; when he can do that and we can make it seem like the melody doesn’t catch it—that’s our job. Somebody will sit in for a song or two every now and then, and I tell guys, ‘That was like four and a quarter but wait till five and an eighth comes up.’”

  The road crew had to pay attention too, or at least most of them did most of the time, although they good-naturedly grumbled about how none of the other crew guys were the professionals they were, as road warriors tended to do.

  The only instructions Willie gave Budrock when he joined up was not to use green lighting onstage. “A psychic told me it made me weak,” Willie told him.

  “You don’t have to worry about that because I don’t use green anyway,” Buddy replied.

  “You can use it on the band,” allowed Willie. “Just don’t use it on me.”

  Budrock ran a self-contained lighting operation when he joined Willie in 1979, with his own tractor-trailer diesel rig and his own driver and crew. “You had to have somebody to take with you to hang everything to be safe because you’d have tons of equipment hanging over your head,” he said. “There weren’t any such things as riggers. Nobody in Columbus, Georgia, knew what to do. You had to be self-sufficient back in those days and carry everything with you. You couldn’t count on anybody having anything. Today you have house riggers. You draw a circle and an X and say, ‘I want the points there.’”

  Budrock knew his boss man’s ticks. “He doesn’t want to be lit the whole time,” he said. “When someone else is doing a solo, he’ll go back and get a drink of water, adjust his guitar, wipe sweat off his brow, or change the hat. He’s still lit, he’s just not the primary spotlight.”

  In addition to no-green, Budrock practiced a no-babyshit-yellow-on-Willie-either policy. “I used to put a real strong yellow color downlight on Willie when he was doing ‘Red Headed Stranger’ and came to the line about ‘the yellow-haired lady,’” he said. “He just didn’t like that color, so he asked me not to use it again.”

  The approach was old-school show business all the way. “All the new technology is all about programming a show during rehearsals and hitting the cues during the performance,” Budrock said. “But Willie doesn’t follow a set list, so I can’t do that. I can tell if he starts one song, it’ll be three songs in a row. If he starts ‘Funny How Time Slips Away,’ I know ‘Crazy’ and ‘Night Life’ will follow. If he’s limited to an hour and a half or less or he’s coming up on curfew, he’ll start slinging ’em at me. The band knows the same time I know—when Willie hits the first note. I was taught to follow the bass and the drums when doing lighting, but that’s not true with Willie. We all follow Willie. He’s the one who starts everything.”

  Above all, Budrock knew to avoid aiming lights directly into Willie’s eyes. Direct light thwarted him from making eye contact with the audience.

  Eye contact was everything. “A long time ago I’d look for one friendly face in the audience, when I was first getting started and I didn’t know anybody, so I’d try to find somebody that was looking at me and liking what I was doing,” Willie said. “I’d sing to that person all night long. I still look for who’s looking at me—I’ll check the audience out and see who’s got me zeroed in and try to make contact back with them. And that grows, that little-bitty spark of energy exchanged will pick up some more around you and you can see some other people getting off on that one exchange.”

  Feeding off the audience was a factor in why neither band nor crew members were particularly fond of private parties, a necessary evil of roadwork. “They’re the gigs that pay the most, but they’re the ones we like least,” Budrock said. “People talk through the whole damn thing. Nobody’s paying attention, but you don’t tell them to shut up. It’s sad. It’s the only time most people attending don’t have worn blue jeans; the soles on their boots are new. They’re dressed in designer rope skirts, cowboy hats that have never been worn, and they don’t even watch the show. They pay us double at least, but it’s frustrating to Willie. He doesn’t like doing them, because he doesn’t get any energy off the crowd. It distracts him.”

  No matter where they played, one thing the band leader made sure of was band and crew were not distracted. “He throws shit on you,” Budrock said. “He used to pull one out from forty years ago, and Paul would know it and Bobbie would know it but nobody else would. If he’s doing something the band doesn’t know, I’m not going to know it, either. If he wants a solo in a situation like that, they’re all looking at him anyway and I’m looking at him, trying to figure out where it’s going. After thirty years, I know a lot of his tendencies, like he’s getting ready to give something to Bobbie or Jody on that side of the stage. I knew his hand was hurting a long time before he said anything about carpal tunnel.”

  Budrock also knew, at the end of the day Willie would be just fine if lit with a single naked lightbulb above his head.

  TOUR manager David Anderson and his bodyguard L.G. were constants by Willie’s side in public. David was the precious child of the family, joining when he was eighteen after meeting him through Leon Russell. He had been riding with Willie for more than thirty-five years. “I’m Willie’s assistant,” he explained of his role, although no one had an offic
ial title. “I ride on the bus, live on the bus, smoke a lot of dope, work on getting the word out on biodiesel, Farm Aid, and other causes. These days it’s become less about the music and more about the other twenty-two hours in a day to fill his time.” David was Willie’s go-to guy, checking into hotels, looking after Bobbie, making sure everything in Willie’s immediate world was to his liking, setting up appointments, and screening interviews and visitors who stopped by to say hidy.

  David and Willie had been around each other long enough to just as well be family. “We will both be as blunt and as honest and as vocal to the point of almost rudeness with each other,” David said. “If we go too far, we apologize for hurting each other’s feelings, maybe, sometimes. It’s that honesty, I don’t know any other way to be. I’m not going to change it for him or anyone else. But you do give in to the ego. He is your boss. He’s ultimately in control. Whatever he wants to do, we’ll ultimately do. But I’ll say, ‘Damn, is that a good idea?’ It would be lying to do otherwise, and that’s not what I do.”

  Like in many other families, a strong paternal streak ran through this one. “Not everyone likes Daddy on Friday but loves him on Sunday,” David Anderson said. “It goes back and forth. When you first asked what I did, I wanted to say I’m a babysitter. The kids do grow up and become the parents. I’ve been around Willie, Bobbie, and Lana longer than my own family. I love them and I hate them.”

  Whatever his conflicted feelings, David was close enough to the Nelsons to be able to come out of the closet in 2006 and reveal his homosexuality. It came on the heels of publicity surrounding the Academy Award–nominated Brokeback Mountain, to which Willie contributed music for the soundtrack. Willie signaled his acceptance of David’s decision by making a joke out of it, protesting to David, “And after all these years when I was in the back of the bus alone...” David and his boyfriend appeared in the video of “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly (Fond of Each Other).”

  Family, more than ever, was defined as the people you surround yourself with. Daughter Lana Nelson, Willie and Martha’s firstborn, had joined the rolling roadshow for good in 1995. Her brief marriage to country singer Johnny Rodriguez was headed for divorce, “so rather than leave me here and worry, Dad asked me to go on the road.” Her children were grown up and out of the house. She’d had enough of the married life. The highway sounded pretty good.

  Like the others before her, she had to figure out her place in the show on wheels. “Paul did the money,” she said. “I had to figure out what David did.”

  She started the WillieNelson.com Web site, posting photographs, reviews, and filing on-the-road reports in the Pedernales Poo Poo online newsletter.

  This post from January 22, 2007:

  Day off in Amsterdam

  This was the proposed schedule...

  DAY OFF—AMSTERDAM

  10:00 A.M.—Band and Crew—Hotel arrival / check-in

  Noon—Lunch / coffee shop across the street from hotel

  13:00 P.M.—Take trolley to Museum—Van Gogh

  14:30 P.M.—Walk from Van Gogh museum to Rijksmuseum

  16:00 P.M.—Take trolley to city square to listen to street musicians

  17:00 P.M.—Shopping in City Square. Take trolley back to hotel

  19:00 P.M.—Dinner—Italian restaurant across from hotel

  21:00 P.M.—Walk off dinner with a nice stroll through Red Light District

  21:30 P.M.—Dessert at Dutch Chocolate Bar, walk back to hotel

  22:00 P.M.—Nightcap at Hotel bar

  This was the actual schedule:

  DAY OFF—AMSTERDAM

  10:00 A.M.—Hotel arrival / check-in

  10:05 A.M.—Visit coffee shop across the street from hotel

  13:00 P.M.—Walk next door to Italian restaurant for lunch. Eat fast.

  14:30 P.M.—Walk back to coffee shop across street from hotel

  16:00 P.M.—Still in coffee shop across street from hotel

  17:00 P.M.—Coffee shop across the street from hotel

  19:00 P.M.—Coffee shop across the street from hotel

  21:00 P.M.—Dessert at coffee shop across street from hotel

  22:00 P.M.—Coffee shop across street from hotel closes

  22:15 P.M.—Reluctantly leave coffee shop. Last patrons on premises

  22:18 P.M.—Feel way back to hotel across street from coffee shop, narrowly avoiding getting hit by the trolley

  22:25 P.M.—Asleep in hotel across street from coffee shop

  The most important role Lana created for herself was personal chef. “I figured out what Dad needed more, which was good cooking. They were stopping at restaurants and the food wasn’t very good.” So she became her father’s cook, doing many of the same domestic chores she had done with her kids. Honeysuckle Rose was outfitted with a full kitchen, and Lana stood at the counter preparing three meals a day.

  “He likes my cooking. He knows what he can eat—what upsets his stomach and what won’t,” she said. “You can’t afford an upset stomach when you’re about to go out there and sing.”

  During a couple of his highest-flying years, Willie had hired a cook for his entourage named “The Beast,” who traveled in his own bus, the former Pauletta, Paul English’s old bus he’d gotten from Porter Wagoner after a smaller bus he had outfitted with steel plates proved too heavy to be roadworthy. Beast’s bus, the fourth in the entourage, was outfitted with a kitchen, booths up front, and a large back room. But the band and crew ultimately rejected his cooking, citing his Italian roots. “He was a Yankee and we weren’t Yankees,” Poodie Locke said. “I love veal parmigiana and I love pasta, but he baked everything. You got to have grease to make a turd, you know. I’m serious. Everybody was all plugged up from eating all this baked food. I almost went to blows with him, teaching him to make iced tea. The Beast was a good guy, but he just never fit in.” A cowboy could stand only so much cannoli.

  The band and crew ate meals provided by promoters, with menus including both green, leafy foods that were often organic and, per the needs of Poodie Locke and others, meat and taters with a little bit of grease. As the rider noted, there was no substitute for bacon.

  There was no substitute for riding with her dad, as far as Lana was concerned. “I get to see the last half of the show and then he comes onto the bus,” she said. “He and the band are real high, or not, if the show didn’t go well, but usually he’s real high. He’s happy. He’s hungry. Everything tastes real good to him. We’re rolling. The phone isn’t ringing. No one’s asking him to do anything. He’s got his bus clothes on, his real big T-shirt. He’s comfortable. Eating his eggs. That’s my favorite time. He doesn’t eat much meat. I make a lot of vegetables. He loves cabbage. Thank God I don’t have to please everybody. I just have to please Dad.”

  Lana stayed up into the early morning, looking after her father until David got up. “It takes both of us to handle that, plus Mark’s office [financial manager Mark Rothbaum] to do all the legal stuff,” Lana said. “Then there’s the two other buses. He keeps so many people hopping.”

  Daddy’s girl just wanted him to take better care of himself. “But I know where he’s coming from and that’s what he’s going to do. I just try to figure out ways to make it easier on him, instead of trying to stand in his way.”

  In early 2007, Willie played a benefit for his tour manager David Anderson and David’s partner, Darrin Davis, a Dallas choreographer and singer. The couple had created the AetheriA Foundation to promote art in schools and award college scholarships for the arts in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. The foundation made its public debut with “AetheriA: An Artclectic Evening,” a gala fund-raiser, including a $1,000-a-plate VIP dinner at the Nokia Theatre in Grand Prairie, and featuring performances by the Dallas Black Dance Theatre and the Living Opera of Dallas, a vignette by performers from Cirque du Soleil, and performances by the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra and Willie Nelson and band.

  “Yes, I sort of thought he was nuts when he first told me about it,
” Willie told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram of David’s idea. “But I’ve seen a lot of nutty ideas turn out pretty good, so I didn’t want to completely squelch it for him.” Instead, he donated his services and those of the band and crew.

  The band and crew had driven overnight from playing a gambling casino in Tunica, Mississippi, arriving early enough to indulge in that timeless road game called “Hurry Up and Wait.”

  Amid the chaos of a symphony orchestra and stagehands at a rehearsal, Willie walked onto the stage to the applause of symphony musicians. The star-studded event, which attracted an audience of around two thousand, was a fancier-than-normal Willie Nelson and Family Show. His friends Kinky Friedman and Little Jewford, actors Morgan Fairchild and Larry Hagman (J.R. of television’s Dallas), and stunt-freak Johnny Knoxville of MTV’s Jackass fame shared the emcee podium. Johnny Knoxville tried to lead the crowd into a cheer for Poodie, but most of the audience had no clue who Poodie was. Backstage, Johnny Knoxville spoke admiringly of Poodie doing a pole dance at his home in California, while Willie and Kinky discussed Anna Nicole Smith, the buxom, bleached-blonde bombshell from Texas and the well-publicized paternity of her four-month-old daughter, while an effeminate cast performer from Cirque du Soleil walked past. “He sure isn’t the father,” Willie joshed.

  Willie and Mickey Raphael performed six classics with the symphony, with arranger David Campbell as guest conductor—the trifecta of his early hits written for others (“Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Night Life,” and “Crazy”) along with Darren Hayes’s “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You,” a cover of Jerome Kern’s much-covered “All the Things You Are,” and a stirring rendition of his own “Healing Hands of Time.”

  The strings, oboes, and cellos effectively conveyed the deep sadness of the melodies and the songs’ lyrics. His vocals were strong and assertive.