Willie Nelson

by Graeme Thomson

  Willie Nelson: I like [the old music] because it’s good. Well, to me it’s better than anything I hear. I haven’t heard anything better than Frank Sinatra in a long time. Or much better than Hank Williams or Lefty Frizzel or Johnny Mercer or Hoagy Carmichael. It’s hard to beat these guys. Django Reinhardt. Eddie Arnold. Ernest Tubb. I’ve always thought that you start with a voice and an instrument and you add to it.12

  The boy was listening, learning and using what he could in practical situations. He was able to find links between Tubb and Sinatra, getting a kick out of the way certain singers phrased different words and made a song their own. He gravitated toward the unusual and the off-beat. He wouldn’t have known it, but he was already preparing himself to become a vocal stylist, to find the cracks and spaces in songs which could be filled in a thousand different ways. He had a natural ear and perfect pitch as a singer. He heard blacks and Mexicans singing in the fields and picked up other nuances there, too.

  Willie Nelson: I first heard the blues picking cotton in a field full of black people. I realised they knew more about music, soul, feeling, than I did. I felt inferior.13

  It was, he later recalled, ‘a great opera’.14 The Mexican influence in particular was to help shape his unique guitar style. ‘He’s from a Tex-Mex background, Spanish guitar,’ says Merle Haggard. ‘There’s a lot of Hispanic influences in [his] music.’ He adored jazzists like George Barnes and especially Django Reinhardt, and would practise the licks of country pickers like Billy Bird, Bucky Meadows and Hank ‘Sugarfoot’ Garland from the songs he heard on the radio. Throw into the mix the lyrical Spanish-style playing he heard from Mexican radio and local players, some of whom lived right across the street from him, and you come to a pretty basic understanding of the three formative musical influences which define his guitar style to this day.

  He and Bobbie would play anywhere at the drop of a hat: church meetings, school assemblies on a Friday morning. They would ride together down the Interurban electric train which ran from Dallas into Waco to perform gospel songs together on radio WACO’s Mary Holiday’s Amateur Talent Show.

  Jack Clements: They played all the activities at school. Of course, we didn’t think anything about it then! It was just another kid who could sing. As long as I’ve known him he’s been pulling the guitar and singing, [but] I don’t remember him being that gung ho about it back then. He wasn’t obsessed with it. We thought more of Bobbie than we did him because she played piano at just about every function we had.

  He played his first proper gig at the age of nine in a bar in West with the local Czech polka group, the John Rajcek Band. He stood on stage and bashed away at an old acoustic guitar, inaudible to all but clearly enjoying himself. He picked up a few dollars, a welcome addition to family funds and certainly enough to risk the wrath of Mama Nelson, who feared for his soul in those rowdy joints. But there was no going back. He performed regularly with the band in the Bohemian beer halls of West, Waco and Ross on the weekends before he was barely into double figures.

  His musical apprenticeship really moved to another level when Bobbie married at the age of sixteen. She had known Bud Fletcher only one month. He was 22, good-looking, and a bit of a charmer by all accounts. He had a day job driving a truck for his father, a commissioner in charge of the roads in the Hill County area, and by night he led a band called Bud Fletcher and the Texans. He wasn’t much of a singer or a player, but people liked him. Bobbie played the piano, the thirteen-year-old Nelson was on guitar and vocals, even Ira would sometimes sit in. They would practise in Mama Nelson’s front room and play Friday and Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons in local venues in West and Waco, many of which were fairly new on the scene in the 1940s. Some, such as the Terrace Club and Scotty’s Tavern, weren’t too bad, with an Art Deco feel, a bar up at the front and an area for dancing at the back.

  At the rather less elegant end of the market were clubs like the Nite Owl, stuck on the roadside between Abbott and Waco. It was run by Marge Lunde and her husband U.J. and Nelson became a patron not long after it opened in 1943. It was not for the faint-hearted.

  Jack Loftis: The Nite Owl was a tough joint and was unique in that there was no wash basin in the men’s room. I don’t know if the ladies’ room had one. Waco had an Air Force base in those days and the airmen used to raise hell in the smallish clubs, much to the resentment of central Texas residents. The Lundes put up with no bullshit from the servicemen. True story: Lunde had a Baby Ruth candy box beneath the bar and it contained about six sets of brass knuckles. When trouble broke out in the dance area in the back of the club, U.J. would bring out the ‘knucks’, pass them out to regulars and the fight would be on – with the Air Force always losing. Mrs Lunde, a stout woman, would also participate. While the fighting went on, Bud, Nelson and the Texans would continue to play. A night without a fight was out of the ordinary.

  This was the environment in which Willie Nelson grew up as a performer. There were several of what Johnny Bush would call ‘skull orchards’, places that existed almost entirely outside of the law and where you could get as drunk as a dog and fight with other like-minded souls. Nelson took to it like a duck to water, and those early bonds ran deep. When Bobbie and Bud had their first child, Randy, Marge Lunde would babysit in the bar while the band played. Much later, in the 80s, Lunde was charged with shooting and killing her brother-in-law. Nelson stood as a character witness at the trial and she walked away free on the grounds of self-defence.

  Working with Bud Fletcher and the Texans also took the band to some more prestigious places, like the Scenic Wonderland in Waco which held 3,000 people, and Fletcher even managed to get the band a regular slot on the local radio station KHBR, based in Hillsboro, which really made Nelson feel like a local celebrity. They would head into town on a Sunday morning and broadcast live for an hour or so.

  Most importantly of all, it was bringing in the money. Willie was thirteen years old and Bud paid him $8 a show, the equivalent of perhaps $200 today. It was mostly passed straight back to Mama Nelson, with perhaps a little bit creamed off the top, and it proved beyond all doubt that this was what he wanted to do with his life. The money provided for clothes and food and other essentials and helped assuage the guilt that both Bobbie and her brother felt about going so explicitly against her religious wishes by playing music in bars late at night. She firmly believed they were going to hell fast. Nelson was rather attracted to that idea; indeed, he was probably already resigned to it. There were other bands in his teens: the magnificently named Charlie Brown and the Browns, who were led by the father of one of Nelson’s early girlfriends, and Joe Massey and the Frontiersmen, to name but two.

  He was tasting something new and compelling. He enjoyed playing for people, liked the attention it brought him and the way that he didn’t have to work too hard to get it. And he realised early in life that girls like guitar players. His performing instinct undoubtedly helped him with girls, especially as Bud Fletcher and the Texans would sometimes play neighbouring High schools. Fundamentally quite shy, Nelson was awkward with the opposite sex until he realised that he didn’t have to do very much more than stand there with a guitar.

  At first he had school girlfriends, someone to take to the movies or into town on the weekends, and it was all quite demure until he started playing the night clubs regularly. Then, he would watch the evening shaping up from a safe vantage point on the stage and ‘see who was left at the end of the dance’.15 It’s a basic musician’s ploy he honed and perfected long into later life. If the girls had had a drink, all the better. Sex was certainly on the agenda. People married young in poor, rural communities anyway, but the process was often speeded up a touch because the girl had already fallen pregnant. Even today, the age of consent remains a pretty loose rule of thumb in Texas in the eyes of the law and, although it had risen from ten to eighteen and then back to sixteen in Texas in the years between 1891 and the end of World War II, it was largely a matter between you and your conscience. Nels
on had a fan club of sorts, and it seems he made the most of it.

  If the concerts and late nights in honky-tonks were turning his head and opening his eyes to life as an adult, his more creative musical side was a private thing, kept even from his closest friends.

  Jack Clements: He’d spend a lot of time [at my house] and at night before we’d go to sleep he’d make up songs about horses or something like that. Of course, I didn’t think anything about it. He’d make up songs, but I don’t recall him actually putting them on paper.

  In fact, Nelson was writing avidly. He had started penning little poems almost as soon as he could write, and into his teenage years he compiled a book of fifteen songs and titled it the ‘Songs Of Willie Nelson’, complete with index and page references. He was aping his heroes, a common enough conceit for a boy whose head had already been turned by being on stage and on the radio. The songs were called things like ‘You’ll Still Belong To Me’ and ‘Starting Tonight’, which began, ‘Starting tonight/ Your daddy’s gonna start living right/ Starting tonight/ I’ll never more roam.’ Also included was a song called ‘The Storm Has Just Begun’, which would become one of the first two songs he recorded. It was classic tear-stained country, with some jazzy chords thrown in; it was OK.

  He had already decided what he wanted to do, and he couldn’t do it in Abbott. In his graduation photograph in the 1949–50 issue of The Panther, the school yearbook, he stares out sullenly. He is the only one of the other pupils on the page not smiling, and the only one of the boys not wearing a tie and his Sunday best. He was long gone before it was even taken.

  NO SUCH THING AS AN EX-WIFE

  WILLIE NELSON’S JOINT has gone out and he is talking about marriage. He has been married almost continually since the age of eighteen. Indeed, at one point in the early-70s he was married to two people at the same time. ‘Well, with marriages, there’s nothing perfect,’ he says, nodding to himself. ‘There’s always something a little wrong with it, but you try and live with it the way it is and hope that the next marriage will be better.’

  He nods again and takes a swig from a gigantic drum of water in front of him. Nelson has had four wives and still lays some kind of claim on them all, despite the fact that two of them are dead and the other divorced him.

  ‘There is no such thing as an ex-wife, there are only additional wives,’ he continues. ‘It’s an accumulation. It’s a fact: there is some reason you married the first one and there’s some reason you’re going with the next one.’

  He has been married to Annie D’Angelo for fifteen years. He calls her his ‘current wife’. It’s as though he’s still expecting another to come along or for something to go horribly wrong. Old habits die hard. He writes his songs without any regard for the signals or messages his wife may interpret in them. In any case, he is sure she doesn’t spend much time contemplating the matter.

  ‘My current wife doesn’t really worry too much about it. I think she understands that I’m somewhere, and she is somewhere else, and she’s not worried about what I’m thinking or writing about. That could no way in the world have anything to do with her. It’s completely separate.’

  He locks into the kind of eye contact which can make disciples out of people. ‘I hope she understands that.’

  He maintains eye contact and takes on some more water. There is a pair of white socks under the table in his hotel room, and a small travelling bag on the table. Everything else that matters will be on the bus. His wife is in Hawaii.

  2. 1950–1957

  THE 50S WAS probably the last era where people could reasonably expect to spend their entire lives in the area in which they had been born. For every wandering Myrle Nelson there were a dozen more who were happy to stay close to the comforts and certainties of home. However, with rapid improvements in transport and a post-war realisation that the world was not quite as large as it once was, the younger generation were beginning to sense wider horizons. Culturally, the notion of travel and discovery was creeping onto the agenda. The Beats were coming: Kerouac’s On The Road was published in 1957. Marlon Brando and James Dean were reflecting and shaping teenage rebellion in The Wild One and Rebel Without A Cause, and Elvis Presley was waiting in the wings. Very little of this would have been filtering down to Abbott, Texas, but it was in the air nonetheless. For Willie Nelson, the 50s would be a decade lived on the hoof, consisting of several significant fixed points connected by lines which often meandered, hit dead-ends or double-backed upon themselves, and which – viewed half a century later – occasionally become so entangled they are hard to follow.

  All over Texas people were moving, some in pursuit of one vague dream or another, some in retreat from poverty, or attempting to escape the mistakes of their past, or running from responsibility, or in denial over their true identity or destiny. Nelson would fit most of these descriptions at one time or another, and like many other rovers, he was playing music. The first thing any aspiring musician must do is leave the familiar and embrace the notion of constant motion, and it was especially true fifty years ago, before the saturation of television ushered in the rather odd idea of being entertained in your own home by tiny, distant figures on a small screen. Prior to the mass popularity of the 45 single, the 33 album, the cassette, the CD, the Internet, the mp3 or the iPod, not only was the audience required to work just that little bit harder to entertain itself, but a musician had to be almost constantly on the move in order to find sufficient numbers to enable him to earn a living. For some reason – its sheer size, its proximity to Mexico, its history, its landscape – Texas seemed to produce more of these wanderers than most places in the States.

  Willie Nelson: The question is: why were so many of us [musicians] born down in this part of the country? I really don’t know the answer to that, but a lot of us were – and we scattered.1

  One of the many hundreds of Texan players in the process of ‘scattering’ was Johnny Bush. Born John Bush Shin III in Houston on 17 February, 1935, Bush was a big baby-faced nineteen-year-old when he first met Nelson in 1954 but, despite their physical differences, each man almost instantly recognised something of the other in themselves.

  Johnny Bush: He was a real funny guy, it was one reason why we hit it off: we both had the same sense of humour, a little on the weird side. He was real gutsy, just trying to find his way.

  Bush had succumbed to the travelling bug two years earlier when his parents divorced, and headed for San Antonio. He started out as a solo act. He would forever regard himself – and would later demonstrate why he was entirely justified as doing so – as a singer and a songwriter, but he switched to drums because there was more work to be had that way. By 1954 he was singing and drumming with the Mission City Playboys, a local band led by David Isbell, playing San Antonio clubs like the Texas Star Inn, Walter’s Ranch House and Al’s Country Club; places that sounded a little smarter than they really were.

  Johnny Bush: We worked Friday, Saturday and Sunday at Al’s Country Club. That was a real joint. An old-fashioned Texas honky-tonk. Today, the word honky-tonk is kinda chic, but if they really knew what a honky-tonk was they wouldn’t be using that term today!

  Word had got around that Isbell was looking for a fiddle player. One Sunday afternoon a tall, skinny violinist called Cosett Holland walked in to Al’s, accompanied by a short, red-headed guitar player he had been playing with locally as a duo. Isbell wanted to hire Holland but wasn’t so keen on the guitarist, but he was told that they came as a set. And so Nelson joined the Mission City Playboys in the autumn of 1954. He had come to Al’s Country Club by the scenic route. San Antonio is only a three-hour drive south from Abbott, but in the four years since leaving Hill County Nelson had mimicked his mother’s wanderlust and traversed great swathes of Texas and beyond in search of a purpose. Along the way he had acquired armfuls of life experiences, not to mention a wife and a daughter.

  He had departed Abbott in 1950 with predictable haste. ‘Everybody kinda lost track of him for a little
while,’ recalls Jack Clements. ‘He knew what he wanted to do, it just took him a while to get started.’ Initially, he had fallen in with his new friend Zeke Varnon, with whom he had become tight in his senior year at school. Varnon was several years older than Nelson – many of his early friends were slightly older boys – and had already been around the block a few times. They egged each other on, taking pride in their near-the-knuckle escapades. Throughout the summer of 1950 and into autumn they moved around, sharing a place in Waco, then spending time in Tyler, about a hundred miles east of Dallas, where Nelson worked with Varnon trimming trees for eighty cents an hour.

  They were broke but scraped together enough money for a car, taking off to Fort Worth or Hillsboro or Waco to seek their kicks. Their collective appetites could be encapsulated simply: drinking beer, playing dominoes, chasing girls and seeking out low-level trouble. Nelson was, on the surface, still the quiet, polite young man he had been through school, but already there was evidence of a reckless streak that bordered on the self-destructive. He often seemed not to care much about what might happen to him as a by-product of keeping himself amused.