Willie Nelson

by Graeme Thomson

  Surprisingly, ‘D’ Records didn’t want ‘Night Life’; Nelson thought it was because it wasn’t a straight country song, but they were a label with a diverse stable. More likely, ‘Pappa’ Daily just didn’t see much commercial mileage in it, despite the fact that everybody locally knew that he had already written a hit in ‘Family Bible’. Although under contract to Daily’s company, Nelson decided to throw in his lot with Buskirk and Freeland. He may have thought he was driving a hard bargain by upping his asking price three-fold when he sold them ‘Night Life’, but $150 was a paltry sum, denoting a desperately struggling man. It paid at least for the independent session recorded in Houston’s Gold Star studio in the spring of 1960, with the same musicians who had cut ‘What A Way To Live’. The A-side was ‘Night Life’ and the B-side ‘Rainy Day Blues’, a straight, hard blues riding on after-hours saxophone and Nelson’s confident vocals. Bobby Bland would have been impressed. It was a long, long way from ‘The Storm Has Just Begun’. The record was released by Rx under the guise of Paul Buskirk and his Little Men featuring Hugh Nelson, a pretty lame attempt at throwing Daily off the scent.

  It made no waves, but the dam had burst. In the next few weeks he also composed ‘Crazy’ and ‘Funny How Time Slips Away’, two more deceptively simple minor miracles of songwriting. He had the good sense to hang onto them, despite the fact that he was mired in debt and had been fired by the radio station for missing too many Sunday calls. He was, he later admitted, ‘broke, tired, drunk and unhappy’.6 It could almost be his motto for the entire decade. But he had to admit that his misery was letting through some marvellous songs. It was a dangerous precedent, for now he believed he could only write when he was dramatically blue. He swallowed hard and made up his mind: Nashville or bust.

  There were several cities in the United States which could have ended up being Nashville. Places like Shreveport, Louisiana; Dallas, Texas; Chicago, Michigan; Springfield, Missouri; Wheeling, West Virginia. In the 30s and 40s they all had huge 50,000-watt radio stations and massively popular Saturday night jamborees, broadcast live across the nation on radio. In Nashville, of course, it was the Grand Ole Opry, which broadcast from the Ryman Auditorium on WSM from 1925 onwards. But there were many others. Shreveport had the Louisiana Hayride, the show where Hank Williams became a star, beamed over 28 states on KWKH. Chicago had the National Barn Dance on WLS; Wheeling had the Wheeling Jamboree on WWVA.

  Any one of these cities could realistically have become Nashville, but crucially, it was the Tennessee city which first added a substantial recording element to the equation. The record companies built studios and established offices there. By the 50s it had indisputably become the place to be for any aspiring country music singer, musician or songwriter; the other radio shows effectively became nurseries, building talent locally then sending it onto Tennessee to swim with the big fish. During this period, everyone coveted an affiliation to the Grand Ole Opry. It was almost impossible to make it without one. The acts came to Nashville, went on the show, had hit records and then went on the road. It drew Hank Snow from Canada, Billy Walker from Texas and Jim Reeves from Shreveport. Later, with the growth of television and the diversification of radio, it became possible to have hit records without ever playing the Opry – Buck Owens never played it, Charley Pride broke through without it – but that time was a few years hence.

  When Willie Nelson drove into town in mid-1960, with his 45 pressing of ‘Night Life’ clutched hopefully in his hand, he was entering a city already working towards having every angle of the country music business covered. The record companies owned all the studios, they provided the musicians, they often picked the songs and would overdub willy-nilly. Essentially, what the musician laid down in the studio was a mere template for what might be released on record. It was a ruthlessly unromantic system, and an era which pre-dated any notion of the musician as an Artist. This was about control. Control meant money and money meant work; the rolling out of product – like a factory rolls out carpet by the yard – was regarded as paramount. There was little time or opportunity to get precious about what was being done in the studio.

  Interestingly, although he came to resent the confines of the Nashville system, Nelson remains a product of his generation: he is a resolute opponent of any preciousness or high-falutin’ claims when it comes to his work. If you are looking for an artist who sweats blood over his music or who spends months locked in studios seeking inspiration, then look elsewhere. He is more likely to add a vocal on his bus and think no more of it. The difference now, of course, is that he is in complete control.

  One of his frequent gripes throughout the 60s was that he couldn’t use his touring band on his records. This was commonplace. The live band and the studio band were kept firmly delineated. The musician would go on his merry way around the country with his band or, if budgets were tight, pick up local players in clubs as he passed through different towns. There was no tour money, no label support. It was a tough game. Mere road musicians weren’t entrusted with the ‘Nashville Sound’. Records were traditionally cut in two- or three-hour sessions with professional session men and a company-appointed producer, then the label would pick the best songs, produce them and put them out. It encouraged a certain level of quality control, but it also bred a blanket uniformity of sound.

  By 1960, the stark, emotionally raw style of Nelson’s heroes like Lefty Frizzel and Hank Williams was going out of fashion. Williams had been dead seven years, and the era of pop-country was looming. The great, dark spaces of yore were filled with strings and featureless backing vocals. The big ambition was to score a crossover hit into the pop charts. The album had not yet really taken off as a concept in country music and the single was still king, ready to feed the jukebox and the radio stations all over the nation.

  Buddy Killen: They were only selling singles, it was before album sales. It was a local thing. If you had 100,000 or 200,000 albums in the 60s you were really cooking. It hadn’t crossed over.

  Nelson arrived in Nashville primarily as a songwriter. Many country acts wrote their own songs, but none were averse to cutting other people’s material if they smelled a hit. It was before the days of ‘cover versions’. People in the industry cared about who was writing the songs, of course, but nobody buying the records did. The artist was the important part of the marketing process, and the songwriter was strictly behind the scenes. Most good songwriters were signed up to publishing companies like Tree or Pamper, who paid them a weekly wage set against future royalties to write songs which they could then get other people to record. The bigger the star the better. The composer would then get a small share of the royalties from sales, and also royalties from radio play and performance, the latter calculated by the Broadcast Music Inc., or BMI. It was a system designed to favour the big fish and penalise the small fry.

  Buddy Killen: When I signed Roger Miller in 1957 I gave him $25 a week – and [for that] I also got his BMI royalties. Back in those days the rate was two cents per record, and the label would often say: ‘We’re not going to put this [record] out unless you give us a [lower] rate: a cent or even a half a cent.’ Back in those days, people weren’t getting rich off hit records.

  If the Grand Ole Opry was Nashville’s flagship, Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge was the engine room, the place where ideas and personalities mixed with smoke and alcohol to dream alive the music which kept the whole industry afloat. Situated on Fifth Avenue, Tootsie’s literally backed on to the Ryman Auditorium, and became a home from home for practically every famous face in country music. Roger Miller, Hank Cochran, Faron Young, Webb Pierce et al could be found hunkered down in the booths or playing in the back room at all times of day and night. It was run by ‘Tootsie’ Bess, a big, maternal woman with a three-inch hat pin to keep troublemakers at bay. If she knew you and liked you, you could run up a bar tab and settle at the year’s end.

  The place was nothing much to look at: ‘Just a dump that served beer,’ says Ray Price. ‘Just a beer join
t.’ But it was jumping. All the acts at the Grand Ole Opry played two shows, and would wander over to Tootsie’s for a drink before, between and after. It was a Mecca for writers and musicians. Although the industry itself was something of a cartel, there was a real camaraderie amongst fellow musicians. David Zettner first visited Tootsie’s with Nelson in the mid-60s and paints a vivid picture of a typical night in the bar.

  David Zettner: Willie grabs me and says: ‘Welcome to Nashville. Let’s go to Tootsies!’ That night Willie and [steel player] Jimmy Day decided to have a jam session. There was this old coloured lady that worked there back then, and she would cook this great bowl of chilli for everybody. Lord Jesus, we started phoning around, and Jimmy got me in the car and we went to get Buddy Emmons, the steel player. Before we knew it there was maybe fifteen awesome pickers coming in: Jimmy and Buddy, a guy named Curly Chalker who was an incredible steel player, they were just grabbing them out of the nightclubs. Boots Randolph came in with his sax. Johnny Bush was there. At the same time, Willie would get on the phone and call people like Roger Miller and all his writing buddies, and they’d get over to drink and write. By now, we’re into day two of the jam session: been up a whole night. Willie and them would come in about every three hours and go: ‘Hey, we’ve got one here! We got one!’ And all the musicians are like, ‘Oh, Goddamn singers! We don’t care about words!’

  It’s little wonder that Tootsie’s was where Nelson naturally gravitated upon his arrival in Nashville. He had left Houston and deposited Martha and the kids with her mother in Waco for about ten weeks while he went to explore the city. He cheated on his wife a little, now a fairly routine distraction, cashed in favours, looked up old contacts and found places to stay, including a spell with Billy Walker and his wife Boots. He eventually told Martha to come up on the bus with the children and join him in the autumn of 1960. He had found them their most desultory home yet, an old three-room trailer house next to a graveyard in Dunn’s Trailer Court on Nashville’s east side. It cost $25 a week and it was grim.

  At first it was the usual drill: fights and disappointments. Martha – the waitress to end all waitresses – quickly got two jobs: at the Hitching Post, a bar across the street from Tootsies, and at the nearby Wagon Wheel. It was the closest she could get to having a good time. She earned the money, paid the babysitter and watched as Nelson went out to Tootsie’s every night and got drunk in the name of making music biz contacts. Nashville was a tough city to crack. It was full of people like him, aspiring stars or desperate songwriters on every corner, and what seems like obvious talent in hindsight was less apparent to the naked eye back then.

  Ray Price: They didn’t understand him at first. And you don’t do very well until you get that big hit. When you get that big hit, everybody all of a sudden recognises it, saying, ‘Oh well, we knew he was going to do it!’ [But] at that time it was hard to get started anywhere.

  He approached Starday with ‘Night Life’, hoping they would release it as a single or perhaps hire him as a staff writer. They weren’t interested. He hung around Toostie’s waiting for a chance to show what he could do. Songs like ‘Night Life’ and ‘Crazy’ were not straightforwardly country, and although people could see that he could write, not everyone was sure he could sell. He would hang around and drink anyway, work his natural charm on the place. Not really a natural drinker – it made him aggressive, depressive and prone to blackouts – in many ways Tootsie’s was a dangerous place for him to spend a lot of time. It was a haven for musicians and a necessary place for him to visit if he was to interest anybody in his songs, but it was also an environment which perpetuated the myth of the hard-living, self-destructive songwriter. He accentuated his behaviour accordingly, and may even have felt that he had to live up to the words of ‘Night Life’. He was finally amongst his heroes and he wanted to emulate and be equal to them in every way: in song, in drink, in women.

  Willie Nelson: Well, the myth can get in the way, all right.7 I think a lot of people got to thinking that everybody had to do the same thing Hank Williams did, even die that way if necessary. And that got out of hand. Of course I did [that].8

  He went from being merely unhappy with his lot to being depressed and a little ashamed. Martha had scuffed around after him for nearly ten years, dragging up the children, staying at home while he worked and partied, and she had nothing to show for it but an old trailer home and an unhappy marriage. She had wanted him to come to Nashville, but this was not the kind of reality she had envisaged. She started drinking a lot of whisky as well, and the fights got nastier and more physical. The most famous Martha story recounts the time her husband came in drunk and she tied him up with the children’s skipping ropes before beating him up with a broom handle. It has been turned into a comic vignette over the years, but it was a bleak little episode at the time. There were other, similarly violent occurrences. She attacked him with a knife, and on a separate occasion, a fork; whether she every tried to get him with a spoon is unrecorded. In Nashville, they nicknamed her Dynamite. Only once, according to her daughter Susie, did Martha claim her husband retaliated with his fists. It was a vicious cycle: Nelson would disappear for days to escape Martha’s wild moods – he disliked confrontation and distrusted his temper; Martha would react with escalating fury each time he went off and left her alone to fend for the kids.

  Johnny Bush: The depression came after he went to Nashville. He was living in some trailer park and it was cold, and he was trying to get his songs published and she was waiting on tables. He was going to these guitar pulls trying to get his songs recorded, and he’d come in drunk and broke and they’d get into it.

  The bottom line was that he didn’t want to be at home, and he didn’t want to be responsible for his family if it meant he had to change his ways. That laid-back facade masked a hard, determined, selfish streak. He would smile benignly and say ‘OK’ to most things, but he would do what he wanted nonetheless, and then try his level best not to be around to face the consequences.

  Two things happened to lighten the skies. Late in 1960 Nelson finally got the break he had dreamed of. Hank Cochran was a hot young songwriter who had recently co-written ‘I Fall To Pieces’ with Harlan Howard, which was about to become a big hit for Patsy Cline. Cochran was a staff writer for Pamper Music Company, co-owned by the musician Ray Price and his manager Hal Smith. One night in Tootsie’s, Nelson sat down and sang a whole host of songs in front of Cochran and Howard and several more of his peers. As he ran through ‘Touch Me’, ‘Night Life’ and ‘Funny How Time Slips Away’, Nelson sufficiently impressed Cochran for him to recommend him to his bosses at Pamper. They ‘ummed’ and ‘ahhed’ over the finances for a while, until they finally agreed to pay Nelson $50 a week to write songs for the company.

  Willie Nelson: I broke down and cried. Martha cried, the kids cried, Hank cried. We were so happy. It was a real big deal for me.9

  It was the culmination of a decade’s endeavour. He would never need to work outside of music again. It wasn’t a great wage, but it was enough to get by on and get them out of the trailer park. In the winter of 1960 the family moved to a rented red-brick house in Goodlettsville, a northern suburb of Nashville where Pamper had their office, and Nelson settled down to write songs for a living. Almost immediately he struck gold.

  Very few writers have ever been able to articulate the mundane truth of loneliness quite like Willie Nelson. He can make the abstract physical, the inanimate come alive. He can even make the furniture talk. ‘Hello Walls’ is the truest example. Even the means of its composition is a lesson in creating something precious out of the most ordinary base metal: he was sitting in the garage at the Pamper offices, with just a window, a door, a guitar, and the walls closing in. He was staring into space. Ten minutes later, he had a song. ‘Hello walls/ How are things going for you today/ Don’t you miss her/ Since she upped and went away?’ he sang, later conjuring up the magnificent, pathetic image of a teardrop in the corner of the windowpane. Its wit di
dn’t dilute its poignancy. Its mundane imagery didn’t overwhelm its humanity. It was a classic.

  ‘Hello Walls’ announced him as a songwriter with a unique perspective, but it wasn’t a cri de coeur. It was an inspired piece of off-the-cuff craftsmanship, a song firmly within the Nashville parameters of measured, acceptable unhappiness. Country music always found room for sad songs, and it didn’t always require the writer to believe what he was singing. ‘Hello Walls’ was grief-lite, and none the worse for that. Nelson once wrote a never-recorded song with Harlan Howard called ‘Wanted: One Mother’ (‘For one little boy/ Who cleans up his room/ Puts away all his toys’) which effectively lampooned the whole tears-in-my-beer country stereotype, even if the subject matter strayed dangerously close to home.

  But he was writing dozens more quality compositions around the same time, and many of them were emotionally much nearer the knuckle. He cut raw, guitar-and-voice or stripped down band demo versions of these new songs for Pamper, recordings that wouldn’t see the light of day until years later. These included ‘End Of Understanding’, ‘Face Of A Fighter’, ‘A Moment Isn’t Very Long’, ‘Home Is Where You’re Happy’ and ‘And So Will You My Love’. Most of the songs document a litany of despair, a catalogue of heartache and confusion which was, for the most part, too downbeat for public consumption in 1961. ‘No Tomorrow In Sight’ – which begins ‘The children are sleeping/ Our talk can begin’ and then proceeds to gets really morose – is a straight slice of autobiography. For all the salty anecdotes and embroidered tales passed down through the years, this bleak, brilliant, but ultimately suffocating music remains the best source of divining the depths of Nelson’s unhappiness in his first year in Nashville.