Willie Nelson

by Graeme Thomson

  Then there was Billy, who had already had enough. Barely out of short trousers, the off-kilter lifestyle that was raging around him was to cause him eternal insecurity and do him permanent damage. He had a father he rarely saw and a seemingly endless succession of mother figures in his life, from Martha and Shirley to Lana and now Connie. He had been old enough to realise that things had been going downhill between his father and Shirley, with whom he was especially close, and he used to ask her to take him with her when she eventually left Ridgetop. When she did go, of course, he had been left behind. When Connie arrived at Ridgetop, Billy shut himself in his room and refused to speak to her. She tried but never got through. It’s debatable whether anyone ever would.

  Connie Nelson: Billy was a tortured little soul, God bless him. He was [eleven] when I moved in with Willie, and he was always a tortured little soul. That was a tough time. I met their mom, Martha, and she and I became really good friends, so I never really tried to take over being the mom. I was more of a supervisor while Willie was away. That’s how I viewed it.

  The new woman at Ridgetop tried to impose some sort of order on this chaos. Cook proper meals, get the kids to school more regularly, give them some kind of stability. It was altogether a losing battle, and though the girls quite liked her they were wary of getting too close. Connie was more successful in supporting Nelson. She tried to get him organised by gathering all his phone contacts together and calling the likes of Roger Miller and Hank Cochran to invite them over to write and play. Shirley had not been keen on that side of things.

  David Zettner, too, had become an indispensable ally, a kind of in-house jack of all trades. It was he who had found Nelson his legendary guitar, ‘Trigger’. Nelson had previously played a red Fender Melody Master, until he signed a deal with Baldwin Piano Company who wanted to outfit him with their own equipment. The guitar they sent him wasn’t working out for him – ‘It had all these knobs and shit and he couldn’t keep it together,’ says Zettner – and so he and Jimmy Day went down to Sho-buds guitar store on Broadway in Nashville and spent $400 on a little gut-string Martin guitar. Then, armed with a fifth of Crown Royal Scotch, they bribed the owner Shot Jackson into gutting the guitar and putting the Baldwin pick-up inside – highly improper practice. ‘Trigger’ is therefore a true one-off, an irreplaceable mongrel beast. And the Smithsonian Institute have recently deemed it to be officially priceless.

  At Ridgetop, Zettner also built a little makeshift studio in the basement, with an old Walhamsack reel-to-reel tape recorder and three or four microphones, and his job was to change the tapes every half-hour or so as the guys got down to it. It was serious but hardly studious work.

  David Zettner: Once Roger [Miller] pulled up and asked me if I’d mind getting some stuff out of the back of his truck. Of course, I opened the truck and there was a case of Scotch – and a couple of little notebooks. That was it! I could tell they were getting all wound up in there. In the next two days I ended up cutting about thirteen of those big tapes. These guys would just write and write and write and write. Then go down and cut a hit record.

  Nelson was indeed still cutting records, but in reality there were no hits being had. My Own Peculiar Way had been released early in 1969, and just a few days after he had reaped the full force of Hurricane Shirley, he was back in the studio for the first time in a year, recording tracks for what became the Both Sides Now album. It was the only time at RCA that he was ever allowed in with his touring band (although for reasons that aren’t clear Paul English’s younger brother Billy took his place on the drums. English may not have been up to the task), thanks to Felton Jarvis twisting some arms. They had become a fearsomely tight little foursome: Nelson leading from the front on vocals, with a guitar style which could switch between rhythm, lead and all points in between; Jimmy Day weaving wonderful pedal steel, finding hooks and swoops in the songs that weren’t even there to begin with; and a solid rhythm section in David Zettner and English, although no one would claim English could ever match Johnny Bush. On stage, they would wait for the house lights to dim and – bang! Jimmy Day would watch the curtain man’s hand: as soon as he hit that rope and began pulling, Day would start playing. Everyone had to be right on top of their game, and they generally were.

  David Zettner: God, it was a hot band. It would blow your mind away. We used to love to show off with it, our music was so together. Everybody was saying, ‘God, why don’t y’all record this?’ We couldn’t. [RCA] wouldn’t let us. But Willie talked to a guy named Felton Jarvis, and he set up some sessions where we could go in and just kind of do our thing. We could tell by those little recordings that, God Almighty, if we were just allowed to get in there it could be good. But it never happened [again]. It was a tragedy.

  Half of Both Sides Now is a brilliant document of a band at their peak. Alongside the wonderful, deceptively chipper ‘I Gotta Get Drunk’, a classic slice of drinker’s dread at the inevitability of his fate, Nelson also recorded Shirley’s own ‘Once More With Feeling’, perhaps intended as a roundabout, backhanded sort of goodbye. The other half of the record grasped a little too hard for some kind of contemporary relevance with the inclusion of a rather sickly version of Joni Mitchell’s title track – which showcased Nelson’s lithe acoustic guitar – and a melancholy reading of Fred Neil’s ‘Everybody’s Talkin’ ’, but the performances were uniformly excellent, hot off the road, unadorned and all the better for it. The original ‘Bloody Mary Morning’ – bizarrely called ‘Bloody Merry Morning’ – was also among the eleven sides cut, and would go on to be re-recorded for Phases And Stages in 1974 and finally become a classic. It could have been a classic in 1969, but nobody at RCA was listening. The song would seem to suggest that as well as Shirley and Connie, Nelson had also been keeping himself characteristically busy with at least one other squeeze somewhere out there on the endless road; in California, perhaps?

  Connie Nelson: ‘Bloody Mary Morning’, the line about flying back to Houston – that was kinda about me. I’m not real sure who he was leaving [in LA], that was never made clear! I never went into it. It was like, OK, fine. But the flying back to Houston was coming back to me.

  Around the same time, Nelson and the Record Men made a trip to Europe – Scandinavia in particular had always been a hot country music spot – on an RCA package tour. It was a big deal, a holiday for the company CEOs and their wives, with a climactic concert at the prestigious London Palladium. Nelson, however, wasn’t really playing the game. He was uncomfortable overseas, partly because he was out of his comfort zone and it disrupted the steady supply of pot he was now smoking, and partly because he was genuinely sick and tired with what he was doing.

  Jessi Colter: I first met Willie playing some dates in London. I worried about him because he seemed like he was on autopilot. At that point, he had been somehow pretty hurt and lived pretty hard already. It took a lot to keep him going and press him toward the future and wait for some good people to come into his life. I always had a sense that he had given up somewhere.

  He was not in the best of moods. He clashed with Jimmy Day backstage at the Palladium and stormed off, leaving Day to perform a solo set. Of all the band, Jimmy Day had the greatest claim to being a true artist in his own right; he could be difficult and demanding, with a robust ego which matched his employer’s. In London, Nelson watched from the side of the stage as Day performed a rendition of ‘Londonderry Air’ which brought the house down. Later backstage they bumped into Ringo Starr, who was just about to head to Nashville to make his own country record, Beaucoup Of Blues. Starr invited Day to play steel on the album, but eventually chose Nashville’s other great player Pete Drake, who had recently worked with George Harrison. Day wasn’t too upset, mainly because he had absolutely no idea who Starr was.

  David Zettner: Jimmy looked up and said, ‘Come on in, bud!’ He didn’t know who he was. Old Ringo was like The Fonz. He’d stacked his hair and had this little pretty girl with him. She handed him this big bag, he o
pened it up and hauled out this quart of Smirnoff vodka. He said, ‘Awright luvs, let’s party.’ After that incident, [Jimmy and Willie] didn’t seem to be on each other’s nerves any more.

  Upon returning to the States, the band undertook another package slog with the Harry ‘Hap’ Peebles Agency, perhaps the king of country music bookers. It was a tour of the north-east of the country and the bill included Faron Young, Kitty Wells, Marty Robbins, Charley Pride and Johnny Wright. Nelson was fourth on the bill, but he wasn’t happy. Other acts kept cutting into his time every night, to the point where he and the band would barely have time to set up and play a couple of songs before one of the headline acts would be scheduled to go on. He regarded it as a further slight, and in Buffalo he took matters into his own hands.

  David Zettner: Willie called us in the hotel and said, ‘I want to meet you all downstairs at eleven o’clock.’ In the bar. In the morning. Oops, something has happened. So all of us were down there, Paul was with Willie already. They were working on a Bloody Mary. I’d never seen Paul English drink any liquor – ever. That morning he was. He was mumbling, and Willie was just staring at the wall. What’s going on? After about three or four Bloody Marys, Willie said, ‘Too much juice. Gimme the jug.’ Drinking vodka straight up.

  When they got to the show, a drunk Nelson ran onto the stage and grabbed the microphone from the DJ’s hands and started into the kind of spiel he had woven back at KCNC fifteen years earlier. ‘How did you like that, ladies and gentlemen! Now, the next king of country music – the one and only Mr Charley Pride!’ Instead of Pride, Paul English walked on with his guitar, banging into the microphone and slurring ‘Hello Walls’ to a bewildered audience. It was a light-hearted way of confronting a serious issue, but before the second show English and Nelson had it out properly with Peebles. For some reason, English had bought a wig made out of his real hair. Part of his shtick with the crowd on stage was standing up in his cape and tipping his wig in thanks, as though it were a hat. That was just part of his personality. That night backstage, the argument ended with English taking off his wig, slapping it onto ‘Hap’ Peebles’s bald head and commanding: ‘Now you go up there and you introduce Willie.’ He did. Nelson duly walked on stage with the band in tow, went up to the mike, said, ‘It’s been nice seeing you,’ and just kept walking until he reached the other side.

  David Zettner: Woah! I looked at Jimmy and he said: ‘Pack ’em up. Let’s go!’ That was Willie’s way of saying, ‘I don’t need this.’ He knew how to handle it without making anybody say anything. The audience thought it was part of the show but we never reappeared. We took off for California and never came back.

  The verse in the classic ‘Me And Paul’ referencing the package show in Buffalo catches the essence of that night: ‘We came to play and not just for the ride.’ It was funny, but it also concealed the bitterness he felt deep down. In essence, that line summed up the futility he felt with much of his work over the previous decade. He had come to Nashville to play his music, not just for the ride, and now he was burning bridges, finally losing patience with what he was being asked to do and also what he wasn’t being allowed to do. He had recently written and recorded a demo called ‘What Can They Do To Me Now?’ in his basement in Ridgetop, which he had recorded at one of six sessions he had undertaken for RCA in 1970 that would make up the Laying My Burdens Down and Willie Nelson & Family albums. It was not a happy song, even by his standards. He was 37 and his career was going nowhere fast.

  Then came the fire, and that would finally change everything.

  WHERE WAS I GOING TO GO?

  WILLIE NELSON IS talking about his house burning down.

  ‘I had a fireplace and I had stove pipes that were kind of going across the ceiling, and they got hot one night and those stove pipes caught the house on fire,’ he says, smiling. ‘And burned the house down.’

  He smiles. He has turned this story into a party piece. Everyone knows how it goes.

  ‘I was down at a Christmas party and they called me and told me that my house was on fire. I think I told them: “Pull the car in the garage and get the hell out!” By the time I got out there it was full of smoke and fire and everything.’

  He is still smiling. ‘So I did go in there and I knew what I was going in there for. I got my guitar out and I got some dope out and hid everything down in the hollow down there. And then I got out myself.’

  He stops suddenly.

  ‘My house was burning,’ he says, as though the ramifications had just occurred to him. ‘Where was I going to go?’

  6. 1970–1972

  THE RIDGETOP FIRE has become a legendary chapter in a life hardly lacking in natural disasters. It has taken on the significance of a terrible omen, a sign in the sky, an almost biblical event. Like many of the misfortunes which have befallen Nelson through the years, it has also become little more than a comic anecdote, another box to be ticked in his potted biography, but at the time it was a shock, a heavy setback to him and his family, and one which had far-reaching consequences on his life and career.

  Like most legends the facts have become twisted over time and tangled up in folklore. Even the date has slipped its leash: in his loose-limbed autobiography, Nelson had it down as Christmas Eve 1969. Other sources swear it was 1971. In fact, it happened on 23 December 1970. Nelson was attending Lucky Moeller’s Christmas party at the King Of The Road club in downtown Nashville when the fire struck. He had recently taken on ‘Crash’ Stewart as his – for want of a better title – manager. The ex-football player from San Antonio had specialised for some time in booking country acts into venues in Texas, and the fact that Nelson had taken him on hinted that he was already looking towards home for the next stage of his career. But he was less a manager and more of a regional booker. The Moeller Talent Agency still booked most of his gigs and although they were firmly part of the establishment that was strangling Nelson’s creativity, they were also friends. Their Christmas bash was one of those occasions where the leading lights of the Nashville scene would sit around, picking guitars and singing their songs long into the night.

  Back at Ridgetop, things were quiet. David Zettner had gone home to his parents for the holidays, as usual the kids were doing their own thing, Paula Carlene – only one year old – was asleep in the back bedroom, and Connie was napping on the couch. She was awoken by Bobbie’s eldest son Randy ringing the doorbell, announcing his arrival from Austin to spend Christmas. Connie went into the bedroom to get Paula Carlene so that Randy could say hello to her, and when she did so she knew that something was terribly wrong.

  Connie Nelson: I could hear her talking in the back bedroom, so she was up. We went back and there was smoke just going straight up the wall. ‘What could that be?’ So I picked Paula Carlene up out of bed, walked down the hall and opened the basement door, and as soon as I did it just flooded the house with smoke, to the point that we had to get [straight] out. As I’m walking by to go outside I picked up the telephone and it was dead. It had been going in the basement for God only knows how long.

  It was already consuming the house. There are conflicting theories about the cause of the blaze. Nelson’s stepfather had undertaken some work in the basement a few years before. He had installed a wooden stove with pipes that ran across the ceiling beneath the ground floor, and Nelson claims that they overheated and caught alight. Connie Nelson also points the finger at the stepfather, who seems to have been the handyman from Hell whichever way you look at it, but cites a different source. ‘Willie’s stepdad had done the wiring in the house before I lived there, down in the basement, and it had started somewhere in the wiring. Insurance paid for it, because there was a defect somewhere.’

  Connie, Randy and the kids quickly made it out of the house to safety and went over to Myrle’s house a few miles away, from where they called Nelson at the King Of The Road. Again, there are several versions recounting his reaction: some at the party remember him taking a call and then sitting calmly, waiting pati
ently and politely for the next song to finish before he got up to leave: ‘Excuse me, I have to go,’ he said quietly. ‘My house is burning down.’ Others claim he went off to play a show that night before going home. The most reliable and sober witnesses remember him as being more shaken, as one might expect, and rushing out immediately to get home. He may be laid-back, but the news that his home was burning down was almost guaranteed to make an impact.

  The most enduring part of the legend of the Ridgetop fire is that Nelson hot-footed it home and ran into the burning house to rescue his beloved ‘Trigger’ and a prime stash of Colombian marijuana as the flames crackled around him, like a scene from Towering Inferno crossed with The Waltons. It’s a tale that has its basis in truth but has been distorted over the years, not least by Nelson’s own love of a good hero story. In actual fact, ‘Trigger’ was taken out almost immediately, long before Nelson arrived on the scene from the King Of The Road. Susie had also rescued David Zettner’s Goya guitar and some clothes. Nobody thought to rescue any drugs. The fire had spread up the walls of the house and the ranch was collapsing from the top downwards; there was very little time to do anything other than escape before the whole thing caved in.

  The losses were devastating: most of the song charts and the myriad recordings that had been made down in the basement over the past year went up in smoke, although some did survive and were eventually restored. Numerous personal effects and irreplaceable items were destroyed. Only later, when the site had settled and it became safe to re-enter, did Nelson and others start rooting around to assess the full scale of the damage. Zettner had come straight back up from San Antonio and recalls the scavenging process, which did involve pulling some dope out of the remains of the house: the penalties for possession were still incredibly harsh even then.