Willie Nelson

by Graeme Thomson

  David Zettner: He said, ‘I’ve got to turn in another record. I’m on a contract, but I haven’t written shit.’ I went with him [to Nashville] for some reason. Lucky Moeller had a son named Larry, and he came over to the Holiday Inn, it was about four in the afternoon, and Willie told us both, ‘Man, if you don’t mind, could y’all just get lost! I’ve got to do some work. I’ve got to try to get something down.’ We came back about 4 a.m. and we opened up Willie’s room and there were pieces of paper all over the fucking floor – on tables and chairs, some had pins in them. He was laying on the bed, and we just closed the door. ‘Jesus, what has he done?!’ Later we called up: ‘Yeah, I’m ready. Y’all come on up.’ He had all these pieces of paper and he said, ‘OK, I’m ready to go cut.’ [It was a 10 a.m. start at the studio]. His eyes were all bloodshot, he put on these old sunglasses, got into the car and, boy, just started off. ‘Me And Paul’, all those songs, he wrote them in one night. I’d never seen anything like it.

  Sometime during the long night of writing, a wired Nelson had called Paul English and told him he was writing a song about him. ‘Me And Paul’ was a true classic, a slice of real road life made heroic, each verse detailing an on-the-edge escapade which only serves to mythologise the two buddies as the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid of country music. ‘It really got me,’ admits English. And the coy mention of being ‘busted’ in Laredo was pretty daring in country music, even in 1971.

  Sadly, the album went over everybody’s head. The eccentric religious overtones on the liner notes and the bizarre introduction instantly put listeners on the back foot, but look beyond that and it is perhaps the most true and pure country album he has ever made. It was a new start creatively, and would act as an escape route from the hole he was in and lead him towards the green pastures of Shotgun Willie and Phases And Stages. But commercially it plummeted, and when Nelson returned to the redecorated Ridgetop in October 1971 his career was in no better shape than it had been a year ago. He was depressed. Legend has it that one night before Christmas, in a drunken moment of melodrama, he lay down outside Tootsie’s in the snow and waited for a car to come along and run him over.

  Pat Croslin: Poor ole little Willie. He’d just got down and out. He just went out in the middle of the street, got down on the road and begged people to run him over.

  If it even happened at all, it was hardly a serious suicide attempt. It’s not hard to picture a few old regulars standing on the icy pavement laughing at his antics. After a while he found he was still alive, so he picked himself up and walked away.

  The most important figure to enter Nelson’s life at this time was Neil Reshen. Reshen was a hard-nosed East Coaster who had – through friends of friends – started filing tax returns for executives at CBS Records in New York back in the 60s. This led him, circuitously yet rapidly, to handling the affairs of jazz drummer and notorious heroin addict Art Blakey. Reshen would dole out Blakey’s dough like it was a child’s pocket money, trying to ensure it didn’t all disappear overnight into his veins. He would later manage Miles Davis and Frank Zappa. For all his stoned outlaw vibe, looking after Willie Nelson seemed like a walk in the park.

  Improbably, Reshen claims to have been a genuine country music fan, fascinated by Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams as a child. It was exotic fare for a Jewish boy growing up in New Jersey, and he listened religiously to the one local station which played country music. Its appeal had never left him, but as a man utterly obsessed with the market value of each and every thing, in adulthood he must also have been aware of its commercial potential. As he built up an impressive raft of rock and jazz clients in the 60s, he trained his sights on one artist in particular.

  Neil Reshen: Sometime in the 60s, Waylon Jennings played the Taft Hotel. I went to see him and there were only 100 people in the room. I went backstage and I talked to him, and basically he said, ‘I’m sorta happy with Nashville. I don’t like it but I don’t think I could use a northerner.’ Later on, when I was managing him, he told me that he didn’t want to bring in a Jewish guy. Well, Nashville was a very parochial place. Waylon was not prejudiced at all, but he knew that he would have all this trouble.

  Reshen dropped the idea of managing Jennings. Or rather, he put it to one side. By 1971 he was based in leafy Connecticut, looking after the likes of Zappa, Linda Ronstadt and Goose Creek Symphony, the band who had the original record of ‘Mercedes Benz’. His whole ethos as a manager was to sign up acts who – no matter what your personal tastes, whether you liked them or not – you couldn’t possibly state that they weren’t good at what they did. Out of the blue, he got a call summoning him to Nashville. Jennings was sick with hepatitis and RCA were trying to exploit his weakness by getting him to re-sign to the label for a paltry $5,000. His drummer, Richie Albright, had worked with Goose Creek Symphony and knew Reshen a little, which meant he already knew he was unpleasant, uncouth, untrustworthy and almost entirely devoid of compassion. He recommended that Jennings at least talk with him.

  Richie Albright: I said to Waylon, ‘You’re probably not going to like this guy, he’s pretty ruthless. But he knows where all the bodies are buried, you know.’

  Jennings could see the beauty in that, and reasoned that he couldn’t be ripped off any more than he was being already. Reshen took the next plane down, to find Jennings lying in bed ‘dying’. Outside, the swimming pool was covered in algae. None of it signified an artist in his prime.

  Neil Reshen: It was the most horrendous place you’d ever seen. Waylon was sick and RCA wouldn’t give him any money. I said to Waylon, ‘Let me manage you. Let me do it for a year, I can’t do any worse than this. I’ll go to RCA and get you the money.’ So I went to RCA and I met with Chet and [RCA President] Jerry Bradley and they gave me $20,000. So I came back with the money, and Waylon said OK. He didn’t sign that day, but he [eventually] signed up. In the meantime, I read through his contract and I found out that RCA had neglected to pick up his option. That was the way I finally got Waylon free.

  Richie Albright also called Willie Nelson to tell him about Reshen. On the day he was leaving Nashville to return to Connecticut, Reshen met Nelson, Paul English and Bee Spears at the airport before they caught a flight back to Texas. It was late April 1972. The trio had just attempted what would be their final sessions for RCA; cutting embryonic versions of the material that would end up on the Phases And Stages record two years later. They had managed to cut nine tracks over two sessions, including ‘Phases, Stages, Circles, Cycles And Scenes’ and ‘Mountain Dew’, the songs which would fill both sides on his last 45 for RCA. It was the first time since November 1969 that Willie had been allowed to use his own musicians in the studio, and he had blown it. They had been kicked out of the studio for smoking dope. It was the final straw for both sides.

  At the airport, Reshen and Nelson talked. He outlined his growing contempt and frustrations with his situation: ‘I can’t take it any more, I’m going back to Texas,’ he said. ‘If we want to play we can always play in Texas and get in the car and drive from place to place. I’ll keep writing songs and one day I’ll get a hit record.’ Reshen nodded his sympathies. At the end of the conversation he offered to embark on a quest: if he could extricate Nelson from his RCA contract, would he sign a management deal with him? Nelson agreed.

  Neil Reshen: So I called Jerry Bradley and said, ‘Listen, I’m going to manage Willie, how do you want to handle it?’ He said, ‘Willie can’t record any more for us. We caught him smoking pot in the studio, we can’t have that. I won’t give you a release because we cancelled the session and I think Willie owes us about $1,250.’ I said, ‘If I give you the money can I have Willie?’ He said, ‘Yeah, you give us the money, you got him.’

  Thus Nelson was sold as a going concern for a little over a $1,000. RCA would go on to make millions from his back catalogue once he became a star, but it stills stands as a shoddy piece of business and a creative own-goal of enormous proportions. But then the top brass at the company had
misrepresented him through the full eight years of his contract, and it would have been astonishing had they recognised his true worth now. In retrospect, he never really had a chance. An employee at RCA later told Willie they usually only pressed 2,500 copies of his albums.

  The period he spent at RCA – prime years in most artists’ careers, those between 30 and 39 – are pivotal in understanding what has made him tick ever since. Soon after he became hugely famous in the mid-70s, he confided to a friend that: ‘I played the same songs [tonight] and I wrote most of those songs ten or twenty years ago, but nobody gave a shit about me then. And now I’m twenty years older and I can get every girl because my name is Willie Nelson, but sometimes I wish I could have gotten the same girls twenty years ago.’ He also discussed his use of drugs in reference to the way he felt about how he had been treated by RCA. It was around this time that Nelson switched from drinking a lot of whisky to smoking more. It calmed him down, curbed his blackest moods. ‘I take it because there are some days that I get so mad at Chet Atkins and Jerry Bradley, that if I wasn’t smoking dope I’d go in and shoot them.’

  Chet Atkins: I was just about the worst at promotion and sales. I didn’t care anything about that part of the business. It hurt Willie a lot to have a guy with my attitude as the one who was supposed to push his product. I guess the timing just wasn’t right.4

  In fact, Atkins was really just a musician. He can certainly be held responsible for some dubious musical decisions made on Nelson’s records, but the really big commercial calls were made at company headquarters in New York, and once Nelson had been around for a few years and done nothing major they gave up interest. He was far from immune from blame himself. There is a case to be made for saying that he should never have left Monument so readily, given the quality of what he was doing there. Too single-minded to really play the RCA game fully once he arrived there, he was nonetheless unhappy and not a little bitter that he couldn’t participate in the game to the extent that he would have wished. He was too stubborn to want a proper manager, but there is no doubt that if he had had better representation earlier on he would have got further ahead.

  It is one of the interesting and unanswerable questions posed by his 60s career: if he had become successful and really broken through adhering to the RCA script, would he have been satisfied? After all, he had not failed because he was too radical. He had not failed on his own terms. Atkins once recalled that Nelson never once complained, that he seemed happy with the music he was making. For all the later media talk of him as an outlaw who had taken on Nashville and won, Nelson did no such thing: rather, he was a passive co-conspirator in his own downfall. He had cut his hair, worn the suits, smiled the smile, let Grady Martin and Chet Atkins play guitar on his songs because he felt they knew best, and none of it had really worked. He had changed tack when asked, made records of contemporary pop songs, and been overdubbed virtually out of existence. Like many others before and after him, he had been cajoled and connived into toeing the company line, even though the company had much bigger fish to fry. He had tried his best to conform and it hadn’t worked. It was humiliating.

  Don Light: I know [journalists] always try and make out these guys were being suppressed or restrained in some way; but they were just trying to make the same kinds of records everyone else was making. Then one day they decided they didn’t want to make those kinds of records any more. It evolved, that’s all.

  He didn’t have the force of personality of a Johnny Cash or even a Roger Miller, someone who could break through no matter how extenuating the circumstances. Things were changing by the late-60s, but Nelson had been churning around the system for so long he had no platform on which to perform. By then he was barely a country act at all, certainly not in the studio. With the exception of Both Sides Now and Yesterday’s Wine, his records were all over the place; they lacked personality and unity, and he had become detached from what he really wanted to do. He walked away from confrontation and held it in, but it had made him depressed and angry.

  Willie Nelson: There’s nothing wrong with [working within the system] unless you’re being restricted on what you can do. If a guy says, ‘OK, I’m going to put up the money and then leave it up to you, you come in and play your music,’ then that’s perfect. But if a guy says, ‘OK, I’m going to put up the money but you’re going to do these songs, and you’re gonna do them in this key, and this tempo,’ then that’s not good. I knew how it was, and I knew that one way to do it was to do it their way to get inside. Which I did. I did it their way and I got inside and I started trying to change it to my way. It took a while to do it, you know, but I did it.

  It’s a typically optimistic reading of the situation, suggesting that he somehow subverted the Nashville system and eventually won people over, but he never did quite ‘do it’ that way, at least not at RCA. It would take companies such as Atlantic and finally Columbia to grant him – and somewhat reluctantly at that – his full creative freedom. He was working for a giant conglomerate, one which had all the angles covered. Control was not going to be handed over willy-nilly. It’s not too hard to see why most of the people who had real creative freedom in country music didn’t record in Nashville: Merle Haggard and Buck Owens recorded for Capitol – the Beatles’ label, based in Hollywood – a company who understood that the artist often knew best, or at least should sometimes be allowed the chance to fall flat on their faces on their own terms. In Nashville, they wanted their artists tied to their studios because they could make their profit that way. It was, claims Reshen, like ‘a fucking real estate company’.

  The fact that Reshen was an outsider was crucial. He wasn’t in the country business and had no interest in or respect for the hierarchical structures of Nashville. He regarded the people with disdain and saw the system for the anachronistic, backward-looking control-freakery that it was. He came from the rock ’n’ roll industry, where artists were used to demanding promotion, tour money, a bit of leeway, basic support, and where managers could be as obnoxious as they liked.

  Jessi Colter: I loved Neil Reshen because he was the first man who had the knowledge and the guts to bring something back when he would go to the companies. Neil knew how they operated. When he came in to find out what was going on, he did, and he came home with [the] money. I will forever appreciate him; he avenged a lot that had been done to Waylon unjustly. He showed their tactics could be exposed and that gave us confidence and strength. And Waylon – as he often did – wanted to share this with Willie.

  Reshen discovered that even the booking agencies in Nashville were a closed shop. Nelson – like many other Nashville acts, including Waylon Jennings – was tied to the Moeller Talent Agency, run by Lucky Moeller. That too was afflicted by stasis and a complete ignorance of what their clients were worth, despite the fact that the bookers themselves were making money hand over fist. One night not long after he had taken over the reins, Reshen was working late in his New York office when he received a call from a major bar owner in west Texas who wanted to book Willie and Waylon.

  Neil Reshen: I’m desperately looking through the bookings, and I see the guy has been paying about $1,900 for two separate nights. The promoters were always smarter than the [booking] agents, they found out how much you could go for the cheapest and they’d pay that. So every date was for gas money. I said to the guy: ‘Y’know, new management team. I need $2,500 a night.’ The guy said, ‘OK, you got it.’ I asked him why he gave in so easy, and he said, ‘Well, let me tell you what we did with Waylon and Willie. We’d call Moeller Talent about this time of the night and we’d get their [answering] machine. We’d tell them what night we wanted and we gave them the same price as always, and the secretary types up the contract in the morning and sends it. We’ve been waiting about four years for someone to tell us we’re charging too little, but nobody ever does. So I’ll be happy to pay you that and I’ll probably pay you $3,500 next time. Waylon sells out every night.’ I knew right there we were going to win!


  Reshen thrived on such victories; they were his fuel. He didn’t care too much about the niceties of life. Nobody was ever working under the illusion that he was a particularly pleasant guy. He was a rock manager in the classic tradition: blunt, not overly well groomed, too interested in the hustle to be socially easy, not even a little bit trustworthy. All these traits would eventually come back to haunt Nelson, but at the time they seemed to be precisely what was needed. He had enough friends. What was required was a bully who was on his side.

  Willie Nelson: He’s probably the most hated and the most effective manager I know of. He’s so sadistic. He enjoys going up to those big corporations and going over their figures. It’s a challenge to like Neil.5

  To Waylon Jennings he was a ‘mad dog on a leash’. To Connie he was a ‘bulldog’ who could be trusted only slightly further than he could be thrown. It was Reshen who presented her with her first ever diamonds, a pair of beautiful earrings. He watched in delight, proud as could be, as she cried with joy and thanked him. Years later she got them valued and they turned out be fake, worth only $50: ‘That’s Neil in a nutshell,’ she says. However, he undeniably did the job that was asked of him. After barking at Bradley, Reshen called Nelson and informed him that ‘he had just bought him’ from RCA. He was free for the first time in eight years. Having seen Reshen prove his mettle, Nelson told him to send the management contract down and he signed it. A deal was a deal, after all.

  TEXAS WAS ALWAYS THERE

  WILLIE NELSON IS talking about home.

  He speaks about Texas as though it were a living, breathing entity. A friend. Over and over again when times have turned tough he has found solace there. Personally. Creatively. Spiritually. He used to say that no matter what time it was on the bus, whether he was asleep or awake, he would always sense the precise moment when they crossed the state line and were back home.