Willie Nelson

by Graeme Thomson

  ‘Texas was always there; it was an easy place to go back to,’ he says. ‘It’s a good place to live. I still live there.’ He sounds oddly like a very laid-back travel agent. His pitch is simple. ‘Anybody who doesn’t live there should come there and see what it’s all about.’

  He leans forwards a little. ‘You been to Abbott?’ he says, almost animated. He is sitting on the edge of the sofa. Hands clasped together. Elbows on his knees. Water drum between his feet. ‘Well, Abbott is still home.’

  He falls into something of a reverie as old names and memories from six decades ago come spilling out. He has a ramshackle old house in Abbott, no different to the ones on either side of it, but he doesn’t spend much time there these days.

  The Austin area has been his home for three decades. It holds a special energy. It is where he finally found an audience big enough to embrace his music; to link arms and encircle it in its entirety.

  ‘I think they were way ahead in Austin,’ he says. ‘I realised that this is a place it can happen. It makes sense. It just means that these guys know what’s going on and they’re not afraid to say it. And it’s still there. Oh yeah, it’s still there. Ain’t nothing changed about Austin. In fact, it’s so good that a lot of people are coming there to experience it, but it doesn’t make it any less great.’

  He beams, and when he does his eyes almost close and his head tilts slightly upwards, like a shaggy dog seeking approval. His enormous ranch outside Austin has a mocked-up Wild West town in its grounds and real deer prints scattered on the red earth. At its entrance, the black wrought iron gate spells out T-E-X-A-S. As if he would forget. There is a pair of old sunglasses hidden in the wall that can only be seen when the security code is punched in and the gate swings open.

  It is about two hours and a whole world away from Abbott. But they both hold him.

  7. 1972–1973

  AUSTIN HAD BEEN waiting for Willie Nelson. All he really had to do was to go and claim it. It was almost as though he were living two separate lives. He couldn’t get arrested in Nashville but in Texas, and especially in Austin, he was fast on his way to becoming a star. This was way beyond the popularity he had enjoyed in his home state since the early-60s, the simple comfort of knowing that he could always come home and play to a packed house, charge up his confidence and earn some decent money. Something more profound was brewing.

  He finally moved back to Texas for good in 1972. The return to Ridgetop from Bandera in the autumn of 1971 had left nobody happy. He had ‘Texas fever’. The house had changed physically, of course, and with his recording career stuttering to a halt, increasingly there seemed little point in being in Nashville. Nelson spent most of his time driving to shows and then turning around and contemplating the long haul back to Tennessee. His parents were at Ridgetop, but Myrle would shortly move back to Washington state on the north-west coast and Ira would return to Texas. Connie especially missed home and her own parents in Houston. Indeed, when they first moved back to their home state it was Houston they picked. Connie put down a deposit on a nice new apartment, but her husband took one look at its cold concrete and glass and shuddered. It would be Austin.

  Willie Nelson: I literally picked up, left and went back to Texas. I thought maybe I’m going about this the wrong way, maybe I’m spinning my wheels, maybe I should go back home and not try to travel in such a great circle. Maybe I should just work Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, places where I was known and where I could draw good crowds. Where I could make a living.1

  Such modest ambitions were to grow as he saw what was achievable thanks to the unique configuration of the times, but initially he planned a quiet semi-retirement as a working musician playing around his homeland, ticking over financially. He was, after all, almost forty years old and had little cause for believing that his best years would be ahead of him. The advantages of Austin were manifest. It was a physically appealing location, nestled among the gentle slopes of Hill Country and built on the banks of the Colorado river. Its population was a shade over 200,000, just a third of the size it is today, and it really felt more like a good-sized town. It was manageable; knowable. It was also, as Nelson acknowledges, a ‘little oasis in the middle of the desert’, culturally rather than literally. It still is. In the 2004 US elections, Austin came in as the only Democratic part of Texas. The white-washed mansion that stands just across the street from the impressive State Capitol building at the top of Congress Avenue is the official governor’s residence, the place where George W. Bush called home when he was Governor of Texas, but most of Austin’s residents take pride in the fact that this part of the state didn’t vote him in.

  Music has always been an integral part of the landscape. Nowadays Austin hosts the South By Southwest festival in March and you have to book a hotel room half a year in advance, but back in the 60s it was very much the poor country cousin to the larger south Texas cities of Houston and San Antonio. Things were less hectic but still interesting. It was mainly blues and country, but Austin also found room for the psychedelia of Roky Erikson’s Thirteenth Floor Elevators and later spawned a vital alternative rock scene. There has always been room for a little weirdness here. Home to the University of Texas, the biggest in the country, it has forever swarmed with young people. Year after year students graduated but refused to leave the town, creating an ever-expanding educated, culturally enlightened core which began to rub up against the traditional old-time Texan caucus. Nowadays, the liberals, new media kids and musicians have practically taken over, but 35 years ago the balance between the two was pretty evenly split and shifting yearly. By the late-60s, this rumbling tectonic activity began to alter the landscape and ultimately came to define the place.

  In 1970, when Nelson and the band would visit Austin, they would play the Broken Spoke or the Alliance Wagon Yard or Big G’s in Round Rock. These were cowboy outposts. The Broken Spoke is a traditional roadside honky-tonk on the outskirts of the town, and though its once pastoral location has since been subsumed by the city’s rapid expansion, the surroundings are about all that have changed. It remains an authentic period piece: the back room is still decked out with a dance floor and a small stage, the tables are dressed in red-checked cloths, chicken-fried steak is on the menu. Owner James White is resplendent in his Stetson and leather waistcoat, and his welcome is large and genuine, but you can imagine that it would take an extremely brave hippie to venture inside these doors 35 years ago. It was a hard-core country establishment, and the lines of social delineation were very strictly drawn and often violently preserved. Even members of Nelson’s own band didn’t always feel safe.

  Paul English: We had Bee and he had long hair. Oh, they didn’t like his long hair. I told Bee at the time: ‘When we’re in beer joints and you go to the bathroom and people stick their foot out [to trip you up], just step over their foot and say, ‘Thank you very much!’ with a big smile and just keep on going. I’ll watch your back, don’t worry about it. I’ll watch your back.’

  It would be hard to over-emphasise how conservative country audiences were. They were predominantly middle-aged or older, and working class. Country music was the preserve of either the genteel old-timer in the sticks or the beer-drinking truck driver at the bar, who liked cars, beer and women, maybe guns too, and had very little truck with liberal politics, drugs, or anything as obviously effeminate as long hair. Merle Haggard’s 1969 hit ‘Okie From Muskogee’ was a hippie-baiting, redneck republican anthem, released at the height of the Vietnam War. Its lyrics (‘We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee/ We don’t take our trips on LSD/ We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street/ Cause we like living right and bein’ free’) were a hymn to the enduring values of short hair, manly footwear, respect for your elders and waving Old Glory down at the county courthouse. Haggard later claimed he had at least part of his tongue buried in his cheek when he wrote the song and that it didn’t necessarily reflect his inner feelings, but he knew what would hit the spot with a country audience. ‘O
kie From Muskogee’ became a country No. 1 and won Single of the Year at the 1970 CMA Awards.

  From the other side of the fence, country music had traditionally been regarded with disdain by most teenagers and hippies: an out-of-date institution which said little to them about their own circumstances. It was backward, insular, conservative, and musically behind the times, but perceptions were changing. Everything was open to re-examination. Richard Nixon was in power and the Vietnam War was still rumbling disastrously on, inflicting deeper wounds upon the nation’s psyche and killing young men from college and cowboy backgrounds alike. Death didn’t discriminate, and the experiences of war bred unity across all kinds of social borders: black soul music, for instance, became politicised, reaching its apogee with Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On in 1971. In country music, the grimness of the age invited a dip into nostalgia, a refresher course in simplicity and enduring values. Joe Gracey became a DJ at the local rebel radio station KOKE-FM in Austin, and he began playing Bob Wills and Lightnin’ Hopkins next to Willie Nelson, the Allman Brothers and the Rolling Stones. Country music was being reclaimed as just music – removed from its ghetto. Astute listeners were bypassing the schlocky Nashville product of the 60s and making a connection straight back to the elemental raw country of the 40s and the 50s. Sociologists have a name for what was happening: Hansen’s Law of the Third Generation, the theory that the grandson wants to remember all the things the son wanted to forget.

  Joe Gracey: The first generation does things a certain way, maybe they are immigrants or new arrivals to an area, and things get done a sort of basic and soulful way. The next generation wants to distance itself from the old ways and generally screws everything up and you have stuff like frozen dinners and Melmac and all that awful 50s and early-60s nonsense. The third generation realises that something precious has been lost and tries to revive and preserve and renovate the positive things in the first generation’s lives. We truly believed that we were on a kind of holy mission to save and protect and revive Texan culture. Or at least I did.

  Slowly, a merging of the battle-lines began. As late as it was, Texas was still catching the slipstream of the whole hippie movement just as it was disappearing over the horizon practically everywhere else. As David Zettner later recalled – and it had earlier been proven when Nelson and the band tried to wear their West Coast clothes in Fort Worth – if something happened in California, it usually took five years to get to the Lone Star State. Austin was, however, already perhaps the capital of the US in terms of psychedelic drug use. Long before acid became de rigueur, mescaline and peyote were in constant supply. Texas may have been a conservative state by nature but it was not immune to the ripple effects of the civil rights movement, anti-war feeling, drugs, music and general cultural change, and it followed that Austin – the university town – would be the epicentre of what was going on. Added to that potent brew, musicians of the calibre of Jerry Jeff Walker, Michael Murphey, Doug Sahm, Townes Van Zandt and Billy Joe Shaver could be seen almost every night in Austin in one club or another. Threadgills had been a favourite college hangout during the 60s and had always played country music. Janis Joplin started out there. Now it was jammed every night and some tentative cross-fertilisation was going on; it took really brave hippies and really tolerant rednecks, but it was happening. A psychedelic club called the Vulcan Gas Company opened in 1967, and among its mainly white, collegiate clientele were a few blacks who came to dance and a few airmen who came to check out the hippie girls. And all the time more and more players piled into the city, attracted by its easy lifestyle.

  Jerry Jeff Walker: In the early-70s Austin was one of the cheapest cities to live in, so that gave [musicians] a chance. You could play three or four gigs a month and pay the rent and live around. You had a small town and a big college with 50,000 students, which put bodies in the bars to pay for beer and stuff to support the bands, which made it an ideal musical source to draw from. It was a good hotchpotch. You had country bands, rock bands, the songwriters were mostly folky kind of guys who had grown up with singer-songwriters, and you had all these musicians who would say, ‘Yeah, I’d love to play on that song.’

  There was a need for this burgeoning movement to find a place to call home. The Armadillo World Headquarters looked an unlikely candidate, housed in a plug-ugly former National Guard Armoury on Riverside Drive. Founded by Eddie Wilson – a music-loving, university drop-out who was managing local psychedelic group Shiva’s Headband – an artist called Jim Franklin and a lawyer, Mike Polleson, the 2,000-capacity Armadillo opened for business in 1970 and was intended to provide an outlet for rock bands coming in from the East and West Coasts and any other act that couldn’t be accommodated in town. It started slowly but soon picked up pace, with the likes of Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Freddie King, Leon Russell and Commander Cody all passing through. In time, Bill and Hilary Clinton came, and Laura Bush illicitly watched Bruce Springsteen there. It became a legendary venue.

  Eddie Wilson: We were space cadet hippies. We thought of Armadillo as an experimental Arts Lab. Gradually it all came to pass. The Armadillo was where it came together like a clap of thunder, and that was where we had these great crowds, with people either growing their hair or wearing a hat! It was like a huge costume party.

  All of this was already in the air when Nelson arrived in Austin: social foment, a blurring of cultural boundaries and stereotypes, scores of great musicians, all playing night after night, sitting in with each other, mixing up a brew of country and rock, folk and blues, then keeping on after closing time; a venue which was becoming a focus for a new consciousness; marijuana and LSD were everywhere. In March 1972 the Dripping Springs Reunion concert was held, a huge open-air gathering in the tiny town of Dripping Springs, about twenty miles outside Austin. It was essentially a Nashville show: Kris Kristofferson, Rita Coolidge, Charlie Rich and Waylon Jennings played. And so did Willie Nelson. Although it was a shambolic disaster in many ways, haemorrhaging money and terribly organised, it was significant in that, scattered among the usual country crowd, a smattering of long-hairs showed up and got stoned in the sun. Nelson had been aware of Woodstock and had visited the Atlanta Pop Festival in July 1970 and been impressed by the concept, but the combination of hippie and cowboy ‘out in the pasture’ in Texas was so unusual and so striking it gave him the idea of organising his own grand event: the Fourth of July picnics would begin the following year. He could see things changing in front of his eyes, all it needed was someone to bring it all together. Within a matter of weeks he had moved to Austin.

  Rodney Crowell: In country music culture, it was the 70s before the sub-culture of the 60s, the counter-culture, the so-called mind-expanding culture, drifted over and found a focal artist, and that was Willie. In the same way that Dylan, Hendrix and other artists were the focus of that in pop culture, Willie was the first to really focus it in the culture that country music took its livelihood from. If Gram Parsons had lived he may have done it, but Willie Nelson was more salt of the earth. He captured that imagination more simply than another artist might have done.

  Willie Nelson emerged as the undisputed king of Texas by covering all the angles: he befriended the most powerful, conservative members of Austin society and got them on side for life, while at the same time connecting with the hippies and the counter-culture’s leading lights. It was a cunning smoke-and-mirrors trick and proof positive that he could, in fact, be all things to all people if people wanted him to be badly enough. Nelson had been well connected in Texas for a long time. In the 60s he’d receive visits from old redneck lawmen who would give him presents. In Houston, the head of narcotics in the city would come backstage after every show he attended, take Nelson out to his car and open the trunk and tell him to choose a gun to take away with him as a gift. That’s not all he would get.

  Willie Nelson: Some of the best marijuana I ever got came from narcotics agents. They’ll bust somebody then come by and share it. That’s why I’m not necessaril
y hassled. Course, as long as it’s illegal I’m subject to getting popped one of these days. Some local guy that didn’t get the word.2

  While attending the Dripping Springs concert, he hadn’t bunked down with the masses. Instead, he had stayed at the extremely well-heeled Austin abode of Darrell Royal, the coach of the University of Texas football team and a highly influential local figure. Royal was a conservative – he hated the Armadillo, because his daughter went there to hang out with the debauched hippies – but he was instrumental in Nelson’s rise in Texas. He had been coach since 1957 and, although his reputation was tarnished by persistent allegations that he refused to pick black footballers for his team, he had a lot of people on his side.

  He was also a die-hard country music fan. Royal had first met Nelson when they were both staying at the same Holiday Inn. They talked and got to know each other and became firm allies, to the extent that Nelson was guided almost step by step by Royal. He would take him golfing with his millionaire friends, or set up numerous impromptu private showcases for Nelson in hotels in Austin. He would invite the governor and other important people: businessmen, policemen, politicians, union leaders. He performed at local benefits for major used-car dealers who were feeling the pinch of escalating oil prices. These were men who often sailed a little close to the wind, but they were influential.

  David Zettner: Whatever they pulled off, they really did pull it off. It is extraordinary. I’ve never seen another ‘star’ actually make himself like Willie did. They just kind of grabbed him and said, ‘This is our guy.’