Willie Nelson

by Graeme Thomson

  Nick Hunter: He realised that this was the time. If he was ever going to make it, it was now. I was with him in the hotel room in Dallas when he signed the Columbia deal, and we talked about it. This was the next step. He was focused on his career then. Willie had figured out what he was going to have to do, and he kind of pulled it all together and got very, very determined about it.

  Red Headed Stranger was presented to the executives at Columbia in the same way that a teenage girl presents a delinquent boyfriend to her parents, with a ‘you’re-not-going-to-like-this-but . . .’ mixture of pride and defiance. The Nelson camp were prepared for battle and planned a pincer movement. In New York Neil Reshen took the acetate of the album into Lundvall’s office, while in Nashville Nick Hunter presented the record to Billy Sherill and executive Ron Bledsoe, who was running the CBS operation there. Reshen was accompanied by Waylon Jennings, despite the fact that Jennings was signed to RCA.

  Bruce Lundvall: I said, ‘Why is Waylon here?’ ‘Well, he’s just Willie’s friend.’ So we played Red Headed Stranger on an acetate and I said, ‘Wow, this is really kinda . . . special! Sounds like it was recorded in his living room!’ And with that, Waylon practically jumped on my desk and said, ‘That’s what Willie Nelson is all about! He doesn’t want to have a producer, he should never have a producer! This is what he is. This is what he’s all about.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute. I’m not trying to be confrontational with you. Let me take it home and listen to it a little bit.’

  According to Reshen, Lundvall hated the album on the first listen and Jennings screamed at him: ‘You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, this is why you lose all these acts.’ Reshen himself was a little more persuasive: ‘You don’t give up on Willie Nelson just because he did what sounds like a thin, cheesy album,’ he told Lundvall. ‘You have to trust your art. He comes up with this album and it’s his concept album, and you can’t tell him: “You’re really good but I don’t trust you.” You’ve got to at least let it play out. If nobody buys it then we go back and try again.’ Lundvall was at heart a music man and he had signed Nelson on instinct rather than commercial judgment, so he was prepared to give it a chance. In Nashville, however, the reaction was even less positive. The executives were shocked and taken aback by the rawness of the album, the stark clip-clopping beat (where there was a beat at all) and raw acoustic guitar. They began talking about it as though it were a demo – with a bit of spit and polish, maybe some strings and a few overdubs it might make a decent album.

  Nick Hunter: The record just stunned them. If you had gone to a Willie Nelson show back then – pretty much the same show it is now – you see this hell-raising, beer-drinking show with a lot of energy. Then you hear this record. It wasn’t what they were expecting. I said to Billy, ‘Look, if this record doesn’t work and there’s something you want to do, then we’ll work out a way where you can produce Willie’s next record.’ When I told Willie that he didn’t talk to me for about three weeks. He wasn’t too thrilled about that comment. That was what he had spent his life trying to get rid of!

  Lundvall and Sherill communicated over the weekend. Lundvall had listened hard to the acetate a few more times at home and had fallen for the record. He loved it. Sherill called him and told him he thought the album was a ‘piece of shit. We’ll never sell this record. It’s not even produced.’ To Lundvall this was all part of the charm. Once again, he pulled rank. ‘It’s a Willie thing,’ he said. You either understood or you didn’t. He had signed Nelson and he wanted to be seen to have the courage of his convictions: the record would come out as it was. He called a meeting with his staff at Columbia and explained the concept of the album and how important it was for Nelson, adding almost apologetically that it probably wouldn’t sell many copies but it would be a solid catalogue album, ticking over, and would further bolster Nelson’s reputation.

  Originally, only 30,000 copies were printed. It would eventually sell over one hundred times that figure. Its phenomenal success surprised everyone, not least Nelson, but it was no accident. Neil Reshen was determined that the record wouldn’t disappear down a long, dark cul-de-sac marked ‘country’. Nelson was invited to the Columbia Records convention in Toronto. He played virtually all night long and everyone there simply fell in love with him: the salesmen, the promoters, the executives, the entire company. It was the same show he always played but most people outside of Texas had yet to see it. ‘They wouldn’t let him off the stage,’ recalls Lundvall. ‘It was one of the great moments at a record company convention – everyone talked about it.’

  CBS were the gold standard of record company sales, and with the New York office onside and Nashville’s nose out of joint, the record was given a national marketing push. Crucially, it was marketed to a pop audience rather than a country one. That the radio stations in Austin and Houston would love the record was a given – if they didn’t receive a promo copy from the record company then they would go out and buy one if necessary because their listeners wanted to hear it, so they were bypassed in favour of important national stations. Nick Hunter had worked for Columbia between 1968 and 1972 and had a lot of good contacts. He personally sent a white label of Red Headed Stranger with an accompanying note to all 64 Billboard reporter radio panels in the United States – the stations that supplied the airplay data which made up the mainstream charts. That was how radio really got hold of the album.

  Neil Reshen: This was his first release with CBS and he was meeting the top CBS sales to the station. That’s what we wanted. That was the big argument I had with Willie and the band and everybody else: they didn’t want to be a ‘pop’ act – well, ‘pop’ is short for popular. It just means people like you! So if I’m going to have the ability to ask for X amount of dollars in a budget, I want to use it to get the biggest stations. We insisted that the album be promoted as a pop album. Willie to this day doesn’t understand that that album was promoted differently to all the other ones.

  Reshen had other contacts which helped. The album received a glowing review in Rolling Stone, perhaps the most influential mainstream music magazine of its day, which concluded: ‘Willie Nelson has recently recorded an album so remarkable that it calls for a redefinition of the term country music.’ The writer was Chet Flippo, who happened to be looked after by Reshen’s management company, Media Consulting Corps. Flippo was unquestionably a fine writer, knowledgeable about country music and a genuine fan of Nelson, but his position was perhaps a little compromised.

  Neil Reshen: My deal with Flippo was: If you’re going to pan it, then don’t [write] it. But if you like it, write what you think. We represented Chet and [Creem magazine’s] Dave Marsh and all these people, so we were able to pick up the phone [to the media] and talk to our own clients. But don’t get me wrong, they didn’t write anything they didn’t feel.

  It was, after all, not a difficult record to love. John Rockwell gave it a highly complimentary review in the New York Times of 8 August 1975, which reinforced in a prominent publication the notion of Nelson being the leader of a movement which advocated country music coming back to something fundamental. But what really made the album fly was ‘Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain’. Written in 1945 by Fred Rose, it was an old-time sentimental standard, a death ballad with spiritual overtones: ‘Someday when we’re both up yonder/ We’ll stroll hand in hand again/ In a land that knows no parting.’ Nelson’s reading was agonising, slow and empty, devoid of drums and unerringly beautiful, but it was a song that nobody in their right mind would have chosen as a single. CBS wanted to go with ‘Remember Me’, the only song on the album that had any real tempo at all, but the hypnotic magnificence of the song won out. Radio stations, especially ones like KIKK in Houston, started playing ‘Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain’ on air and getting a tremendous audience response. CBS relented, and the single exploded. It became Nelson’s first country No. 1 in July 1975, but its real significance was in its crossover appeal: the single reached No. 21 in the Billboard Hot 100 in August. Sudde
nly, aged 42, Willie Nelson was on the pop charts, with perhaps his most uncompromisingly austere song yet. He admitted to being ‘a little surprised’,3 but he had always believed this could happen.

  Bee Spears: It really wasn’t [surprising] because in Willie’s mind, from the time that I first started and we were travelling in a station wagon, it wasn’t a matter of if he was going to make it but when. He really believed in positive thinking and there was never any doubt in his mind. So he instilled that pretty much in us as well, just hanging with him. I mean, it was nice when it happened, but I can’t say that I was really surprised by it.

  Album sales rocketed on the back of the single, and the Red Headed Stranger hit No. 28 on the pop charts and stayed on the list for almost a year. It went gold in 1976, denoting over 500,000 sales, and eventually hit multi-platinum ten years later, with sales of over 3 million. Ultimately, for all the marketing push, great reviews and major label support, his breakthrough into the big league was one of those odd curveballs which ensures that the art of making music will always retain a little bit of magic and mystery amidst the harsh realities of big business. It really proved once and for all what Nelson had always argued: let me do my own thing, with my own band, and then sell the hell out of it. In essence, it was him they loved. It still is. He was simply being honest and people – given the chance – responded to his uniqueness and his ingrained spirit, and identified with him in some way as a survivor. Asked on the eve of the release of Red Headed Stranger what he had done differently with his new album, Nelson stared at the interviewer as though he had horns growing out of his head: ‘Nothing,’ he replied. And he was right.

  Nick Hunter: One time we were talking about the record and how different it was and how kinda surprising it was that it was so successful, and he looked at me and he said: ‘You know, it was my time.’ Which in the long run may tell the whole story.

  Legend states that the term ‘outlaw music’ was first coined by a journalist called Hazel Smith, who worked as a PR for Tompall Glaser and was probably riffing on Waylon Jennings’ 1972 song ‘Ladies Love Outlaws’. Jerry Bradley at RCA had also noticed a wild photo of Jennings where he had been given an electric shock by the microphone and remarked, ‘He looks like an outlaw!’ It was a tag which would later come to stick in the throat of some of those whom it sought to define, but it was a crudely essential label which became vital in selling this new musical movement to the masses. Jennings, the more serious of the pair, always thought it a little silly; Nelson rather enjoyed it.

  Willie Nelson: It means you are not completely agreeing with the establishment. With that type of description I’d like to be known as fitting it. I don’t run away from that word at all.4

  It is one of the ironies of the so-called ‘outlaw’ movement that it was both a crassly commercial concept and also came to define a type of music which stemmed from an essentially conservative standpoint. Just like the phrase ‘progressive country’, which had been used to define the music coming out of the Austin scene, it was a misnomer. If you looked beyond the long hair, earrings and slightly comical piratical attitudes, the music was a throwback to old times and enduring values. It was the simplicity and harshness of the 40s, filtered through the expanded consciousness of the 60s, punched out with a thoroughly modern aesthetic; it was plaid shirts, jeans and denim dungarees versus gaudy Nudie suits and rhinestone; Nelson, Jennings, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson and Tompall Glaser versus Kenny Rogers, Glen Campbell, and country carpetbaggers like Tom Jones, Olivia Newton-John and Engelbert Humperdinck. Soil versus silk.

  The smash success of the Red Headed Stranger record did not go unnoticed in industry circles, and it wasn’t long before the cash-in commenced. RCA were now sitting on a goldmine of old Nelson material which nobody had ever really heard. However, instead of merely repackaging old songs – which they would also begin to do with a vengeance – a grander concept was imagined. An album featuring four artists – Jennings, his wife Jessi Colter, Tompall Glaser and Nelson – which marketed them towards a non-country audience; in other words, the audience Nelson had just identified with his new record.

  The record was called Wanted! The Outlaws and in reality it was a cheerful swindle. There was no new material on offer. Nelson’s four tracks consisted of two songs from his 1971 RCA album Yesterday’s Wine and two concocted duets with Jennings. One of them, ‘Good Hearted Woman’, was sold to the public as a live recording of the two in concert, but in actual fact it was a grand piece of fakery: a recording taken from Jenning’s 1974 album Waylon Live, with Nelson overdubbing his vocals in a Nashville studio; they even added crowd noises and a cry of ‘Willie’ when Nelson came in, as though he were striding on stage. Chet Flippo wrote the sleeve notes. Despite the unmistakable scent of Nashville – the overdubs, the blatant commercialism – those concerned tried to put an ‘outlaw’ gloss on the project, from the mock Wild West portraits on the cover to pointing out that it was the first time that two Nashville artists from different labels had made a record together, which admittedly did free a lot of artists in the future. But it was a pretty shabby spectacle and not a particularly good record, although instructive in showing how far Nelson, and to a certain extent Jennings, were ahead of the competition.

  For all the cheapness of the record, few could really blame the artists involved for capitalising on the moment. Jennings was the prime motivating force from the artists’ side of the fence, believing this was a good, inexpensive opportunity to let people catch up with some of the decent material they had previously recorded. An inclusive man by nature, he wanted to share the good luck around, and if this was what it took to finally make people sit up and take notice, then so be it. The two men had become incredibly close, though they were very different. Jennings was borderline paranoid and wanted to keep a tight control on what he was doing and where the money he made was going. He was somehow more solid than Nelson, who was content to be allowed to make his own records after all this time and generally went with the flow. They fell out all the time but it never lasted long.

  Jessi Colter: There was always brotherly rivalry, but their friendship outweighed that. Waylon described Willie as a free spirit, kind of like a gypsy. He went however the wind blew. I don’t know how interested Willie was in business and really taking control, whereas Waylon took control of all his own business, so there was a very big difference. But they really understood each other. They were a duo, but Willie is very private. He and Waylon were good friends and he was always sweet and engaging, but he’s his own person and there is a part of him that is very much a loner.

  Jennings’ and Nelson’s ‘Good Hearted Woman’ reached No. 25 in the pop charts in March 1976, while the album went into the Top 10. Both the single and the album won their categories at the CMA awards the following year, while the album went multi-platinum. There followed a tour by all four acts of the west of the United States which was hugely successful. Again, there was a very close eye being kept on the money, although Nelson was probably least conscious of all the financial aspects. Huge amounts of cash were changing hands – little wonder he eventually ended up with tax problems – and as soon as the final chord of the opening song died down Reshen or one of his minions would be on hand to collect. It was still a pretty rudimentary operation.

  Mickey Raphael: One day we’re stopping for gas. I open up the glove box and I find this pistol. I pull it out, thinking, What the hell is this? I’m in the front window of the van, and Paul is going [sotto voce]: ‘Put that down . . .’ Obviously it was loaded. Paul always carried one. He had to collect the money, and a lot of times the promoter would skip or say they didn’t have the money or they got robbed or whatever. So Paul knew how to collect the money.

  The tour was the final seal on the emergence of new, roots country into the cultural overground. Cue patronising articles in the national press about country music creeping ‘out of the shacks and into the suburbs’. By 1977, almost one in every five records sold was a country record. In
1965, 250 stations played country music; a decade later, it was 1,150 and you could switch on your television and see Loretta Lynn dueting with Frank Sinatra.

  Tompall Glaser: Everybody rushed out to buy the Outlaws’ album: rock and rollers, kids, lockjaw types from the East, people who had never bought a country album in their whole lives bought that album.5

  Inevitably, the image very soon passed into pale parody, but if it was a contrived fad at least it was a significant one and Nelson was surfing right at the top of the wave as the pre-eminent artist of national importance. He won an award for Best Country Vocal Performance for ‘Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain’ for 1975 at the Grammys in early 1976. He wasn’t merely a singer with a big song – there were plenty of those. He was at the head of a movement, something completely new and odd and intriguing to the pop market, and he was grabbed and objectified almost instantly. His image helped: by now his hair was so long he was sporting pigtails, topped off with a bandana. He began to resemble the Nelson who is instantly recognisable today. It was a tidal wave of success which brought many changes. His natural lack of pretence and physical accessibility was a potent combination. He became an almost deified figure, and people would come to see him at all hours, expecting either a 24-hour party or some kind of spiritual or emotional guidance. The ranch at Fitzhugh Road was suddenly protected by six-foot high walls, electrified wire, closed-circuit TV, all designed to keep out unwanted visitors who ‘thought I could lay hands on them and heal their crippled limbs’.6

  Willie Nelson: It’s hard to go anywhere and really just sit down and enjoy the evening. I only get two or three days off at a time and when I do I like to have complete isolation and privacy in order to rest.7

  Success on such a scale marked the end of Nelson’s free and easy home life, but it also abruptly ended his high watermark period of beautifully concise writing and record making. It is one of the anomalies of his career that he has very often created his greatest music when the fewest people have been listening. ‘All of a sudden we had the ability to do what we wanted,’ recalls Neil Reshen, and Nelson – so long denied – was indiscriminate about sating his appetites: every fondly harboured pet project came gushing to the fore, demanding to be heard, no matter how uncommercial or out of time it may have been. He had given himself – no, he had earned – the licence to do what he wanted.