After Red Headed Stranger he recorded a tribute album to Lefty Frizzel called To Lefty From Willie, which was literally cut in an afternoon on a stopover between Toronto and Austin. CBS weren’t happy with it because the bass drum pedal squeaked and it sounded a little flat. They asked him to record something else and he came up with the plodding The Sound In Your Mind, one of his weakest records, which was released in March 1976 and was a little overshadowed by the success of the Outlaws’ compilation, although it did contain a country No. 1 in the shape of ‘If You’ve Got The Money I’ve Got The Time’. In March 1977, To Lefty From Willie was finally released, the bass drum pedal having been electronically oiled. It came six months after CBS had eventually issued Nelson’s gospel album The Troublemaker in October, three years after it had been recorded in New York. It contained a significant dedication.
Paul English: Ever seen the back of that album? It says this album is dedicated to Carlene. He didn’t say Carlene English or Paul’s wife, he just said Carlene. He got the artwork done, locked off, and gave it to my son. Nelson and Waylon Jennings reconvened in 1978 for another Outlaws style project, Waylon & Willie. Again, it was Jennings and RCA’s Jerry Bradley who orchestrated the whole thing and again it smacked a little of expedience rather than genuine inspiration: the tracks were manufactured to give the illusion of genuine duets, the cover was a watercolour depiction of the two heroes with a silhouetted horseman thrown in for good measure, but it did the trick, going platinum within two weeks of release and hitting both the pop and country charts. Later, in 1979 and 1980 there would be duet albums with Ray Price and Leon Russell and an album of Kris Kristofferson songs. His sales plateaued over this period, averaging a healthy 350–500,000 copies per album, but his popularity as a performer showed no sign of waning: by 1978 he was playing to audiences of between 10–30,000 in huge auditoriums or stadiums and commanding $50,000 a show.
But one of the things that did stop, and it stopped very quickly, was his songwriting. Tellingly, the number of new Nelson songs on all of his combined album releases between 1976 and 1979 could be counted on one hand, marking a return to a familiar pattern. Necessity being the mother of invention, when the immediate financial need vanished and the time available to write shrank, the songs simply dried up.
Ray Price: The writing suffers, because you can’t do two things at the same time. It affects you. The same thing happened to Kris Kristofferson when he got real popular – his writing slipped and fell by the wayside.
Nelson didn’t head off over the hill with Price and the Cherokee Cowboys this time, but he did head over yonder and away down the long road. Some might say he never came back.
YOU NEED FRIENDS
WILLIE NELSON IS talking about friends, but he is really talking about protection.
There have been times when he has needed protecting – from fame, from life, from being alone. When hard, true fame finally hit he created a mobile buffer zone between himself and the world, an ever-changing travelling party of cowboy courtiers who kept the world at arm’s length when the need arose. And it arose frequently.
‘I didn’t want a lot of people around,’ he says simply, and sighs. ‘I just didn’t know what was going to happen.’
The hotel room has never really warmed up and he huddles into his tracksuit top. It is not a subject he wants to talk about but he will. The words leave his mouth and form vague shapes, hinting at sharper images he will be picturing in his mind but will not reveal. He has seen almost every form of base criminality and the most extreme acts of loyalty and kindness pass before his eyes, many acted out in the name of friendship. Protection.
‘At the time, I didn’t want a lot of things to get out of my control,’ he continues. ‘I knew these guys were not the most politically correct in town, but they were good characters, good guys. I knew that if they had their eye on things everything would be cool. There would be no problem.’ He laughs softly. ‘I knew they wouldn’t encourage a lot of people to come around.’
His entourage is unique in modern music – not even Frank Sinatra could claim such loyalty and longevity from his clan. He has been the centre of this show for over thirty years. He is the very reason it exists. He could make it all stop tomorrow and perhaps a hundred people would be left on the side of the road.
The line between employee, hanger-on and friend became blurred a long time ago, if indeed it ever existed. The relationship between the man and his human bubble is complex and comprises a multitude of mutual needs and wants. He doesn’t want to hear it. Let’s keep it simple.
‘Oh, they’re friends,’ he says sharply. His eyes focus and darken the way they do when he feels a little anger rising. ‘As far as needing, well, I don’t know who needs what, but they’re friends.’
He looks up from the floor and smiles, his brief passion spent. ‘And you need friends.’
9. 1976–1978
THE FOURTH OF July picnic at Gonzales in 1976 witnessed fifteen stabbings, seven rapes, one drowning, eighteen overdoses, one man on fire, 147 arrests, hundreds of openly copulating couples and more drugs, guns and bad vibes than Vietnam. The perimeter fence was knocked down and thousands of gatecrashers poured in. At Nelson’s behest Hell’s Angels were the powerbrokers, while cocaine, whisky and swaggering egos dictated the foul mood. It was country music’s Altamont, the moment when all the good will which had been built up over the past few years folded in upon itself and soured, and Nelson was right in the eye of the hurricane. He bailed out, played a short set and flew to Hawaii before the picnic had even ended. He was sued by the site owner, the ambulance services and the electrical contractors. He lost $200,000 and cancelled plans for 1977.
If the term outlaw was contrived and essentially meaningless in a musical context, it had a wider social significance which was very tangible and not at all edifying. It is a fact that as the music became more and more sanitised post-1975, the lifestyle around it conversely became much wilder and flagrantly irresponsible. The outlaw tag had been taken at face value by many country artists. Not only were they granted exclusive access to the metaphors and imagery of the old West in song, which soon became hackneyed, but they also took it as an invitation to literally live beyond the law. It followed that the music attracted not just middle-class dilettantes who simply wanted to play a little with a new image, but also those who genuinely lived their lives on the wrong side of the tracks, who believed the hype and couldn’t – or chose not to – recognise the line dividing artistic licence and real thuggery and bigotry.
Hence Gonzales, which became a virtual playground for all stripes of thugs, thieves, modern-day pirates of the prairies, bullies and predators – and hence the increasing mayhem and intimidating weirdness of Nelson’s entourage. He had always been fascinated by these characters and now he began sailing even closer to the wind. He was on the road almost constantly following the success of the Red Headed Stranger, touring with the Outlaws’ package, with Emmylou Harris, with Waylon. Things were getting faster, bigger, bumpier, wilder.
Rodney Crowell: It was wild. I remember being in a two-stall bathroom in Fort Collins, Colorado, standing in line for a long time in conversation and then finally looking down and seeing that the second stall was empty. ‘Shit. What’s going on?’ So I went down there and took a piss, and that’s when I realised that there was a pair of cowgirl boots turned backwards in the other stall and there was this line of road crew and hangers-on who were getting blow jobs from some unidentified woman in there. Guys waiting in line, drinking a beer, smoking a cigarette, and having a laugh. A little debauched? It was just the by-product of the culture revolving around the eye of the storm.
After years of station wagons, Winnebagos and even an old armoured bank vehicle which Paul English had decked out to look like a whorehouse, Nelson finally had a proper, full-sized tour bus, able to accommodate the more esoteric members of his extended family. A new coterie of hangers-on arrived and the atmosphere became seriously heavy. The band as well were let
loose on the back of major league success, and soon the whole charabanc began to resemble an X-rated circus. In the middle of the madness was the bereft English who, half-joked Nelson, had become like the Red Headed Stranger himself: ‘Don’t cross him, don’t boss him/ He’s wild in his sorrow.’ English provided the Mephistophelian swagger to the proceedings, hell-bent on self-destruction. In the bus, he would practise firing rat shot into paperback novels with his Derringer pistol – an apt piece of symbolism if ever there was one – and still ruled with an iron fist. It was funny. He would walk to the eating area and say, ‘Don’t use salt, it’s bad for ya!’ as almost every type of drug was being consumed around him. He even scared his own band a little.
His dark charisma and sense of danger undoubtedly created an atmosphere which allowed others to test the boundaries, as well as attracting a real social underbelly to Nelson and his crowd. The FBI trailed the bus sporadically, hoping that one of English’s former associates, a man called Jimmy Renton, might show up. He never did, but plenty of others weren’t so shy. There were numerous personalities: groupies, musicians and, according to Jerry Jeff Walker who toured with Nelson, ‘a lot of weird hangers-on, biker guys with no teeth and shit. It was somebody’s Saturday night everywhere we went.’
Nelson’s personal involvements became more questionable. He invested $5,000 with a local character called Travis Schnautz, who used the cash to open a massage parlour in Austin. Schnautz was later assassinated by contract killers. In May 1976, just a few months after picking up his Grammy, Nelson was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in a multi-million dollar drug-running trial in Dallas, due to his close friendship with the defendant Joe Hicks, a former car salesman. He appeared in court in June to give evidence, and although there was never any suggestion of direct illegality on his part, there was a degree of guilt by association and a lot of bad press. Later, Neil Reshen’s assistant Mark Rothbaum was jailed for distributing cocaine to the Nashville studio where Waylon Jennings was working. The package was intercepted by police in August 1977 and many suspected a set-up, but Rothbaum took the fall and would later be rewarded with Reshen’s job for proving his mettle. Previously Nelson’s criminal associations were run-of-the-mill – he was convicted of drink-driving in Texas in June 1974, fined and restrictions placed on his licence – but these events, combined with the ugliness of Gonzales, charted altogether murkier waters.
The way he was perceived changed somewhat. The papers began calling him ‘Cocaine’ Willie, which was ironic, given that he was practically the only one around who wasn’t shovelling hundreds of dollars of the stuff up his nose. Cocaine was everywhere and became the primary engine of the touring escapades, but Nelson had never been a big fan of the drug. He had tried it enough times to have formed a negative opinion about it; Eddie Wilson recalls people spelling out W-I-L-L-I-E in lines of coke on glass-topped coffee tables backstage at the Armadillo in the early-70s but, as with speed and LSD, he dabbled before re-affirming that his drugs of choice were marijuana and tequila. However, once Nelson’s career went through the roof and the band started earning good money every night, most of them were wired almost constantly. You could even hear it in their playing, which sometimes sounded like everybody was talking at the same time. Nelson would play a lick on his guitar and everybody would answer him on their own instrument, oblivious to the whole. In time word reached him that there was too much powder flying around and he attempted to put a stop to the cocaine use within the group: ‘If you’re wired, you’re fired.’ It became known as the No Blow Blues Band.
Mickey Raphael: It was pretty much non-stop drug abuse. I mean, everybody got high: even the executives at the record company were getting high. We’d be on an aeroplane and chopping out lines on the trays, because we were all pretty much hooked. Of course, Willie would go in the bathroom of the plane and smoke a joint too, but cocaine was a really bad drug – just the people who would bring it to us. The best thing about quitting that stuff is that you’d get rid of your playmates.
These ‘playmates’ brought their own brand of outlaw mentality into the camp. On the road, there were numerous tales of intimidation, guns being waved around, petty crime. The general tone of the times was encapsulated in the form of Peter Sheridan, one of the many Hell’s Angels who latched onto Nelson’s group – limpet-like – and refused to budge. Nobody quite knew how he arrived, they only knew that they weren’t going to ask him to leave. Neil Reshen, who rarely came on tour for more than a few days at a time, had arranged for Sheridan to jump on the bus to watch Nelson’s back, which was a worrying enough indication of the mood of the times. If the manager wanted someone like Sheridan on board, what on earth was going on?
Mickey Raphael: He was so obnoxious and so crazed that it really kept a lot of the riff-raff away. I think that was his main job. But it was also like having a pit bull as a pet: if it got bored it could turn on you.
Like some biker version of Conrad’s Mister Kurtz, Sheridan soon turned native and became a genuine loose cannon, answerable to no one. He was intelligent, violent, articulate, drugged, loyal and unpredictable. He would walk around cutting people’s T-shirts with scissors, grabbing pills and swallowing fistfuls at a time, hunting down and punishing miscreants for the tiniest misdemeanour. Connie Nelson admits to being ‘really scared’ when Reshen first introduced Sheridan into the Nelson camp, but she also saw another side to him.
Connie Nelson: My girls loved him and I grew to love him too. He took our daughter Paula outside in the dark at our ranch in Texas one time to see the fireflies. It scared my mother to death that I would let her go out in the dark with him, but Paula remembers that, to this day, as one of her fondest memories. Another time, he was tossing her up and catching her and bumped her head just a little on the static ceiling fan, but she cried. I thought he was going to start crying as well – it took him a long time to get over doing that. So, there were a lot of scary-looking guys out there that had a heart of gold. But not to mistake kindness for weakness – Peter would have literally killed for any of us.
It was the classic cliché of the roughneck with the soft centre, and Nelson was a sucker for it. The problem for those not in the know was judging which way these guys would turn. Mickey Raphael once lost his patience with Sheridan and pushed an ice cream into his face, and he just laughed. Then again, he could just as easily assert his power in unpleasant ways. He would stalk a security guy for not letting one of Nelson’s family into the dressing room – an honest mistake – or steal a car and drive it over a field for no apparent reason. To anyone outside of the circle, visiting the bus was like stepping into a trial by fire. It was an instinctively hostile atmosphere. Newsweek magazine journalist Pete Axthelm had been commissioned to write a long cover piece on Nelson, and spent some time on the bus in 1978 when he was touring with Emmylou Harris and her Hot Band, which included Rodney Crowell, whose song ‘Til I Gain Control Again’ Nelson had started playing in concert. The writer was treated like a punch bag.
Rodney Crowell: Pete Axthelm was on the back of the bus and there was drugs flying around and what have you, and he was trying to find his comfort zone and be part of it so he could absorb the vibe. First of all, you need to understand that Willie is the centre of it. If you try to find your centre in the middle of all that, you’re lost. Peter Sheridan would pick up on anybody’s discomfort and really pick up on an impostor trying to insinuate themselves into the group. So I sat there and watched Sheridan just dismantle Pete Axthelm. I mean, he just took him apart. He was nearly in tears, when all he had to do was laugh and say ‘fuck off’. Axthelm got up and left and Peter just looked at me and said, ‘Pussy.’ There was a lot of that.
The band’s motto was ‘Don’t Try To Contribute’. In other words, ‘You are a stranger here. You don’t understand our life or our rules so keep quiet and back off.’ People could step in and take their place in the outer edges of the swirl, but if they were caught trying to assert themselves or ingratiate their way into the bant
er they would be mercilessly exposed. It was a crude, macho system, consisting of constant tests and bluffs, and you either instinctively understood how to deal with it or you didn’t. It was really a way of needling the new middle-class audience Nelson had stumbled upon, and underpinning it all was a very natural desire for honesty and truth – each visitor was scrutinised and any fakery or adopted attitudes were picked apart. After all, if Nelson and his band and his music and his life stood for one thing it was this: be who you are and be proud of it. Underneath the swagger there was a lot of humour and sweetness and camaraderie on the road, a drunken, stoned 24-hour party where you had to keep your wits about you but if you stood up for yourself and didn’t take it all too seriously you would probably be OK. There was a fierce loyalty and a certain old-time courtesy which stemmed from Nelson, but it was often all but obscured by those around him.
The really interesting question, of course, is why he chose to surround himself with these people in the first place. This is a man capable of acts of astounding generosity and articulating profound sensitivity, who plays several low-key benefits each year and routinely gives money away, who is spiritually preoccupied, paternal and considerate to his band, who would listen to his harmonica player’s girl troubles and always leave the door open. Indeed, to some observers he was not nearly firm enough with his band, either artistically or personally.
Willie Nelson Page 21