Lana Nelson: His immediate reaction would be to turn around and give that person everything he asks for, just to prove he’s not making a mistake. He doesn’t want to admit that someone has taken advantage of him, because it hurts his feelings and he doesn’t want to deal with that hurt.2
Aside from those around him, there was also a whole sub-culture of supposed fans who would come to him looking for financial help: school fees, medical bills, handicapped family members, funerals, bank loans, business schemes, life – there was always a good reason for needing a little extra and Nelson was incredibly patient and forthcoming with his time and very often his money. Instead of signing autographs after gigs he would very often be signing cheques. He still does.
Paul English: He still helps a whole lot of people, and he still has people take advantage of him. He’ll know it, but he don’t care. It used to really make me mad but now it don’t. I used to really get hostile over it but that’s what friends are for. I always thought that I had to look out after Willie.
He never lost his faith in human nature. This was how it was supposed to be. In the dark days of the late-60s he had vowed privately that if he ever got the chance to play his music to people he would ‘stand up there on stage as long as anyone will listen’, and he also vowed that he would look after his friends. ‘Where were you when we were sleeping in cars?’ he would ask those who criticised his generosity. Rather than retreating into isolation and paranoia, Nelson clasped his people even closer to him. Rather than skulking behind closed doors to count his money, he did the opposite: he began building an entire infrastructure for himself and his entourage, and it is one which has – against all the odds – held together to the present day. Its creation was an extraordinary act of faith and friendship. For those members of his extended ‘family’ who had stuck close to him through penury and depression since the late 60s and early 70s, payback time was coming.
In May 1979, Larry Trader spotted a ‘For Sale’ sign outside Pedernales Country Club, a 76-acre expanse in the gentle hills of Briarcliff, Spicewood, near Lake Travis and about half an hour from central Austin. The lot contained a nine-hole golf course, a clubhouse and a group of condominiums, but it was run down. Nelson bought it and began pouring money into the site: he restored the clubhouse and repaired the ailing golf course; he installed a hi-tech recording studio; he renovated the condos. Everyone got in on the act. Trader was installed as pro and general manager at the golf club; Tim O’Connor, another face from the early Austin days, was brought in to oversee the general developments; Jody Fischer, one of Neil Reshen’s associates who had turned from gamekeeper into poacher, came in to run the recording studio. Core road crew members like stage manager ‘Poodie’ Locke, lighting manager Buddy Prewitt, bus driver Gator Moore, bodyguard Billy Cooper and others who had less tangible connections with the business came to live in the condos, often rent free. It was not luxurious accommodation – they were small, scuffed buildings sitting on the hill lining the road that led to the golf club, surrounded by grass and scrub – but the gesture and the spirit behind it was unmistakable. It was almost like a new Bandera on a larger, more ambitious and permanent scale. Bobbie moved into the house over by the sixth fairway. Even David Zettner, Nelson’s old friend and bass player from the Record Men days, came back into the fold.
David Zettner: He basically retired me onto that ranch. He told me, ‘I just want you here.’ I’ve become his master graphics designer. I do all the graphics for T-shirts, CDs, posters, and I’m just free as a bird. I do all my watercolours and paintings.
Pedernales became something like a cross between a base camp, a den and a social club for Nelson and his friends. It is also where he has made the majority of his records since the late 70s. Everyone from the golfer Lee Trevino to Dennis Hopper – who dried out there – was welcome to come by, play some golf, kick back and relax. A few minutes and about a mile away from the country club, Nelson bought 700 acres of prime hill country land. He made plans for a cabin to be built there, which eventually turned into a magnificent country lodge with views over the rolling countryside, with deer and horses roaming around. Elsewhere he built a Western town in the grounds at a cost of $800,000, an authentic mock-up of something that might have come straight out of High Noon, with a saloon bar, a jailhouse, a single-room church and an Opry House. It was the outlaw dream taken to its most surreal ends: when he was on the road he had his gang all around him, and when he was home in Texas he could play king cowboy in the big house at the top of the hill, with his posse at hand and a permanent playground for them all to frolic in.
Poodie Locke: We’d get drunk and we’d ride horses through there – like kids! It was a fantasy: wind’s blowing, a quart of tequila in you, the Texas sky. How many people can play cowboys like that?3
The end of the decade brought major changes in Nelson’s personal and professional life. Ira died from cancer in Austin on 5 December 1978 at the age of 65. He had been in hospital for three weeks and it wasn’t an altogether sudden passing. Nelson had managed to put the hurt of his childhood to one side and had established warm relations with both his parents since the mid-60s. He would see them often. Ira was just down the road from Pedernales at Willie’s Pool Hall, and according to Connie Nelson father and son were fairly close when he died, for which Nelson must take the majority of the credit. And if the band were touring the Pacific West Coast they would stop in to see Myrle in Yakima, where she had lived since 1974 in the three-bedroomed house that Nelson had bought for her, and where she would – finally – mother him. She died on 11 December 1983, aged seventy, after a long fight with breast cancer, living life to the full almost until the end. He never could do anything other than love and admire her spirit, which was so close to his own.
Willie Nelson: Bring everybody, was my mother’s outlook. Take all the buses and line them up out there, and everybody get off. It didn’t matter whether it was me or Kris Kristofferson or whoever it was, Mother would stay up all night and cook and drink and carry on. God love her, that’s the person she was.4
Outwardly he wasn’t particularly affected by his parents’ deaths: he had learned to live his life without relying on them. However, their passing reaffirmed his commitment to healthy living. They had both died from cancer and he blamed cigarettes, one of the few vices he is almost moralistic about in his opposition. He had smoked tobacco since he was in single figures, but he quit in the face of what they had done to his parents and other members of his family. He views marijuana as a far lesser evil.
Neil Reshen had also gone, although not quite so dramatically. He was fired in 1978 after a dispute which centred on the fact that Nelson felt his manager couldn’t be trusted – he believed he wasn’t looking after the money properly and was taking more than his share, all the while neglecting basics like taxes and invoices and accounts. He also didn’t feel he was doing his reputation much good. Reshen’s company, Media Consulting Corp, sued Nelson’s companies for $1.1m in November 1979, and at the 1980 hearing it emerged that Nelson had initially believed that Reshen was both a lawyer and a certified public accountant, although he was in reality neither. He also claimed to be unaware that his erstwhile manager had previously pleaded guilty to embezzling stock from a Los Angeles bank. Even today, neither Nelson nor Reshen have anything to say on the matter. Reshen’s assistant Mark Rothbaum came in as a booking agent and Nelson ‘kept giving me responsibility’ until he found he was fulfilling the role of manager, in fact if not actually in name. ‘It was very understated and low-key.’5 Rothbaum still prefers to be called Nelson’s advisor. Like his predecessor, he was from Jewish, East Coast stock, and although tough and straight-speaking he was a little more urbane than his ex-boss.
Creatively, albums were taking a back seat to other things. Nelson was making them – lots of them, almost compulsively – but they were knocked off quickly and contained no new writing: duet albums with Leon Russell (One For The Road) and Ray Price (San Antonio Rose), a Christmas album (Pre
tty Paper) and a tribute to Kris Kristofferson. The album with Price marked a rapprochement between Nelson and his old mentor, who was still pretty mad about his old Cherokee cowboy shooting his prize fighting cock at Ridgetop back in the mid-60s.
Ray Price: He kinda did it as a surprise for me. He called and told me to come on in. Of course I live in Texas, and when I got up there he said, ‘We’re gonna do it tonight.’ We cut it all in one night. It kinda had a rough edge to it, but that’s what you want. I didn’t realise it until after the thing was over that it was my birthday. That’s the kind of person he is.
Such prolific, unstudied offhandedness would eventually run his commercial appeal into the ground, but for now he was still riding high on the success of Stardust. Movies had become perhaps his most pressing interest. It was really the Red Headed Stranger that led to Nelson’s involvements in films. Even as he was writing the album he was envisaging it as a film – with him in the lead role, naturally. As much as he did want to be a cowboy – he wanted to say the things cowboys said and do the things they did – the Western town on his ranch was a serious undertaking, designed to be a movie set for the film. He was hot property and was courted by the film-makers. He sold the script to Universal for around $400,000 and set up a production company in a suite of offices in Burbank, Los Angeles, but he was entirely unprepared for the tedious process of getting a film off the ground and onto the screen. Red Headed Stranger didn’t happen until as late as 1986, and in the course of waiting for the film to be made Nelson undertook a number of other roles. He talked with his friend, the Texan writer Bud Shrake, about various projects: at one point Phases And Stages was going to be made into a film, Leon Russell’s ‘A Song For You’ was going to be adapted, something called The Willie Nelson Story was also mooted, and Songwriter, the humourous story of a writer based in Nashville who returns to Texas was also planned. It was clear he wouldn’t be steering too far from autobiography.
But it was producer, director and actor Sydney Pollack who really got things moving on the screen and who, for a while, became ‘sorta the Willie guy’ in the movies. Pollack was – and remains – a highly respected figure in the industry, the director of They Shoot Horses Don’t They? among several other films. In 1977, with the outlaw wave at its peak, he had been approached by an agent suggesting that Waylon Jennings could be a movie star. He barely knew who Jennings was but began listening to his music, and while doing so was struck by the sight of Nelson on the back cover of Waylon & Willie. Later he had dinner with Jennings in Nashville and Nelson tagged along.
Sydney Pollack: I got kind of mesmerised by Willie. In the middle of the conversation he said to me, ‘Listen, I sold this album Red Headed Stranger to Universal, so I’m going to be in the picture business and I need to get some experience. I’d love to be in a movie with you sometime.’ So I said, ‘Um, OK . . .’ Well, months went by. I started working on The Electric Horseman, and I got a phone call from Willie, saying: ‘I know you’re going to do this picture with Robert – he called him Robert – and I’d sure like to be in it.’ And I said, ‘Well, Willie it doesn’t work that way. Yeah, it would be kinda fun, but . . .’
But Nelson was determined. The Electric Horseman was a movie about a rodeo star and would star Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. It would be the perfect place to go to school. He was quite deliberate about what he was doing. He didn’t want to take just anything, and he reasoned that Redford and Pollack were the kind of people who would protect him and give him a little kudos. Ever since High school he had liked acting and he had always loved movies; his songs were often cinematic narratives and with his writing on hold, acting gave him another means of self-expression. In many ways it was a natural step.
Willie Nelson: I figured I’d just wait for something that was right for me. Truth is, I never know when I’m acting and I wasn’t sure I could do it, but I thought it was time for me to find out.6
He called Pollack and said he was coming to California and could he drop in to see him? When he did the director was bowled over. ‘He looked so amazing,’ he recalls. Wearing a dark-brown suede Western jacket with fringes – exactly the same outfit he wore in the film – Pollack fell in love with the look and straight away said, ‘Look, I’ve got a tiny little part I can give you, but you have to have an attention span. You have to repeat and just stand there, it’s not like a concert where you sing and it’s over with.’ ‘Oh no, that’s OK, that’s OK, I’ll do it,’ said Nelson. Pollack called his wardrobe people over and said: ‘I just love the way he looks. Exactly like this, if you can just duplicate that.’ And Nelson, ever the beacon of common sense, said: ‘Hell, I’ll just wear this!’
The conversation over his clothes was an interesting insight into his acting style: simply be yourself. He knew no other way. His role in The Electric Horseman, filmed towards the end of 1978, was as Redford’s roguish manager. The part was small – although it kept expanding once Nelson came on board – and no real stretch. Pollack talked to him in simple terms: do the same thing you do when you sing a song. Just be yourself, be real, and don’t try to act or listen to your voice. He did it well, at the same time pulling off the best line in the film, taken from the boys on the tour bus and ad-libbed straight onto the screen. Talking to Robert Redford’s character, Nelson drawled that he was going to find a woman who ‘could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch’.
Sydney Pollack: I thought the crew was going to fall in the swimming pool when he said it, because we didn’t know that was going to happen. I’d never heard the line before, and the truth of the matter is it went past the censors. They didn’t even know what the hell it meant!
His small but eye-catching performance in a mediocre movie was credible enough to lead to a starring performance in Honeysuckle Rose the following year. This time it was a hand-crafted role: a country singer called Buck Bonham torn between his wife and his lover, containing plenty of performance sequences featuring Nelson’s songs and friends like Emmylou Harris, Hank Cochran, the Family Band and Johnny Gimble. How typical of him to ensure that everyone in the gang got a slice of the pie. Nelson had wanted Pollack to direct again but he was reluctant, and eventually he agreed to come in as executive producer. His co-stars were Dyan Cannon as his wife Viv and Amy Irving as the nubile young musician Lily, who leads him into inevitable temptation.
It was a pretty basic scenario with some truly bad lines, but most of the really compelling action was taking place offstage and when the cameras stopped turning. Life began to imitate art. Nelson and Irving embarked upon a less-than-discreet on-set affair. Irving was a pretty, 26-year-old Californian who was dating – and would later marry – Steven Spielberg, but it was an on–off thing which was very firmly off during the filming of Honeysuckle Rose. The affair wasn’t particularly conducive to a relaxed working atmosphere, especially as the liaison was quickly mirrored by another one between Dyan Cannon and the director Jerry Schatzberg.
Sydney Pollack: Well, it was a mess on the picture! I go back all the way to Connie, and this thing started up. Willie’s relationship was pretty rocky with Connie. It was an uncomfortable situation. There were these two affairs going on: Dyan Cannon with the director and Amy Irving with the star. I think there was this internecine tussle over protecting the size of the parts. Who the hell knows? But it was fun! He’s a very attractive man. There’s just something very unusual about him.
Nelson remained unapologetic. ‘She was something else,’ he later said of Irving. ‘And I’d do it again.’7 But he was famous now, and the kind of privacy he had been used to for over forty years was no longer on offer. The affair with Irving – conducted relatively openly within the confines of the set, although at the time he publicly denied the rumours that were flying around – could not just be ignored by his wife as so many of his previous flings had been, lost out in the vast emptiness and endless hours on the road, where temptations and loneliness meant that almost everything was instantly forgotten and – almost – forgiven. The affair ensure
d his marriage to Connie was becoming more strained than ever.
Connie Nelson: I guarantee you I knew about [the other women] from day one. I just tried to look at it like, Well, it’s the women, it’s not him. It’s them coming on to him. It’s not his fault. Denial. Total denial. There were a couple of times when I let him know that he’d better watch it because I really noticed, and then all of a sudden things kind of stopped. When it just got too blatant and I felt like it was real obvious, if I mentioned it then it stopped. So I would think, Well, it wasn’t Willie, he just stopped it. It was just so ridiculous. The band were absolutely [protective of me]. It was funny, they tried to keep things from me for so long, and then they did the reverse. They’d want to tell me everything! I said, ‘Wait a minute, I don’t want to hear this!’
In the end, Connie and Nelson came back together for Christmas in 1979 and managed to patch things up, but it was an increasingly uneasy match. It could be that Honeysuckle Rose gives the audience a greater insight into Nelson’s personality and his romantic appeal than is immediately apparent. As Buck Bonham he did a very good impression of someone who remains static as life happens around him. Attractive women compete for his affections with no apparent encouragement from him; his music and the mysterious force of his personality are enough. He is an oddly detached yet compelling personality. It was this kind of attitude which really held the key to Nelson’s charisma in the eyes of the opposite sex. The calm, unshowy, take-it-or-leave-it presentation of his character and the to-hell-with-the-consequences shrug was very appealing, although not so much if you were on the receiving end of it, as inevitably one day you would be. But it’s not true to say that he needed no one. He always needed someone, it just didn’t have to be the same someone all the time.
Willie Nelson Page 24