His touring brings genuine happiness to many people and has provided a lifestyle and a purpose for hundreds of those around him. He reflects and emits warmth. He has changed perceptions with Farm Aid but mostly he is the soundtrack to a good time. ‘It’s like this guy is plugged permanently into this cosmic groove,’ says Bob Geldof. ‘And the minute they start playing it’s right there: there’s no preamble, no warm-up. It’s fucking – bang! Amazing.’
Nelson has a complicated, mysterious relationship with his music. He claims to receive messages from angels and archangels and other wavebands, some in languages unknown to the human race. The standard set list is like an extended mantra, a connection of emotions and moods which works for him. ‘I like the old stuff better,’ he says. ‘It’s already proven itself to be good for me.’ A change of structure or the introduction of a new song has to be carefully thought through, for it is almost an interruption of something that has become a recitation, a form of healing, a prescription that he knows will work to soothe and mend. He has to think long and hard before he feels sure it will work. Mostly he doesn’t take the risk.
The shows are really a mix of the very personal and the joyously communal. He is working through the mantra in his head, and at the same time he needs the adulation, the warmth coming back at him, to really make it work. It is a duet. And when it does work, as it did at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire in April 2005, it is dependent on a convergence of the will of the venue, the crowd, the atmosphere, and Nelson’s energy levels. On these nights his set remains a wondrous train of music, each carriage carrying another chapter of the great American hymn sheet, from Hank Williams to Rodney Crowell, Hoagy Carmichael to Methodist gospels, not forgetting his own immense canon. The critic suddenly sees and hears why he needs to keep going. He hasn’t reached the destination yet.
Mickey Raphael: I don’t think he cares if it’s Berlin or if it’s Beaumont – it’s a gig. As long as the fans want to see him, I don’t think he cares where he goes, really. He’s the kind of guy who would be content playing in a hotel lobby bar, in a Holiday Inn, if there were five people in the audience. He truly would be comfortable doing that.
One of his oldest friends explains that he sometimes looks up at the afternoon sun and takes comfort in the fact that he knows Nelson is somewhere out there underneath it with his band, still moving, still receiving his education from the nation he loves. It’s a romantic but nonetheless beguiling notion: the sun shining down on Nelson and the vast numbers of lives inextricably connected with his own.
In his home town of Abbott, his house stands empty almost all of the time, watched by Jimmy Bruce, his next-door neighbour and friend of nearly seventy years. Not all that long ago someone broke in and stole the answering-machine tape with Nelson’s welcome message on it. Bruce sits in the old cotton gin down by the railroad, reading his paper, wondering if he’s made Annie Nelson mad over some domestic matter. In the post office they admit he hasn’t been around much lately, not since Zeke Varnon died. Jack Clements got a call at Christmas but hasn’t seen him for a while.
A hundred miles or so south down the I-35 Larry Trader sits outside the golf course at Pedernales, chewing the fat with the regulars, cadging a cigarette, criticising golf swings from afar, taking it easy, talking about all the good times, all that he has learned from Nelson. ‘It’s been most enjoyable,’ he says slowly. ‘It’s going to be a sad day when we all leave this planet and go to another one. They’ll never make another one like him. I’ve been trying to figure it out, really, but I think his whole life revolves around trying to make people happy. Understanding people.’ Just behind him stands the recording studio where the majority of his music has been made over the last three decades. There is a lifetime’s worth of it still in there that nobody has ever heard.
Over by the sixth fairway is Bobbie Nelson’s house, the woman who knows him better than anyone, who has played music with him almost every night since the days when they shared a house in Abbott. She represents, of course, the mother figure neither of them ever really had. They gather strength and protection from each other, living together on the road and less than a mile apart in Austin. It is a silent bond, a mysterious and lifelong pact that neither can really define.
David Zettner: I could never fathom what they had to go through. His son died, and Bobbie lost her sons in a matter of years. All this tragedy, and these two old people just hang on to each other and just keep getting bigger and bigger. And they smile! I told Bobbie one day, ‘If I wished for anything it would be able to have that kind of mindset. That you people are able go through any tragedy, anything on this earth, and know how to survive it. How do y’all do it?’ She said, ‘Oh, I don’t know if we’re doing that very well.’ They’re real humble people. These two guys have got it figured out. They don’t talk about it much. He never likes us to talk about any recollection of negativity. Sometimes he’ll just blow me off if I’m talking about something like an ex-wife. I kind of have to watch myself, even today, not to ever say anything that would connotate a negative thing. He don’t want to hear about that.
A few hundred yards down the hill in his condo, Bob Wishoff is up in his tiny engine room, an electronic crow’s nest at the end of a step ladder filled with a dizzying array of computers and memorabilia and books. This is Outlaw Radio HQ, the place where all manner of chaos has been dreamed up over the years. Nelson has had a high internet presence since he launched his web site in the late 90s and recently launched www.livewillie.com, where many of his shows can be downloaded.
Wishoff’s home is surrounded by other condos where many of the crew live when they are off the road. The area is called Spicewood, but he calls in Space Weed, or sometimes Spice Weird. It is a tight little community, rough around the edges and fuelled on humour and eccentricity and dope and devotion to the cause. Nelson has a business office which takes care of day-to-day interests, but this is where the dreaming happens, where the connections occur.
Less than a mile away up the hill, the black gates to Nelson’s sprawling 700-acre ranch swing open. Just out of sight behind the almost anonymous entrance stands the old tour bus, painted with heroic images of an Indian warrior and Nelson’s face morphing into an eagle and taking flight, a visual representation of his karma. They were painted by David Zettner, who lives on the grounds in his little cabin, painting, making posters and pondering Nelson’s ideas for everything from Biodiesel to building a new venue at Carl’s Corner near Abbott.
Today the $4m ranch house, added to and expanded through the years, stands empty. Annie and the boys are in Maui; they don’t come around much. Nelson recently wrote a new song called ‘Love Gets Lost In The Big House’. Sometimes when he is here he can be found sitting in the main building, the World Headquarters, in the Western town he built on the ranch, quietly playing chess. He likes to spend his home time on the golf course, or in the little cabin he built behind the house, or in the more homely confines of Zettner’s own cabin.
David Zettner: He loves coming to my old place, with insulation hanging out and nothing on the floor but boards. He loves coming there and just sitting for hours, like it was before [fame]. He never has been able to get people to understand that, because they all think: If I do this for Willie it will make me look better. What can this [do] for me?
Zettner slips down to the Broken Spoke in Austin, orders a chicken fried steak and sees a picture of himself nearly forty years ago, boarding an aeroplane with Nelson, Paul English and Jimmy Day. He’s glad he made it back. Later, the old honky-tonk will fill with waistcoats and smoke and music and laughter, and the owner James White will point with pride at the pictures of Nelson on the wall, his old Stetson, his gold records. In the back room, Cornell Hurd and his ten-piece band plays ‘San Antonio Rose’ and people dance the same way they’ve been dancing here for the past forty years.
It’s a mere snapshot of the world Nelson has helped create and the one he so frequently leaves behind. He is still out there, rolling aro
und in his big tin can somewhere on the endless highway, insisting that the world is turning his way, playing almost the same songs for different people every night, moving and sitting still. He is constant dialogue with his sprawling, loving, slightly dysfunctional family: faxes, telephone calls, e-mail, but one day he won’t return at all and you wonder if anyone has really thought about what will happen then. It sometimes seems like it is a dependent relationship, his friends relying on Nelson as, for want of a better word, employer and absentee landlord, and on one level it is: everything here is designed with his best interests in mind. But on a deeper level it is all about co-dependence. Nelson needs to know they are there, just like he needs to know that his wife and kids are there. They all give him the capacity to be alone and yet feel that he is not alone. Most of all, they give him a reason to keep going.
The song playing in the background during Nelson’s latter years is Bob Dylan’s ‘I Can’t Wait’, the one where he sings ‘It doesn’t matter where I go any more/ I just go.’ His life is held together and defined by movement. He has created a way of life that keeps him out of trouble and keeps him from sinking into unhappiness. ‘If it wasn’t for the bus and this weed, I’d be at the bar right now, doing serious harm to myself,’ he once admitted.6 He lives the life he does through the instinct of self-preservation. In one sense it has become an extended meditation, an escape from the inevitability of who he really is. There is a lot going on beneath the skin of the smiling, benevolent troubadour, kept at bay by a constant dose of marijuana which inevitably blunts his stimuli, takes some of the sharp edges away.
There is a dichotomy at his heart: he defines himself as a ‘hippie cowboy’, but you could easily add a whole host of other opposing terms to describe him, a man who has sufficient love to reach around the whole world yet not quite enough to allow anyone to hold him too closely. Perhaps he said it best himself in 1974 on ‘Pick Up The Tempo’: ‘Well I’m good and I’m bad, I’m happy and I’m sad and I’m lazy/ I’m quiet and I’m loud/ And I’m gathering a crowd.’ He is all these things and has nothing left to prove. He need not write another song, though he will. He is a one-off, a force beyond contrivance or marketing, and the fact that he somehow became a superstar so firmly on his own terms should be endlessly celebrated, for such a strange occurrence is unlikely to ever happen again.
Connie Nelson: I remember sitting just offstage with Kris Kristofferson one time. Kris had opened the show, then Willie comes out. It was back in the days where he was wearing overalls and he had pigtails, and Kris was shaking his head. He said, ‘You know, I come out here and I try to look really cool and be as sexy as I can be, and Willie comes out in overalls and pigtails and sings ‘All Of Me’ and the crowd goes nuts. I just don’t get it!’ It was one of the funniest moments. If you tried to manufacture that it wouldn’t work. It would look contrived.
He has released far too much music, although he would balk at the very possibility of such a notion. ‘All music is gospel,’7 he says, and that is really it. He is a point of communion, a church at which all the other millions worldwide who chafe with their own internal contradictions can congregate. He plugs into something so honest and fundamental it really defies definition. ‘Soul’ is the closest term. He has not allowed anything as awkward as reasoning or logic to get in his way, trusting his intuition all the way down the line. He will not stop now. ‘However you want things to be, create them in your own mind and they’ll be that way,’ he once said.8
Perhaps his greatest achievement – in a life studded with hard-won victories, landmark acts of creativity and immense rewards, alongside desperate lows and more pain than he allows himself to acknowledge – has been convincing so many people to come and join him in the world he has built using only the sound in his mind.
Nelson relaxing at the height of his fame in 1978 (© Wally McNamee/ Corbis)
Taking his daily medicine on the Honeysuckle Rose (© Getty Images)
Aged 17, posing for the Abbott High School yearbook in 1950
The shortest basketball player in Texas
One of the boys in the school baseball team – note school friend Jack Clements (third left, top row).
Playing the game in Nashville: an early, clean-cut publicity shot (© Getty Images)
Songwriter: working Music Row in the 60s (© Getty Images)
Recording vocals during the sessions for his debut album . . . And Then I Wrote in 1961 (© Getty Images)
On stage with Jody Payne in 1991 (© Getty Images)
Backstage in the 70s, when every night was somebody’s Saturday night (© Wally McNamee/Corbis)
Honeysuckle Rose, Nelson’s old tour bus (© Graeme Thomson)
With Connie, Susie and her boyfriend at Fitzhugh Road in 1973 (Courtesy of Connie Nelson)
Nelson and Connie in 1983. They split two years later (© Bettmann/Corbis)
On the golf course with Larry Trader (© Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Nelson’s nine-hole golf course at Pedernales, complete with Lone Star flags on each hole (© Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
One of the many attractions at Pedernales Country Club – note the misspelling of the name (© Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
The Outlaws: with Waylon Jennings in the early 70s (© Bettmann/Corbis)
The Highwaymen: Nelson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson (© AP/Empics)
On stage with President Jimmy Carter in the late-70s (© Wally McNamee/Corbis)
Keeping fit amidst the madness. Nelson still jogs every day (© Wally McNamee/Corbis)
The gentleman farmer: milking a cow – and smoking a cigarette – at Ridgetop in the mid-60s
At the inaugural Farm Aid in 1985, with Neil Young and John Mellencamp (© Bettmann/Corbis)
Performing at Farm Aid: the organisation has raised over $25 million in twenty years (© Timothy D Easley/AP/Empics)
Drummer Paul English and Nelson’s eldest daughter Lana, relaxing in 2005 (Courtesy of Mickey Raphael)
Mickey Raphael, harmonica player in the Family Band (Courtesy of Mickey Raphael)
Johnny Bush: friend and collaborator for over fifty years
Nelson surveys the scene at his Texas ranch following the IRS bust in November 1990 (© Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Under lock and key: the IRS come calling at Pedernales (© Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
A promotional flyer for The IRS Tapes in 1991
On the golf course with Annie and Lukas in the late 80s (© Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Mr and Mrs Nelson step out at the Grammys in 2000 (© Mark J Terrill/AP/Empics)
On stage with Lukas (© Brian Kersey/AP/Empics)
Two of the great voices of America: Nelson toured with Bob Dylan in 2004 and 2005 (© Robert Galbraith/Reuters/Corbis)
With his friend and co-conspirator Keith Richards (© Robert Galbraith/Reuters/Corbis)
Relaxing with Julio Iglesias and Ray Charles in the 80s (© Bob Wishoff)
Willie Nelson Drive is the main thoroughfare through the Wild West town at Nelson’s Texas ranch (© Graeme Thomson)
The Opry House in the western town (© Graeme Thomson)
With Emmylou Harris and Daniel Lanois during the making of Teatro in 1998 (© Chris Cuffaro)
Nelson still signs numerous autographs after every show (© Getty Images)
Loading up with BioDiesel, his new environmentally friendly passion (© Paul Natkin/AP/Empics)
Trigger: the most famous guitar in the world (© Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis)
Still on the road: Farm Aid 2005 (© Getty Images)
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Listed below are brief biographical sketches of the characters whose voices are heard throughout the book. Their roles are explained in reference to their relationship with Willie Nelson.
Dwayne Adair: Childhood friend from Abbott.
Ryan Adams: Musician. Nelson’s label mate at Lost Highway Records.
Richie Albright: Drummed with Waylo
n Jennings from 1964 until his death in 2002. Also Jennings’ collaborator and co-producer.
Chet Atkins: Musician, producer and executive at RCA Records. Produced the bulk of Nelson’s 60s output.
Barry Beckett: Keyboard player with the Muscle Shoals Band. Worked with Nelson on Phases And Stages.
Johnny Bush: Country musician and close friend of fifty years. Band member until 1968. Wrote Nelson’s signature tune ‘Whiskey River’.
Paul Buskirk: Friend and Houston-based musician who bought some of Nelson’s earliest original songs, including ‘Night Life’ and ‘Family Bible’.
Jack Clements: Childhood friend from Abbott.
Jessi Colter: Country musician and third and final wife of Waylon Jennings. Appeared on Wanted! The Outlaws.
Pat Croslin: Barmaid at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, Nashville.
Willie Nelson Page 36