Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville

by Michael Streissguth

  Willie reckoned that he first saw the unexpected combination of patrons at the club Big G’s, in Round Rock, Texas. It “was a highly redneck place back then,” Willie told country music historian Robert K. Oermann. “But there was a few little long-haired cowboys that were coming in there, and of course they got the shit kicked out of ’em a couple of times. But they kept comin’ back. They kept showing up.”

  It must be said that the crowd Willie saw in front of him mirrored that of Johnny Cash, drawn in thanks to the Man in Black’s prison albums and popular television show. But in Texas, this curious mingling was largely confined to the bars, particularly a reimagined gas station that was Kenneth Threadgill’s, the spiritual home of eclecticism in Austin. A fiddler and folk music lover, Threadgill gave over his space to pickers filtering in and out of the progressive culture around the University of Texas. “Threadgill’s was the first place in Austin where I saw the rednecks and hippies packing into one place together,” said Mary Egan, who fiddled for Greezy Wheels, one of the staple bands playing around Austin in the early 1970s. “They’d pack in there on Wednesday nights to jam. Threadgill would be selling long-neck [bottled beer] as fast as he could pass them out, and everybody’d get up and try to play.” During the 1960s, blues spots and rock clubs sprouted up all over Austin, but Threadgill’s was common ground. It might even have been a place where whites and blacks mixed, if Texans had done that sort of thing.

  In 1970, the main stage for this country-rock movement moved to the Armadillo World Headquarters, housed in an old National Guard armory in Austin. A magnet for hippies, truck drivers, and state office workers, the Armadillo hosted an enticing mix of national and local acts. John Sebastian, John Prine, Bette Midler, and Jerry Garcia rubbed shoulders with Texas-based acts such as Doug Sahm, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, Jerry Jeff Walker, Leon Russell, and Asleep at the Wheel. “But the obvious plus was the crowd: mobile, shouting, native-costumed young people with beer, music, and the thought of being Texans,” wrote Jan Reid in his classic history, The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock. “The dress wasn’t exotic like in San Francisco; the style ran to boots, jeans, T-shirts, long hair, and cowboy hats. The bellowing mobs scared the daylights out of Bette Midler, exacted smiles of karmic delight from John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, enticed Billy Joe Shaver to play several times for free, and subjected John Prine to the stifling early-summer heat of Armadillo.”

  In the summer of 1972, Willie and his family left Bandera for the suburbs of Austin. He’d been playing Austin clubs such as Big G’s and the Broken Spoke, and the scene around town seemed infinitely cooler than Houston’s or San Antonio’s. Naturally, Willie sought out the Armadillo World Headquarters, where he personally arranged a gig with Greezy Wheels opening. “The manager was real optimistic about it,” Willie continued with Robert Oermann, “and sure enough, there was a whole lot of people who showed up. A whole lot of young people. Plus, there were a few of the cowboys from Big G’s who had ventured in there, just to see, because they’d never been around the hippies and the long hairs. Anyway they came in there and mixed around. They looked around, and they wound up not disliking each other at all. They found out that it’s not hard to like Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb. They found a common ground.”

  In the wake of the Armadillo gig, Willie dialed his friend Waylon in Nashville and urged him to get his band down there as soon as possible. When Waylon finally paid a visit, the audience who paid to see him erupted. “There was hippies and cowboys and everybody together and they were screaming and really getting off on it,” says drummer Albright. “Waylon turned around and said, ‘Go get that little red-headed son of a bitch. What’s he got me into?’ We hadn’t been in a situation with hippies and cowboys side by side. It was quite the rush. When the crowd gets almost louder than the band, you know you’re doing something right.”

  Although Willie wasn’t the first artist with national credentials to move to Texas—Michael Martin Murphey, Jerry Jeff Walker, and B. W. Stevenson had preceded him—he embodied like nobody else the union of hippie and hillbilly, where the boundaries between rock, country, and folk suddenly blurred. He channeled the spirit of Threadgill’s on bigger stages all around Texas and became the patron saint of an ethos and style of music that was alternately called redneck rock or progressive country or outlaw.

  “Going back to Texas has sure been good for Willie Nelson,” wrote Fort Worth native Dave Hickey in Country Music. “You get the impression that when he was living in Nashville he was sending out his songs like a stranded man sends out messages in bottles, and that when he moved to Austin, he suddenly discovered that all those bottles had floated to shore among friends.”

  Willie delighted his Texas fans by donning his own outlaw attire. He replaced the ties and turtlenecks, the blue blazers and brown slacks of Nashville’s past with the loose-fitting jeans, bandanas, tennis shoes, and cozy cotton shirts of the so-called cosmic cowboys: Murphey, Walker, and Sahm. He often wore a cowboy hat, and with every passing week after landing in Austin, his hair dropped lower and the whiskers on his face multiplied. The contrast was startling. He had gone from looking like a singing insurance peddler to the spiritual leader of a back-to-nature pod.

  The new Willie and the Austin movement that swirled around him magnetized the national press. Reporters from big newspapers and magazines parachuted into Texas to taste a slice of Austin life and give Willie a lot of honey press. The attention, more than he had ever known, polished his reputation in the eyes of concert promoters around the country. He fell back on the national circuit, making the proverbial grueling string of one-nighters from Buffalo to Boise.

  A stop in Nashville gave him his next recording contract, this time with the legendary rhythm-and-blues label Atlantic, which by the early 1970s was also collecting an impressive array of rock acts and seeking a niche in the country music world. In 1972, Jerry Wexler, Atlantic’s legendary producer, and label boss Rick Sanjek had stopped by a songwriters’ jam in Nashville just in time to catch Willie in the spotlight. The singer unfurled a collection of mostly unrecorded songs that presented male and female perspectives on a relationship gone sour. “He got on the stool late at night when the party had thinned out,” said Harlan Howard, who hosted the party, “and he sang like a total album with a gut string and a stool. He just went from one song to the other and then [Jerry Wexler] from New York . . . flipped out.” Afterward, Wexler shuffled up to Willie and offered him a contract. Willie welcomed the invitation and pointed him to Neil Reshen, who negotiated a healthy advance and lots of artistic control.

  In February 1973, Wexler reserved five days at Atlantic’s storied recording space near Columbus Circle in Manhattan and tapped the Turkish-born staff producer and arranger Arif Mardin to lead the proceedings. Mardin, who could pass for Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau, loved jazz and had studied to be an arranger at Berklee School of Music in Boston, before he joined Atlantic in the early 1960s. At first he did little more than deal with administrative tasks, but he soon joined Wexler and Tom Dowd on Aretha Franklin’s production team and, in 1969, contributed arrangements to Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis. More recently, he had produced Austin kingpin Jerry Jeff Walker and coproduced and played piano on the Doug Sahm and Band album, the Texas guitar slinger’s first outing after dissolving the Sir Douglas Quintet. Accordingly, the studio that Mardin oversaw when Willie hit town could not have differed more from RCA’s if it had been located in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

  Mardin opened the door to Willie’s band, freed him from the glare of the studio clock, and let the boys smoke their pot, a no-no at RCA-Nashville, where the session musicians who partied did so in their cars on break. In Nashville, artists punched the clock. In New York, Wexler and Mardin orchestrated an event. Journalists from Creem and Rolling Stone visited the studio while rumors flew around town that Bob Dylan, Leon Russell, and Doug Sahm might show up to accompany Willie. Of the three, only Sahm appeared, to add li
cks to the Bob Wills classic “Stay All Night (Stay a Little Longer)” and Willie’s own “Devil in a Sleeping Bag.” An army of Willie’s friends, including B. W. Stevenson, David Bromberg, Sammi Smith, Larry Gatlin, and Waylon, visited, too, chiming in on the rollicking “Stay All Night.” Even Willie’s wife, Connie, and Creem journalist Ed Ward joined the chorus during a deluge of gospel recordings on the session’s last day.

  On the first day, Ward feared that Willie and his musicians might not measure up to New York standards. “Happily,” he confessed later, “I’d underestimated the professionalism of all concerned, not to mention the core ensemble of musicians themselves, who decided to test the sound of the studio with a spirited version of ‘Under the Double Eagle,’ which left me awestruck: Willie wasn’t only a great songwriter, he was a goddamn virtuoso on that battered Martin guitar of his!”

  In five days, Willie cut thirty-three songs, twelve of which appeared on the first album, Shotgun Willie. And when the last inch of tape slipped through the machine, Mardin popped open a bottle of expensive French wine and toasted the room. It was early in the morning when Willie stepped out onto Broadway. “Gotta get back to Texas,” he told Rolling Stone’s Chet Flippo. “We play in Round Rock tomorrow.”

  SIX MONTHS LATER, Rolling Stone continued the story of Shotgun Willie in a sterling review: “With this flawless album, Willie Nelson finally demonstrates why he has for so long been regarded as a C&W singer-songwriter’s singer-songwriter.” Atlantic released only one more Willie Nelson album, the Muscle Shoals–recorded Phases and Stages, before its country division folded, but, like Shotgun Willie, it woke up the critics and endorsed Willie’s creative vision.

  Nashville’s a great place to be right now—like Paris in the twenties—a place where you can get together with people and rap.

  —Mickey Newbury

  Six

  * * *

  The West End Watershed

  AFTER THE NEW York sessions, Willie ambled back to outlaw country. The very mention of Round Rock, Texas—that small town that prepared to receive Willie’s caravan—suggested a magical destination where folk-rock mingled with native dance hall and honky-tonk creations meant to accompany wildly changing attitudes and lifestyles. It was as if the elusive Summer of Love had floated to Texas after fleeing the grungy Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.

  Elements of that spirit had also traveled to Nashville, where musical and intellectual cross-pollination, experimentation, and promise of freedom had awakened in the city’s West End. The streets running across and along Division, Broadway, and West End between Music Row and Hillsboro Village delineated Nashville’s very own Austin or Greenwich Village, where young musicians and other searchers gathered to play, parade, party, and talk politics. Like those sister neighborhoods, the West End watershed encompassed a major city park, a university, cheap rentals, diners, and the all-important nightclubs and taverns that embraced struggling musicians who played for young people newly licensed by a reduction in the legal drinking age from twenty-one to eighteen.

  The lucky musicians arrived and quickly found sponsorship on Music Row: Jimmy Buffett, who worked at Billboard and wrote for a small publishing company; John Hiatt, who wrote for Tree Publishing; Dan Fogelberg, who turned up with a Columbia contract; Dave Loggins, who was signed to MCA Music Publishing; and Dianne Davidson, who recorded for the independent label Janus and got session work as a background vocalist. “We were all hippies,” says Davidson. “We tried to scrape up enough money to pay the rent, buy some smoking dope, and a jug of cheap wine and guitar strings. Most of us had connections in the business that helped take care of us in that way. We had publishing deals. We had production deals. We did sessions. That was how you made some money. Then your gigs—if you made money great, if you didn’t that was okay.”

  Dan Beck, from Pittsburgh, was unsponsored, but he smelled the unusual fires burning in Nashville and came anyway. Later he would play a brief but key role in Willie Nelson’s career, but in 1971 he was a college student itching for a songwriting deal in Nashville. He knew that Dylan had recorded there, heard about Kristofferson, and read in Rolling Stone, Creem, and Circus about the artists streaming into the city to record or appear on The Johnny Cash Show or both. The list of artists working in independent studios such as Quadrafonic, Woodland, Music City Recorders, and Cinderella astonished him: the Steve Miller Band, Gordon Lightfoot, Lonnie Mack, and Neil Young, just to name a few. During the school year, the Earl Scruggs Revue stopped in Pittsburgh, which only supercharged his imagination. “This was post Flatt-Scruggs,” explains Beck. “His sons were my age, and it was electrifying. They were putting elements of rock with their dad’s banjo.”

  Beck wrote songs and played in a rock band that had periodically traveled from Pittsburgh to New York looking for a break. “We could afford to hang out about two days, then we’d have to go home. And we’d come back six months later and knock on doors.” Nashville seemed more promising, fewer closed doors, and cheaper accommodations. “So I talked to my band: ‘Hey, let’s all go to Nashville,’” says Beck. “Well, I was the only one in college, and for that reason, I was the only one who was broke. The rest of the guys worked in the steel mills; they’re all nineteen or twenty years old, driving Corvettes. Everybody’s like, ‘Yeah, let’s go to Nashville.’ Well, when it came time to go, everybody backed out because they had these lifelong union jobs.”

  So Beck flew into town by himself and asked a cabbie to take him where college kids lived and people made records; he planned on staying for the summer. That night, he wandered into the Red Dog Saloon, on Division, where David Allan Coe was playing and a musician and writer named Willie Fong Young was watching him. Beck fell into conversation with Young who offered him a place to sleep. A job busing tables at the House, a club on Twenty-First Avenue South, soon followed. He couldn’t have picked a livelier spot to work: Marshall Chapman had gotten her first paying gig there a few months before Beck arrived, and by the fall she was a magnetic regular. “The girl, all six foot two of her, had beautiful eyes surrounded by a waterfall of blonde curls and a hole in her white jeans that ran from her knee all the way up,” swooned a fan who watched her take charge of the club.

  Beck, too, marveled at Chapman’s act and returned to the Red Dog Saloon to see the spectacle of George and Arizona Star, a female duo whose Dada-ish musical play, The Lobotomy, featured songs like “We’re Off to See the Gizzard.” “They used to live in a carriage house over by Belmont [College] that I don’t think had a bathroom in it,” recalls Beck. “So they used to come over and use our shower, bathtub, change there, and go out and busk. And they were notorious down there. Star was a beautiful lady who had this Marilyn Monroe persona, so that every hillbilly guitar player in Nashville was chasing her. George was sword-wielding; she wore these Edwardian velvet suits and looked very dykish. It was just a scene.”

  From left to right: Kinky Friedman and Dan Beck hanging with pop-country singer B. J. Thomas.

  Courtesy of Dan Beck collection

  While Beck pondered his future in Nashville, Young hired on another new roommate, aspiring songwriter Kinky Friedman, who came from Texas by way of a Peace Corps stint on the island of Borneo in the South China Sea. They bunked at 1909 Broadway, the same building where Billy Swan heard Kristofferson yelling the news of his Newport gig through his open window. Many a night, Beck, Young, and Friedman haunted the Red Dog and the sleazy, greasy Burger Boy joint, just steps up the street from their apartment. Or they slipped into Music Row studios to watch sessions and then stretched out the night at the Exit/In. Invariably, they ended up at the Pancake Man in the Holiday Inn on West End. “All the session guys would come in for a late-night breakfast and tell stories,” adds Beck. “And we were game. This was a nightly thing. Eddie Rabbitt was hanging out there then. It was a real street thing.”

  Friedman concentrated on writing a country music opera while he and his Texas Jewboys band jammed into Glaser Sound Studios on Nineteenth Av
enue South, working on his outrageous musical commentary on the Jewish condition that would become the Sold American album of 1973. Anyone who saw the cigar-chomping, western-clad bard sing “Ride ’Em Jewboy” or “We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to You” did not soon forget him. On the street, he was just as outlandish, snorting and growling at the proselytizing so common in Nashville and ridiculing the town’s political conservatism.

  Each and every evening, says Beck, the Jewish outlaw rose from his chair and approached the French doors of their apartment, which looked down on Broadway. “It was like the pope’s window. It was just before we’d head to the Pancake Man every night, and he would open those doors and take a drag on his cigar and shout out in his gravelly voice, ‘Assassinate Your President.’ And he did this every night at the same time. I thought for sure one night they [the police] were going to show up and drag him off to jail.”

  The apartment building on Broadway where Billy Swan, Dan Beck, Kinky Friedman, and Willie Fong Young lived.

  Photograph by Michael Streissguth

  Characters such as Friedman and Arizona Star enlivened Nashville in Beck’s eyes, but he also saw the city’s hard edge, like when the Nashville police spied his Pennsylvania license plates and virtually disassembled his car looking for drugs. While still searching for a day job to support his writing and his Pancake Man habit, Beck got an appointment with RCA executive Wally Cochran. “I sat down in this airport-lounge-size office that was nothing but golf clubs because that’s probably what he did all day,” says Beck. “I remember giving him my little pitch, and I’m from the North, my hair’s long, and he listened to my little thing and paused and said, ‘You know, I think you ought to go home.’”