We found an apartment in Pasadena, east of Houston. I had a gig six nights a week at the Esquire Club. On Sunday mornings I worked as the sign-on DJ for a Pasadena radio station.
Things were looking up again. I ran into Pappy Dailey, who had started a record company in Houston called Starday. Pappy had put out two hits so far—“Y’all Come” by Arleigh Duff and “Why Baby Why” by George Jones. About the time I met him, Pappy was forming a new label he named D Records.
I cut two 45-rpm records for Pappy Dailey. One had “The Storm Has Just Begun” on the A side and “Man with the Blues” on the flip. The credits on the record said “Willie Nelson and the Reil Sisters.” The other record I did for Pappy was “What a Way to Live” backed with “Misery Mansion.”
It was a thirty-mile drive from our Pasadena apartment to the Esquire Club. I had plenty of time to think making the round-trip six nights a week. One night driving to work a lyric popped into my mind:
When the evening sun goes down
You will find me hanging ’round . . .
Driving home again, another line came to me:
The night life ain’t no good life
But it’s my life.
I finished writing the song and put it in my stack of unpublished work.
They fired me at the radio station for being late to work, hired me again, and then fired me again. I wasn’t making much money at the radio station, but I needed even more than they’d been paying me. What I took home from the Esquire Club wouldn’t tote the load.
I ran into Paul Buskirk, a fine musician I had known for a while. Paul hired me to teach at the Paul Buskirk School of Guitar. He hired me on a Thursday, then spent the weekend teaching me what I needed to teach the students on Monday.
I had about fifteen students and managed to stay a lesson or two ahead of them. Every now and then I would hit a lick of “Wildwood Flower” or “Under the Double Eagle” to dazzle them with my footwork, but I think they knew I was sort of faking the lessons as I went along.
Paul Buskirk was my mentor. He taught me a lot about life and about music. He’s one of the top musicians I’ve ever seen in my life. He knows his instruments and knows what he’s doing and is able to tell you what he’s doing and then play it again exactly the same way, if he wants to. That comes from knowledge and training. I, like most guys who play, have no idea where I’m going or what I’m gonna do and sometimes it comes out right, but I wouldn’t know how to do it a second time. My playing is a lot of leaping off into space and seeing if I can hit the ground running.
I called Paul aside one morning and offered to sell him “Family Bible.” He paid me $50 for it. Then I sold him “Night Life” for $150.
“Family Bible” was recorded with Claude Gray singing it. It rose to number one on the country charts. The credits on the song went to Buskirk and his pardners Walt Brelin and Gray. My name wasn’t even on it. But I was really glad to know I could write a number-one song. Up until then I didn’t know if I could write a song that was commercial or even acceptable. After “Family Bible” hit the top, I knew then that all my other songs were good. And, believe it or not, I never harbored any resentment toward Paul. I needed that money in a big way when I sold those songs, and I was real glad to get it. I appreciate that Paul and his pardners knew a bargain when they saw it.
“Night Life” had been turned down by D Records and the Pappy Dailey people as not being a country song, even though I owed D Records some songs. I knew “Night Life” was good. I sold it to Buskirk for enough money to go into a studio and record it. Pappy Dailey heard what I was doing and threatened to sue me, but I didn’t care. I just changed my name.
The record we put out was “Night Life” by Paul Buskirk, performed by Hugh Nelson and Paul Buskirk and the Little Men.
“Night Life” is now one of the most-recorded songs in history. It’s been performed by more than seventy artists from country and blues and jazz and pop all the way to opera singers. “Night Life” has sold more than thirty million records. All I got out of it was $150. But so what? At the time I needed the money. Suppose I’d been stubborn and waited and maybe never sold it at all? The fact that both songs became hits encouraged me to think I could write a lot more songs that were just as good.
Finally the time had come for me to go to Nashville.
Martha packed Lana, Susie, and Billy into our 1950 Buick that I was five payments late on. I drove them to Waco and left them with Martha’s parents.
With an Oklahoma credit card—a syphon for stealing gas—I drove that Buick to Nashville wondering, all the way, at exactly what moment the car would fall apart.
The Buick took me as far as downtown Nashville and then belched smoke and kind of sighed like an old horse and laid down and died.
But I was in Nashville at last, ready to shoot it out with the big boys. I was going on toward my twenty-seventh birthday.
The Chorus
BENNIE BINION
The first time I laid eyes on Willie Nelson was at a honky-tonk outside of Fort Worth about thirty-odd years ago. It was a rough joint full of real rough characters. I mean your tough guys of the old school: gamblers and whores and pimps and cowboys out for a wild time. There was enough guns in this place to invade Korea. Willie was singing his songs for this crowd. I knew right off Willie would be a star because everybody was listening to him and feeling his magic. I damn sure felt it—kind of like the pull of a magnet.
There’s two people I know of who have magic that strong—Willie Nelson and Billy Graham. Willie might make a great preacher, I don’t know. Billy Graham would sure as hell make a great entertainer.
I don’t believe in preachers. I’m a Catholic and to me religion is too strong a mystery to doubt. No smart person would doubt it no way. No preacher, priest, rabbi, or nothing knows any more about God than I do. I’m eighty-two years old. I’ve died three times and done went to heaven once.
I was in the hospital with heart failure the time I went to heaven. I spoke to each member of my family in different parts of the country after my soul left my body, consoled them, told them I was fine and everything was all right. And God damn, first thing you know I’m up on stage with Jesus. Some other people that have died and come back say they went through a tunnel. But I just popped up on the stage in an odd bright light, and there stood Jesus. I asked him, “Are you Jesus?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Well, I’ve always believed in You and God, but I really ain’t ready just yet. I sure would like to go back.” So He let me come back. It’s like this guy that went into a saloon and said everybody who wants to go to heaven line up over here. They all lined up except one fellow on a bar stool. Guy says, “Sir don’t you want to go to heaven?” Fellow says, “Yeah, but not if you’re loading up to go right now.”
I’d just as soon Willie don’t become no preacher, just keep on with what he’s doing, making people so God damn happy they jump up and holler. Colonel Tom Parker, that used to manage Elvis Presley, is a smart son of a bitch, and he thinks Willie is overexposing himself with all this TV and Picnics and Farm Aids and what all. That’s the Colonel’s opinion, not mine, and maybe the Colonel don’t know what the shit he’s talking about. The Colonel would never let Elvis do a God damn thing he didn’t get paid for. He said an entertainer has got to be paid, because they’ll play out eventually. They got to get all the money they can while they’re on top. But I think you’ve got to do a whole lot more than sing to draw packed houses night after night. It’s personality. The people must love you and believe in you.
When Willie was getting ready to shoot his movie Red Headed Stranger, I heard he wanted a buffalo coat. I had one made for him at Green Furrier in Anchorage, Alaska. Shipped it to Willie and he wore it in the movie. Some people thought I skinned one of my own buffaloes off the ranch, but that’s not the case. I have 1,400 buffaloes, and they’re the worst thing to handle, mean and ornery. You can’t turn a buffalo like you can a cow.
Willie has got some buffalo in him. You k
now why that big fur is on a buffalo’s neck? Because when it storms, a buffalo faces the storm and goes straight into it instead of running from it. In other words, if the storm keeps coming and coming, the buffalo turns straight into it so he goes through it quicker. Otherwise, if the buffalo ran from the storm, he’d have nothing to show but a furry ass.
I can tell you, Willie understands buffaloes.
MAE AXTON
In 1957 I was doing PR for Colonel Tom Parker, who was managing Hank Snow but had taken over Elvis Presley. So the Colonel and Hank were coming to a parting of the ways, and I was asked to finish promoting a tour for Hank in the Pacific Northwest.
I stopped at a radio station in Vancouver, Washington. This young kid who interviewed me was very shy and clean-shaven. His jeans were worn and patched. He had a butch haircut. I thought he was a local boy. He told me he played every record of mine on the air, and I thought, this kid is all right.
Then he said he read every story he could find that I wrote in magazines. That blew my mind. He said he’d written some little songs that I’d never heard of. He didn’t know if he had a chance to be a top songwriter, but did I have time to listen to one of his songs? He looked poor from hunger and so sweet. He was shy but when he looked at me he looked directly at me with those eyes that show straight into his soul.
I said, “Son, I’ve got a plane to catch. But I’ll take time to hear your music.”
In the lobby of the radio station, this young Willie Nelson turned on a little tape player. The first song he played was “Family Bible.” It took about four bars before my chin hit the proverbial floor.
I kept listening to his songs until finally I said, “I’ve gotta run for the airport. But I want to tell you two things. One, if I could write half as well as you I’d be the happiest woman on earth. Two, you quit this job and go to Texas or Tennessee and write. I know you couldn’t be making much money. So here’s my unlisted phone number. I can always raise a couple of hundred dollars. Call me.”
Later when he started turning out hits he began sending me flowers. The first ones I got from him I still have, pressed between the pages of my memory book.
Many years down the road from Vancouver, I went to see Willie perform in London. You talk about a great communicator. Willie knocked them out. At the break I went backstage and hugged him and said, “Willie, you’ve won them.” This big grin spread across his face. There was a flash of delight in his very peaceful, penetrating, wise eyes—he knew he’d gotten through to people who were not from his country, but they understood his message and they cared.
Those eyes. They really show everything he’s feeling. In Austin I was in a hotel room with Willie and his lawyers and some guys from a record company in Germany. These Germans were embroidering things, laying the con on Willie, telling him he had to do it their way and it would be so great.
Willie sat very quietly, but I was watching his eyes. The Germans were trying to take him for all he was worth. They thought they had him totally outsmarted. But I saw dark clouds forming in his eyes, a fire starting inside his heart, close to anger. I could see him thinking: Do they really believe I’m this dumb?
When the con men finished their pitch, Willie turned his eyes on them for a full minute. Then he said, “Okay, if that’s how you say it has to be, then we won’t do business together.” He walked out and left them with sauerkraut on their faces. They thought they were dealing with some stupid hick from Texas, and suddenly they realized he’d let them talk their way out to the street.
I booked Willie on a big package show with Patsy Cline at a hotel in Stafford, Arizona. The entertainers all stayed in free rooms at the hotel. After the show, Willie said he was getting ready to go to his room and wondered if I had anything he could read. I said, “Willie, the only thing I have is a book of poetry I’m working on, just a manuscript stapled together.”
“Would you mind?” he asked.
Willie writes poetry. Willie himself is poetry to me. His loyalty, friendship, caring, his love of people, all those things make great poetry come out of him. The next morning he gave me back the manuscript. On it he had written, “While reading this book and the thoughts contained I find myself saying, these are thoughts that I have but never quite seem to transfer them from my mind to paper. My hat is continued off to Mae B. Axton. Sincerely, Willie Nelson.”
That page is kind of yellowed, but I have it framed on the wall of my den.
Not long ago we held a press conference for Willie. The room was crowded. Willie came in while I was talking. He wore his shorts, a tank top, a baseball cap, and tennis shoes. And he reached out his hand to me and said, “Mae, I just want you to know that I need that two hundred bucks now.”
CHARLIE WILLIAMS
I was doing a radio show in Sherman Oaks when a good friend of mine, Joe Allison, asked me to write the liner notes for the first album of a new singer-songwriter named Willie Nelson.
I went into the studio that day in 1962 expecting to find the usual nervous rookie at the microphone. Instead, there was Willie, cleanshaven with his hair slicked back, perched on a high stool with a cigarette in one hand and his chin in the other, calmly recording his own songs as though he’d been doing it all his life.
He sang, “Stop here, across the way on your right. That’s where my house lives. Sometimes I stayed there at night.”
A very far-out opening line for a song. The way Willie sang it, though, it seemed the most logical and poignant thing for a heartbroken man to say. There’s an excitement that runs through the engineers, the musicians, and the spectators when a recording session is really working. I felt the thrill of being there as a new star was being discovered. Willie sang “Touch Me,” “Wake Me When It’s Over,” “Hello Walls,” “Crazy,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “The Part Where I Cry,” “Mr. Record Man,” “Darkness on the Face of the Earth,” one after another, and by the time he finished Willie was the only calm person in the studio.
Willie and I liked each other and started hanging out together. When he’d come to L.A., he’d call me and we’d go holler whoopie after his show. We went to a lot of guitar pullings together over the years.
One guitar pulling I remember most vividly was a night in Willie’s suite at the Spence Manor in Nashville—Willie was a headliner by now—and about ten of us met up to show off our new stuff.
Johnny Darrell was there, blind running drunk. If you’ve never seen Johnny Darrell drunk, you have missed one of the . . . well, no, never mind. You haven’t missed a thing, now I stop and think about it.
Anyhow, Johnny was real drunk. He snatched up Willie’s old Martin guitar—the famous one he picked so much he wore a hole in it, the one with all the names signed on it—and was reeling around with the guitar saying he was going to sing a song.
Very nicely, Willie said, “Johnny, if you don’t mind, would you please use another guitar?”
Johnny ignored him and went right on tuning and flogging the guitar and stumbling around.
Willie said, “Johnny, please. There’s plenty of guitars in this room, but that one is very special to me. I’m afraid you’re gonna break it.”
Darrell whirled on him and said, “What’s the matter? You become too God damn big a star to let me use your guitar?”
Willie was off that couch like a shot and across the room and grabbed Darrell and pinned him against the wall in the corner and said very quietly but forcefully, “Put that guitar down and do it now.”
Johnny immediately put down the guitar. Willie went back and sat on the couch, gave one of his serene smiles, and said, “Now, then, I’d sure like to hear your songs, Johnny.”
I wonder if Willie is afraid of anything. It seems to me he’s so together, so full of complete and total confidence, that nothing can shake him ever. I’d like to believe that’s true, but it can’t be. There’s got to be times when he says, “Whoa, this really is hard to figure.” The man is human, after all. He’s got to be scared of something. But I can’t
imagine what the hell it might be. If I have seen it, I didn’t recognize it.
PAUL ENGLISH
I was born in Vernon, Texas, in 1932. After I finished high school in Fort Worth, I hit the street.
I joined the North Fort Worth Boys Club when I was about nine years old. My mother and dad was Holy Rollers. They started the Northside Assembly of God. I played in the band. I played down on the Exchange on North Main on the corner on Sundays, and I couldn’t go to a movie or anything like that, but I could go to the Boys Club so I started boxing at the Boys Club. I turned into a rough little character in order to survive. I never saw a movie till I was fifteen. I went to the Star Theater on 10th Street and saw a movie at the Star Theater. When I got out these boys accosted me. They were the Peroxide Gang. I whipped three of them and they said, “My God, you’re great. You know, we’ll make you our leader.” So I was introduced to a brand-new thing—girls. I said, “How about this? A whole new life has opened up for me.” I had all the girls I wanted and was the head of the Peroxide Gang.
I wasn’t a big known character. I was just a kid. But I knew some big characters. I started making the papers in 1956 when the Fort Worth Press started running a “10 Most Unwanted” list. I made it for five years in a row. They said, “if Paul wasn’t there he just left,” meaning, whenever there was a murder, if I hadn’t been there I’d just left. I was involved in three murder trials, but they never led to anything. I was the kind of guy they were always trying to stick charges on. One of the murders the police tried to blame on me, there were six guys shooting at each other. One guy ran out of bullets and got killed. But that ain’t murder—not in Texas, anyhow.
My friends and I started beating pinball machines and slot machines. Back then even a little old drugstore would have four or five pinball machines. We’d just get a drill and some piano wire and drill them and put a Crayola on the side of them and run up big scores and get paid cash.
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