Willie

by Willie Nelson

  I didn’t know Julio was selling more records at that time than anybody in the world.

  Julio flew to Austin and came to my studio out at the golf course.

  He had found a song he liked, called “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.” We cut a track of it in my studio in about two hours, mainly to put my voice on it. Julio took the tape back to L.A. and redid his part a few times to get the English down better.

  Julio and I performed it together on national TV at the Country Music Association Awards show. A few weeks later the single came out. It was a monster hit.

  With Julio, it was his singing that attracted me. But as a rule it is my feeling for the song itself that urges me to cut it.

  A song came to me once that I knew would be huge. It was a story song that grabbed you right away with a sharp hook and a powerful message and a chorus that everybody could remember and sing along with.

  I turned it down. I was already doing a long story-song sequence, “Red Headed Stranger,” in my shows. I knew if I recorded this new song it would be such a hit the audience would insist on hearing it every show. There simply wasn’t enough time in the show for me to do two story songs.

  So I sent “The Gambler” over to Kenny Rogers.

  One of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard is “Moonlight in Vermont.” The words don’t rhyme at all anywhere in there, but it’s still poetic.

  I always wanted to record “Moonlight in Vermont,” but I didn’t really feel I was musically qualified to do the arrangements. Then I happened to be living in the same condo complex in Malibu as Booker T. Jones. We became friends. I asked him if he would work up some arrangements for me on “Moonlight in Vermont” and “Stardust.” Booker T. came up with sounds that I loved and I could perform. I asked him if he would produce an album for me.

  “What kind of album?” he said.

  I decided I would select my ten favorite songs of all time. We started with “Stardust.”

  “Stardust” was one of those songs I heard all the time on the radio when I was young. We had the sheet music for it as kids, and Bobbie played it on the piano. I tried to figure out the chords to play it on the guitar, but it was real hard and took a long time to learn. I needed a producer with Booker T.’s skill as a musician to show me how to do it. There’s a saying I believe in: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

  Next after “Stardust” I chose “Georgia on My Mind,” “Blue Skies,” “All of Me,” “Unchained Melody,” “September Song,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” “Moonlight in Vermont,” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

  The Stardust album sold triple platinum in 1978. It was really my “crossover” album. I remember the first night I sang “Stardust” with my band at the Austin Opera House. There was a kind of stunned silence in the crowd for a moment, and then they exploded with cheering and whistling and applauding. The kids in the crowd thought “Stardust” was a new song I had written. The older folks remembered the song well and loved it as much as I did.

  “Stardust” is my favorite song, but I’m just as glad Hoagy Carmichael and Mitchell Parish wrote it instead of me. Because maybe then they would have written “Night Life” instead of me.

  I guess my three favorite songs that I have written so far are “On the Road Again,” “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” and “Healing Hands of Time.” The first one is a good happy song. The second is a good love song, and the third is a good philosophical song like “One Day at a Time” and “It Should Be Easier Now.” These are songs of a very personal nature, but everybody can apply them to their own situation. I wrote “Angel” during a time when Connie and I were having personal problems, but people related it to their own love affairs or even to someone who had died. It was the same with “I Still Can’t Believe You’re Gone.” I wrote it about Carlene, Paul English’s wife, when she died, but it has a lot of different meanings to a lot of different people who have no idea why I wrote it.

  What this should say to songwriters is there is no formula for writing songs. If a song is true for you, it will be true for others.

  If I were just starting out today and I had a song I thought was good, I would go to Nashville. That’s still where the store is.

  I would go around to all the publishing companies in Nashville and talk to all of them and take them a tape of my song. The publishing companies will open their doors to a guy who walks in and looks and acts like he’s got something they want. If they’re really in the publishing company business and really looking for writers, they’d be dumb and unprofessional not to give a writer a chance. It’s not that hard for them to say, “Sure, we’ll take your tape, leave us your phone number and we’ll call you.” They have people to listen to new material, because it’s their business.

  If you have a good song, the odds of you finding somebody who will like it and record it are good. If your song is mediocre, the odds ain’t so good. If you’ve got a real great personality and a piss poor song, you might get signed up for life by the publishing company because they like you. I know a lot of guys who ain’t that great as songwriters but have good jobs with publishing companies because they’re good talkers and good at pitching songs.

  I will never say anything to discourage a songwriter who is out there knocking on doors, trying to get heard. But if you are a real songwriter, nothing I could say would discourage you, anyhow. If my opinion could change your mind about being a songwriter, then you really weren’t a songwriter to begin with and I would have done you a favor by making you look for a different career.

  If a real songwriter happened to hear from somebody else that I didn’t like his work, he would say, “What the hell does Willie Nelson know? Fuck Willie Nelson.”

  You can’t tell a real songwriter he ain’t any good, because he knows better. And he’ll keep hacking his way through show-biz hell until he proves it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The roughest part of my life with Martha was our time in Nashville.

  I picked up Martha and our three kids at the bus station about two weeks after I’d arrived in Nashville and drove them to our new home—a little green trailer house at Dunn’s Trailer Court on the east side of town. There was a used-car lot on one side of Dunn’s and a veteran’s cemetery on the other. About thirty trailers sat on concrete blocks behind a headquarters house with tall stone pillars. There was a pay phone on a post in the middle of the yard. The rent was $25 a week, which was about $10 more than it was worth.

  Martha went right out and got a job mixing drinks at the Hitching Post. It was on Broadway, across the street from Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, where I hung out with the other broke pickers who were trying to sell songs. Being the hard worker that she is, Martha quickly became manager of the Hitching Post and began working a second job at the Wagon Wheel.

  Martha had two jobs and I had none. For eight years she had been going around the country with me and it seemed like every time we took a step forward we fell backwards six feet. After all her years of hard work, we had landed in maybe the shabbiest place we ever lived. Martha’s Cherokee temper was getting the best of her, and she was drinking a lot more. My Indian blood was being mixed up with too much whiskey at Tootsie’s, and my old manhood hang-up kept telling me only a worthless asshole would lay around drunk playing the guitar while his wife worked two jobs to support the family.

  I could see Martha and me pulling apart from each other. I saw us growing in different directions and wasn’t wise enough to keep it from happening. In the back of my mind I’m not sure I really wanted to keep it from happening. I think we may have had so much water run under the bridge by the time we reached Nashville that when things started going bad it was too late for us.

  Martha found out I had been running around on her while I was in Nashville by myself. Then I found out she had been running around on me, too. To my way of thinking it was okay for me to cheat on her, but it sure as hell wasn’t okay f
or her to cheat on me. That’s how I thought a man should look at it.

  The first thing a man in Texas was trained to do was to find the guy his wife was running around with and kill him. I didn’t know who Martha was seeing on the side, so I went looking for a lot of suspects. I always carried a gun back then. It was part of the uniform. You carried a gun, you looked mean. Everybody I knew carried a gun. You stuck it in your boot or in your belt if your shirttail was out.

  I was mad enough to shoot somebody. But the circumstances never quite called for it. Sometimes if I had showed up an hour earlier, no telling what might have happened. If the other guy had said, “Okay, Willie, I’m Martha’s boyfriend, so go for your gun,” then at least one of us would have gotten shot. Fortunately the guys I was after had a little more sense than I had, or else they didn’t want to get shot over a piece of ass.

  It’s strange that this is how I was raised, coming from a strong church family. But I was taught you had to at least whip a guy who flirted with your wife, and you had to shoot him if he went far enough to threaten your family. One of the greatest laws, I thought when I was growing up, was a Texas law that made me real proud to live in the state of Texas. I understood that it was just in Texas that it was legal for you to kill anybody you caught screwing your wife or husband. You could kill them both and legally walk away free. I always thought, boy, what a great law that is. I never thought what might hapen if I was the one who got caught in bed. It turns out the Texas law didn’t exactly say you could kill your mate’s lover. But I do know some people who got killed doing things like that, and nobody went to prison.

  In Nashville my fighting with Martha became more and more physical, as if we had screamed all we could stand. Martha was a tough old girl. She fought like a tiger. She took a lick pretty good, and she dealt one out even better. One time I had my hand around her face and she got my little finger in her mouth and bit it to the bone. Slowed up my guitar playing. My voice went about four octaves higher when I’d hit a chord.

  Hank Cochran rescued us from Dunn’s Trailer Court. He asked me to go with him to Pamper Music in Goodlettsville about twenty miles north of Nashville. The owner of Pamper Music, Hal Smith, listened to my songs, and nodded and said he’d call me. I went back to Dunn’s to wait. Hal told Hank, who was his top writer and song plugger, that he liked my stuff well enough but couldn’t afford to hire me. Years later I heard Hank said Hal could take the $50-a-week raise Hank had just received from Pamper and pay it to me as an advance against my royalties.

  Hank drove back to our trailer to tell us the news. He had an easy time finding the trailer because Hank and Roger Miller had both lived in our same trailer earlier.

  When Hank said I at last had a real job that paid a real salary for writing songs, I broke down and cried.

  Martha cried, the kids cried, Hank cried. We were so happy. It was a real big deal for me—my first job as a professional songwriter.

  We moved to a nicer place in Goodlettsville and I started working in a garage at the Pamper office. There was just a door, a window, a guitar, and the walls. I started talking to the walls, like I had done when I was a child in Abbott reading the pages of the Star-Telegrams that kept the wind out. Hank walked into the garage, and on a piece of cardboard I had written “Hello Walls.”

  Faron Young cut “Hello Walls” and it sold two million copies. Suddenly, my world started spinning. In 1961 Patsy Cline recorded “Crazy,” Billy Walker recorded “Funny How Time Slips Away,” and Ray Price recorded “Night Life.” All four made the Country Top 20. “Crazy” and “Hello Walls” cracked the Pop Top 40.

  Chubby Checker had started a new craze called the Twist at the Peppermint Lounge in Manhattan that year, the Berlin Wall was built, the Bay of Pigs happened, and Roger Maris hit sixty homers for the Yankees. But for me 1961 was the year I started making it as a songwriter.

  Faron Young had loaned me $500. When I got my first royalty check of $3,000 from “Hello Walls,” I ran to Tootsie’s and found Faron sitting drinking at a table and kissed him flush on the mouth I was so excited. I tried to pay Faron the $500, but he wouldn’t take it. “I don’t want your money, son,” he said. “Wait till you can afford it and then fatten a steer for me or something.”

  It took years, but I finally paid Faron back by giving him a prize bull my son Billy bought at a livestock auction for $38,000.

  After “Crazy” and Hello Walls” were recorded, I heard Ray Price’s bass player Donny Young—now better known as Johnny Paycheck—had quit. I talked Ray into hiring me to play bass with the Cherokee Cowboys. Ray didn’t ask if I knew how to play bass, which I didn’t.

  The Cherokee Cowboys hit the road. Johnny Bush, Roger Miller, Darrell McCall, Buddy Emmons—they all played for the Cherokee Cowboys. I was making $25 a day faking it as bass player, but more royalty checks started coming in. I blew the money as fast as I could. Every time the Cherokee Cowboys pulled into a town, Ray would put us all up at a Holiday Inn. But I’d get the biggest, most expensive suite they had—a penthouse if there was one—and have a party for the boys until the money ran out. Between Jimmy Day and me and a couple others, the money just disappeared. I even took to flying commercial airplanes to the next gig instead of riding the bus.

  You can imagine how this went over with Martha. She was getting some of the royalty money, but not as much as she should have.

  Martha and I had advanced into the worst type of marital discord. There wasn’t so much hitting each other any more. Now it was fighting with cruel words that once you say them you can’t ever take back. If you hit somebody, or they hit you, it’s over with. It’s out of your system. But if you speak mean angry words, it goes to the bone and stays there. Just your tone of voice can do damage. Maybe you hardly notice how harsh you sound, but the other person never forgets it. They’ll always hear your words and your tone and remember what you meant. You are what you are thinking and what you say is what you mean in those situations. You’ve got to watch that. It’s heavy shit.

  I bought Ray Price’s 1959 black Cadillac with fishtail fins, a classic car, and gave it to Martha. She would get drunk and terrorize Nashville in that car. I was so worn out from being jealous and macho that I got to where I barely cared any more if Martha was carrying any boyfriends in the Cadillac.

  There was a rumor I heard on the road that Roger Miller and Martha had something going. I never did ask either one of them if it was true. But Roger wrote a song called “Sorry, Willie.” Actually I was with Roger the night he wrote the song someplace outside of Tulsa. By then, Martha and I were separated and I didn’t care to know what might have happened between them.

  In fact, I recorded “Sorry, Willie” on Liberty with Joe Allison. Roger was at the session. It wasn’t that I had become broad-minded about such shit as that, but, you know, I wasn’t sure of anything. And art is art wherever you find it.

  I went into Tootsie’s one night toward the end of our marriage and tried to talk to Martha. We were both drinking. She didn’t want to hear any more of my crap. She started throwing glasses at me. One hit the wall and shattered and cut Hank Cochran’s face pretty bad. I took him to the hospital, but I was wiseass drunk and wouldn’t let the doctor touch Hank, whose face was a mess of blood. I kept telling the doctor, “If you’re a good doctor, how come you’re working at this hour of the night?”

  Hank said, “Willie, shut your fucking mouth and let him sew me up before I bleed to death.”

  One night Hank showed me an 8 × 10 glossy photo of a girl singer named Shirley Collie.

  She was already pretty well known. Shirley was a regular on the old Phillip Morris road show with Red Foley and a bunch more. She was an old pal of Grady Martin, one of the world’s best guitar players. Shirley was—and still is—one of the finest female vocalists and yo-delers and probably the best harmony singer I’ve ever known. When we worked together, Shirley sang as close harmony with me as anybody possibly can. She second-guessed me. Like with my band today, they always guess
where I’m going to go with a song. Shirley could sense that, too. Shirley and I were pretty much on the same level of thinking, music-wise, whatever that was. However low or high that was, we were very close.

  Shirley and I cut duets of “Willingly” and “Touch Me.” Both records reached the Top 10 in 1962.

  It was the final blow for Martha to find out I was seeing Shirley, who was married to a DJ friend of ours named Bif Collie. Martha packed the kids into her black Cadillac and took off for Las Vegas in 1962 to get a divorce.

  You hear stories that when I married Shirley I thought she had six months to live. It’s true she had told me she had a terminal disease called lupus. If she had it, she got over it. But that had nothing to do with why I married Shirley.

  Shirley traveled with me for quite a while singing and playing bass. I had left the Cherokee Cowboys, and it was me and Shirley with Jimmy Day playing steel guitar, just the three of us. I would follow her every night on stage. She’d sing “Penny for Your Thoughts” and then she’d do “Bet My Heart I Love You,” which is a yodeling song. Shirley tore the house down yodeling. I mean she was great. The last time I saw her, a year or so ago, I invited her onstage and she yodeled and tore the house down again. She’s still great.

  I had learned from Ray Price to sing songs the crowd is familiar with if the crowd is not familiar with you. But this didn’t prevent me from trying to do it my own way when I started a band called the Offenders. We didn’t really intend to offend people, but it seems like we always were. Maybe it was our attitude. It could be that because we fancied ourselves as the Offenders, we naturally became offensive. We played jazz and things that people who had come to dance didn’t want to hear. We played whatever we wanted to play.

  Finally we broke up that band and I started singing songs the audience was familiar with. I did “Fräulein” and “San Antonio Rose” and “Columbus Stockade Blues” and all the old favorites that got their attention. The same music that got the crowd up on the dance floor would get them out of their seats in an auditorium. Once I figured that one out, it was pretty simple. I discovered “Rolling in My Sweet Baby’s Arms” was just as hot in a concert as it was in a dance hall. That was a big revelation to me. I had always been told you couldn’t play that kind of music in an auditorium because people came to listen and they didn’t want a lot of yelling and screaming, they wanted to hear the record just like it was when you made it. But this wasn’t necessarily true, and it opened up a whole new area to work in.