Willie

by Willie Nelson

  It was definitely out in the open now.

  Well, Shirley took to cussing, screaming, fighting, threatening to sue, calling my sorry ass every name she could think of—and Shirley was an eloquent lady with plenty of insults in her repertoire. She did all the normal things a woman would do under the circumstances.

  What could I say? My only defense was the truth—that Connie and I were in love—but this didn’t calm the atmosphere at Ridgetop. Finally I got on my high horse and acted outraged and offended and stomped out of the house.

  Connie and I got married at a wedding chapel in Las Vegas on my birthday, April 30, in 1971.

  There was one little matter I neglected to mention to the preacher.

  I was still married to Shirley.

  Shirley and I had been split up for a year and a half. After our bitter battles the first couple of months following the hospital bill, Shirley moved out of Ridgetop and I didn’t see her again for ten years. In my mind, my marriage to Shirley was over long ago.

  I don’t know whether Connie realized I was still married then or does now or really cares that much. I think she knew in her mind, too, we felt the same way. We always have felt that when we got married, we blew it. We got along so great when we were just hanging out, living together, and having a good time and she was following me around all over the country and she was my lover. When we got married, she became a wife with all the definitions that go with it. Every time you see a joke about marriage, it’s about either his infidelity or hers or he’s no good, she’s no good, all the nagging connotations that go along with a marriage, a husband and wife. We hated that. We didn’t want to be that, and then we got married and we became that. We became a husband and a wife and all the things that go with it.

  I think the paperwork in marriage means more to women than it does to men. I’ve always felt that a marriage contract was in the minds of the people that did it and not on a piece of paper. A judge somewhere in some courthouse had no right over me and over my mind, over my thoughts and feelings for another person. That’s why, probably, they call me a rebel. I don’t believe that one person can judge another person’s actions. I don’t think a person should say, well, okay, you’re legally married or you’re legally divorced. That has to be between the two people, and Shirley and me were divorced in my mind. I had divorced myself from the Shirley situation, and that was good enough for me.

  Shirley was granted a divorce from me in Nashville on November 2, 1971, six months after Connie and I had our ceremony at the wedding chapel in Las Vegas.

  Connie being a Catholic could have presented obstacles that we couldn’t overcome in the eyes of her church, but our love was stronger than anything. All she asked of me was to agree that Paula Carlene—and Amy when she was born nearly two years later—be raised Catholic.

  In 1978 Connie and I had a second wedding. It was like a reaffirmation of our love and commitment. Our second wedding was held on June 10th in the Las Vegas home of Steve Wynne, who owned the Golden Nugget. When people asked why we wanted to get married again, Connie said it was to change the date of our anniversary.

  “Will is always working on his birthday,” she said.

  Connie came to Ridgetop before Christmas of 1969, as soon as Shirley left. Suddenly Lana, Susie, and Billy had not only a new stepmother but also a new sister, Paula Carlene.

  Connie and our baby arrived just in time to get into the middle of what our family has come to call the Great Ridgetop Shootout.

  My daughter Lana had gotten married at age sixteen to a country boy named Steve Warren who was in his middle twenties. They lived a few miles away with their kids. Steve and Lana stopped by Ridgetop one morning, but Lana stayed in the car. Susie went out to talk to her sister. After Steve drove Lana away, Susie told me Lana had two black eyes and bruises on her face. “Steve beat up Lana,” Susie told me.

  I ran for my truck and drove to the place where Steve and Lana lived and slapped Steve around. He really pissed me off. I told him if he ever laid a hand on Lana again, I would come back and drown his ass.

  No sooner did I get back to Ridgetop than here came Steve in his car, shooting at the house with a .22 rifle. I was standing in the door of the barn and a bullet tore up the wood two feet from my head. I grabbed an M-l rifle and shot at Steve’s car. Steve made one pass and took off.

  I drove straight back to Steve and Lana’s. Steve had come home and taken their son Nelson Ray and left again. He told Lana he was going to get rid of me as his top priority.

  Thinking Steve would come to Ridgetop to pick me off about dusk, I hid the truck so he couldn’t tell if I was home. We laid a trap for him. I had my M-l and a shotgun.

  He drove by the house, and I ran out the garage door. Steve saw me and took off. That’s when I shot his car and shot out his tire.

  Steve called the cops on me. Instead of explaining the whole damn mess, the beatings and semi-kidnapping and shooting and all, I told the officers Steve must have run over a bullet.

  The police didn’t want to get involved in hillbilly family fights. They wrote down what I told them on their report and took off. Then we turned back to the immediate problem of seeing to it that Steve wouldn’t mistreat Lana again.

  It was kind of an unusual introduction to our family, but Connie reacted like a real trouper. She’s a strong person, Connie is, really good and dependable. I admired the way she handled herself at the Ridgetop Shootout.

  My records still weren’t selling, and we had wrecked five cars in three months. Down in the basement of the Ridgetop house we had a crude little recording setup where the guys and I would get drunk and write songs day and night. The week of Christmas in 1969, Hank and I wrote “What Can They Do to Me Now?”

  On the night before Christmas Eve, I was at a party in Nashville when I got the news that the Ridgetop house had just burned to the ground. Connie and Paula Carlene were home when the fire broke out, but they were safe.

  It was a horror to see the smoking black skeleton and smell the burnt wood that sizzled in the water from the fire hoses.

  I ran into the smoking, stinking debris and kicked through the ashes until I found an old guitar case that contained two pounds of Colombian tea.

  I stuck the case under my arm and went back to the car and sighed with relief. In 1969, you could get life in prison for being caught by the law with one joint. In Louisiana you could get the death sentence.

  I was glad to find my stash before the authorities did.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Happy Valley Dude Ranch was closed for the winter, but Crash Stewart arranged for us to move the whole family there after the Ridgetop fire. Happy Valley is near the town of Bandera, about fifty miles west of San Antonio. The country is rolling hills and cedar trees and pure flowing creeks and springs bubbling out of the limestone everyplace. As spring came to the Hill Country, the land was a riot of wildflowers—bluebonnets, Indian paintbrush, desert willow, and primrose. The afternoon sky was bright pastel blue. The way mountains of white clouds built up above the hills, looking like snowy peaks, you could imagine you were in the Rockies.

  Connie and baby Paula and I moved into the ranch foreman’s house. The other kids and relatives and friends and the band and their families scattered out into clapboard guest cabins. The Happy Valley Dude Ranch was a great location for us. We had an Olympic-size swimming pool, tennis courts, stables, and a nine-hole golf course. Although I had batted the golf ball around a little before, it was living on the Happy Valley golf course that started my addiction to the game.

  I was reading Edgar Cayce, the healer and prophet. The poems of Kahlil Gibran made sense to me. Gibran said life on earth is a quest for returning to God.

  I started working on the Yesterday’s Wine album, though I wasn’t ready to record it then. Yesterday’s Wine was my first concept album, an album that tells a story. It’s about a guy—imperfect man—watching his own funeral and reviewing his life.

  Yesterday’s Wine starts off “Do
you know why you’re here?”

  Yes, there’s great confusion on earth, and the power that is has concluded the following:

  Perfect man has visited earth already and his voice was heard;

  The voice of imperfect man must now be made manifest

  And I have been selected as the most likely candidate.

  YES, THE TIME IS APRIL, AND THEREFORE YOU,

  A TAURUS, MUST GO.

  TO BE BORN UNDER THE SAME SIGN TWICE

  ADDS STRENGTH AND THIS STRENGTH, COMBINED WITH

  WISDOM AND LOVE, IS THE KEY.

  After the Yesterday’s Wine album came out a friend of mine got a call from a hippie fan in San Francisco who said, “I’m worried about Willie. He thinks he’s Jesus.”

  I got a kick out of that. Just last year one of those supermarket newspapers had a full-page story about the face of Jesus suddenly appearing on the outside wall of a grocery store in South America after a dramatic rainstorm. Hundreds of people came to pray to the image of Jesus, and some of the sick went away cured. A few days later, following another thunderstorm, a new figure appeared on the wall beside Jesus. It was Julio Iglesias.

  What had happened, the rain had washed off the coat of whitewash that had covered a poster for “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.”

  The supermarket headline said:

  THAT’S NOT JESUS—IT’S JUST OLD WILLIE

  Well, this imperfect man in Yesterday’s Wine was just old Willie. In the song “Goin’ Home,” it’s just old Willie who observes his own funeral and sings:

  The closer I get to my home, Lord, the more I want to be there.

  There’ll be a gathering of loved ones and friends, and you know I want to be there.

  There’ll be a mixture of teardrops and flowers,

  Crying and talking for hours

  About how wild that I was

  And if I’d listened to them, I wouldn’t be there.

  Well there’s old Charlie Tolk, they threw away the mold when they made him.

  And Jimmy McKline, looks like the wines finally laid him.

  And Billy McGray, I could beat any day in a card game.

  And Bessy McNeil, but her tears are real, I can see pain.

  There’s a mixture of teardrops and flowers,

  Crying and talking for hours

  About how wild that I was

  And if I’d listened to them, I wouldn’t be there.

  Lord, thanks for the ride, I got a feeling inside that I know you,

  And if you see your way, you’re welcome to stay ’cause

  I’m gonna need you.

  There’s a mixture of teardrops and flowers,

  Crying and talking for hours

  About how wild that I was

  And if I’d listened to them, I wouldn’t be there.

  I think it’s one of my best albums, but Yesterday’s Wine was regarded by RCA as way too spooky and far out to waste promotion money on.

  The Willie Nelson and Family album came out in 1971 and went into the dumper, commercially.

  I was in sort of the same situation I had been in ten years earlier. My band would fill a Texas dance hall. We were stars in Texas. But in Nashville, I was looked upon as a loser singer. They wouldn’t let me record with my own band. They would cover me up with horns and strings. It was depressing. But as some athlete said, I hung my head high.

  The Ridgetop house was rebuilt and we all traveled back to Tennessee.

  For the Country Music Association Awards party week in 1971, Harlan Howard arranged a guitar pulling at his house. The rules were simple—just singer and guitar on a stool in front of a gas-log fire in a big room full of record executives, songwriters, and disc jockeys.

  Naturally I had my favorite Martin guitar. I had already worn the hole in the body of the guitar because classical guitars like my Martin are not meant to be played with a pick. The hole looks soulful, but it’s just a hole. I didn’t have all the autographs on the guitar that night at Harlan’s because Leon Russell started the autographing two years later.

  I had been playing electric guitar early in the noisy beer joints. I had a Fender Telecaster and a Fender Stratocaster. Those Fenders had much smaller necks than a classical guitar. Baldwin then gave me a guitar and an amp. I still use the amp, an aluminum job made in 1951, but I busted the Baldwin guitar at John T. Floore’s one night. I sent the guitar to Shot Jackson in Nashville. Shot Jackson took out the guts, took out the pickup, and put them in a Martin classical guitar and set the whole bastard instrument up.

  I’ve got such a terrific tone out of this guitar because it was a good guitar to begin with and then putting all that electronic equipment in it just happened to work exactly right, and there is just enough beer spilled in the amplifier to give it the perfect tone for me. I’ve never changed guitars or amps since Shot fixed up this Martin for me.

  It came my turn to sing about two in the morning. The party had halfway thinned out. Most of the food was gone but there was plenty of booze. I climbed on the stool with my old Martin and sang all the songs I had written for a new album I called Phases and Stages. The concept is a look at marriage and divorce from the man’s point of view on one side and the woman’s point of view on the other. Considering the puzzlement with which Nashville had received Yesterday’s Wine, I didn’t know how this new concept album would go over. The song I started off with that night was “Bloody Mary Morning.”

  When I finally finished, a stranger came up and said, “I’m Jerry Wexler. We’re starting a country division at Atlantic, and I run it. I’d love to have the album you just sang.”

  I said, “I have been looking for you for a long time.”

  Jerry let me bring my own band in to play on my albums for the first time. Shotgun Willie came out first and sold more than any album I’d ever done. Phases and Stages followed and sold much better than Shotgun Willie. My third Atlantic album was The Troublemaker, mostly gospel songs, and by then the company had decided to drop country music and wouldn’t do any promotion.

  But I was long gone from Nashville by then. As soon as I signed with Atlantic, I moved back to Texas, looking for something like the Happy Valley Dude Ranch.

  First we had to pick a town for headquarters. We considered Houston. I even put a deposit on an apartment in Houston. But then I went up to Austin and looked around. My sister Bobbie was playing a gig at a piano bar on the top floor of an apartment building near the capitol. She and her husband Jack were living in Austin with their kids, Freddy, Randy, and Mike.

  The more I got to thinking, I liked the idea of living in Austin more than Houston. Who wouldn’t? Houston was too hot and too crowded. Austin was a very pretty place. My friend Darrell Royal was the football coach at the University of Texas, and he told me I’d be crazy not to move to Austin. He said Austin had a lot of people like me, brothers under the skin, and I would find it out.

  Austin had lakes and hills and plenty of golf courses, and it also had Big G’s and the Broken Spoke and other good halls to work.

  And Austin had a new redneck hippie rock and roll folk music country venue in an old National Guard Armory. They had painted the walls with portraits and scenes by Jim Franklin, Gilbert Shelton, Michael Priest, Jack Jaxon, and other Austin artists who were becoming well known in the hippie underground. My friends in Mad Dog Inc. had an office near the stage where they did “indefinable services for mankind.” The roof was hung with acoustic shields, and the crowd mostly sat on the floor like at the Fillmore in San Francisco.

  There was a strong Austin to San Francisco axis in those days. The towns reminded me of each other. If San Francisco was the capital of the hippie world at that time, then Austin was the hippie Palm Springs.

  This new Austin hall I’m talking about was sort of like San Francisco, but at the same time it was pure Austin.

  It was called the Armadillo World Headquarters.

  You need to understand what Austin was like when we moved there in late 1971 and rented an apart
ment on Riverside Drive.

  If you stand downtown and look west across the river to the limestone cliffs that rise up abruptly on the other shore, you are looking at the place where the West literally begins.

  The cliffs are a tall wall of rock that runs in an arc from Waco south to Del Rio. The old cotton economy of the South ended where it struck those limestone cliffs. Farther west beyond the cliffs is the Hill Country, which used to be the Comanche territory.

  Built on seven hills in a river valley where pure artesian water flowed from the rocks and with a mild climate and deer and other wild animals roaming through the oaks and cedars, Austin was like Palm Springs for the Comanche nation long before the Anglo real estate developers turned it into a town in 1840. Houston had been the capital of Texas until then. The brazen act of building a new capital right in the middle of the Comanche’s centuries’ favorite resort started the bloodiest Indian war in Texas history.

  You know the Indians lost, but it was hard to tell in Austin in the early seventies. A hell of a lot of young people wore feathers and beads and necklaces and bells and doeskin pants and skirts with fringes and moccasins and long hair and headbands.

  It was cheap living. Low taxes, no traffic to speak of. Billie Lee Brammer, who wrote The Gay Place, a novel about Austin, was legally blind without his glasses, but Billie Lee was forever taking a bunch of acid and losing his glasses and driving safely all over town in the middle of the night. Austin was a stable place that depended on the state government offices and five universities for much of its economy.

  There was no way to get rich in Austin. Only half a dozen houses in town would be allowed in Beverly Hills. People who did have money didn’t show it off. Car dealers and beer distributors were big socialites.

  You couldn’t legally walk around Austin smoking weed or eating acid or mescaline or peyote—dope was very much against the law in Texas—but it seemed like you couldn’t walk around Austin for very long without at least being offered a joint.

  Every few blocks in Austin you saw some new, unexpected vista—a Victorian house framed against the water and the purple hills, a pair of hawks circling above Mount Larsen, a Mexican family eating dinner on the front porch of a house painted pastel yellow with statues of Jesus and the Virgin in the front yard behind a little iron fence.