Willie

by Willie Nelson

  The bullet went through the side of the sound truck and hit the CBS record representative in the leg.

  It was a couple of weeks before I saw Willie. He said, “Well, Tim, you want to talk about it?”

  I told Willie exactly what had happened.

  He listened and grinned and said, “Tim, I want you to negotiate all my contracts with CBS from now on.”

  Later that year I got a message: “Willie wants you to come to Austin and find a big warehouse that he and Leon Russell can turn into a club.” Willie got on the line and said, “I think we can get the Terrace Motor Inn, with the Opera House and convention hall.” We bought 14½ acres of ground, 218 apartments, the motel office (which I converted into the Backstage Bar), two swimming pools, three restaurants, and the Austin Opera House complex, a 54,000-square-foot building that had been a convention center. We paid $10,000 cash-with a note for $1,600,000.

  We founded a company called Southern Commotion—we used to say we were just in it for the commotion—and I asked Willie how he wanted to structure the organization.

  Willie tore off a piece of paper from a notepad and wrote “Southern Commotion . . . Tim O’Connor, President . . . Paul English, Vice . . . Willie Nelson, Secretary-Treasurer.”

  Then he scratched out the line with his name on it and said, “We don’t need one of them.”

  I didn’t feel I had the right to be a 50–50 partner. I wasn’t bringing much to the table except desire and unproven worth, whereas Willie was already famous and making big money. But Willie graciously insisted we be full partners.

  It was our understanding that I wouldn’t use his name negotiating with the bank to buy the Terrace unless absolutely necessary. Everything Willie was getting into—like buying the country club—when the seller would hear the buyer was Willie Nelson, the price would go from $400 an acre to $3,000.

  But the bank people got suspicious that I was just an imaginary character who just imagined Willie was a friend of his and just imagined Willie wanted to be involved.

  The head guy at the loan office said, “I need tangible proof that you’ve ever dealt with Willie Nelson.”

  So I threw that little piece of notepaper on his desk. My lawyer, Terry Bray, almost had a stroke. He kicked me under the table and tried to snatch the paper before the banker could see it.

  But that piece of paper got us the $1,600,000 loan.

  The paper is now in my safe in Montana, along with two wadded-up stock certificates.

  In 1978 we sold half our Terrace property and paid off three-quarters of the note. Then Willie had a changing of the guard and his new management decided to restructure our deal. They offered me stock that made Willie and me 75–25 owners.

  I took the stock certificates to Willie and said, “How do you want it to be?”

  He picked up the stock certificates, wadded them, twisted them, tried to tear them in half. You ever tried to rip twisted stock certificates in half? It’s like tearing the phone book.

  Willie hurled the certificates on the floor and said, “I don’t want to discuss this. We’re fifty-fifty partners. I signed a piece of paper and that’s all there is to it.”

  In 1978 I was in the hospital with cancer, could hardly stand up after the operation, when Willie came and said, “Get out of here. I’ve got a new project for you out at the Pedernales.” It’s been like that with one project or another, ever since.

  Willie poured millions of dollars into restoring the clubhouse and golf course, building the finest recording studio, repairing the condos, buying another 750 acres across the road where he built his cabin and his Western town. He’d say, “Well, this golf course is my Stardust album. The other 750 acres is my Red Headed Stranger album.” That’s a nice way to look at it.

  His cabin—I have to chuckle at that word, considering the artistic masterpiece it turned into—started as a one-room place with no electricity, no air conditioning, and no telephone. The phone company wanted $10,000 to run him a line, but he said, hell, he was hiding out up there, he didn’t need a phone. But the builders kept adding things, like a fireplace, running water, bathroom—and finally a telephone. Now the cabin has 3,500 square feet of deck alone, plus electricity and a satellite dish and a stable for his horses. It’s a monument to the builder’s handcrafted art—a 5,400-square-foot cabin. The panoramic view across the Hill Country is the most beautiful I’ve seen anywhere in the Southwest, maybe even in the whole world. Willie has lived in some beautiful places—his house on Maui, his house in the Rockies in Colorado—but his cabin at the Pedernales might be the greatest of all. He’s locked away from the world by fences, way up on top of the hill at a place even his close friends know not to phone him unless it’s an emergency—and if he gets cabin fever he can be at his country club in five minutes or in downtown Austin in half an hour. We all respect his desire for privacy when he goes to his cabin.

  Like Willie says, “If you need me, I’ll call you.”

  In the ten years we’ve been partners, Willie has never once given me a direct order. Never once has he told me, “Damn it, I want this done now.” He gave me the opportunity to make a lot of mistakes but to keep working on getting things right. So I constantly think: how would Willie want it? I observe his actions as my guidelines. I know, well, Willie wouldn’t want me to do this or this because he doesn’t treat people this way.

  He’s never lost his temper with me, and I’ve given him a lot of opportunities to do so. When he does get mad his eyes go steely cold black, his face tenses, his body tenses, his wording becomes short and direct—a slow burn, ready to explode and strike out. He doesn’t like himself this way, doesn’t like to be put in situations that inspire anger. He feels he should be more in control than to use anger to express his emotions. Willie is the deepest bunch of water I’ve ever known.

  Quite honestly, he gives me chills constantly with his insight. He can be in a room with sixty of his best friends, and each one feels Willie is really with him above all. He’s always introduced me to everybody wherever we went, even when I was in no condition to be introduced. With Willie, friendship is for life and he trusts his friends completely. It can be a heavy weight to carry that much trust, but if you do it’s very rewarding.

  He’s not just a songwriter, a singer, a musician. He’s on the National Council of Theologians. He’s read everything important by every important writer. He’s a statesman of sorts. If he wanted to be an evangelist of the Jim Bakker approach, he could raise so much money you could cover Texas eight feet deep with it. But that is the opposite of Willie’s kind of message. I love to hear him talk about Christ or the universe, the big things in life. I guess it’s like listening to the pope, except the pope is boring.

  You know how in the sixties we all wanted to go to the mountain-top to search for the meaning of existence? Willie is sitting on that mountain. I don’t think his music is as important to him as it used to be. I know the road and the stage are not as big in his life now. He’s in the act of finding himself, and we all may be very surprised what he does in the next few years.

  Sometimes I wish his name wasn’t Willie Nelson. It’s probably selfish on my part, but it would really be neat to know him without him being a superstar. I wish his name was just Willie Jones.

  Of course, then he’d probably be a blues singer.

  TOMPALL GLASER

  When I first met Willie at the Grand Ole Opry in the early sixties, it was a very frustrating period in our business. I would see Willie passing backstage, or jamming with Buddy Emmons and Hank Cochran and the boys over at Tootsie’s. Nearly everybody realized how good Willie was, but the people who ran the music industry in Nashville would just keep saying, “Well, I don’t know if Willie is country or not. Is Willie country? Because if he ain’t country, then this stuff he sings won’t get played on the country music stations. If he don’t get played on the country music stations, he won’t make money for us. And if he don’t make money for us, the hell with Willie Nelson. Who needs him
?”

  It was such a major concern—are you country enough for Nashville? If you didn’t fit in, if you didn’t do their idea of country material whether it suited your sound or not, then you weren’t worth a dime. That’s how it was.

  Willie finally took off and went back home to Texas for good. Waylon and I would fly down to Texas to catch a Willie show and just be amazed at the enthusiastic crowds he was drawing. But still the record company bosses couldn’t make up their minds about him.

  When I heard Atlantic Records was closing their Nashville office, I realized that since Willie had a contract with Nashville Atlantic, he would be out of a label. I thought that was the biggest mistake Atlantic could make, pulling out, because Atlantic had looked like the only door that was open to our kind of music. So I went to New York and got an appointment with the head of the label to talk to him about the Nashville office and mainly about Willie.

  I’m sitting in this guy’s office in New York, pleading our case. He pushes a button. A well-known producer sticks his head in the office. This guy says, “Tompall thinks we ought to keep Willie Nelson on our label. What do you think?”

  The producer shook his head. No.

  But Willie went right on making music, cutting tracks all over the place, music just flooding out. It was called outlaw music: music that didn’t get played on country stations because it didn’t fit the format.

  Hazel Smith worked for me at the time, doing promotion and publicity, and she picked up on this “outlaw” angle and really started hitting it hard. The publicity was pushed to extremes that I found a little embarrassing, but at least it got recognition for our kind of music.

  Jerry Bradley got the idea to put us “outlaws” together on an album. We chased Willie down and got him in on the project. Waylon was much easier to find. Waylon’s idea of being low-key is to drive an orange Cadillac convertible with a white top and a Continental kit on the back. We always say, if you want to find Waylon, hire a helicopter and go up and fly around, and you’ll see him.

  Waylon wouldn’t do it unless Jessi Colter, his wife, was on the album. I don’t think Jessi was really an “outlaw” but there was an awful lot of talk about Waylon and Willie and me being outlaws. They made it sound like we were the Three Musketeers.

  We took a bunch of old tracks and combined them with some new songs written for the album, added a guitar here, some harmony there—and suddenly we had an album called Wanted: The Outlaws. It was released by RCA in 1976 and immediately went platinum—sold more than a million albums.

  It was named Album of the Year by the Country Music Association. “Good Hearted Woman” won best single record, and Waylon and Willie were selected for the Vocal Duo of the Year Award. “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” was on that album.

  Everybody rushed to buy the Outlaws album: rock and rollers, kids, lockjaw types from the East, people who’d never bought a country album in their whole lives bought that album. All of a sudden we were a big hit and we had to deal with it. So we put together the Outlaw Tour. We did eighteen dates in California, Texas, Oklahoma. We didn’t go East.

  Waylon and I traded off nights closing. The nights Willie would close, me and my boys would go back to the hotel early, change our clothes, change our attitudes—and on our way out of town we could hear Willie still on stage picking. They’d have to pull the plug on him if they wanted him to stop. He’d just keep playing and playing until his fingers would bleed. He really loves to play, and the crowds love him for it.

  People came out to hear our outlaw shows like they were rock concerts. All at once we were in coliseums and stadiums, we had tractor-trailer trucks and a huge overhead.

  Ultimately, I think the outlaw movement or publicity or gimmick or whatever you want to call it did a great thing for country music as a whole, because it opened the way for different styles. There are much broader opportunities now than there were ten or twelve years ago. I hope people remember that it all started with Willie, who always insisted on doing his own kind of music regardless of what the record companies wanted and regardless of the popular styles. All he ever wanted was to do his music and do it right.

  BILL WITTLIFF

  When I was hired to do a rewrite of the Honeysuckle Rose script, I phoned Willie and said I’d love to come out to his ranch on Fitzhugh Road in Dripping Springs and jawbone with him about life on the road. I knew Willie pretty well by then because we had already been working on making the Red Headed Stranger album into a movie—which was to take another six or seven years to happen, though we didn’t imagine it would be so long at the time.

  Reading the script of Honeysuckle Rose, I thought it lacked a sense of what it meant to be a country musician on the road. I asked Willie, “Do you ever get vulnerable when you’re on the road?”

  Willie looked at me like I was from Mars.

  I said, “When the concert is over and the parties are over, don’t you get lonely?”

  Willie said, “There’s always a woman.”

  “Don’t you need more than a woman? Don’t you ever pick up the phone and call Connie and say, ‘Why don’t you fly down and join me for a couple of days’?”

  Willie looked at me funny, like my questions weren’t registering.

  “Do you know where wives come from?” he said. “Wives come from the fourth row. You see, when you’re on the stage singing, you make eye contact about the fourth row. There’ll be some pretty lady there and you sing to her. After the show you have somebody invite her backstage. All the guys are enormously friendly to her, light her cigarettes, open the doors for her, say yes ma’am.

  “So you invite her on the bus and she thinks this is the most romantic thing in her whole life. This goes on for about three months—or until you marry her, whichever comes first. Suddenly nobody lights her cigarette or opens her door or pays her the slightest damn bit of attention any more.

  “She starts thinking, God, I’ve got to get off the road, this is horrible, I want a house and a place to sit. You buy her a house and a chair. She’s so damn happy to have a roof over her head and a place to sit that for a while she doesn’t care what you do. You’re gone on the bus, but it’s okay with her.

  “This lasts about three more months. Then it all turns to shit. She’s sitting there thinking, isn’t this wonderful, I’ve got this lovely roof over my head, this comfortable chair to sit in. It would be really perfect if that sorry no-good son of a bitch out on the road was sitting here with me.”

  We stayed up all night talking.

  I had a date with Willie for the next morning. When I called, Billy Cooper told me, “Willie ain’t here. What the hell did you all talk about last night? The minute you left, he grabbed his bag and took off for Colorado to see Connie.”

  I got fired from Honeysuckle Rose because the producer and director had different notions from mine about what a musician’s life was like.

  Willie phoned and said, “Do you have any other scripts in your trunk?”

  I took him the script of Barbarosa. I told him it was about a blood feud between this old cowboy and a family of Mexicans who cut his ears off. Willie opened the script and read two pages.

  He shut it and said, “I want to be this guy.”

  Honeysuckle Rose hadn’t come out yet and Willie was a hot actor. We made a deal to co-produce Barbarosa. I could see that Willie wanted desperately to learn to be a movie actor, but he wasn’t getting much constructive help from his directors so far. They mainly told him where to stand and where to walk and left the emotional content and the techniques up to him.

  When we finally decided to do Red Headed Stranger as a low-budget independent film—after years of chasing around with the studios who claimed we needed Robert Redford and a $14 million budget (about seven times more than we eventually shot it for)—I signed on as the director, and Willie and I went to work.

  It was exciting. We learned together. I had a TV camera in my office, and Willie and I would read scenes, record them, a
nd study them. I found if you told Willie what you wanted in a scene, by God he’d give it to you and illuminate it.

  Willie has always had a fixation with Red Headed Stranger. The album turned him into a national figure. It is a very religious tract. Take Willie’s history with wives and women. If one believes in reincarnation, there was probably a lifetime where he killed a wife. Willie’s relationships with women don’t work out well. He has a fear that to be a husband is to be owned—and Willie certainly does not want to be owned. I think this is why Willie has such a fascination for outlaws—this determination to go ahead with his own ideas despite advice to the contrary by people who are supposed to be experts.

  It would not at all surprise me if Willie becomes a more private person in the near future, in the sense that he’ll actually spend time by himself writing songs again. For the last ten years or so, his need has been to be a singer and an actor more than a writer. But Willie is primarily a poet. When he reaches deep into the well of his soul, he comes up with a bucket of pure water.

  JIM WIATT

  At three o’clock on a Thursday afternoon in February 1978, I found myself walking along the deck toward Willie Nelson’s condo on the water in Malibu. I didn’t know Willie. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. After managing John Tunney’s Senate campaign and losing a tough one, I had gotten out of politics and gone into show business as an agent. I had been an agent for exactly two years and three months, didn’t know shit about the movies. But I had been bugging Jan Michael Vincent and Gary Busey to introduce me to Willie, because I loved the Red Headed Stranger album and thought it would make a terrific film.

  I remember realizing I was wearing a white three-piece suit as I walked toward Willie’s door. Well, maybe the color was closer to beige, but it was definitely a three-piece suit. I could imagine Willie with his beard and earring squinting at me and saying, “Who the fuck is this guy in the ice cream suit?”