Willie

by Willie Nelson

  I kind of wished Mama and Daddy would get a divorce because they fought so much. I always figured if they could get away from each other and not be together, maybe that was the answer. In order to get divorced, Mama took us to Las Vegas. She had to be a legal resident for six months in order to be able to get the divorce. It was kind of exciting. I wasn’t very happy or anything, but it was something different. Mama was trying to make it, and she wasn’t doing a very good job of it. Where before it was her and Daddy fighting, now it was her being really depressed over them being broke up, so it didn’t solve anything, them breaking up, like I thought it would.

  Daddy was on the road and he had met Shirley and they were living together and Mama was really pissed at that and she wouldn’t let Daddy come around or bring Shirley or have anything to do with us for quite a long time. Shirley had supposedly been a friend. She and her husband socialized with Mama and Daddy. Mama hated Shirley more than if it had been anybody else, I think.

  Mama had a way of driving Daddy really to the edge. He was driven to the edge quite a lot. Mama had such a bad temper. She was always instigating the physicalness of the fight and putting him on the defense. With Shirley, I noticed later, it was the opposite. He’d get mad at her to the point of wanting to hit the walls and throw things and stuff, and she’d be on the defense.

  He wrote us a letter about life when he was with Shirley. That was during the time when Mama wouldn’t let us kids see him. Letters and Candygrams were basically our communication, other than his songs. The first song I remember him singing to me was “Red Headed Stranger.” I was about two, I guess. I can remember being in a crib and him singing that song. That’s my earliest memory of him.

  I’ll take you back to being in Nashville. About the time that Patsy Cline recorded “Crazy.” Soon after that, she was killed. I can remember the morning she was killed. I guess Mama and Daddy had already split up, because we were staying at a babysitter’s and Mama would come pick us up in the morning when she got through with work. And we watched the news that morning about Patsy Cline’s plane crash and Mama goes, you know if there’s one woman in the world I hated, it’s that Patsy Cline. So I can just remember that. That’s my memory of Patsy Cline, Mama saying if there’s one woman I hate, it’s Patsy Cline. I thought it was kind of cruel since she just died that day, but . . .

  I remember when we were in Houston and when Daddy was gonna sell “Family Bible.” I think it was when I must have been about four. Daddy came home and told me he had sold “Family Bible.” I just cried and cried and cried. You remember when you heard there was no Santa Claus? I felt like that. I wanted everybody to know that he wrote it, that it was his song. He told me it doesn’t matter whose name is on it, he wrote it, and he will always have wrote it, so not to worry. Some day he was gonna buy me so much stuff and some day we were gonna have as much land as far as we could see, and don’t worry about a thing, that this was just one song. So that was when I decided, well, ya know, he’s gonna be this big star. So that was when I started planning on being his secretary, when I was four years old. I groomed myself for years, to grow up and be his secretary. Worked out real well, too.

  I’ve seen him through many happy times. I remember when I had my son Nelson, I was sixteen and I woke up and Daddy was there in the room and Pop, his daddy, was there and Steve, my husband, was there. It was pretty nice. Daddy was beaming pretty good then. His first grandbaby. Who looked like this little bitty Indian papoose with a bunch of black hair and everything.

  Steve and I had started having fights. He beat me up. We had to go pick up the kids at Daddy’s house one night. He heard that I had been hurt. I had told Susie the truth, she told Daddy, Daddy and Connie came into our house. I’ll never forget Connie had on this white fur coat, it’s like this white full-length mink coat, and her white hair was striking and Daddy was flinging through the house in the fur coat that Shirley had bought him that made him look like a brown standard French poodle. Steve had broken out the plate-glass window and the door and the screen and the glass and all the crystal and everything, and it looked like a bomb exploded inside our house. Daddy comes in and he and Steve have a big fight. Daddy said to me, “Are you gonna stay with this son of a bitch or are you coming with me?”

  Steve was laying on the floor bleeding and crying, and Daddy, it seemed like he was doing pretty good. Steve had kept yelling, oh, don’t hit me, Willie, don’t hit me, Willie, I got anxiety, I got anxiety. In a way I felt sorry for him and I figured well, ya know, he’s all right tonight, and well, I’m gonna make this work. I had two kids and was just eighteen.

  By now, Mama and Daddy had become friends again. Mama had married after she and Daddy got the divorce. She had two more little boys during the time that I lived with her. We traveled around, we went to California and New Mexico. Gradually, she let Daddy call and then she let Billy live with Daddy, and then she let Susie and me visit him in the summertime and eventually one summer we just stayed with him in Nashville.

  Shirley was the lady of the house at the ranch at Ridgetop. We had chickens and pigs, it was a fun time. Shirley was doing a lot of writing with Daddy. At the time of the shootout, Mother was living with us in Ridgetop. She was working as a waitress in a truckstop where Steve’s mother was the cook and she had rode to work with Steve’s mother, who had to bring Mama home only she couldn’t bring Mama home to our house because it was all trashed out and Daddy’d just shot up Steve’s car in the front yard. So we had to have Mama come to Daddy and Connie’s house. Steve’s mother had to drive up in that territory and let Mama off and all the way over there she’s saying if they’ve hurt my Stevie, I’ll just kill somebody. And Mama says fuck your Stevie, and they get in a fight on the way over. So here’s Mama, she’s mad, she comes in, and there’s Connie, and there’s just a whole house full of people, and Steve drives by, and he’s shooting up the house. Mama’s running through the house screaming we’re gonna get killed, we’re gonna get killed. Connie tackles her in the hall and says get down, Martha, you’re gonna get killed. Bullets were flying everywhere. After everything was over and years passed, that was one of the funniest things I ever saw—crawling on my knees to see Connie tackling Mama who was running wildly through the hallways, yelling, we’re gonna get killed, we’re gonna get killed.

  Looking at the lights shining in the windows of Daddy’s cabin, I just remembered Mama getting me, about two or three years old, and pulling me in the light to look at shirts that Daddy had worn the night before to see if I could see the lipstick traces. Because she was saying lipstick was there and Daddy would say, Martha you’re crazy, there’s nothing there. She would get me in front of the window and say, Lana, do you see that lipstick? I’d always say no, Mama, I don’t see a thing. She’d get so mad.

  She used to send me to sit on his lap and ask him for more money when they were getting a divorce. She’d say tell your daddy that you need, that we need, that Mama needs more money. And I’d go say Daddy, Mama wanted me to tell you she needed more money.

  Listening to “Mr. Record Man,” I can remember when Mama and Daddy were getting a divorce, and this song was on his very first album. I remember playing the single over and over and over. When she was getting a divorce, Mama would play Ray Charles, all those really sad, sad songs—“Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “I Can’t Stop Loving You”—and she’d just cry and be depressed. She loved Daddy. I think she loved him maybe more than anybody else I’ve ever known him to be with. They really got along the worst of anybody I’ve ever seen him with. Mama heard Daddy singing “Mr. Record Man” on the radio. She knew the songs because they were written when they were together and were just now getting recorded as they were breaking up. He bought her a Cadillac in Nashville right before they got the divorce.

  The saddest I ever saw my dad was when his mother died.

  We tried to get to the funeral. Daddy had his Lear and Mount St. Helens had just erupted. His mother lived close to Mount Rainier, in Yakima, Washington, where the fun
eral was. We had to fly over Mount St. Helens. Weather forced us to land four hours away from the funeral. We radioed for a limousine to meet us. When we landed, the limo was two hours late.

  We missed the funeral oration, but they waited to bury her body until we got there. In a way it worked out just perfect for such a sad thing. There had been so many people, so much press earlier. When we got there nobody was in the whole funeral home except for us. It was about midnight. We had traveled for twenty-four hours. We had our own private ceremony, and that was the saddest I ever saw him, but then he started feeling a little better. He started feeling at peace, thinking about her, because she had been in terrible pain from cancer, so she was much better off. And we started laughing about her looking at us and watching us and we could hear her laughing at what we were doing and what we had on. We started back, two or three hours over the mountain, to the airport. The limousine catches on fire. We can’t go any further.

  In the limousine it’s me and Daddy and Connie and Aunt Bobbie and Jack and Mark and the limo driver. There was snow everywhere, and we saw a golden light way off in the distance and Mark said well, I’m gonna go for that light. He walked through the snow, through fields, over fences, having no idea where he was going. He finally got there and called the police. We had a police escort into the town where the airport was. We stopped and had breakfast with the officer in the patrol car and he had already called several of his friends to come meet him at the Denny’s and so it was like this big party in the town as we were leaving the airport. And we had a good laugh about how Grandma Harvey had probably staged the whole thing and how funny she thought it was for us to get stranded in the middle of the mountains in Washington in a snowstorm on the day of her funeral.

  Lana is Willie’s oldest daughter and longtime business associate.

  PART SEVEN

  On the Road

  Again

  On the Road Again

  On the road again

  I just can’t wait to get on the road again

  The life I love is makin’ music with my friends

  And I can’t wait to get on the road again.

  On the road again

  Goin’ places that I’ve never been

  Seein’ things that I may never see again

  I can’t wait to get on the road again.

  On the road again

  Like a band of gypsies

  We go down the highway

  We’re the best of friends

  Insisting that the world keep turnin’ our way

  And our way

  Is on the road again

  I just can’t wait to get on the road again

  The life I love is makin’ music with my friends

  And I can’t wait to get on the road again.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  We were rolling along the highway on Honeysuckle Rose aiming for Salt Lake City in the very early morning for a show at the Salt Palace. Out the window I could see patches of blue snow in the fields. Crowns of snow on the mountains looked like starched white nurse caps—like most musicians, I owe my life to nurses and waitresses—and the jagged rocks turned purple in the rising sun, like you might see in a Zane Grey novel or a good Western movie.

  From my mound of coats and blankets on the floor at the foot of my king-size bed in the rear of the bus, I could see Gator Moore sitting up straight at the wheel. Gator had been driving all night, since we left our last show at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles. It would be another six hours before we reached the Holiday Inn on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. I pulled the blankets closer around me in the cold. I could hear Kimo Alo, the Kahuna I had met in Maui, breathing in a deep sleep in my bed. My back was hurting. I had been to Kimo’s people in the mountains in Maui to treat my chronic ailing back, and what they did to me worked for a while. But on the road, my back started hurting again. I couldn’t get comfortable in my bed, so the Kahuna medicine man slept in my bed and I shifted around on the floor, as usual, aching and sore. It might sound like some kind of metaphor for show business that the doctor was in the bed and the patient was on the floor. But I had suggested Kimo sleep on the bed, told him I’d be happier on the floor. Hell, maybe it is a metaphor for show business.

  I had been up half the night prowling around Honeysuckle Rose, listening to a tape of our last show, playing computer golf, cleaning up. I was tired, but I was pumped up from the show. We had played our music with a lot of power and the crowd gave us their energy and love in return. That feeling really jacks me up. Friends like Dennis Hopper—so clean and straight these days he looks like a mad scientist preppie—joined us onstage for “Amazing Grace.” When Larry Gorham hustled me to the bus, I found out he and Gator had hidden it to avoid the after-show visitors. I didn’t really want to avoid anybody, but L. G. and Gator must have seen I was tired and hurting.

  My old friend Jan-Michael Vincent found me, anyhow, and we sat at the table on the bus and talked movie bullshit for a while. Jan and I are always just about to make a movie together, and I guess one day we will. Meanwhile, we swap a lot of good bullshit, and in honor of Jan’s visit and my aching back, we drank a few swigs out of a brown bottle of rare Sauza tequila and burned a joint that smelled like a cave where skunks went to die.

  So I was feeling mellow by the time Jan bailed out in his dark glasses and his limo, and our convoy got loaded—five buses of people and two semi-trucks of equipment. Gator drove Honeysuckle Rose down the winding hill through the lights of Burbank, and all seven vehicles took off rolling toward Salt Lake City.

  In the early morning now, after maybe two hours of sleep, I could hear the tires humming on the highway and feel Honeysuckle Rose singing with energy. I went up front to drink a cup of coffee and watch miles and miles of Utah roll past the window.

  It makes me feel good to gaze out the windows of the bus at the towns and signs and landscape going past. It’s like the other side of the feeling I got when I was a little kid and heard a railroad train whistling and rumbling into the distance in the middle of the night. This is what might have happened if you had ever really caught that mysterious midnight train.

  Most people have that fantasy of catching the train that whistles in the night. It’s a hunger for freedom, I guess, that holds in the heart. The last time I was on David Letterman’s TV show, the first thing he said was, “Willie, can I ride on your bus?” I told him sure he could, and I meant it, but he wouldn’t really do it, which probably is why he brought it up so fast.

  A couple of days ago, taping the Johnny Carson show in Burbank, we’d parked our bus convoy in the middle of the NBC lot at Universal, causing much comment. Johnny Carson had to work his way through the buses to slip his sports car into his own parking spot, which is right by the front door to the NBC studio.

  So on the show, the first thing Johnny talked about was the buses. The day before, one of his producers had phoned me at L’Ermitage in Beverly Hills and drilled me on the questions Johnny would ask. I remember one question was how did I handle female groupies. The producer said, “I guess you just get rid of them, huh?”

  I said, “Sure. I can do that.”

  But on the show, Johnny kept talking about the buses being the center of attention in Burbank that day, and how he could barely squeeze his car into the lot, and what a wild, free, glamorous kind of life it must be out there on the road rolling on the bus.

  He said, “How do you handle the groupies?”

  I said, “Well, I try to give them whatever I can.”

  That broke up Johnny, because he was expecting the answer about getting rid of them. It got a real big laugh everywhere, in fact. But, shit, it’s the answer I was going to give the producer, because it’s the truth.

  Whatever I can don’t mean what it used to.

  As I stood in the aisle, pouring a cup of coffee, my sister Bobbie was in the lower berth with her curtains shut. Honeysuckle Rose has two Pullman-type berths, except they’re big enough for a guy like Ray Benson, who’s 6′6″
, to stretch out in. There are color TVs at the foot of the mattresses and reading lights at the head. It is the bunk you should have had on the old midnight mystery train, for sure.

  With her curtains shut, I couldn’t tell if Bobbie was asleep. She might be looking out the window at miles and miles of Utah. Or possibly she was fingering chords on a practice keyboard she carries, working on a piece by Beethoven or Mozart, hearing it in her mind while her fingers touched the board. Bobbie is pure music. In her soul she is a spiritual Indian who vibrates music. My sister has put in about as many miles on the road as I have, playing her music.

  Traveling was always one of the things I was supposed to do in conjunction with music. The fact that my family sort of disintegrated when I was a youngster made it easy to become a gypsy whose home is wherever he finds his hat. The home that was Abbott faded away in my teens. I had a home wherever my mother was, or wherever my dad was, but they were the traveling kind, too. All of us in the family were constantly moving up and down the highway. Even my great-grandfather, Mama Nelson’s daddy, was a circuit preacher who rode the hills of Arkansas in a buggy and horse.

  I think everybody is looking for a home. It’s one of the strongest motivations in life. The movie Songwriter was about artists struggling for freedom against bankers and greed and the sometimes crooked rules of the music business establishment. But at bottom the character of Doc Jenkins that I played was looking for a home. Bud Shrake used to say he thought of Doc Jenkins as a boll weevil. Remember the Boll Weevil song? It was a big hit for Tex Ritter.

  “First time I see de boll weevil

  he’s settin’ on de chair;

  Next time I see de boll weevil

  he’s got alia his family dere . . .

  Jus’ lookin’ for a home, Boss,

  Jus’ lookin’ fora home.”

  This is a universal truth. It’s just as true for the old as the young. Chinese, Russians, Republicans, Mexicans, cowboys, university presidents, preachers, you name it, under the skin they’re all just like us country singers on the road—their hearts break, they know loneliness, they want love, they’re looking for a home.