Finally somebody broke up the fight. It turned out that the last time I’d played Phoenix a few months earlier, the band had been out with this guy’s wife. She went home and told him she’d been with me.
Barroom brawls are something I try to avoid. I know my temper has always been a problem, whether I inherited it or developed it. Having a hot temper is like being an alcoholic, you always know it’s there. I don’t like to get mad. It makes me feel terrible. I am not pleasant to be around when I get mad. People actually get up and leave the room. Anger and anguish are basic emotions everybody feels. I’m sure I’ll always feel them, but I hope it’s for more important reasons than just to get pissed off. I guess life is a continual process of trying to wise up.
Honeysuckle Rose and our caravan rolled into the outskirts of Salt Lake City early in the afternoon. The buses parked in the alley and around the corner. The Holiday Inn had a swimming pool indoors, so the lobby and the bar were kind of warm and humid.
Darrell Wayne English, Paul’s son and our tour coordinator, had already checked me and Bobbie in under an alias. She went to her room. The guys in the band drifted to the bar beside the swimming pool inside the hotel. We had the night off. The pleasures of Salt Lake City beckoned to the band and the crew—fellows with imagination.
In my room, I switched on CNN on the TV and ordered a cheeseburger and a glass of tea from room service. I checked through a dozen phone messages. All of them were from people who knew enough to find me, and most of them I should call back.
The room service kid took the lid off my cheeseburger and unpeeled the plastic wrapper off my glass of tea. He acted pretty suave.
Day after tomorrow the band would be at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. I would be in a suite as big as a house. I knew the Caesar’s Palace suite well—I like washing my jeans in the bathtub there and hanging them out the window to dry in the desert wind.
The toughest spot to work up a frenzied exchange of energy with the crowd is Las Vegas. Most of the people who come to the big dinner shows when I work on the Strip are just glad to be sitting down. They’ve been standing at the slot machines all night, or losing at the tables. What they want is a couple of hours of rest and relaxation. If they get to eat something and hear some music, so much the better. Mainly, though, they’re trying to get off their damn feet.
A Las Vegas dinner-show crowd is not a rock and roll crowd, that’s for sure. In his heyday, when he was really hot, there was an explosion of energy between Elvis and his audience. I wasn’t a wild fan of Elvis’s, but put the man onstage doing his music, and you got something more powerful than the sum of its parts. You got magnetism in action. Maybe it was sexual, I don’t know, but if ever a performer could get up onstage and turn a crowd into crashing waves of energy, it was Elvis.
Yet Elvis couldn’t really whip up a Las Vegas dinner-show crowd on a regular basis. I went to see Elvis one night on the Strip and I slipped in at the back of the room and listened a minute and thought: what is going on here? There was Elvis up there working his ass off, and the crowd was just kind of politely exhausted. They clapped and whistled, but you couldn’t feel them giving anything back. I felt like jumping on top of a table and yelling, “Hey, everybody, that’s Elvis Presley up there! You should be jumping up screaming.”
But the crowds in Las Vegas are normally not screaming crowds. Las Vegas is the place where you make more money than you do anywhere else, but it’s not the place where a performer is the most appreciated.
When I finished my cheeseburger and tea and made a few of my phone calls in the room at the Holiday Inn, I sneaked back out to Honeysuckle Rose and put some ballads on the tape machine and drank a couple of beers to make me sleepy and burned one down and crawled into Bobbie’s bunk and shut the curtains. It was cold, so I pulled the blankets around me and snuggled up. I felt like a kid camping out, real cozy and nice. Maybe my back wouldn’t start hurting.
For all you fellow pilgrims, here is my list of statements to watch out for on your journey:
THE 60 GREAT LIES ON THE ROAD
1. The booking is definite.
2. Your check is in the mail.
3. I promise not to come in your mouth.
4. We can fix it in the mix.
5. This is the best dope you’ve ever had.
6. The show starts at eight.
7. My agent will take care of it.
8. I’m sure it will work.
9. Your tickets are at the door.
10. It sounds in tune to me.
11. Sure, it sounds fine at the back of the hall.
12. I know your mike is on.
13. I checked it myself.
14. The roadie took care of it.
15. She’ll be backstage after the show.
16. Yes, the spotlights will be on you during your solos.
17. The stage mix sounds just like the program mix.
18. It’s the hottest pickup I could get.
19. The club will provide the P.A. and the lights.
20. I really love the band.
21. We’ll have lunch sometime.
22. We’ll have it ready before tonight.
23. If it breaks, we’ll fix it free.
34. We’ll let you know.
25. I had nothing to do with your marriage breaking up. Your marriage was on the rocks long before I ever met you.
26. The place was packed.
27. We’ll have you back next week.
28. Don’t worry, you’ll be the headliner.
29. It’s on the truck.
30. This coke hasn’t been cut.
31. My last band had a record deal, but we broke up before recording the album.
32. Someone will be there early to let you in.
33. I’ve only been playing for a year.
34. I’ve been playing for twenty years.
35. We’ll have the flyers made tomorrow.
36. I’m with the band.
37. The band gets free drinks.
38. You’ll get your cut tonight, no problem.
39. He’ll work the door tonight for us.
40. You’ll have no problem fitting that speaker cabinet in your trunk.
41. There will be lots of roadies when you get there.
42. I know we’ll get some applause after the next tune.
43. We’ll have more than enough time for a sound check.
44. This is one of Jimi’s old Strats.
45. We’ll definitely come see you play tonight.
46. You can depend on me.
47. You won’t have to play any requests.
48. We have this great gig in Vegas next month.
49. The other band will be glad to let you use their P.A.
50. I am singing on key, the P.A.’s screwing up.
51. Sounds good to me.
52. You won’t have any trouble finding the place.
53. I’ve played there before.
54. We can turn the volume down if it’s too loud.
55. I just use this little amp for small gigs. I’ve got a Marshall stack at home.
56. This tour itinerary you can count on being correct.
57. You only have to do two sets.
58. The laundromat is just around the corner.
59. Best party club in town. Go check it out.
60. The guy with the dope will be here in twenty minutes.
The Chorus
DUDLEY (BUDROCK) PREWITT
When I first went on Willie’s payroll, the production crew rode in a station wagon. Now we have our own bus.
My job is to do all the advance work and scheduling of the trucks and my crew. I negotiate the sound and light packages. By that I mean I communicate with Mark Rothbaum’s office in Connecticut and find out what the dates are in advance so I can get a fair deal for the sound and light equipment we need to rent. I’ll design a lighting plot, for example, and Fed-X it to four different lighting companies and then take bids on the telephone to get the best price. I
keep in touch with Paul about it, but he pretty much leaves it up to me.
That is before the tour starts. The real fun part of the job is doing the lights during the shows.
I use seven or eight colors and there are seven or eight people onstage I have to cover with lights. I can do general washes and throw special colors on one person, change to different looks. I call it accenting the mood.
Take a simple number like “Georgia.” It starts with Jody Payne doing a little guitar intro, and I highlight him with a flesh pink which comes up when the rest of the stage is dark. It’s very quick and subtle. Then, boom, spotlights hit Willie as he sings. Then I change the color scheme again, directing the attention, helping create the mood. We may have lavender lights on stage right and stage left, maybe light blue on the sides, and a different color—an amber spot—on Willie to make him stand out.
Willie sings along and I add subtle bumps and looks, then Willie fades out. Boom, hit Mickey for his harmonica solo. I go to a straight red on Mickey, but his next solo I don’t use red on him again. Don’t want to identify Mickey with nothing but red. At the end of Mickey’s solo, Mike Garvey hits the echo on his sound board. I bounce a different color, bop it, pop it to white, and then I add Willie in there, and Mickey gets his applause and slowly fades out. Then it’s back to Willie. And you give a soft highlight to Mickey as the song ends.
That’s a simple one, four cues. We use fourteen cues on some numbers. A couple of songs are just one cue—the opening cue on Willie and let him do it. But there we are, maybe 200 feet from the stage directing the attention of the crowd to the musicians. The average person who goes to the show wouldn’t have any idea from a distance which one was playing the guitar unless he’s accented by the lights.
Every night Willie comes out onstage, he’s going to have the exact same sound, the exact same microphone, the exact same monitors, the exact same lights. We put a carpet down, and it’s just like a living room. The only thing that might change from night to night is the way Willie enters the stage.
He comes off his bus and he may have to go up the center back, center of the stage, or right side of the stage. We got a place called the “Grady Gap,” which is between Bobbie on the piano and where Grady Martin stands with his guitar. Willie comes through the Grady Gap, or maybe around the side of Mickey Raphael. Once Willie hits the stage, he could be like Ray Charles. He could be blind and still know he’s got eight feet between the end of his microphone and his amps. He can keep his eyes on the crowd, take two steps and hit a knob on his amp and never miss it. Unless Jody Payne sees him coming and hits it for him first. It pays off in satisfied audiences. At a Willie show the band is not irritated by a bad sound system that makes them lose their timing or their feeling. It makes everybody real comfortable to know what to expect.
RANDY (POODIE) LOCKE
We were a beer joint band in the beginning, and we’re still a beer joint band—because in a heartbeat we’d go back to the beer joints and be just as happy.
We were doing a tour of the South fifteen years ago, alternating opening the show with Poco. We’d play our gig and drink all night and chase women and shit and get up at noon and roll six hours and show up at the next gig at eight. Poco would have done two sound checks and lifted their three split-level risers into place and be wondering where we were—and here would come thirteen Texas yahoos piling out of buses and trucks at the last minute. Willie and the band would walk onstage and just blow Poco away. It killed those Poco guys. After Atlanta, they quit the tour. Their road manager told us, “Hey, we like you guys, but we can’t work with you because you ain’t professional. You guys are never gonna make it in this business.”
We do things a lot different now. We’re organized, calmer, saner, use tons more equipment, try to arrive at the gig with plenty of time to set up. But the spirit is the same. We’re still a bunch of Texas yahoos.
People would get on our bus in the old days and change their lives. They’d come back speaking strange languages. We were crazy then. We’re crazy now, but back then we had no regard for anything. We didn’t hurt anybody, we were just wild. Our only rule was, we had no rules. And if there’s no rules, there ain’t no penalties. Now we do have rules and penalties—a sign of progress, I suppose. Country bands didn’t have large road crews in the old days. We’d run in and play the show, check the money, and rumble. We can’t really do that any more, because things have gotten too big. But if the time should come when we cut way back and start playing the beer joint circuit again, we’re ready.
We’re not like a lot of music people who get greedy because they’ve got a good living coming in. That’s what’s so fucked about the show-business industry. Greed just kills people. One of the things I regret about this whole business is meeting certain stars that I’ve looked up to and finding out most of them are just turds in a punchbowl. They’ll try to screw you just to keep in practice. They’ll quibble over $50 so hard they lose a $100,000 contract.
I was never in business on Wall Street, but the fucking entertainment business is the nastiest I ever heard of. I think the movies are nastier than records. It’s hard to say. But if anybody ever walked through a fucking war zone without a scratch, it’s Willie. He cruises through it, smiling and unscathed. Paul walks a little in front in the jungle to keep the branches from snapping back and hitting Willie in the face, and the rest of us work our asses off to be sure when Willie reaches the stage he’s as safe and comfortable as in his own living room.
If Willie could see all the shit that goes on behind him, he might get upset. But he has created the situation where he goes onstage and performs, and it’s up to us to make sure he ain’t bothered. We have to do the miraculous pretty often, but that’s what Willie has come to expect and that’s what he gets.
The first few years I worked for Willie, I hardly talked to him. Because when I was a kid in Waco, he was to me the greatest, an immortal, a guy that don’t shit between his shoes. It was like working for John Wayne. I was scared to approach him. I had worked for some big acts before, and some of them were just total assholes. They’d blow their money on drugs and whores and let their crews rot. But Willie has always taken good care of his crew and expects the same in return. Our guys get their own rooms at hotels, where some stars put four to a room. We all play golf together on the road. So we draw the crème de la creme, the best engineers, the guys who do the Rolling Stones and the Who and the Beach Boys, they want to work for Willie.
It’s like a big machine when we hit the road. You got to keep everything moving, don’t throw the rhythm off. People who don’t do it right don’t last long. We have worn out a lot of people. The strong survive, and the weak fall by the way. We travel now with five buses and two trucks, plus a motor home for Bo and Scooter Franks who sell the T-shirts and caps and such as that. One bus is for Willie and Bobbie. The next is the business bus—that’s the one with Paul English, who is the business head of the operation and either number one or number two in command of the whole caravan, depending on how you want to look at it. I ride on that bus with Paul and Paul’s son Darrell Wayne, the tour coordinator, and Larry Gorham, who’s in charge of security. Larry—we call him L.G.—is a Hell’s Angel from San Jose. The stage crew rides on Paul’s bus, where the important decisions are made about the tour.
The third bus is the band bus—Bee Spears, Jody Payne, Grady Martin, Mickey Raphael, and Billy English, Paul’s brother, who plays percussion. Bee is third in command of our outfit. The fourth bus is the Animal House. That’s where Buddy Prewitt, our production manager, is in charge of the sound and lighting guys like Mike Garvey and David Selk and Tommy the Tuner (Tom Hawkins)—who tunes Bobbie’s piano and the guitars—and others. The wild, rowdy shit that most people think happens on every bus mostly happens only in the Animal House. The fifth bus is for the Wrangler folks and their guests. The two forty-eight-foot semi-trucks are crammed with equipment. We all roll together, partly for safety’s sake. Trucks rolling alone full of exp
ensive equipment have been known to get hijacked. Waylon has lost a truck, Alabama has lost two trucks. It can get dangerous out there.
When the caravan pulls into town to do a gig, the first thing we have is the rigging call. A rigger is a guy who crawls up the beams to the stress points of the building and connects the cables to hang our sound system and lights over the stage. They can drop a chain down 90 feet from the ceiling—250 feet at the Superdome—and hit an X on the floor. Our big amps weigh 1,000 pounds each, so you don’t want them crashing down. A rigger can kill you. Buddy likes to have the rigging call at 10 A.M. Buddy and Mike Garvey oversee this part of it. Buddy is lights, Mike is sound. The lights go in an hour after the rigger because lights take longer to put up than sound. Two hours later they fly the amps and put the monitors onstage. They lay carpet on the stage and hang our big Texas and U.S.A. flags. By then it’s about 3 P.M. That’s when me and the stage crew—Paul’s bus—come in. We set the amp lines and the band gear. First up is Bobbie’s grand piano, which Tommy proceeds to tune. We polish and tune the guitars, set up the drums. If all goes well, we’re ready by 5:30 P.M. We eat at six. The band gets there at seven for an eight o’clock show. And Willie comes in right as the show starts. Boom, boom, he’s singing “Whiskey River.”
After the show if we’re running to another town, we do it all in reverse, but we do it in a couple of hours. The two forty-eight-foot semi-trucks are loaded, the buses rendezvous—and we roll.
Before we got so big we’d travel in station wagons. I had a battery TV that I’d put in my lap and the guys would crowd around to watch the football game or whatever. I guess that’s one way we really became like a family, as far as I’m concerned.
Mickey was real skinny then and didn’t take much room. Mickey the kid. Mickey Meskowich, we called him. Half Mexican and half Jewish. A great harmonica player, but he’d drive you crazy asking questions constantly. One day we thought we figured out a way to shut him up for a while. Me and Bee and some others each threw $100 on the table, maybe $500 in all. We told him, “Meskowich this jackpot belongs to the one who can go the longest without asking a question.”
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