Willie

by Willie Nelson

  Mickey said, “Hey, that’s great. When do we start?”

  We bought an old bus from Dolly Parton and Porter Waggoner. Bee’s daddy—he called him O.M., for Old Man Spears—and Baby Earl, who’s a carpenter, remodeled the bus. They gutted the thing, tore out the front two bedrooms to make a lounge, ripped the bathroom out. Suddenly we had to run back on the road and had no bathroom. What we did was find a big red funnel and attached a coat hanger to it. You’d hook the coat hanger on your belt loop because it was so rough in the back of the bus you had to use both hands to hang on to the wall while you was pissing in the funnel. One night Bee sneaked into the room where the funnel was and nailed the door shut behind him and went to sleep. Willie got a knife and cut the door open, pissed in the funnel, and took the hammer and nailed the door shut again with a two-by-four. Bee never woke up.

  O. M. got a good deal on a bunch of ugly-ass blue shag carpet. He covered the floor and padded the walls of the lounge with it, and that became our Blue Room. We had a driver named Maynard Lutz. We called him Homer Bounds—you know, homeward bound?

  Paul designed a new bus for us. It was covered with quarter-inch steel, half-inch steel plate by the door, two drop safes, bulletproof glass, like a fucking armored car. Named it Pauletta. Paul ordered it to sleep seven, but before it was finished we had nine. We’d carry our gear in the back and strap the rest of it on top. It was red and black velvet inside, like a rolling whorehouse. By the time it was ready to roll, fucking Pauletta was too heavy to drive on most roads. We just parked it at the Austin Opera House and it sat there forever.

  One of our old buses was called the Tube. It got bizarre on the Tube. We had as many as thirty-two people riding on the Tube at times—our guys, Waylon’s guys, Tompall Glaser’s guys, Hell’s Angels, Hank Cochran, Bonnie Bramlett. You talk about a bunch of gypsies. When we did the Outlaw Tour, we expanded to two buses because Bobbie needed her own space to escape from all the shit on the Tube. You’d get on the Tube and there’d be ten people in the front lounge, people sleeping sideways in the aisles. Mickey and Bee and I would go scratch on the door of Bobbie’s bus, and ask if she could find us a place to sleep. On the Tube, Bee made a rule that the last person still awake would get the best place to sleep—so Bee usually tried to stay up the longest.

  We finally sold the old gold-and-black Tube to Beast, who Willie hired as our traveling chef. Beast tricked up the Tube like a big kitchen. He was a good cook, but he was a Yankee and none of us is Yankees. I love veal parmigiana and I love pasta, but Beast baked everything. I swear to God, he even baked black-eyed peas in aluminum tins. Everybody knows you got to eat grease to make a turd. The whole band was plugged up from eating baked food. I almost went to blows with Beast over iced tea. I mean, how hard is it to make iced tea? Even after I showed him how, he couldn’t do it. Beast was a good guy, but he never fit in.

  In the beginning nobody’s job had a title or an official salary that went with it. Nobody was hired, you just kind of came along at the proper time. The organization wasn’t conceived, it happened. Willie would reach in his pocket and hand you a wad of walking-around cash. Willie has no respect for money, see. That’s why his cash is always wadded up.

  I guess you’d call me the stage manager. My job is like a combination of a foreman, a referee, a cutting horse, a body guard, and a psychiatrist.

  We used to play a lot of dumps like the Palomino and the Troubadour in L.A., the Boarding House in San Francisco, Gilley’s in Houston, the Rio Pall Mall in Longview, Big G’s in Round Rock, Panther Hall in Fort Worth, the Longhorn Ballroom and the Sportatorium in Dallas. The only thing you could expect was the unexpected. We played Panther Hall one night in summer when it was hot as shit and the promoter wouldn’t spend the money to turn on the air conditioning. It was so fucking hot the guitars warped. Everybody in the band—except Bobbie, of course—played stripped to the waist. At the Sportatorium the promoter, Gino McCoslin, used to oversell the place every time. To solve that problem Gino hung signs that said MEN’S ROOM over the exit doors. Guy would go in to take a piss, and bam, he’s locked outside. He’d hammer on the door and yell, “Let me in, my wife’s in there!” And Gino would say, “Fuck you, buddy, we’re sold out.”

  Gilley’s was the all-time worst. I hate that fucking place. On the stage, your back is to the wall with no exit. You’ve got to go down the side and out the corner. The stage is only a few feet off the floor. We’ve played plenty of rough fucking beer joints, but we’d do a gig at Gilley’s and come out with bruises and cuts and our shirts torn. People would be fist fighting in the crowd. Gilley’s is a fucking skull orchard. You look out there at the crowd in that dim light and it’s like a melon patch. People throwing shit. They could shoot each other without us even knowing.

  One night in the midseventies at Gilley’s this big-titted, cotton candy blond with red shoes and a little waist and big arms with the sleeves rolled up on her cowboy shirt—I think she was a fucking offshore welder from Pasadena—grabbed the rail and came right onstage, eye to eye with me, just a few feet from Willie. I said, “Lady, you got to get down, you know. This place is crazy enough already.”

  She says, “Eat my shit, you asshole.”

  I poked her in the solar plexus. Boom. She kind of buckled. But she jumped right up, and I thought: Oh my God, this bitch is gonna whip my ass right here in front of everybody I know. I hit her another good shot, and she backed down.

  Another night in San Diego, Willie invited the Jazzercise class to come up and dance onstage. It was 150 girls. Well, 150 girls onstage is dangerous enough, but get them dancing in step and you got an earthquake.

  In Vegas the stage is about table high. People leap onstage and you got to deal with their shit. You can’t be violent with them, because Willie don’t like it, but sometimes it’s hard to restrain a person without being physical. I looked around at one show, and here was some drunk bitch on the stage heading for Willie. I stepped in front of her and she said, “Get out of my fucking way. I’m gonna touch Willie.”

  I said, “No, you ain’t.”

  She said, “Have you ever touched Willie?”

  I said, “No ma’am, but I jacked him off once in Kansas City. Does that count?”

  She looked startled, and it gave me a chance to ease her away as gently as possible.

  Westbury, in New York, is a theater in the round that is a nightmare because the stage is so accessible. This goofy motherfucker jumped over somebody’s shoulder at Westbury and landed onstage and walked right over and looked at Bee, then walked behind Willie and looked at Paul. They’re still playing, right? So he goes over and sits down on Bobbie’s piano seat and puts his arms around her and tries to kiss her. We got hold of that fellow and took him off in the darkness. I wanted to kill the son of a bitch, but you can’t really do that.

  We played with the Grateful Dead in Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City in 1977 to a crowd of 80,000. Us and Waylon. The Dead played three and a half hours while we watched clouds building up. This big fucking storm blew in and it was pouring rain when Waylon took the stage. Waylon freaked out. Lightning ain’t the best thing to have happen when you got all this electrical equipment around you. Waylon hadn’t been to sleep in about a year—he just ate Hershey’s Kisses and snorted cocaine. Waylon started hyperventilating. He froze. So Willie walked onstage, took Waylon’s guitar, and kept on picking.

  I says, “Willie, it’s dangerous out here.”

  Willie says, “If you got to go, you got to go.”

  We changed bands in the rainstorm, moved Waylon’s stuff off and ours on. Willie never missed a lick with rain pouring on him. I told the Grateful Dead guys, “You fuckers played so long you made it rain.” They said, “Yeah, so why don’t your old man make it stop?”

  Soon as we got our band set up, the rain stopped.

  But one of the strangest happenings was in Birmingham, Alabama. We had done a show at the coliseum downtown. The Franks brothers had a Suburban then to carry their T-shirts
, and we were loading our gear on the old Tube parked at a six-deck parking garage. We all carried two or three guns and plenty of ammo back then. Half the band was already on the Tube. Mickey was off chasing the monkey someplace.

  All of a sudden we hear Kaboom! Kaboom!

  It’s the sound of a .357 magnum going off in the parking garage. Kaboom! Kaboom! The echoes sound like howitzer shells exploding. It’s kind of semi-dark, and this guy comes blowing through this parking deck and jumps in the Franks brothers’ Suburban. Now here comes this bitch with a fucking pistol. Kaboom! She’s chasing this motherfucker. It sounds like a fucking war.

  People are piling out of the show and they start scattering. Here come cops from every direction. They’re flying out of their cars, hitting that parking deck, spread-eagling the whole crowd—“On the deck, motherfuckers!”—because the cops don’t know who is shooting at who.

  We cut the lights, and slip around to the back of the bus. All you can see are police headlights in a big semi-circle and hundreds of people lying flat on the ground all stretched out. It looks like Guyana.

  All these cops are squatted down in the doorjambs, turning people over, frisking them, aiming guns at everybody, just waiting for the next shot to be fired.

  And here comes Willie. He walks off the bus wearing cutoffs and tennis shoes, and he’s got two huge Colt .45 revolvers stuck in his waist. The barrels are so long they stick out the bottom of his cutoffs. Two shining motherfucking pistols in plain sight of a bunch of cops nervous as shit.

  Wilie just walks right over and says, “What’s the trouble?” Well, he’s got some kind of aura to him that just cools everything out. The cops put up their guns, the people climb off the concrete, and pretty soon Willie is signing autographs. He’s got those eyes, that smile, it’s magic. It he’s singing to one girl or fifteen people in a hotel room or 200 people in a club or 50,000 people at a football stadium, these piercing eyes find the people, and he sings straight to each one of them. The men who don’t like him are stuff-in-the-muds, bureaucratic assholes and chicken dicks. Women all love him. Everybody relates to him. Everybody has heartbreaks and problems with their families and their sweethearts. Willie plays to them. He’s got this low wave of the hand that covers the first fifty rows and this high wave that covers the second deck, and everybody feels like he’s waving at them. And he really is.

  Our crowds have changed over the years. It used to be the hard core, then the older people started coming, and eventually the kids joined the crowd. Now everybody’s there, from generation to generation. People are going to buy Willie Nelson records for the rest of their lives, and so will their children.

  But if we ever do go back to playing nothing but honky-tonks, it’s all right with me. At heart we’ll always be a pile of wild Texas yahoos.

  GATES (GATOR) MOORE

  Most nights on the road, Willie sleeps on his bus instead of in a hotel. When he plays Atlantic City, for example, they provide a big suite. But he wants to sleep in his own bedroom on the bus—on the beach in Atlantic City. So I found a parking lot on the beach about ten miles out of town, and that’s where we head when the show is over unless we’re running to a new gig in another town.

  There was a hurricane blowing in one night a couple of years ago as we drove to the beach. I kept checking the weather reports. They sounded grim. The cops told us we weren’t safe in the parking lot—the hurricane was a big one and was coming straight at us. I suggested to Willie we might ought to move, but he said, “Don’t worry about it, Gator. We’ll get some fresh air tonight.”

  Willie was tired and went to bed listening to the rain pounding on the roof. All night long I sat nervously in the driver’s seat, ready to pull out. The waves started showering the bus, the sand piled up over the wheels, the whole bus rocked back and forth, the wind howled. I thought: God, I guess we’ve had it this time.

  But in the wee hours the hurricane split in half and the two forces veered away from us. In the morning I was outside looking at the sand banked up against the bus. I was still shaking. Willie opened the door and got out, yawning and stretching.

  “I love the sound of rain,” he said.

  I came by my love of traveling naturally, I guess, because I was born on a navy base in Maryland. My dad, a test pilot, was killed in a jet crash when I was little. My stepfather was also a navy test pilot. I grew up all over the country and drifted into driving station wagons and trucks for bands like the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, the Kinks. In 1978 I got a job driving Willie’s equipment truck. I moved to driving the crew bus and finally to driving Willie’s bus—the one we call Honeysuckle Rose.

  It’s funny. This used to be a real young business. All the roadies for all the bands were in their early twenties. Now it seems the population bubble has just moved up. We all got older, and no young people are coming in as roadies. It’s going to be real strange in a few years—a bunch of ragged, geriatric roadies.

  You don’t have to be a Teamster to drive a band bus. This is like a motor home. All you need is an operator’s license. If we had to fill out Teamster logs—drive ten hours and take eight hours off—we couldn’t get creative enough to do the paperwork. For us a twenty-six hour run is routine. You’d have to sit for three days to let your paperwork catch up.

  My personal record is ninety-six hours straight. Four solid days and nights behind the wheel with no sleep. It’s only my personal record, but I don’t care ever to break it.

  We used to pull into the parking lot of the big hotel near our gig, and the word would have gotten out that Willie was coming. There’d be thousands of people thronged around the place, waiting. We might turn off the motors, turn off the lights, get off the buses, and lock the doors—leaving Willie inside in the dark. Maybe the people would go away. But usually they’d stand there all night long and watch Willie’s bus. Willie would be asleep inside. Not that he’d be avoiding his fans, but even Willie has to sleep now and then. Sometimes the crowd would pound on the bus until Willie woke up and came out.

  Now we stay at hotels that aren’t so obvious, maybe twenty-five to thirty miles from the gig. But people still manage to find us. Willie won’t let us escort him through the crowd. He’ll stop and talk to every one of them. If they’re too nervous to ask for his autograph or ask him for a picture, he’ll say, “Hey, why don’t you pose for a picture with me?” or “Hey, did you want an autograph?”

  It’s been kind of rough on Willie after the show. He’s soaking wet from being on the stage. We have used 100 subterfuges to sneak Willie onto his bus to change his shirt, at least, before he goes back outside to sign his name a few thousand times.

  Every kind of star and politician you can think of has been on Willie’s bus. But maybe the most peculiar visitor was Richard Pryor.

  It was Willie’s birthday, about three or four years ago. We had a huge ornate birthday cake in the back room of the bus parked behind the Holiday Inn in Las Vegas. Richard Pryor showed up with his monster bodyguard. Pryor walks in and says, “Nice cake, Will. It’s beautiful.”

  Willie says, “Why, thank you.”

  Pryor says, “Happy Birthday.’

  And Pryor went whap! Hurled his whole face and chest headlong into the cake. Buried himself in it.

  So Willie picks up a double armload of cake and mashes it all over Pryor’s bodyguard.

  “A happy birthday to all,” Willie says.

  The wildest bus is the crew bus. They’re still wanting to live the legend or enhance it in their own way. Paul cracks down on them the most.

  But when the guys were drinking real heavy, the buses inside would look like a baseball stadium after a big game—ankle deep in bottles and rubbish. They used to play poker for maybe thirty straight hours until Bee Spears got mad and slammed his fist on the poker table so hard it exploded the thick glass top into a million pieces, glass flying all over the guys. I haven’t seen a card game on a bus since then. Now it’s dominoes or chess or computer golf. I’ve seen some terrible,
red-faced, screaming arguments on the bus—never with Willie, mind you—but it’s an unspoken rule that fist fighting is forbidden. Nobody ever swings on anybody. They might scream in each other’s face all night long, but deep underneath they know they’re going to be buddies again tomorrow.

  It’s my job to go grocery shopping and stock Willie’s bus with food and drink. He wants raw vegetables and fruit—like carrots, apples, celery, radishes, oranges, bananas—on board all the time. I buy fifteen cases of Mountain Valley water for a trip, and plenty of Budweiser. And skim milk. Willie won’t drink milk if it ain’t skim. He gets into diets, takes a lot of vitamins and bee pollen. Willie doesn’t eat much, but he does like cans of Beanie Weenies and pork and beans—pops ’em in the microwave for a quick meal—and he loves potted-meat sandwiches. Potted meat is probably his favorite thing.

  With the big four-cylinder diesel generator that runs the central air and stereos and TVs and VCRs, one of our buses gets about six miles a gallon. We’ll run a bus about five years before we replace it or get a new motor—and five years is about as long as drivers last. I’ve seen seventeen changes of drivers since I came to work for Willie. It’s a hard grind. You have a high burnout rate. I keep myself going by playing mental arithmetic games: How far to the next town? How fast are we going? What are we averaging? What is the fuel consumption? I don’t know why I do it, but I can tell you within two minutes what time we’ll arrive.

  Willie likes looking out the window and seeing all our buses and trucks in convoy. If anybody screws with one us, suddenly they’ve got all of us to screw with. It’s a real feeling of camaraderie, being on the road.

  KIMO ALO