Gumption (32 page)

In the middle of our palaver, Laurie stopped short, distracted by something over my shoulder.

“What do you think of that?” she asked.

I looked back at a large, confusing painting on the wall overlooking the bar area.

“It’s either really good or really bad,” she continued. “It might be a combination.”

I pitched in. “My gut reaction is: abhorrent, but then I . . . yeah, I’m gonna stick with abhorrent.”

She said, “But it really bothers me. It’s not a tasteful painting, but—”

I said, “No, but it caught your attention.”

She went on. “You could say that about it. It did, and it really bothers me.”

There was a similarly styled second painting across the room that we had to get up and scrutinize. In the baffling details I pointed out the New York Stock Exchange, a picture of a squirrel, and the name Pocahontas. Laurie grew suspiciously silent, but I am not saying that she is not a Freemason.

Our conversation ended up on the topic of love. We did not discuss Laurie’s relationship with Lou Reed across the last twenty years of his life. We did discuss my wife, Megan, and the fact that she and Laurie had both performed in the excellent performance space thirty floors directly beneath us, known as the Allen Room. I described Megan’s show to Laurie, which included a duet with the late, beyond great Elaine Stritch, as well as other dark, funny, and eclectic song choices.

Laurie said, “I love dark. That’s beautiful. And she sang there.”

I said, “She did. I’m a big fan. I got real lucky in my marriage.”

She said, “Yeah. Being in love is the whole point. It’s the whole point.”

A sprite to the end, Laurie left an indelible impression upon me in the manner by which she gravitates toward lightness and humor, fueled all the while by the noblest of emotions. Witnessing her acuity and commitment to whimsy firsthand, in addition to my previously cultivated devotion to her cleverly orchestrated glamours, I realized as we said good night that I would be enlarged by the compassionate effects of her gifts for the rest of my days. I was as crazy about her witchcraft then, on top of a building, as I had been twenty-five years ago in the middle of a cornfield.

WILLIE NELSON

America, to me, is freedom.

—WILLIE NELSON

I
f you have not caught up on the quality television program
Parks and Recreation
, I will simply reiterate that I portrayed a devilishly handsome (according to my mom), gruff libertarian named Ron Swanson—a man with little use for modern fashion or popular culture. That is, popular culture beyond the novels of Patrick O’Brian,
The Bridge on the River Kwai
, and the records of one Willie Nelson. The sum total of musical selections we ever heard Ron enjoy, in fact, was comprised of Willie’s songs “Buddy” and “Hello Walls.” I mention this now, in this context, because the character of Ron had a (hopefully) enjoyable, curmudgeonly demeanor, founded in an obdurate, John Wayne–esque simplicity when it came to his stance on most issues, particularly those issues concerning this great country that we call America.

That a singular American man such as Ron Swanson would choose the music of Willie Nelson serves as a splendidly accurate introduction
to not only my vision of the ideal country we live in, but what’s more, the nation that America could one day become. He has been a musical and political maverick for decades, one who has often been revealed as quite human, a fact that he openly displays in his lyrics.

Born in 1933, Willie grew up playing music (and football, baseball, and basketball, natch) in the small town of Abbott, Texas, about a half hour north of Waco. His first professional gig earned him eight dollars playing rhythm guitar in a local polka band, and he was hooked.

“That first night I made money making music, I knew that I had succeeded.”

Despite his wealth of talent for songwriting and performing, Willie spent years jumping around the western United States, working at a vast variety of odd jobs, with a focus on radio DJ gigs—a position that allowed him to record his songs on the radio stations’ equipment. He sold songs here and there, primarily in the flavor of the west Texas country genre in which he had made his beginnings, until he finally made the move to Nashville in 1960.

Despite the successes of “Hello Walls,” recorded by Faron Young, and Patsy Cline’s famous cover of his song “Crazy,” Willie had a hard time finding his niche in the conservative setting of Nashville country music. He had contracts with Liberty Records, Monument, and then RCA across the later sixties, with middling success. His songs would make the charts but never top them, which meant his songwriting royalties would about break even with the cost of tours and living. During this time, however, he began to develop confidence in his own unique sound, along with the likes of pals Waylon Jennings
and Kris Kristofferson. Their less-polished, more honest and stripped-down style came to be known as “outlaw” country.

In December of 1970, his house in Ridgetop, Tennessee, outside of Nashville, mysteriously burned to the ground. Willie took this as a sign from the gods to leave the conventional business of Nashville music and head back to the state of his youth.

Austin, Texas, one of the most charismatic American cities—state capital and also “weirdness central”—is where Willie took up residence in 1972. Over the forty-plus years since, he has established himself there as something more than a mayor or royalty. He has become Austin’s wizard. I am perhaps in danger of overtaxing the use of “Gandalf” as a high compliment, but I cannot bear to refer to the warlock Willie as Dumbledore, Oz, or Thoros. He demands something more classic.

Willie Nelson is the Merlin of Austin. Yea, and of America, to boot.

By the way, I am sorry to report that I was not able to meet Willie for an interview. Oh, I’m not sorry for you, reader. I mean my sorrow in a purely selfish way—as I should be able to render a serviceable, if not enjoyable chapter from my research and clear ability to opine, for better or worse. But, selfishly, the crybaby in me rears his head back in a tearful squall when I lament that I have not yet shaken Mr. Nelson’s hand. I’d settle for clasping either one of his astonishingly nimble dinner plates, those ennobled workhorses with which he manipulates the fretboard and strings of “Trigger,” his eldritch, scarred, and seemingly immortal Martin guitar, to disseminate his delectable mix of
jazz and country styles, hitting perhaps eleven other genres in between them.

In 1974, Willie was the star of the pilot episode of
Austin City Limits
, the now-venerated PBS show that initially highlighted the music of Texas but has come to represent the finest of contemporary performers across genre lines. Notably stripped down in its production, the “unplugged” quality of the program’s presentations often delivers performances that are considered definitive—one of the reasons that the show is the only television program to date to have been awarded the National Medal of Arts. Considering all this, they could not have found a more perfect point man than Willie Nelson.

Once he made the move to Austin, Willie was able to get his feet under himself artistically, a strengthening that saw the advent of his signature style, which we’ve come to know and love and upon which we depend when we’re in need of any emotion from melancholy to mirth. His third record of this renaissance,
Red Headed Stranger
, is my favorite of all his albums. It’s got everything: horses, murder, Bonaparte, a piano, a preacher, and “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” which provided Willie Nelson the singer with his first number one hit.

That was followed soon after by my next two favorites,
The Sound in Your Mind
(1976) and
Stardust
(1978), and the new independent feeling and flavor of these records would serve to fuel Willie’s prolific output, which has included to date more than one hundred records. If you throw in compilations, collaborations, and film soundtracks, that number tops three hundred. It’s worth noting that Willie was past forty years old before he saw the kind of success with which we have come to identify him. He’d been selling songs as a writer for fifteen or
twenty years, but once he broke free of the constraints he felt in Nashville, his talent and creativity took him to a whole new level, a fact that reminds me of this, one of my favorite Willie quotes: “The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”

By the early seventies, Willie was into his third of four marriages, and he has fathered seven children to date, but considering his apparent joie de vivre, I wouldn’t cut off his tab just yet. The roller coaster–like undulations in his life’s path have undoubtedly played a salient role in Willie’s seeming ability to perpetually represent the average American. Even now that he has been a colossal success and icon for decades, the various platforms and causes for which he advocates allow America’s working class to feel that he remains representative of their best interests, quite simply because he does.

The bearded and braided man who said, “If you’re not crazy, there’s something wrong with you,” certainly inspires confidence in me. He’s another person I think we’d elect to office in a heartbeat, if he was ever convinced to run, although I’m afraid he’d have to be awfully high to entertain such a conversation. Rocky Mountain high. On weed.

With his social activism alone, he’s accomplished more for the good of our citizenry than most politicians will in their lifetimes, the difference being that we
pay
the politicians. He’s been a very vocal advocate for the adoption of horses, supporting the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) with a letter campaign urging the public to contact their representatives in Congress about the AHSPA, or American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act, a proposed piece of legislation of which I had not heard, for a seriously macabre situation occurring under the table.

Apparently, a great many horses are being slaughtered (one every five minutes, according to the AWI) by nefarious overseas interests, for human consumption. For obvious reasons, this information is being kept under wraps, but until Congress passes a ban on this practice, horses will continue to be shipped to Mexico to meet the same grisly end. Given his alignment with Habitat for Horses, and the many horses he has personally adopted to his ranch in Texas, this cause is a no-brainer for Willie the cowboy.

There has been a good deal of discussion in this book about the ways in which our society is voraciously consuming the dwindling natural resources on our planet, but there are few examples given as to tangible solutions to which we may offer our support. Willie has actually funded two plants, in Oregon and Texas, that produce biodiesel fuel. Made from mostly soybean oil, this biodiesel can be burned in conventional diesel engines without the engines needing any alterations. Finding an alternative to the monstrous amount of petroleum products and coal that we burn every day will be one of the most important forward steps we can take in conserving our planet for future generations. I personally have no bright ideas for how to do this, as I am a jackass, and so I am extremely grateful to Willie and other forward thinkers like him for stepping up to the plate on all our behalf and taking a swing at it.

Another amazing movement in which Willie has played a leading role is the establishment of Farm Aid in 1985—the annual one-day music festival that raises money and awareness for the plight of the small American farmer. He was joined in this effort by Neil Young and John Mellencamp, as well as a killer lineup of guest artists every
year (including Jeff Tweedy and Wilco), and the organization has raised millions of dollars in aid for failing farms, but more important, they have made Congress sit up and take notice of the financial dilemma in which these families find themselves when trying to compete with the corporate giants in “agribusiness.”

If you don’t normally hear about a celebrity and music legend getting behind groups like horse ranchers and farmers, then prepare to be doubly impressed (or if you are already baked, unsurprised) when I tell you that Willie Nelson sits on the advisory board of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. It has been reported that Willie was not as pleasant a rambler when alcohol was his main medicine, and so to me, his regular and cavalier employment of pot as a reliever of stress is a consistent representation, decades strong, of the
positive
effects of the herb: “I think people need to be educated to the fact that marijuana is not a drug. Marijuana is an herb and a flower. God put it here. If He put it here and He wants it to grow, what gives the government the right to say that God is wrong?”

Like any other mood-altering substance, of course you should think twice about consuming it before entering a situation wherein you might endanger others, like, say, behind the wheel of a moving vehicle or at work as an air traffic controller. One of the times Willie found himself in hot water with the Texas authorities was in 1994, when police found him safely parked on the side of the road, sleeping in the backseat of his Mercedes. He had been enjoying his luck at a late-night poker game and felt too tired to drive, so he pulled off the road to get some sleep. Police officers found a joint in the ashtray and a bag of weed under the seat and decided to give him hell instead of
shaking his hand for doing the right thing by getting off the road. Common sense is often low on the list of priorities when it comes to prosecuting citizens for possession of marijuana. In most cases, the “perpetrator” will just be causing a given scene to become more mellow, a state of affairs that seems like it would behoove the authorities to promote rather than punish.

He has said, “There are a lot of ignorant people who don’t know, that have been told it’s a drug, and if you smoke it you’re going to hell. A lot of the right-wing religious fanatics are the ones who are the most against it, just like they’re [for] telling women what to do with their bodies. A bunch of old, ignorant white people that are dying off. And the big deal about weed or gays or any of that—it’s going away. It’s not a big deal no more to most people.”

We can only hope that Willie’s sunnily disposed prediction on the matter will prove true. It seems like our population has plenty of conundrums to be more concerned with than those Americans putting on a pleasant buzz. For example, the crooks running the pharmaceutical racket: the real drug lords, who exploit our citizenry with exorbitant prices as they maintain a stranglehold on their pill monopolies. There are many places where our law enforcement tax dollars could be better focused than upon stoners consuming
suspicious
quantities of Rolo candies.

In 2010, Austin appended the name of its downtown Second Street to Willie Nelson Boulevard, and two years later, an heroic bronze statue of the wizard (and Trigger) was added at the corner of his honorary street and LaVaca. Appropriately, the unveiling occurred at 4:20
P.M.
on April 20 (4/20), 2012, when, according to the
Austin American-Statesman
,
“there was something in the air.” It’s long been no secret that Willie is for weed, as Willie is for America, and so, by God, I am for Willie.

Now that we have paid homage to the cowboy—the sort our mamas should not let us grow up to be—let us also give praise to his weapon. The aspiring baby luthier in me would be remiss if I did not take a moment to turn the bloodshot eye of my journalism upon Willie’s one and only axe for about as many years as I’ve been alive (forty-four): Trigger.