Willie Nelson (21 page)

The gig was supposed to be temporary for Paul. But eleven years after they first gigged together, the arrangement turned permanent. Willie became Paul’s life. He gave up the rackets for the road. It was his first honest job since he had tooled leather. Playing in a band was a chance to go legitimate and do what he loved, and playing with Willie was downright inspirational. “I was really hostile,” Paul said. “If somebody was to say something wrong to me, they would have a fight. I finally learned from Willie to turn around and say, ‘Thank you very much.’ And they’d stand there with a guilty look on their faces and say, ‘What did I just say?’”

Willie had used that trick when Biff Collie’s daddy tracked him down at the Roundup Club in Bandera, Texas, after Biff’s wife, Shirley, ran off with Willie. The seventy-year-old Pop Collie cornered Willie in the back of the club and after introducing himself informed Willie he was about to beat the shit out of him.

“Well, whatever will make you feel good, you go right ahead, Mr. Collie,” Willie told him with a smile. Flummoxed at the invitation, Pop Collie just walked away. Biff Collie heard about it and fully understood. “I can’t think of anybody I would rather have had steal my wife than Willie Nelson,” he said.

“Characters believe that violence breeds violence, but Willie is given to a lot of tolerance,” explained Paul. “I’m sure I’ve changed his attitude toward a lot of things and he’s changed mine.”

One thing Willie full well understood was Paul’s value watching his back. “The club business was rough,” Willie said. “So you went in with a you-motherfucker-you-better-pay-me attitude from the start. When I was with Ray Price, he’d always say, ‘You guys hurry up, let’s go. Let’s not give that sumbitch any excuse not to pay us.’ Every day he would say that. And he was right. They were just looking for an excuse not to pay you.”

Paul wouldn’t let that happen. He put a premium on loyalty and friendship. If anyone tried to fuck with Willie, they’d have to fuck with him first. And if they fucked with Paul, Paul liked to point out, “three or four people would be looking for them.”

Johnny Bush took time to teach Paul some drumming basics, including the kind of beat Willie preferred. “Willie was hard to play with,” Paul said. “I would sit at the table and listen to what John was doing. I had a really hard time learning to play with Willie.” Willie offered better advice. “Don’t count,” he told Paul. “Just feel it.” He was baptized by fire, playing twenty-eight consecutive dates in Texas. After Paul had completed four months of road work, watching, listening, and doing, Willie told John he thought Paul had figured out the groove well enough to do the whole set.

Of all Willie’s friendships over the years, none was tighter. If not for Paul, Willie Nelson would’ve most likely wound up dead, toothless, or selling Kirby vacuum cleaners. Willie had a smart mouth and didn’t mind using it, especially when he was right. Paul was at home in dark alleyways and dim-lit clubs and knew the unwritten code. He understood the ritual of the honky-tonk, how folks liked to take their fill of Pearl, Lone Star, Jax, and Southern Select with a heaping helping of good ol’ country music, and how that combination inspired dancin’, lovin’, and sometimes even feudin’ and fightin’ with fists and bottles. And whenever a boiling point was reached where guns and knives were displayed, Paul knew how to keep the peace.

If the situation merited Willie calling a club owner or promoter a “cheap-ass motherfucker,” “shithead,” or “asshole” to make his point, Paul’s presence would prevent them from having Willie’s ass handed to him on a platter for flapping his lip. If Paul happened upon Willie being beaten to a pulp in a back room at the end of a gig, as occurred several times, he wouldn’t hesitate to pull out one of the three heaters he carried. That’s what guns were for, never mind the blood stains on the floor.

“You see, I have a good reputation,” explained Paul. “A character means exactly what he says. A character has got to have a lot of character. I never drank, didn’t smoke until I was thirty-four, have never had a needle stuck in my arm outside a hospital. All that wasn’t done where I came from. A character has to treat everybody right. When you call a friend a friend, you have to treat him as a friend. It’s respect. Being a character means respect.”

B
USH,
Day, Nelson, English. The band needed a name and Johnny Bush was quick on the draw. “I was watching television in Nashville and a television ad came on for a breath mint. The announcer said, ‘It eliminated the offenders, be it garlic, onions...’” Willie loved the name the Offenders, but some promoters did not, so in the spirit of stamping out negative thoughts, they tried the Chosen Few at Paul’s suggestion to fit their self-image as outsiders. But when announced from the stage, “Willie Nelson and the Chosen Few” sounded a little “too Asian,” as in the Chosin Fu. So they went with the Record Men in honor of Willie’s first single for Liberty Records, “Mr. Record Man.”

They traveled in a 1947 Grumman Flxible Flyer bus that originally belonged to Faron Young before he sold it to a movie company and the movie company sold it to Houston oil well firefighter Red Adair, who sold it to Willie for $4,000. The Flex had seen better days and required constant mechanical repair. Willie Nelson and the Record Men drove it hard, doing between five hundred and eight hundred miles between dates booked by W. E. (“Lucky”) Moeller or Crash Stewart. Johnny, Paul, and Willie took turns behind the wheel, running up the odometer until the road bit back.

Johnny Bush had been taking care of the band’s business, collecting the money and paying the players and the bills. Paul inherited the job in San Diego after John, Jimmy Day, and Doyle Nelson, Willie’s stepbrother and extra driver, showed up drunk and bloodied from a wild time in Tijuana. Johnny was so trashed, Paul had to take him to the emergency room. On his way out, Johnny gave Paul instructions on how to collect the money for the band at the end of the gig.

“That’s how I figured out the business,” Paul said wryly. There wasn’t much to figure out. Paul had been schooled in repossessing autos after missed payments and righting wrongs without calling a lawyer or the cops. Getting money after a show was no different. “I wasn’t a really nice person when it came to collecting. I’d put my briefcase on the desk in the club office whenever it came time to settle up after a gig,” without mentioning the briefcase contained a pistol, Paul said. “They knew I meant business. In New Mexico, I had to chase down the guy to get our money. There was a forklift outside the club, so I got the forklift and raised his Thunderbird up on the lift, took the key out of the car, and wrote him a note, ‘Come see me.’ He did.

“I’ve never had a club that didn’t pay me,” Paul later told reporter John Moulder. “No, I had one,” he said, correcting himself. It was in Florida, shortly after he joined up with Willie. The owner offered $750 instead of the guaranteed $900. Willie said, “All or nothing.” Paul’s gun was on the bus, and the owner had his own security detail. “I ran to the bus to get my pistol and they shut the steel doors in front of the club. I tried to kick the doors open but couldn’t. They had cops working for them anyway.”

The best defense was a good offense, especially a firearm. On an off-night at a bar in Phoenix, Doyle Nelson sought out Paul. “Two guys I was playing pool with lost their bets to me and won’t pay up,” Doyle reported.

Paul got up from his table and walked into the pool room.

“Hey, you lost this bet, why don’t you pay it?” Paul said, confronting the two men with his piercing eyes and threatening countenance.

“We were just playing for a quarter,” one protested.

“Pay him the quarter,” Paul said, seething. “Anybody who won’t pay on a bet is a rotten motherfucker.” Making a bet was like signing a contract as far as Paul was concerned, and these two were not men of honor.

A fight erupted, with Paul ending up on top of one guy, pounding his head with his fists. The other came up behind Paul and used his pool stick as a garrote around his neck, pulling him back. Paul swung his right arm up. In his hand was his “bidness,” whose snub-nosed barrel was inserted into the guy’s nostril. The gun was cocked and ready when Willie walked in. “Paul will whip any one of you guys, and I’ll take the other,” he said with perfect timing. The fight was over.

Despite his commitment to Willie, Paul says he harbored no delusions. “I never figured it would amount to anything,” he said. “I was just along for the ride and for what it was at that time. We were having a real good time.” On Christmas Day 1966 they found themselves at a Holiday Inn hundreds of miles from home. “We went out and got shaving cream and toilet paper and decorated the Holiday Inn and took pictures,” Paul said. “It was being with best friends.”

Willie’s next hire was David Zettner, a bass and pedal steel player with George Chambers’ Country Gentlemen out of San Antonio, the showcase dance-hall band of South Texas. Adding David allowed Willie to move Jimmy Day to pedal steel full-time. David was multitalented, a painter in addition to being a musician, and a sensitive, soulful cat. His tenure with the Offenders/Record Men/Willie Nelson Show was cut short in 1968 when he was drafted into the military to fight a war in Vietnam. Just before he left, his friend Bee Spears, who replaced David in the Country Gentlemen back in San Antonio, showed up in Houston with a couple ounces of manicured Mexican
mota
.

The band had developed an appreciation for good weed, Willie included, once Paul put his connections to characters trafficking in high-quality marijuana to use. While the band gathered on the bus to check out the farewell gift from David’s San Antonio buddy, the conversation drifted to David’s pending departure. Who would they get to play bass? Willie asked Paul about a bass player they knew from California.

“Naw,” Paul said. “We can’t afford him. Besides, he’s married and has three kids.”

Jimmy Day glanced his glazed eyes toward the tall, gawky friend of David’s who brought the dope. “Why not him? He can’t play worth a shit but we can teach him what we want him to play and he gets high.”

Why not? Bee Spears may have been a stringbean of a nineteen-year-old and half crazy with a healthy appetite for illicit substances, but he was good enough to replace David Zettner in the Country Gentlemen and came from good stock. His daddy, Sam, a fiddle player with the Texas Tophands, raised his family across the road from John T. Floore’s Country Store and dance hall in the Hill Country town of Helotes, outside San Antonio.

“Can he play?” Willie asked David.

“Naw,” David said, twisting his face into a wise-ass grin, plainly high as a Georgia pine. “But he’s a fast learner,” he said, exhaling smoke.

From that day forward, George Chambers would always turn just a tad testy whenever Willie Nelson’s name came up; the Country Gentlemen wasn’t Willie’s farm team.

Bee’s first gig with Willie Nelson and the Record Men was the Nashville Room in the basement of the Taft Hotel in New York City. “I was scared to death,” Bee said. “There was a very steep learning curve, but Jimmy helped a lot and I snapped real quick that Willie plays bass lines on his guitar, so I started playing low.” The New York gig was followed by twenty-eight gigs in twenty-eight nights.

The 1947 Flex eventually gave out at the end of the tour, forcing them to switch to a black Lincoln Continental with a matching black trailer that Paul bought from Leroy Van Dyke. The Continental gave out a few months later, prompting the band to switch to a turquoise Mercury Marquis station wagon that Billy Gray sold them.

The musicians got by on $100 a week if they were lucky, plus whatever bar tab they could run up wherever they were playing. But that didn’t stop them from looking sharp like the professional musicians they were, resplendent for a few hours every night in their shiny blue outfits or Nehru jackets with turtlenecks. Other bands wore uniforms. Willie Nelson and the Record Men styled.

“We dressed hipper than most of Nashville,” Paul English said. “That’s what I liked about Willie—we weren’t conformists.” When Paul first went to work for the band, they were wearing frilly shirts, maroon brocade tuxedo-like coats, bulldog ties, and black pants. When cleaning all the coordinated outfits at the same time became a pain in the ass, Willie gave them each $100 during a layover in Los Angeles and encouraged them to go out and buy something different.

Paul and Willie were walking past the display window of Sy Devore’s in Hollywood, when Willie spied a cape.

“You have to have that!” he said.

Paul’s trimmed beard and sharp-edged sideburns had always prompted comments that he looked like the devil, which he took as a compliment, since he always said, “The devil was the prettiest angel in heaven.” A cape would enhance the image.

The effect was immediate. People treated him differently when he wore the cape. At Panther Hall, he took the image one step further, placing dry ice around his drum kit, creating the effect of smoke. “When I got off the stage, there were fifteen girls waiting for me, wanting my autograph,” Paul said.

Willie Nelson and the Record Men stood out on any package show bill. They were road dogs of the highest—and most offbeat—standing.

And they were always evolving. David Zettner’s flat feet earned a medical discharge from the military after he’d been away from the band for a year, and he picked up the bass again and Bee moved to play behind Johnny Bush, who was touring as a single act on the Willie Nelson Show. “David and I would get together and he’d play guitar and I’d play bass,” Bee said. “The older guys taught the younger guys how to play, one on one. They’d tell you, ‘Sorry, son, that shit ain’t gonna fly.’ They taught you feel. We were learning cool tunes, all kinds of jazz—Brubeck, “Blue Rondo Ala Turk” in nine/eight time, odd beats like seven/four, five/four. Country guys jammed jazz. We didn’t jam to ‘Stand by Your Man.’”

A
THOUSAND
miles west, another iconoclast was making a name for himself. He was the embodiment of macho, a ladies’ man who favored black leather to match his slicked-back greasy pompadour, and had a cigarette constantly dangling from his lip and a bad-ass biker vibe. His husky voice matched the image.