Willie Nelson (33 page)

Willie attempted to bring his musical movement back home with the Abbott Homecoming, staged in Willie’s hometown on November 11, 1973, to coincide with the high school’s homecoming football weekend. He announced his intentions in a press conference, promising to give any profit to the Abbott PTA. But some residents were not eager to embrace Abbott’s prodigal son. He had a hard time finding a site. “The man who bought the store from Billy Pope offered his land north of town,” Willie’s boyhood friend Morris Russell reported. “But people were giving the landlord a hard time because all these hippies were going to show up. People just got in an uproar. One guy told me, ‘There’s going to be a hippie in every barn.’” Not coincidentally, the advertising for the event used old promotional photos that depicted Abbott’s favorite native son as a clean-cut and clean-shaven smooth operator.

There was hardly a hippie in every barn, but ten thousand fans did show up, along with most of the three hundred citizens of Abbott for a twelve-hour music marathon starring their favorite son and a bunch of his buddies, including Johnny Bush, Waylon Jennings (though Waylon didn’t perform, due to a curfew), Michael Murphey, Jerry Jeff Walker, Billy Joe Shaver, Sammi Smith, Kinky Friedman, and Kenneth Threadgill and His Velvet Cowpasture. Sammy Allred, Willie’s disc jockey friend from Austin who was one-half of the satirical Geezinslaws, was designated MC and carried out his duties in a very stoned state after Willie handed him the list of bands and instructed him to let everyone play as long as they wanted.

Many of the acts, including Willie, Jerry Jeff, Asleep at the Wheel, and Waylon, had driven six hundred miles overnight from Terlingua, a mining ghost town west of Big Bend National Park in extreme southwest Texas, where they’d just played a country-rock festival. The festival had been inspired by the Terlingua International Chili Cookoff, an event that had grown out of a pissing match between New York journalist H. Allen Smith and Dallas scribe Frank X. Tolbert over who made the best bowl of chili, an original Texas concoction of beef, corn flour, and spices. The Terlingua chili cookoff attracted several thousand chiliheads to the middle of nowhere on the first Saturday every November. The music festival, which had nothing to do with chili, drew about sixty curious and determined fans and a crazed film crew under the direction of Nick Ray, the director of
Rebel Without a Cause.

The Abbott Homecoming lost nowhere near as much money as the Terlingua event did, but Geno McCoslin blamed the Abbott losses on the local PTA anyway. If there had been any profit, it had been taken long before the cash reached the PTA.

Despite the financial baths at outdoor concerts and less-thanstellar record sales beyond the state line, Dallas newspaperman John Anders declared Willie to be the Godfather of Texas Country music. When Willie did a four-night stand at 57 Doors, North Texas’s first progressive-country nightclub not coincidentally owned by Geno McCoslin,
Dallas Morning News
reviewer Dave McNeely compared one of the performances to Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Willie Nelson and Family closed out a very good year at Dallas’s cavernous Market Hall, sharing the New Year’s Eve bill with Leon Russell and Kinky Friedman. The $5,000 guarantee Willie and band received was the most money they’d ever made for a single show.

Music was an all-night, every-night proposition, and Willie was up for the challenge. Willie and band played a four-night run at Castle Creek in Austin, the listening room a block from the state capitol, while Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, the young band of rockers doing Western Swing and boogie, recorded a live album at the Armadillo, where the crowd was so loud, the audio was later inserted into live recordings by other bands. Willie sat in with Freda and the Firedogs at Aqua Fest, Austin’s annual August celebration at Fiesta Gardens, and double-billed with the band at a fund-raiser for Symphony Square and at a voter registration benefit in Dallas. He played an unadvertised, sold-out gig with the Family Band at Soap Creek Saloon, where he’d been hanging out and partying with his pals, and split the box-office receipts evenly with the club, even though he could’ve taken it all. “At the end of the night David Anderson [one of the new additions to Willie’s family] took all the money and divided it up among everyone, even the employees,” Soap Creek co-owner Carlyne Majer said. “The employees had their rent paid for a month, grocery money, and money to do things with. It was a gift that he played—he wanted to play Soap Creek. It had nothing to do with money.”

Ira Nelson had a hard time believing what his son had started in Austin until he saw it for himself. Willie Hugh had hair flowing over his ears, neck, and collar, an earring, a beard, and Lord knows what else. Ira couldn’t help but ask, “What’s happened to you? The last time I saw you, your hair was short and you had on a suit.”

“That’s right, Pop,” Willie said. “And the last time you saw me, I was poor and hungry, and now I’m fat and happy.”

“I got to grow me some hair,” Ira said with a chuckle.

He did just that when he and Lorraine moved down to Austin to run Willie’s Pool Hall, an old U-Tote-M convenience store at 2712 South Lamar Boulevard that had been refashioned into a beer joint. A hangout for his buddies and a touchstone for tourists, it provided a decent income for Ira and Lorraine.

The pool hall was home away from home for Zeke Varnon, Willie’s longtime partner in crime from Hillsboro and Waco, who played dominoes out front and slept in the back. “Just mention Zeke’s name and you’ll hear sirens,” joshed Sammy Allred, the wild KVET disc jockey who was a regular. Sammy marveled at Willie’s sense of timing around the old pool hall. “He was a genius at knowin’ when to hang out. He knew just how often to come by to keep the rumors going— ‘Hey, Willie’s comin’ in.’ ‘Willie was here.’”

When tourists grew impatient waiting for Willie, they posed for pictures with “Mom and Pop” Nelson and went away happy.

News of the pool hall reached all the way to Washington state, where Willie’s birth mother, Myrle, was living again. “Myrle got tired of everybody calling Lorraine Willie’s mom, so she decided that she’s gonna let the world know that Lorraine was not Willie’s mom,” Willie’s nephew Freddy Fletcher said. “And you don’t tell Myrle no.” Myrle was so ticked, she telephoned media people to tell them she was Willie’s mother and damn proud of it.

T
HE VIBE
that Willie had created down in Texas convinced Atlantic Records to record a second Willie album,
Phases and Stages,
an ambitious song cycle in the tradition of
Yesterday’s Wine,
only more overt. The theme was a marital breakup told from the viewpoint of both the husband and the wife. Willie used his first marriage for inspiration, as he had been doing for years, and drew upon Lana’s bad marriage to Steve as well. Family was an underlying theme of the album. “Sister’s Coming Home” was about Lana. “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way” was inspired by Susie’s first experiences with dating.

Willie had been road testing and massaging the song cycle at picking sessions and guitar pullings in Nashville and Austin for several years, and the title song had been issued as a single for RCA when nobody was looking or listening. All the folks who counted, from Coach Royal to Jerry Wexler (especially), gave him their thumbs-up on the material, so it was worth a shot. As the buzz for
Shotgun Willie
faded in the fall of 1973, a November recording session was set up in a small town of trailer parks and shotgun shacks tucked away in the northeast corner of Alabama.

“For
Phases and Stages,
I wanted Willie to come to Muscle Shoals,” Jerry Wexler said. The fact that
Shotgun Willie
was done at Atlantic’s New York studio had pleased the Erteguns and the Atlantic brass. Jerry wanted this one on his turf—Muscle Shoals, Alabama, 130 miles south of Nashville, about as close as Jerry wanted to get to Music Row, where he had been producing soul and rhythm and blues hits by African American artists largely backed by a studio band of white boys who happened to play very funky. Wexler came to Muscle Shoals from Memphis and the Stax studios and had already rung up a string of million sellers, including the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There” and Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally” and “Land of 1000 Dances.”

Jerry recruited Conway Twitty’s pedal steel man John Hughey (Jimmy Day being on the outs with Willie and family) and the earth-iest of all Nashville session guitarists, Fred Carter Jr., whose credits included the Band, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, and Muddy Waters. Willie brought along his boys, plus Johnny Gimble, the swing fiddler who’d worked the
Shotgun Willie
sessions. Guitarist/dobroist Pete Carr, keyboardist Barry Beckett, David Hood, and Roger Hawkins came with the house.

Eleven tracks were recorded and mixed in two days before Thanksgiving, nothing out of the ordinary for someone conditioned to watching the clock. But a few weeks later, Rick Sanjek, the head of A&R at Atlantic Nashville, convinced Willie he could do it better, leaving Jerry Wexler out of the loop. So they went to Fred Carter’s Nugget Studios in Goodlettsville, just down the road from Ridgetop. Willie brought his road band of Mickey Raphael, Bobbie Nelson, Paul English, and Bee Spears to join Grady Martin, and they cut the whole album all over again in another two days, with the exception of “Pretend I Never Happened.”

“It was nowhere near as slick as Jerry’s production, but it was Willie,” said Nick Hunter, Atlantic Nashville’s radio guy. Rick Sanjek took Hunter with him to New York for a meeting with Jerry Wexler. “The Muscle Shoals tracks were too R&B,” Sanjek insisted to Jerry. Country radio would never buy it. On his own, Sanjek told Wexler, he had remixed the album to give it more of a country flavor. This new mix was the one to use. Sanjek avoided telling Wexler they’d rerecorded the entire album. Calling it a new mix was easier to explain.

Jerry went ballistic nonetheless. “After I listened, the red rage started in my heels, up my backbone, up to my neck,” he said. “It was the most horrible piece of shit you ever heard. Suddenly, I slapped myself: What the fuck is a country mix? There is no such thing. A mix is a mix.”

“This was the one that closed Atlantic Nashville,” Nick Hunter said of the meeting.

Jerry Wexler ran Rick Sanjek out of his office. Within weeks, he fired him. “Rick was my representative of the Nashville aristocracy,” Jerry later said. “I took him on because he was the son of a very dear friend of mine. Big mistake. He came down from Yale with a ten-gallon hat and a big buckle and he tells me, ‘You gotta know how to talk to these people.’”

Wexler authorized Tom Dowd, Atlantic’s chief engineer, to do the final mix of
Phases and Stages,
which was released in March 1974. The album was promoted as something new and completely different, using the phrase “When Willie Nelson tells you the same old story, it’s not the same old story anymore.”

For all the emphasis on concept, many of the songs on
Phases and Stages
stood out on their own. Three songs—“Pick Up the Tempo,” “Heaven or Hell,” and “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way”—also appeared on Waylon’s pivotal album
This Time,
released in July 1974, which was not coincidentally coproduced by Willie Nelson, a cross-promotion that built the Waylon and Willie brand.

“I Still Can’t Believe That You’re Gone” was arguably Willie’s saddest composition to date, written in the aftermath of Carlene English’s suicide, which no one saw coming. A few hours earlier she had been laughing with Connie Nelson, her neighbor down the street and her soul sister since Connie had met Willie. She departed, complaining of a headache. Paul said he had taken a sleeping pill, as he usually did, and slept through the incident. Their son, Darrell Wayne, discovered her body the next morning. She had left a brief note to Paul to take care of their son and to Darrell Wayne, telling him to be good and to finish school. Carlene hadn’t exhibited signs of being suicidal, but suicide ran in her family. Her father took his own life years before. Paul was devastated and wasted away, dropping from 190 to 120 pounds as he sank into depression. Willie did all he could do to help his best friend and his best friend’s son, including writing the song.

The single reached number 51 on the country singles chart. “Bloody Mary Morning,” a flat-out countrified run through the jungle, with a flurry of picking and rhythm under a contemporary Texas storyline rife with drinking and fooling around, did much better, reaching number 17. “Sister’s Coming Home,” released as a single at Willie’s request, barely charted at all, checking in at number 93.

Another single that wasn’t on the album almost broke out. “After the Fire Is Gone,” a Loretta Lynn composition made popular by Conway Twitty and Loretta a few years earlier, was redone by Willie and Tracy Nelson (no relation), a Wisconsin girl with a bluesy Big Mamma voice who led the San Francisco band Mother Earth (which included Austin folkie Powell St. John) and had relocated to Nashville, where she was signed to Atlantic. Her producer, Bob Johnston, heard Tracy sing the tune at a showcase at the Exit/In in Nashville. Leaving the club, he told an Atlantic associate, “I just heard the greatest song in the world and we’ve got to get Willie to do a duet for Tracy’s album.”

It was the first time Willie had charted with a duet since his first single with Shirley Collie, “Willingly,” was issued on Liberty late in 1961. His plaintive whine was the perfect complement for Tracy Nelson’s brassy voice. For the B-side, Tracy added her vocal to the existing track of “Whiskey River” from the
Shotgun Willie
sessions. “After the Fire Is Gone” peaked at number 17 on the
Billboard
country singles chart. The recording earned the two Nelsons a Grammy Award nomination for Best Country Duo in 1974.

The single might have climbed higher or actually won a Grammy if Atlantic Nashville hadn’t shut down on September 6, 1974. “We weren’t doing too well,” Jerry admitted. “My partners and the chief financial officer made the decision to close the Nashville office because it was running behind in start-up money.” Wexler protested feebly, telling the Ertegun brothers, “You can’t do this. We’ve got Willie Nelson now.” The response was “Willie who? Go ahead and close it.”