Willie Nelson (37 page)

The live show was dynamite. With Jody Payne being primed as a solo act with the release of the single “Three Dollar Bill,” a second drummer, Rex Ludwick, had been brought in to augment Paul. After Carlene English’s death, “Paul got sick,” Willie said. “He needed help back there. Some days he just couldn’t get there, so I hired Rex. When Paul got better and came back, I kept Rex.” After rolling with Waylon Jennings for almost a year, including playing on Waylon’s
Honky-tonk Heroes,
then moving on to work with singer-songwriter Guy Clark for a spell, Bee Spears came back too. But Willie wanted to keep Chris Ethridge, so the band expanded into a two-bassist, two-drummer ensemble that packed a wallop. “Whiskey River” had been transformed from a honky-tonk anthem done as a Ray Price shuffle into a crunching rocker. Willie Nelson and Family were no longer tethered to the traditions of Ray Price, Faron Young, and Ernest Tubb. Their new peers were Southern rock bands like the Allman Brothers of Macon, Georgia, who also carried two guitars and two drums, the Charlie Daniels Band of rural Tennessee, the Marshall Tucker Band of South Carolina, and whatever ensemble Leon Russell had going up in Tulsa. “When it worked, it was like thunder, or a train rolling down the track,” Bee Spears marveled. “It was smokin’.” “It sounded great if you had the right chemical mixture in your body,” observed Willie. “It was a really hard-core, heavy metal, rock kind of country.”

People had noticed, including Columbia Nashville’s Ron Bledsoe, who was wondering, where was
that
band on the recording?

Even Willie’s friends were questioning his wisdom. “Willie, that album isn’t going to sell shit,” Joe Jamail told him flat out.

Bruce Lundvall played the recording at an executive meeting in the New York office, announcing to everyone around the table, “This is the first album by Willie Nelson on Columbia. It’s probably not commercial and might not be made for country radio, but I want you to live with it. It’s going to be a collector’s item because it’s so special.”

Bruce was ready to suck it in. Jerry Wexler might not have had a hit on Willie, but Columbia would stick with him until he did. He was worth the investment. Bruce Lundvall’s instincts were validated by national media coverage of Willie’s picnic at Liberty Hill. As the Bee Gees dominated the national pop charts in 1975 with the disco hit “Jive Talking,” the Third Annual Fourth of July Picnic drew seventy thousand true believers to a five-hundred-acre treeless pasture on the banks of the South San Gabriel River near Liberty Hill, a picturesque small town in the Hill Country, thirty miles northwest of Austin. The picnic starred Willie, Kris and Rita, Billy Swan, the Charlie Daniels Band, Doug Sahm and His Tex-Mex Trip, singer-songwriter Alex Harvey, Johnny Bush, Delbert McClinton, Floyd Tillman, and the Pointer Sisters, a trio of retro-dressing, very good-looking African American females from San Francisco whose cool harmonies had been championed by the Armadillo World Headquarters.

Fifty thousand advance tickets priced at $5.50 were sold, and another ten to twenty thousand were sold at the gate for $7.50. The Texas Senate declared Willie Nelson Day. Music press was flown in from around the world to take note of the cultural phenomenon in progress, signifying Willie, as it were.

To live up to its image as a giant-size wild and woolly outlaw concert, traffic backed up for miles on Farm to Market Road 1869, the main route into the site, and Paul English drew down on a guy he caught hopping the fence, inserting the barrels of two pistols into his mouth before running him off. Otherwise, it was basically a whole lot of roaring, musically and personally.

The accounting system Paul and Neil Reshen had devised was primitive at best. Paul, Neil, and Willie had a plywood box built with a hole in it and had Lana sit inside. “They threw the money in the box and I counted it and handed it to the Purolator armored-car man,” she explained. But the heat and lack of ventilation made her pass out. “Dad came in with Neil Reshen and Paul,” she said. “Paul was still scuffed up by the altercation. I was sopping wet. They picked me up and told me to get out. They shoved the money into the plywood box with a padlock on it for three hours until it got full enough to give it to the Purolator man.”

No matter how much came in, it wasn’t enough to pay for the cost of throwing the picnic, just like Dripping Springs and Bryan–College Station. Unlike with the Bryan and Dripping Springs picnics, Geno McCoslin and friends did not bother applying for a Texas Mass Gatherings Act permit, passed by the Texas Legislature in 1971 to prevent any more hippie conventions like the Texas International Pop Festival staged in 1969. Why bother, when the penalty was a misdemeanor punishable by ninety days in jail and/or a $1,000 fine? They were thinking like characters. The show ran all the way to five a.m. the next day, but only ten arrests were made and thirty-five traffic violations issued, relatively tame by previous standards, with no clashes between factions in the audience. Williamson County sheriff August Bosshard ignored enforcing the Texas Mass Gatherings Act and reported “no violence, no affrays, and no complaints about the crowd’s behavior from locals. Those people who were down there, if they want to swear there were more than five thousand people there for more than twelve hours, they can file a complaint. I’m not going to.”

Along with sunburns, heat strokes, overdoses, bug bites, and more music than a mortal could keep up with, the picnic served notice that Willie and Texas were happening on their own terms.

The picnic conveniently coincided with Columbia’s release of the first single from Willie’s new album. Nick Hunter hatched a plan to send white label copies of the album to the program directors of the fifty-four country radio stations that reported their charts to the music trade magazines. The PDs would know if there were hits on the album.

Columbia’s radio people were leaning toward “Remember Me” as the first single. The disc jockeys thought otherwise. Joe Ladd of KIKK in Houston, the top market for country record sales, was dead certain: “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” was a smash. It had all the right ingredients to move up the charts, never mind that the song was written by Fred Rose for Roy Acuff thirty years ago and there were no drums on the track.

Willie had been building goodwill with radio people since 1961. For once, he’d given them a song they could pay him back with for all the generosity and good hang time. Airplay was strong the day the single of the beautiful lullaby was released, thirty years after the song was written.

The single struck a particular chord with Bruce Lundvall. “I remembered hearing ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’ when I was ten years old,” he said. “I knew the original by heart because I’d always hear it on
Hometown Frolic
on WAAT in Newark, the only country radio in the New York/New Jersey area. I was a country fan before I was a jazz fan.”

The single finally reached number 1 on the country singles chart the first week of October as it began crossing over onto the pop charts, peaking at number 21 a few weeks later. But Willie was still being second-guessed. The appeal of the record escaped country legend Charlie Louvin. One night on Bill Mack’s
Midnight Cowboy
program on WBAP-AM, a truckers’ show broadcast from Fort Worth that could be heard throughout half the nation, one-half of the Louvin Brothers voiced his opinion: “I can’t understand it. That thing wouldn’t have even made a good demo.”

Willie discovered that despite all of the doubts, he was a pretty good producer. “Chet Atkins was a better guitar player than me,” he said. “Grady Martin was a better guitar player than me. I thought they knew the answers in the studio. Come to find out, they didn’t know any better than I did.” He had made an album against all odds and at one-tenth the usual expense.

“Columbia wanted to pay for the sessions, so I called Phil York in Garland and told him to send me the bill,” said Nick Hunter. “I sent it over to the accountant. She called me back really nice. Could I get all the bills together so she could send just one check all at once? I said, ‘That’s it.’ She started laughing.”

The
Red Headed Stranger
album officially debuted in Houston at a Halloween party with a live performance by Willie and band at the Shepherd Drive-In movie theater, an unlikely venue for an album debut, much less a concert. The Halloween night show was promoted by Dar Jamail, Joe Jamail’s eighteen-year-old son. Even stranger, Paul Simon, the folk-rock singer who was once half of the duo Simon & Garfunkel, showed up to sit in with Willie Nelson and Family. Columbia’s CEO Bruce Lundvall had come to Houston to see Paul perform in concert at an arena and go to Willie’s drive-in show. Willie urged Lundvall to bring Paul over. “He knew Willie’s songs but he didn’t really know who Willie was,” Poodie Locke, a Willie roadie, said. “He was sitting on the steps with Steve [Koepke] and me and he’d ask, ‘Did Willie write that?’ We’d nod. Willie called him up, hadn’t even met him, just handed him his guitar.”

The first real concert date supporting the album was scheduled for Ebbets Field, a small room in Denver. Willie asked Nick Hunter not to bring Hank Cochran to the Denver gig as planned. He wanted to stay focused. Hank would get him sidelined. Ebbets Field was chosen because Chuck Morris owned the room and Willie had committed to a national tour promoted by Barry Fey and Morris and Feyline Concerts, which controlled the mountain states territory for concerts, much like Bill Graham owned northern California and Ron Delsener dominated New York City and the Tri-State area. It was a big leap for both parties. Feyline specialized in rock acts that could fill hockey arenas. Other than Waylon, country acts weren’t working those kinds of venues. Fey and Morris thought Willie had the potential once they witnessed a few shows in Texas. Willie saw the potential too. After a career represented by booking agents from Texas and Nashville, going with Barry Fey and Chuck Morris was a step up.

“It is my time,” he explained to another friend.

For the first time ever, Willie had the wherewithal to hire a full-time road crew. Before then, “He’d sit out in his Mercedes, smoking pot, watching people arrive in the parking lot,” Wally Selman of the Texas Opry House recalled. “We’d be talking until it was time to go inside and he’d get his stuff from the U-Haul trailer and everyone would carry their stuff in.”

Mickey Raphael called Poodie Locke, who was the only roadie in Austin worth a shit besides Bobby “Flaco” Lemons and Travis Potter. Poodie had worked with Mickey when Mickey was with B. W. Stevenson and had twice turned down offers to join Willie to stay with B. W. “Buckwheat was such a mess, somebody had to watch him,” Poodie reasoned. “I couldn’t leave him. He was drinking two bottles of Jack Daniel’s a day.” But Poodie did leave when Mickey called a third time.

Poodie went to Paul English’s, where he was introduced to Paul’s son, Darrell Wayne, Connie Nelson’s brother Steve Koepke, and Willie’s son, Billy, aka Wild Bill—the road crew of record—and shown the battered green Blazer wagon that Austin car dealer Bill McMorris had loaned to the band. Paul handed Poodie $1,000 and instructions for where to meet him in Los Angeles, where the band was going to showcase the album. Flush with running change and aided by two ounces of weed and an eight ball of coke, Poodie drove west, hauling the guts of the Willie Nelson and his Family Band road show to the big time.

Word about Willie and his new album had L.A. primed and ready. Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and most of the West Coast staff of Columbia Records turned out for the label-sponsored showcase at the Troubadour Club on Santa Monica Boulevard, a musical launching pad since 1957. The acoustic-friendly club, which could hardly accommodate two hundred customers, was an ideal setting for a song cycle that demanded paying attention to. The heavyweights in attendance validated Willie with record buyers. More important, Columbia staff finally got what the album was about.

Other dates were added quickly. The Palomino in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles for the country fans, two nights at Jay’s Silver Cloud in Algodones, New Mexico, near Albuquerque. “Two-thirds of the bar was for regular customers. The other third was padded for the drunk Indians,” Poodie Locke said about the rough start. “Until we got to play in front of Carl Perkins and the Tennessee Three at the Jackson Coliseum in Jackson, Tennessee, we were making five hundred a gig,” Poodie said. Then the going got good, and kept on going. “It was supposed to be for two weeks. We were out for six months.”

None of the crew had a title. Everyone did everything and found their place amid the chaos Willie enjoyed creating. A job description was beside the point, Willie said, “except Bee—he plays bass.” They were pickers, gypsies, pirates, vagabonds, wanderers, and carneys, each addicted to “having a new reality every day,” as the front man liked to say.

The band, which had been flying to gigs out of Texas for the past year, and the crew, who had been in the old Blazer, began riding in old Porter Wagoner’s bus. Nice as it was to have everyone in one vehicle, it was already too small. Selling records put them on a steep learning curve. “Willie didn’t know shit about sound checks, so we’d leave [for a gig] when Willie wanted to leave,” Poodie Locke said. “We were touring with Poco [on Willie’s first major arena tour, opening for the West Coast country-rock band] when Timmy Schmidt, Chris Hillman, and Sneaky Pete were playing with them. They’d do two sound checks. I’d go in myself and set up in the dark behind them. We blew them away every show, six shows in a row. They got all these bad reviews. Dennis Wall, their road manager, called me in Atlanta. He said, ‘We really love you guys, but you guys are too unprofessional. We don’t think you’re going to make it.’”

Getting kicked off the Poco tour was a back-handed compliment. Within a year they would be headlining the Omni Arena in Atlanta for three nights running with the future President of the United States of America, Jimmy Carter, among the Willie-ites.

After the album passed the five-hundred-thousand-units-sold mark (it was certified gold in March 1976), Bruce Lundvall sent Waylon a gold record with the note, “This is from that tin-eared tone-deaf son-of-a-bitch. You were right. Here’s your album.” The album soon eclipsed one million in sales and was certified double platinum, signifying sales of two million units, in 1986. Willie took a cue from Lund-vall’s graciousness by sending a framed platinum album to his friend Joe Jamail, who had told Willie the album was shit. Beneath the platinum record was a message from Willie. “You’re right, lawyer.”