Willie Nelson (49 page)

“Obviously it hurt Joe because he didn’t get anything out of it,” Coach joshed, because the initial judgment—in favor of Jamail’s client—exceeded $10 billion, the largest jury verdict in history. The figure was ultimately reduced to $3 billion, but the lawyer did very well for himself, earning $335 million for his troubles. He’d already won one case using Willie as an argument. “Some guy was really hurt in a car wreck, and [Joe] used the lyrics to ‘Half a Man’ to convince the jury to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars that [the guy’s] insurance didn’t want to pay,” Willie said. “Joe didn’t mind borrowing a few words.”

W
ILLIE’S
drawing power remained strong, enticing thirty thousand fans to pay $18 for an all-day admission to the 1984 version of the Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic, staged at South Park Meadows, an eleven-acre open-air concert venue with no seating (read: a big ol’ pasture) in deep south Austin. After he had held “picnics” in stadiums in New Jersey, Syracuse, and Atlanta the previous year, it was time to come back to Texas. It was a classic progressive-country bill with Waylon, Jessi, Kris, and Leon headlining, joined by Joe Ely, the Lubbock songster and rocker who’d relocated to Austin, Extreme Outlaw David Allan Coe, San Antonio country singer Moe Bandy, semi-reformed Austin icon Jerry Jeff Walker, whose career had been revived when his wife, Susan, a onetime state political operative, took over as his manager, actor Gary Busey, who, like too many music biopic lead actors thought he was really a rock star after he did
The Buddy Holly Story,
pal Johnny Bush, ol’ Faron Young, and Austin folkie Steve Fromholz.

Unlike previous picnics, this one was promoted by Pace Concerts, the dominant concert promoter in the southwest that had been staging Willie’s big New Year’s Eve bashes in Houston. “Now Louis Messina [of Pace] can worry about losing half the money,” Willie joked. The outlaw vibe lingered, but the suits were running the show now.

A year later, it rained throughout most of the 1985 picnic at South Park Meadows, holding the crowd count to fifteen thousand, despite one of the strongest lineups ever: Neil Young at his first picnic; the Highwaymen, an old-lions-of-country supergroup consisting of Willie, Kris, Waylon, and Cash; several stars with two first names—David Allan, Jerry Jeff, Ray Wiley, and Billy Joe; the Nashville greats—June Carter Cash, Faron Young, Johnny Bush, and Hank Snow; and several Austin FOWs—Geezinslaws, Fromholz, Rattlesnake Annie, and Jubal Clark, the self-styled Gypsy Cowboy who opened the festivities. Clearly, the vibe surrounding picnics past had faded. No matter how good the music was, sitting in a field full of stickers and ticks surrounded by drunks and dopeheads had lost its charm among a significant number of Willie’s old fans.

The picnic was no longer the only way to experience Willie Nelson—movies, television appearances, touring, and the continuous barrage of new albums made him more accessible than ever. Of all the multimedia projects, the most surprising was the 1985 film
Red Headed Stranger,
on which he bet some of his own money. After six years of hemming and hawing, he bought back the film rights to the movie from Robert Redford, who at one time fancied playing the Stranger himself.

As with his music career, Willie had learned enough about how the movie business worked to think he wanted to promote the show as well as star in it. He and writer-director Bill Witliff shared the title of producers. They put together a group of investors headed by Don Tyson, the president of the biggest poultry processor in America, to get the movie made. Concert promoter Barry Fey and Willie’s right-hand man on the road, David Anderson, were associate producers. Tim O’Connor unloaded what ownership he had left in the Austin Opry complex to add money to the producer’s pot. Caroline Mugar, a friend and fan of some means from Boston, added $500,000 to the pot to get the movie finished. She later would become the executive director of a Willie project called Farm Aid.

The movie stuck to the same script as Willie’s album, with the addition of a Texas Ranger character named El Viejo that had been created by scriptwriter Michael Mann for his hit television series
Miami Vice.
Willie played the Stranger, the Reverend Julian Shay. Dallas native Morgan Fairchild played his wife, Raysha, and Katharine Ross of
The Graduate
and
Butch Cassidy
fame played Laurie, the Stranger’s love interest. Character actor R. G. Armstrong played the sheriff. Also in the cast were Austin actor Sonny Carl Davis; Paul English and Bee Spears from Willie’s band; Elberta Hunter; Bill Richardson, who went on to fame making
Invasion of the Space Preachers;
Austin power attorney Joe K. Longley; and the thieves of the Pedernales, including Billy Cooper, Bo Franks, Ralph (the Midget) Franzetti, Jody Fischer, several dozen other family friends, and Jubal Clark, one of the most talented songwriters you’d never heard of, who got a speaking role as the third horse thief:

JUBAL:
Get me some spurs!

(No one answers.)

The
STRANGER,
emerging from the shadows: Get Jubal some spurs!

All the
THIEVES
suddenly run around, yelling: Get Jubal some spurs! Get Jubal some spurs

The day after filming Jubal’s scene, Willie spied him on the set.

“How do you like the way I shot you in the ass off that horse?” Willie asked him, reveling in the joys of being a movie cowboy.

“Willie, if you were a little taller and aimed a little higher, you wouldn’t have shot me in the ass,” Jubal said.

Willie sold the finished film to Shep Gordon, a movie producer who had been manager of the rock personality Alice Cooper. Shep paid enough up front to give the investors their money back plus a 25 percent profit. Willie had risen to the challenge, but the experience involved enough heavy lifting to convince him he had better things to do with his time than produce films. “Making movies is a slower process than making music,” he said with understatement. “The payoff depends on who you are doing the movie with and if you are enjoying it.”

But movie ownership had its perquisites. Willie got to keep the movie set as his own personal western town, which he named Luck, Texas, complete with facades of a church, horse stables, hardware store, and saloon. The saloon was eventually refashioned into the Luck World Headquarters, where Willie tended bar, cooked breakfast for the boys, played chess and pool, and picked music the old-fashioned way, sitting around, singing, and playing guitars.

Weddings were held in Luck. Cowboy gunfights were filmed in Luck. Whenever Willie had to do interviews or photo shoots, like the one he did with Annie Leibovitz, Luck was the place. The town motto—“When you’re here, you’re in Luck. When you’re not here, you’re out of luck”—said it all.

Outside the bubbles of the Pedernales Country Club and the adjacent Luck, a good part of the nation was reeling from a real-estate bust, with falling prices, rising bankruptcies, and vanishing buyers. The downturn was caused by corrupt savings and loan executives, who cost taxpayers billions of dollars by loaning easy money to speculators.

The earlier boom had jacked up housing prices in Austin, and the subsequent bust offered some real steals and bargains as the overheated economy cooled, but the breather didn’t last long. City boosters had seen past the old-school wisdom of trying to attract heavy industry by offering tax breaks. Instead, two critical semigovernmental high-technology research bodies discovered Austin, like Willie had eleven years earlier. Austin won out over three other finalists (San Diego, Raleigh, and Atlanta) as the location for the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, a consortium of twelve American technology companies that banded together to stave off competition from Japan and advance supercomputer research, bringing a new wave of best and brightest minds to town led by Admiral Bobby Inman. Another fourteen-company consortium, called Sematech, formed in Austin in 1986 to advance semiconductor (computer chip) research.

As Austin ascended to global-city status and the rest of Texas was embracing its new reputation as America on Steroids (San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston consistently ranked in the top ten of America’s Fattest Cities), Willie was polishing his altruistic credentials.

Giving was always part of his philosophy. When the offering plate was passed around Abbott Methodist on Sunday mornings after the sermon, he felt responsible, like everyone else did, and wanted to drop something in the plate, even if he had nothing to give. Alfred and Nancy had taught him to do right, especially when someone less fortunate needed help. Mamma Nelson would have been proud of him and Bobbie becoming the people they were—two of the closest siblings on earth doing what they were raised to do, and doing it better and with more grace than almost anyone else. The urge to help others stayed with him. He remembered the other side of this life too well.

The desire to help took Willie to the end zone of a college football stadium in Champaign, Illinois. It was harvest time—September 22, 1985, to be exact—the time of the year when crops came in all across America, and those who prepared, planted, and nurtured them hoped to reap the rewards for the previous nine months of toil and gamble.

Willie was standing on an improvised stage between John Mellencamp and Neil Young with Illinois governor Jim Thompson to his side, looking over a crowd of eighty thousand gathered to honor the American family farmer at a fourteen-hour marathon concert dubbed Farm Aid.

Real farmers needed help, at least the ones who were still hanging in. Most of the tillable soil in America was owned by corporations. Harvesting was done on a mass scale with machinery and cheap labor. Family farmers were pretty much a memory when Willie put his mind to honoring them. The aim was to raise awareness for American farmers the same way money had been raised for AIDS through the Live Aid concerts in London and Philadelphia two months before. During his Live Aid set in Philadelphia, Bob Dylan had weighed in with the comment “The American family farmer could use a hand too.” Willie had heard the sentiment loud and clear.

Farmers were to Dylan what Gene Autry was to Willie, mostly an idealized fantasy of Americana Lost. To Willie, farmers were the folks he grew up with and who shaped his worldview. An idea grew in his head after he talked to Dylan. The more he talked to the kids he’d grown up with in Abbott who were still farming in Hill County, the more he wanted to do something on their behalf.

At a gig Willie played in Springfield, the capital of Illinois, he brought the subject up to a visitor on the bus, Governor Jim Thompson. “Every time we’d play the state fair, Big Jim would come on the bus and we’d have a beer and a bowl of chili and talk about things,” Willie said. “This particular year, I’d heard the farmers were having problems and asked him if he knew anything about it.”

Farmers were having a bad year, Governor Thompson told him, going into detail about the upcoming federal farm bill, soft markets, price supports, parity, drought, fuel costs, and other agricultural issues.

“That’s when we started talking about doing Farm Aid,” Willie said. “I knew [the government wasn’t] doing the right thing. There was no good farm bill. All of us out here know that we need a good farm bill to save the farmer, and there’s no good farm bill right now to protect the farmer from the big corporations. That pissed me off. I thought one Farm Aid one time with me and the governor there, how could they argue with that?”

Twenty-one days later he was at Champaign, taking the stage with Neil Young at ten a.m. to open the show with a song about farmers “trying to make a stand.” A stream of superstars followed throughout the day, including Bob Dylan, B. B. King, the Beach Boys, Billy Joel, Loretta Lynn, Bonnie Raitt, Rickie Lee Jones, Waylon Jennings, John Denver, Roger Miller, Tom Petty, Lou Reed, John Fogarty, Randy Newman, Roy Orbison, Charley Pride, Kris Kristofferson, Van Halen, Merle Haggard, and George Jones. In all, more than fifty acts volunteered their services. June Carter and Johnny Cash reworked “Old McDonald Had a Farm” to tie into the day’s theme. Charlie Daniels wrote and performed a new song called “American Farmer.” The event raised $7 million for family farmers, which was disbursed through the nonprofit organization Willie had formed.

“No one knew what the fuck he was talking about at the first Farm Aid,” said Floyd Domino, who was playing piano for Waylon Jennings at the time. “But because it was Willie, everybody figured it was for a good cause.” The ones who really got it—John Mellencamp, Neil Young, and, later on, Dave Matthews—were artists representing a broad spectrum of music that shared the common trait of integrity, which people were happy to pay good money to witness.

Months later, Willie was still speaking out. Farm Aid was no feel-good one-off. It had turned into a crusade. If not for music, his involvement with Future Farmers of America in high school would have eventually led him down the agrarian path. The least he could do for all the folks back home was help.

Willie became Farm Aid’s voice. He testified in front of a panel of U.S. senators in Washington, DC, telling them, “The farmers in this country are dropping out—they’re dropping like flies.” Back at the ranch, personal secretary Jody Fischer, who was supposed to be handling the business end of Pedernales Studio, became a crisis-hotline counselor, fielding calls from farmers and their families who wanted to talk to Willie, saying such things as “I need help,” “I’m going to kill myself,” and “My husband’s in the barn with a gun.”

“I was really discouraged because I saw us losing more and more farmers every week,” Willie explained in a radio interview. “And we had about eight million small-family farmers. Now, we’re down to less than two million, still losing three to four hundred every week. So I’ve been watching that happen and it was very discouraging. The bills passed to help the farmer were not helping the farmer. The Freedom to Farm bill was laughingly called the Freedom to Fail bill by small farmers.”

In the summer of 1986, Texas’s sesquicentennial year, Willie combined his picnic and Farm Aid, staging the July Fourth event at Manor Downs, a quarterhorse track east of Austin owned by Frances Carr, the comanager of Stevie Ray Vaughan, and former girlfriend and business partner of Sam Cutler, the one-time road manager for the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, and (briefly) Willie Nelson. SRV joined an eclectic Farm Aid on the Fourth lineup that included the Beach Boys, Los Lobos, X, Rick James, Julio Iglesias, Waylon, George Jones, Little Joe Hernandez, Steve Earle, illusionist the Amazing Kreskin, and seventy other acts, who performed a nineteen-hour marathon in front of forty thousand fans and a nationwide audience watching on the VH-1 cable channel, raising $1.3 million for small family farmers.