Willie Nelson (9 page)
Studio or no studio, Dallas was a music scene unto itself, and occasionally Willie would drive over to check out the action. “There was a big difference between Dallas and Fort Worth,” he said. “You noticed the change somewhere around Grand Prairie, it got a little more high-falutin’. Fort Worth was still a Cowtown and wanted to stay that way.”
Willie and Joe Andrews, his old buddy from Bud Fletcher and the Texans, would sit in with Leo Teel and his band at Danceland at Corinth and Industrial, or with whoever was playing the Aragon or Bob Wills’ Ranch House, a three-thousand-seat ballroom that became Dewey Groom’s Longhorn Ballroom.
On Saturday nights, Willie and Joe could check out the Big D Jamboree, the country “barn dance” staged inside the wrestling ring of the Sportatorium, a tin-sided sixty-three-hundred-seat arena at the corner of Cadiz and Industrial that also hosted wrestling and gospel shows. The “Home of the Hillbillies” had been a springboard for Lefty Frizzell, Ray Price, Charlene Arthur, and Billy Walker, among others.
The Big D also played to the emerging rock-and-roll audience by featuring young rockabillies—hillbillies playing that newfangled rock and roll, which was really honky-tonk and swing music on speed. The Jamboree’s stars included Ronnie Dee, the “Blond Bomber” later known as Ronnie Dawson, as well as teen heartthrob Johnny Carroll, “Groovy” Joe Poovey, Sid King & His Five Strings, the Belew Twins, and Gene Vincent, who relocated to Dallas after his biggest hit, “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” and was managed by the Sportatorium’s Ed McLemore.
The main drawing card every week was a major star from the Grand Ole Opry or its rival Louisiana Hayride, someone like Johnny Horton, Webb Pierce, Carl Perkins, Carl Smith, Roy Orbison, or Johnny Cash. After the broadcast, the act would go next door and play Dewey Groom’s Longhorn Ballroom, the “Number One Country Dancehall in Dallas,” for the rest of the night.
When he couldn’t be at the Big D, Willie heard it on KRLD 1080 radio, whose nighttime signal covered most of Texas. “Johnny Hicks was the master of ceremonies, him and Hal Horton,” Willie said. “At one time or another, most everybody worked on the Big D Jamboree. I wanted to be on it. ’Course I wanted to be anywhere there was a crowd or an audience or somebody that would listen. You did for the exposure, to say you played the Big D Jamboree. It was something you could use, but there wasn’t a lot of money there.”
The money was at joints like the Southern Club in a pasture off Greenville Avenue, Deb’s out on Highway 80 on the Grand Prairie strip, and the Top Rail and the Star Lite, out on 114 toward Grapevine, where Willie would sit in with the house bands in the hope of getting work.
“The first thing I learned when he came down and sat in with me was not to play guitar when he sang,” said Leo Teel, who helped build Jim Beck’s studio and had recorded for Decca. “Lawsy me, he moved that meter around. I was used to playing on the one, two, three count. Willie would mess with that count. If you let him sit in, surrender your guitar ’cause he’ll move that beat around. When he plays guitar, he’ll wait till that last little moment to put a tag on it.”
TV was broadening country music’s horizons more than Elvis and his wiggling hips. The Big D Jamboree was broadcast on KRLD-TV. The Ozark Jubilee, a barn dance in Springfield, Missouri, starring Red Foley and a cast that included long tall Porter Wagoner, the mustachioed Hawkshaw Hawkins, Arlie Duff, and instrumentalist Grady Martin and His Crossroad Boys, grabbed nationwide exposure when the ABC-TV network began airing the program from eight to nine p.m. on Saturday night. Tennessee Ernie Ford hosted his own variety show on NBC-TV, while the Grand Ole Opry launched its own filmed series sponsored by Falstaff Beer.
TV brought Paul Buskirk—whom Willie had seen play at the Round Up in Dallas—into sharper focus. Buskirk played banjo weekdays at WBAP-TV, Channel 5, on a local variety program called
Jones Place
. Neal Jones’s presentation of “Comedy, Humor, Philosophy” aired from noon to 12:45 p.m. but started fifteen minutes earlier in 1955, when it was presented “in living COLOR.” That allowed Willie enough time to watch and listen to Buskirk before going on the air with his
Western Express
show. A renowned stringed instrumentalist from Parkersburg, West Virginia, Buskirk was equally proficient on mandolin, guitar, and dobro, as well as banjo, and possessed a broad knowledge of all different kinds of music like no one Willie Hugh Nelson had ever met, and that included Alfred and Nancy Nelson.
Back home in the Appalachian hills, Buskirk was frequently compared to Bill Monroe. He grew up under the tutelage of the famed bluegrass duo Johnny and Jack. He followed the Callahan Brothers to Texas, where they all became radio stars as the Blue Ridge Mountain Folk, broadcasting radio shows aired in Texas and Kansas while recording for Decca, the crème de la crème of country music record labels. Buskirk had played with everyone from Roy Acuff and Chet Atkins to jazz drummer Art Blakey. He was knocking around the same country joints in Fort Worth, Dallas, Waco, and San Antonio as Willie was when they first met.
Buskirk introduced Willie to the singer in his band, a scrawny, scruffily handsome young man named Freddy Powers. He’d come from Seminole, Texas, a hardpan, sparsely inhabited piece of flat, dry scrub. Paul told Freddy that Willie was writing some interesting pop songs and shared their interest in Western Swing and swing in general. “There was a lot of swing going on because of Bob Wills and Hank Thompson,” Freddy said. “Playing the nightclubs, we had to play it all because of them. Paul turned me on to Django [Reinhardt]. He had the whole Django catalog. Swing musicians and jazz musicians considered him a hero.”
Freddy could tell Paul was mentoring Willie too. If someone wanted to talk music or theory or exotic sounds, Paul loved engaging them. He’d quickly gleaned the small kid from down around Waco was hungry to learn, and Paul was glad to assist. “Paul had the connections that Willie didn’t,” Powers explained. “Paul helped him because he had a lot of respect for Willie.”
Paul occasionally joined Willie and his guitarist Oliver English and drummer Tommy Roznosky on Willie’s
Western Express
radio show on KCNC in Fort Worth. Freddy Powers visited Willie in the studio several times, often plugging the latest Paul Buskirk 45 on Lin Records, the small label out of Gainesville near the Oklahoma line. He saw what Buskirk saw, and heard what Buskirk heard. “I was pretty much impressed with his songs,” Freddy said.
Paul cut a track on a song Willie had written called “Heartaches of a Fool,” with Freddy singing vocals, at Jim Beck’s, but the recording was never released. At least his songs were good enough for someone else to record.
In his own quiet way, Oliver English, Willie’s lead guitar on the radio, was as much an influence as Paul Buskirk. He was the grandson of a champion fiddler and had worked most of the joints a musician could work in Fort Worth, including Rosa’s and Stella’s on East Belknap, where Freddy Powers used to sit in, the Crystal Springs Pavillion, the Casino Ballroom on Lake Worth (“a job everyone hated to play because you had to wear monkey suits”), Jimmy’s Westland Club out on Highway 80 West toward Weatherford, and all the joints up and down the Jacksboro Highway and the Mansfield Highway, where the featured entertainment was “Live Band Tonight.”
After the clubs closed, Oliver would sit in at the New Jim Hotel downtown, the “colored” hotel where black touring musicians stayed when they were playing in North Texas. “You had to be careful and know the right people or they’d roll you,” Oliver said. “You wanted to have some black friends.” The reward was getting to play with some of the finest road bands, black or white, on earth.
Oliver learned to play a little bit of everything and a whole lot of Western Swing, usually doing four sets a night from eight until midnight, except at the Westland Club, where they went till sunrise. “We didn’t make much money,” he said. “Nobody did. A musician in it for the money was in the wrong business.”
For Oliver, music was its own reward. “When I was at the Westland Club, from eight to twelve, we’d play country. From twelve to four in the morning, we’d play jazz. Everybody back then liked Django Reinhardt and the Hot Club of France. I idolized him when I was a little kid.” Oliver turned Willie on to Django. Willie helped Oliver whenever he could. “If Willie had ten dollars, he’d give someone five if they needed it. He didn’t have anything, but he’d give you half of what he had.”
Willie was learning a lot and making enough at sales to move Martha and Lana out of Ira and Lorraine’s house into their own rent house out toward Arlington. But he still wasn’t satisfied. What Willie really wanted, Oliver realized, was to be understood and not get too distracted. If someone offered him a shot of whiskey, he’d drink it and keep drinking until the bottle was gone, which led to nights when he didn’t come home. He took his first knowing drag off a marijuana cigarette behind a building on East Belknap. “I didn’t realize it until then that I’d already smoked marijuana before as a kid with my cousin who had asthma,” he said. “The doctor had given him some cigarettes and while we were fishing out on the creek bank, he brought out one of these asthma cigarettes, and I took a couple of puffs. That smell stayed with me for the years later when I first ran into what was really pot.” A lot of musician friends smoked. “I was smoking for six months before I realized I was getting high.”
But the presence of family kept him out of serious trouble. Between Martha and Lana, Ira’s family, and Bobbie Lee’s family, who moved to Fort Worth along with Mamma Nelson to live with Aunt Rosie and Uncle Ernest in White Settlement, there were plenty of kinfolk with an eye on him.
S
ISTER
Bobbie thought she had lost her way. She had divorced Bud Fletcher, and after Bud’s influential parents went to court early in 1955, they won custody of Randy, Freddy, and Michael Fletcher, leading Bobbie to suffer a nervous breakdown. When she recovered and regained custody of her boys, she headed to Fort Worth to find work and raise her sons. “I thought I couldn’t play music anymore. It was sad,” she said. She found a job in a TV repair shop and enrolled at Brantley Business College to learn secretarial skills. “I had to find a way to raise my children and make as much money as I could,” she said.
When she completed secretarial school, she went to the Texas Employment Commission. “I was the only person at the employment agency who was a pianist and a stenographer,” she said. The Shield Company called to ask if she would work as a stenographer in the organ department and be trained to teach the new Hammond electric organ. Bobbie needed no persuading. “I could go back into music,” she said. “I played pump organ but this was a different thing. Me and my boys started going to Edge Park Methodist Church. They bought a little spinet organ from Hammond. I started playing for the church. Willie and his father and his wife went to Metropolitan Baptist Church. That’s where Willie taught Sunday School until they told him he couldn’t. He had to choose between playing music in bars or teaching Sunday School. He chose to play music.”
Bobbie’s job for Hammond Organ led to evening demonstrations at the El Chico Mexican restaurant and Wyatt’s Cafeteria. “They trained me to play organs there and all the grocery stores [Buddie’s], the Stock Show, Home Show, Boat Show,” she said. “I was the person on the little carousel going around and around, talking to people about how easy [playing organ] is to do. I sold organs. I taught organ. There were three teachers, and I wound up teaching the other teachers. And I’m the organist at Edge Park Methodist Church. They had their own sanctuary by this time. I sold them the big concert model.”
Just as Bobbie was getting settled, her brother came down with a bad case of itchy feet. If Fort Worth was the first place where his career showed potential, it was also the first place where he learned hard lessons about making a living playing music. He’d been raised to play music. But the truth was, the few dollars he made were earned because he sold beer and sometimes provided cover for gambling. No one was paying attention to all the songs he was writing. He risked getting beat up for not smiling when he was informed there wasn’t any money to pay him at the end of the night, or getting his head split open behind a beer joint just for saying something nice to a pretty young lady from the bandstand.
Even with Martha waitressing, it was still tough making ends meet. He had grown sick of old man Speck barging into the control room whenever he heard a record being played that he didn’t like, knocking the tone arm off the turntable, picking up the offensive record, smashing it to pieces, and stomping out of the room. An asshole like Jim Speck was all the convincing he needed to conclude KCNC was a dead-end gig. And Martha coming down hard on him for staying out and paying no mind to her or their daughter was just bacon grease poured on the fire.
For Willie, a change of scene might make it all better.
M
YRLE NEVER LEFT
Willie’s life. She came back to Texas often to visit her children as they were growing up, but never stayed long, always heading west again. Ever since his discharge from the air force, Myrle had encouraged her son to come play music in Oregon, where she’d put down roots in Eugene and married her third husband, Ken Harvey. Several times, he had obliged her.
With Myrle’s help and encouragement, while Willie was working at KCNC in Fort Worth, he sent a demo tape to Grandpappy Smith, the man to see when it came to country and western music in Eugene, Oregon. Grandpappy owned the Melody Ranch dance hall and was bandleader of the Western Valley Boys, the Melody Ranch house band, and hosted a show on KASH radio. He also had a small recording empire going on, with two record labels, Orbit Sound (for country acts) and Willamette Records, and a song publishing company, Myrtle Mountain Publishing.
The demo reel began with an introduction from Willie and the promise that if Grandpappy didn’t like the songs, he had fifty more. The first song was “One Time,” followed by “When I’ve Sang My Last Hillbilly Song,” “Just a Million Years,” “Maybe You’ll Know,” and “Born to Be Blue.” Willie was still singing “The Storm Has Just Begun” when the tape ran out.
Grandpappy liked the demo well enough to book Willie at the Melody Ranch in May 1955. Grandpappy’s twelve-year-old son, Leon Smith, played lead guitar behind him on the dates. Grandpappy liked Willie, but not enough to offer a recording contract or more bookings.
When Willie left Fort Worth, he didn’t go to Oregon but instead headed for sunny San Diego. California was a land of opportunity, he had heard, and San Diego’s climate was close to ideal, with warm days in the winter and summer nights cool enough you could sleep outside. Willie’s cowboy movie heroes Gene and Roy were in Southern California—Gene Autry was one of the biggest developers of land between Los Angeles and San Diego.
Westward movement had grown in number and desperation during the Dust Bowl drought that decimated much of North Texas and the Great Plains during the 1930s, and a quest for prosperity following World War II prompted the next great migration wave, which Willie joined. San Diego sounded good to him. He felt confident he could get work playing music and possibly score a disc jockey job; Charlie Williams, the DJ he replaced at KCNC in Fort Worth, found work on a country radio station in Los Angeles, just up the road from San Diego.
Willie hit walls from the moment he arrived. The most imposing barrier was the Musicians Union. You couldn’t play music in California without joining the Musicians Union, and you couldn’t join the union without paying for your membership. Without gigs, he didn’t have the means to scrape together the fee, and no radio station was looking for new talent.
Broke, busted, and running out of options, he finally accepted his mother’s invitation to come stay with her in Portland, Oregon. She had moved there and was tending bar at a local tavern in nearby St. Helen’s. The idea of a roof over his head felt pretty good. Even better, his mother knew the lay of the local country music scene and all the good dance bands in the area. Willie hustled a job as a plumber’s helper to bring home a paycheck and started looking for real work.
If there was a stereotypical character of the Northwest, it was the lumberjack, the big tough physical man of the woodlands, trained to fell as many tall trees as he could to render into timber. Many of the people who worked in the woods came from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and across the South.
But though the Pacific Northwest was about as far removed as it could be from where country music was manufactured and marketed and still be in the United States, its clubs and dance halls were jammed and jumping with customers with money to burn from the logging, railroad, shipbuilding, and shipping industries, abundant fruit orchards and grain farms, several large military bases, and general construction.
The stars performing in the dance halls and clubs were touring artists and regional talent, including T. Texas Tyler from the Lone Star state, Rusty Draper, Bud Isaacs, Rose Maddox, and a popular Pullayup, Washington, disc jockey named Buck Owens. Records were being made and played in the Northwest too. One local hero from Spokane named Charlie Ryan had scored a monster hit with his Timberline Riders two years before Willie arrived, a bopped-up cover version of Arkie Shibley’s “Hot Rod Race” song about car racing, retitled “Hot Rod Lincoln.”
Portland was the largest city in the northwest, with a population of 412,100 in 1957 and almost a million souls living in the metropolitan area. Hundreds of taverns in and beyond the city functioned as community hangouts, many featuring country music. The lush scenery, the volcanic soil that produced bountiful crops, and the bright lights of the big city had spoken to the roaming gal from Arkansas and Texas with a wild streak a mile long. Now they were speaking to her son. “Well, it rained a lot, but I didn’t really mind that,” he said. “I enjoyed the greenery and the fruit. It was apple country and fruit country.”
Martha got waitress work at Fran’s Café in Portland, and Myrle tipped Willie to a job at a radio station in Vancouver, Washington, fifteen miles from downtown Portland. Vancouver was a good town for a country music radio station. It was Portland’s smaller, more rural sibling, much like Fort Worth was to Dallas, less than one-fourth the size of Oregon’s largest city, although locals liked to point out that Fort Vancouver, from which Vancouver had sprung, was the oldest European settlement in the Pacific Northwest, established as a fur trading post and headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Willie’s friendly, authentic drawl, his experience at KBOP, KDNT, and KCNC, and his increasingly effective ability to sell himself, as he’d learned to do peddling Bibles, encyclopedias, and vacuum cleaners, scored him a shift on KVAN AM 910. KVAN’s “instant radio in Ear-O-Phonic Sound . . . first in the metropolitan Portland/Vancouver area” station already boasted an all-star cast of disc jockeys, including Shorty the Hired Hand, Cactus Ken DuBord, who fronted his own band, the Trail Riders, and Pat Mason, a promoter of Grand Ole Opry package shows, who ran Wagon Wheel Park, a big dance hall outside Camas, Washington, east of Vancouver, where touring country acts frequently played.
The station’s new boy was touted as a very big deal in newspaper print ads.
A photograph depicted Willie looking suave, wearing a striped shirt and a convincing smile. Opposite the photo was a cartoon drawing of a donkey standing on its hind legs holding a guitar and looking at Willie’s image, asking, “Who, Him?”
“Why, he’s yer cotton-pickin’, snuff-dippin’, tobaccer-chewin’, stump-jumpin’, gravy-soppin’, coffee-pot-dodgin’, dumplin’-eatin’, frog-giggin’, hillbilly from Hill County, Texas . . .
“WILLIE NELSON!
“Just rode into town to take over his own show on KVAN . . . an’ this young fella fits right in, here at the station with the sense of humor. See that pan-handled description up there? Them’s his very own words! Willie’s got wit, warmth and wow . . . and once you hear ‘Western Express’ you’ll agree!
“He’s no newcomer to radio though. Been entertaining folks since he was sweet 15 . . . and for the past 3½ years, he’s been a big name in Ft. Worth on station KCNC. But now he’s moved ‘kit ’n kaboodle’ to Portland. An’ ya know what? He likes rain!
“You’ll like him . . . an’ you’ll get your ‘enjoys’ listening to Texas Willie Nelson on ‘Western Express,’ 2:30 to 3:30 Monday through Saturday on KVAN.
“KVAN 910 on your dial.
“The station with the sense of humor.”
Unlike at KCNC, he stuck to playing records without singing and picking along with them. He selected the music he played during his show by relying on personal taste and street sense. “I grabbed some records I wanted to play—and they were all good records—and went into the studio and surprised myself,” Willie explained of his programming methodology. “No one was telling me what to do.”
When he wasn’t on the air, he sought out businesses and promoters throughout the greater Portland-Vancouver area to sell them airtime on his
Western Express
show and other KVAN programs. He was selling Willie Nelson too.
Willie played to the image he’d created for himself, making personal appearances dressed in fringed buckskin and moccasins and wearing a holster around his hips with two pistols (the guns were plugged), an outfit influenced by the hugely popular Walt Disney version of Davy Crockett as played by fellow Texan Fess Parker.
Once he could float enough credit, he embellished the image by driving around in a red Cadillac convertible. He bought a cut proud palomino from the radio station’s engineer Leo Erickson and joined the Sheriff’s Posse so he could ride in parades on his steed. It sure beat the cow he used to ride in Abbott.
He was Gene Autry, a movie cowboy on the radio, living out his boyhood fantasy formed by the shoot-’em-ups at the Saturday picture show. His timing was perfect. The singing cowboys from the movies were migrating to television; the two most-watched weekly series on TV in America were the westerns
Gunsmoke
and
Wells Fargo.
In a matter of months, Willie moved into the ten a.m. to two p.m. midday shift and bragged that he was so popular, he had more listeners than any other radio personality in Portland/Vancouver, including Arthur Godfrey, who was broadcasting from New York on the CBS radio network. His competitiveness didn’t end in the sound booth. In 1957, he entered a celebrity stock car race against eighteen other local disc jockeys and radio people and won the race.
Disc jockeying, performing music, and Martha waiting tables brought in enough money for Willie, Martha, Lana, and her new sister, Susie, born during a snowstorm on January 20, 1957, to move. They rented a Mexican adobe home with a barn on farmland out Burton Road on the eastern edge of Vancouver. Martha’s mother and father moved up from Waco to live with them and look after the girls. The family got a dog named Duke and Willie rode his palomino as often as he could around his spread.
He befriended Max Hall, a pump jockey at the gas station near the KVAN studios, which were located in a red-brick building above a furniture store at the corner of 7th and Main streets. Max was friendly and game enough to step into the role of a surrogate Zeke Varnon. Willie would advise Max to come visit him at the radio station when he got off work. “I’ve got a bottle we can share,” he’d tell him. While Max watched Willie spin 45s and entertain listeners, they’d get loaded and make plans to go hear music, chase skirts, and carry on at the end of his shift. One night while hanging with Max at the gas station, Willie spied a shiny new motorcycle parked by the pumps and, wanting to try it out, hopped on, revved the engine, and sped off, promptly hitting a brand-new Plymouth.
The accident did not detract from Max’s high opinion of Willie. “He was the top DJ,” he said. He also recognized his wild streak. “He was a loose cannon. He was always looking for adventure.” The combination brought him a lot of attention. “The ladies really liked Willie,” Max said. It was no surprise, then, that his celebrity caused trouble at home, especially with that “Indian lady,” as Max referred to Martha, who had quite a temper. “She was a fiery little thing,” he said.
Meanwhile, Willie was performing live, picking up work with several area bands and as a solo act. “I was playing the same songs I played in Waco, and people liked them,” he said. Pat Mason, the KVAN disc jockey who ran the Wagon Wheel Park dance hall outside Camas, Washington, hired Willie to play. So did Heck Harper, host of
Heck Harper’s Bar 27 Corral
western show on KPTV, Channel 27, “Portland’s Pioneer Station,” following
American Bandstand
every weekday afternoon.
Harper was one of Portland’s first local TV stars. He played cowboy songs for the young ranch hands at home, told stories, and introduced fifteen-minute segments of cowboy movies. Willie sometimes appeared as Heck’s guest, singing a cowboy song to the kiddos, and also performed on Heck’s weekly country music television show, sponsored by Hollywood Ford (Heck also DJed on KGW radio, the biggest station in Portland). On weekends, Willie played dances with Heck. For one six-month stretch, he and Heck and Cactus Ken DuBord from KVAN joined Roger Crandall and his Barn Dance Boys, a Western Swing big band from Kelso, Washington, who had an extended residency at Tiny Dumont’s Dancehall.
Playing music was more rewarding than being on the radio. Besides the Wagon Wheel, Tiny Dumont’s, and Heck Harper’s show, Willie worked Watkins Park, the Wishing Well Restaurant in St. John’s, and the Dollars Corner Barn Dance. He was a featured attraction at events such as the Clark County Fair and the Rose Festival Western Jamboree and No-Cash Auto Auction staged at Bud Meadows’s Pontiac, Sandy Boulevard at Lucky 13th in Portland. Texas Willie Nelson was part of an undercard with the Powder River Boys, Shorty the Hired Hand, and square dance exhibitions from Mel’s Bells and Beaus, Rafferty’s Rhythm Rustlers, and Faye Gerber’s Barn Owls. All of them performed on a flatbed trailer at the car dealership to warm up the crowd for headliner Jimmy Wakely, “America’s foremost Western tune wrangler, In Person Direct from Hollywood.”
Texas Willie developed enough of a following to attract two talented young musicians named Bobby Gibson and Buddy Fite, who showed up at the radio station and wherever he was gigging so they could sit in with him for a few songs. Willie liked the young fellows all right, although he allowed that Buddy “was a real weird guy. He would sleep with jazz music in his ear and wake up playing all kind of shit.” As much as the kids loved hanging out and playing with Willie, they were too young to appreciate the side benefit of music stardom when a friend dropped off Willie at the home of a woman who was not his wife. “We didn’t know that was going on,” Bobby Gibson admitted.
Being on the radio and playing dances gave Willie a taste of what it was like to be the center of attention. Now he needed a record to promote his existence to the world. He used a studio at the radio station to record two songs, bringing in Buddy Fite to add his steel guitar to the magic sound of Willie Nelson. The setup was “as basic as it sounded,” Willie said. The vocal, guitar, and steel were drenched in echo, about as close to a sound effect as could be coaxed out of the primitive technology.
